Крис Бекетт: Spring Tide

I was a bright kid and, a couple of years later, in spite of doing very little work, I got myself a place at a university. It was a disaster. Without the rudimentary structure that had been provided by school, I stopped working altogether, failed all my first year exams and duly dropped out. I fell out badly with my parents over that. They said some cruel things which I found hard to forget or forgive, specially my bully of a dad, and I decided to punish them by doing nothing with my life at all.

I was already with Josie by then. I’d met her at a rock concert in King’s Lynn when I was seventeen. (I remember gold-painted Artex walls, smelly toilets, interminable guitar solos.) I had been getting rather panicky about the fact that I’d never had a girlfriend and had no idea how to go about finding one. It was hard enough making friends from among my own gender. Driven by desperation, and fortified by enough cheap cider to make staying upright a fairly challenging task, I attempted to chat up a shylooking girl who seemed to have come to the gig all on her own. She responded, to my amazement, with enthusiasm.

I decided at once that I was going to fall in love with her and yet, at the same time, on that very same evening in King’s Lynn, I experienced doubts. I still remember the questions going through my addled head, queasy with booze, assaulted by prog rock. Had I really made a choice here? What was wrong with this girl anyway, that she should be on her own, and be interested in someone like me? Weren’t her ears a bit big, and wasn’t there something a bit desperate about her? And wasn’t it all a bit repulsive: her desperation, my desperation, those ears? I suppressed those thoughts as soon as I had them – I was seventeen, I’d never had sex, I’d been afraid that sex would always be beyond my reach, and to turn away from Josie then would have been like a starving man turning down a food parcel – but I couldn’t expel them altogether. My doubts about her, and about my own motives, were there from the beginning, digging and gnawing away. (Not that I was such a great catch either, of course. Josie’s apparent enthusiasm for me presumably also involved suppressing her awareness of certain things, such as my poor personal hygiene, my bad breath, and my utter inability to ask her questions about herself.)

Josie also went to university and, unlike me, managed to stick out the full three years. When she was in her second and third years, I lived with her, sleeping in her room, picking up various temporary jobs in bars and so forth, and otherwise watching daytime TV and smoking weed.

Josie scraped a degree, but she had no idea what to do next, and, as her contemporaries gradually launched themselves out into the world like baby birds taking wing, she and I clung to our now-familiar twig, trying to carry on a student life without either study or fellow students. It was actually quite scary, no matter how much weed we smoked. It was like one of those anxiety dreams in which you’ve somehow lost the ability to move forward. But Josie finally managed to get herself an administrative post in a hospital in King’s Lynn and we both returned to the area we’d grown up in. I went along to a few IT courses, found I was pretty good at picking up this stuff, and in due course stumbled into a temporary job helping to set up a new computer network for the local council in that part of Norfolk, back in the days when PCs were something new.

That job, in its essentials, I still do now. I’ve taken on a few extra roles and responsibilities over the years, and local government has restructured many times, but I’m still part of the IT team, still based in an office that’s less than twenty miles from the small town where I was born, and still basically spend my time sorting out the problems that local government officers have with their PCs. My teachers at school had once expected a good deal more from me, I knew, but this is how I am. I flounder, I grab hold of whatever comes to hand, and then I cling on.

Josie and I stuck together in that exact same way. In the best moments we sort of peacefully co-existed. In the worst, we punished each other, undermined each other, poured cold water on each other’s hopes and dreams. If she found something hard that I found easy, I would feel ashamed of her and let her know it. If she did well at something I found hard, I would hate her for showing me up. Our sense of togetherness, such as it was, came mainly from the fact that, when we both found the same things hard, both of us together would pour scorn on the things that others could do and we could not: them and their flashy holidays, their fancy jobs, their attractive friends, their seemingly happy relationships.

Deep down we despised ourselves. We hated the fact that there was no love story behind us, just two lonely and unconfident people who’d noticed each other’s availability at an utterly forgettable event, and grabbed hold of one another because that seemed preferable, or at least less frightening, than the alternative of remaining alone. And of course we soon had kids to distract us from ourselves, and to give us a reason for being together.

But when the last of our children had left home, there was nothing left for us to hide behind. Rational human beings might have sat down at that point, figured out a way of sharing out their resources, found two new places to live, and parted calmly. It would have been entirely doable for us, at least in a practical sense – we each had a lump sum coming to us at retirement, and a reasonable pension – but that’s not what we did at all.

No. We fought. There were scores to be settled, slights to be avenged, and we fought without restraint, screaming out forty years’ worth of hate and bitterness and disappointment into one another’s faces. Sometimes we flung things or smashed things, and once or twice we even began to hit out at each other, clawing at each other’s cheeks, pulling each other’s hair. Mostly, though, we just argued and shouted, on and on, until we were sufficiently exhausted to crawl off to sleep for a few hours, or at least lie down and try to sleep, in separate beds as far apart as possible, before resuming battle again the next day. It was horrible, sickening, terrifying, and it went on for several weeks, bizarrely interspersed with ordinary things like work, and walking the dog, and putting out the bins. And still neither of us made the decision to leave.

One Sunday morning we were sitting at our kitchen table, fighting as usual, and Josie had embarked on a long litany of my faults and shortcomings over many years.

‘…and you’re selfish, Bob. You’re selfish and self-righteous and unbelievably self-centred. You act like you’re the only person in the world with—’

‘Oh come on, not all this again. You know I could say exactly the same things about—’

‘Excuse me, Bob, I haven’t finished. You act like you’re the only one with feelings, the only one with legitimate explanations. There’s always a perfectly good reason for everything you do wrong. It’s always someone else’s fault, and nearly always mine. When you shagged that poor silly secretary and broke her heart, it was because I wasn’t giving you good enough sex. When you went storming out in a sulk, leaving me to deal with the house and kids, it was because I was creating an atmosphere which you couldn’t be expected to tolerate. But I’m not allowed an excuse, am I? Every possible explanation I offer for what I do, you dismiss out of hand. In fact, you provide counter-evidence. You quote conversations and precedents from years and decades ago. You cite your so-called friends, who you’ve discussed me with in detail, and agree with you entirely. You prove beyond all reasonable doubt that you are entirely blameless, entirely virtuous, entirely and tragically misunderstood. You turn everything back onto—’