Joseph O'Neill - This is the Life

Yes, this is the problem with whys: ask why once and you never stop asking why. Why this always leads to why that, and everything unscrews and comes apart. This is exactly what happened that day. I fell into a line of questioning which dismantled everything: why was it I was so hung up on Donovan? What skin was it off my nose what happened to him? Why was I unable to work any more? Why — really — was I writing this stuff? It did not end there (as I have said, it is a slippery slope) — why had the fates conspired to deprive me of my tenancy at 6 Essex Court? Why was I a solicitor? Why should I care about my career? Why should I care about anything any more?

I could not see what was going on any more. My mind started blooping and rolling, like a man lost in a cathode-ray blizzard. I lost the picture completely.

Suddenly I felt terrible.

Then the telephone sounded (I had just put it back on its hook) and when I picked it up I uttered my first word for a week and a half.

‘Hello?’ I said.

‘Thank God you’re in,’ a female voice said.

The last time I had spoken to Susan Northey was — let me work this out — 22 November 1988.

‘Where have you been?’ she said impatiently. ‘You’ve had everybody worried.’

‘Susan,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

Susan said, ‘I got a phone call this morning from your secretary — Jane? They’re trying to get hold of you at work. She thought maybe I knew where you were. She told me you’d gone off on some frolic with a woman.’

‘It’s June,’ I said. ‘Not Jane, June.’

Susan said, ‘You’re wanted at work, Jimmy.’ She paused. ‘Jimmy?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know,’ I said.

Susan waited before speaking again. Then she said, ‘Look, are you all right?’

I reassured her that I was. ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m in good shape. How about you? How are you, Suzy?’

Susan sounded decisive. ‘Look, stay there, I’m on my way.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Really, I’m fine. I’m just getting away from things for a while, that’s all. Don’t worry about it.’

Susan hung up half-way through my protests.

I did not want to see Susan, not right at that moment. She would demand explanations from me and what was I going to tell her? Also, I had just finished reading these pages and — I have admitted it — I was in a bad way. It was not easy, re-living those ups and downs, those hopes dashed left, right and centre. It had pretty much wiped me out. I was in no mood for company.

Later, the door-buzzer rang. I stayed put on the sofa. Then the buzzer sounded again and I dragged myself to my feet. Through the spy-hole I saw a gigantic face: Susan.

When I opened the door I stood around uncertainly — what was I supposed to do, give her a kiss?

Susan walked past me into the living-room. ‘My God,’ she said. She gesticulated at the mess. ‘What’s all this about?’

I went to make coffee. From the kitchen I could see through to the living-room. Susan was doing some tidying up. She had opened a window and now was plumping up cushions, emptying ashtrays and picking up, with the very tips of her fingers, buckets of chicken bones, pizza cartons and silver curry containers. I felt a dull glow of affection. Susan.

‘Jimmy,’ Susan said softly after we had sat in silence for a moment, drinks in hand. ‘What’s the matter? Hmm? What’s the matter?’

‘It’s nothing, Suzy,’ I said. ‘It’s just that …’ I discontinued my sentence. I was exhausted, I just could not come out with the words.

‘Tell me, Jimmy.’ She was still looking at me with her bright grey eyes. ‘Tell me,’ she whispered.

I looked at Susan. Perhaps I had not properly appreciated her, I thought. Perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, I would see her in a new light. So I looked at her again.

There was nothing new there. It is true that, sitting next to me for the first time in seven months, she had a sheen and freshness about her. But otherwise she looked just the same to me. She looked just as she had always done. She sat there with her serious grey eyes, giving off the same old sad, brave emanations.

‘I’ve been working too hard,’ I said. ‘I just needed a bit of time off. Suzy, it’s that simple. There’s nothing funny going on — I’m not having an affair or a nervous breakdown or anything. I don’t know what they’re getting so worked up about at the office.’

She looked at me sceptically — and tenderly. She was not sitting very far away from me on the sofa. I sensed her breathing body near by, within range of my arms.

I said, ‘Shouldn’t you be back at work now?’

At that moment a breeze snared up the curtain in the open window and Susan stood up to free it. While she did this she explained that she had taken the afternoon off. Although she was still at the office equipment company in Hounslow, they had promoted her, so now she worked flexihours. She could come and go pretty much as she pleased. Even so, she told me, she was trying to get away. She would be looking for something new in the autumn round of jobs. Maybe something in advertising, or PR. What did I think?

I was happy that the conversation had taken this turn. That sounded promising, I said. Her new seniority would stand her in good stead on the job market, I said.

‘I definitely want something else by the new year,’ Susan said. ‘I want to start the nineties on a good note.’ She crunched a crisp — I had brought out a bowl of crisps and a pack of beers — and said, after a pause, ‘You know, it’s funny, isn’t it, how little fuss they’re making about the eighties coming to an end. You wouldn’t think we were coming up to the end of a decade. A decade, Jimmy! You’d have thought there’d be a bigger fuss about it.’

Yes, it was funny, I said.

Susan, I thought once more, this time tiredly. Susan.

‘I wonder what they’ll call the eighties? It won’t be easy, finding something to call the eighties,’ Susan said. We stopped to think about it but neither of us could come up with the word to encapsulate the decade. ‘It’s sad, isn’t it Jimmy,’ she said with a bright, dolorous smile: ‘Another ten years, gone.’

Yes, it is, Suzy, I said. What a pair we made, I thought.

Then, in a strangely matter-of-fact way, Suzy kicked off her shoes and moved over and took hold of me. She burrowed into my body, hooped her arms around my chest and awkwardly tucked her head under my chin. I was taken aback. We were in the middle of a normal conversation and suddenly here she was, embracing me. I had not seen it coming at all. I thought that she was leaning over to help herself to another beer.

For a while I reciprocated. I squeezed her lumpy little body against mine and let her nestle her face against my shoulder. And while she pressed her short arms around me I hugged her gently: you have to be careful with Susan, she has these collapsible shoulders, and when you hold her tightly it feels as though you are folding her in half. But then, after a little while, I let her go. To be truthful, I simply did not feel like indulging in anything physical. This was not Susan’s fault — it was nothing personal — it was simply that that afternoon I was not in the mood for any kind of hanky-panky or for anything lovey-dovey. Can I be blamed? Here she was, uninvited, expecting me to pick up as though seven months ago was yesterday and nothing had happened in the interim. Also — this has to be said — she was making a spectacle of herself. What kind of woman would want to have anything to do with someone like me, in my state? It was all too desperate.

I slid out of her hands and cracked open a beer. I said nothing. Then I looked around at the squalid room, at the cloud of bugs hovering under the ceiling lamp and the trash of meals brimming from bin-liners and the beer mugs choked with ashy butts and Susan next to me with a hole in her brown tights and a susceptible expression, and I only just suppressed the urge to cry out, Get out! Get out of here!