A Fucked Up Life in Books (13 page)

Ten minutes must have passed when the door opened and my Indian Mum came in, holding the red pair of goat shoes. She said a lot of words in quick succession in Hindi, while pointing at me with her bony forefinger. I nodded solemnly, and she put the shoes on my feet. She left the room, but her daughter remained, and translated.

‘She said you must hide your cow shoes or people will spit on you. She says wear the goat shoes. She also says you have been very silly.’

‘I know,’ I replied. ‘I’m a fucking twat.’

‘Twat? What does that word mean?’

Jesus.

‘Nothing, honestly. Please, never say it.’

And she nodded and left me alone with
Owen Meany
.

I met a man in India who had been through hell.

I was sat in a café and there was no space for anyone else to sit down. He asked if he could sit down next to me and, of course, I said he could.

I was sitting drinking some tea and having a rest from a trek up through the mountains I’d had that morning. He talked to me, about what I was doing in India, and about what my plans were for the afternoon.

I told him that after lunch I planned to walk to the Dalai Llama’s pad and have a look around. He was very interested in me then, and asked me if I was interested in Tibet.

Now, when you are alone in Dharamshala and a man who may or may not be Tibetan asks you if you are interested in Tibet then you are in a bit of a pickle. I took a gamble, and said yes. Told him that I understood the issues between China and Tibet, and that I was firmly on Tibet’s side. In truth, In Dharamshala, everything was so anti-China that I’d not been able to read anything giving me the other side of the story.

He seemed happy with my answer. He went into his bag and rummaged around for a long time, saying, ‘I want to give you something …’

To my relief, it was not anything weird or sinister. It was a book. I like books. I know how to work them.

He handed it to me, and as I took it I looked at the front cover. On the front cover there was a picture of him.

I waited for an explanation, and that was when he told me that he was a monk who had been tortured by the Chinese. This book was his account of what happened.

My jaw dropped to the floor then. He laughed and ordered us some momos and tea and we sat and ate and drank and chatted about nothing in particular for an hour or two.

When it was time for me to go, he took the book from me and wrote something in the front. Then he told me what it meant. I kept his words stored carefully in my head all afternoon, and then promptly forgot them, so I now no longer know the translation of his message.

I’ve got a photo of my text though. You know, just in case I ever bump into another Tibetan monk.

I used to get up at the crack of dawn to walk fucking miles to a bus stop and then get on a bus that took an hour and a half to get to my job. It was the first job that I had out of uni, so it felt pretty good to be earning some money, but pretty shit to spend about four hours a day commuting for the pitiful wage that they paid me.

The good thing about having such a long commute is that I read a shitload of books. As I got on at the beginning of the route and got off at the end, I always had a seat, and so could read uninterrupted for fucking ages.

Halfway through one journey back from work and we were coming into the city centre. I was reading
The Eye of the World
, by Robert Jordan – the first in a fucking massive fantasy series that had been recommended to me by loads of friends. It was good, I was enjoying it, and then a girl got on the bus and sat on the empty seat in front of me and got out her phone.

She pressed a few buttons and made a call. After a few seconds pause she began to speak. Obviously, I could only hear one side of the conversation that started like this:

I looked up from my book. The first name she’d said was my brother’s, and the second name she’d said was the name of the girl that my brother was seeing at the time. The girl he was seeing had a pretty standard, normal name, but the name that my brother goes by is not one that you hear all that often at all.

I got out my phone and opened a blank text.

‘Who are you meeting tonight?’ I text my brother.

‘Oh, one of ___’s mates. ___. Why?’ I went back to listening to the conversation in front of me.

Thank goodness she didn’t say anything nasty about my brother or I would’ve had to rip her head off.

I text my brother: ‘___ does her head in.’

He texted back: ‘Where are you?’

Text: ‘Bus’

Text: ‘She’s sacking you off.’

Brother: ‘She’s on the bus?’

Me: ‘In front of me. Her Nan’s not sick.’

Brother: ‘Oh, her Nan was in hospital, is she out?’

Me: ‘Yeah.’

Text: ‘She’s ringing ___. Wants to go to her pub with her mate instead of meet you. You two must be well boring.’

Brother: ‘Fuck off.’

Me: ‘Ring ___ before she does.’

The girl in front of me was still saying bye to her mate when I put my phone back in my bag and carried on reading. When she hung up she sat looking out of the window for a bit. Then her phone rang.

‘Hey babe!’

She stood up. This was her stop to get off the bus to go and meet her mate in the pub. She started walking down the stairs and I just about hear

‘What? Er. Huh? Yeah Nan’s … oh. Oh. Oh babe, it’s not like that! Listen …’

And then she disappeared down the stairs and off the bus.

If that’s not an advert for why you shouldn’t have a private conversation on public transport then I don’t know what is. Some people are just fucking stupid.

I’ve got this girl in my family. I don’t know how to describe her to you, apart from the way she looks, and I think that the way she looks is a bit irrelevant to what I would be trying to get at if I knew for one second how exactly I could make you see what I do.

So I asked my brother how he would describe her. And he didn’t know either. After a very thoughtful conversation, we both decided that she has to be seen and heard to be believed.

It’s not that she’s stupid. She’s got loads of common sense and she’s kind and loyal. She’s just … I dunno. Different.

Anyway. My brother had a gig somewhere that was about three hours away from where I was living. I’d booked the afternoon off work, and as this girl in my family and her boyfriend wanted to go as well they offered to pick me up from work and we’d all drive down together.

So they picked me up at lunchtime. I don’t really like being around the pair of them because they do that thing that couples do sometimes, you know, where they are kind of bickering but it’s the bickering that is ‘playful’ and they turn around to look at your halfway through and give a little shrug or eyeroll like they’re not really bickering and isn’t this oh-so adorable.

No. It fucking isn’t.

So they’re bickering and eyerolling and I’m in the back of the car wishing that they would just shut the fuck up but they don’t because they’re being ‘cute’, and have I mentioned that I fucking hate this? I FUCKING HATE IT.

Where I used to work they’d have book sales occasionally, and I’d just bought myself a copy of Haruki Murakami’s book
A Wild Sheep Chase
for the journey. It was my first dip into Murakami. Imagine, you’re a Murakami virgin and all these fantastically surreal scenes are washing over your brain but every so often you’re disturbed because the two in the front of the car are fucking fake-bickering again. Something about a coke can on the floor, where’s my fucking drink, Jesus FUCKING Christ I wish they would shut up and stop ruining the Murakami.

Then I’m dragged out of the book because they want something from me.

She turns round in her seat and says

‘Hey, could you pass that CD case over, the one on the floor by your feet?’ Yes. I can do that. Easy.

He turns and looks as I pass it forward to her.

‘What you puttin’ on, babe?’ he asks.

‘Michael Jackson,’ she says.

‘YEEEEAAAAAH!’ he says. ‘Smooth Criminal!’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Heal The World.’

‘Smooth Criminal,’ he says.

‘Heal The World,’ she says.

This goes on and on for some time, with each repetition getting louder and they’re both starting to get a bit upset and for FUCK sake I don’t like him much, but I’m with him on this one, because Smooth Criminal kicks the bollocks off Heal the World.

‘HEAL. THE. WORLD,’ she says. ‘AND. And. Do you know what, pumpkin? I’ll tell you something. I think that we
should
heal the world.’

The car is silent. They both look thoughtful. The boy nods his head and sighs deeply.

‘I think the world’s a bit past healing, babe,’ he says.

They both go quiet. She pushes the CD into the player and the piano-y opening notes of Heal the World ripple through the car. They gaze out of the window. She leans over and touches his hand. He turns, smiles.

I sit in the back of the car silently pissing myself with laughter and texting my brother ‘You’ll never guess what, you would’ve loved it, it was fucking brilliant …’

And after I’d managed to stop myself laughing, and wiped the tears of joy from my face, I went back to the Murakami and let them bicker over which song they’d put on next.

I don’t get embarrassed very easily. The reason that I don’t get embarrassed very easily is because I’m one of these people who just tells other people pretty much everything about me. All the personal and mortifying stuff that happens is stuff that I tell people in the pub, or on the phone, or wherever else it just felt right, so I don’t really have any secrets, and I guess that a lot of people keep their embarrassing memories to themselves. But that is simply not my style.

Anyway. I can only remember ever being really, properly embarrassed once. And this is it.

At one of my old jobs things got a bit weird when a colleague started to have feelings for me. Normally this would be fine, but the colleague in question was twenty years older than me. He was also incredibly rich because he had a dead wife. I found out about his dead wife when he said to me one time in the pub, ‘I haven’t felt this way about anyone since before my wife died.’ That was a bit awkward.

I didn’t like him in that way, and even if I did like him I don’t shit where I eat so nothing was ever going to happen. I told him this and he told me that he was broken hearted, but he’d be OK. Lovely. Then everything should be fine.

Apart from it wasn’t fine. At work he was a manager, and sometimes had to manage me. It was awkward but despite my beautifully colourful use of the English language, I am a fucking professional. But it wasn’t the fact that he had to manage me that made it awkward, it was little things he’d do to mean that I had to speak to him, be in meetings with him, and stuff like that which really pissed me off.

He’d email a lot. One day I was sat at my desk with my feet up on the desk reading
Delta of Venus
. At this particular job I had the liberty of being able to do shit like sit with my feet up on the desk reading while I waited for other stuff to be ready. I’d poked my head into his office a few minutes previously and noticed that he wasn’t at his desk. I needed to return some work to him, and upon seeing that he wasn’t there quickly ran and got the work, chucked it on his desk and trotted back to my desk for a little rest and read.

It wasn’t too much longer after that that an email popped up:

‘I was in a meeting when you brought the work back, you should have waited until I was at my desk, we could have had a chat.’

Now, I’d been talking to my team leader about this guy for some time. I started to tell her stuff when he started to creep me out a bit, and then we got a bit friendly and kind of used to joke about it a bit. He wasn’t threatening or scary, obviously just lonely and wanting a bit of cunt. I’ve got a cunt, so it wasn’t all that dreadful that he wanted to speak to me as much as he did.

I clicked forward on the email and send it to my boss, typing at the top:

‘This is because I took that job back when he was at his desk. Maybe I should just go over there and get a tit out to get him off my case.’

I clicked send and settled back in my chair with Anaïs, glancing round at my team leader as I did so. Weirdly, there was no trace of a smile or any surprise on her face as there usually was when I sent things on to her.

Thirty seconds passed before an email popped up on my screen. From him:

‘Was that meant for me?’

Fuck. Fuckfuckshittingfuck. I’d pressed fucking reply instead of fucking forward. Oh God. I am such a fucking idiot, I am a fucking twat.