Title: Sport 27

Publication details: Fergus Barrowman, October 2001

Part of: Sport

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Sport 27: Spring 2001

(Biographical Sketch 4—Helen Gunby

(Biographical Sketch 4—Helen Gunby

I think she was at university with me. Sometimes it seems like everyone was.)

‘Hello Helen,’ I say.

‘Your brother's down here, I had to let him in…’

‘Thanks. Send him on up.’

‘I already have. I just called to remind you to fix your intercom. All you have to do is call the landlord. I'm sick of your friends buzzing page 11 me all the time…’

‘I'll get onto it, Helen. Catch ya.’ I hang up and go and open the door for Daniel.

‘Hi,’ he says as he steps over the threshold. ‘This was in your mailbox,’ he hands me a bulky package. It looks like another fifty pages of Morris's novel. I throw it on the sofa and close the door. Daniel is twelve years younger than me, he has just started at uni. I have long hair, he has short hair. I have a pierced ear, he has a pierced lip. We both wear glasses.

‘Where's Wall?’ Daniel asks.

‘Out on the balcony.’

‘Jason?’

‘In the States, searching for Joni, his Internet lover.’

‘Is she a guy?’

I shake my head. ‘We think she's probably just thirteen. What brings you here?’

Daniel shrugs. ‘I was thinking about your generation…’

Wall walks in and turns down the stereo. ‘What generation?’ he asks.

Daniel shrugs again. ‘You guys…you know…your generation…the tail-end of Generation X…’

The phone rings.

‘I'll get it,’ I say.

‘I don't like to be typed as a Gen Xer,’ Wall says.

‘It's not a bad thing to be…’ maintains Daniel.

I pick up the phone. It's Morris. ‘Have you finished yet?’ he asks.

‘I only just got the package…’

‘Not that, the other stuff. Part Three, have you finished it?’

‘No…’

‘I really need some feedback here, Phil…I can't write into a vacuum…’

‘I mean, think about it,’ Daniel is saying, ‘yours was the first generation ever expected to achieve less than its forefathers. But look at the way things turned out. You guys introduced us to the wonders of the World Wide Web and made cellular phones really small…’

‘I feel caged up here Philip,’ Morris says. ‘Every day, when I wake page 12 up, I feel like screaming, ‘What about me!…where am I!…why was I left in this place!…I didn't want any of this…I never wanted any of this…all I ever wanted was to find my…’

‘Yeah, that sounds bad, Morris,’ I say, ‘maybe you should tell the Sniff…maybe you should tell your wife about the way you feel…’

‘The other day, when I was sitting at the bus stop, I thought I saw a madwoman,’ Wall is telling Daniel. ‘A genuine and authentic madwoman; I was so excited. She was sitting there with one hand pressed to the side of her scalp, rocking back and forth, muttering to herself. I sat next to her for ten minutes but then the bus arrived and she stood up and I saw that she wasn't mad at all, she was just talking into a really small cellphone…’

‘My wife!’ Morris almost screams. ‘What's she? How can I talk to her? Anna shares my house, my bed and my salary, but what is she? What about her made me think that I could stand to wake up next to her every morning for the rest of my life?’

‘I don't know,’ I say, ‘her hair?’

‘…and that's another thing I hate,’ I hear Wall say, ‘text-messaging. All those abbreviations compressing our language into some sort of bizarre Orwellian newspeak, it gives me the creeps…’

Morris sighs into the phone. ‘Sure,’ he says, ‘joke about it…But you're lucky that Anya girl walked out on you when she did…’

‘Don't talk about Anya,’ I say.

Daniel and Wall nudge one another.

‘I can remember the letters you sent me,’ Morris continues, ‘you and her in that little basement in Santa Fe, all set up to play at being Levin and Kitty, you were so happy…Domesticity is a religion, Phil, a salve for out fear…’

‘A salve…?’

‘…but how can we flourish if we indulge our fears? Trust me Phil, nothing brings a man lower than the fear of being alone. Solitude is the only path to self-fulfilment. How can we ever be happy when we're smothered by the desires of another? Coupledom extracts a tithe from our personalities…That's…that's…sort of the theme of my novel, Phil…one of them, anyway…By the way, I've re-written the wedding chapter, I'll send that down to you soon…’

page 13

‘I'll look forward to it. Got to go now, Morris, my brother's here…’

‘Yeah…I've got a client coming soon anyway…’

I hang up. Wall scoops the latest instalment of Morris's novel off the sofa and feels its weight in his hands. ‘What's this like?’ he asks.

‘Terrible,’ I say. ‘No plot, lots of pointless characters, no unifying message…’

‘Remind you of something?’ asks Dan.

Visa. Work permit. These are things which I must try to arrange.

A few days later, Helen lets another visitor into our building and they wake me up, knocking on the door at three in the afternoon.

‘Hello,’ I say blearily, ‘you here about the room?’

‘Yeah…’ our visitor says, taking a few cautious steps back.

‘Want to come in and check it out?’

‘Ahhh…nahhh…’

‘Why not?’

The guy shrugs in a hapless fashion. ‘Sorry mate,’ he says, ‘I didn't know this was a mature flat…’

‘A mature flat?’ I say, but he's already heading back down the stairs.

It's cheaper to fly on stand-by, but I want to set a date.

I try to avoid Nick Weir. It's hard because he lives where I work. Some messages are left for me at the desk and I ignore them. Whenever I see a lift descend I duck out the back to get a Coke, just in case it's him. Eventually, however, he somehow manages to bump into Wall and they arrange to meet for a beer and Wall brings me along and, when I see Nick Weir sitting at a table outside the Dux, I think ‘oh fuck’, but it's too late to run away so we have a few drinks and Wall and Nick argue about computers (one is anti, one is pro) and then I say ‘It's getting pretty late’ and Nick says ‘Why don't you guys show me a bit of the old Christchurch night life?’ and Wall says ‘Ahhh…okay…’ and we take him to club on Oxford Terrace which is not a place we usually frequent and so the three of us wind up sitting at the bar, page 14 sipping overpriced drinks and watching candyfloss-skinned club chicks dance to a repetitive techno thump.

‘Christ, she's not too bad, eh?’ Nick mutters, nodding at a pouty little blonde who might have just strutted out a Glassons wear-it-your-way ad.

‘Not bad at all,’ Wall says. To the best of my knowledge, Wall has never loved, screwed, nor so much as put an arm around the shoulders of a member of the opposite sex. To his credit, however, this fact does not make him feel the slightest bit self-conscious when indulging in laddish banter of this kind. Club chicks and nasal-voiced Helens, I think as I take another sedate swallow of gin and tonic (prepared Oxford Terrace style—heavy on the tonic), interesting women are a myth, a device of literature, an illusion of the screen. What I would not give to have some pale, dark-haired nymphomaniac who reads Proust and chain-smokes unfiltered Marlboros hovering around the edges of my life…I look to Wall and to Nick. All you ever have are your friends. I look to the people dancing on the floor, to the club chicks and the guys with tight T-shirts and excessively short haircuts. I wish I could say that I've never felt so alone, but I feel this way all the time. Nick and Wall give up on their half-hearted ogling and have returned to the evening's earlier arguments. Wall denounces the Internet as ‘a vast monument to the intellectual, moral and aesthetic failings of Mankind’ and Nick slowly stiffens on his stool like an eighteenth-century nobleman who has been slapped in the face with a white glove. All you have are your friends. I feel this way all the time.

‘So where are you from then?’

‘Can't you tell?’

‘You're not…you're not Scottish are you?’

‘Aye, ye ken it…’

‘Really! No way! I was up that way for a while, a couple of years back…whereabouts are you from?’

‘Didja no say it yeself? Ah'm frem Scatlin…’

‘No, no, I meant where in Scotland…’

‘Oh aye. Ah'm frem Gallenach.’

‘Oh…right…Whereabouts is that?’

page 15

‘Well…d'ye ken Hadrian's Wall?’

‘Yeah…’

‘Aye, well it's jist a wee bit northa that, likesay…’

Daniel rings me and asks how my travel plans are going, how long will it be before I rejoin the poverty jetset? I tell him that he's been reading too much Douglas Coupland and he asks me if I've decided where I'm going and I say yes but before I can say anything more someone knocks on the door and I have to go open it. Morris is standing on the landing. He is wearing a dark, finely-cut suit tastefully offset by a patterned green tie; eye-catching, though not to the point of eccentricity. He is holding a briefcase and has a large carrier bag slung over one of his shoulders.

He says, ‘The girl downstairs let me up.’

‘Come in,’ I say.

Morris steps into my flat and I close the door behind him. ‘I've…I've come to finish my novel,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say and take his bag.

‘I think I've left Anna.’

‘You think you left her?’

‘I think I've left my firm too…’

Morris sits down on the sofa, still clutching his briefcase. I toss his bag into Jason's room.

‘I haven't…I haven't exactly told them yet…’ Morris says, at length. ‘I just went out at lunch and got on a plane and…This is it, man…this is it…I can't go back now…’

‘There was this night once when I didn't show up for work,’ I say. ‘My work starts at nine pm, y'see, and when I woke up, on that one occasion, I rolled over and saw that it was six o'clock. I thought ‘good, I can sleep for another couple of hours’, but it was actually six in the morning. I had slept through my entire shift.’

‘Did you get in trouble?’ Morris asks.

I shake my head.

‘No one noticed I wasn't there. The desk remained unmanned all through the night.’

page 16

Morris moves into Jason's room where he spends the next week or so writing and drinking vodka from the bottle he brought with him in his otherwise empty carrier bag. Sometimes he wanders into my room to wake me up and insist that I read a newly revised passage or to tell me again how lucky I was to have been abandoned by Anya and how he envies me for the years I have spent on my own. Anna calls up to ask whether I have seen him and I say no and she sniffs and hangs up. Morris tells me that this means she's probably seen through my attempt at subterfuge and will undoubtedly call again or even turn up, unexpected, on my doorstep, but she never does. Morris has no clothes besides his suit and as the week wears on it grows increasingly rumpled and stained; he is not washing and he smells of vodka and sweat. Morris's presence in the flat would be almost unbearable if Wall had not taken an interest in his work in progress (which now has a title—The Theory of Everything) and started subbing me in my roles as editor, proof-reader and literary critic. Daniel too has become intrigued and has started to drop in more frequently now, to discuss points of plot, theme and character with our new writer-in-residence. Previously barren surfaces are swiftly colonised by piles of annotated paper. Heated arguments over the chronology of World War Two, Jungian psychoanalysis, the organisation of the civil service in nineteenth-century Russia, split infinitives and the correct usage of the word ‘hopeful’ rage throughout the flat. I spend these days sleeping or sitting out on the balcony in the sun. Slowly and quietly I put my affairs in order.

While we are having breakfast at our café on yet another fine Christchurch morning, Wall tells me that we were visited by another potential flatmate just after I had left for work on the night before.

‘What was he like?’ I ask.

‘She,’ Wall says.

‘Oh. Right. What was she like then?’

Wall takes a thoughtful bite out of his apricot and almond muffin. ‘She was short and slender,’ he says, ‘dark, with a pallid complexion. She carried a copy of Swann's Way tucked under one of her arms and, while we spoke, she carelessly tapped the ash from her unfiltered page 17 Marlboro into the cup of coffee which I had prepared for her. She mentioned that she liked to have sex a lot.’

‘So are we going to give her the room?’

Wall shakes his head. ‘I told her to get lost,’ he says. ‘I mean, she's a smoker. We don't want a smoker, do we?’

It's about midnight and I'm working my last shift at the hotel desk. The place is deserted, no sign of any customers wanting to check in or check out. Under such circumstances I'd normally try to grab a little sleep, but right now I'm too wound up. In just a few hours I'll be gone, out of Christchurch for God knows how long. No more white houses, no more green gardens. No more treading the mean streets of suburbia. Say a fond farewell to uncluttered skies.

‘Philip?’

I look up to see Nick Weir standing over the desk.

‘Hi Nick,’ I say wearily.

‘Hi,’ he says, then leans closer. ‘Look, Philip, I need some help…’

‘What sort of help?’ I ask.

Nick smiles nervously. ‘This is…this is silly really…’ he says, ‘but the thing is I…I can't pay my bill…’

‘You can't pay? But you've been staying here for two weeks!’

‘I have enough left to pay for about three days…Nick ruefully admits, ‘two days if I'm charged for all the stuff I took from the mini-bar…’

‘But you have money! You own your own company! In London!’

‘Well…really I should have said that I owned my own company. I owned it for about four months…then it went bust.’

‘I see…’

‘It happens all the time, you know. It's rough in the computer trade these days, lots of competition, every idiot is trying to get in on the game. You see, my company went bust, my girlfriend vanished and I was left at the end of the day with enough money in my account to fly just about anywhere in the world or pay a fortnight's rent on my place in London and so I just thought, ‘Right! I've got to get out of here.’ Then I thought, ‘Where will I go?’ and I decided to head back to Christchurch. I don't know why…I really don't…Anyway, I page 18 checked in here and spent the last couple of weeks in my room, drinking from the mini-bar and trying to figure out what I'm going to do…’ Nick takes a deep, steadying breath. ‘I'm all out of money now, Phil, and I really need some help.’

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Go get all your luggage and meet me back down here real quick. You can stay at my place for while, I'll walk you there.’

‘Thanks mate!’ Nick darts off towards the lifts but then stops and turns back. ‘Won't they miss you here though?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say ‘they won't’

Back at the flat Dan and Morris are sitting on the floor amidst a heap of scattered papers, engaged in a vigorous debate.

‘…and I don't see why you keep calling the city “Christminster”,’ Daniel is saying. ‘It's clearly meant to be Christchurch. Why don't your just call it Christchurch?’

‘The masking of Christchurch behind the alias of Christminster is vital to the integrity of my novel,’ Morris says. ‘Christminster was the name used by Thomas Hardy to denote Oxford in Jude the Obscure. The protagonist in my Christchurch scenes, Malcom Manticore, is the antithesis of Hardy's Jude. Manticore, who has formal education spilling out his ears, wishes to flee his city and taste the pleasures of the outside world, while Jude wishes with a similar fervour to enter the cloistered world of Christminster and attain the education which he has been denied. I have to use the term “Christminster” to link my Christchurch to Hardy's Oxford…’

‘Okay…okay…’ Dan says, ‘but I still don't understand how this ties in with all the pre-war Germany stuff…’

‘Look, it's really very simple…’

‘Hi,’ I say.

They both look up at me. ‘Hi Phil,’ they say. Morris squints his eyes blearily, trying to remember who Nick is. I re-introduce them, then slip off to call a taxi. My bags are already packed and I don't feel then slip off to call a taxi. My bags are already packed and I don't feel like loitering for prolonged goodbyes. My check-in time is ten o'clock but I can hang out in the airport until then. I like airports, I don't mind waiting in them. When I re-enter the living room I find Wall page 19 waiting for me, grinning with devilish glee.

‘Guess what,’ he says, ‘Jason just emailed me from LAX. He's on the next flight back.’

‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘Didn't he find Joni?’

‘Oh no…’ Wall says. ‘He found Joni all right…’

‘She was thirteen,’ I say.

‘She was a guy,’ Daniel says.

‘Actually she was a thirteen-year-old guy,’ says Wall. ‘Real name Johnny…’

‘Wow…’ Nick is saying, ‘Wall, Morris, Phil…man…this is just like The Big Chill….’

‘Yeah,’ Wall says, ‘only on one's dead…’

‘Give it time,’ I say, eyeing Morris, who has just taken another fortifying slug of vodka.

Before long, the phone rings and I duck away to answer it.

‘Philip?’ Helen says sleepily. ‘Did you call for a taxi? Because there's this…’

‘Thanks Helen’ I say and hang up. I fetch my bags from my room and, by the time I return to the living room, Morris has slumped, unmoving, into a corner while Dan and Wall are trying to list all the generational categories which have emerged since ‘Gen X’ became too tarnished a phrase. The Missing Generation, Generation Y (Why?) Generation Next. Nick sits down on the couch, carefully shuffling a segment of Morris's novel out the way. ‘So we've got four generations in…what? Three decades?’ he says. ‘Is anyone else troubled by this?;’

Dan shrugs. ‘Our culture is accelerating…’

Wall looks up and sees me with my bags. ‘Where are you going?’ he asks.

‘Back to the States,’ I say. ‘I'm going to find Anya. Nick can have my room.’

‘You're making a mistake…’ Morris murmurs as I open the door.

‘That's sweet, that's romantic,’ Nick says, reaching down to liberate the vodka from Morris. ‘Go for it, Phil.’

‘When are you coming back?’ Dan asks.

‘Never,’ I say.

page 20

‘Good-bye then,’ he says.

‘See you,’ says Wall.

Downstairs, the taxi is waiting for me. The driver holds the door to my building open while I struggle with my bags. Helen, in dressing gown and fuzzy slippers, opens her door and peers out at me.

‘Where are you off to?’ she asks.

‘The airport,’ I say.

‘Oh…’ says Helen. ‘Going home, are you?’

‘I am home,’ I say.

Helen gives me a puzzled look and closes the door. I don't see her or Wall or Morris or Nick or Daniel again for about six months.