The Distance

You probably don’t remember but the world ended in May 2002. It did for me anyway; that’s when I split with **** and that’s when it felt like everything stopped. I’d had minor heartache before and thought I was the worst case in the world but they had all been childish crushes compared to this one. This time I had genuinely loved someone to the greatest extent I could and I had still failed to keep them and myself happy and together. Something broke in me then and I’m not sure even now that it can ever or will ever be fixed. Since then it’s felt as if nothing has been real, that I have been living in some half dream state, which I always thought it would feel like after I had died, or once the world had ended. So for me, however melodramatic it may sound, the world ended for me back then.

Anyhow, this isn’t going to be me whining on about my broken heart. Well, not directly. It’s more of a story than that. It’s a true story but then all stories are true so I suppose that hardly matters. This story is about at least one world ending, one other than my own. It begins with a run of lousy New Year’s Eves. Probably my own fault, through self pity and heartbreak. After the break-up I had made the effort, year after year, to go out and try to be part of it, part of the New year’s thing that is such a compulsion with everyone, especially the young and single. It always felt forced though and when it feels you have to force yourself to go out and try to enjoy yourself then of course you’re not going to. Difference is it’s better to be able to go back to work after the New Year and discuss where you had been out to instead of admitting you had stayed in; admitting you’d stayed at home alone at New Year would be like admitting you’d given up. People would pity you.

I’d done the large gathering thing for a couple of years;  I’d done the going to a club with friends thing, paying an outrageous ticket price so I could stand in a corner feeling sorry for myself whilst midnight rolled around and everyone else kissed the New Year in. The only highlight of one of those nights was when my friend started a fake countdown at ten to midnight – it fooled everyone and they all had to do it again nine minutes later. That night the closest I got to any attention was a dumpy woman with a mono-brow who looked like she probably smelt of Vaseline.

After a couple of more years of quiet local pub outings I found myself with another choice for the upcoming New Year. I was working on the phones for a company that sold video games and at Christmas time they hired in temps. The guy in charge of hiring that year made sure he brought in the youngest, best looking female candidates and for two months the place was transformed. They each had a number of slacker nerds fawning over them, the regular staff being mostly made up of kidults into gaming. I was no exception, going out of my way to talk to the 3 or 4 I found especially attractive and coming away from the experience feeling like an awkward doofus, as usual. However there were a couple of girls moderately attractive and less intimidating and they were friends with people some of which I vaguely knew in that way that you do. Live in the same city long enough and you become entangled in that web of recognition; the one of people you know but don’t really know. This group of people ran a night at a  local music venue, very low key and lo-fi; the DIY music scene was quite new but upcoming at the time. So I ended up, with some work colleagues and some other friends, seeing these girls socially but always in a vague way. We’d be at the same nights but we wouldn’t be out together. We’d talk for a little while but then gravitate back to our own groups of friends. We’d go back to our own places in the social grouping.

This continued throughout the year following the Christmas that the girls worked at our place. That New Years itself wasn’t that bad, it was just three or four of us at a local pub, leaving at 2am and getting takeaway and then watching crap TV until the early hours. Not bad but still a  reinforcement of my loneliness and regret since the break-up with ****.

I want to make clear; I wasn’t a total wash-out. I had a few short term relationships, fooled around with some girls, still felt like I could get out there and do that, but it was continuing to feel empty. It felt as though I had once eaten a meal that was prepared by someone who knew how to cook food exactly right and who more than that knew exactly how I liked my food. They had made me a meal that was delicious and rich and yet satisfying enough to make me want more. All food after that meal tasted inferior and lifeless… no amount of dressing and relish could cover the lack of true flavour and attention. I was condemned to a life constantly aware of that loss of true flavour.

So the year went along. I started going out a little more, had a couple of near things, one short relationship which ended disastrously and just confirmed my worst fears for me. Little by little I stepped forward and occasionally took a little step back. Baby steps back to normality, so I thought, so I kidded myself.

I was virtually living alone at the time. I had a flatmate, my best friend, but his employer, trying to piss him off enough that he would quit, had started sending him to manage other branches of their restaurants around the country. Maybe he was in Glasgow that night, I’m not sure. That was the last place they sent him and he quit soon after the deputy manager tried to strangle him one night. I forget the reasons why. My other best friend lived upstairs and at the time we still worked together at a local comic book store  together, just part-time. We’d both been to several of the DIY gigs that the temp girls had co-run or just been at and we both knew them well enough now to get invited to the New Years party they were having at their big shared house across the park. Lots of ex-students and musicians and organisers of things, all living together and having a good, young, carefree life. What harm could it do, I thought, to try and have a good New Year with like minded people ( though a lot younger than me…) at a nice place not far from home. Maybe this way I would break the string of bad New Years. Maybe that in turn would break the feeling that life was a ghost of what it had once been.

So it’s the night of the party. We leave it until 9pm to set off as it’s not far and we don’t want to be sat in a mostly empty house looking over eager as the younger, hipper guests arrive. We pick up some drink on the way, not much for either of us as we can neither take much booze without feeling lousy. Partly age, partly whatever else. I don’t mind; I’m a cheap drunk. I get a four pack of some nice, crisp lager and put it in the fridge when we get there. Of course hardly anyone is there when we arrive so we look exactly like the thing we didn’t want to. It’s okay though, we get talking to a few of the house mates, there’s some nice looking girls and some good conversation. Someone keeps insisting I have this expensive bourbon once I’ve admitted liking it. Maybe I drink too much too quickly.

We hang around, we talk, we drink, it gets busier, it gets louder and eventually it tips over the party point. Now it’s a proper party, not just some people in a house. I end up feeling a bit dizzy from the bourbon, wishing I’d had more food before coming out and drinking. A young Asian guy is talking to me and making me feel a little odd. He talks like he’s hiding something. Or maybe I’m just drunk. Anyway, he has some weed and he offers me some and because I do actually like getting stoned a little (but only at home – as I will soon remember) and also because I want to seem open and maybe bohemian I accept and have a few tokes. I have forgotten that weed takes time to take effect, so maybe I have a little too much too quickly. I pass it on and go back to talking. I feel like I’m having a good time. There are a few girls there that are nice but I feel overweight and tired and old so I just figure I’ll talk and have a good time and go home. No use forcing myself to try and make an effort when I’m clearly not in the right frame of mind. But it feels like a step in the right direction.

The next thing I know I can hear people singing Tiny Dancer by Elton John. They’re singing it like in the film it was used in, Almost Famous. That scene on the bus where they all join in and sing. I remember the girls used to talk about that in the office at work. It caught them all up, that film. Where am I? I’m in the bathroom with my head in my hands. I feel very, very sick. I don’t know what time it is until I realise they’re singing the song because it’s midnight. They’re singing it because it means more to them than Auld Lang Syne or anything else traditional. I don’t know how long I have been up here. It’s a nice neat bathroom. I’m aware of people talking outside the door. They’re discussing me, asking does anyone know who is in the bathroom and why they’ve been there for so long?

I cannot trace time. There seems no past, present or future. I can’t tell how long events are taking. It feels like I am outside of time and everything has already happened and is happening now and has already happened and I’m trapped here in this eternal moment and this is all that I will ever know or could know. I feel very, very sick but I don’t think I can be sick. I want to be sick so I can just do that, clear my head and get the fuck out of here. I want to be home. I’m middle aged, fat, stupid, lonely, insecure and trying to be somebody I can’t be. I’m frightened, like I have been all my life. I need to be at home. I need to be secure.

Time keeps passing and I still don’t know how long. With a gargantuan effort I decide to leave the room and from there leave the house. I will not try and search out my friend, I can always text him later. My course of action is direct; I must get out of this house and breathe in a lungful of the air outside and then vomit into the road once I have gotten far enough away from the house. I unlock the bathroom door. I am sweating and embarrassed. A line of people are waiting for the bathroom, including several attractive girls I talked to earlier. I must look sad and freakish to them now. The embarrassing older guy who thinks he can party with us. I just want to get out but one of the girls who lives in the house wants to talk to me and ask me if I’m okay because of course that’s the polite thing to do when you’re hosting the party. I tell her I’m okay and I just need some air but she’s talking to me more and I still can’t tell if time exists and I feel very, very sick. I clasp my hand to my face and vomit springs out between every finger and all over the floor at the top of the stairs. Now I’m feeling sick and old and stupid and embarrassed and I’m standing with vomit coted fingers in front of several girls who I found attractive. I apologise through my vomit covered hand and then the girl who’s house is it insists I clean it up and then I’m on my hands and knees with a tiny washing up sponge arranging the former contents of my stomach into a pile consistent enough to be picked up. I feel very, very sick. Did I mention? I don’t know what time it is. Did I mention? I feel so stupid. I want to be home. I want to be home.

I’m out in the street. My friend is asking what I’m doing. I tell him frankly that I just made a complete dick of myself and now I’m going home and he should stay as he’s having a good time. I want him to stay so that the next time I vomit it will be in front of either strangers or no one at all.

He insists that he does not want to stay, he’s bored, he doesn’t really get on with anyone. We walk back. It’s very cold but I’m grateful for it, it makes me feel slightly less nauseous. I think the booze is wearing off a bit but the weed is not yet. I know that it won’t wear off until I can sleep for a while. Hopefully I will get home and just go to sleep and wake up feeling lousy but a lot less lousy in the morning. The walk is about 10 minutes but it might as well be ten hours or ten days for all I can tell. This I hate the most, the loss of any sense of time moving as it should. This feeling will never completely go away – it hangs around for years and comes back every time I smoke a cigarette and then comes back much more dramatically when I start smoking weed regularly a few years down the line.

At last we get home and I excuse myself straight away, get in the flat, stroke the cat and say hello and feel very grateful for having the place to myself. I get to my bedroom and pull my clothes off in 10 seconds and then I’m on my back in bed and I want to sleep. Eventually I started to drift off but wake up a couple of times with my forehead sweaty, feeling disorientated and sick. Not sick enough to throw up again, just that type of horrible post drunk nausea that feels like you are going to throw up at some time in the future. Just an indeterminate time in the future.  I wake up 45 minutes later and it’s only around 2am. I put on the radio so that I’m not lying there in silence. I feel slightly ill now but no longer drastically stoned or drunk. I feel tolerable but not well. I feel ill at ease rather than ill. I lie awake in this state for a while, gradually getting more sober and gradually getting more bored of the World Service. One window is open so I turn off the radio and instead I listen to the sound of the air outside and the occasional group of drunks. Not many this year. The Japanese dog that lives across the way and is permanently in the front yard of it’s owner’s house responds to passers by with a constant series of barks, until they had moved far enough away for him to no longer consider them a threat to the household.

I put the radio back on and try my best not to listen to it. Shortly after 3 am. comes a loud noise, which sounds to me like someone crashing into one of the large wheelie bins on the street. I lie there a few minutes listening but do not hear anything else until I catch a sound very much like the low moan of a cat in heat.

With sleep now very far away but weariness fully with me I get up and put on my dressing gown and walk through the dark corridor that leads to the living room. Mirrors at either end of this corridor give it a spooky, threatening air. If all lights are off and you stand right in the middle then there seems no end to the passageway. You are suddenly plunged into an infinite black space. There seem to be no boundaries. I leave the lights off and walk unsteadily into the living room with my hand out to meet the door. Street light is visible through the big windows, curtains left open in my stupor.

I open one window slightly, sitting sideways on the back of the couch which sits under the window frames. I can hear the noise still, regular and disturbing and in a paranoid worry I check around the room to find my cat. She once climbed up and out of a back window and managed to get down from this first floor to the ground. We only knew something was wrong when the landlady found her scratching at the ground floor door and brought her up to us. Whilst there seems no way for her to do that tonight I always tend to think the worse and panic. She is safely sleeping curled on the sofa. I run a hand along her back and she gives a contented murmur that makes me realise the sound outside is not from an animal at all. It sounds like it is human.

I open the window up more and look around. My sight is not great at night and tonight it’s worse so I can’t see anything at first. I’m thinking maybe someone is drunk and passed out in a hedge and moaning in their sleep. I listen carefully now, straining to find where the sound is coming from. It’s not easy; the narrow terraced street bounces sounds around and normally everything seems to be coming from only one direction, down the hill. At first I think it’s maybe a house halfway down, some lights are on there. Then I hear it again and I realise it’s much nearer. Directly across is one of many houses divided up into tiny student flats but this one has a communal living room on the first floor, straight across from me. Above that it a communal kitchen and the light is on there and the window is wide open. It’s not the weather to have the window wide open.

I hear the moaning again and this time it has some undertone to it, maybe a sob. I look hard into the darkness of the front yard of the house opposite and maybe now I can see something. Maybe I can see some long object, something out of place. Maybe it is a person. The sound comes again and I know now that a girl is lying there in the front yard and moaning with all the strength she has left. I start at the realisation and am about to go for the phone when the front door of the house opens and lights come on. Two girls come out and they give half screams which turn immediately into crying. One of them is saying the name Annie again and again and again. She rushes over to the dark object whilst the other girl starts to dial for an ambulance.

There is a horrible, desperate feel to the situation. I just sit there on the back of the sofa in the dark, window slightly open doing nothing but watching. What is it I could do right now? An ambulance is on it’s way. I don’t know any of these people and as more of them come out of the building I would only be getting in the way by going out there. So I sit there, watching. The girl’s moans have faded. The crying girl is no longer crying but sitting by her side, squeezing her hand and talking to her, saying her name.

It seems to take a long, long time for the ambulance to get there. After the ambulance come the police. It takes a long time before the ambulance have loaded the girl up and taken her away. Half a dozen of the house mates are in the front yard by now. I am sitting there the entire time, watching. Maybe a couple of times I move. Maybe I make a drink or smoke a cigarette. I’m not sure. By the time the girls is gone it is light and the police are taking their time. I go and get dressed and have decided I need to go down there and talk to the police. I feel like I need to give a statement, I did witness the event if only partially. I also feel like I am part of what is happening. And I feel distanced and separated from it. I feel I want to be down there, I want to be involved, I want to feel something about it.

I stand in the doorway to my house for a while, arms crossed, leaning slightly, just watching. The air is cold but fresh and sweet. I feel I am being intrusive just standing there but I also feel too much of a compulsion for me not to take action. Eventually I approach a young police woman and explain myself. I have some details taken down. I go back and stand at the doorway again until everyone eventually disperses. Then I go back to my flat and sit on the back of the sofa again and watch out of the window, trying to recall in my mind what exactly I saw, what exactly I heard. I think further back to the party, sitting in that bathroom as midnight passed and the New Year started, feeling sick, confused, dizzy, alone. Everyone else was having fun. Probably Annie was having fun at the same time.

Two days later I am arriving home when I notice police at the house opposite again, talking to some of the occupants. There is a man in his late fifties too, balding, grey moustache, a kind but troubled face. I know straight away that he is the girl’s father. One of the policemen mentions something to him and points at the house behind me. The man sees me looking and comes over to talk to me. I tell him what I heard and saw on the night. He tells me his daughter is alive but will never walk again. He tells me how she was drunk and locked herself out of her flat so decided to climb out of the kitchen window and make her way across. It was the last decision she would consciously make. The look on her father’s face is weary and vaguely puzzled. He cannot understand how something so simple as a stupid decision has taken so much away from him. His life from the moment that I heard the crashing noise was no longer the same. Something irreversible made it into something else.

A week later again there are police at that house. I wander out and ask how Annie is doing, mentioning I had talked to her father a few days before. Annie is dead. Annie has been dead since the day I talked to her father.

The distance from my window to the window of the house across the road isn’t very far. It’s still not much further to where I lay as I heard a noise that night, a noise like someone crashing into something. I still try and remember what that noise was really like. I wrote down the sound I thought it made some weeks afterward and now this is being written years after the event. The distance doesn’t change the events or the consequences, or anything that happened since. When we take a memory out and look at and listen to we put it back in a different place and it is no longer the original memory; now it’s the memory of experiencing it once again. We take memories out and look at them and we put them back and every time we do we reconstruct the past in our own mind. It’s only the memory of the past we can change, not anything that has happened since.