PULLING DOWN THE LEVERS
A short story.
He'd had a good innings all said and done. So thought Piers Hardwick as he stared out of a French window permanently mottled by grime, noticing without great remark the first leaf of autumn. Admittedly the past twelve months had been miserable, the long weeks broken only by an intermittent haul to a small bookshop where Piers had scrabbled an income barely sufficient to resist the battalion of flint-eyed creditors regularly clamouring at his door.
His life of drudgery was interrupted only by the occasional gobbet of rejection sent from various individuals and organisations who Piers had hoped would decide to effect some change on his life with an investment of either interest or money, preferably both.
Now, shuffling away from the over-familiar view, Piers found himself consumed by the realisation that such life-changing drama wasn't going to happen. Secretly he’d accepted this for some time, so long in fact that he no longer felt like a child with its nose pressed hard against the sweetshop window, but instead a more lonely figure standing alone on the opposite side of the road.
Quickly banishing the thought, Piers considered making himself a cup of tea but unwilling to countenance the effort required decided instead to flop onto the broken hull of his sofa and pick up his old guitar. The Fender Telecaster, like its owner, had seen better days. The volume knob was missing and the strings were coated with an unpleasant grey residue containing, Piers mused, enough DNA to solve a thousand killings. If anyone ever asked, he always denied he could play the thing. It had simply become an item of comfort, like Linus' blanket, to be held and caressed, something upon which one could while away the hours, letting one’s mind drift into a state of contented vacuity, the chords lazily strummed in a repetitive pattern; E minor, G, D, before returning to a reassuringly morose minor A.
As he played the guitar, Piers considered his options. He'd been tied to this sprawl of a city for as long as he could remember. Moving up from the suburbs as a teen, he'd thrown himself towards all London had to offer. Self-education, he'd called it, not the stuff they taught you in school. In those wide-open days he'd been keen to discover all there was to discover, so much so he'd even kept a journal, jotting down various eye-popping events and experiences he was convinced were gradually forming his life. The journal, like the volume control knob, had long disappeared and if Piers had considered buying a replacement he'd have little to write in it; rehearsals for suicide notes maybe, shopping lists for food, phone numbers never to be called.
Piers had come to the conclusion that these days London was a young persons’ city, its booze-addled teenagers storming the streets as if in revenge for slights yet uncommitted. Then again, all cities are for young people, Piers considered, young people or old people too poor to leave. His mind flashed to the recent flooding in New Orleans he’d watched on TV and its images of overweight paupers waist-deep in slurry, their sopping string-vests struggling to contain the flesh within. And the babies, he frowned, the snot-smeared, tear-bubbling babies. African-Americans they called themselves. Well they sure looked African now.
It struck him, as he rummaged in a cupboard for a packet of biscuits, how fortuitous a natural disaster could sometimes be. One minute you're miserably struggling through life, trying to make ends meet, shit job, shit relationships... then boom! Mother Nature to the rescue. It was as if a cleansing had taken place, a second baptism. Like 9/11, the perfect get-out. Change your life, walk away. In the midst of the horror, the carnage, no one troubled to check on the details. The phrase ‘lost in the flood’ was a catch-all for failure, stasis or a lack of personal direction. It was a disappearing trick, a way to self-reinvent, to slip from all that had had come before and begin a new path, a bright, white, unsullied path leading far from the smoke, the dust, to a fresh-aired vision of the future, where one could be free, where one could become new. It was then, once Piers remembered that he didn't have any biscuits as he'd scoffed the whole box the night before in a frenzy of boredom, that this could be the way out of his own situation.
But did the state of his life really deserve to be seen in such a dramatic light? His lot was no worse than many others. In some ways it could be said to be better than most. But it didn't feel better to Piers. And the fact that there may have been large numbers of individuals unhappier with their lot than he did little to alleviate his misery. If anything it made him feel worse.
When Piers took time to study his life he recognised there had been no sudden falling away, no brutal disappointment, no catastrophic let-down. Instead, a slow fog had descended upon him, a murky scrim blurring any notion of optimism he might have once had.
The emergence of this veil had been gradual. In his youth, the floppy-fringed Piers Hardwick, failing to gain entry to Oxford or Cambridge had instead and almost as an afterthought, gained a place at a red-brick University where he'd read English and History. Yet up until that juncture in his life, things had come relatively easy to Piers.
Though not what one might describe as traditionally handsome, his louche appearance and cynical drawl had held him in good stead during the years of transition from innocent youth to insolent teen. Piers been part of the in-crowd without ever finding himself situated at its heart. He preferred to remain perched on the rim of social-circles, ready to bolt should a more desirable offer come along. It never did of course, despite his avid scouring of the horizon, and unwilling to devote the necessary level of commitment to whichever group of people he happened to be sponging off at the time, Piers ended up feeling disconnected to everything. This would establish the future pattern of his life. And though he was happy with the freedom his phantom-like presence brought him, its lack of responsibility and duty oddly satisfying, as the years rolled by, Piers began to consider the idea that there might actually be a greater benefit to profound social interplay, to feeling the sense of actually belonging to something. Sadly, by the time he came to this realisation, Piers was too far wrapped up in appreciating himself and his personal requirements to do anything about it.
This blithe missing of the boat was echoed in his relationships. While Piers was aware he had the capacity for love, it had always turned out to be a fleeting thing. He treated it like a rare bird, to be spotted, annotated and briefly enjoyed, before being allowed to return, usually at high speed, to its former surroundings. As the gaps between sightings grew wider, Piers was forced to pleasure himself with a number of solitary interests. He became part of the army of singletons similarly ensconced in one-bedroom flats, polishing off bottles of cheap wine and mouth-scalding ready-meals, claiming total ownership of the television remote-control while loudly proclaiming their council-tax rebate.
At the same time, watching friends' relationships regularly and acrimoniously disintegrate convinced Piers that one’s private life could be a lot worse. But now, as the nights of another year drew in, the thumpingly prosaic nature of his domestic scenario, its silent homecomings, its need for talk-radio, its undone washing-up, its dust gathered in heaps along the wainscotting, began to weigh heavy on his soul. And it had been on of these nights, TV channels surfed like a Cuban musician playing the scales of xylophone, that Piers first considered the notion of death.
(to be continued)