Twelve. Vanessa Jones

gardens in town he has ripped cuttings. Usually under cover of darkness, but never intended. His garden has grown exactly as he has grown, slowly and by series of chance. It is the same with all his possessions, furniture, clothes, books and friends. I try to be more like him but I am too much in a hurry. I have an idea and like to realise it all at once. He waits, and he finds the design by accident. He is far less often disappointed.

      I don’t think I have ever seen the garden looking as real as it does this year. It has come into itself. The plants are growing so thickly that it looks like a secret, but still it manages to steal the sun. In it, on the paving, Josh has drawn a backgammon board in chalk. A game of skill and chance. He suggests one.

      Could I ever not understand backgammon? could I survive without Josh? how did people get hold of me before my mobile phone? can we forget concepts once we have them? could we unlearn the word “car”? Luxury turns right turns given turns necessity. When I was younger I could almost have moved in with someone who lived in a barrel of water, but I have definite needs now, definite edges. I don’t understand how anyone manages to fall in love after the age of seventeen. I do understand claustrophobia.

      Because every day I make the decision to see exclusively. I must not register certain realities – like: there is no silence, or: I am never further than ten feet away from another person above below left right – for I am going down a tunnel. And looking straight ahead it seems there is room to manoeuvre but noticing the backdrop is never starting again, and attempting to turn around is: panic.

      Josh and I make packed lunches for each other. It started off as an economy drive but has become a game of surprise. It was his turn last week and on Wednesday he shocked me with a cockle sandwich. It was a coup, not least because he did it on the most uninspiring day of the week. This week it’s my go, and I’ve decided on a radically different approach, five days of egg mayonnaise. It’s a huge price for not-that-funny a joke I realise this morning as I’m slicing the bread. For a start, egg mayonnaise first thing. For another, I too have to eat it. For a third, if someone did it to me I’d think they were very sad. Will he? Well …? Here we go.

      When we first started working, we used to smoke a joint before we left the house. I don’t know how we did it, it is entirely unthinkable now. At the least delay on the underground, we’d come home and phone in to say we were catching a bus. We did wonder if they could hear us filling the kettle on the end of the line, but we decided we didn’t care – they could sack us – then we’d roll another. Funny how you get over it without noticing. Funny how what the company does was once ‘what they do’ and is now ‘what we do’. Funny how it doesn’t hurt.

      Still, Monday morning it is definitely them and us and ‘them’ is everyone apart from me and Josh. We stride to the station, we sandwich ourselves between varying amounts of aliens and we look straight ahead, soft focus.

      So many people all rushing to do their jobs. I wish I knew whether they enjoyed them, or got from them some sense of satisfaction. To my mind, work is the most monumental waste of time. I know that I could be thinking a larger thought, or having a more interesting conversation elsewhere. But I suffer from a lack of imagination. I don’t know where elsewhere is, or how to make it pay my rent, I can’t picture anything that could keep me interested nine-to-five, monday-to-friday, forty-eight-weeks-of-the-year. And I’m inclined to believe that everyone agrees with me for if they didn’t, surely there’d be no such word as ‘holiday’. Watching them, joining them struggle for space in this survival-of-the-fittest test first thing in the morning, every morning, the city seems to me a complex organism with a terminal disease. The new age has notions which oppose its ethic – fitness, health food, relaxation – and the age of communication has negated its reason to be.

      After twenty minutes, Josh goes east and I go west. When I was little, I used to steal application forms and leaflets from banks, and with some other small friend whose every detail is now lost to me, played ‘work’ which consisted of, fundamentally, filling in these forms and reorganising them in piles. This is pretty much what I find myself doing for real now and it’s somewhat lost its appeal. The origami heaps on my desk are exactly how I left them minus my friday-air of elation. As far as they’re concerned, the weekend was my illusion.

      It is ironic that, as an atheist to the work ethic, I have incarnated as a recruitment consultant. It startles me sometimes that my journey to this point is entirely due to a secretarial course that I never wanted to take. If I could unlearn to type, how different my life might have been. I started here as a temporary secretary and I have never left. Well, you’ve got to do something and I’m no good at first days. On my first day at school I got sent to the corner for colouring the moon in yellow and not knowing why I’d used that colour; I hated being new and I was new often. Now, I’m an old hand and no longer a secretary, in fact I’ve got one of my own. He tells me this morning that I have wall-to-wall interviews till lunch time. Time will fly then. Then I’ll think of Josh, ignorantly tucking in.

      Time is subjective. The interviewees sitting in reception find the ten minutes until I can see them an eternity of sweating palms. The fly on the wall beside them spies in an even slower motion which lets it dodge the swiftest of swatting hands. Someone has found life on Mars. Well. Even if it were more than a single-celled bacteria, it would be as distinct from a human as a fly, or a lion. It would have no knowledge of day or night, week weekend, month year century millennium. We have invented millennia. And although I know we’ve made them up, I can’t help but feel apocalyptic at this point in time, in the madness of weekday mornings, on the Friday nights when we abandon our metropolis, one day never to return.

      The city is sick. At its centre is chaos because everyone within it is dispensable, yet the central icon of our times is: the individual. In a tunnel though, there is no direction but straight ahead. Evolution involves the collation of information, to no end but survival, but how will we survive? I may feel apocalyptic but I’ve no idea what should happen next, I suffer a lack of imagination. And so does everyone else, I imagine. We’re neither-nor. We laud people over machines, but we can’t help looking forward to the day when computers can make love to us. We’re unsure whether to live organically farming or safe within the helmet of a virtual world. It is the end of the decade, the century and the millennium. It is Thursday Afternoon all over the world and this is what I’m wondering: where are we going for the weekend?

two

      Shirley’s father died when she was eleven months old. It is this, she says, that has given her her unique spin on the politics of men and women. ‘Being brought up without a father,’ she tells us quite often, although now it doesn’t grate so, ‘gives you a very different outlook. It means you don’t play to roles.’ She is married to Andrew and together they have a small son called Oliver.

      It is because of Oliver that Shirley and I met in the first place. She was background music before then, heavily pregnant when we moved in and leading to a few do you think they know they’re alive? conversations: babies in stomachs and bodies in general and breast-feeding (it can’t be right). But babies, they perform the same function as dogs do in human interaction. You pretend you’ve not noticed the person queuing next to you for the past three months and then all of a sudden it’s ‘hello, fella’ and ‘isn’t he sweet?’ and ‘does he bite?’

      This house has Shirley on one side, mr faceless on the other and behind it, garden-to-garden back-to-back, it has naked neighbours. These others have neither children nor animals and so have remained objects of peeking and conjecture. Sometimes sitting in the garden, doing my thing while they are doing theirs, it seems like we are plastic figures placed in toy town being repositioned by a giant child. To him, mr faceless is a secret. He is intriguing because neither Josh nor I are able to describe him. If we saw him somewhere other we’d never recognise him, and we quite often have arguments about the colour of his hair. Our naked neighbours live in a flat parallel with our first floor. On weekday mornings, they iron shirts in their boxer shorts and they eat cereal in them at the weekends. I go red when I see them on the street fully clothed. They have the bodies of young gods and I’m sure that to the child in charge they’re superheroes. And me and Josh … ?

      Shirley,