A Day in the Life of Someone
There’s something rather touching about a winter without any autumn, I thought, looking from the 3rd storey window of
the office
where I work in my telephone job. All the trees are losing their green leaves, I
felt a pang of sympathy; it was not right for them to fall, but there they were,
spinning past the pane, green and cold on the wind. November now, and hardly a
touch of autumn colour to grace summer’s demise.
I work at a management consultancy in Buxton,
Derbyshire, as a telephone market research interviewer. The money is good, and
we get paid £14phr if we work calling Australia after midnight. The hours are
totally flexible, and the other telephonists are good friends of mine. I am
working towards a CIM degree in Marketing, now doing the Advanced Certificate
Stage 2, with Metia at Stoke on Trent College.
Last Saturday my cousin Olivia got married. She is
going to live in New York with her husband, a handsome Dutch South African guy,
whom she met the year before last. The wedding reception was a wonderful affair,
held at Mottram Hall in Cheshire, the room decorated with the flags from all the
countries represented by members of the family. Paul and I did a lot of dancing
and partook of a scrumptious buffet. It was great to be re-united with my
mother’s side of the family too.
But I digress. It was a Friday, and I always get
butterflies, because my boyfriend Paul comes over to see me. So my lunch lay
unfinished on the desk: half a ham sandwich from Marks and Spencer’s, with
English mustard. I can see him in his Land Rover now; just as he was when my
sister took my car off the road one winter, all the lights in the fog and the
dark, and his quiet, serious face as he worked out how to retrieve it. He
doesn’t know how much I love him; if he guesses it, he will still never know
why!
We met at the local disco, the Winking Man, a
notorious joint halfway between Leek and Buxton, in the Staffordshire Moorlands,
habituated by the local farmers and the scene of many fights. I was 24, single,
just back from my course at London University. I live five minutes away and
loved dancing. A friend of my brother’s was just telling me he would be the
happiest man around if he could date me (or my sister!), when Paul walked up,
and we were introduced. He tells me he wanted to ask me to dance then, 6 years
ago, but I looked as if I thought I was too good for him… Anyway, we
eventually made it. We have been together four-and-a-half years now.
I‘m home educated and play lots of musical
instruments, paint copies of the pre-Raphaelites’ pictures, speak Japanese,
and am an idealist. Paul is five years younger than I, works ten hours a day in
a local quarry, is a qualified motor mechanic, and has a very “normal”
outlook on life. Caviar and nut cutlets, our stars say! But he is a straight guy
with a lively sense of humour, and I’m a ‘fit bird’ with a wild mind and a
nice way of saying “yes” where most people around here abbreviate even this
shortest of words. And so we make a fair Romeo and Juliet…
Gaynor, who works on the desk next to mine, entered to
put the kettle on and cut short my reverie. “It’s snowing!” she announced,
grinning. I live on the moors, and snow is a serious matter at home. Our lane,
winding down the side of a steep hill, is two-thirds of a mile long.
“And I’m going home.” I put the sandwich in the
waste paper basket and closed my file; I’d been phoning Scottish Telecom’s
residential customers, and it was hard work. As soon as they hear an English
voice, they assume the company has fallen into English hands (and assume an air
of hostility).
Outside the air had a sharp moist quality; the wet
snow was coming down in large flakes which settled on my black velvet coat and
melted with alarming rapidity. I hurried to my car, an old diesel Audi 80, and
climbed in. As I drew onto the street, the awful sick feeling I always get now
returning home washed over me like a wave. I opened the window and breathed the
icy fog in deep breaths.
My parents have separated. Sometimes I tell myself
that I am foolish to make so much of this in my mind, that it happens all the
time, and that a quiet parting of ways is so much better than the usual tales of
betrayal or violence. But predominantly I feel confusion, anger and worry.
Confusion that an apparently happy marriage of thirty odd years should go so
badly wrong in such a short time. Worry as to how it will all end. How will it
end?
I switched on the stereo. I’m a rock fan; my
siblings & I have a rock band called Slightly Fatal. I’m the drummer. This
was our new demo tape. I write all the songs for the group, with my sister. We
have three brothers, two of whom play in the band. The oldest is an engineer; he
doesn’t play rock, although he has a lovely singing voice. Felix lives in Leek
with his wife Emma, a lovely girl, whom he met and married within a year.
The Burbage traffic lights changed to green. I love
the way the Audi surges forward when you depress the accelerator. The mist hung
low over Axe Edge just outside the town, and with this and the whirling snow, I
had to drop my speed to a sensible 30 and put the car into four-wheel drive.
These days I sometimes drive up onto the Roaches, a
spine of rocks on the opposite side of the valley from our house, and sit
watching the sun go down and all the sodium lights in Leek come on and turn from
pink to orange. I can see traffic lights changing and car headlights as it gets
darker, and imagine a contented world, where husbands return from work on time
for tea, tell their wives how nice it was, and settle down in the sitting room
for a cosy evening chat and a film on TV. Before they had the row, my Dad and
Mum used to spend long hours at the kitchen table together, a glass of wine half
finished, talking about us, the weather, and all sorts.
My younger brother Fergus, who is just twenty, has
started smoking. He always hated fags, but when my Mum moved into the sitting
room, he began smoking to calm his nerves. He suffers from weird attacks after
having anything sweet, even tea with sugar in, and we all thought he might be
diabetic. But we took him for blood tests at the doctors with normal results. It
was stress.
The atmosphere at home is enough to stress a
Reinforced Steel Joist, though. My sister eventually moved out to live with her
boyfriend Jonathan, who has a house in Brown Edge. She has been together with
him for a couple of years now and loves to grow flowers and vegetables in their
big garden. Jonathan is building a garage for his motorbikes, and they both ride
out together sometimes. I too shall be very glad when my turn comes to flee the
parental nest. At thirty, I can’t help wondering if I have outstayed my
welcome…
I was stressing again now, myself. I tried to think of
something pleasant as I turned down our lane. Paul. His kind face and gentle,
loving ways. In March this year he insisted that I book a holiday for the pair
of us in Wales. I caught him packing a bottle of champagne into his luggage the
night before we left. “What have we got to celebrate?” I laughed. “We can
celebrate being on holiday, can’t we?” he returned.
But there was more to it than that. On our first night
in the cottage, in front of the stove after a delicious meal of roast beef,
potatoes and vegetables, with lashings of thick brown gravy, when the red
candles on the table were sparkling in our glasses of red wine, he went down on
one knee before me holding out a big diamond.
“Will you marry me?” he asked. I was thrilled, and
told him so.
As I stopped to open the gate into our yard, a vehicle
drew up behind me. With all my varied musings, I had never even noticed the
headlights behind. Paul’s early, I thought. It’s only seven. He swung open
his door, came over and pushed the gate away from me.
“You all right babe?” he asked. “I was thinking
we could go for a spin in the snow, but let’s have a hot milk first shall we?
And then I’ll take you back with me to mine. You’ll never make it in a car
tomorrow!”
Later that night, sitting in front of the dying stove
before going to bed, I smiled at a cynical thought floating in my brain. Paul
couldn’t solve all my problems, by a long chalk, but by heaven, was he a good
beginning!
©2003 StoriesByEmail.com
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