It's a Blunder-Full Life

This is like the kind of second that seems to hover and taunt you and make you think that you’re not going to crash down onto the pavement knees first, and you’re not going to realise that said knees are bleeding, and that the bottle of wine you bought has broken and that it is seeping out through the cloth of your bag and people are going to jump to conclusions.

     Yes, this is that kind of moment, except it is not, apart from the odd perception of time. The person concerned is not a hypothetical you or one, it is me, and I am not about to crash down on a pavement and suffer nothing more than cut knees, a loss of dignity, and the waste of good wine. I am in a high speed train that has just jumped the tracks and is about to somersault down the embankment and this is not going to end well. 

     Oh, dear God, I’m scared! I’ve heard folk say this kind of thing seems surreal and almost calm, but it seems neither calm nor surreal. Metal is beginning to crash against metal, and metal is beginning to crash against me. 

     I’m scared but I also wish I had got round to hoovering my house this morning and that I’d finished off typing up the agenda of the last trustees’ meeting.

     And that I’d phoned Mum to tell her that despite that stupid row we had I still love her so very, very much.

It is over as suddenly as it began. I am aware that this time, time has passed and I am not in the train crashing down the embankment. I am walking down a street that seems familiar, in a town that seems familiar. But the light is not quite the same, it is both brighter and dimmer, and voices are not quite the same, they are both flatter and more echoing.

     I am in the office of the publishing company where I work. Where I used to work. We liked to call it a publishing company, but in truth, though it never crossed the line into vanity publishing, it helped people publish their own works, online or (more rarely) in print. We all had to multi-task. Claire is sitting on my desk (and I will call it my desk!). She’s always had a habit of thinking that chairs were for wimps or the unoriginal. “It’s awful that Josie was in that train crash,” she says, with one of those expressions that proclaims, “I am sad, so do not think me heartless, but I’m not about to burst into tears, so don’t worry!”. “I still can’t quite get my head round it. I’ll miss her, of course. But she could be a bit – well, I don’t want to say unreliable, but lackadaisical. How often have we asked her to type up the notes of the agenda at the last trustees’ meeting? And after all, she was the one who volunteered to do it. But they’re still in her desk, the pages not even numbered.”

     You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, Claire!  But she has a point. And I did volunteer. Nobody made me, and I wait for someone to spring to my defence. They don’t. 

     I slip out of the office, and head home. My next door neighbour Kelly and my cousin Tess are in the lounge. “You couldn’t say she was houseproud, could you?” Kelly asked. She doesn’t say it nastily, and perhaps I am deluding myself that there’s a catch in her voice. I knew I hadn’t done the hoovering . But I admit I’d forgotten that the sink was in dire need of a good clean and that that I hadn’t got round to putting the clothes back in the wardrobe that had fallen out in a tangle when I was trying to find that blue top that I was wearing on the train. My home, my business, I think, defiantly. But it is a weak, peevish sort of defiance. I bet their homes aren’t always wonderfully clean and tidy, and they’ve no need to be so high and mighty. But it is true it has been a long while since I had anyone over. And I suppose I really shouldn’t have let those old newspapers accumulate, though I fully intended taking them to the recycling depot this weekend. They’re looking in the cupboard under the sink – well, that’s going too far, they have no right to look there. “Blimey, she certainly liked her wine,” Kelly says, “I mean, I’m not teetotal, but she’s been hitting the bottle, alright.” So that is how people see me, is it? A borderline hoarder and a borderline alcoholic. Neither of these things are true – are they?

     My old college friends, Lorna and Leon, are in their car, heading up here. In the years and, God help us, the decades, since we graduated, we’ve had spells of being in touch and spells of being out of touch. They’ve finally decided to get married, and I wonder if I’ll be invited. No – I wondered if I’d be invited.

     “It still seems surreal,” Lorna says, “I mean – I know she wasn’t the first of our year to pass,” for one bizarre moment I think she is talking about exams, I wouldn’t have had her down as a user of euphemisms. But people change. She’s right, of course. Adam died of leukaemia only a couple of years after we graduated. Looking back I wonder if he knew he was ill at the time. We were all still very much in touch then, and gathered to mourn our dear friend who died so tragically young, and by all accounts had been so brave during his illness. But now we are all, or most of us, leading our own lives, and there is a certain nuance between young and tragically young. And I didn’t bear an illness heroically (something I doubt I would have done!) – I was in a stupid, messy, and probably avoidable train crash. 

     “She never achieved what she could have done,” Lorna says, sadly. “I thought she might be a late blossomer, but it’s too late for that, now.”

     “I know,” Leon nods, “Do you remember, when we were in our second year, everyone said that if anyone in our group would get a first, it would be Josie. It was more or less a given. But then she seemed to lose interest, not to do any more than she had to, and it was such a shame. It was almost as if it seemed too much like hard work, or perhaps she just wasn’t as bright as we thought she was.”

     “In the end, it was probably quite generous to give her a 2.1,” Lorna agrees.

     Ditto, I think, spitefully, but acknowledge it probably isn’t justified and she’s telling the truth.

     “Then she had that chance to make it as a writer. I think she really did have talent –a way with words. Oh, I don’t mean she’d have won the Booker, or been a top of the list bestseller, or anything like that, but those short stories she had published – they were good!”

     “They were,” says Lorna. “And she was offered a deal for a novel with the firm that published them. I remember how ecstatic she was. And she wrote the first 10,000 words as if her life depended on it – was well ahead of schedule. But then she let it slip. Said her characters weren’t doing what she wanted them to do, or that she had writers’ block, or both. The thing is, I had a connection to the relevant publishers at the time – my older brother was working for them, not in an editorial capacity, but things trickle down. Apparently they totally understood that things like that could happen, especially with first timers, and they thought she had enough talent to give her some leeway. But they had their limits. She stopped returning phone calls, answering letters and emails, and in the end – well, it fell through.”

     The trouble is, I can’t dispute a word of that. I could have been a moderately successful novelist (okay, no guarantees) instead of working for a hole in the corner publishing firm. I refuse to use the phrase Mickey Mouse (and after all, Walt Disney hardly died a pauper!) but suppose others do. 

     That hurts. It hurts like hell, and it did at the time, though I made out I didn’t care and didn’t plead for another chance.

     But it’s not the thing that hurts the most.

     Now I am lying somewhere white and quiet, except it is not quiet. A child has rushed into the room! For goodness’ sake, whoever let that happen! It’s my little niece, Jeannie. Five years old, going on twenty sometimes, but sometimes so little and so vulnerable. My Mum is there, too. Oh, please, Mum, if there’s any way you can hear me, or even sense something, I am so, so, sorry, I said things that were hurtful and more childish than anything Jeannie would say, and even when I drove you mad, and I know I often have, a deep part of me knew you always wanted the best for me, though God knows it was no wonder you were frustrated and disappointed at times.

     “Jeanne – child, how did you get in?” Mum asks, “Auntie Jo-Jo – wouldn’t want you to see her like this!”

     “Auntie Dodo knows what I want,” she says, stubbornly. I thought she’d got over that childish speech impediment, but it seems all this worry and fretting has brought it back. It has a certain horrible appropriateness, I suppose, after all, we all know the simile. “Auntie Dodo always knows what stories I want to hear and what toys I want to play with and she – and she doesn’t treat me like a nidiot!” She says it as if she thinks the word is nidiot. 

     “I know, love,” Mum says, stroking Jeannie’s ginger curly hair back from her forehead. “I don’t care what anyone says, she’s a decent person, and you tell me someone who hasn’t made silly mistakes!”

     She is talking of me in the present tense! Is she still in denial? But then I feel her touch on my hand, and hear her say, “Josie, darling, it’s Mum. It’s time for you to wake up now!”

     Slowly, sweetly, it dawns on me, though at first I don’t dare believe it. I am not in a mortuary. I am in a hospital bed. I know I am injured – the pain is coming back now, and I know my head aches, and can see my left leg is in a cast. But concussion heals, and so do broken legs. And I have this glorious, wonderful chance to make something more of my life – which doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll always get round to taking bottles and newspapers to the recycling without letting them build up! 

     I will be able to tell the stories Jeannie wants to hear, and I will be able to make things up with Mum.

     I have been such a nidiot!