The Time of My Life

‘Because most of the people I meet aren’t one hundred years old like you.’

‘I’m not going to be one hundred for at least two weeks.’

‘Ah. I see. Thirty? Forty? Fifty?’

‘Thirty.’

‘It’s all downhill from there, believe me.’

And he went silent, and I went silent and then it wasn’t natural any more and we were just two strangers on a wrong number who both wanted to hang up.

I got in there first. ‘It was nice talking to you, Don. Thanks for the offer of the ticket.’

‘Bye, toothless married woman,’ he said and we both laughed. I hung up and caught a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror and I looked like my mother, just a face full of a smile. It faded fast at the realisation that I’d just spoken to an absolute stranger on the phone. Maybe they were right, maybe I was losing it. I went to bed early and at twelve thirty my phone rang, waking me in fright. I looked at the number flashing and didn’t recognise it, so I ignored it and waited for it to stop so I could go back to sleep. A few seconds later the phone rang again. I answered it, hoping it wasn’t bad news. All I could hear was noise, screams and shouts. I moved it away from my ear, then heard the music, then heard the singing, then recognised the song. He was calling me, Don Lockwood was calling me, so I could hear my favourite song.

‘If you think your life’s a waste of time, if you think your time’s a waste of life, come over to this land, take a look around. Is this a tragic situation, or a massive demonstration, where do we hide?’

I lay back on the bed and listened to the song, then when it was finished, I stayed on the line to speak to him. As soon as the next song started, he hung up.

I smiled. Then texted him.

–Thanks.

He texted back straight away.

–One less thing on your list. Nite.

I stared at those words for a long time then added his number into my phone. Don Lockwood. Just seeing it there made me smile.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

I was standing on the fire escape, secret smoking location number three of the year after the disabled toilet on the second floor and the cleaning staff service room. Two other people were there too; a man and a woman but they weren’t there together and none of us spoke. It wasn’t like the smoking section outside a club or pub where everybody spoke to everybody, united by the happiness of being out on a social occasion. This was work and the only reason we were all here, apart from needing to feed the nicotine fix, was to get away from talking to people. We had come here to have a break from thoughts and the hard work that came with the constant interaction with idiots. Or at least people we considered idiots because they were not mind readers and we had to, patiently, use polite words to explain things that we were thinking when really inside we were fighting the urge to take their heads in our hands and softly and repeatedly thud their foreheads off the wall. But there was no such politeness here; we were shutting off our brains, deliberately ignoring each other and satisfied by our right to do so, concentrating only on breathing in and blowing out smoke. Only I wasn’t. I hadn’t stopped thinking, and I wasn’t smoking.

I heard the door open behind me. I didn’t bother turning around, I didn’t care if location number three had been found and we had all been caught. What was another misdemeanour on my current rap sheet? But the other two did care and they hid their cigarettes in their closed and quickly yellowing palms, forgetting the rising smoke would give the game away, and they both quickly turned to see who had stumbled upon their lair. They didn’t appear too concerned by who they saw but they didn’t relax either which meant it wasn’t the boss but it wasn’t someone they knew. The man took a final long drag of his cigarette and quickly left, the scare of the close call enough to ruin his nicotine thrill. The woman stayed where she was, but eyed the new guest up and down as she had done with me when I joined them. I still didn’t turn around to see who it was, partly because I didn’t care who it was, but mostly because I knew who it was.

‘Hi,’ he said, standing so close to me our shoulders rubbed.

‘I’m not talking to you,’ I said, staring straight ahead. The woman sensed something juicy and settled down to suck on the remainder of her cigarette.

‘I told you it was going to be harder than you thought,’ he said gently. ‘But don’t worry, we’ll get there.’

‘Will we now,’ I said. ‘Excuse me,’ I turned to the lady, ‘would you mind if I borrowed a cigarette, please?’

‘I think she means can she take it. She can’t give it back once it’s smoked,’ Life added for me.

She looked at me as though she’d rather sell her favourite grandmother but she gave me one anyway because that’s what people do, they’re mostly polite, even when they’re feeling rude inside.

I inhaled. Then I coughed.

‘You don’t smoke,’ he said.

I inhaled again in his face, then tried to stifle the cough that immediately came after.

‘Why don’t you just tell me why you’re so angry?’

‘Why?’ I finally turned to him. ‘Are you demented? You know bloody well why. You made a fool of me in there. You made me look like a … like a …’

‘Liar, by any chance?’

‘Look, I had a plan. I had it all under control. You were just supposed to sit there and observe, that’s what you said.’

‘I never said that.’

‘Somebody said that.’

‘No, you assumed.’

I silently fumed.

‘So tell me, what was the great plan? You were going to lie again and all of a sudden like the great genius you are, learn Spanish overnight?’

‘I have a great aptitude for learning, that’s what my French teacher said,’ I huffed.

‘And your civics teacher said “could do better”.’ He looked away. ‘I did the right thing.’

Silence. The smoker sniffed.

‘Okay, so I should have told the truth, but there has to be another way of doing this. You can’t just bulldoze your way into my life and try to fix every little lie that I’ve ever told. What are you going to do when you meet my parents? Come out with every little fib and give them a heart attack? Are you going to tell them that instead of a study group, I had a house party the night they went to my Aunt Julie’s fortieth and that their darling nephew Colin shagged a girl in their bed and Fiona streaked across the lawn for the last bit of hash and that no, I’m sorry, it wasn’t vegetable soup on the floor like I said it was, it was Melanie’s vomit and I shouldn’t have let the dog eat it? And by the way, Lucy can’t speak Spanish.’ I gasped for air.

He was taken aback. ‘Even your parents think you can speak Spanish?’

‘They paid for a summer there, what else was I meant to tell them?’ I snapped.

‘The truth? Does that ever occur to you?’

‘That I was a podium dancer in a night club instead of doing the job they set up for me at a hotel reception?’

‘Maybe not, then.’

‘I mean, where does the big reveal begin and end? One minute you’re buying light bulbs and the next minute you’re telling my father I think he needs to get off his high horse and stop being a pretentious little shit. You need to have a little sensitivity about this, you’re supposed to be helping me make things better, not putting me in the unemployment line and ending what little relationship I already have with my family. We need to have a plan.’

He was silent for a while, I could see he was mulling it over and I waited for one of his analogies but none came. Instead he said, ‘You’re right. I’m sorry.’

I pretended to keel over the banister but he and the smoker pulled me back, thinking I was serious.

‘Thanks,’ I said to her, a little embarrassed, and she quite wisely found that an appropriate time to leave.

‘But I’m not sorry for what I did, just the way that I went about it. We’ll work on another strategy for the future.’

I respected his fairness, his ability to admit when he was wrong. So I took another drag of the cigarette and then put it out, as a mark of respect. But he wasn’t finished and I examined the crushed smouldering cigarette to see if I could pick it up again and continue smoking.

‘I couldn’t just sit there and listen to you lie again, Lucy, and I’m never going to be able to do that so whatever strategy we work out, it has to involve you not lying again. It gives me heartburn.’

‘My lying gives you heartburn?’

‘Right there.’ He rubbed the centre of his chest.

‘Oh. Well, I’m sorry about that.’

He winced and rubbed it again. ‘Your nose just grew, Pinocchio.’

I shoved him playfully. ‘Why don’t you just let me tell people the truth? In my own time, that is.’

‘I don’t think there’s enough time in the world to allow that to happen.’

‘Well, I’m not going to gather the troops and admit everything all at once but I’ll do it. I’ll do it when the time is right. How about we agree that I just won’t tell any more lies from now on, and you do your little accompanying, observing thing if you have to.’

‘How will you stop yourself from lying?’

‘I think I know how not to lie if I don’t want to,’ I said, insulted. ‘It’s not as if I have a problem.’

‘What is it about the wrong-number guy that makes you tell the truth?’

‘Who?’

‘You know who. See, you’ve just done it again,’ he said, amused. ‘Your first reaction is to deny any knowledge of anything.’

I ignored his insight. ‘I told him not to call me any more.’

‘Why? Did you call and he was engaged?’

Though he was pleased with his joke, I ignored it. ‘Nah. It was just too weird.’

‘That’s a pity.’

‘Yeah,’ I said vaguely, not sure if it was pitiful. I held out my hand. ‘So have we got a deal? I don’t lie, you observe?’

He thought about it. ‘I want to add to it.’

I dropped my hand. ‘Of course you do.’

‘Every time you lie, I reveal a truth.’ He held out his hand. ‘Deal?’

I thought about it; I didn’t like it. I couldn’t truthfully promise that I would never lie again, all I could do was try, and I couldn’t trust him to reveal any amount of truth in my life, but if I agreed to the deal then at least it put the ball in my court and he wouldn’t be charging around my life like a bull in a china shop. ‘Fine. It’s a deal.’ We shook on it.

It was tense when I got back to the office. The others couldn’t figure out whether to be angry with me or not, just as they couldn’t figure out whether to be angry with Steve or not so we just worked in silence, no doubt putting aside any issues that needed discussion with one another in the newly created when everything gets back to normal tray beside the inbox and the outbox. Life faced me from the opposite desk, which was acceptable because I bet there wasn’t a soul in the room, apart from Edna, who could remember the name of the guy who worked there. He’d been knocked out in round one early last year when I had nothing to do with him from where I sat in the corner right beneath the air-conditioning vent and my sole task every day was to try keep warm and do everything to stop Graham from staring at my nipples. Needless to say, Augusto Fernández’s quite earnest promise that he would do all in his power to give Steve his job back was nonsense, and so Steve’s desk stood empty. If Life had chosen to sit at that desk, however, that would have caused a stir. It would have been too raw, too painful. Life looked through his computer all day, tap-tap-tapping and making notes, watching me, observing how I spoke to the others which was at an all-time low seeing as nobody was willing to communicate.

Then I started to think about what he’d said. About the wrong number, about Don Lockwood, about why I didn’t lie to him. I don’t know why I didn’t lie to him but the most obvious answer was because I didn’t know him, he was a complete stranger to me and the truth didn’t matter with him.

The truth didn’t matter. Why did it with everybody else?

I picked up my phone and went through my photos; I stopped at the one of his eyes, studied them, zoomed in and out of them one by one like an obsessive stalker, saw the flecks of aqua, almost green, in the blue, then I set it as my screen saver. It looked pretty impressive when I placed my phone on the desk and they were staring up at me.

‘What are you smiling at?’ Life asked me, and his sudden voice made me jump.

‘What? Jesus, you scared me. Don’t creep up on me like that.’

‘I was sitting right here, what were you doing?’

‘Oh,’ I was about to say nothing, when I looked down at the screen saver. I didn’t want to lie. ‘Just looking at photographs.’

Satisfied I was telling the truth, Life decided to take a break and headed off to the kitchen. Graham’s eyes followed him across the room; then he looked around at everyone else to make sure they were staying put at their desks, stood up and followed Life into the kitchen. I watched the door, waiting for one of them to come out but when five minutes had passed I began to worry. Life had been in the kitchen too long with Graham the Cock, I hoped he hadn’t fallen prey to one of his offers of a dalliance, a thought which I knew couldn’t be true but made me queasy. I stood at the filing cabinet which Louise had strategically placed by the kitchen door, opened a drawer and pretended to look for a file while eavesdropping.

‘So she lied about the Spanish,’ Graham said.

‘Yep,’ Life said, sounding like he was eating, and he was scraping something. A yoghurt pot, I deducted. That was Louise’s, she was on WeightWatchers and snacked all day on yoghurts which had more sugar in them than a doughnut.

‘Well, well, well. And she lied about smoking.’

‘Yep,’ he said again. Scrape, scrape, scrape.

‘You know that I smoke,’ Graham said.

‘No, I didn’t know that.’ And it sounded like he didn’t care much either.

‘We sometimes go out there together, me and Lucy, to the private place,’ Graham said, keeping his voice low, not because he was talking about the private smoking place but in that way that men did when they were talking about sexual things they had done, or more usually wished they’d done.

‘The fire escape,’ Life said, keeping his voice at normal level, which told anyone who wasn’t Graham that he didn’t want to lower his tone of voice or subject of conversation.

‘I was thinking that she might have a thing for me. That pretending to be a smoker was just a way to get close to me.’ Graham gave a naughty little chuckle, forgetting about the fact that it was always he who followed me.

‘You think?’ Scrape, scrape.

‘Well, it’s hard to get close in here, with this lot. What do you think? Has she ever mentioned anything to you about me? Or she wouldn’t have to say it, you’d just know, wouldn’t you? Go on, you can tell me.’

‘Yeah, I pretty much know everything,’ Life said and I was annoyed that Cock knew he was my life. It was enough that he tried to come on to me, never mind trying to sweet-talk my life as well.

‘So what do you think? Does she want some?’

‘Want some?’ The scraping stopped. The yoghurt had been demolished, the integrity insulted.

‘She’s turned me down a few times, I won’t lie to you, but the thing is I’m married and for a girl like Lucy, that’s not her thing. But I still feel there’s something … Has she told you anything about me?’

I heard a squeak – the bin lid rising; heard the plastic bag rustle as something was dumped – the yoghurt pot; heard a clink in the sink – the spoon. Then heard a long sigh – my life.

‘Graham, I can safely say that Lucy wants to like you and occasionally sees glimpses of a nice guy but deep down, deep, deep down she thinks you’re an absolute asshole.’

I smiled, closed the file drawer and swiftly returned to my desk. I knew then that though he’d stabbed me in the back just that morning, by the afternoon, he had my back. The office, namely Graham, was even quieter that afternoon and I wasn’t fired that day. Lying in bed that night I knew Life was awake because he wasn’t snoring. I was running through everything that had happened that day and all that had been said; between me, Life and everybody else stuck in between. I eventually came to one conclusion.

‘You planned all that, didn’t you?’ I asked to the dark empty room.

‘Planned what?’

‘You deliberately went in and told Edna the truth in a way that would make me come up with the idea to tell the truth myself.’

‘Sounds like you’re analysing everything too much, Lucy.’

‘Am I right?’

Silence.

‘Yes.’

‘What else are you planning?’

He never answered me. It was just as well.

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