And that was it. No message back. Nothing the next day. They had missed the boat, maybe they had never meant to do anything about their situation in any real way, just a surge of anxiety in the small hours of the morning, some fantasy of escape, some flurry of activity that had settled now back into fatalism, resignation. Our lives had briefly intersected and then drifted on. Poignant but for the best. And besides I had my own things to sort out, work, involving myself in the local Labour party and related initiatives, figuring out the local area, getting into some kind of routine. Plunge into things, be busy, that’s how you hold off fear, grief. Try to be useful.
I had already arranged a job with my previous employer at the language centre the company ran at the University, a variable hours contract during the Summer which at that moment stood at ten a week, inconveniently arranged over five days. After I had reassured them that I was a reliable, low maintenance, self-motivated team player I hoped I would be able to shift to a two-day week from the September onward, leaving me more time to get involved with other things. I wasn’t due to start for another week and, at a loose end, thought I should take the bus out to the campus, check the route, time, find the department well in advance.
What else? I needed to get back down the gym, that always helped and I understood that my own father who had been a body builder in his youth and lifted weights all through his life to a fixed, inflexible timetable that had impinged on family holidays, visits to grandkids, had probably done it to ward of depression. Certainly he had married late, had children late for a man of his generation, had fantasised of escape when he was younger, perhaps if he’d been born a decade later he would have dropped out somehow, gone on a spiritual quest, been a hippie, but he had come of age in the narrow 1950s and despite holding out somehow, imaging life might come in and sweep him up, he had succumbed finally to family, a job in the Shipyard and life in the town, with at least the consolation of an early and comfortable retirement on the horizon.
I had inherited his capacity for fantasy, his grandiosity, if not quite his discipline. Odd to think that it was only in my mid-life that my childhood and my youth came fully into view, certain iron continuities could be traced now, the parameters seen, felt. All that sense of limitless possibility all that agony of choosing and yet here really is the narrow path you have always been on. A surge of loss and doubt. I checked my phone, perhaps out of the blue she had messaged me to say she was coming back after all.
No. Nothing. Just a reminder email that I was due to attend my first Lancaster Initiative meeting that night. The outskirts of the city scrolled past the bus window.
Good. Keep busy.
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