Contacts. Mark Watson
want to see him. Everyone had kids, or they were in couples having brunch, or they were just mysteriously away as people so often seemed to be when you were yearning for them. His last online date had ended in a humiliation so complete that he couldn’t imagine opening the app again; it felt as if everyone else there could see him, pitied him. Thoughts like that were irrational; they were not the sort of thoughts James was used to having – not until he lost the job, if it was possible to identify a turning point. Since then, they’d been more and more common, and it was exhausting to carry them around.
He went into the hall, made sure Steffi was out. His body felt heavy, his legs reluctant to carry him even this couple of dozen steps. Her bedroom door was open – chaos inside, as usual, as if she’d had a fight with herself in there. In the bathroom, the shower was dripping. James went to turn it off, returned to his room, picked up his phone and typed the strange word into Google. S-a-m. The algorithm finished it off for him. The future Karl had once predicted was here, now; maybe the phone knew you were miserable just from the way you sat on the edge of the bed with it.
His fingers went over the numbers on the screen. 116 123. It felt too short for a phone number. Even as the dial tone sounded in his ears, James doubted that he was going to go through with this. He wasn’t even certain he expected it to be answered. Calling the Samaritans felt like something you did at midnight, not before lunchtime. But it was answered, almost straight away, and it was too late to go back. It was a woman’s voice. She asked what he wanted to talk about. James swallowed and clawed at his scalp and managed to say that he was very lonely, and that he’d been thinking about … not being here any more.
The Samaritan did a good job of sounding surprised and concerned, even though this must be how many of her calls began. In her kind, Home Counties voice – a voice he could imagine speaking authoritatively on Jane Austen, or the need for better cycle lanes – she gently steered him towards more concrete discussion. James found he was, if not enjoying it, at least pleased to be able to answer the questions. He’d once remarked to Michaela, during the cult for Scandinavian murder shows, that he quite liked the idea of being a witness. Being quizzed by the police, ‘helping their investigations’. She’d laughed. ‘How are you going to infiltrate a criminal gang?’ she asked. ‘You literally phoned the Revenue this morning to tell them you owed them more tax.’
‘When were you last in a relationship?’ asked the Samaritan.
‘About two and a half hours ago. I mean, years ago.’ He was annoyed with himself for the slip of the tongue. ‘Two and a half years ago. And that relationship was four years long. It was the only proper one I’ve had. If you see what I mean.’
‘With a woman?’
‘Yes.’
‘Can you say a bit about her?’
‘Her name was Michaela.’ Straight away he thought he should have kept her anonymous. ‘We met doing a weight-loss course. We were both, er … Overweight. And then we set up our own health-and-fitness business, which was successful. But she left unexpectedly.’ Unexpectedly, he thought, even to Michaela. It was the way Michaela always did do things. He’d believed her when she said that she never planned it this way, she never meant to hurt him so badly.
‘She’s in Berlin now. With someone else.’
‘That must be difficult,’ said the Samaritan.
‘It is.’
A silence seemed about to fall, but the woman caught the conversation expertly and tossed it back into the air. ‘And do you have a support network?’
‘A …?’
‘People you can talk to, people you trust.’
‘It’s difficult.’ James scratched his scalp, fingered one of the untidy curls. He was more than due a haircut, he was starting to look like someone you’d move away from at a bus stop. But even this had been beyond him, the past couple of weeks. He remembered last time at the barber’s. The awful creak of the chair as he settled into it; the way he caught, in the mirror, the stylist eyeing his body in a way he was used to people eyeing it. Like a house that needed some work. He’d have to go to a different place next time. All this took time and mental energy. ‘My – er – main friend. Well, he became my boss. And recently sacked me. So we haven’t been – we haven’t spoken much since then.’
‘And close friends, family?’ asked the woman.
The word made James think immediately of being young. ‘Family’, like ‘Christmas’, was an idea that belonged to his past, not his current situation.
‘I was very close to my dad. My father. But he’s dead – he died.’ He’s dead had never stopped sounding brutal, winding him, in the saying or the hearing of it. ‘My sister and I, actually, were close too, but we had a disagreement.’ James felt that he wasn’t holding up his end of the conversation very well, even though that was a strange thing to think about a Samaritans call. His list of setbacks didn’t seem substantial enough to justify having called; having confessed to being in despair. He searched for a way of explaining why the thing he was trying to tunnel through felt thicker than the sum of these parts.
‘You know – Tony Hancock, when he … well, when he died,’ said James. ‘He just said too many things seemed to go wrong. Something like that.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,’ said his younger listener, ‘but I do understand the feeling, of course. And it can seem like that for a long time – but also, life can change very quickly for the better.’
The slight easing that James felt, after the chat, lasted about a week – maybe more. But it wore off like aspirin, a little at a time, and he didn’t feel he could call up again. They must have more urgent cases to deal with, and he didn’t want to become a regular; he wasn’t a hypochondriac bothering a GP. What he needed was someone to sit and talk to. What he needed was to have friends again. And that urge had led to his ‘opening up’ to Steffi, someone who wasn’t really a friend, and that had been a terrible misjudgement which embarrassed both of them.
Well. It was gone, now. James listened to the footsteps padding up and down in the corridor; the lilt of the Welsh woman’s peppy voice as she chatted to the sports fans. ‘Yes, be a good game, I should think! You should get some sleep though, mind!’ People he didn’t know; people who couldn’t affect him. Nothing could really affect him any more. It had been as easy as the single touch which slid flight mode into action.
Departing from his own life, he could look back on it like one of Karl’s pub biographies. This fella, can’t remember his name. Girlfriend leaves him for a geezer in Germany. Best mate gives him the sack. He gets the hump, jumps off a bridge. It was a comforting thought, James reflected, allowing himself to open the second beer. That everyone ended up being a minor curiosity, given time; all lives ended up as footnotes, often full of factual errors. He needn’t have seen himself all this time as a major character, every decision triggering grave consequences. Everything he’d done wrong would pack down into an anecdote for future Karls. Something to pass time between rounds at the bar; something very quickly forgotten.
JEAN CHILTERN (MUM)
It had to be Sally calling. At this time of night. It had to be one of the children, Sally or James. Or at least, more worryingly, it had to be about one of the children. But James would be fast asleep. No, it would be Sally in Australia, and that must mean something major was happening. All this went through Jean’s head in the ten seconds after she was woken by the phone. The thoughts didn’t arrange themselves one at a time; they coalesced into a pang of disquiet, something Jean felt before she was even really thinking. It had been