I've been working at the fag end of Lancashire in an open-air shopping centre in Fleetwood, a wind-blown place with the smell of rotting fish stewing in wheelie bins. To get there for 1145, when I start, I have to leave on the 0938 from Lancaster. In the morning, the journey gives me time to read, and I have finished the second volume of Knausgård and am now wrapped up in Elena Ferrante's My Brilliant Friend, about her childhood and adolescence in 50s Naples. She's a better writer than Knausgård, manipulating language into evocative conjunctions, and able to still a moment better than he.
On the way back, weary from cajoling people into answering questions in which they have no interest, and filling in half the answers myself based on imaginative extrapolation from their clothes and manners, I have taken to cancelling my evening at home and settling into a pub in Blackpool.
You have not seen obesity until you have sat at teatime in a cheap pub in Blackpool. Massive couples sit with legs splayed, eating, with cutlery seen as a refinement too far. One man was so fat he couldn't turn his head as far as he wanted to follow a boob-vested teenager out the front door. It's a coarse and accepting place and I like it.
Walking back to the station the other day, I fell in with three homeless people in a shop doorway. They were intelligent, fallen middle class people. The bloke offered me a bottle of lager. In a well-meant but unthinkingly superior gesture, I refused, saying "No thanks -- we can go better than that!" and produced a bottle of Prosecco intended for my journey home. One of the girls struggled with a mouthful, her manners in a competition for her face with a contortion brought on by the wine's acid sparkle; she made her thanks, and went back to the Carlsberg.
I constantly lie to strangers to make my imaginative life more interesting and my lived one lazier: I told them I was a security guard in a shopping centre. A few weeks ago, at the opera, I told a curious elderly lady that I play the viola.
There's a vacant room in the house at the moment and I was supposed to be showing a teacher round it 8.30. Enjoying myself too much, I rang him with a tale of having to "finish a project in Blackpool", which, devoid of detail, is a lie only by omission.
He only wants the room for a few weeks, which suits me, as I am moving out of here. I am sick of this house. I am sick of living with the cycle of strangers, sick of being around Muslims and their smiling separatism, sick of the insatiable desire of the gas and electricity meters, sick of homely soups and bonhomie in the kitchen, sick of never knowing if anyone else is in, sick of shit and piss and flushing that isn't mine.
Trina has offered me her narrowboat until (or if) Kirsty decides to move in with boyf and let me rent what used to be our house, sharing it with the girls. Therefore, I've got to start giving away my furniture and belongings. I only want to keep my hifi, my records and the futon. I got the beds, the fridge-freezer, the tables, the sofas, the washing machine -- everything -- free, and I am only attached to those white goods that can be crushed and put up your nose.
Wendy's ex is a manipulative man who sleeps on his mum's sofa every night in order to claim that he can't have their daughter round and who controls her by using their daughter as his proxy. He's very jealous of me, and poking around on her mantelpiece the other day, he read all the postcards I've sent to her over the last two or three years. Worried about the postcards? You should see the texts, mate.
Kitty has been superb in all this, the best of critical friends. I went round to hers on Wednesday: Prosecco, acid, and laughter to the point of crying with it. She wanted me to feel her thighs, proud of the tautness brought on by going to that outer circle of hell known as the gym. "Oooh yes," I said, in a put-on northern accent while pincering her legs. "That's the finest specimen we've seen in the Heifer Class at the Westmorland Show for many a year."
When we'd calmed down, we talked about Wendy's situation. Kitty said she had proposed that she gets him to give her back his key and set a deadline for him to move all his paraphernalia out of the house.
When I got in I texted Wendy about it. "...it's just that I'm concerned that this is turning into a borderline abusive relationship. We'll do anything we can to help you. I love you and I want to do anything I can to make your life better. I can help with re-decorating and I can have the dog when you're at work and help take his stuff to the tip. Me and Kitty can help you. Everything though, the key, his stuff, and having [their daughter] more, you've got to do it xxx." And later, from bed, aching with the lack of her, "...night night. I send you a hectare of love, a metric ton of tonnage of love, a wharf of love, and a little hayfever of love that I turn around along my lips xxx"
Wendy and her ex set up a Summit Meeting for today. They met in a beige pub whose interior decor seems designed to drain emotion from tense meetings with exes. It was all I could think of all day. She rang me afterwards, saying that it went surprisingly easily -- almost too easily, with keys handed over voluntarily and a couple of dates arranged when he would have his daughter. She said that her relief was only tempered by wondering whether such a ready capitulation was another round in his manipulative game.
And then she asked me what I am doing tomorrow, saying that she had a couple of hours free while he took daughter swimming, and was thinking of going up to the park. "I'm going out with you, of course," I said. "You and a bottle or two of Prosecco. It's been ages. I've missed you."
I was standing in the dull vestibule of the pub, but inside of me, as I put the phone down, I felt as though a liquid joy had been poured into me. It was a mixture of admiration at what she'd done, the joy of having her back in our circle ("The Unholy Trinity", Kitty named it), a pleasure at having such a brilliant friend as Kitty to urge her into action, and -- and here I descend again into the folly that Wendy provokes in me -- a lip-bite of hope that perhaps at some point in the future she might come to love me in the way I do her; followed immediately by a foreboding of the pain that such a hope will cause me in the future.
I rang The Racing Commentator and tumbled away about it for an hour. "I must love her", I thought to myself, "talking to people about her like this." He was advising me not to exploit the situation, to tone down the declarations of love, and to play a long game, to be practically helpful and a good friend, to wait. I must keep reminding myself though, that nothing is going to develop, no matter how much I want it.
