Dear Dad,Sorry it’s been a while but I think it was like I had my braces stuck on the gatepost over something. You know what I mean by that do you? Something came up and I couldn’t get myself past it. There I was going back to it in my mind. To be honest with you it was like walking round in circles – always coming back to the same old thing and yet never being quite on top of it. So, you see, my braces were stuck on the gatepost of this thing and I was somehow being pulled at every time I tried to walk away from it.
All right. I’ll come clean with you. The fact of the matter is I fancied a new car. Well no. I fancied a new car for Ruth. She works hard (this is for your eyes only.) She does work so hard and spends ages in her “mobile office”. (Actually it’s a sort of travelling chocolate wrapper collection point if what I find when I clear it out is anything to go by.) I’ve already said too much – if by any chance she ever gets her hands on this letter and even sniffs a rat of praise for what she does I’ve had it.
Now that just puts me in mind of so many people. You might have come across a few yourself. Those folks that do stuff and then when you try to tell them it’s good, or that they might be half decent you get the “Give over will you!” or “I wish! You should see me on a wet Wednesday afternoon when the kids have trailed muck in on the carpet” or ”I’m not what you think I am you know…I’m no saint!” Personally, I find that sort a bit difficult to handle. It’s like the moment you have anything decent to say to them they stick their head down the neck of their jumper and the rest of the conversation gets increasingly woolly. There you are in the presence of someone in whose shadow you walk. You can’t remember them making a single demand of you. They only have to walk into the room and your life moves on like the Starship Enterprise shifting into warp factor twenty-seven. Clouds part, hunger abates, longings cease etc., etc., etc.
“You do me so much good,” you say.
“”It was nothing,” they reply as the broken shards of your pitiful life are miraculously drawn together in the right order and something frighteningly akin to love starts to stick them to each other with only the tiniest scars of experience to show for the whole sorry mess. “No, really, you would have done the same for me”.
Oh, I would, would I?
Well anyway. She simply must not get a whiff of the “Well done you good and faithful servant”. (Now where have I heard that before? And just how are we going to learn to cope with such unwavering praise when it does come our way I wonder? And just how are we meant to get any practice in for it unless we do some of it to others whilst at the same time allowing them to waft a bit of it in our direction?) Back to the car!
I know it was coming round to the time for a change. High mileage, one or two repairs fast coming over the horizon and the door bins were overflowing with the milk chocolate of human kindness. Ruth didn’t make a song and dance about it of course, just the odd comment or two. Someone at work had just had a new convertible – “nothing too ostentatious mind you”. Maybe a four wheel drive affair? “I just think that it might be nice to have a bit of fun.” (Thankfully, she hadn’t noticed that my mileage was creeping up a bit and that I was getting ready for a few – albeit minor – repairs myself. “Maybe a convertible next time? Perhaps a two leg drive?”)
That’s when I think I got my braces stuck on the gatepost. I found myself going out of my way to pass car sales places. Stopping off now and then to make a few discrete enquiries. I was a man on a mission - but sneaky. A gumshoe-buyer. An undercover agent in the world of pressed tin and re-cyclable plastic. An air-con-man extraordinaire.
“You’re a bit late love. Been anywhere interesting?”
“Who me?”
“Well yes. It was you I had in mind. You are the man I live with aren’t you?”
“No. Well yes, but, err no. Nowhere in particular.”
“You’ve been looking at cars haven’t you?”
And so the seedy and seamier side of my existence took over. Oh the lies! Oh the scheming machinations of the human mind! How hard we try for what we love!
“It’s no good. I know full well when you’re lying. And anyway, we can’t afford it. I don’t want anything too showy I couldn’t justify it. I’ll have a Fiat Punto.”
Now, no disrespect to Fiat. And certainly none intended to the Punto – in fact it has turned out to be just fine actually. The real problem is that I really don’t think I was buying it for Ruth at all. And like when she buys a dress for a very special occasion I had a sneaking suspicion that Ruth would end up back at the first shop she looked in. Same with the car – we went back to square one, threw a six and climbed the oh so familiar ladder that had been staring us in the face all the time. But why all the running round in circles? To be frank, I was earnest to impress that’s what! The trouser support department was hung up on the upright beam of longing, and the longing was for a touch of the “He’s the best…yes, he does spoil me doesn’t he? ‘Don’t know what I’d do without him…a real treasure…”
So that’s it. This is the now quite feeble sounding excuse for not writing earlier. Selfishness, pure and simple – well simple anyway, if not so pure. And this brings me to the point I had in mind when I sat down to write in the first place. If I’m not trying like mad to get somewhere whilst being pulled backwards at the same time, I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time running around in circles. In fact, I think that I am becoming something of an expert at doing the two together and at the same time. (A bit like that old party trick. The one where you pat your head with one hand and rub your tummy with the other. You should try it sometime – my other dad showed it me once when I was a little kid.)
If I’m beginning to understand how it works – and writing to you now is helping to clarify the whole sorry business of it all for me. The fact is I find myself wanting so much for myself. To get it takes so much effort. I have to really go out of my way to put all the facets of the plan together. Then I have to start conning others like I have already begun to con myself, stretching the whole thing just one step too far. If I’m not running round in circles, I’m running in a straight line but one that takes me away from the real problem I have to face. See, I think it’s me that needs the sorting out. The car is a bit irrelevant I suppose.
This all puts me in mind of some difficulty I had in a lift.
I don’t know if I told you yet - maybe you have already heard from other sources – but I go out to Romania from time to time. It’s family business of a sort. I go with my mate Norman. Now there’s a guy a bit short on guile. He’s more in your mould than mine I’m thinking.
We were popping in to see a friend of ours. He runs a Christian radio station. Well it’s not really a Christian radio station. I don’t think it has made any sort of personal commitment or anything like that. It is more a radio station for Christians. Actually, Naxus (the chap with the radio station in question) thinks that it is more in the market for non-Christians if you get my drift. Anyway, we were in the lift having left his ninth floor Christian/non-Christian radio station when I got bored between floors four and three. Norman had spotted something in my personal demeanour which indicated that trouble could be afoot. A loving yet certain glower radiated from him and filled the small compartment (already a little crowded, what with there being me, him of the glowering visage, two bags, a guitar case and a translator, driver/general fac totem.)
I was trying out the lift for any signs of springiness. The floor had a certain satisfactory measure of give in it. There was just the faintest hint of a bounce so I gave it a go. One quick hop, a little stretching of the cables, one very loud bang and our downward progress halted immediately and, seemingly, forever.
All buttons were pressed until I found the one marked in Romanian for “Alarm”. I rang it once and no one came to the other side of the jammed lift door. I was beginning to play over in my mind various submarine disaster movies I have seen. You know the sort of thing? Men shuffling quietly off this mortal coil as oxygen grows thinner and beads of sweat slip dramatically down stalwart looking faces. The look of relief as they hear a faint tapping on the hull and the rising sense of hope as the radio operator (the one who can do the Morse code really well) spells out “Help at hand…cutting equipment set up and ready to go…hot food and warm drinks standing by in the galley…anyone in there got a box of matches for the oxy-acetylene?”
I played the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth on the bell. Norman panicked, I played more, and the fac totem rolled his eyes in growing disbelief. Deciding that something more useful should be done he gave the door a good kicking and it swung open with the surface of floor three some feet above the level of the lift floor. We climbed out, paused for a quick gathering of photographic evidence and legged it down the stairs as the door locks of the flat next door to the lift shaft began to shake rattle and roll.
I should have known that it would end in tears. I just get something in my mind and then push and push until finally I discover the edge of the envelope and have to do a runner. I’ve been like it all my life. (I’ll spare you the story of how I put a match to the neck of an ‘empty’ meths bottle just to see if the fumes would burn. It’s a wonder to me to this day that I have been able to grow a beard!)
Come to think of it, my other dad tried his best to sort me out on this one but I don’t think he ever quite got through on it. The trouble with his master plan was me. I could see through his show. The older I got, the more I saw where I got the running business from. My dad was an expert in his own right, so why should I listen to him? That’s where you come in. Ever since I started getting you into close up I’ve found that there doesn’t seem to be much room for personal manoeuvre. I get the feeling that there isn’t much, if anything, you have ever run away from. Nor does there appear to be anything you have ever gotten yourself hung up on either. I don’t seem to be able to turn anything back on you when you raise it with me.
Well on that note I think I’ll bring this short note to an end.
I did, by the way, go back to the radio station. Naxus was really nice to me – much better than I think I could have ever deserved. On leaving he just stepped out of his office door as I was entering the lift.
“Don’t you mess with my lift!” he called jovially giving it his best God Father, Mafioso shot.
Write soon.
Love,
Pete.
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