Sometimes

Sometimes, your girlfriend comes out of the bathroom waving a wet pregnancy stick and shouting. Shouting that for someone who sucks at thrusting you very much suck at pulling out too.

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

A SHORT STORY

Sometimes you have the right answer to the wrong question. Sometimes, just sometimes, you wish you didn’t know the answer at all.

Mr White Shirt tells me to grab a seat on the only empty chair in the room. He’s just doing his job, he says. The door is shut with semi-transparent glass showing the rest of the office suspended outside. Insulated chamber. No one can hear what we’re saying. This is a safe space.

He grabs the green bottle of gin standing next to him and slides it on the table. The bottle stops in front of me and he says, “So?” He pulls his red tie straight with small yellow ducks quacking all over and jerking his chin at the bottle, he says, “What’s this?”

Mr White Shirt is asking the same question to everyone. Company policy. You’d wonder if anyone before me took a big leap of faith and confessed. You’d wonder if this is just a formality now.

Sometimes you just have a bad morning.

Sometimes the marketing director skips the queue and uses the only free bathroom without a wheelchair. Sometimes, just sometimes, he spots a plastic bag wrapped around a newspaper wrapped around a bottle of gin hidden behind the sink.

To Mr White Shirt I say, that’s a disgrace. I say, if people can’t afford a Bombay Sapphire or a Hendrick’s, they really shouldn’t be drinking at all.

Sometimes you have the right answer to the wrong question.

Someone will get sacked today. Or send to an AA intensive boot camp. Stomach pumping. Soul cleansing. A five to seven steps program and you can trust them again with a credit card in their pocket around a liquor store.

Mr White Shirt says, “Jesus Christ.” One hand holding the side of his face. His eyebrow so stretched up, you’d say he’s having a bachelor party worst headache.

I ask if he needs a glass or two to make that migraine go away.

And Mr White Shirt, he is sweating. He’s sweating so much his shirt turned all patchy and grey around his armpits. His trousers streaked with dark stripes around the pockets every time he wipes off his fingers. When it’s time to shake hands before a meeting all consultants always pretends to hold a cup of coffee greeting with a nod.

Sometimes you apply for a job and prepare a list of answers to questions you aren’t asked. What’s left then is to improvise. Make yourself vulnerable and anyone will open up. Say your dog was run over by a drunk and you’ll get the sad banana of a smile. Say you’re a single parent and they’ll give a compassionate nod.

Sometimes we all pretend to understand.

Sometimes, your girlfriend comes out of the bathroom waving a wet pregnancy stick and shouting. Shouting that for someone who sucks at thrusting you very much suck at pulling out too.

Sometimes, you find yourself on the wrong bus and forget to get back home.

Sometimes, just sometimes, you forget to raise your own child. You get a phone call when they’ve got their first period. The first time they got handcuffed. Passed their first job interview. Sometimes you just pretend to be happy for them.

Mr White Shirt says I’ve been filing my sales reports after deadlines. Am I alright? Do I need a one-on-one chat with a counsellor? A mental well-being break?

No one is ever having a breakdown. Everyone is always working towards their better self.

Climb the career ladder. Work on that anger management. Meditate. All those checkboxes you need to tick for a pay rise.

You don’t need to cover your furniture in brails. Never move a chair or change layout and you can keep the lights out and move in the dark with no bruises. Every bulb counts. Ends meet ends. A leak from the ceiling is bliss. Fill a bucket with enough rain drops and you won’t have to flush your toilet ever again. You can cut on those bills in so many ways.

Mr White shirt says if no one talks they’ll get an external agency to investigate. No one wants to be affiliated with a company where they swap pancakes for booze shots. Do I know how much damage this could do to our brand?

I say, “We do really just sell toilet brushes” His forehead clumped between the palm of his hands now. I say, “Maybe someone in Marketing can use it for one of those TV ads no one watches anymore?”

Sometimes you watch the TV screen watching you. Even switched off your reflection on the screen can keep you company. More than a stranger at the bar asking questions you’ve already answered too many times. More than those mental assistance helplines with volunteers holding a yawn and trying to feel good about themselves.

Sometimes, just sometimes the phone rings and you don’t pick up.

You miss your daughter’s wedding invitation. Her firstborn. Her second whining baby.

Sometimes it’s like contraceptions have rather confusing instructions manual.

In the office, Mr White Shirt squeezes his temples with his index finger and thumb and can’t see me anymore. All blind from behind his closed eyelids, he says, “Fuck me.” Then with his hand shooing an invisible fly in front of his face, he says, “Just go now.”

And sliding the chair back under his desk I say, maybe it’s not that bad? Maybe it’s like one of those soft mattress spring. You load it over and over but then it has to bounce back.

His eyes squeezed to a squint now. Mr White Shirt and his look of someone who’d rather hit a ball in a golf course. I say, “Aren’t we all like cheap soft mattresses?”

Outside all those ties and high heels are refilling their water glasses without drinking. The coffee machine is grinding beans until a red flickering light asks for maintenance. No one asks questions but they check your face for a hint of distress. A twitching eye. A tear dried too quickly. Mr White Shirt calls in two clacking heels. The door shuts behind. Sound insulation and blurred glass. Welcome to this safe space.

Sometimes you miss a call for a new money-saving phone plan. A call for that tax return you forgot to send. You miss a call from your daughter. Those unread messages you don’t open anymore. Voicemails piling up you don’t listen to but you’re too afraid to delete.

You could make a fortune putting down some money on those greyhound races. Place a straight forecast, a tricast bet and just sometimes you lose. Sometimes they lose more than a race. Before they break a leg and get shot in the head. Turned into meat. Boil, treat and filter bones, hides, hooves and you get a bag of red bears, green snakes, pink hippocampus jelly beans.

Sometimes you skip your team out bonding lunch with colleagues and walk in the opposite direction. You can find a bench in the isolated park where the only people around are those who slept there the night before.

Sometimes you wake up with your upstairs neighbour poking your ribs with his walking stick. All colander teeth and his big beard decorated with a constellation of breadcrumbs. With one eye open, you ask how did he get into your bedroom? Can he and his stick please go poking something else somewhere else? And he carries on walking upstairs, leaving you on the staircase. His groceries swinging in a plastic bag, he says, “No matter how long you fall, there’s always a ground to hit.”

Sometimes you go back to the office and Charlie at the front desk is typing on the keyboard with a shaky hand. He tap, tap, taps the delete key and starts typing again. His face the colour of a psychiatric ward.

Then Charlie hands you back your office badge and asks, “Did they sack anyone yet?” His eyes flicker from side to side of the empty hall, the way you wait for a car to drive through the internal brick wall and park by the guest sofas. Charlie says he only came in hungover a couple of times. He’s crossing his heart once, twice. He’s crossing himself a lot saying that he’ll never even down a shot in the office. They all know that, don’t they?

Sometimes you knock at Mr White Shirt’s office door and the bottle of gin is still there on his desk. Only it’s half empty now.

Mr White Shirt waiting for his promotion to be announced every Christmas. After a third glass, he’d tell you he’s struggling. His 5-bedroom Victorian house with marble porch and high ceilings. His kids’ private school.

You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to live on a quarter of a million.

Without looking at me, with his face so close to his laptop screen you’d say he’s kissing it, he says, “What is it?”. And I say, I know he’s busy trying to make the world a better place with our toilet brushes, but has he got a moment? It won’t take long, I promise.

Sometimes a lorry driver crosses a red traffic light not to miss a delivery. Boxes of lyophilised milk, baby formula, diapers, all packed up in the trailer ready to be shipped. A baby  somewhere is whining in a cradle waiting to get changed and fed. Every minute matters. And sometimes if you’re checking your phone sending another voicemail, while switching gear, while crossing that same traffic light, and the only thing left in the voicemail is the slap of a lorry bending your driver’s door, the window glass blowing off in a million pieces with a long scream coming from the back of your throat in the background.

Sometimes the mother of your daughter calls you with her husband shouting behind her. Her kid kicking a football in the living room that lands on their breakfast, she says, “If you don’t turn up at the funeral, so you know, no one will really miss you.”

Even from the back of the church you can hear sobbing. Even hidden in a corner behind the holy water where people dip their fingers and cross themselves, you can hear the woman in the front row blowing her nose. Everything echoes at church. With those high ceiling and glass window every sound is amplified.

Sometimes the greeting card lands on your desk and it’s so filled with little stupid hearts, and sad smiles with dashes for eyes and phone numbers you can’t even find an empty corner to write your own name.

Sometimes, just sometimes, you do find an empty corner and the only thing you can write is, “A Gin-ormous hug from us all.”

So when Charlie gets his card he’s all sob, sob, sobbing no one can understand what he’s saying. And no one really suggests one last drink at the pub around the corner.

Charlie wobbles away with his straight trousers hanging sad between his legs. He gives one last stranded-dog look back at the room. His knuckles all white clamped around his laptop. He waves with one hand, but no one is looking anymore.

Sometimes the coffee machine is refilled with new toasted beans to grind. And Roman from Sales comes holding an empty cup waiting. Looking outside the window, he says, “That’s a shame.” HR is going through all applications for a new front desk person now. Then Roman, he leans forward, so close he could bite my ear and says, “I’ve got a locker upstairs.” He says, it’s hidden. No one knows about it. And he winks.