The Washing-Up Bowl

He’d finally forgotten her number. Maybe he’d forgotten it in his sleep weeks – maybe months, or years – ago, but he couldn’t recollect it now. Of all things, emptying the stoury washing-up bowl had brought it to mind. He’d went off his nut one time over this very thing. They were playing a silly game one night ‘name three things about me’ type of nonsense. She’d said blah, blah and then ‘you never empty the washing up bowl’. This was obviously something that got on her nerves and now she saw an opportunity to get it out there. To him it meant an utter rejection of his presence in her flat.

They both knew it wasn’t quite right him living there. Their relationship had been fractured beyond repair long before but he, still smitten, more smitten than she of him (she wasn’t the smitten type, at least not towards him, but towards her –ex as it turned out), had been hanging on to the carcass of their ‘love’ like grim death; almost rejoicing in her inability to pay her bills so that he could step in and help, the condition being….

Him, her and two cats that weren’t allowed out and literally climbed the walls and kept them awake half the night. (He was convinced she’d somehow managed to turn at least one of the cats against him).

She said that all the fusion music he listened to sounded like 1970s cop show themes, but the final split came over that damn remark about the washing-up bowl.

Her –ex, he suspected, would have had nothing whatsoever to do with washing up, never mind emptying the bowl.

The Heart Is the Matter

“How can you be a Socialist and not like people?”

Her question was jarring in its simplicity. Why, indeed, was he so concerned with the plight of his fellow man?

The question was too big, too vast for him this bright, sunny spring morning, when just walking around the park hand in hand seemed to negate any such deep considerations.

“I don’t not like people, I like you don’t I?” That this should be a question at all seemed to her to go right to the heart of the matter.

“I know you love me, but I’m not always sure that you like me”

He snorted in gentle dismissive derision, but he feared that she was about to go on.

“I mean, I do get on your nerves don’t I? I feel your impatience with me”

O dear! Funny how we fall in love, he thought, so urgent, so dramatic, so needful, and then spent the next months and years picking away at one another. The impossible plateau of mutual-worship, giving way to the drip-drip erosion towards the beige chasms of ordinary life.

He was good at the first part and piss-poor at the second. In fact, he pondered way too often these days that, in order for him to accrue any hero status at all in a relationship, the other party had to be suffering in some way; family problems, depression, a crisis of some sort, because as soon as things straightened out his purpose in the partnership seemed to diminish, at least within himself. Yes, he needed to be a hero, a rock, an ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you’ figure. His ego demanded it. 

The other stuff – buying houses, acquiring cars, promotions, invites to dinner parties – he seemed to rail against to the point of obliteration and self-destruction, with little sense of rationale or compromise.

A child trying to have a relationship with a grown-up, but sometimes the grown-up became a child and he, the child, became the grown-up.

“You don’t get on my nerves. I love you very much”

How does one insecure person convince another insecure person of that?

“Anyway, I’m no longer a Socialist. You’ve turned me into a Liberal Democrat”

Maybe now, the walk among the pleasing flowers could continue unhindered by any more home truths.

Never Beige

My father was certainly the only one at the wedding adorned with calf-length cowboy boots and wearing a brown pin-striped suit. He looked like an Albanian at a job interview, and puffing on cigars no less.

This was during my father’s cigar-smoking period, another seemingly conventional habit that he could make singularly odd. Why he’d started smoking cigars was a mystery to my mother and brother and I: if he inhaled he had to walk around the block for twenty minutes to clear his head and quell the resultant nausea. In characteristic style he’d smoke them down as far as he could, to maybe three-quarters of an inch then stick a pin in the end to allow him to smoke it down further without burning his lips. He wasn’t mean, just peculiar.

He once took up ‘blues harp’ style harmonica, fancying himself as the Scottish (and white) Sonny Boy Williamson. He drove my poor mother demented for many weeks as he endeavoured, as is appropriate to this musical idiom, to ‘bend’ a note in imitation of a hobo-filled train passing a jailhouse on a lonesome Mississippi night. But, this was a Kilmarnock afternoon and not the musical accompaniment my mother needed during her viewing of ‘Home and Away’.

She refused to walk with him as he insisted on wearing a beret. No-one else in Ayrshire let alone Kilmarnock wore a beret. Maybe ‘up Byers Road’ or in posher parts of Edinburgh you’d get away with this Bohemian look, but Kilmarnock is not, and never will be, Bohemia. The ‘bunnet’ was considered respectable headwear for the working class Scot, and usually this was what he would wear, but for reasons known only to himself he had decided to purchase a beret which he now wished to perch jauntily and Gallic-ally on his napper and my mother was having none of it.

It’s as if the man sought deliberately to be unconventional. To support ‘the wrong team’ in whatever way he could. From good upper-working class aspirant stock he seemed to want nothing more than to live in a tower block in a housing scheme.  He was one of the few people you’d meet, outside of religious sects pursuing singularly devout monastic leanings, who was actively ‘downwardly mobile’.