It’s not as if I haven’t worked in the past. I’ve had plenty of jobs in my time: bar jobs, cleaning jobs, cooking jobs, warehouse jobs, labouring jobs, retail jobs, telesales jobs, call centre jobs and (and this was my least favourite) a job filling large metal drums with cooking oil day after day. While most of the jobs I’ve had I’ve hated, there have been a number I’ve enjoyed (I have particularly fond memories of a job I had once planting bulbs for the Council’s Parks and Recreations Division) but the one thing they all have in common is that I never lasted more than a few months in any of them.
Employment and me do not work well together.
Employment and me do not get along.
The thing about work is that it’s a habit. If you do it enough. it sort of sticks so that you feel wrong if you’re not doing something. But when it doesn’t stick, if for example something happens somewhere along the way so that you don’t form that habit, and instead spend long periods of time barely going outside, let alone being part of the labour market, then work will inevitably always feel sort of alien. Like a thing that other people do. Like a foreign delicacy made of animal entrails that the locals love but you just can’t seem to drum up the appetite for. Even thinking about working makes me feel queasy.
This I know makes me sound a lot like I have no ambition. It presents me as almost having given up on life. It suggests that I’m content to just exist like some corpulent bluebottle basking in the sunshine on the windowsill of life. The thing is, I just don’t see the point in it all any more and haven’t done for a very long time. I don’t get it: why would you willingly spend a huge chunk of your finite time on earth doing stuff that ultimately amounts to nothing, spending day after day with people you can’t stand, in order to earn money to buy things you’ll never use? Wouldn’t you much rather be sat at home in your favourite old tracksuit bottoms and hoodie watching a compilation edition of Homes Under The Hammer while some other mug pays your way? I know I would.
I leave it until after Maya returns home from work and we’ve eaten tea to break the news to her about my money being stopped. When she inevitably says, ‘I told you this would happen,’ I nod and look away because it’s true. Her exact words to me a little over a week ago as we sat on this very sofa, watching this very same TV programme were, ‘The dole are going to stop your money if you’re not careful,’ to which I’d replied, ‘Think about it, babe, how many long-term unemployed people are there claiming dole? Do you really think they’re going to bother with me? I’d have a better chance of winning the lottery.’
It could be you.
I can feel Maya’s eyes on me, even though I’m not looking at her. I can tell she wants to know what I’m going to do about this. She wants to know that I have a plan. But the truth is I don’t know what I’m going to do about anything and I don’t have a plan. And so I keep quiet and she keeps quiet too, until we use up all the quiet in the room so that finally one of us has to say something.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asks. ‘What’s your plan?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, you should.’
‘We’ll be fine, I promise.’
‘How exactly? Have you got a secret stash of money I don’t know about? Isn’t it enough that I already pay for everything around here? Isn’t it enough that I’ve put up with this for so long?’
I turn my head towards Maya and our gaze meets awkwardly. While I’d been fully braced to see disappointment in my girlfriend’s eyes, I’m taken aback by the depth of it. It’s as if I’m looking into two vast tawny reservoirs of disillusion and regret. I think perhaps Maya is aware of how she’s feeling, because she is the first to look away. She hates herself for being hard on me. She thinks that somehow she’s letting the side down. She thinks that somehow she’s letting down the version of her that first fell in love with me. The version who, two and a half years earlier, when I’d informed her that I wasn’t really boyfriend material, had responded with the words, ‘We’ll see about that.’
She sighs and runs her fingers through her hair. ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that, it was spiteful.’
‘But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.’
She looks tired and ground down by life. ‘I think I’m going to have a bath and get an early night.’ She makes her words sound deliberately half-hearted as if to take the sting out of the fact that we both know an early bath followed by bed is shorthand for, ‘I can’t be around you right now.’
As she picks up our empty plates, I smile to make it clear that I’m grateful she’s even vaguely considering my feelings at this moment and she returns it in a perfunctory fashion before leaving the room. For a moment I wonder if I should follow her and reassure her that somehow things will be okay, that I’ll work something out. Before I can get to my feet, however, she’s back at the door, but only half enters the room, almost as if she’s afraid of getting sucked into the vortex of despondency lurking within.
‘Danny?’
‘Yeah?’
‘I know you might not want to see it this way but I’ve been thinking this could be exactly what you need. I hate that you’re stuck is this pokey flat all day, every day. I hate seeing you wasting your life like this. There’s so much that you could give the world if only you’d try, so much that you could do if only you wanted to.’
I thank her for being so kind because it is nice of her to try and see the world from my point of view, when it’s probably the last thing she wants to do, but once she’s gone from the room and I hear the bath running, I make a special effort to delete every word she’s just said from my mind. I adore that woman, I really do, from the hairs on her head to the ends of her toes, but she’s wrong about me having anything to offer the world. She’s wrong about the difference trying hard would make to anything at all. What she doesn’t understand is that even if I got a job tomorrow, one that paid well, engaged me on every level and handed me back my self respect, nothing about me is ever going to change, not now, not ever. Some people are simply beyond redemption or salvation or whatever, some of us are simply stuck being what we are.
2
James
‘But I asked you not to do that.’
‘Do what, darling?’
‘Cut up my food.’
‘Oh, I am sorry, have I done it the wrong way? Is that the problem?’
‘I have asked you lots of times not to do it and you have just carried on. I am thirty-six years old. I am a grown man. I can cut up my own food.’
It was last Monday when I reminded my mum, Erica, not to cut up my food before she brings it to the table.
I know it was a Monday because my dad, Don, and my mum, Erica, and I were having lamb chops, potatoes and broccoli. We always have lamb chops, new potatoes and broccoli on a Monday. On Tuesdays we have baked salmon, new potatoes and broccoli. On Wednesdays we have chicken, mashed potatoes and broccoli. And I think that if I thought about it for long enough, I could probably remember what we are having for supper for the rest of the week too.
Anyway, last Monday my mum, Erica, put my food in front of me already cut into tiny pieces and I said, ‘Mum, please don’t cut my food up when you bring it to the table. I can cut it up myself.’ And she said, ‘Of course, next time I won’t.’ But when next time came around, she just did it again.