The Hell of It All (8 page)

And then one day they bought a karaoke machine. And installed it over my bedroom. And stayed up until 4 a.m. every night for a week, blasting out cover versions of ‘Rebel Yell’ and ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ through an amplifier. And downstairs, in the dark, on the fifth straight night of this, I finally discovered my breaking point. For the first time in my life, I grabbed a broom and start thrashing wildly at the ceiling, screaming and wailing, like a mad aunt trying to stop a war. And when that didn’t work, I called the police and sat boiling with dark satisfaction as I heard them arrive and start remonstrating with the despicable bastards upstairs.

That was then. This is now. And in an apparent bid to test my capacity for xenophobia, a fresh group of Australians has just moved in next door and started using their roof terrace as an occasional al fresco debating society and drinking club. Which is fine and everything, except, y’know, it’s kinda right outside my bedroom window, so when they kinda carry on late into the night, it kinda stops me from like, sleeping and stuff? But thanks to my in-built aversion to being the ‘boring fusty guy’, I said nothing for weeks, until last Wednesday, at 2.30 a. m., when I meekly popped my head out of the window and asked if they’d mind moving inside. And thankfully they did so, and were very polite and charming about it – except for one of them, a woman, whose knee-jerk reaction was to glower at me and snap, ‘We pay rent here! We’ve got a right to talk!’ as though I were the walking embodiment of an oppressive fascist regime clamping down on the flower children.

So from now on, every time I enter or leave my flat, I know she’s going to be looking at me and thinking, ‘There goes the petty uptight guy,’ or ‘I hate you,’ or ‘I pay rent here! I’ve got a right to talk!’

And I know how she feels because I once felt precisely the same about another neighbour I had, one who used to moan about my incessant talking. Not the volume of it, but the content. For
instance, one night I was entertaining a friend by describing an imaginary scenario in which he was forced at gunpoint to have sex with an incontinent horse. I got quite into it, and my voice grew louder and louder, the details more explicit and unnecessary, until suddenly I was interrupted by a plaintive, disgusted cry from downstairs. In my head, I snorted at the small-minded sniveltude of my fusty, boring neighbour, because I knew with 100% conviction that I was right and he was wrong; that I was cool and brilliant, and I’d never be like him. Ever.

That’s the sort of thing I reminisce about sometimes. Late at night. When I can’t sleep. Can’t sleep because she pays rent there, and she’s got a right to talk.

If I was compiling a list of things I wouldn’t want to happen to me, ‘losing my ears in an accident’ would rank pretty highly, just below ‘accidentally coating my own eyeballs with hot melted cheese’ and three slots above ‘sharing a sleeping bag with Piers Morgan’ (which comes one place higher than ‘being force-fed live mice’).

I don’t know what you’d have to do in order to actually lose both ears – over-enthusiastically push your face through some railings to gawp at a nudist, perhaps – and I’m not sure it would actually affect your hearing that much, what with most of the listening mechanisms being housed deep inside your head. But I’m guessing that since the external ear-shaped part catches all the sounds and funnels them toward your brain, removing it would drastically reduce your field of hearing, so you’d have to twist your head sideways until the exposed hole was directly facing whatever it was you wanted to listen to, which would turn any attempt at conducting a romantic conversation over dinner into a bleak farce.

And obviously you’d stand out, especially if you also needed glasses, and the only way to keep them in place was to continually press them against the bridge of your nose with your knee (because you’d also lost your hands in the accident – I forgot to mention that earlier). And local kids would torment you by running
up from behind (where you couldn’t hear them) and suddenly blowing across the hole, so your head whistled like an ocarina.

Anyway, all things considered, I’d miss my ears, partly because it’d rob me of my favourite pastime, which is trudging through London with a Walkman on. (It isn’t a Walkman, OK – I’m not 500 years old – but it isn’t an iPod either: it’s another brand of MP3 player, but calling it ‘an MP3 player’ is an awkward mouthful and, besides, you know what I mean).

Pounding along in a musical bubble is fantastic for the following reasons: (1) you get to ignore everybody else; (2) you feel like you’re in a movie so if you, say, tread in some dogshit, it seems less like the everyday misery of treading in dogshit and more like a magical interlude from an epic adventure; (3) you’re oblivious to the car horns and screaming and intermittent volleys of gunfire that make city life more stressful than it need be.

Your choice of soundtrack is vital. I was reminded of this the other day. One of the most overtly ‘fun’ (and deceptively vital) aspects of making a TV show is choosing the accompanying music, and I often download potential backing tracks almost at random from Napster, then walk around listening to them on headphones, thinking about which bits of the show they’d go well with. Which is all well and good until you find yourself trying to choose the music for a ‘suspenseful’ scene, as I was the other day. In practice, this meant sitting alone on my sofa at 3 a.m. with a load of horror-movie music on heavy rotation.

It was terrifying. In fact, I’d recommend it to thrill-junkies: fuck the latest Alton Towers terror-coaster – just whack the
Halloween
soundtrack on to your iPod and listen to it while walking around your own house in the dead of night. Try it tonight. It’s great.

All of which makes me wonder why they haven’t invented an intelligent mood-complementing MP3 player yet. They’ve got ones for joggers that deliberately select fast-paced tracks when they’re running quickly, but why should they have all the fun? When are we going to get a music player that can tell, say, that you’re melancholy (maybe by measuring the level of moisture on your face and working out whether you’re crying or not), and demonstrate its
sympathy by playing some welling, mournful strings? Or perhaps do the opposite, and try to cheer you up with a stirring burst of ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ (although if you’re sad because you’ve just lost your ears in an accident, that last choice could be construed as tactless).

And it wouldn’t just detect obvious moods, like joy or sorrow. It’s the future, you cunt. It’d clearly be far more sensitive and advanced than that. If you were in the mood for a biscuit, for instance, it wouldn’t only see it coming a mile off and select the perfect piece to get you in a biscuit-eatin’ frame of mind, but time its cue perfectly so that great bit with the drums would kick in just as you took your first bite.

In fact, the only thing it might have trouble with is choosing a piece of music that goes nicely with the feeling you get when you’re sick of having music chosen for you by a smartarsed machine. That’d be too self-reflexive. It’d overheat and explode and unfortunately, since the mood-detecting chip is made out of uranium (yes, uranium), the blast would devastate an area twice the size of Asia and millions would perish screaming in flames and it’d all be your despicable fault. But that’s technology for you. It’s risky.

Friends occasionally come to me for advice, which is odd, because one glance at my shambling semi-existence should be enough to convince them I’m in no position to offer guidance on anything. I wouldn’t trust myself to tell someone which end of a mug to drink from.

But still they come. The other day, a friend wanted to know if a colleague of hers was (a) flirting with her or (b) not flirting with her, and (c) how she should proceed, bearing in mind she didn’t know the answers to (a) or (b) yet.

I like it when female friends ask for advice about men, because it gives me a chance to slag off my entire sex with as much authority as I can muster. So I said, ‘Duhhh – he’s a man! Of course he was flirting.’

‘What if he’s just being friendly?’ she wondered.

I snorted like she’d asked whether horses have gills, and shook my head, which was pointless because we were on the phone.

‘Look. All men, without exception, are shallow, priapic skunks. A man would fuck a ham sandwich if no one was looking. Sex is all men care about. It’s the only thing. There’s literally nothing else going on in our minds. Remove those thoughts and our skulls would cave in. And any man who says otherwise is lying – lying in the hope that his wheedling little lies will lull you into a false sense of security, and he can have his way with you. Up against a bin, if need be. He doesn’t care. He’s a man. At the end of the day he’s just a quasi-sentient jizzing machine. A cum dispenser. That’s the software he runs on. That’s what makes his eyes blink and his limbs move. He’s a dick and a larynx and absolutely nothing else. Hello. Hello? Hello?’

She hadn’t hung up. Just fallen silent. I’d gone overboard a bit, and was befouling her harmless romantic daydreams, robbing her world of magic. I felt bad, as if I’d just told a six-year-old that not only does Santa not exist, but only an idiot would think he does. Worse still, this was an ex I was talking to.

‘Is that what you thought when you met me, then?’ she asked.

‘What? Nooooo! Of course not! Don’t be daft. Look, I’m joking. Ignore everything I just said. He’s probably lovely.’

I managed to make the about-turn sound convincing, although part of my brain was still thinking, ‘Yeah, but come on, he is a man.’ It gets easily disgruntled, that bit of brain, and ought to learn when to shut up.

Anyway, the key to working out her next step was to decide whether said man had been genuinely flirting or not. Which wasn’t simple. With flirting, there are more variables than Stephen Hawking could handle. It’s as complex as poker, but with far higher stakes: potential life-enhancing happiness or crushing humiliation, not piffling financial loss.

Body language doesn’t always help. What if one minute they’re playing with their hair and touching your knee, and the next they’ve got their arms folded? What if they are flirting, but only for
their own detached amusement? Worst of all, what if they’re already taken, and deeply in love, thanks for asking? How do you subtly find out? You can’t ask outright: that drops your guard and the answer might leave you not knowing what to do with your face for a good 10 minutes.

So you drop casual prompts … but don’t get a straight answer. Now what? You’re in limbo. You’re no longer even yourself. On the outside you’re a picture of amused, confident nonchalance, while on the inside your brain is gnawing itself to shreds, assessing odds, crunching integers. Above all, you want to avoid The Sudden Look of Horror, and the awful, awkward vacuum that envelops the pair of you when it transpires that You Misread The Situation Like An Idiot.

Infuriatingly, you won’t get anywhere without risking exposure to that Sudden Look. And nothing’s worse than discovering later that you didn’t misread the signs, but now something’s come up and sorry, but see ya. Years ago, on a night out with a girl I was slowly going crazy for, the sheer weight of mental calculation left me unable to make any sort of move. We shared a cab together, and after it dropped her home, she sent a text message saying: ‘I wanted you to kiss me.’ But the moment had gone. A week later she met the love of her life and that was that. It happens to everyone at some stage, obviously. But this was worse because it happened to me.

Anyway, we discussed all of this, my friend and I, and ultimately my advice boiled down to this: all you can do is prepare to go mad for a while. Maybe there’s a sunbeam at the end, and maybe there isn’t. But it’s out of your hands. To quote Abba: ‘The gods will throw the dice/ Their minds as cold as ice/ And someone way down here/ Might wind up sucking the cock of despair.’

If you’ll excuse the crude paraphrasing.

Technically, you’re not reading this, because technically, I’m on holiday. Except I’m not. Instead, I’m basking on the glamorous sun-drenched beaches of my living room, having failed to book a
holiday for the millionth time in a row. My last proper holiday was three years ago (OK, there was a week in Spain two years ago, but it doesn’t count because it was a relationship-break-up trip, and therefore the polar opposite of fun and relaxation).

I’m useless at every single aspect of holidays. Timing them for one thing. I tend to exist in a permanent work-bubble, fighting off deadlines with my bare fists. Then, when there’s an eventual lull, I think, ‘Wow, I really need a holiday’, but by then it’s too late. What’s more, I’m single. How, as a tragic singleton, are you meant to go on holiday anyway? I know from experience what couples do on holiday: they argue. But I’m not a couple. Who am I supposed to slowly fall out of love with? I can’t slowly poison my relationship with myself. Or can I?

I know several people who regularly go on holiday alone, including one whose idea of a rejuvenating break was a week on the Trans-Siberian railway, where he read books and stared out of the window into a landscape of unending nothingness, until he wound up drinking vodka just to get it over with quicker. He considered this a life-enriching experience. Another friend urged me to simply jet off somewhere alone because it gives you an unparalleled sense of freedom. ‘Just stick a pin in a map of the world and fly somewhere,’ was her advice, and it was such a stirring notion I was about to fire up Google Earth and do just that (I’m modern, see), when she added a small caveat. ‘Just don’t go for more than a week, because you end up talking to yourself.’

‘Huh?’

‘Well, it’s the evenings, you see. It’s fine during the day, because you can just lie on the beach or walk round museums with an iPod on, but in the evenings there’s not much you can do except eat alone in restaurants or sit alone in bars. If you’re a woman it’s not so bad, because you get chatted up now and then, which can be amusing, but you’re not a woman so you’ll probably have to sit there reading a book or something. And eventually you’ll get so lonely you’ll start talking to yourself. I went for a week and started talking to myself on the last day. Go for a fortnight and you’ll totally lose your mind somewhere around day 10.’