Stonemouth полностью

All these years, this half a decade that I’ve spent making a new life for myself, trying to forget about Ellie and my idiocy with Jel, forgetting about the wedding that never was and trying to push out of my head everything I ever knew about my friends and Stonemouth and my life here, purposefully turning my back on it all to draw a line under it, to make starting again easier and so forge a Stewart Gilmour: 2.0, a newer, better me who’d never behave like a fool again …and in the end the simple act of coming back has made that decision itself look like my greatest, most prolonged act of stupidity.

Of course I want to see her again. She may still hate me, she may just want to slap me in the face and tell me I should never have come back, but — even if it’s that — I need to know.

I let myself in. As usual, when the storm-doors are open, that means people are home and the inner doors aren’t locked.

I pull in a breath to shout hi or hello or whatever, and I remember something about That Night that I’d half forgotten, a little detail that suddenly seems germane now. It was from when Anjelica and I were just starting to get serious, in that over-lit ladies’ toilet on the fifth floor of the Mearnside, at the point when either of us could have changed our minds and it not have been awkward, even hurtful.

I remember thinking: We could get caught, somebody could walk in, Jel might tell somebody — she might tell Ellie — or Jel might even be doing this not because the chance suddenly presented itself and we both just sort of got carried away in the heat of the moment, but because she wanted this to happen, even set it up to happen this way, so she could tell Ellie, or so she could have something over me, something to make me feel guilty about, even if outright blackmail was unlikely.

Again, all of this had flitted through my mind in a couple of seconds or less, and I remember thinking, as a result of all this simming and mulling over and thinking through: Don’t care. If that’s the way it’s going to be, then let it be; bring it on. Sometimes you just have to abandon yourself to the immediate and even to somebody else’s superior karma or ability to manoeuvre, to plan.

I suspect we all sort of secretly think our lives are like these very long movies, with ourselves as the principal characters, obviously. Only very occasionally does it occur to any one of us that all these supporting actors, cameo turns, bit players and extras around us might actually be in some sense real, just as real as we are, and that they might think that the Big Movie is really all about them, not us; that each one of them has their own film unreeling inside their own head and we are just part of the supporting cast in their story.

Maybe that’s what we feel when we meet somebody we have to acknowledge is more famous or more charismatic or more important than we are ourselves. The trick is to know when to go with the other player’s plot line, when to abandon your own script — or your thoughts for what to improvise next — and adopt that of the cast member who seems to have the ear or the pen or the keyboard of the writer/director.

The other trick is to know what sort of person you are. I know what I’m like; I tend to over-analyse things, but I know this and I have a sort of executive function that overrides all the earnest deliberation once it’s gone past a certain point. I see it as like a committee that sits in constant session, and sometimes you — as the one who’s going to have to make the final decision and live with the results — just have to go up to the meeting room where all the debating is going on and, from the outside, just quietly pull the door to, shutting away all the feverish talking while you get back to the controls and get calmly on with the actual doing. I control this so well I’ve even been accused of being a bit too impulsive on occasion, which is ironic if nothing else.

At the other end of this particular spectrum are the people who are wild, wilful and instinctive and just do whatever feels right at the time. Jails and cemeteries are full of them. The smart ones like that have the opposite of what I have; they have a sensible, Now-wait-a-minute, Have-you-thought-this-through? committee that can veto their more reckless urges. (For what it’s worth, I suspect Mike Mac is like me and Donald M is the opposite.)

Either way, some sort of balance makes the whole thing work, and evolution — both in the raw sense and in the way that society changes — gradually weeds out the behaviours that work least well.

Voices from the kitchen.

I walk in and Ellie’s there, sitting at the table with Mum and Dad, tea and biscuits all round.

Ellie smiles at me. It’s not a big smile, but it’s a smile.

‘Here he is!’ Mum says.

‘Aye-aye. Your phone off?’ Dad asks.