CHAPTER 6 #2
‘How? Do you not have any? Do you just sit in the dark twiddling your thumbs between work shifts? Everyone spends their time doing something.’ He leans back in his chair, mimicking what he described with a comically blank look on his face.
It annoys me how funny it is. No one has ever called me funny.
‘Have you ever considered that we have been conditioned to believe that a meaningful life is one filled with activities for the sake of undertaking activities, but that the true purpose of an activity-filled life is to distract the general lemming populace from the corruption of the owner class? Because if we ever discovered that life is truly meaningless, the people would revolt, and the rich and powerful couldn’t have that. ’
He stops mid-twiddle, which is satisfying. He did say I have a flair for the dramatic, so he really shouldn’t be so surprised. Does the chair inch back a little further though?
‘If existential philosophising is your current hobby, we’ve got work to do,’ he says. ‘But I’m starting to think that it won’t be a problem of finding you a personality so much as it will be to contain what you’ve got once we dig it out.’
Is he calling me too much? It may be the greatest compliment I’ve ever received.
See? Sad.
‘I’ll think about it,’ he goes on. ‘And I’ll come up with a plan.’
I’ve been home for about an hour when Bee enters.
I think I’ve nearly worked up the courage to tell her about my day.
Not all of it, mind you. More just the new resolve to hunt down individuality.
I’m vibrating with anticipation as I sit on Bee’s bed waiting for her.
How will it go? Will I see that warm expression on her face that friends in movies share when one of them has a win because they care as much about their friend’s happiness as their own?
Maybe we’ll talk long into the night like we did when we were nineteen, dissecting every moment of a uni party.
Except this time I might actually have something to contribute.
‘Gertrude! What are you doing in here?’ Bee dumps her bag in the corner of her room and begins shedding her ladies-who-lunch layers.
First the coat draped over her shoulders, then the slouchy jumper, then the skirt, the boots, the tights.
Replaced by a cosy jumper-and-trackies set in a pop of burgundy.
I inhale to begin, but apparently I take too long in the silence because Bee fills it. ‘But it’s perfect that you are.’
She actually looks at me for the first time, rather than just knowing I’m there by feel and peripheral vision. ‘Have I seen that top before?’ I’ve owned it for six years. ‘It’s interesting.’ It will be going out with the next set of donations.
William has texted the sweetest things all day.
Good morning, beautiful.
Hope you have a wonderful day, gorgeous.
Can’t wait to take you out again soon, babe.
He misses her already. Wants to know what her favourite flowers are so he can prepare for their next date.
(Bee might be stuck in this lie for as long as the relationship lasts, I think.
You can’t just pull up stumps at six months and say, ‘By the way, babe, those expensive ephemeral gestures you keep getting me? They cause me physical pain.’)
What has Bee done today while William was doing all that texting?
Oh, she got up, went for a run, had a coffee and an acai bowl.
Then she went for lunch with the girls. (They were so excited to hear all about William.
They all agree with Bee that he’s the real deal.
And isn’t it nice to meet a real, adult man who has his shit together?
Chlo was being such a perv, hunting out all the sexy details, but women don’t talk about sex in a Samantha way anymore.
Oh! And Emmy is going to Thailand in the new year, so Chlo was giving her all the tips.
I got them to put them in a shared-notes app, just in case. I can send it to you if you want!)
I revel in the secondhand girl-chat. Bee and I never talk about sex; we steer clear of discussing it like the pothole at the end of our street.
(‘Hey, I’ve faked every orgasm your boyfriend’s best friend thinks he ever gave me, and it makes me feel like a bad feminist’ doesn’t really roll off the tongue.) Bee has other friends for that, I guess.
I keep looking for an in. Lunch with the girls—I had brunch today! William has his shit together—Arthur is going to help me gather my own!
Half an hour later, Bee gets up to shower. It’s only after I go back to my own room that I realise I never answered Bee’s question about what I was doing in there.
It’s fine. We’re both out of practice.
By the time I wake up the next morning, I’m doubting that the whole thing even happened.
I have absolutely no proof that it did. Nothing in writing from Arthur.
No hearsay witness in Bee. I’m used to the ‘let’s catch up’ signoff.
Like when you run into someone from a past life and you exchange some upbeat generic nothings and then, as they are trying to make a graceful exit (especially awful if all parties are headed in the same direction), they say we should catch up soon.
Those catch-ups never happen and they’re not meant to. I know that. It’s just one of those things people say. It means the brief exchange was nice and we won’t have to pretend we can’t see each other properly without our glasses should the situation ever crop up again.
There is a not-insignificant voice in my mind now wondering if Arthur’s ‘I’ll come up with a plan’ is a more context-specific ‘let’s catch up’.
It might just slip his mind as a thing of little relevance to his own day-to-day.
He probably has a lot going on. Most people do.
He probably isn’t going to get in touch.
It’s good that I didn’t tell Bee. Maybe it can be a funny little thing we bring up every so often when forced to interact alongside Bee and William. An amusing dinner-party anecdote.
But I wake up to a wall of text from Arthur.
I can’t decide if a wall-texter is worse than a multi-texter, and he has exhibited both behaviours in our short acquaintance.
He could at least use some paragraphs. He seems like a paragraph guy, so I’m a little thrown off to see such disregard for form and convention from a guy who has used the word ‘thus’ in a text.
Focusing on his grammar helps me temper my excitement that he not only remembered but also followed up (at length). I’m really hoping that ‘desperate’ isn’t a new thing for me. Best to play it chill for now.
He texted at five in the morning. I suspect being awake at that time is a regular thing, and I really hope he isn’t one of those guys who gets up at two a.m. to rise and grind like Matt Damon. I can’t work with that, friends-wise; it’s too big a fundamental difference in values. It’s a value chasm.
The message:
I’ve decided that the solution to our problem
is quite simple.
Our. Not reading too much into all of this is getting harder.
The two of us don’t want to spend more time
one on one.
He just gets me.
Thankfully, our slightly unhinged friends have
given us the in we need with these group
dates. And before you ask, I have tried again
to get William to explain to me the reasoning
behind the weird chaperoning and gotten
nowhere. I think at this point we just have to
file it under ‘quirky hot people things’. Thus,
I am convinced that we should encourage
them to keep doing this, and use it to our
advantage. I might need to lay it on a bit thick,
but I promise this won’t end up becoming
some cheesy fake dating situation.
Thank goodness for that.
Net result: we’re going to have a lot of time
to kill with two people who simultaneously
require our presence but refuse to
acknowledge it. I am going to suggest to
William that he outsources the planning of
dates to me, which he will jump at because
he’s more of an ideas guy. And we can use
the dates to try out a bunch of stuff you’ve
never done before to see what actually
interests you. I’m sure once you start to trust
your gut on something like what you like to
do, the rest will follow and your worries will
vanish in a puff of smoke, or something less of
a cliché.
I tap back a thumbs-up.