CHAPTER 2 #2
Gentle Questions had a simple premise – try to prompt the least controversial and most enjoyable discussions ever.
It was like BuzzFeed rankings but cottagecore, designed to while away time.
They’d originally invented it as a way of winding down from extremely drunk nights out – levelling the plateau.
There was a knack, a kind of competition, to finding the most aggressively gentle queries.
Of course, one of the weirdest parts of Gentle Questions was finding a topic that sounded innocuous but became a heated debate.
Jeremy quickly learnt never to ask Anna about the correct way to cut a jaffle.
‘Useful … not the best … not the most delicious … the most useful. Part of me wants to go mozzarella, because it’s so meltable,’ mused Anna.
‘Hmm.’ Liz nodded. ‘I can see that.’
‘But I don’t think you can go past tasty … just a classic tasty cheese. It’s good for all occasions.’
‘I have to agree.’ Liz nodded again. ‘It’s probably the most common for a reason.’
‘Do you support shredded cheese bags?’ asked Anna, keeping the game going. ‘Jeremy? Cheese bags? Cheese bags, Jeremy.’
Jeremy sighed, swirling his finger around in the damp spot left on the table by his beer.
‘Yeah, I guess,’ he said, watching Hilda move around inside the bar, leaving a trail of wool and shredded coasters behind her.
‘If you’re gonna have cheese, I guess you want it in a bag …
don’t want it loosely spilling out on the bench, just a pile of unorganised cheese; that isn’t going to impress anyone …
a cheese that could have been a whole lot more … ’
Liz and Anna looked at each other, and Liz sighed dramatically.
‘It’s against the rules for a man’s feelings to get in the way of Gentle Questions, so I guess we can take a quick break to talk about the stupid work problem you’re ever so subtly steering us back to.’
‘I keep telling you it’s not about work!’ protested Jeremy. ‘Or maybe it is, but not exclusively. It’s bigger – it’s about … everything?’
‘The zombie apocalypse,’ intoned Anna.
‘Have you ever had a moment where you look around and realise you’ve made a mistake somewhere, but didn’t even realise?
Like, not that I’ve ever been hiking, but hypothetically, you’ve been walking for hours and suddenly realise you’ve made a wrong turn, and everyone else is much closer to the mountain and you’re just somewhere completely different?
Like just standing near an ants’ nest or something? ’
‘Umm,’ mused Liz, ‘no, because that is a very unclear metaphor.’
‘No, I kinda understand,’ said Anna. ‘And yeah, I guess when I turned thirty I realised my life looked different from a lot of my friends’ lives: they were all married and having babies and buying homes, and …
I was super high dancing to Robyn in a lesbian bar.
It was this moment of truly realising my life was different. ’
‘And clearly much more awesome,’ said Liz.
‘That’s kinda it,’ said Jeremy, ‘but not quite … Do you ever think you fucked up your life? I mean look at me: completely work obsessed but with basically nothing to show for it; tragically single; getting older and uglier every day; and with no hope of anything different, nothing exciting. I just sit at the same pub every week drinking the same beers with the same people, doing the same stuff over and over again …’
Liz and Anna exchanged looks at this point, which Jeremy ignored as he continued.
‘… paying rent for my shitty little room, ignoring my alcoholic mother’s phone calls … Is this what I’m going to do with the rest of my life? I am nearly thirty and I have nothing in my life to be proud of.’
Liz and Anna were uncharacteristically quiet, until Jeremy finished with, ‘When I see Miles, is this what I’m going to show him? A hack entertainment journo who looks exactly the same as he did ten years ago except droopier and unhappier?’
‘Wait, MILES?’ shrieked Liz. ‘That PSYCHOPATH? Why are we talking about MILES?’
‘Why do you care what your awful ex thinks?’ asked Anna.
‘Because I have to see him at my uni reunion in August,’ Jeremy moaned, his hands supporting his skull as if it weighed as much as a bowling ball.
‘Okay, number one: do not go,’ Liz said. ‘Reunions are pointless – everyone is just there to find out who went to jail. I literally transitioned into a woman and people were more interested in the guy who embezzled from Apple. Number two: fuck that guy!’
‘I have to go. I can’t get into it, but I do.
And that’s not even the point. I have to go and I have to be nice to that asshole, and everyone will talk about how brilliant and successful he is, and how wonderful his award-winning book is, and then they will look at me, and I will be a horrible swamp creature in comparison.
I just … didn’t realise I’d failed so hard until now. ’
‘You absolutely shouldn’t compare yourself to other people, especially people who are actual scum monsters who did awful things to you,’ said Anna, in full considerate mode.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah, believe in myself, et cetera,’ Jeremy said witheringly. ‘We can deal with my emotional problems and disgusting lack of esteem later. I need solutions.’
‘Oh, you should lie!’ said Liz, who loved lying. ‘Do a total Romy and Michele – turn up, pretend to be super successful, have a husband who lives on a remote Greek island, say you work in … crypto. Nobody knows what it is, so it’s impossible to prove otherwise.’
‘Ooh I like this,’ Jeremy murmured.
‘I still don’t think you need to change anything about yourself or pretend to,’ said Anna, always stubbornly supportive. ‘But I guess if you’re doing this, you should create a list of things to make yourself more impressive. Be strategic.’
‘I love lists and I love strategy,’ answered Jeremy, pulling out his phone. ‘Right, so fake life, fake job … what else? I could hire a really cool car. Although Miles is super smart; he wouldn’t be impressed by that. Fake PhD?’
‘Yes! You’ve been getting your doctorate in … genetics. Maths! Something a novel writer wouldn’t understand.’
‘Totally! And no offence, but I need grown-up friends. You know, like, dinner-party friends – the kind of people who invite you to a dinner party and have opinions about wine. God, I always thought I’d be invited to dinner parties by now,’ mused Jeremy.
‘I get invited to dinner parties,’ said Anna.
‘Me too,’ said Liz.
Jeremy was too swept up in the seed of his new plan to really care about this, but there was a part of him that realised that both Anna and Liz, successful in various fields, were in fact living more adult lives than he’d known. Was he their messy friend?
‘Maybe you could ride in on a horse and say you’re an Olympic horse athlete. A horse racer?’ Anna suggested. ‘Although then you’d have to spend the next six months learning how to ride a horse.’
‘You could learn to ride a horse in six months,’ said Liz. ‘You could learn most things in six months I reckon. Like, basic shitty French … horse riding … Why are you looking at me like that, Jero?’
Jeremy felt like he’d been punched in the face.
The whole ‘fake your way through the reunion’ idea was fun, but it wasn’t really his vibe.
He had always been work-oriented and bad at lies.
Perhaps it was the two beers he’d quickly drunk, or the nagging feeling of failure, or perhaps it was the incipient dementia from almost turning thirty, but Liz’s off-the-cuff suggestion suddenly felt like genius.
‘That’s it, guys! That’s what I’ll do!’ Jeremy said, slapping his palm down on the table.
‘Ride a horse?’ Liz said, looking confused.
‘No … I don’t just spend the next six months pretending to have a better life. I spend the next six months fixing my life. By the time that reunion rolls around, my life is going to be so perfect Miles is going to shit his own pants in envy. He’s going to shit them.’