Ladder Made of Coal

t’s a hot day in summer and I’m on holiday but I’m not happy.

I’m sitting with my wife on a beach while our son Michael plays by the water. Did I say it’s hot? It is, it’s hot. Scorching. The sweat on my scalp. My eyes are closed but I open them now and then to see a snatch of the blue sky, and blue sea. Lots of people sunbathing, larking about.

I’m tired, I’m miserable, but it helps to try and drift off. I like that feeling, when you’re on the edge of sleep and you can feel yourself drifting off. Heat’s making me all woozy. Can’t focus. Like my brain is made of jam.

I guess this is what it would be like sitting under a palm tree on a desert island. Closing my eyes and drifting off with the heat. Suppose it doesn’t matter where in the world I am if the sensation is the same, and my eyes are closed – I can come down to the beach and pretend I’m in Barbados and save myself a fortune.

I wouldn’t want you to think I’m happy, though. I’m not happy. I’m not content. I’m not fulfilled. If you were on this beach looking at me and her you might think we’re content, sitting here in the sun, all still and peaceful with a still hot sun and there’s no breeze playing so the air is still but you wouldn’t know what’s going on inside us.

I wish we got divorced years ago.

We’re both sitting on these fold-up chair things. On the beach. On the sand. Quite useful, these chairs. Clever, how they work. You can fold them up into a carry bag and sling it over your shoulder, take them to places. Convenient.

She keeps opening her eyes to glance at Michael and make sure he’s okay.

Like I said, I wish we got divorced years ago. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. One reason was I didn’t want to split the house down the middle, because then I would only be able to buy a smaller thing, and how could I impress the neighbours then?

Because when I have an object, a thing, a possession, from a house down to a coat, my weak feeling is, how can I impress people with it? How can I be well thought of?

Because if they like me, I can feel good about myself. It’s like they’re giving me permission to feel that. And I hate to feel inferior, or beneath them in some way. That’s why I spent so much on the car, and on my clothes.

I once read about a man who wore brand new underwear every day – that’s the way to do it. If you can afford it. Although people would not see it, so that misses the point.

But anyway it matters to me what people think. What they think and feel about me – that’s where my identity lies. That’s me, inside them. I can’t stand the thought of being rejected by people, or gossiped about behind my back.

I have a recurring fear, a picture in my head where I walk past an open doorway and overhear my friends in the room slagging me off. That I can’t stand, and because I can’t  stand it, I’m at the mercy of other people. It means I shall go through my entire life desperate to impress them. Which, even I agree, is not the way to live a life.

But that is how I am. A kind of loser. I’ve always been like this. In fact, when I meet people, if I meet someone who is a bit like me, I cannot stand them. To see myself, my fear, in someone else, makes me sick. So oddly, I can be made quite happy meeting someone who is self-sufficient and couldn’t give a damn what the people around him think of him. I like that. But sometimes I wonder if it is rare – I think a lot of people are like me.

My wife taps me on the arm. I open my eyes. She is pointing to Michael as he stands over a sandcastle he’s just built, pretending he’s a giant demolishing a city. I nod.

‘You happy?’ she asks, with an expectant expression.

I give a little smile. She moves her face closer and we kiss. As we move apart she eyes me searchingly, hesitates, and I know what she’s going to say next.

‘Do you love me?’ she asks.

‘Of course,’ I say, and hold her gaze for as long as is necessary to make her happy, then close my eyes, settle back in my chair and go back inside my own head.

When I was a teenager I used to listen to Radio One in the  morning – that would give me a lift. To try and fit in a bit of pleasure before I went to school. So I’d have this glimpse of this other world of New Wave bands with guitars and amps and attitude and it would play on in my head as I went around my lessons. Like a soundtrack of escapism to the day.

And I guess I liked to think of them as my heroes – I was sixteen, they were twenty-four, twenty-five, and I’d think, ‘They don’t have to do Algebra, they are so lucky and free, they live lives of freedom and pleasure and glamour.’

And I’d hope that when I was their age, I too could reach a life of freedom. I pictured myself at twenty-five walking carefree around the local park all day, eating an apple on a park bench and thinking ‘Life is good, I have to do an appearance on ‘Top of the Pops’ tonight for my latest single, and I don’t have any Algebra homework.’ It seemed like heaven.

[end of extract]