Читать книгу Outlook - Charles William Johns - Страница 6

Like any event of death within life, things seemed to settle down after a while. The sadness and confusion disappeared and the day-to-day activities of the eight men that Benjamin sent his ‘suicide email’ to (who were presumably the closest to Benjamin) quickly ensued as if his death were only a nightly thunderstorm that departed with the rise of the sun the next morning. We were all interviewed the day after his death, but because these sessions were isolated to a one-to-one interrogation I never got to meet Benjamin’s friends. I was still a little perplexed (yet flattered) as to why he thought of me as one of these special select friends; I had taught him how to play basic guitar chords at my studio for approximately six weeks before his suicide. He was undoubtedly more competent at the guitar than he had first reputed and had mastered some of its intricacies long before he had met me. He had seen a photocopied poster lying around in a hairdresser’s (I think) and admired its honesty;

“Beginners’ guitar lessons catered for by a semi-professional player with over ten years’ experience. Looking to save up and enroll at music college sometime this millennium. Five pounds an hour . . . or anything you can afford.”

I remember Benji, in our last lesson, giving me fifty pounds and telling me to go put it towards my studies. That was the last time I spoke to Benji. He would always take his watch off before practice and would always slowly put it back on after the session had finished, keeping his gaze continually fixed to the face of his watch while he completed this resolute task. He would play on a spare guitar that I had lying around the studio and so, when he left his lesson, he was absolutely free to do as he pleased. He would always walk to my house and he would always walk out; perhaps meeting his wife, his girlfriend, stopping off at a bar . . . maybe simply walking home to bed. Of course, there was something mysterious about him (there is mystery in everyone) but it was a gentle mysteriousness that was always naturally sanguine. It wasn’t a dark, sophisticated mysteriousness but more like the mysteriousness of old film posters from the fifties that you can pick up in auction houses, the mysteriousness of someone you meet on holiday who attempts to speak to you, but you cannot understand what they are saying.

I ended up, after an amount of time had passed, as anyone would; bringing my perplexities and curiosities back down to earth (with the help of my girlfriend Isabel and the comforting monotonous activities of day to day living). But it was Benjamin’s email that now hovered in my thoughts. Why write such a lengthy soliloquy? Why did he feel, in his last distraught hour, the need to communicate those life defining neuroses he calmly talks about? He obviously did not wish to cathartically expel them as he states that they will never leave him in peace. Isn’t he saying that he is these neuroses and nothing else? I soon began losing sleep to the idea that maybe he was telling his faithful readers something else. I began thinking that he had entrusted some secret message to me, to the world, and its meaning lay hidden, deep within his suicidal message. I began to wonder what this event was that simultaneously split his life into a past and future Benjamin Flew. Did he want us to discover it somehow, to unwrite his wrongs? Was he asking us to find this event in ourselves and hence set out on our own personal voyage of self-discovery? Whatever the answer was to this myriad coded message I began to realise at least one truth; that the neuroses inhabiting Benjamin’s mind had unstuck itself from his words and had found a home within my singular, commonplace existence.

After my long-awaited interview at the music college I so desperately wanted to study at, two years after Benji had died, I realised what I had to do. I could either study the ways of musical composition, harmony and cadence, or I could study the life of Benjamin Flew. After a moment’s hesitation I drew out all my savings from the last three years directed solely towards my education and decided to buy the cheapest car I could find and visit every friend that Benjamin had sent his last remaining testament to. The easiest part was finding their names; each of their email addresses were included within the message Benjamin had sent me. Not only a name, I thought, but direct contact with each and every one of them through the medium of email.

I knew this wouldn’t be enough though, hence the car; I knew that email addresses could be deleted and that names could change. The medium of email didn’t seem adequate for such a topic either; surely one would wish to discuss the difficult issue of Benji’s death face to face, in a pub, or, words shared during a short walk (but if that wasn’t Benji’s style then maybe it won’t be theirs either)?

I won’t lie to you, of course I was looking to fill the immediate present with adventure and unknowing. I didn’t want to just sit at home emailing seven people, waiting for them to get back to me, it was much more than that. Benjamin’s letter, even from the beginning all those years ago, suggested something to me about my own life, in the form of questions; Who am I? What is it that I am meant to be? What is it that I am meant to do? Perhaps I was traveling to find myself? After all, I am down on the list as one of these recipients.

Isabel would not be happy with my decision to roam around the country meeting strangers, sleeping in hotels, most probably drinking a lot. But they weren’t strangers, they were Benji’s most trusted friends, and through that trust they would become my friends too. As it happens Isabel was not unhappy because I had told her that I had enrolled at music college and would be away for two weeks watching various music recitals. I told her that we had been “thrown into the course” (I think those were my words) and that I could not afford to miss such a valuable experience if I were to prove worthy of such a prestigious institution.

What could she say? She knew how long it had taken me to save up the money, she believed I was worthy of a degree, she knew it was important for me to make a good first impression. She looked at me with this perfect mixture of casualness and concern that only women seem to be able to pull off, and the rest is history. We slept together that night for the first time in three months.

I slept a peaceful sleep in Isabel’s arms. I dreamt of three discontinuous environments without any real narrative. I dreamt of exotic birds and plants like the ones in Henri Rousseau’s paintings, I dreamt of a farmers’ market in Iowa lit up beautifully at night, with friendly people serving chili from out of these giant steaming cooking pots, and I dreamt of a little boy sulking in an indoor swimming pool.

The next day I met up with a private dealer who was selling his car on the internet and gave him £600 for it upfront. His dog (I assume it was his) was barking hysterically at me throughout the proceedings and I could see two clocks adjacent to one another, telling different times, in the hallway of the man’s house, through the front door he had left open. I drove back home whist Isabel was at a dance audition and picked up a few clothes, some C.D.’s for the car, my laptop and the usual toiletries. I left a note on the fridge for Isabel that read-

Izzy, Izzy, Izzy, I’m sure you’ll enjoy the peace and quiet whilst I’m gone! My phone is fully charged!! :) Miss you already. Love ya! Sam X

I locked the front door behind me and got into the car with all my stuff. The truth was I did miss her already. I really didn’t know what I was doing. I was already beginning to feel a bit gloomy. This obviously wasn’t a good start. I drove to a twenty-four-hour service station towards the motorway, parked the car and got out my laptop in order to write a message to Benjamin’s other seven friends. I could write the messages on my laptop (I write best on laptops with a proper keyboard) and then copy them over to my phone in order to send ( . . . oh the perks of infinite Wi-Fi roaming access). After floundering for an hour and overthinking, buying several large coffees from the service station and smoking half a pack of cigarettes, I got to work.

Dear (insert here),

I hope this email finds you well.

I am writing to you about one of our beloved lost friends Benjamin Flew.

I was a good friend of Benjamin’s and it had occurred to me that I had never been introduced to any of his friends.

Would you be interested in meeting up and having a chat? It has been almost two and a half years since his death and I really wish to know a bit more about the man he was, and indeed the friends he had.

I will be free for the next couple of weeks and am happy to travel a fair way.

Anyway, you have my email, hope you get in touch.

Blessings,

Sam

These were the thoughts going through my mind as I stared upon my fifteen lines of text hovering above a backlit computer screen; can I send this one message to all the recipients or would I have to tailor each email for each individual? But I don’t know what is individual about any of them yet! But surely, I can’t attach all the recipients in one message because they will see that I have just bunched them all together? But this is what Benji had done, right? Why had I not sent the email earlier? What if no one replies for a few days . . . weeks?! What am I meant to do in the meantime? Sit in my car drinking large coffees, smoking cigarettes, fully aware that my girlfriend is nine miles away deciding which shower gel to use?!

I thought about everything over the next few minutes. Probably not everything, but lots of things, many things I had not thought about before. I sat in my car and thought about whether the car fumes of a neighbouring motorway would affect the fields of crops next to it (?). I knew a man who got asthmatic every time he visited his girlfriend’s auntie’s house because of the traffic fumes nearby, and I wondered if cabbages got asthmatic ( ? ).

I thought about the teenager who served me my coffee and wondered about how many things might have changed since I was a teenager; is teenage depression still a thing? Do teenagers still hate their parents and then realise later on in life that you can actually happily talk to them about what types of things you can put in a curry or how to best boil an egg? When you get really old and live in a bungalow or an old persons’ home do you do very little and embrace the little things in life because all of your brain cells have gone or because you are slowly training yourself to accept the fact that the world will soon cease to assist you? Or perhaps you have filled such a large quota of experience that you slowly learn to adapt to the circadian rhythm of an indifferent universe? Or maybe you really do just wake up one day and want to take a trip to the shops and buy a low maintenance miniature garden for your windowsill?

I sent each email to the desired recipient individually, with exactly the same content. I had to make some guesswork as to their full names; some were easy: brian_rose35@yahoo.com, TerryOrgan77@hotmail.com, Jmacauley@parkcourts.ac.uk. Some were verging on downright weird; celineatnight@gmail.com, youandwhosearmy@btconnect.com, themosthandsomemanalive@aol.com, serialkilla56@gmail.com. In the event of such addresses I either decided on their gender and wrote Sir or Madam, or, gave up and put both.

Nothing more to do now but wait. I flirted with the idea of staying in the hotel next to the service station, maybe grabbing some food at this restaurant I could see near the truck stop. I would order a steak, a few sangrias, move to the bar, talk to a barman that graduated at Oxford, he would tell me why he packed it all in, the academic opportunities, the money, the success, just so he could quietly clean glasses, make cocktails and talk to ‘normal’ people. Doesn’t that all sound fun?! I glanced at the storage compartment on the inside of my car door and scanned the spines of the C.D.’s I had brought with me: Brouwer: Guitar Music Vol. 1, Boccherini: String Quintets, George Bizet’s Carmen, Essential Purcell and Bartok’s Six Quartets.

As my eyes skimmed the environment around me I felt them glazing over a little. Evening was coming, and its blacks, yellows, blues and purples were filling up the world, starting with my car. In a world full of so much obscurity and chaos sleeping seems like an almost too simple phenomenon. I quickly realise that everyone has once been sleepy like a child; Caesar, Pontius Pilate, Napoleon, Hitler . . . all yawning and ready for bed. My eyes returned to the electronically lit screen on my mobile phone and to my surprise I had received an email. “Already?!” I thought to myself. This filled me with genuine excitement; what will this lead to? What will happen next? It was as if I were making my own story with the help of a few email addresses. I was to become quickly disappointed however. The message read:

Many thanks for your email. I am on annual leave on Monday 10th April and on a research trip on Tuesday 11th April. I will respond to your email on or soon after Wednesday 12th April. If it is an urgent Postgraduate Research matter please contact Lynn Johnson at ljohnson@parkcourts.ac.uk.

Regards,

Prof James Macauley

I strongly believed at that moment that whoever invented the auto-reply message was a twit. Who is too important and busy to check their emails once a day? It is always some poncey professor, writer or academic that uses these types of automated messages to make them appear too engrossed in the celestial world for mere correspondences through a computer.

I was about to give up and go for that sangria but then it struck me. Surely, I have everything I need to find Professor James Macauley; he is away for a few days, but he will soon be back at the university ( . . . Park Courts College? University?). It is not urgent enough nor formal enough to contact this Lynn Johnson lady so maybe I could just pop in. I typed Park Courts Postgraduate Research into my phone and found a university near Boston. I checked the staff directory and found a Professor James Macauley.

His resume came up and that was the first time I saw his face. Mr. Macauley seemed like a pleasant man from his first digital appearance. He appeared to be smiling in his photograph which is always a good sign (shows that one does not take oneself too seriously). He was wearing a suit that didn’t seem to fit him right (he looked more student than teacher). His face was somewhere between oval and square, he was clean shaven, eyes black, small and deep-set with thick, black but well-shaped brows. He looked totally unpretentious, verging on naive.

His subject specialism was on Carl Jung and the theory of synchronicity. He had graduated at Warwick University (First Class Honours) and was writing a book called Meaningful Coincidences: On Walking and Acausality. I decided to set course for Park Courts University immediately. Images of meeting James flowed through my mind; shaking hands, speaking of Benjamin, burrowing deeper into the lives and times of his friendship group and ‘how things were back then’. I bought one more coffee from the service station and an egg-salad sandwich tipping the adolescent waitress on my way out. I secured my seat belt, inserted George Bizet’s Carmen into my C.D. player and smiled to myself; tonight, I will be conquering the Great British motorway system similar to how Bellini’s Norma conquered the whole of Europe.