Martin Harbottle's Appreciation of Time (7 page)

Of course she refused. I’d have refused too, and walked before he could sack me. But it was a bit harsh to sack all the other grad trainees just because of her unwillingness to whip her top off in front of millions and play ball.

He’s been known to throw books, telephones, fax machines, computer monitors, once even a chair, at reporters failing to file good copy. He infamously made one of the sub-editors stand all day on a table in the canteen with a dunce’s cap on, because he had used a split infinitive in a headline.

He is not, in short, a reasonable man.

And now his job’s threatened. Now the police and the Crown Prosecution Service and even hacks from other newspapers are questioning his means, motives and methods – well, now he’s gone full-blown psycho.

Turning up an hour and a half late with nothing but some phoned-in excuses about cancelled trains? It cost me a thwack around the head with a 1988 edition of
Who’s Who
(a particularly fat year, that year, too. Just thank God it wasn’t a hardback copy) and a promise that I would work at least an hour and a half late every night for the rest of the week.

I got off lightly. But my card’s marked. There’s a blot on the old escutcheon, as Harry the Dog might say.

And, of course, that’s not all of it. I’ve got another problem.

My other problem is, how does this morning’s marathon delay square with this pet project of mine? If the length of this email is to reflect the length of my delay, if I’m to waste a proportionate amount of your time (as you have wasted mine), then what do I do about today’s sorry situation?

It’s a test case, is what it is. It’s – as our bewigged adversaries in the legal profession prefer to put it – a precedent. If, for example, I decide that a cancelled train is the equivalent of, say, 30 minutes’ delay, then that’s how it’ll have to be from now on. The precedent will be set.

But does that mean that three cancelled trains require me to bang on for an hour and a half of your time?

I’m not going to bang on for an hour and a half today. To be frank: I don’t think I could manage it. I haven’t got it in me to keep you stimulated for that long. So I’m going to devise a formula. A secret formula! An equation involving the relative differences between scheduled journey times for the train I should have got and the coach I did get, factoring in an integer representing the cancellation of trains (multiplied by three) and with a little bit added on for the walk from the train station to the bus station. And a little bit taken off for the slightly shorter tube journey at the other end. And then a wordsearch right at the bottom to cover all the extra time I forgot to include in my original calculations.

What did happen this morning? The buzz in the station was that a train broke down. Could that be true? Again? How often does that happen? That trains break down, I mean? What’s the lifespan of your average passenger train these days? How often do you replace them? And is that too many questions for one paragraph?

I await the answers with breath firmly baited. Or bated. And in the meantime, I’ll leave you with a cheering thought. One ray of sunshine in an otherwise grey and overcast day.

I sat next to a lovely old American gentleman on my coach journey to London this morning. He was over for his holidays. He ‘did’ the Lake District at the weekend, he ‘did’ Oxford yesterday and he was ‘doing’ London today and tomorrow. On Saturday he was off to France to ‘do’ Paris, before tripping over to Deutschland to ‘do’ Germany – all of it, mind – on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. He was one of life’s doers. I really liked him. I liked his energy. He was about 85 and he was ‘doing’ Europe in about ten days. Europe was totally his lobster!

When I grow old I’d like to be like that. The doing bit/Europe being my lobster thing, I mean, obviously. Not the holidaying alone on a coach bit. When I grow old I’d like to be one of life’s doers. How about you? Would you like to be a doer someday too?

And in the meantime, and in the absence of any doing to do – I made a wordsearch for you. It’s not in the same league as my old dad’s were, but it’s something. See how many you can find!

Au revoir
!

Dan

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
07.31 / 07.52 / 08.06 Premier Westward Railways train from Oxford to London Paddington, July 12.

Dear Dan

I am sorry once again that you have had to write to me. The 21.48 on July 7 was late leaving Paddington due to a problem with the relief driver.

Yesterday we unfortunately experienced widespread disruption to our services in the morning due to vandalism on the line in the Banbury area. The theft of copper wiring is a serious and ongoing problem and one that we are working hard with Network Rail and the British Transport Police to prevent in future.

I am sorry that you felt you had to catch the coach to London, and also sorry that the delay caused problems when you arrived at work. ‘Goebbels’ sounds a fearsome chap!

Best

Martin

From:
[email protected]

To:
[email protected]

Re:
21.20 Premier Westward Railways train from London Paddington to Oxford, July 15. Amount of my day wasted: 16 minutes. Fellow sufferers: Overkeen Estate Agent.

Top o’ the pops to you, Martin. Phew! What a scorcher! Summer has arrived. Here comes the sun, little darlin’… and I say: it’s all right.

Summertime – and the view from the window of one of your delayed trains as the sun sets over England…

London is a beautiful thing, isn’t it? Not Tower Bridge or Buckingham Palace or St Paul’s Cathedral or any of the other tourist traps, but the real London. The dirty jumble of it. The glorious mess. The triumph of human endeavour and failure and achievement that’s written in every building – from the vaulted roof of Paddington Station to the sloppy tower blocks west towards Ealing Broadway. In the purple haze of a summer sunset, it all looks beautiful.

And the train line, Martin – it cuts right through it all. To gaze out of a smeary Premier Westward train window as you arrow west out of the capital is to see a sight you won’t find advertised in any visitor brochures (well, maybe in one of yours, but you get the point) but it should be. It should be.

Those great slabs of building either side of the sidings around the Paddington basin – every window holding its own human story, hidden behind nicotine curtains and pot plants; the brown brutal thrust of the Trellick Tower, burnished by the last of the sun, somehow looking something like its architects must have first imagined it would – like a symbol of hope, of aspiration. The goods yards and building sites and vast car parks of Acton and Southall – in the right light they speak of industry, of work, of progress… of getting things done. And there’s nothing so gloriously human as the wonder of getting things done, is there? That’s what we’re here for: to do things. To get things done.

And then the slow slipping away of the city, the sporadic trees and parks of Hayes, and Drayton and Slough, until beyond – the gentle glory of the English countryside. In the dusk, in the last of the light, over and across and along the looping line of the River Thames towards Oxford. It’s beautiful, Martin.

And after the sun had set and the skies had darkened? Well, then there’s nothing to look at but your own reflection. Or those of your fellow passengers. Actual humanity. And, of course, actual humanity does tend to break the spell, somewhat.

So it’s a sigh, an unscrewing of the cheap wine, an unconscious sniff of the collective sweat and the fractious soundtrack of Overkeen Estate Agent jibber-jabbering endlessly into his white iPhone about ‘event horizons’ and ‘outsourcing the subs bench’ and ‘making the portfolio wash its own face’ and all the various ‘legendary’ deals he and his ‘bros’ are setting up.

I’m on this train too much, Martin.

And if you think I’m annoyed about it, you should hear what Beth has to say. She doesn’t know I’m writing to you, of course (she’d only laugh at me. She’d only call it a midlife crisis, these rants of mine. She’d think that – and she’s supposed to be the depressed one. What does that say?) but she’s not at all happy with the hours I’m away every day.

They’re not helping the situation at home, let’s put it that way. Me never being around, I mean. They’re not helping convince my postnatally depressed wife that there is more to her life than attending to the every whim of the baby. They’re not helping her believe that there was any point in marrying me at all actually, when we barely see each other, and less still when we’re both awake.

They’re not helping her believe that her life is in any way better now than it was before she married me.

All she does, she says, is feed, burp and change. Feed, burp and change. Her life is broken up into three-hour segments, 180-minute chunks, eight of them a day, during which she feeds, burps and changes the baby. Milk, wind and poo. That’s all she’s about now.

Do you know how long it takes to feed, wind and change a three-month-old baby? Beth reckons it takes about an hour and a half. Which gives her another hour and a half after she’s finished before she has to do it all over again. Eight times in every 24-hour day, seven days a week.

She’s sleeping in one-hour bursts, every now and then through the day and night. She’s eating where and when she can: frantic, gobbled-down, quick microwavable bits of whatever she can get, any ideas of enjoyment or pleasure in food abandoned in favour of simply getting something down her in those brief, blessed moments when Sylvie’s not screaming for attention.

Refuelling, that’s what she calls it. Not eating. Refuelling. And she’s low on fuel. She says she feels like she’s constantly running on fumes. Like she can only put enough gas in the tank to get her through the next few miles.

And all the time, the constant, deafening, relentless, ear-piercing, heart-piercing, soul-piercing crying. The perpetual wail of the three-month-old; and the perpetual sobs of her mother. Neither seem to stop for very long. They’re driving me crazy and I’m hardly ever even there.

So where am I? Where am I when all this is going on? I’m at work, mostly, or travelling to and from work, or sitting on one of your delayed trains fretting about it all. I’m barely at home for eight hours in every 24. Monday to Friday I’m around for two, maybe three, of those feed–wind–change routines. And always in the middle of the night, when normal people are sleeping.

Through the week I do try to help: doing the midnight shuffle with the screaming bundle, shushing and cooing and pacing the same six paces across the bedroom floor, up and down, down and up, shush, shush there, shhhhh… I put in what hours I can. But I can’t breastfeed. Beth’s still got to get up to do that. And I do need to get up and function at work the next day. We’ve got a mortgage to pay. I can’t work all day and stay up with Sylvie all night.

Weekends are easier. For Beth, I mean. Weekends she’ll at least sleep more, waking only to hoik her nightie down or pull her pyjama top up, latching Sylvie on half-comatose, mechanically, somnambulantly, refuelling her, filling her up, giving her the necessary, before her little flushed face finally turns away, lips still pursed like the tiniest rosebud, white drops like dew on them, and Beth will hand her back to me without a word and collapse back into bed and sleep again.

And despite it all – I can’t help myself – I’ll find myself thinking: is that the loveliest sight in the world? Is that the most beautiful thing I’ll ever see in my life? And then the rosebud lips will tighten and widen, and the eyes will screw up into angry knots, and Sylvie will start with the screaming again.

Christ, it’s hard, isn’t it? How do people do it? Beth and I – we spend most of our time thinking: this can’t be how it should be done. This doesn’t make sense at all. There must be an easier way, there must be something we’re missing here… After millions of years of evolution, we still have to go through this? Science and nature and the human race hasn’t come up with anything better than this?

Not that we actually discuss it or anything. Not that we ever actually talk or anything. When I’m around, then I’m on the Sylvie shift, and Beth grabs the chance to do her own thing (sleep). She’s not going to waste valuable sleeping time actually talking to her husband or anything. And even if she were to, I’d only be telling her about work, about my increasingly unhinged boss, about the culture of paranoia and fear that’s beginning to creep into the place. About how we’re all getting a bit worried this whole scandal might not blow over after all.

She’s depressed enough already. No point in having her worry about me on top of it all, right?

Although there is one silver lining: at least she’s no longer at home all day. The baby groups seem to be working. A bit. She’s gone along three times now. She’s making (tentative) friends at least. She’s no longer spending all day every day feeling her mind turn to mush in front of
Antiques Hunt
and
Murder She Wrote
. If it’s a comfort to the miserable to have companions in their misery, then perhaps she’s getting something out of it, at least.