I’m in the pub with the drinkers and the train drivers and the commuters waiting for the Virgin speed train to London Euston from Lime Street and all they’ve got on tap that doesn’t make me baulk is Peroni so I order a half and count out the change from what I can find in my pocket and in the zip of my wallet even though I’ve got only fifteen minutes to wait before I can buy an off peak ticket and order it before I realise I need the loo. The table I sit down at has an old Victorian radiator blooming with heat and I’m in my gloves and scarf and coat and at the table next to me three women use words like “shock” and “disorganised” in conversation about a boss of theirs but I can’t tell what it is they do. “What do you do?” not “How do you do?” not how are you as a fellow human person but what is it that you engage in to occupy your time, for time must be occupied if you’re to be worth the status and relative comfort that we as an unconsciously self-declared community can afford you. Is it worth my time? Are you? Are you worth any time at all? The man I love has left me for his home. He won’t be talked to or touched. I may sit here an extra hour thinking about him and how I could be to be the optimal human for enabling him to live his life as fully human and so abdicate responsibility or even desire for living my own life or being fully human myself. The lager is working on my digestive system and I still need to deficate, I can feel it in my lower bowel, and I think about my grandmother who was so kind and well read and gave up almost her whole life to an emotionally abusive man in order to raise five kind and well read children, one of whom was schizophrenic and committed suicide, before she died of bowel cancer. I drink more of the lager and press myself into the chair.
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