Hope
“Why do they call you ‘Chubby’?”.
He glanced down to where his limp and underemployed penis lay hidden by the light duvet, then looked back to her, eyebrow raised.
“No, really. Tell me.”
His attempt at a visual joke failing, hers became an inauspicious question. He would have hoped for something more, something to indicate he hadn’t just experienced yet another inconsequential one-night-stand. Indeed, if that was the case then the excitement was already all over, all promise dissipated.
“And what is it with men and nicknames anyway? Your two friends last night - ‘DJ’ and ‘Spandau’ - what’s that all about?”
Although she had looked outstandingly pretty the previous evening, the cold light of a new day saw plainness getting the upper hand. The usual combination of enhancements had been responsible for her elevation in his eyes: the drink, the party atmosphere, the music, the dancing. A typical birthday night-out for Spandau. Almost certainly it had been a cocktail which had transformed him for her too, and now, the morning after, she was laying a sight distance away from him with similar thoughts probably running through her head. He tired to ignore the space between them and focus on her questions.
“Well, it’s DJ because those are his initials: David James. His christian names. And Spandau because when he was younger he looked a bit like the guy who was their lead singer.”
“Tony Hadley.”
“You know them?”
“Who doesn’t? But he doesn’t look a bit like Tony Hadley.”
“Maybe not now. But back then he did. Before he got older. Anyway, the name stuck. It’s funny.”
He wasn’t sure if he meant the nickname was amusing or - years later - it was bizarre that they were still using it. Perhaps doing so said more about how they were in their mid-thirties, attempting to cling to past selves.
“And Chubby?”
“That?” He smiled as one tends too when reflecting on happier times. “I used to eat like a horse and never put any weight on. For a while I had this amazing metabolism. Then one day someone said they were stunned that, considering everything I ate, I wasn’t chubby. It was like a christening, and no-one let it go. Let’s face it, it’s slightly more interesting than Rob…”
He paused to allow her to comment; another opportunity to say something positive, to rescue a shred of potential from their shared night, the suggestion that it was still possible there could be another.
“I have to be more careful now, weight-wise.” When she remained silent he had to say something. “And don’t girls do nicknames in the same way?”
Again she said nothing. Half an hour later, over breakfast, the cooling embers had turned to cold cinders.
After she had gone - the harsh finality of her departure belying her soft words of farewell - Rob found himself once again contemplating an empty life. Fanciful it may have been, but he imagined himself reading a crumpled data sheet on ‘Living’, one given to him as a teenage birthday present from an anonymous donor - and only recently rescued from the waste basket. Akin to its medical equivalents, the sheet was filled with instructions as to what he should and should not do: ‘do not’ was repeated far too often, the words picked out in bold italics to make sure he didn’t miss them. Warnings of side effects were couched in language which tried to play down likelihood and severity - ‘one in ten thousand’, ‘one in five hundred’ - but to him they read like a litany of all he had been through. Side effects? He’d had them all.
The predominant topic on the sheet focussed on relationships, its words telling him what to look out for and what to avoid. He imagined himself scanning bullet points only to discover he had lived his life completely the wrong way round, doing what he shouldn’t have done and vice versa. “Avoid partners” it said, endeavouring to be modern and gender neutral, “who are dominant, passive, aggressive, passive-aggressive, untrustworthy, needy, disingenuous or disloyal”. When he thought back to Di and Maisie and Florence, he found that, one way or another, he was able to tick every box. And it felt like looking through a one-way mirror from the side of concealment: he could see out, but was unable to cross-reference those same characteristics against himself. How would he have fared had he been able to do so? Others would have had their own view - particularly Di.
“Divorce” - the sheet told him - “was the most serious potential side effect of marriage, afflicting around one in three.” Tick. So where was the advice that said in order to be assured of avoiding the pain associated with that fall-out, one should not marry in the first place? That would have been advice worth heeding. Towards the end, Di had clearly demonstrated her own regret, and had not been slow to complain about him. “I don’t know why I married you in the first place” had been her lowest blow. Given the luxury of both hindsight and the jaundiced view into which he had all too readily settled, Rob ascribed her poor judgement not to any failings on his part but to her not reading her own ‘Life instruction sheet’. “Boom!” - as Spandau liked to say.
“Be wary of making emotional commitments when either you or a potential partner are emerging from a recently failed relationship (colloquially known as being ‘on the rebound’).” Tick. Twice. First with Maisie who, in getting over a traumatic separation of her own, needed a shoulder on which she could initially cry and later implode. Post-Maisie, in the case of Florence it was Rob who had been in a tailspin - which made him easy meat for a woman whose sole aim in life seemed to be to milk her men dry emotionally and then move on. It had been a brief but predatorial affair, sufficient to give him a good kicking when he was already down. His data sheet offered no statistics in relation to these calamities however; there was no “one in x” warning to administer a sobering jolt designed to prevent nascent victims falling into the trap likely to open up before them. Rob wondered how such a warning might have been articulated, and what it might have scored: nine in ten? A racing certainty then. As if to offer an excuse himself, he reminded himself that he hadn’t come across the idea of the data sheet until it was too late. Perhaps that was the irony of it; the sheet played back the cumulative results of an experiment called ‘living’, results only relevant after the event - as if it were a belated conscience, ‘lessons learned’ in italics and boldface.