A filter exists, between my mind and my typing, protecting the tender inner parts of my psyche from the harsh eye of those who know me. Today it’s on holiday.
This story begins the sleepless night I received my exam results after my second year at University. I’d failed and in doing so, had almost totally wrecked my chances of ever having a career as a lawyer. I remember feeling resentful at the atmosphere of observation at home, the inability to leave your front door without being harassed, questioned. I called the school’s ‘Pastoral Care and Welfare (et cetera)’ tutor, Paul Hubert, tears streaming down my eyes and barely holding the feral noises in my mouth. I asked for advice. ‘Call back during my office hours’, he said and he hung up.
I replaced the receiver, I didn’t call back. I obviously wasn’t worth his time.
When my third year results were released, I remember pacing around and wishing that Hubert was there. He was the pin that tied together my pain and when, despite all of my hard work, my effort, it hadn’t paid off. I was mere inches away, I wanted to burn and I wanted him to burn with me. I was psychotic, and I remember standing on the grass outside his office, wondering if the impulse would take me and chastising myself as a wimp for not doing so.
Inside my head, there is often a fight between the angry and immature me and the weedy, terrified one. I wonder if angry was let out, he would make a monster or if it would be years of repressed energy, deforming me into some cocksure winner of the world. I don’t know what he is or what he represents, but he’s staying locked down in the bottom there.
o0o
At the end of my final LPC exam, I walked aimlessly around London. I found myself wandering around like a loon, the question of what to do now repeating in my head. I didn’t have anything. The wind out of my sails, no feeling of motion, just a hollowness where I should have felt.
I have never been one to dramatise anything, when I was at High School there was enough drama to power the BBC for years.
I wandered up and down Victoria bridge. There are little balconies with benches recessed which allow passers by of a bygone era to sit and reflect upon the day. I climbed over and dangled over the edge. I had been (and still am, to be honest) rejected or ignored by every firm I had sent an application to, and for the first time I was aware of the impending impotence. I would have spent five years, thirty thousand pounds and wasted my adult life not finding a job. I was a dead end, a footnote that life’s winners can compare themselves to, someone who fell by the wayside. In my head I was contemplating the best method of suicide and the correct method to achieve it. I worked it through in the methodical, committed fashion in my own mind that I do everything. This is no idle threat to my psyche. I don’t say this to glamourise it, attention seek or crave statements from my friends. I was low, and I want you to know how low I was. I was alone and in pain. The pain wouldn’t go away.
Of everyone I have been fortunate to know, students I have studied with, valued friends, most of them are off onto careers, further study, travel… something. What did I have? A worthless degree from a University I loathed and had treated me with a contemptuous indifference, no career prospects and the thought that I would live out my days working in a factory in Lowestoft for the rest of my miserable life. The propeller blades on the Thames clipper couldn’t have looked more inviting.
o0o
This afternoon I raced home from work, sweat beading from every part of me, my hair matted and unkempt. I poured myself a glass of whiskey and sat in silence with the envelope of results in my hands, on my lap. I was still. As long as the envelope remained closed, there was hope, however slight, that I could move on. When it was open, it felt feted that it would be the end of me and that the pain would be silent no more. All I had ever wanted was to fit, to do well by others and to stand on my own two. Nothing in my life was even close to that ideal. I offered no prayer, I merely wanted to never leave the stasis.
My right hand pawed at the seal, the left held it steady. I closed my eyes and the right hand tore forward, drawing the seal back and shocking the paper into it’s hand. It didn’t belong to me anymore.
I opened my eyes, and in the centre of the page, separated on all sides by a generous, wide, clear margin, was the word
COMMENDATION
and my body went cold, then warm, sparks and shocks. I giggled. I cried. I giggled some more and cried a little. I downed the fluid in one go and felt nothing but the hysteria of triumph. The first time in years, I had made it. I’d not passed, I’d not scraped it, I’d done it properly .
Overleaf, the sheaf of paper offered more marks, a breakdown of the results, information on graduating and a mention of…
the LPC can be converted (upgraded, what have you) into an LLM with the submission of a 20,000 word dissertation. It’ll cost, but it’ll be cheaper than re-doing a whole year in education, and an LLM is now respected and often is seen by employers as positive. It could potentially wash away my shitty degree, and with it I could again begin to hope that my life could still have some meaning. I don’t doubt that something shall come and ruin me, something shall snipe, pick, I shall feel yet another thousand betrayals as I am rejected for more jobs, but for today, and today only, I shall allow myself to bathe in triumph.
As a child, when I wrote a story in which the main character emerges, battered and bruised from his torment and stands free, hopeful of a better life, I always ended with a line stolen from Douglas Naylor. For today, at least, I can begin to hope.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the grass began to sway.
