Strangers

I don’t usually hang (out) upside down. It’s just how things turned out that day. But, as usual, I’m hopping along too fast. Let me tell you how it started and then we’ll get to the interesting part of how it ended up.

I was drinking tea. Herbal tea: some kind of ginger and tulsi thing that someone brought back from India one year that’d been sitting at the back of the cupboard waiting for now to happen. I’d put one of those vitamin C tablets in it. You know; the ones that fizz when you put the water in. I’d woken up with a bit of a sniffle so, you know: just in case. I’d tell you how I pulled the hairs from my nostrils too, supposing it was the way they ticked my nostrils that made the sn … but that’d be too much digressing for one day, so I’ll not bother you with that.

After I finished the tea I picked the tea bag apart. The little paper tag goes in the recycled paper bin, the string goes in the normal bin, the tea leaves from inside the paper bag (cunningly folded I have to say) go into the compost bin and the paper that the tea leaves were in goes in the paper recycling if the tea comes out cleanly enough, or in the normal bin if it’s too messed up. I trust the planet appreciates the little soap opera that I go through for its sake.

All the while I looked out the window at the green, brown and blue of the back garden. Amazingly for October, the sky was clear of clouds and the sun had come out to play. Not that it makes the frozen wastes of Northern England any warmer, but I thought that it should at least dry the washing a bit. Yes, that’s right: hanging out the washing came next.

Then she called. Halfway through pegging a pair of jeans on the line, the phone played a snatch of drum and bass and I knew it was her. Caller-display, they used to call it. Now it’s on every mobile phone and it’s so it’s not got a name. It just happens: the phone rings and the name and a picture comes up. Magic that’s not magic anymore.

‘Hi, Grace.’

‘Hi, Robert; what you doing?’

‘Well, I was hanging the washing out but I’m talking to you now. Hang on, let me just put you on speaker so that I can multitask.’

‘That’s not going to work,’ she said, and she was right.

There was nowhere to put the phone near enough for it to pick up my voice. I did consider hanging it on the line in a sock but decided against it. The battery has this funny way of kaputzing when the phone gets even slightly damp. So I did what blokes always do: I stood looking at the washing in the basket and sent these invisible waves of ‘get off the phone’ energy towards her as I talked. I mean, what’s the harm? She’ll never know what I’m thinking and, if it works, I can get off the phone quickly so that we can both get on with doing something else until the next time she calls.

We chatted. She was full of news and bubbly energy and I was monosyllabic. After a bit, she kind of got the drift. She slowed down. Her voice became quieter. She tried to push through it, but I wasn’t helping and then gaps started to show up and widen.

‘What’s up,’ she said.

I could hear quiet exasperation in her voice, but I said ‘nothing,’ which is pretty much like saying nothing.

‘Umm,’ she said.

‘So …’ I stopped.

She sighed. I knew that she’d got the message.

She didn’t hang up. She just muttered something I didn’t quite catch that had the word stranger in it.

‘What?’

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘It’s fine,’ she said. And then, with the softest, kindest tone, she said ‘goodbye’.

I went to put the phone down on the garden bench where the basket of clothes was sitting, having completely forgotten the plant pot I’d moved so that I could get to the pond to do something or other the day before.

This, as you might have expected, is the part where we circle back to the start. I tripped over the plant pot and splashed, face forward, into the pond. And it was just how you imagine it to be: cold and wet and full of very uncomfortable upside-down vibes.

Honestly, life baffles me: what did I do to deserve this?!