Things Got Pretty Shaky There For a While

This is an extract from my forthcoming new book 10X Happiness, Zero Bullshit. 

More information on the book coming very soon….

 

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Things got pretty shaky there for a while. I went out to the phone box—this was before cell phones—and tried to call her. It kept ringing but no answer. Time and time again I kept calling, getting that damn ringing tone and . . . nothing.

That was the story of my life right there, encapsulated. A phone ringing forever that no-one would answer.

I staggered out into the daylight, dazed by the sun. She was fucking some other guy, no doubt. But that wasn’t the worst thing. I didn’t even care about that. Not really. I just wanted to talk to her. I just wanted that light, female voice on the other end of the phone to soothe me, to lie to me, so I could feel alright again for the next few hours.

I lived from hour to hour, you see. A few hours bought me time. It was morning. My head ached like someone had driven a hot screw into the brain mush inside. I lived from hour to hour.

Just a word from her,  even a lie, and it would be OK again, for a while. I could go to the pub by the railway arches and hide from the sun and drink until the feelings went away.

Just for a few hours.

But she wouldn’t answer that fucking phone. She was out somewhere, fucking. This time the thought was a bolt of electricity that shot through me to my kidneys. Would the darkness of the bar, the cold alcohol, work this time? Maybe I needed something stronger. Something permanent.

I walked around, dazed. I needed to get my head right and this was another feeling that I knew I should repress, but it was so dark it thrilled me. What if I didn’t get my head right. What if, instead, I just found a way to turn it off. For good.

The feelings churned around. It felt as though I were coming towards a decision. They thrilled me and they made me sick with fear. I wandered around outside the phone box. A few steps this way and that. And then I began walking towards Oxford Road.

There was an office there, a place I’d seen before. I had ‘Samaritans’ written on a sign over the entrance. As I pushed at the door I felt stupid, like I was in a corny TV show. What were these people going to do anyway?

I entered and walked up to the counter. On the other side this woman got up and came over. She was in her thirties. She looked kind. I thought maybe she was a young mum. She was nervous, like she hadn’t been doing this long. And there was I all sweaty and red-faced and having greasy hair and black-ringed eyes through lack of sleep. I felt like I needed to protect her from me. Maybe she’d never met anyone like me before. Anyone who’d gone down so deep and so low.

‘I wondered if there’s someone I could talk to?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said. Now she looked even more nervous. ‘You can talk to me. But you have to stand there,’ she continued, pointing out my position behind the counter. ‘There’ve been threats of violence against staff recently.’

‘I’m not going to threaten anyone,’ I said. It suddenly seemed incredibly sad that I couldn’t even come behind the counter and sit down with her face-to-face like a fucking human being.

‘It’s the rules,’ she said. ‘I can talk to you from here. So what’s bothering you?’

The question seemed absurd. It confused me. How could I begin? Did she want me to tell her everything, every twist and turn of the last twenty-six years that had led me here, talking to a stranger, behind a counter in a scruffy little office in Manchester?

‘My girlfriend is cheating on me,’ I said.

‘Why do you think that,’ she asked.

‘Because I haven’t spoken to her for twenty-four hours and she’s not returning my calls.’

‘Maybe she’s just asleep,’ said the woman.

‘No, she’s not asleep.’

I know she’s not asleep because we have this rhythm of communicating. We speak everyday. And now we haven’t. For twenty four hours. And the thing is when you speak to someone everyday then you have a closeness with them, a bond, and when they pull away you can feel it.

‘How do you feel?’

‘I want to kill myself,’ I said. It sounded stupid, saying it out loud like that. It sounded like I was confirming a train booking or something. ‘Yes, I’d like to take the 18.30 from London to Guildford.’

But I meant it. Or at least I had meant it when I’d been out in the street walking round in circles by the phone booth. Wanting to kill yourself is a strange state to be in. It’s beyond thinking in an abstract way that suicide could be a good idea in theory, an option. It is when that idea crystallises, hardens, and at the same time becomes white hot so that it burns the inside of your brain and under your skin. It’s when taking your life becomes a necessity, as urgent as breathing.

But to say it out loud to someone, in my polite, English way, seemed silly. I was embarrassed.

We talked some more. She asked what I enjoyed doing. Actually I didn’t enjoy doing anything other than drinking and taking drugs. So to have something to tell her I said I liked playing the piano, which I had used to do, badly, several years earlier. This allowed us to create a story together where I was a keen musician.

‘Concentrate on your music for a while,’ she said. ‘Don’t worry about this girl. Whatever will be will be.’

It was ridiculous. Laughable. The conversation had been a fantasy. Nothing had changed. I felt no different to before. And yet, I didn’t kill myself. I went home, and I laid down, and I didn’t kill myself.

That much, at least, had been accomplished.

Talking helps. Human contact helps. Even when you think it’s stupid and you haven’t got anything to say and you don’t know the other person and it won’t change anything and you have to stand separated by a fucking counter, talking helps. Remember that—someday it might just save your life.

My latest release Fifty Shades of Game Vol 1 reached number 11 in Germany, 12 in the UK and 28 in the US Amazon ‘Sex’ charts and is getting five star reviews:

Troy Francis once again takes the role of an experienced teacher, this time into the edgy realm of kinkiness and how to reap all its benefits – Alexandre (Five stars *****)

To pick up your copy of Fifty Shades of Game Vol 1 click here