The Boys from Oz

“Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.” Ecclesiastes 1

“Guys are great. I am a huge fan of guys. You don't get knocked up at sixteen being indifferent to guys.” Lorelai Gilmore, ‘The Gilmore Girls’

When it was 2013, and I was spending my first year in the UK, I flatted with a Mick Jagger clone - sly of wit, quick of tongue, possessed of a devastating Essex accent and a coke habit that bordered on professional. He had a mop of gravy-coloured hair and a devil-may-care attitude that hit all the ladies straight between the kneecaps.
I can see him now sauntering out of his bedroom at the lordly hour of 3pm, probably having not got out of bed for less than $10K. He would emerge in nothing but a bathrobe and a wayward smile, with a cig propped rakishly out one corner of his curled lip.

‘Mornin’, darlin,’ he’d intone, before disappearing back into the recesses of his bedroom, to return to whichever occupant was the catch of the day.

That’s if he emerged at all. Or at times, the lady would emerge first. The ones he might want to see again tomorrow night were never sent on their way without a full English breakfast, and he’d step back into the room, arms laden with a pot of tea, fried egg, and side of sausage.The ones he really couldn’t wait to say vamoose to might get a quick cheek-peck and a fiver for the bus ride home.

Soon the entire female populace of the household had come down with ‘Patrick fever’. I arrived home one afternoon to battle ensuing – clearly one of his latter-day conquests, a “turn-and-spurn' –  and a wooden chair in pieces in the corner of the room where she’d presumably just missed his head.

Christmas season came, and everyone went home to their respective families, except for him and I. I noticed Patrick had nowhere to go.We ended up heading down to the local the week before Christmas, and I polished off a steak pie while Patrick probably had a pint or two. It was an unseasonably warm winter. As we walked back, I can recall him taking my hand to guide me across the street. He really had graduated top rank and file from some Essex charm school.

We arrived back at the flat and started watching Raymond Briggs' ‘The Snowman’. In this British seasonal favourite, a boy’s cherished snowman becomes real. As we sat and talked about ourselves, he shared with me that he’d lost his mother to cancer, and had been raised by a single-parent father. Piece by piece, he wove a story about how this early life event had shaped his upbringing and his worldview.

Several years later, that man with the crooked grin lost his brother to suicide.

In 2020, I find myself in the presence of another complicated, working class man who I happen to cohabit with. My flatmate here is so similar to Patrick, but different at the same time. Both have barely emerged from the rubble of a broken family life – yet, while Patrick had made a career of rebuilding himself in the image of someone who pretended none of it mattered, my current flatmate had become prison warden of an institution which kept everyone else out – and him locked in.

My flatmate told me once that he’d punched his dad on a ferry. They say if you punch a wall, you’re capable of punching a woman. He got mad, he said. Not annoyed, but white-hot rage. I said I’d never seen him like that. And he told me I never would.  That’s why he would always be a bachelor, he said.

I wondered if it was like the rage that had sent the teeth of the woman I met on Finchley Road flying. I was heading home when she called out to me. She was shaking violently. Her partner had also fractured her face. She was a school teacher, she said. She had four kids, and an hour to get them out of the house and to a shelter before he came home.

Last night, I went to see my flatmate's play. His voice as a writer came through so evocatively, only he could have written the words. His love of Latin and art history, of classics, Pilgrim's Progress and Dante's Inferno, I could hear it all. The audience was entranced. Nothing could break their concentration. And yet, like every victory, he told me, it had felt pyrrhic. He knew to the millisecond when the laughs were coming. He couldn’t enjoy it. 
I told him he sounded like King Solomon. He agreed.

He very nearly missed graduating, but the school was understanding. So many wonderful things had happened. He had become an intern at the BBC – only a 2% acceptance rate - and moved to London. It was to be the start of everything.  

This was the debilitating manic depression that came out of nowhere and impenitently stole everything. He could only pick up short prose to begin to read again. There were the days of self-imposed exile, prone in bed. Imagine invisible shackles, until your mattress is like Alcatraz, and you are a solitary island, surrounded by water, where escape from yourself is impossible.

Then he would self-isolate, disappearing back into his room. Not to a woman, like Patrick. Simply, returning to the solitary confinement of the prison of the mind.
As a woman of the heart-on-sleeve variety, it's hard not to take these things personally, but then you realise it’s selfish to think it’s about you. It’s the farthest thing from about you there could be.

* (a pyrrhic victory inflicts a devastating blow on the victor to the point that it feels like defeat.)