Still here

George didn’t mean to be, and Debs wasn’t.

The house in Queen’s Park was no longer a thing of promise, and Mikey had deserted him, or had George deserted Mikey?

George had followed Mikey up to Scotland alright, in the Spring, as promised, but George had gone too far into the wild, and the only folk he’d seen had been tourists and townies, escaping for “an experience”.

And there’d been no croft, no narrow lane carrying wide lorries. It had been beautiful, but the beauty was distracting and the people were people, but George felt confined by the story he’d begun, that he couldn’t finish.

He’d come back to London refreshed, revitalised, – frustrated.

And Debs had picked up on it, and got out the way.

George was left with nothing but the occasional visits of a ginger Tom, for company.

He was cross with himself. He’d got inqto a difficult exchange of messages with Debs after she’d left, he’d meant to be loving and supportive, but he’d come across as angry and condescending. He could see it all now, but that didn’t make it any easier.

He didn’t know which girlfriend’s sofa she was sleeping on, or which boyfriend was shafting her, or when she might come back. He honestly didn’t mind, but not hearing from her hurt.

He was tempted to kidnap the cat, let him in, but not out, he knew a friend who’d done that, on the pretext of rescuing it, but “don’t open the door, the cat will get out”. He’d been in a bad way, and George felt as bad or worse.

Always too intense. He wasn’t a proper writer anyway, it would never be a living, just a cheap way of abusing himself. Freudian slip – amusing himself. There was abuse too. Too much masturbation, to the point he thought he could never be clean, so he didn’t go out, – and since he didn’t go out, he didn’t bother much with clean clothes. All he could do was look out of the window, and wait for his mood to get better, or worse. No matter how bad you thought things were, no matter what depths you thought you’d plummeted, it could always get worse, you could probably go deeper.

Oh yes, deep…. George always liked to go deep, but he inhabited a shallow world. A world of smartphones and gimmicks. Of people cueing for stuff that was nothing special, but just to make them feel special, for cueing. And the cue had become social, but the only folk that could socialise this way were those with time and money to burn. George had both, but he scorned the overpriced bakery and the takeaway coffee stall in the park where these folk would form up and remind themselves how local, how different they were, and how Queen’s Park was just not like anywhere else.

George wanted so much just to hear from Debs. Ostensibly she’d been working away, but he knew the locum thing would only be for a week or two, at most, and that she was back, but avoiding him. Funny how things could change so quickly, with just a few ill judged words, just a few inattentions.

He would be awake too late listening to modern Russian classical music, and then he’d take himself for walks under cover of darkness.

Tonight not even a walk, just Shostakovich on a long loop. And staring at the ceiling. And checking, and rechecking, for messages, all in various smartphone apps. It was as though his world could be scrunched up small, and squeezed inside that thing.

George needed some magic, and he needed it soon.