Three encounters of the absurd kind

My first week at university; I was away from friends in a strange city and I didn’t know anyone. I tried speaking to people, trying to make acquaintances, introducing myself, hoping that one of the people I spoke to was doing the same thing. I didn’t get anywhere. Everyone already seemed to be part of a group or too busy trying to work out where they were and what building their next lectures were in. There were no people like me, wandering around looking lost, looking for someone to hang out with and deal with those early university days with a like-minded lost soul. Whenever I spoke to someone, they’d look at me without smiling. They all seemed to have a darkness behind their eyes like I’d interrupted them when they were about to discover a cure for hangovers. It felt like nobody in that first few weeks smiled at me or even spoke to me of their own volition except to tell me to move out of their way or tell me I’m in the wrong queue for something. Those who did speak back to me with a modicum of courtesy would only manage a few strained words before leaving as quickly as it was possible to do so without looking impolite. It felt like a conspiracy. Don’t talk to the weird lad with no friends. I wondered if it was my craic; you know, my banter, my opening lines, my choice of conversational topics – but I’d had friends back in school – good, close ones. Friends who found me funny, engaging and interesting.

Not at university.

I got more and more paranoid about it in my first two weeks – it just seemed impossible to connect with anyone beyond asking where a certain building was or if they knew whether there was a canteen in the Student Services area. Why didn’t anyone want to be my friend? Was it my hair? My shoes maybe? I wasn’t the most stylish dresser but then, these were students who were dressed in anything they found at the bottom of the wardrobe that morning. I began to think that maybe it was the big blue coat I used to wear. It was Cinderella blue with loads of press-stud pockets on the front, like one of those you’d wear if you went skiing. It was September, so it wasn’t as if it was cold enough to wear a coat, but I always felt more comfortable wearing one. I had a big bag as well. Haversacks wouldn’t be popular until many years later so I used to carry this huge sports bag around with my books and stationery inside. One of the handles had started to rip too, so it wasn’t a good look; walking around with a massive ripped tatty looking sports bag and big blue coat. Now I think of it, I probably wouldn’t have talked to me either.

One day, I think it was in my third or fourth week, I was late for a lecture – not very late, but late enough for it to have started when I sneaked into the room. The door was at the back of the room and everyone else was down the front, copying the text from the board at the front which was being used as a screen for an overhead projector. There were at least five empty rows at the back of the room so I decided to sit right at the back. I didn’t want to attract attention and I definitely didn’t want to sit next to someone who was just going to resent me for interrupting the lecture, so I took my seat at the back, got my books out as quietly as possible, notwithstanding the rustling noise my blue coat made when I moved a millimetre in any direction, and started copying from the board. Not that I could see it that well, being as I was, quite a way from the front of the room. I started to regret my choice of seat.

That’s when the door opened again and in walked Sandra. She was about five foot seven, had long dark hair and a bright red face. I thought her beacon-like appearance might have been from running to the lecture because she was late but it couldn’t have been that. She wasn’t out of breath and didn’t look in the slightest bit bothered that she was late. She just breezed in, clocked me on my own, came straight over to where I was sitting and pulled out the chair next to me. It was weird. I looked at her; my expression, I imagine, was one of trying to work out if I knew her. The way she made her way over to me and brazenly yanked out the chair beside me bore the hallmarks of someone I’d known for years, not a stranger. Strangers don’t just invade your space like that. Truth be known, I’ve no idea what my expression was but she smiled at me and sat down. She was making loads of noise – she wasn’t bothered about attracting attention or interrupting the fifty or so other students trying to learn about whatever it was the lecture was about – I’d stopped paying attention. She was obviously not bothered about being late either, not that it was a punishable offence like it was at school. Nobody at University cared if you turned up or not, you were meant to be adult enough to make your own decisions and destroy your own future, if that’s what you felt most appropriate for you at the time. She got her books out and started copying the board. From the way she breezed in and plonked herself next to me, I expected her to strike up a conversation about something she assumed I cared about. She didn’t though and I felt disappointed about that. This is regardless of the fact we would have been thrown out for, again, interrupting the lecture.

Completely out of character for me at that time, I decided to try and communicate with her. She exuded a laissez-faire aura and it put me at immediate ease. I’d felt like that around people before, and those were the people I gravitated towards the most; the kind of people who were open to different ideas or ways of thinking. I wrote my name on a torn off square of paper and slid it over to her. A few seconds later, it was slid back towards me with her name written below mine. I then wrote ‘Hello!’ underneath that and slid it back. I felt sad when the piece of paper hadn’t been returned after twenty seconds. Had I gone too far? Had I done too much too soon? I wasn’t asking her to marry me – I was just looking for someone to talk to in this new city I’d been plopped into against my better judgement. Twenty more seconds passed until I saw the piece of paper being slid back towards me. My heart quickened. I had to unfold it – it wasn’t the same piece of paper I’d slid over. I soon realised that she’d written her next note to me on a bigger piece of paper.

‘Am I in the right room?’

‘Depends’

‘On what?’

‘On your definition of right and wrong’

I heard her snort; it was a really quiet and gentle snort but I knew she’d found my note slightly amusing. A few seconds later, the paper was returned, ‘Hudson. Is this Pharmacology 101?’

‘I have no idea. I just came in here because it was warm. You?’

Again, she snorted gently. It felt like I’d found a friend at last. I didn’t ever want to say that out loud however, even if we left this place that instant and became the best of friends that ever there were and we went and sat on a hill in the park and made daisy chains for the rest of the day whilst discussing the best flavours of hot chocolate.

‘I thought there’d be sandwiches.’

We’d both missed four or five Overhead Projector slides so whatever the lecture was about was now something neither of us would be able to answer if it came up in the end of semester exams. This already gave us something in common that we could fall back on in moments when conversation went a bit stale.

‘Hey, remember that day we met and we missed the entire lecture because we were passing notes and then we failed our degrees and both ended up working in KFC?’, I’d say.

‘Yeah’, she’d reply, ‘good times!’

We decided to concentrate on what the lecturer was saying for the rest of the session. Finally, the lecture finished and I turned to face her for the first time since she’d sat next to me, raising my eyebrows in a ‘what was all that about’ kind of way. She smiled and started stuffing her books into a cotton bag with the name of a shop I’d never heard of on the front; ‘Bay Trading Company’ if my memory serves. I remember it made me think that she liked gardening; I like gardening too, well, I grew some cress on a piece of kitchen towel once, but I think that counts. I put my books away and zipped up my big blue coat. I wondered if she saw me in all my blue-coated glory, she’d shudder and run off down the street claiming to be late for a hair massage or something. This was the ultimate test of both the coat and the bag. Had the humorous notes created a positive enough shield to contravene any negativity caused by the puffed-up blue windcheater and ripped bag combo?

She wandered away towards the door; everyone else had left the room by the time we were ready to leave, so it was just me and her ascending the short stone staircase in the yard beyond the door. We stepped out onto the cobbled back street and started to walk down the hill towards the main road. This was a big moment for me. We’d not spoken to each other using our real voices yet. She could have a really high screechy voice that makes dogs wince or she might sound like Zelda off Terrahawks. She might realise I was a Northerner and again, just wander off into the misty morning claiming she had to do something implausible and urgent. To my relief, it was her who spoke first. It was a bit weird because we didn’t know each other in any capacity, yet here we were. Walking down a hill, side by side after a chance meeting. Both late for the same lecture and connected by a few passed notes. What was she going to say? How the hell was I supposed to say something that made her think I was worth talking to again? Just listen to my coat!

‘Where are you off to now?’, she asked.

My next heart encounter happened a few weeks later. I’d gone on a night out with a group of people I sort of knew from one of my lab groups. It was somebody’s birthday; I had no idea who but I decided that the best way to make friends, proper friends, ones that wanted to speak to me of their own accord, was to tag along with a group of such, wait until we were all drunk and then work my way into conversations when everyone was less judgy and more open to the opinions of someone they didn’t know. The only person I knew in the group was Damian. He was the sort who would talk to anyone, regardless of whether he knew them or not. He didn’t seem to have an opinion on whether he liked you or not, he just spoke at you. On one occasion, I was standing in a queue to sign some kind of student form and out of nowhere, he started telling me of the time he got drunk and woke up the next day in a field fifty miles away from his house. He had no idea who I was, nor me him, but I listened and hoped we’d become better best friends than Piglet and Pooh. I tried very hard with my limited social skills to sound intrigued, but he wasn’t looking for a friend. He was looking for someone who’d listen to his wild stories of adventure, however truthful. I took this as a win though, he was never going to be the Ant to my Dec but it made me less lonely and, I thought, more appealing to other people who were looking for friends. It’s like jobs isn’t it? It’s easier to get a job if you’ve already got one. You’re appealing to employers, your job history shows you’re able to turn up for work and remain employed for a period of time. I assumed it was like that with friends. Someone sees you with someone and assumes you must be half-decent company.

Anyway, I bonded with a few people on that particular night out early on, at a quiz machine. I’m a bit of a trivia nerd; I know lots of things that won’t help you in actual real life but make people look at you funny when you spout a fact about the Mexican cheese weevil. Anyway, I helped this small group of lads get up to the £20 prize. They could have cashed-out at £10 but the final question was ‘What kind of animal was Dilbert?’. In my memory bank somewhere, Dilbert was that bloke who worked in an office and provided a kind of dry satire regarding the working world. ‘Human’ wasn’t one of the options. I urged them to cash out but one of them pressed ‘Frog’. The screen flashed red and the money in the bubble at the top of the screen quickly counted down to zero. I felt a sense of injustice – I think to this day, I still do. Whatever answer the quiz machine thought was correct, Dilbert is definitely not a frog. I was integrating with a few people who seemed to be listening when I spoke but not really reacting. I tried not to be paranoid and just go with the easy feel of the night when I noticed one of the group, an attractive female member of the party, looking at me like someone on a diet would look at a cream cake. It felt really weird. Nobody had looked at me all night, other than to judge which way I was walking so they could avoid me without having to say the words ‘excuse me’. I turned back to Damien, who was by now spouting some fantastical story about how he rescued a troop of boy scouts from a church roof. I looked back again; she was still looking at me. I could see by the glazed film over her eyes that alcohol had taken root in her cerebrum – or her cerebellum – shows you how much notice I took in that anatomy lecture, but somewhere in her soul, she must have found something interesting about me; I didn’t have my big blue coat on for a start and I was also sans Sports Bag. It soon struck me that I’d never spoken to a mysterious female before, not one on a night out anyway and definitely not one I fancied. Meeting a partner in a pub always felt quite alien to me. I didn’t think it was the place to form long term, strong emotional and psychological attachments. It felt more like the place you try and find someone who’d engage in various physical activities before wandering off into their futures without so much as an e-mail to find out how you’re doing these days. No, I’d never been tempted to walk up to someone and try to initiate a long meaningful relationship which would eventually blossom into a Ruby wedding anniversary. But here she was, staring at me like she wanted to try out everything she’d read in the forbidden section of the adults-only shelf in the library.

I smiled at her and to my surprise, her face changed from one of carnal desire to one which suggested she hadn’t been looking at me at all. She seemed to find the fact I was now looking at her, quite unusual. Who had she actually been looking at if not me? I looked behind me but there was only a wall and nothing hanging on it to draw the eye. Maybe she was checking out the bricks, thinking they’d go well in her new kitchen extension? ‘Hello’, I squeaked. She smiled back and asked if it was my birthday. I explained that the birthday belonged to someone else in the group and that I didn’t know who. She said she didn’t know who either. We then postulated that maybe it wasn’t anybody’s birthday and everyone assumed it was a night out for a friend of someone they knew, that they didn’t know themselves. This made her laugh so I told her about my idea for a film which follows an undercover policeman who joins a criminal gang only to find out at the end that the entire gang is made up of undercover policemen. She liked this also. I told her I could do a Yorkshire accent – she challenged me to prove it so I did. She didn’t seem as enamoured with this as she was the film idea but she continued to sit opposite me, looking at me and listening to me. At the end of the night I asked for her number which she saved into my mobile phone.

‘Lizzy’

She’d saved the number under the name ‘Lizzy’. She didn’t look like a Lizzy. You know how some people look like their names. Bernards always look like Bernards don’t they? Anyway, as we were all ushered outside by the ‘glass collection operatives’ (something they all had printed on the back of their work T-shirts) I smiled at her one more time and noted that her eyelids were doing all they could to meet in the middle.

I had a member of the opposite sex’s number in my telephone. Eighteen years old might sound a bit late to most people but I’d never been the forward type. It was time to change that though because I had to ring her if I was going to see her again. I had no idea who her friends in the group were. Did she know Damien? Did Damien know her? I thought it best to ask him first but when I turned up for my first lecture of the day on the following Monday, he was nowhere to be seen. I assumed he’d woken up in a field somewhere near Scotland and would turn up before the end of the lecture but no. I was going to have to ring Lizzy and, from somewhere, obtain an alcohol-free personality. I’d made her laugh on the night out. She’d said lots of intelligent things that interested me. She knew why bottles of tequila have a worm in the bottom. She was au fait with the comedy of Bob Mortimer. She liked some of Stevie Wonder’s back catalogue. She’d seen James Blunt in concert. If our next seventy years together were similar, I would have been very happy.

I rang her.

She answered the phone.

I explained who I was.

She remembered me.

I asked if she’d like to meet up again.

She said she would.

We arranged to meet in a wonderful Irish pub I knew in the city centre at around eight. It was dark and cold when I got there and, stupidly, I hadn’t worn my coat. It was a nice black suede number by then. I’d updated my wardrobe and my shoes in particular. I thought not wearing a coat in March made me look hard and cool. The only thing hard and cool about me however were my nipples which could have punctured the outer-casing of a Sherman tank. I wandered around the pub for a while, looking around corners, studying people who were sitting alone in booths at the side. I wondered if I would even recognise her again. It had been a few days but I assumed that the intervening time wouldn’t have transformed my memory of her face into a vague collection of beige blobs this soon. I remember she had blonde-brown hair to her shoulders, parted in the middle. She had blue eyes and quite narrow nostrils. It was the nostrils that had fascinated me the most when I was talking to her that Saturday night. I wondered how she was able to breathe at night. I supposed that oxygen molecules are quite small so they’d have no trouble at all getting into the narrow slits but still, it worried me that she might have to have a tube inserted into her somewhere when she went to sleep.

I couldn’t see anyone in the pub that looked remotely like what I remembered of her so I decided to go outside and make sure I was in the correct pub; paranoia winning its eternal battle with my self confidence once more. As I stepped outside the pub, there she was, crossing the road in a big white coat and white bobble hat. It was a chilly night but I thought this was a little bit over the top. As she neared me, it looked like she was going to kiss me hello. I panicked of course, time slowed down; if she wasn’t going to kiss me hello and I went in for a kiss, well, that’s awkward. If she was coming in for a kiss and I avoided it, well, that’s the date over before it’s started isn’t it?

She put her arms out and I decided that not kissing her was less awkward and more respectful so I darted my head to the side and rested my chin on her shoulder as I hugged her hello. Had I already sealed the coffin shut on our future together? Well, it wasn’t long before I found out. We went to the bar and I ordered a pint of stout. Lovely thick black tar-like beer with the flavours of every year it had spent sat in a barrel in a dirty cellar. She ordered half a cider. There couldn’t have been more of a difference between our drinks. Stout to cider is like a full-strength Vindaloo to a packet of lightly salted Snack-a-Jacks.

We went into a cosy corner of the pub, set our drinks down and sat next to each other. She removed her large white coat and hat to reveal a sparkly jumper. I like anything sparkly. Fireworks, glitter, lemonade. ‘My sister has been helping me get ready all day’, she announced. I felt the pressure of this immediately. This was my first ever actual date with an actual member of the opposite sex. She was telling me that she’d been actually looking forward to this actual night. The information didn’t go into my brain very well. I should have been really flattered but I couldn’t think of anything other than how not to mess this entire unfamiliar yet wholly welcome situation up. It felt like one of those games where you have to move a metal ring along a wiggly metal wire without touching the sides. I’d gotten half-way across and now all I had to do was keep my nerve and be very careful for the rest of the evening. Within 20 minutes of what I thought was stimulating conversation, I noticed her demeanour change. It was slight, but I could sense something about her had deflated. I tried not to think about it and continued as best I could without saying anything controversial.

We went to a different pub and I told her about the books I’d read recently. She told me about hers. We went to a different pub where I explained how much I liked the song that was playing on the jukebox. She said she wasn’t surprised, which baffled me as she didn’t know anything about my musical tastes yet. I tried to slip a third meeting into the conversation but every time I did so, it was skilfully ignored and the topic was changed. Eventually, it came time to leave so I walked her to the nearest underground station. There was no one around and the conversation had come to a complete halt. Just stony silence between us interrupted only by the spooky echoed clanks from the subway tunnel. I couldn’t work out what I’d done wrong or why she was so distant. ‘Everything ok?’, I asked.

Without looking at me, she gave me a cursory, ‘yeah’.

‘What’s up then?’

‘What’s the point of us seeing each other again if you don’t fancy me?’

‘Eh?’ Oh God, I thought, the kiss? No – that can’t be it. She would have been icy straight away.

‘You said you didn’t fancy me so what’s the point?’

Did I? Did I say that? I ran through all the snippets of conversation we’d had, looking for that particular soundbite, until, eventually – ‘Ohhhh!’. What an idiot. ‘No, I didn’t say I didn’t fancy you.’

‘You did.’

She now had her back to me, looking up the train line just wanting the train to arrive. What I’d actually said came flooding back. We’d been discussing attractiveness and I’d made a point about how, in the past, I’d had female friends who I didn’t find attractive at first but through their personalities, things they did, said and stood for, I started to find them attractive. I know this probably wasn’t the forum for such an observation but I realised that she must have thought I didn’t find her attractive and was hoping, one day, that I would.

We did go out again as it happens but I could tell she was just there out of duty, despite me explaining what I’d meant by the whole ‘fancy someone later’ thing. We went for a meal and on to a pub but I could tell from the dynamic that this was just a ‘let’s be friends’ situation. I didn’t bother calling her again after that although I did meet her by chance one afternoon in town and she was pleasant enough but I could see she just wanted to be anywhere else.

My third encounter with a potential heart was the weirdest of all thus far. Having found courage from somewhere to initiate the first date with Lizzy, I struck up a conversation with someone in my seminar group. Her name was Kelly. She was good looking and a bit mysterious. People who don’t say much always intrigued me more than those who told you everything about their lives, what they had for dinner and how many sheets of toilet paper they use in one sitting. She had a friend called Helen. Now, I’d seen Helen around quite a bit and I’d even spoken to her on a few occasions. Now Helen, I did fancy. She had short dark curly hair and was always smiling. She was one of those people who could brighten a room just by walking in to it. Nothing ever seemed to bother her and she never said anything negative. Some people would find that annoying but I didn’t, it seemed really genuine. Helen had a boyfriend however so not even a ghost of a notion of ever asking her out occurred to me. I heard one day, whilst waiting for a lecture to start, that he’d bought her a muffin. He wasn’t doing the same course as her, he was over in the Education complex I think, but he’d gone out of his way to bring her a muffin for her afternoon snack. After hearing that, I thought it would be lovely to bring someone a muffin. I wanted a girlfriend so that I could bring her a muffin. I thought it would be lovely to be able to bring any kind of baked snack to someone, just to show them I was thinking of them and wanted them to have something hot and tasty to remember me by.

Kelly and Helen were best friends and they were almost always together whenever I saw them. I didn’t know if Kelly had a boyfriend, as I say, she was mysterious. She could have been from outer space or Kidderminster for all I knew. One day though, I spoke to her during a break in the middle of a three-hour lab class.

‘Boring this innit?’, I said, trying to sound interesting and moody.

‘Yeah’, she smiled back. I recognised this as a buying signal. It said ‘your opening line wasn’t irritating – please, speak some more so I can get a read on you’

‘Biology of Disease? Every time I leave this class I’m aware of thirty more things that can go wrong in your body and kill you instantly. It’s so depressing.’

‘I know’, she countered with a similar gloomy tone, ‘that last bit about aneurisms.’ She shuddered slightly which made me laugh.

‘Harry’

‘Kelly’

‘Look at me’, I thought, ‘Bobby confidence!’

After striking up this conversation, we spoke every time we saw each other until I asked her if she wanted to go for a drink and pretty soon we were dating. Three dates in however, she hit me with a question which hit me so hard, she might as well have gone at me with the back of a shovel.

‘Why didn’t you ask Helen out?’

My entire body was gripped by a kind of internal tazer. I was like one of those goats who go stiff and fall over when they hear a loud noise. It felt like I was on the million pound question on Who wants to be a millionaire with no lifelines. The obvious answer was ‘because she has a boyfriend’, but of course, this answer, whilst being factually correct, is in fact, the incorrect answer for the situation. ‘Helen who’, seemed like a decent option but an obvious attempt to hide the truth – again, the completely incorrect response. ‘Because you are more beautiful in every way’, was so fake and patronising that I dismissed this one too. I noticed that the silence was extending exponentially so I had to find a response that both put to bed the possibility that I could have in any one of the parallel universes, have fancied Helen and/or wanted to go out with her more than Kelly, should the opportunity have arisen and assured Kelly that she was the first and only woman I’d wanted to ask out since birth. Thinking about it now, ‘What makes you think I’d want to ask Helen out’, would have been the perfect answer – deflecting her quite legitimate insecurities back at her to find out exactly why she’d asked the question. I didn’t think I’d ever made it obvious that I liked Helen, apart from that time I sat next to her on a field trip, laughing, joking and flirting for a full hour whilst Kelly sat behind us, listening to every single word. This was weeks before I’d asked Kelly out however so I couldn’t see how that could have – hang on – yeah, that’s exactly why. This dating thing was hard. After about five seconds of silence, whilst all of the above skittered around my brain, I simply said, ‘Because I wanted to ask you out’. It seemed to be enough to allay her concerns although I knew the next time I saw Helen, I would have to tone down the overt wide-eyed hurricane of desperacy for her to want to date me instead of that good looking, six foot Adonis she was currently dating.

Turned out my answer to the question didn’t do the job I thought it had done and I was soon back in the friend zone waiting for that back door to open and a stranger to walk in.