Families And How To Escape - Chapter Three - The Unknown Familiar

It was predictable that the Friday I left Gainsborough was packed and sociable. Waking up with Alan was a first I was glad that I was no going to repeat. Mid-morning Mother came and went, taking the last of the perishable food in her shopping trolley with her. Later I walked a few doors up the street and said 'Goodbye' to Sue Hethershaw at her house.  Her husband, Nick, was about so she was distant but cheerful about my putting the town behind me. As she put it 'You are not going away forever. The place will still be here. You will simply return to it as a different person. You being allowed to change is what matters.'.

At home I checked the boxes that I had filled and repacked them, tighter this time.  Before I had part filled the boxes and stored them out of sight. Now when I finished packing I put them in the yard, since the sun was out, for Graham to pack tightly in his car. I was at ready when Graham arrived. I have always admired the sense of team work with packing, this time was no exception. We soon used all the space in his car that was not for the driver and passengers. In my home town I had only ever been a part time student in lieu of my being unemployed in my home town. I was unused to the level of support that both encouraged me to move, and supported me with the move. My family were not like that. I barely recognised how much Graham's help was like that of a parent who helps their new student son or daughter to move into their first digs for the first time. But that where Graham was coming from.

The ending of locking the door, posting the house keys through the letter box, and setting off with Graham felt so light. The departure did not feel like the exit that it was. The uncertainty I was going into felt very light biggest change seemed to be the change in certainty levels. With my life up to leaving and easy. The Gainsborough I knew had been leaky safety net, including serial losses of hope due to my family being who they were where I got the blame. Since I was leaving I could not say that about them or the town without my words seeming churlish. Whatever went wrong from now on there the safety net was what it was. I would have to have my wits and my sense of being an adult to get me through.

My friendship with Graham was built around how he had led the ecumenical Christian youth group, rather than anything particularly close between us. If that I was older than him and yet he led the group seemed odd, well, I had nowhere else to fit in. My seeking acceptance was another example of 'make do and mend'. In such groups the group always mattered more than the individual. I knew that there was a lot that he did not know about me and would not have wanted to know. I could guess that I knew relatively little about him. Friendship built on the absence of shared knowledge might well have been more common than either of us realised. Opening up via getting personal would have changed that, a lot. He was a patient driver. I was surprised at how good I was at giving directions and telling him which lane to be in with the multi-lane roads. He helped me unpack my boxes and put them in one corner of the living room. At first sight they seemed an odd collection of things that jarred against the sleek modern ambience of the new house in a way I had not predicted. Graham spoke briefly and pleasantly with my new landlord and got an image of somebody who lacked maturity from him, with the impression my tenancy would not be long there. Then Graham gave me a firm hug as he said 'Goodbye'.

By 6 pm I was in the house and everything I had brought with me was in the house too. I was on my own with the landlord for the weekend. I forget his name now. I am going to call him Mike. Mike gave me a run through of the rules of the shared house, where several words came to the fore of my mind that I had to avoid saying. Words I avoided included 'bachelor pad furniture', and 'unused kitchen' because that was what I saw. The impression of him being a show-off bachelor was further cemented with the arrival of his guests that evening, two young women. Mike's university friends both worked as bank clerks in a building society. One of the women lived there. It clear to me that Mike had designs on her being more than a friend. The second young woman was her friend who was there to make sure his designs on her friend remained unimplemented designs. I was part of the group that evening but I felt tired. The two women were pleasant enough but opaque to me, at best.

My landlord worked as a junior manager for a bank. It was easy for me to excuse myself from their shop talk by recognising that how they talked was mild stuff but above my grade of benefits. The main reason Mike had the house at such a young age, about the age twenty five to my by being twenty seven, was because of the special low interest mortgage loans his employer had offered him that he put to good use by investing in debt via property. If money had proven anything much to me, then I could recognise that I was going to have a hard time proving what it gave me to him. I had spent the last decade of my life living that close to being on the dole that when I had a job it made no difference. Most of the work I had done was on government conscription schemes. There the management were the only people on the scheme with permanent jobs and good wages. Any discussion between us would have been a small-town-hick-vs-city slicker sort of dialogue.

But first there was the beer and pizza evening with the two young women to join in with, which after their hard week working behind the glass shutters in their demanding white collar jobs the young women tucked in as if they had earned it all. Maybe they had.

The evening ended on beyond-weird note for me, though I hid my bafflement at the time. At some point Mike put the television on and left it on ITV for the late Friday night when what the choice of viewing was what-to-watch-when-the-pubs-are-shut type entertainment. Somewhat distractedly I watched as the WWF, World Wrestling Federation wrestling programme started. I had not seen it before, on some Saturday lunchtimes. but I had never seen it in the setting I was now watching it. The girls contrived to ignore the television in the corner, I assume because they believed that such a well coordinated exhibition of apparently pure man sized testosterone could only be a fantasy, and whatever they fantasised about it was not the depictions of machismo on the television.

But I had grown up with the crash and thump of television wrestling for as long as it had been broadcast, long enough that when I saw my dad at the meal table when it was on and the sound seem to come from behind his head I could well have wondered 'Do you have a headache dad? It sounds like you should have.'. To fit in with the scene that night I watched the television pretending to watch partly from the perspective of the young women present, bemusement and disbelief at the athletic display of the WWF wrestling. As the new tag team 'The Powers of Pain', The Warlord and The Barbarian, both improbably big, both very fit and lean, men in black tights and boots, demolished the two anonymous no hopers who were marked out as such from the start it all went too fast for anyone to ask how it was staged. The Warlord and The Barbarian performed with an agility that belied their size, performing somersaults and back flips before ending a very short bout with one kneeling in front of the other, both holding impressive looking double bicep flexing poses. There were more wrestling matches in that hour long programme, but to me, tired and socially out of my depth, the mix of the acrobatics, the great size and strength, the perfect finishing skills, and most importantly a pliant referee who briefly looked the wrong way at all the right moments, was such a stunningly intense, but brief, show of athletic superiority that I'd had my fill of the whole programme, if not the whole evening, with that wrestling match.

Please left click here for Chapter Four.