By James Crouchman.
Time is a human construct. There is no past, and no future, just one perpetual present. That’s what time is, just presentness. Where past and future are individual projections of our present, like our memories or our hopes. What might be is an abstraction, remaining an eternal possibility. What we perceive as present is just memory tinged with anticipation. Everything past is unreal, as is everything future. The only thing that’s truly real, James, is the present moment of consciousness.
Cameron says this and smiles, then chews on a cuticle and contorts an empty packet of salted peanuts. The last part – the bit about a ‘perpetual present’ – is ironic coming from Cameron. Everything he says is – in a myriad of different ways far too subtle to penetrate his dense brain – massively ironic. The pseudo-philosophical bullshit he spouts contains layer upon layer of hidden irony. Tectonic plates of irony. But he doesn’t even realise this, and never will. It would be funny if it wasn’t so crushingly depressing.
Of course, he’s memorised this from the Internet. He won’t admit it, but I know he has. He spends all day on the Internet, when he should be concentrating on Customer Services, reading up on the Darfur conflict or downloading fatal NASCAR crashes, or researching the post-modern script he’s writing on the life of Lambert Simnel. He’ll spot something really interesting, look around to see if anybody has seen him looking, wait thirty seconds and then just casually drop it into conversation,
“The Persians invented algebra while we still living in mud huts.”
Because Cameron is a sixth form politician of the most basic kind. He thought that by reading On the Road and owning a few Bill Hicks videos he became part of some intellectual counter-culture movement that was sweeping through the Film Studies department of Nottingham Trent University. He’s New Labour sixth-form politics. If there were a sixth-form government, he’d represent Kent East and campaign for new level-crossings. Every other evening we come here and he drinks pints of beer called things like Skullcracker and Old Les and says things like:
“It says a lot when half the country reads the Mail,” or,
“I’ve just finished the third chapter of my novel,” and sometimes even,
“Me and Dominic just conceptualised a band.”
His novel is called Caf é Rouge and he thinks it’s a biting satire of England’s shallow consumer culture. He’s already written the reviews. The Observer will describe him as ‘Coupland for the I-pod generation’, though he’s recently changed ‘I-pod’ to ‘MySpace’. Each chapter has a one word title he’s thought up by reading a thesaurus. Last week I read chapter two – ‘Diffidence’. It is just more sixth form politics, with excessive use of metaphor and simile, and a few unfunny pop-culture references. Cameron will never be a famous writer. It’ll really bug him that he’ll never have a page on Wikipedia.
So an evening with Cameron becomes so repetitive that it does seem to resemble some kind of perpetual present. No past, no future, just the same anecdotes we have been reciting for the last three years, and the constant struggle not to irritate each other to the point of violence. Time is irrelevant with Cameron. There are just moments, ranked in descending order of annoyance. His bullshit has reached almost existential levels. The rubbish that spews from his overworked mouth is so deeply absurd you begin to question your own sanity. What if we’re all mad and Cameron is the only sane one here?
A family of four walk in. They look cold. As they walk through the door I see a small puff of breath come from the husband’s mouth. He has a prematurely receding hairline and is wearing a rugby shirt with the collar turned up that reads University of Cambridge Rugby Football Union MCMXC. His wife looks like she should be presenting horse racing on Channel 4. The two kids are perfectly blonde, blue-eyed boys, as if someone were attempting to resurrect the Third Reich in West Norfolk. Cameron watches them come in and sit down at the oak table by the fire. He despises them but doesn’t know why. He spends a couple of minutes thinking of a reason, and then says whatever comes into his head,
“I hate toffs,” he says, and flicks the KP packet that he has now completely crushed across the table. But he’s lying. For all his socialist pretence, he’s no different to them. His family holidays in Devon every year, he enjoys the music of Radiohead, he owns a Norwich City tax-disc holder. He drinks pints of Old Les.
Cameron begins to tell me about his plans to travel Italy. He drinks pints of Old Les, he plans on travelling to Italy. I think he’s going to write a book about it. He’s already thought of a pretentious title. I admire him for at least having some kind of ambition. I’m hoping to slowly purge my system of ambition by working temporary jobs creating spreadsheets in local council offices and tinned food factories. We are cursed with high aspirations. And there are more people with high aspirations than there are aspiration-fulfilling jobs. That’s why these evenings down the pub have become so dismal. Cameron and I are the only two still here. The only two ‘failures’ – a word my mother has banned me from using. Last summer I got an interview for a copywriting job in South London. I’ve been trying to convince myself that it’s all for the best they turned me down. I would have become popular, successful, ambitious. They would be proved right. I want to prove that they’re wrong and always have been, and that I’m right. That I really am bitter and twisted and tragic and there’s nothing they can do about it – no amount of encouragement to read the Guardian graduate job section can save me now, people.
It’s funny; we were always told at school that if we worked hard then we’d get good jobs and plush apartments and could fuck hot office workers while the others worked as bin men. I guess that’s been proved to be correct, since Cameron and I spent most of our time at school playing tiddlywinks with erasers. Perhaps secretly we both blame each other.
Cameron tells me about a book he’s recently read on Tajikistan. He tells me he wants to go there and write a piece on the country. I think it’s just so he can use the tagline ‘Tajik moments‘. He got up at the crack of dawn last week to go to some Travel Writing workshop near Paddington Station. He took loads of winter-light, long-shadow photos of London in the morning and posted them on his personal blog that never gets any visitors. The only thing that annoys me more than his pretentiousness is my tragic cynicism.
My mind wonders. I scan the room and settle on the girl in the corner, sitting under the portrait of Robert Walpole that hangs on the wall. Cameron spots me looking at her and senses another opportunity to hear the sound of his own voice.
“I think all men secretly imagine women naked when we first look at them,” he says. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of, it’s just our most base instinct, it’s animalistic.” Then he begins to swill his beer round the pint glass like it’s a fine Tuscan wine.
He’s wrong again, though. I don’t give a shit what her tits look like. I look at her and imagine how she’d fit into the timeline of my life, like those books you have as a kid where you take a photo of your head and put it over cartoons of astronauts and racing drivers. I take a mental cut-out of this girl’s unthreateningly pretty face and project her into my past, present and future. The first few dates, the new flat, walks in the country, weekend breaks in Budapest. Maybe Cameron was right. Maybe that’s what time is, at least for me anyway. A kind of fantasy present, a dream of what I’d like my future to be like, and a past that seems infinitely rosier than it really was. A sensitive art house film being played out in my head:
Scene 5 – The cute girl from sales with the nice rack (whose cousin used to play for Crystal Palace) realises what a mistake she has made by marrying the rich telecommunications expert and shacks up with James instead.CUT TO: After the human construct known as ‘chucking-out-time’, we sit on the sand dunes fifty yards back from the pub and listen to the North Sea. The breaking waves sound like cars passing on damp tarmac. Every so often an actual car passes and momentarily lights up the beach. Cameron chucks a rock into the water, turns round and says:
“George Orwell and Brian Clough are the two great geniuses of the twentieth century”.
We drive home. Cameron puts on a cassette of the band him and Dominic ‘conceptualised’. The tinny drums and scratchy guitars begin to seep through the Fiesta’s sub-standard speakers and I can just smell the drainpipe jeans and stripy polo-shirts. They are heroically average. Cameron lists their influences as ‘Lou Reed, Chris Morris and Garcia Marquez’. He actually says that, here, now, without any sense of irony. This is the Vancouver Centre: Soon to be gracing a medium sized venue in a university town near you.
We drive through a nondescript village with an Olde-English name that sounds hilarious after a few beers. The four pints of Old Les Cameron has consumed make him swerve all over the road and I have an horrific vision of my own death, in a beat up Fiesta, sitting next to a member of Nottingham Young Socialists. Forget time, maybe this is what death is. A timeless infinity, individually tailored for your own personal needs. Bespoke purgatory. Maybe I’m already living it.
# # # # #
JC: The inspiration for the story came from the semi-breakdown I experienced after graduating from university. It was written as much for therapeutic reasons as anything else. General inspiration comes from Philip Larkin, George Orwell and Tom Bissell.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Crouchman is an amateur writer and photographer who has so far only used these skills as an excuse for travelling, procrastination and impressing work colleagues. Having had a few pieces of fiction and non-fiction prose published whilst at university, James is now working temporarily for a major financial institution and is attempting to save enough money to move to Trieste. He is based in Cambridge.
