Memoirs of an Unproven Placeholder

My Mum 1nce asked me what my first memory was. This was during 1ne of this interminable Foxtel ad-breaks, as I sipped tea and tried to pretend I wasn't disturbing her with my visit. My Mum watches a lot of crime shows, primarily to see the ending when, in her words, the bastards get caught. Slightly vindictive, but there you are. My Mum and Dad’s counter to any criticism of their TV watching is to say (for instance when I slagged them off for watching a 33 year old episode of Open All Hours) is to say "Yeah but you watch the Simpsons all day!", which isn't true.

Well, it is, but only on weekends....

I don’t watch much of the Crime Investigation Channel. I don’t watch much of anything anymore. I took a long break from the Internet simply to find thinking space again. Living alone is, by definition, supposed to be lonely, but I really enjoy it. I’ve never truly felt lonely. Even in, say, Dubai airport at 3hree in the morning with just me and 2wo cleaners and a mile of overlaid carpet within miles of each other, I felt more at peace than I do in a crowd. Actually I have felt lonely 1nce in my life. It was on Montello soccer pitches at roughly 11:47am sometime in 1988. It was the last game I played for my school team before I moved back to Scotland. My friends had said their goodbyes, and for some reason I had to go down to the far corner to go and get something – a cone (a witches hat, we didn’t do drugs that early in those days) or a sandwich or something. When I turned around, my friends, they were all at the other end of the pitch preparing for next week’s game. A game of course I would never see because I would be in another country. I swear to this day something ran up my spine. It lasted all the way back to Penguin, it stayed with me as I bit into my Monaco bar on the way home, and maybe it’s still with me. It suddenly hit me that they had already moved on and there I was, holding a witches hat and preparing to drive off. I never told anyone this of course because who can you tell? I wish that I had a more open relationship with my Mum and Dad. Hell, I had a girlfriend for a whole year they never knew about. They think I never got a job because of poor interview technique. Truthfully, after that day, I never trusted them because they had taken me away from my life. And I was, oh, 9ine at the time. I told my Dad 1ne day I was going to invent “suitcase syndrome” as a disease, and all the people who had to move around the world or from town to town would gather and complain about how messed up their lives were. Dad wasn’t listening I don’t think. He was eating a Monaco Bar at the time...if that’s not a sign from above...

"So, first memory, whit was it!" she said again, impatiently. Sadly I am no Cameron Adams when it comes to television criticism, and with her interest in my opinions about the Crime Investigation Network waning. I was forced to answer. I was 4our. I was in my room alone with my toys, and I had a holographic Indian toy. On his chest, you could sort of make an Eagle appear if the sun was aligned with the 6th Quadrant of Venus. Picking up at the Miss Universe backstage party was easier than making this thing appear. But, it was all worth the effort in the end. I know I got it from K-Mart, because the receipt sat solemnly on my cupboard for years as a warning that life wasn't always going to be fair. For reasons lost to time, I put this toy deep inside 1ne of my giant orange beanbags. I presume I was playing some sort of Cowboys and Indians game. I don't think this is right; we didn't have any Indians in Penguin. In fact, we, the Scottish family, were about as ethnically diverse as early 80tys Penguin ever got, so I doubt I had the complexities of divisive land warfare down pat, even in playtime. Maybe I was playing Penguinites vs Ulverstonians. Whatever the case, the Indian was placed deep inside in the orange beanbag to hide, and I never found the toy again. I put my hand inside the beanbag many times over the following year, and it never came out. Sure I could have tipped all the beans all over the floor, but given the beanbag was a hearty, pre health and safety era bean filled monstrosity the size of a small steam train, I'd have been picking beans out of the carpet until at least 2012...

Hairdressers. It's always hairdressers with me. I have another crush on a hairdresser. When I say crush, I'm 32wo, I'm too old for crushes. Its just some1ne I think is pretty. Blue eye shadow girl I had a definite crush on, but work has parted us now. In the window of their business it says "Hair is a religion!" with the ! underlined on a homemade sign. This is also the hairdresser’s mind you that screamed at me last week Pink is BACK! IN GHD FORM! - I think it was GHD, but I thought that was an illegal drug. I might have got it wrong - pink might have come back in some other form. Who would know. I didn't even know pink went away to be honest. Sadly if hair is a religion you could count my sadly inept barnet as an atheist. Long ago it developed an apathy to organisation and dammit that’s how it likes it. It's freezing today. If I was a kid in Penguin I'd extend my jacket out and let the breeze drive me dangerously close to cars as I flew down Mission Hill. There's a girl with a fringe that would make it impossible to drive walking past me in a school tracksuit. Her gaze is on a pamphlet handed out by an Indian man with a bored expression on his face. He never gave me a pamphlet because I had my don't give me a pamphlet face on.

I was eating a Subway sandwich because my work place was evacuated and I got stroll around pointlessly for a while dealing with the bewildered sandwich making fraternity of Subway

"Cheddar Cheese!" she said.
"Yes! For the love of God yes!" I said, for I had been asked if I wanted Cheddar Cheese several times already.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Give it a minute. Let the oxygen marinate in your tiny brain...
"Cheddar Cheese?"
I notice that her hair has a pink stripe in it. Got the memo on hair, but not on the cheese....

They were supposed to ring me to tell me to come back, but I don't think they did. I don't know that I'm strictly necessary at my workplace. I provide Vita wheats and sympathetic understanding, but not a lot else. I can't even get a pamphlet. I saw a prostitute give out pamphlets to sailors in the more liberal time of 1997even. She wasn't working hard for the money, just sort of leaning on a bench and handing out leaflets. I don't think I got 1ne of them either...I think it was the fault of my hair. It was the wrong religion. Someo1ne I know is in the local paper - their Dad died on the weekend. They then still went to the football because it's what Dad would have wanted. I don't ever make the joke anymore that what Dad really wanted was not to die - funeral experience will do that to you. I'm terrified to death. It's scarier to me than anything, a date with Yuliya Dovhal anything...I hate the idea of an accumulated lifetime of personal wisdom and anecdotes reduced quite simply to "what I would have wanted" and "remember that time with the pen" - the complexities of people, I don't think, are ever truly reflected in elegiac flowery poetry. It's what I do every day though - it shouldn't take death to make me reflect on the reality I see every day. The hairdresser is cute, the girl with the fringe is fringey, the guy giving out the pamphlets looks bored out of his mind, and the Subway girl is an idiot. Such short interactions every moment of every day, people reduced to frippery, to exaggerated qualities that take away every decision that lead to them standing there, in that job, in that moment, with those kids....I shut the paper. It nearly blows out of my hand. It turns to a story about a cat and a chicken that are friends...the girl with the fringe laughs in a high pitched way at a txt msg...maybe some1ne sent her the article...

"You don't see it do you Mum!" I say. My Mums house for what's it worth is warm, they installed a fire place a few months ago. They know have heat at the flick of a switch. That's why I go round there. Not for the conversational bon mots...

"It was the first thing in my life I ever lost!"

It's a weak point. It was just a toy. And she is Glaswegian. They are flint hard. Get on with it is in their DNA. The life lesson about the toy and the beanbag and how soon you can lose something, well, it wasn't really falling on the right ears...let alone getting out of conversational first gear to talk about...well...other things...

She sits in her chair and rocks forward.

"Do ye know remember whin ye were dressed up as the King Of Hearts in the Irvine Herald! That whis a cute photie...!"

I leave shortly after, warm house be damned. Some conversational barriers are just too hard to break down...