Leonard and Hungry Paul

by Ronan Hession

Though an adult son living with his widowed mother is a situation about which society has yet to adopt a formal position, it is clearly seen in second-best terms. In so far as anyone noticed, they might have assumed that she was overbearing or that he lacked initiative and possibly a sex drive.

Mother/son holidays, though, have the connotation that one of them must be a burden on the other.

Had Leonard been a different type of person he might have gone to the pub to meet some friends for an evening of darts, dominoes, cards or other prison games, but nothing made him feel lonelier these days than the thought of spending time in the company of extroverts.

Hungry Paul lived on a knife edge between a passion for board games and an aversion to instruction booklets.

The figure is actually closing his ears to block out a scream. Isn’t that amazing? A painting can be so misunderstood and still become so famous.’

‘but the trick is to know how much of the world to let in, without becoming overwhelmed. The universe, as Edwin Hubble taught us, is a hostile place.’

‘Indeed. And sometimes it’s difficult to know whether you want to scream or block out a scream,’ said Leonard.

A game of tracked changes ping-pong required the ability to put up with a lot more than you should. Leonard often felt he was being paid for his patience. It was hard to do his best work when he knew that all his good ideas would be either rejected without being understood, or appropriated and credited to someone else.

Running out of ideas, Leonard took off his noise-cancelling/society-repelling headphones and went to the kitchenette

She browsed the tables and saw books that she had read or wanted to read and almost bought one as an evangelical gift, wanting him to like what she liked.

The three of them often talked like this about Hungry Paul. They had always seen themselves as the bumpers along the bowling lane for him to bounce between, saving him from mundane dangers and guiding him towards his achievements,

And yet, when you love somebody it can be hard to know where the boundary of solicitude ends and interference begins. It

It could equally be supposed that his lack of independence was not the justification for their intervention, but the result of it. Helping someone can so easily become a habit for both parties and people are often more comfortable being the helper than the helped.

In the same way, when her son was born after two miscarriages and almost didn’t make it, she had promised that if he survived she would not expect or ask any more from him for his whole life than that. And that is why she had accepted Hungry Paul as he was and let him follow his natural, meandering course through life as her sunfish.

so he had always held back and looked inwards rather than trying to project his own unsure version of himself on to the world.

Otherwise, you get sucked into being a parent and forget to prioritise your husband or wife and before you know it, you find yourself in the worst situation of all: married with children, but deeply lonely. As you both change, you will periodically lose each other. You need to find each other again and—here’s the trick—instead of trying to rekindle what you had, you need to reinvent yourselves and your relationship. You have to keep starting new relationships with the same person.

he didn’t feel the need to season life’s innate variety with variety of his own. His breakfast was the same every morning: three Weetabix with banana chopped into the bowl using the side of the spoon,

the awful fate of being imprisoned with only one’s thoughts for company. With no distractions, one thought billiards another, and an endless internal monologue drowns out the rest of life, bringing dissonance to silence, restlessness to stillness, and anxiety to forethought.

He thought about how, whenever he read something he wanted to share as a child, if only because he would burst with amazement if he didn’t, she used the same phrase, a phrase that Leonard hoped every parent used with their children every day: ‘Tell me.’

Kids needed to be able to put down the book, run off and grab their friends and bring the energy from the page into their play.

the lollipop lady

The self-knitted lady abandoned him in a sudden undoing of what she had only just started, a trick any knitter would know.

It may well be that if you truly want to open a heart, you need to break it open.

She was another cold-blooded killer, who was able to walk away from a happy relationship as if it never happened.

Their friendship was not just one of convenience between two quiet, solitary men with few other options, it was a pact. A pact to resist the vortex of busyness and insensitivity that had engulfed the rest of the world. It was a pact of simplicity, which stood against the forces of competiveness and noise.

Leonard’s natural instinct was to retreat and to create a safe bubble. But the bubble feeds on itself. Solitude and peace lose their specialness when they no longer stand in contrast to anything. In a

And anyway, Leonard was discovering that distancing himself from people didn’t even bring peace. The more he separated himself from others, the more they become unfathomable and perplexing. The distance just made him lose perspective. If he wasn’t careful he could turn vinegary and judgemental,

And maybe that was the trick: to find the right people; to be able to recognise them and to know how to appreciate them when you do find them.

It is hard to appreciate now, but there was once a time before mobile phones and text messages when people communicated with each other by sticking notes to refrigerators using magnets. It got to be so commonplace that it became the secondary purpose of fridges themselves.

As Helen had often observed, there is no better cure for one’s own worries than to help someone else with theirs.

like so many people, the ability to discuss his ambitions seemed to satisfy his need to pursue them. Ideas led to well-meaning effort, led to messy disappointment, led to retreat and an affirmation that maybe a change was not needed after all.

was also the faffing about to be considered, the general mechanism a near impossibility for someone like Hungry Paul who was all thumbs.

Everyone talking and thinking out loud, with no space or oxygen left for quiet statements and silence. In a way, it’s not just about being a spokesman for the National Mime Association, but a spokesman for silence itself.’

It seemed to him that the mime theatre, in its state of disrepair and irrelevance, had come to mirror the fate of silence itself. But how could he even begin restore the position of mime as a unifying and humanising force in the world when the silent community itself was divided?

All major spiritual and philosophical traditions throughout history had emphasised the value of silence.

This noisy opinionated world had made an enemy of silence: it had become something unwelcome, to be broken or filled.

This woman who used to be in my writing class—I mean, I was giving the class and she was a student—every story she did was about her childhood and she was always using phrases like: “There was an empty chair by the door.” You know, trying to be depressing, because she thought it was more writerly, but I’m sure you’ve seen it yourself, some people get so lost in writing they forget to tell a story. It drives me mad!’

Leonard, for whom silence was as comfortable as bed, sat and enjoyed the time, his universe once again expanding.