Contacts

by Mark Watson

Steffi approached her own room with a trepidation she had never felt before. Christ, imagine if he’d done something in there. That really would be fucked-up. She’d have to move, again.

He understood there would be crises, even in an unremarkable life, but it turned out there was something worse than the adrenalin of a crisis: the endless flat grey afternoon of depression.

‘You know – Tony Hancock, when he … well, when he died,’ said James. ‘He just said too many things seemed to go wrong. Something like that.’

That everyone ended up being a minor curiosity, given time; all lives ended up as footnotes, often full of factual errors. He needn’t have seen himself all this time as a major character, every decision triggering grave consequences. Everything he’d done wrong would pack down into an anecdote for future Karls. Something to pass time between rounds at the bar; something very quickly forgotten.

The lock, the bolt, all the things you continued to do every night in case of some intruder, some wolf at the door. And yet now the wolf was here, had come in down the telephone line.

Almost all of them had a memory of something generous James had done, since he’d accrued a reasonable résumé of small kind acts simply by living forty years as that sort of person.

There was another category of people, of course: those who did not receive the message, were not on James’s phone, but would find that their lives were affected by James’s even in the time he had left. These people could be anywhere, because of the paths technology had built, because nobody was very far from anybody any more. Indeed, one of them was on his train.

I’ll make you proud, Dad. I’ll do something good. When he looked back on that later, James hadn’t really known what he had meant by it. But, over the last year or so, he’d known with a deadening certainty that he was getting further and further from making it come true.

The whole point was that the time of things mattering was over. The misery of it, the physical ache in his muscles that had come from failing, over and over again – those were a few hours away from being over, for good. There had been a version of himself that tried to solve people’s problems, that drove people where they needed to go, knocked on doors to ask if everything was all right. But that person had turned out not to be good enough – and had been spat out.

It was still common courtesy not to make a stranger’s life more difficult than it had to be.

Meghan was a great PA and she was learning, and Sal loved to promote women in the workplace and pass on some of what she’d learned, but also, Meghan was a fucking idiot. ‘Your brother’s about to kill himself.’ Was that a way you began a conversation with someone listening? Was that a way to break the news?

Mentally, she sketched out a five-point plan. 1. Make this list. (This was a little joke of Sal’s. She’d put it in all her time-management books. Sometimes, readers tweeted her pictures of lists with this at the top. It wasn’t just a gag; it was meant to relax you, release a bit of the tension that held you back from making good gut decisions.)

In much the same way as so many other small troubles had, nourished by his silence, grown into bigger and stronger things, into the things he suddenly found he couldn’t live alongside any more.

I tried so hard, did what you’re meant to do. He meant it about weight loss, but perhaps he meant it about everything.

On a date last year a woman had asked James for his fantasy dinner-party line-up, and he’d panicked and chosen Stalin and Noel Edmonds.

James wasn’t sure how sound Karl’s romantic advice was likely to be, given that even in the past month he’d had a credible death threat from a spurned girlfriend,

He couldn’t tell whether he had passed this strange little test, set by the universe with no warning, or failed it.

What about karma, or all those things? Not that you were meant to take those ideas literally, but you always believed there was something, as Mum might have said. Some safety net, some natural justice, so that you couldn’t just fall through the cracks and disappear. If you were doing your best. Some invisible system that paid you back some of what you deserved.

It was being fought on terrain she didn’t know. Life, relationships, everything moved quickly these days, and even thinking that made her a fuddy-duddy, and thinking the word fuddy-duddy made her even more of one, she supposed, but what were you meant to do?

‘Kindness is way more important,’ said Michaela, ‘being a good person, caring about other humans, giving a shit about the consequences of your actions. Also …’ She fanned herself, she was glowing with sweat, almost as hot as James. ‘Also, carrying Christmas trees. Those are the main human skills, and you seem to have most of them. Yep, I think you’re going to be OK.’

She couldn’t ask for a get-out like that. The universe didn’t owe it to her to find James someone new.

‘One: it’s half past four in the morning,’ Karl began, but the voice was not going to let him get even to point number two. ‘OK,’ she said, ‘so – wait till nine o’clock and maybe he’s dead but it’s a nicer time to do a phone call?’

Anyway, Karl was the hero of the story, not the villain. He really needed to concentrate on the bits where he was the hero.

What was unfolding was just what he deserved. Because he was only a hero if you stopped the tape where he had, with James back on his feet, Karl having helped his old friend out. And that wasn’t where the tape stopped. Not in real life.

With an uncharacteristically quick motion, James bounded up from the bed, causing the mattress springs to complain once more; they didn’t seem to like it when he arrived or when he left. Well, that was nothing new.

‘The long version’s the same but with more swearing,’ she said.

And Steffi imagined that, on the whole, people did get what they deserved, even if they had to wait around for it. That was what you were generally led to believe by fridge magnets and memes. They were all about keeping going in pursuit of your dreams, seeing out the bad times. None of them implied that there could be an outcome in which you just admitted the bad times had won.

Contacts is about the fact that, for all its dangers, the age of instant communication gives us what is basically a superpower … If we only choose to use it.