I wanted to say another thing about friendship and about
schadenfreude in personal relationships. Way, way back I met a guy called Rick
Taylor. We had hooked up with Rick and his friend Harry in Germany and they
were going East, the same as we were, in the general direction of Nepal. He was
a little older than me; big but with short legs so that all his bigness was
concentrated in the upper-half of his body. Bald and bearded with a loud
American voice and loud American manner, from inappropriate brightly patterned
shirts to expressing opinions about every society we passed through in
derogatory language. The Ugly American. I wasn’t irritated: that was why I
went, to meet and interact with the rest of the world.
Turned out he was Canadian, a teacher by profession, lived
in Toronto, a city I had visited quite a few times; I think I have mentioned
before, I saw Jefferson Airplane plus the Grateful Dead and their incredible
light-show there in ‘67. So, we had something in common, I suppose. We kept our
distance. Probably, I was too intense and as always, kept myself to myself and
he wouldn’t approve of that: we were there to have a good time. Smoke weed
chase girls, all those manly things that manly men do. No introverts here buddy.
Eventually he got bored with everyone else and somewhere in
Northern Pakistan sought me out and attempted normal conversation. And as we
got nearer to Nepal we became close friends.
In Kashmir, they found what he and Harry came for,
hand-carved walnut chests and artefacts and stayed behind in Sri Nagar to do
deals and arrange shipments back to Toronto. We carried on to Kathmandu.
But he wanted to stay in touch and months later after I was
released from the Hospital for Tropical Diseases and finally returned home,
amongst the piles and piles of post and unpaid bills were three or four Airmail
letters from him. I hadn’t realised that I had made that much impact on him,
although he must have known what had happened to me because every passenger on
the Iraq Airways 747 was checked over by the health authority and there were
people on that jet who would have reported back to him what had happened. Of
course, he couldn’t know if I was dead or alive.
Anyway, anyway, anyway he came over to Newcastle about a
year later with Mike, another friend, another teacher in his school. Mike was a
really nice guy, like normal Canadians. They helped us move house; it just so
happened that the weekend they arrived was the weekend we were moving and they
were amazingly helpful; two brawny Canadians humping washing machines up and
down the stairs. Never forgotten it and eternally grateful, despite what
happened next.
They stayed, I don’t know, a week? Can’t remember and we
all got on great. Harry was still running the shop they had started [Harricks],
still importing timber furniture from Kashmir. Then they went off to London for
their second week. He asked me to visit them; I think he and his [brand new]
wife were living in Mississauga with their two kids. He had gone back into
teaching.
We went the following year. Took our then ten year old
daughter with us. They were so, so pleased to see us. They had made-up a couple
of rooms for us, one of which had a view of the lake.
Their daughter was cute, a little too cute, a daddy’s girl
with her blonde hair done up in elaborate ringlets [4-years old]. Their son who
as I remember was about twelve, was a quiet, reserved child that Rick almost
never addressed except to chastise him for doing something ‘wrong’. Okay, we
were only staying three nights and we were their guests and, and . . .
First night, the boy was sent to his room about 7.30pm and
off he trudged upstairs.
We watched TV and chatted about old-times and drank a little
wine then retired for the night. It seemed a strange relationship: the wife was
a bit dense, four steps below Rick on the social scale. But each to his own.
Maybe they were having great sex; it really matters to some people. Having said
which, I have lost count over the years of the men I have known who seek
intelligent conversation amongst other guys down at the gym or the club and
don’t even consider that they might get it at home.
Next day the boy just wasn’t around: he was still in his
room. Well, he was almost an archetypical American
Teenager and couldn’t surely be expected to have any interest in us so we
thought nothing of it. Rick took us out and about, into the City and out on the
lake. We went to dinner that night with friendly Mike and his latest girlfriend
and some others; had a lovely time. Everyone brought their offspring and we had
a balmy North American evening, with North American food and intelligent North
American conversation. Rick’s son stayed in his room at home.
My wife thought there was something amiss but . . . and
perhaps I didn’t want to dig too deep . . . I shrugged it off; anyway we were
leaving the next day. The atmosphere changed later the following day however,
Louise . . . I have just remembered his wife’s name . . . was getting ratty.
Rick did nothing. He was actually a fantastic cook, probably the best
non-professional I have ever met: give him say, an orange, two carrots and a
chicken breast and he would produce the most mouthwatering meal from just those
three ingredients. But he didn’t clean or help make the beds; didn’t even run
the dishwasher which even the most shiftless men usually do. I think she was
sick of us, complete strangers to her, hanging around, not contributing while
she was left to clear up after us. Rick didn’t do nothing: he played and
interacted with the child: his child. It turned out that the boy was her son
from a previous marriage and it turned out that Rick wanted nothing whatsoever
to do with him which is why he was effectively a lodger. Extraordinary on
almost every level you can think of: that Louise stood for it, that the boy
seemed relatively well-balanced, that an intelligent man like Rick could
inflict such cruelty on another human being, let alone his wife’s son. That he couldn’t
empathise with his wife’s anguish. On and on. There wasn’t any attempt to hide
or cover-up the situation just because we were there that I could see but we
both strongly suspected there was actual violence when we weren’t. The kid was
terrified of him.
God, were we glad to get away that afternoon.
She suffered and I am being unkind in suggesting she was
dense, she must have been in constant torment. Once, we saw a flash of regret
not only for things she longed for in the present but for things she had longed
for in the past but even if she had wanted to talk, it wouldn’t have been us
she would have talked to.
Perhaps the prism of nostalgia really does eclipse all . .
. when it comes to relationships. Perhaps it would have been better to try and
get him on his own and hear his side. At the evening drinks party, nice-guy
Mike whispered that despite everything he loved the guy and he adored Louise
and didn’t want to lose their friendship.
But, how did I get this guy and the subsequent friendship
so wrong? Opposites attract? Or ‘a friend
complements us for qualities we lack?’ Or again, is there always an
inherent inequality in friendship?
Nothing much to add to this. Needless to say, we lost
contact.
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