A Short History of Falling by Joe Hammond

Author:Joe Hammond
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2019-08-07T13:00:00+00:00

Despite her being relatively young, this was so clearly the woman in question, and such a perfectly concise indictment of her crimes, but I lacked the confidence to report her to the appropriate prosecuting body. So I continued like this, month after month, year after year. It was a vast expanse of time that passed – a period of time in which I could reasonably have qualified in a number of quite advanced professions, or mastered several musical instruments; I could have built a large house for myself with my own garden shed or, a little more adventurously, trekked across a continent or two. But instead of considering these possibilities I maintained a clerical job with a hole-punch and a lever arch file and, despite my frustrations and suspicions, continued to attend my appointments inside the garden shed.

*

By the fifth year I was living in a bedsit at the top of a vast Victorian town house divided into twenty or so other bedsits. And by this time, it could almost have been something Alexandre Dumas might have written – an epic love story, with religious overtones, about a man in a tower wearing an iron mask; whereas I was a boy in a bedsit with the curtains closed, masturbating into a tissue twice a day. In fact, this had been my third or fourth such room, but I liked the anonymity this one provided, and also the advantage of the single bathroom I shared with a resident who was never at home. I stored food in my room to avoid using communal kitchen cupboards and timed my runs to the kitchen fridge to avoid other residents. On weekends, and particularly religious holidays, I was especially careful to manage my provisions in such a way that I could remain completely out of view. On the previous Christmas I had been caught with my head in the fridge by a joyous Spanish couple who vigorously persuaded me to share their lunch with them but who then, after prolonged exposure to my company, lost so much blood to their faces and vital organs that I was able to retreat carefully away, thirty minutes or so later, without the three of us even needing to say a word to each other – as if I had walked backwards out of a still photo.

During the long hours I spent in that room I watched a lot of television. On Saturdays, a reliable segment of the middle of the day would be consumed by the build-up to the 3 p.m. football kick-offs and the subsequent post-match analysis. It was fortuitous that, at about this time, Channel 4 started broadcasting live Italian football on Sundays and this offered the ideal equivalent match-day experience. Both days of the weekend I used this central sporting chunk as a kind of tent pole to my waking hours and, either side of this, I managed the preparation and consumption of breakfast, lunch and dinner – laid out on a tray upon my lap.

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