Leonard and Hungry Paul by Ronan Hession

Author:Ronan Hession
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bluemoose Books Ltd
Published: 2019-01-25T09:07:00+00:00

Chapter 14: Happy Meal

When Leonard got off the phone he felt an uncomfortable mixture of guilt and betrayal, having let Hungry Paul down, his best and only true friend. A man who had stood by him through everything and who had always reserved a space in his (admittedly quiet) life just for Leonard. 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.

The only problem was that Leonard had discovered a flaw in their way of life. It was fine so long as everything else stayed the same. With a stable home and work life, a life of depth and meaning, it was certainly possible to preserve a sanctuary of gentleness through their special friendship. But once life had changed, once the people in your life started slipping away from you, as inevitably happens, then north, south, east and west all move from their fixed points on the compass. You are left bereft, with a choice of whether to enter the world, with all the risks that entails, or retreating from it. 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 busy—or at least busier—life, quiet reflection provides resonance to experience. But to deprive life of experiences deliberately and to hide from its realities was not special. It was just another form of fear that led to a life-limiting loneliness that accumulated and accumulated until it became so big that it blocked up the front door, drowned out conversations and put other people behind soundproof glass. 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, like that man he used to see in the supermarket, muttering to himself with egg down the front of his jumper. In fact, he had discovered that he was less critical of people when he allowed them in. People, it turns out, weren’t so bad. At least that was true of some people. 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.

All of this left him in a quandary with his best friend. He wasn’t sure whether Hungry Paul had made the same leaps. What if Hungry Paul just planned to womble from day to day for ever, unaware that his universe was shrinking? It pained Leonard to think that he might be outgrowing Hungry Paul, as though their friendship had become a reverse tontine, where the last man standing was the loser.

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