This is the Life by Joseph O'Neill

Author:Joseph O'Neill [O’Neill, Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780007383726
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1991-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

One of the things preying on my mind in the time before the hearing of the pre-trial review was Susan. Her absence after our encounter was a relief at first, and then, as it persisted, disquieting. When over a week had passed without a word I decided, for my peace of mind, to contact her at work. I was worried that something might have happened. The problem was that when she answered the telephone it struck me that I had nothing to say – or no specific information to convey, at least.

‘I was just wondering how you were,’ I said.

‘I’m fine,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m also quite busy.’ She was eating something and making chewing noises as she spoke.

I hesitated. The occasion was more difficult than I had foreseen. ‘I see,’ I said finally. When she said nothing to this I added, ‘Well, all right then. I’ll see you around.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Susan said. ‘I don’t think we can take things very much further, do you?’

‘I … Well, you may be right.’

‘Goodbye, James.’

So that was that. Exactly what she was thinking I found hard to imagine, but I did understand her wish simply to put a stop to things. It was time to put us behind us once and for all. We had reached, as they say, the end of the road. Now some roads, like tributaries running into rivers, end by merging into other, larger roads, taking on their names and their bright destinations. My road with Susan, though, had not led anywhere special. It had just petered out.

By contrast, the Donovan road has side-tracked me into a wilderness. Lost, I think, is the only fair way to describe my present situation, lost amongst alien places.

Am I exaggerating? Not one bit. Whereas at night, when I am at home reliving the past year, the world is clear and familiar and real, every morning my office grows increasingly strange. At first, when I began to recount these episodes, I was deeply and organically meshed into my workplace. The ecosystem in operation – the social pyramids, the networks of understandings, the unspoken expectations, the subtle pecking orders, the position I occupied in all of this – I was on intricate terms with. The workload? I took care of that with my eyes closed. But with the passage of the days, a foreignness has introduced itself into my surroundings. I do not know where I am any more. The material placed before me has made less and less sense, until, finally, when I went into work today, the letters melted into hieroglyphs. Now the voices that come through on the telephone are speaking pure mumbo-jumbo. The office furniture seems to have changed, too. Now I am uncomfortable in my chair (my chair, where I have swivelled, slept and worked for years, where my body has indented its very contours!); the nibs on my pens are either too thick or too scratchy; the papers on my desk give off an odd dazzle

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