This is The Eureka Project. I’m James Mitchell, I write advertising strategy and fiction, and I’m determined to make them play nice.
Hello. Been a while, hasn’t it? There’s a lot going on. A few big projects are coming to an end, I have some exciting bits of news that I can’t quite talk about yet, and I’m working on a very meaty post to share with you. All of which is to say, I’m sorry for not writing to you in the last few weeks. But I’ve made a commitment not to say anything unless I have something to say, and just enough time to say in a good way.
But you’ve felt the chill. You’ve looked out the window, from inside the window, and you’ve noticed that October is here. Uh oh. This year I’m testing a theory: the cold five months of the year are not inherently bad; it’s just that we don’t do them properly. We try to act the way we acted in August, and then act surprised the Winter makes for a poor Summer.
(Your homework: what good things does Autumn and Winter mean to you, personally, and how can you get more of them?)
For me, they mean more story-time. The original cold-weather entertainment. Next week, I’m off to Scotland for a writing retreat, so I’m definitely in the story mood. In that spirit, this week’s Eureka is a short story.
I really like this one, “Pairing.” It was shortlisted for the Bath Short Story Prize 2018, so I travelled to Bath to read the opening. Let’s start there, then seamlessly segue into the rest…
Pairing, by James Mitchell
…‘It’s music,’ I tell Mark, after work in the table football pub. Sloppy language, again: it’s ‘after work’, but it’s also four o’clock, because my class had sports in the afternoon, and Mark, well, Mark is trying to tell me he has just been made redundant from his sound engineering job, and so we have come out in daylight so he can blow off steam. That’s the intent, but I can’t help talking about this amazing item that’s come to me. I pull it out of my blazer pocket, where my fingers have been tracing the mould lines in its plastic, and hold it in my open palm for him to see.
‘An earbud that plays music,’ Mark says, ‘Amazing. The world must know.’ He reaches out to take it, but my hand jerks back and closed.
‘No, it’s playing music now. It’s been playing the music I love ever since I picked it up. I snuck listens between lessons. D’Angelo. The Planets Suite, Venus, not Mars. Miles Davis at lunch-break. Bon Iver as I came in. As though someone were playing just for me.’
(Even as I recite this list, I’m editing it like a record collection on date night. As a matter of record, I entered the pub to Biology by Girls Aloud, and I know that compositionally speaking, this is a good piece, but the two of us have had these debates before.)
Mark is expressionless until the end of my list, then he tilts his head. He is humouring me the way he humours the games of his two-year-old son, Tibor, who pretends to be a sea cucumber and is supposed to call me Uncle.
‘And who would be doing that?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But they’ve got taste.’ I shift forward in my seat and hold the bud against his left ear.
He squints as though trying to read a sign across the street, then he says, ‘I can’t hear anything. Without the bud it’s paired to, there’s no way it would work. The Bluetooth Class 2 technology standard just doesn’t hold up over ten metres.’ I scan the tables, but the ten metres of daytime pub around us belong to two backpackers, a uni student and a homeless man, his homeless dog pissing on the leg of the football table. The girl restocking olives at the bar? Mark sees me look, and his smile cuts quick and sour.
‘Maybe tinnitus is tricking you. What are you now, 34?’
‘It’s just noisy in here,’ I say, ‘you can’t hear it.’ I put it back in my blazer pocket. But I keep my fingers wrapped around it until I leave.
On the bus home I pretend I’m on a conference call, so that people don’t think the one ear bud situation is any weirder than it has to be, by nodding. But it’s only five, and there is nobody to impress on the lower deck except a pensioner who uses her phone with her index finger, and as we leave town it feels like I’ve slipped onto a conference call with Sade. She sings nothing will come, nothing will come, nothing will come between us, and I nod in acknowledgment. Is the pensioner also listening to Sade, in her good ear? Then she’s gone, and then it’s me and Carly Rae Jepsen, picking at the rubber sealant round the windows. Never really liked her work, overproduced as Mark would have said, but now I’m listening so hard we ride right past the stop near my house.
The next stop doesn’t appear until the park beyond the supermarket. A developer has dug out two great bowls of silt just touching each other to create an hourglass-shaped wetland, with a dirt path circling them and crossing itself in an infinity loop, all as a shared front garden for the four ‘modern vertical living habitats’ that I see through my bedroom window each morning. The people that get off here won’t be back from their city jobs for a few hours, so I ding the bell to have a look in peace.
The bus drives away with its suite of sounds, and me and Arvo Pärt push open the gate. The inside of the park is edged with a neat row of trees, and diagonal sunlight is squeezed through narrow spaces in their leaves, hitting my face with a flat heat as though the squeezing has made light solid. But the person whose earbud this really is, the person wearing the right one and guiding the music for both of us, if they were looking at that same light they wouldn’t try to torture it into shape with language like mine. They would just say, well, I don’t know what because I can’t imagine things I can’t imagine, but the phrase would do no more damage to the moment than framing it to be hung up in memory. I turn to take the long way round towards the wooden infinity bridge, and Grace Jones struts after me.
A gravelly crunch fades in through my bare ear, then someone overtakes me in riding boots, making for another gate, dog trailing. It’s her. It can’t be her. The other person listening to My Jamaican Guy by a suburban pond on the fifth evening of autumn, she would walk in syncopation, head bobbing like a stork nipping a crust from under the nose of the duck it was meant for. Bread causes obesity in ducks; she would pick up facts like that and they would worry her at night, and I would laugh it off. But then I’d see the look in her eye, and I wouldn’t laugh it off any more, and we’d google it, and spend the evening learning about waterfowl gut health, and algae-induced hypoxia in ponds, and then it would be one in the morning with all the dinner places shut, so we’d eat the takeaway left in the fridge; duck pancakes.
I don’t know how she looks. But I know how she looks at me.
We both bite our nails, and we both try to get better every birthday. But while I undo shoelaces by jamming a biro into the heart of the knot, she will have learned cleverness in her fingers and she’ll use it to help us both. I will open her jars of olives, and I’ll show her the hot water trick for when I’m not around. We will feel weird talking about it, but it will turn out that we have similar ideas about how much time two people should spend around each other. We’ll laugh about mutual friends who have been sucked into each other’s worlds too fast and lost all their passions, and named their kid Tibor, even as we scroll through a baby name blog. We’ll suggest the bad ones, knowing the other gets the joke.
I will feel safe telling her about the late nights, the foolish summer, cocaine in the evenings and coconut water in the mornings. We’ll laugh about the ones that got away, and I’ll tell her about the one I got away from. She’ll tell me about the marks she carries too, and when one of us says something we both want to stuff back in, we’ll name the birds, balance beam along the fallen trees, leave an origami note on the gate behind us.
Vivaldi. Chance the Rapper. I’ll ask her how her day was, she’ll ask me how my class was, what I taught, what I learned.
We’ll spend our first year agreeing on what matters, and we’ll enjoy everything that can be wrung out of an autumn, like how even saying the word au-tumn makes your mouth move as though you’re eating something brothy, and how nothing accompanies the haughty dopiness of a moorhen like the chorus of Wuthering Heights, and I’ll be surprised that we’re so silly and so serious by the end of our very first circuit round the infinity pond, to the bridge where paths cross.
Most surprisingly of all, I will enjoy the silences we make. The damp quiet that silts over our music as I hold my earbud out above the water and the mallards gather under it. The tower blocks, expecting. Forever after, people will ask us how we met and we will fight over who gets to tell the story, but in the end she will always win, and she will always say, I was walking along listening to half a song, and the last sun lay on the water like coming home, and I saw a man about to set a tadpole free.
The End.
A good friend said to me “I know you write fiction, and I like it, but the only writing I’ve ever read of yours is Eureka.” Good Friend: I have specifically tricked you into crossing the venn. Heh.
Everyone else: would you like more stories from me? I think it’s a nice thing to turn up in the inbox. Some of them are available online on my new author website, (which is meant to be a nice lil space of calm, feedback welcome), but many aren’t. As they come out of their various publishing contracts, maybe I’ll put them up. And if you know someone who loves stories, do them a favour and pass this along.
That’s Eureka for a couple of weeks. I’ll be back with Scotland pictures, and maybe some words from the XR frontline. Take care.
-James
Been sent this by a Good Friend? Want more? Sign up here: