Nothing Compares to You (1990)

John sat and read the novel, the same fucking novel, the one he’d been reading for the last two weeks during lunchtime at work.

He was just like the bloke in the book he thought. The only difference being was that the bloke in the book actually got off his arse and did something about it, actually told the lassie that he fancied her, and he wanted to have an affair with her. He didn’t really give a fuck whether she was married or not, he just wanted her, whatever. Ok, and the bloke in the book was a teacher, not an office worker.

John sat all weekend brooding over things, sitting in his flat smoking his rollies, drinking cider, attempting to make up stories and poems which he believed to be on a par with those in the books he was currently reading from the library: - William McIlvanney, Alasdair Gray, Janice Galloway, and James Kelman. Every now and then he would write about a girl and in his mind,  she always had ginger, possibly ‘auburn’ hair, like Kelly, the girl from work who he fancied, they got on great at work, colleagues and all that, a bit of mutual flirtation in the office,  but he wanted a bit more than that, and he suspected that maybe she did too. The problem was that neither of them was prepared to address it, to make a commitment, he was too afraid to make an arse of himself, and of course she was married. John spent every Friday and Saturday night getting pissed beyond all coherence and alienating his mates in the process.

There was a point in the Friday evening when he had gone for a piss and had really felt like the bloke he’d been reading about, pissed out of his head and raging against the world.

Kelly had been spending her weekends alone for the last few months.

Charlie, her husband had been working down south and called often, though she sensed that he was always intent on curtailing his calls as if there were someone else with him vying for his attention. They’d been married a couple of years and in that time, they had hardly seen one another due to his work commitments. Friends had commented that Kelly had lost her vivacity, her joie de vivre, since she got married, that he had sucked her dry as a vampire would, but she had dismissed this as she believed herself to be blindly in love with Charlie. Maybe that was is it, in love, with the emphasis on the word ‘blindly’. She sat in the front room of their flat in darkness, sadly contemplating the words of the song playing on the stereo, the singer’s aching, emotional vocal echoed in the room as she declared to the world that ‘nothing compares to you’. Kelly thought of Charlie, allegedly earning lots of money down in England, and John, the guy she sat next to at work, she had bought the Sinead O’Connor single at lunchtime on Friday and she had met John in the street on the way back to the office. John was a really nice guy, and she was surprised that he hadn’t been ‘snapped up’, he was always interested in people and someone who always had time for people. A real dependable guy, he was good to work with too.

 The song came to its end and she switched off the stereo,

The phone rang at 9pm, Charlie with his usual Saturday evening call, he didn’t say much, but she could have sworn she heard a female voice giggling as if drunk and urging back to bed perhaps?

Maybe she was too suspicious, maybe she was right.

After the briefest of phone calls, she decided it wasn’t worth it wasting tears on Charlie if he was playing away, wasn’t’ that what they called it, ‘playing away’?

She found herself wishing that she had married someone like John, not a great looker, but a dependable likeable bloke.

She didn’t usually touch alcohol, but tonight would be different, she would have a couple of large ones, home measures of course.

Taking the key from the sideboard drawer, she unlocked the drinks cabinet and opened one of Charlie’s precious malt whiskies, Isle of Jura it was called.  She poured herself a large measure and threw it back in two gulps. It was not bad, didn’t burn too much on the throat. She had another and was soon asleep in her armchair. The stereo was still switched on, the small orange pilot light presenting a small beacon in the darkness as the central heating system clicked its way through the night. Kelly was out for the count, her brain anesthetised from all thoughts of her husbands’ affairs, in fact from all thought in total.

John, on the other hand, had been out.

He left the pub alone leaving Mike and Andy at the bar, had staggered up Union Street, past umpteen takeaways, police officers and fellow drunks. Outside the chip shop, he weaved in and out of the crowd, who sustained with their greasy chip suppers and bellies full of alcohol, were awaiting their taxis home.

He was halfway home when his thoughts turned to Kelly, how far was her house from here, he knew she lived in Culter and there was no way that he was going out there at two in the morning.

He walked unsteadily home, finally reaching the door of his top floor flat without making too much noise.

He unlocked the door and closed it quietly, stripped off and rendered himself to the coldness of the bed.

He was rudely awakened on Sunday lunchtime as his neighbour banged her door as she admitted her elderly visitors, she chattered incessantly and loudly so you could hear her through the walls.

His head was aching, and his stomach had taken on a life of its own and was moving faster than the body which held it. This pain and gurgling in the guts were just too much, he needed to go to the loo. What a fucking state to get into, feeling like shit and needing one too.

He would have his usual Sunday breakfast, a cup of black coffee and Two Anadins, not necessarily in that order, go for his Sunday papers and generally do bugger all for the rest of the day, maybe give his folks a call on the phone, or maybe even go around to see them. The folks only lived around the corner, it wasn’t as if it was that big an effort.

Then he would try and write some stories again, he at really did think they were shaping up well, even in the sober light of a Sunday morning.

Monday came around, darkness gave way to a very clear dawn, orchestrated by the twittering of the birds. Kelly as usual, was at the bus stop at eight. The same people she encountered every day were there; the old withered woman who bought her cheap whisky at the supermarket, and the fat bald headed man who worked somewhere around Holburn Street and always said a polite ‘Good Morning’ on the bus before drifting off into the world of his own thoughts.

John legged it down the road, fucking shite, back to work, he thought.

He entered the mailroom where the other clerks were slitting all the envelopes with paper knives. Rebecca and Gary were there as was Kelly beaming broadly. He sat down next to her and began opening the envelopes.

‘How was your weekend?’, he asked.

‘Oh …. quiet’

‘And You?’

‘Oh, you know, just the usual rounds of pubbing and clubbing’

What he really wanted to say was ‘On Saturday, I got really pissed and I’ve been thinking about you all weekend, I was going to ……’, then he let it pass.

‘John’, she said smiling.

‘What?’

‘Oh, it’s just that….’

She stopped as she decided her comment would be better said later at tea break time.

Silence descended upon the room, as a hugely fat woman called Val, who was the Head of Department entered, it was like being back at school when she was around.