Perry

 

 

My best friend Perry is dead.

I didn’t do it; I came home and found him that way.

 

It had been a regular, limp Tuesday and I’d had nothing exciting to report, not like last week when Katy offered to make me that cup of tea, but I’d looked forward to seeing him anyway. We’d always have a chat when I got home. Debriefing, Perry called it. Finally falling through the front door, head buzzing with all those meaningless numbers and the tapping of keys, and he’d be there in the kitchen waiting for me. Hey there, kiddo. Long time no see, he’d say. He always said that, even though we saw each other every morning as I rushed through breakfast.

“Bye Perry.” That’s me, running out of the house to catch the bus. The bus stop is only a few streets away from our flat but I manage to miss it and be late for work half the time anyway. Sometimes I don’t actually miss it; the bus comes but it’s too full of people so I don’t get on because I’d have to stand. I’m the kind of guy who’s always in the way, no matter where I stand. I’m not fat or anything, just awkward. I try to flatten myself against the stairwell when people are getting off or coming aboard but it will still end in an embarrassing step-dance of ‘scuse me – oh, sorry – I need to get off – oh, sorry. Once when it was really jammed, a lady with a pushchair was about to get off and I was blocking the door. So I stepped out of the bus while she manoeuvred her way through the crowd – and as soon as her feet touched the pavement, the driver closed the doors and drove off. I’m pretty sure he was laughing. “Hey!” I said, although it was pointless. I swore a few times too - I mean, it was pretty obvious what I’d been doing, the driver knew I wanted to get back on, and now I was stranded about ten stops from work. The lady with the pushchair glared at me like I was a menace to society. I tried to explain about the laughing driver but she disappeared down the road.

People don’t like to listen to your problems.

They like telling you about their problems though. When I eventually got to work I was forty-five minutes late so I knocked on Lynn’s Manager door and started to explain about the bus, but she sighed and held up her palm for silence. “Spare me the details, Andrew. Just go and sit down and get some work done. I’ll make a note.” Then yesterday, when Lynn turned up late, she subjected the whole office to her long-winded tale of how two buses were missed out. She expected us to listen and to care and for everyone to comment on her being a victim of poor time-keeping. Well, I didn’t care. What I wanted to say was, “Spare us the details Lynn. We’ll make a note.” But I didn’t because I’m a desperate coward who needs his job, so I just pulled a sympathetic face like everyone else.

 

Perry had to conduct a lengthy debriefing the day that happened, the thing with the lady and the pushchair and me being stranded.

It doesn’t matter now, he’d soothed.

“What if I get the same driver again tomorrow? He’ll know. He’ll think to himself, there’s that twat, the one who couldn’t get back on the bus.”

Let him.

“I hate him.”

It might have been an accident; he might not have understood what you were doing. Let it go.

“He knew.”

Fuck him. Have a drink, amigo.

Hands shaking, I poured and raised my glass to Perry.

“Cheers, mate.”

 

I think Perry worried about my drinking. He never said anything about it but I could sometimes see unspoken concern in his eyes, like he wanted to say:

Drew, most people have milk with their cereal.

 

They say a true friend is someone who points out your flaws. Well, I disagree.

A true friend is someone who is aware of your flaws but doesn’t mention them because he knows that the rest of the world is already talking against you. Like at work. It’s no secret that I go to the pub on my lunch-break. I’ve overheard the gossip, the women in the office speculating. What they don’t know is that my top drawer is full of mints and chewing gum and my bottom drawer, beneath the files, is where I keep the hip flask. If I die suddenly, killed by a lorry or whatever, I suppose they’ll find it all out; someone will be clearing out my desk and go “Oh my god, look at this!” And everyone will gather round and spend an hour telling each other how they should have guessed, how they always knew...

I’m not, by the way. An alcoholic, I mean. Just the two pints for lunch; I keep the hip flask there for emergencies. I like to take a discreet swig now and then, when the urge to stab everyone in the room rises so high it reaches my throat. I burn it out with cheap whisky. It feels good to have a secret; a private fuck you within arm’s reach. When Lynn sends back a whole report because she doesn’t like the font; when the women spend longer than I can comprehend talking about a celebrity’s alleged infidelity; when the blokes push and shove each other’s sex lives around like pubescent boys in a changing-room…

Have a drink, amigo.

 

Sometimes at work I get scared that I might be invisible. I’ll say, “Has anyone got such-and-such file open?” and nobody looks over. So I’ll clear my throat and call out, a bit louder, “I can’t get into such-and-such file. Has anybody got it open, please?” I hate that ‘please’, but it has to be done. Still nobody answers or looks round. So I have to get up and walk around the office, peering over shoulders until I find out who has the file open. Sometimes I don’t do the walk because I’m too freaked out by the idea that one of them might pass through me, like I’m a ghost. I check that my hand can’t pass through solid objects by patting my desk or the printer. Other times, I contemplate getting their attention.

A scream…a heart attack…a round of bullets…

 

Perry reassured me that I wasn’t invisible. He’d greet me as I entered the kitchen.

Hey there, kiddo. Long time no see.

“Ain’t that the truth. It’s been a long, crappy day. If I could quit and still afford to feed us both, I would.”

Sorry for being a freeloader, man.

“You’re not. It’s cool. If a burglar came, you’d be here.”

Not a lot I could do about it.

“You’d try though. It’s the thought that counts, right?”

I’ll drink to that.

“Good thinking. Me too.”

Pour two whiskeys. One for me, and one for Perry.

 

Perry was fortunate - he didn’t have a job. He lived with me for three years and in all that time he never had to get up early for work. In fact, he rarely left the house. Perry wasn’t a fan of the outside world; he preferred to hang out in the flat with his own thoughts, awaiting my return.

Whether he was lonely during those hours, I couldn’t say. Often, on summer evenings, we would sit out on the balcony and watch the world pass by below, oblivious of our gaze. Perry would sometimes turn his back on it all (even when I pointed out funny things I’d seen in a whisper, like a dog getting hit in the snout by a toddler’s wildly-flung Frisbee).

I don’t know whether Perry turned away out of contempt or because he felt a little overwhelmed by how big it all seemed, compared to the familiar interior of our flat.

 

I’ve never been very good at making friends. Even when I was a kid and Mum would set me loose in a playground, I’d end up sitting on top of a climbing frame by myself. I remember going to the park one day when I was about eight; there was a group of kids my age, chasing some younger kids across the wooden bridge from one platform to another.

“What are we doing?” I asked, scrabbling up the ladder to get to them.

“The prisoners have escaped! They’re stealing our cave!”

“Right,” I said, and joined the soldiers or whatever they were supposed to be. It was all very vague and boisterous and after about ten minutes I saw that the entire game would consist of us bundling the younger kids into the ‘prison’, waiting for them to break out, chasing them and then doing it all over again. Eager for some variation, I sought out our leader, who was the tallest and had a tendency to drag the little kids too roughly and make them cry.

“Let them have the cave! We can get away on the boat,” I suggested.

“What boat?” he said.

“My boat. Look, it’s just over there.”

I pointed to the big see-saw, which had a raft-like middle.

“OK,” he said. “Go and get the boat ready.”

I made a courageous jump from the platform onto the dirt floor of the playground, pretended to swim towards the see-saw and climbed onto it. I patted the sides a few times, which felt ready enough to me, and called over to the others: “The boat’s ready, men!”

They ignored me.

“Hey, quick!” I shouted. “The boat’s ready, it’s going out to sea!”

I think I heard one of say, “Bye, then.”

So I sat and floated miserably, trying valiantly to make it look like fun but basically feeling an idiot. Eventually, some teenagers who wanted to sit on the see-saw to smoke pushed me off it and I slunk away to find my mum.

 

The office environment feels not unlike that day in the park: stuck at my desk, drifting about in a pretend sea of busy importance full of sharks and pirates. Everyone has a gang to play with, except me. I’m sitting alone, sifting dirt and bark through my fingers; close enough to see and hear all the fun but not allowed to join in. I do try sometimes; a bunch of them will be doubled over laughing about something as I pass by and I’ll ask them what the joke is but they always say it’s a private joke or too hard to explain or ‘the moment’s passed’.

Bad timing, I guess.

When Katy offered to make me a cup of tea, I thought maybe it was the start of a friendship. She doesn’t seem very popular either; she doesn’t read glossy trash like the other women and she gets angry when the men try to objectify her, even though they’re ‘just being friendly’. Sometimes she comes into the pub on her lunch-break as well but she doesn’t sit with me, she goes off in a corner and reads a book while she sips at half a cider.

I asked Katy, when she brought my cup of tea over, if she’d like to go together some time – to the pub. She didn’t give a proper answer. She said maybe and laughed a little.

I haven’t mentioned it since because it would mean going up to her desk and that would feel too formal. I’ve considered leaving the office at the same time she does so that we’d be going out the door together, but the trouble is Katy tends to take her lunch at 13:30 and I’m normally in the pub for 13:05 so it would mean waiting quite a while longer. I could do it, but…

But what? Perry had asked.

“Nothing. It’s just my routine, so…”

There was that concern in his eyes again.

 

There’s no expression in them now. I’m looking at his lifeless body and my face feels tight but my brain feels soggy. I don’t know what to do. I know I can’t call his family, and if I called anyone in mine there would be a lot of questions. Who is Perry? How long has he been living with you? Why are you telling us about his passing?

Respectively: my best friend, three years, because I’m stricken with grief and don’t know what else to do. I can’t handle the idea of laying him to rest the traditional way. I’m thinking that perhaps I should try to bury him, perform a private ceremony - but I don’t have a garden, just that concrete balcony, where we used to sit in the sunshine. Aloud, I say “Shit, Perry,” and make myself jump. Then I take a deep breath and say, “I’m sorry, mate.” This time I don’t jump, because I knew I was going to speak. I can’t leave him like that forever. He can’t stay dead, in our flat. The longer I leave it, the harder it will be.

Leaning over the kitchen counter, I look down at his poor bloated belly, his gaping mouth. I push every emotion to the bottom, right down to my feet, so that it all solidifies into resolve.

Then I scoop him up gently in both hands, wishing against all odds that he would jerk to life upon being touched. He doesn’t though so, hands dripping, I carry him through the flat and into the bathroom. Lifting up the toilet lid, I see that the bowl isn’t quite clean, so I transfer Perry to my left hand and with my right I grab the toilet brush and scrub it back to white. I lower him gently into the water at the bottom. He bobs a little.

“Sending you to fish heaven now, Perry. OK? Hope it’s a good place. I - I’ll miss you.”

I lower the lid, then suddenly think of something to tell him, the last thing I ever will, so I lift it back up again and call down to him, “By the way, this is the bathroom. Whenever I said I had to take a shi – shower, this is where I went. Goodbye, mate.”

I flush. Don’t let go of the handle until the gushing noise fades. Peek under the lid.

Perry is gone.

 

I pace the flat aimlessly, avoiding the kitchen because his tank seems so sad and empty.

I don’t know what to do. What would Perry say to do?

 

 

 

Have a drink, amigo.