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Some days, you eat the bear. And some days, well, the bear, he eats you.
This has been one of those weeks where the bear wore a bib. A blocked week. I left my Thoughtballoons strip to the very last minute, and paid for it in the comments. And as for Friday Flash, inspiration failed to strike.
Rather than force it, or leave you without my weekend sermon, here's another old Elephant Words story, dusted off from 2007. Enjoy... and if you can't enjoy, endure. For me...
Have you seen my shirt?
“Which shirt?”
You know perfectly well which shirt. Which mean you must also know where it is. Must in fact be responsible for where it is. Something else you know: how much that shirt means to me. It used to mean something to you too.
1995. Like a million other sixteen year-olds before me, suddenly I’ve got this hard-on for individuality. I don’t want to listen to the same music as everybody else, or read the same books. I certainly don’t want to wear the same clothes. There was this odd little second hand shop in the back of the Corn Exchange. I was in there every Saturday, spending the peanuts I made stacking shelves Friday nights in Asda. Most of the time, I was their only customer.
Antique cuckoo clocks. Dusty old Serge Gainsbourg records. Coffee mugs with women on the side who lost their clothes when you filled them with liquid. (There’s a joke there somewhere, but I’m not in the mood.) Authentic Japanese Godzilla posters. In the window: a vintage 48 key concertina, a working Hornby 00 Gauge train set, and a French policeman’s hat like the one Claude Rains wore in Casablanca. A tag claimed it was the exact same hat. I never believed it.
Of course I remember the day I bought the shirt. It was the afternoon prior to our fourth date. Our third, three nights earlier, ended later than we expected. Just me and you and the swallows, we had Marigold Park all to ourselves. If the rain hadn’t stopped us, that could have been our night. We ran home laughing. I could see your parents in the front room watching telly, trying not to glance out into the street. You made such a big deal about kissing me goodnight. I knew it was for their benefit. I’ll say this for you, though: you knew how to keep a bloke interested. Do you remember what you said to me that night?
“Fuck, Porter – you’re going to get so lucky this weekend.”
It was the first time I'd ever experienced spontaneous human combustion. Good job it was raining. I walked home in another dimension. The shirt I had on got soaked, ruined. I couldn’t wear it two dates running anyway. I needed something new. Special. I worked overtime Friday, on the frozen food. My fingers lost all sensation by the end of the shift.
The thing is, there wasn’t anything special about that shirt. Not to look at it. Just a plain white thing with short sleeves and no collar. It wasn’t what I was looking for. I can’t tell you why I bought it. When I held it to my chest in the mirror... it just felt right.
Saturday came and your parents were up in the Lakes. You made fresh avocado salad, and we split a Bounty while listening to Nick Drake. It was the first really hot day of the summer, and after tea we walked up through the cornfields behind your house, looking for a place to set down our blanket. I started to take off my shirt, but you put your hand on my chest and told me not to.
“Keep it on.”
The thing is, your first time’s supposed to be all weird and hesitant and bungling… I don’t know about you, but that’s what I expected. When it wasn’t, when it… I mean, where do you go from perfection? Afterwards, you flicked a greenfly off my collar and told me you loved me. I reckon astronauts could see me from space that night.
When I got home, I hung the shirt on the curtain rail to catch the breeze from my bedroom window. I was worried Mum might smell us on it when she threw it in the wash. Except, by morning, I’d made up my mind. That shirt wasn’t ever going in the wash. I know you don’t believe in such things, but sometimes I think that’s where the magic came from. The magic that kept us together.
I took the plastic bag off one of my dad’s suits, just back from the dry cleaners, and rolled it over the shirt. I had this crazy romantic notion I’d get it out again in fifty years and wear it for our golden anniversary, but I needed it sooner than that. After we tried and failed to get into the same university... I had to take something of you with me to Bath. You hear about all those couples who split up while they’re away at college, I didn’t want that to be us. So whenever I got lonely, whenever some crazy girl turned my head with a look or a laugh or a keen knowledge of Chomsky… I’d go back to my room and unwrap that shirt, put on some Nick Drake, and remember.
And yeah, if we’re being brutally honest now, the times we did meet up… weekends, holidays, after you fought with Laura and almost dropped out… they were good, they were great, but they weren’t always quite as good as I imagined they'd be. But I told myself that once we were together again full time, things would be different. Better, I mean, better even than that night in the cornfield. But maybe I was kidding myself. Because we’ve been living here – what, twelve years now, and all we do is argue over who gets to open the new jar of coffee and take the first sniff, how it drives me insane that you have to screw up your shopping list and start again just because you’ve spelled ‘quiche’ wrong, and... I mean, god help me if you buy one more pair of culottes…
But no, I don’t want us to split up, and do you want to know why? Because whenever I put on that shirt (and OK, yeah, it smells a bit now—
“It stinks.”
–and there are stains I don’t even want to think about), I know I couldn’t ever meet anyone who’d make me feel half the way you did that on legendary evening in June, ‘95. So please, I’m going to ask you one more time – and don’t lie to me, Clare, because I’ll know if do. Please…
What? Have you done? With my shirt?
