Ability

The half marathon trial I meant to run this morning died out around the sixth mile when I dropped ten seconds and then twenty in the seventh and then settled on twenty-seven for the remainder as I limped home and pulled off my rain soaked and mud-caked socks outside the front door and hobbled to the shower where I suddenly realised I was sick, that I was shivering and couldn't get warm. I realised this had been creeping in since the morning, but I had misread it as shame from the day before. It was shame, but it was also the sickness that was going around and I immediately remembered that I had shaken a man's hand the day before on the train to London after I had seen him cough into it repeated times.

I was not supposed to be on a train to London the day before. Back in January for Yoko's birthday, I went through the same round of anxiety I have, as a C+ husband, felt for many years. A January birthday is difficult because it is so close to Christmas, and I have never been able to get it right, in part because there is no getting it right: birthdays are incredibly important to me because they were incredibly important for my father who, as far as I can tell, never had a proper one, his mother being a Jehovah's Witness. Now, I carry on with this, trying like a male bird doing a mating dance for a female bird of a different species who doesn't recognise the dance and is confused why the male has suddenly begun behaving in such a peculiar way, and the male, instead of recognising this and adapting, just dances harder, gets more frustrated that his efforts are not resulting in any mating.

This year, I did the triad of gifts, the thing she said she wanted, the thing I thought would be the surprise that might not land, and then the experience gift, the one where we as a family do something together, despite the poor track record I have of pulling this off, with at least one, but more often two or more members of the family rightfully upset with something I have I said or done. When the Yoko Ono retrospective was announced, however, at the Tate, I thought this would be it, because we had seen another Ono show at the Tate Liverpool some years ago and it sticks in my mind as a time Yoko was genuinely happy. I booked the tickets and made a card and gave her the card on her birthday, unsure if it would be good or not.

The show opened this last week and I decided we should drive down to Finchley Central and take the underground now that we can’t take a family rail pass as Yoko and I no longer have three children, but one adult and two children. I set the departure time at seven in the morning and of course managed to, despite what I was sure were my best efforts, become annoyed about some uneaten food from the night before and start the day on the back foot. We all managed to pile into the car and as the car idled, I had the familiar feeling of it revving up suddenly and the engine light coming on. This has been happening again, but not sticking. Once the car is restarted, the light stays on, but there is no real problem, so I did that and we set off.

The car drove fine for about a half hour and then around the exit for Coventry, it began to misfire and couldn't maintain its speed. I pulled off and we sat in a Tesco car park for a moment while I did the thing I remember seeing my own father do, trying to sort out what to do, whether to continue, or turn back and either give up or try to take the train, which I quickly searched and decided this would be the best possibility, provided the car could hold on until we got back to the city, so I announced this decision to the back seat and we headed off back the other way. The car held on fine, we arrived in the car park under Moor Street and I decided it would finally be time to get a family and friends railcard, the £70 investment that for three years gets you 30% off when you travel as a group. Yoko and I took quick pictures, and I bought the card on my phone and three adult and two child tickets and we left the car, well on time to reach London by 10:45, still plenty of time to reach the Tate by noon. I had, however, in my plan to drive all morning, drank a tall boy of energy drink, a bad habit I have picked up as I have been fasting. We got into the station and I went to pee, thinking I would definitely need to go again on the train.

We got to the platform and it was busier than it should have been for a Saturday morning and when we got on, we all managed to get seats, but only two together, and I needed up next to a young lad across from an older man that he seemed to know and an Asian woman in a hijab across from me. It became clear that we were on a train of Villa supporters headed to London to see the Fulham match and I listened to the Brummie accent and the changing of cash across the aisle and plans to drink all day, feeling like I had succeeded at least for now, managing to get everyone on the train but more broadly, to have found myself in this country, where I could take my family to London to see something like a Yoko Ono retrospective, the sort of thing I liked saying because of whatever I thought it revealed about my intellectual credentials.

The train filled up more and more to the point that people were standing in the aisles the whole way up, and a woman came by pushing through with a child, looking angry and saying there were no working toilets and you couldn't press through between the cars, that there were too many people. The conversation between the lad and the older man over time brought me in, when the older man was trying to sell a watch to the kid and motioned to mine, saying it was like that, a smartwatch and then the inevitable conversation about my accent, and Las Vegas, and Aston, and the time the man had been detained in the Osaka Airport because he had a criminal record and they wouldn't let him into the country to watch England play. We talked about Villa and the Asian woman talked about her family in Florida and they said that I was destined to be a Villa supporter because I was born in 1982, the last year that Villa had won the European Cup.

About forty minutes from London, I had a feeling that I have had more regularly after drinking high-caffeine beverages, the feeling that I needed to pee urgently. I panicked at first and said to the older man and the lad that I needed to go pee and they said it wasn't going to happen given the report we had been given from the woman earlier. I felt suddenly very worried, and tried to stand up saying I would have to go, but the aisle was completely packed. Yoko and Naomi were several seats up and I said I was having an emergency I needed the toilet, everyone in the back half of the train hearing this and the women across from me saying it was okay not to worry we've all been there, when I apologised.

I looked on my phone thinking I could get off and quickly and run if I needed to, but the train was arriving late and it was going to be 20 more minutes. I was panicking now, and went back as far as I could to the end of the carriage, to the vestibule asking if the toilet door was genuinely locked and seeing if it was just men and they would let me stand in the corner, but there was a family and young women and the well-meaning football supporters all said it was and there was nowhere to go. There was a single seat at the end of the carriage where a man with a suitcase was, and he didn't look at me. I went back up the carriage and Yoko handed me two coffee cups pointing to the woman sitting across from her and I went back to the man sitting alone and said, I'm so sorry but I'm not going to make it, and he got up and I sat down, seeing between the seats in front of me a man pulling his jacket over his head as a joke for his wife or partner next to him, laughing, and I wanted, in that moment, to disappear completely, for nothing to have ever existed.

The train arrived and I felt the deepness of the shame dissipate for a moment as these people who I would never see again leave, and then recoil like the sting of a rubber band when I saw my daughters from further up in the train and could not face whatever it was I going to have to face. What had I done in similar embarrassing circumstances — had I ever experienced something as embarassing as that before. My mind wandered to eminent professors I knew, people that I want to be like, had they ever found themselves in a place where they needed to pee on a train in front of thirty people or so. And the day, of course, had to go on, the events on the train had made no material change to the plan, but what do you do then, how can you trust a man who drew attention to himself on a crowded train, who couldn’t hold it, who stood then for ten minutes with a coffee cup full of his own urine, his thumb over the drinking hole, and still needing to go. How do you deal with his flashes of anger then, about the whole situation, about the rail company, the car, are you whispering and laughing about me. I finally managed to say, How long will it be before this is a funny story, something we laugh about as a family. The stress of this on top of everything else, your father who is so pathetic on a normal day. How long until anyone will make eye contact with me.

The control of one’s body is the most basic right: it’s stupid for white middle-aged men to pronounce this when something so trivial as needing to pee in a coffee cup on train happens. I thought of the story I’d heard of a young girl who had her period unexpectedly on the train and had been mocked ruthlessly by a group of boys. The Villa supporters had been nothing but kind to me, one of them saying, as I stood there, don’t worry mate, we’ve all been there, I’ve peed in many cups in my time. We made it to the Tate and I stood in from of the video of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece 1964, the video of her performance wherein people came up to her and cut pieces of her clothes off until she was naked. You can't understand what this actually entails as a man, but when you watch it, you realise how vulnerable she is, how flashes of fear come through in her eyes, and the anger you feel at the young man, who seems almost gleeful, who is enjoying himself far too much and doesn't realise what he's actually doing, that her consent to the act was predicted on someone actually doing it: who would actually do it. Who would you have to be to do that.

Shame is something you need to narrativise, to make sense of in light of the society that makes you feel that shame, that makes it okay for trains to be packed without toilets and little girls who must be told by their mothers to simply hold it, even if they can’t. Why does one feel shame when the ability to use the toilet freely, when you choose, is a key part of the dignity of life. Why was I meant to feel the shame when the company had forced me into this situation. I said all this to myself as we walked on to Baker Street, but still got angry with the girls the rest of the day, like I could protect myself by being feared. I had a momentary loss of control, but don’t test me, like I’m a monkey who must reassert dominance in the group. We took the train home and drove back to the house in silence and I went immediately to bed, sure that somewhere in the future, another Villa supporter will look me in the eye and tell me it’s okay, mate, you did your best. You’ve done well.