Anatomy of a Fall

British Summer Time, like it is only a British idea, like this island has discovered a secret to making the day last forever, began during Ramadan, when it fell between the two fasts I did. I haven't fully adjusted, falling asleep early, last night at eight-thirty and then waking at ten-thirty as if the night has passed. The girls are all still up, the house still buzzing like it does now without any input from me. Dad, farting and regressing into the walls, Dad, no longer needed for the things for which he was needed only a few years ago. I spent Sunday reading in the loft corner, the sun going down with that low summer descent in the horizon, but still the possibility of snow in the morning. A TikTok video told me that when the Gulf streams collapse, the UK will become like Siberia and although I know this means certain death, more cold air in my life is not something I worry about. You can always get warmer, always put on more clothes, I used to say, sweating in Malaysia, but there is only so naked you can get.

When I started work at Aston, on the ninth floor of the Northwest wing of the Main Building, I was struck by two things: First was the sound of the A38 below us, and the constant hum of traffic I worried would distract me. I remember opening the window and standing back thinking I'd make a terrible mistake, that this was completely untenable. It thankfully was not: I stopped noticing it almost immediately and found the hum, when I did hear it, comforting, like working with brown noise, something to take the edge off.

The second thing was the height, and the feeling you have when you look down and whatever you call it, l'appel du vide, the call of the void, that I would suddenly throw myself out of the window. This was impossible given that the window doesn’t open far enough for you to jump out of it, but this didn’t seem to give me any reassurance. Unlike the hum, the feeling of being high, of vertigo, has not gone away and I still feel it the way men feel height in their balls, when I catch a glimpse over the edge, headed to a meeting or class, a reminder that the edge is right there. I’ve created a path in and out of the university that distracts me from the height and doesn’t allow any time to reflect on the feeling of falling, of what the feeling of falling is compared to what you imagine that feeling to be. Anna Karenina immediately regretting throwing herself in front of a train.

Danger is everywhere, it seems. I’ve had some close calls with cars, walking to and from the city centre, where everyone is always in a rush and not realising they are driving machines that can kill people. I do that thing that my dad would do, stopping just before I get across, just out of the way, to make my point with my body that pedestrians crossing have the right away, and the car needs to slow down. In my subconscious, unarticulated Boomer fantasy of public education, this will lead to changes in behaviour, to dark nights of the soul for young men who will reflect on their driving practice upon returning home and recalling the look in the terrified, angry eyes of the middle-aged man who was walking needlessly slow in front of them.

It never works out this way. Walking home today, I stepped out realising just as I realised a car was coming more quickly than I thought, doing well over thirty in a residential twenty. It's a common place to cross Greenfield Road, right before a roundabout, and I expected the same middle-class apology in gestures that comes at this particular junction in Harborne, where the polite, middle-class SUV driver, hides their annoyance and admits in their eyes that perhaps they were indeed going too fast. Of course you can cross, apologies again, and you wave apologies for crossing and they wave and you continue on to walk through the cricket ground up to the church, and back home.

This kid barrelling towards the junction didn’t slow down, and instead slammed on his brakes after passing me and yelled out something about this not being the place to cross. I said, Where are you supposed to cross, and he said, What mate, you American? and started laughing, you’re jaywalking, that’s it. I said, Where am I supposed to cross, and he said, a crosswalk, looking around to make his point only to awkwardly realise there were no crosswalks. I said, where is there a crosswalk, and he started laughing, You’re American mate, what are you doing, you’re American, right, you don’t know what you’re doing, mate, go back to your country. And I said, Sorry, what? and he said, what colour is your passport, I’m going to record you mate, what are you visiting, go home, and took out his phone as I said, You’re holding up traffic man, both of my passports are blue, and he got his phone out, but I could see he’d now realised this wasn’t as good of an idea as he thought. I said, Did you tell me to go back to my country, and he said, yeah go back to your country, and I said, I’m as British as you, and he said, Nah, I was born here, and I said, I voted this morning, did you vote, and he put his phone down and got angry and said, Nah, because of white people like you, and sped off.

A year has passed now, almost a year, an academic year. It’s hard to keep track of things. I move my desk around to face the window, so the light is better, and then walk up to the city centre to find coffee. Everything becomes normal after a while, and then a year passes or two, who can really tell. It’s just this time of life, sometimes things move quickly, sometimes they move slowly. What is six years of sunk-lost fallacy in your thirties and forties, my one grandfather drove a truck for thirty years; the other was coming out of the ore pit in his forties, was going to be dead before he was fifty. Twenty years or two months, I read something I wrote when I was twenty-three when a decade seemed to pass in a year. As I reflect on my life, I will say that I had made a series of decisions that year without really thinking about it, but of course, I had thought about it all very carefully. I had made a careful record like I was writing into the future knowing I would judge me, and was telling myself that I realised what was happening, that time had warped. But you don’t understand Stephen, there is a woman in your kitchen and you have lost your mind, she has made you lose your mind. Here, I’ll write it out for you, do you remember this now, do you remember losing your mind? Forgive yourself for losing your mind over love. No one needs to know, but you and me, we need to know. Here, I’ll write it in a way you’ll recognise.