Telling Tales

By John Davis

Five friends meet at university, and fall into the habit of telling each other stories. And what begins as something to pass the time becomes something more, a way of expressing themselves, and of making sense of their lives and their growing feelings for one another, even as their own stories become ever more entwined.

Telling Tales is a story about love and loss, dreams and fears; but most of all it is a story about friendship.

Warm and witty, thoughtful and thought-provoking, this is a book for anyone who has ever struggled to make sense of the stories of their lives, to understand themselves and to understand those around them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: John Davis
• Release date: Apr 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311422958

John Davis

Author, self-taught electrical engineering designer, worked for 50 plus years, finally retired and always wanted to write a book put his fingers to the keyboard. The words of this book poured out from his life experiences, lost loves, friends, grandparents and family. A fictional book with touches of true life and life long characters from his past.

Book preview

Prologue

~ Ben ~

My name is Ben, and I died last autumn. It was the tail end of the season; the taste of snow was in the air, and scents sparkled on the frosty ground. I would like to have seen another winter, to have felt the crunch of snow beneath my paws and filled my lungs with clear, cold air, then later to have stretched out before the fire in the den and let it fill my dreams with its smells and sounds. I would like to have caught the first swift scent of spring’s coming, to have felt the sun’s warmth on my fur, and savoured the rich, sweet smell of the fields as the world awoke once more, life bursting forth from the ground and a thousand living things celebrating the passing of winter.

But even so, I knew that it was time for me to go, time to follow the trail onwards and see where it went. My body was full of little aches, and wouldn’t move as fast as it used to, so that I couldn’t chase after scents on walks but had to be content with just tasting their beginning. My senses, too, were becoming muted, smells no longer as sharp, sounds no longer as clear, so that it was as if the world was gradually pulling away from me, letting me know that it was time to move on. And if I was sad to be going, it was mainly because I knew that, for a while at least, I wouldn’t be with Doug. Though it turns out that I was wrong there, and even if he can’t touch me or see me any more, nevertheless I think he knows that I’m here with him, and will be for as long as he needs me.

So you see this isn’t my story. It isn’t really even Doug’s story, though he is in it, of course. It’s the story of...Well, you’ll see.

Part I

~ Karen ~

Yes, of course I remember how we all met. Or at least, I remember how I remember that we met, though those memories have no doubt been shaped and altered during the time that I’ve known them all since then, by the sharing and mingling of our recollections, our stories about ourselves, which we’ve told and re-told to each other so many times over the years. But I suppose that this is what people always mean when they say that they remember something, if they really stop and think about it, that is.

But given all of that, yes, I remember. It was the first day of university, or rather, the Saturday before university really began. The halls of residence were filled with people coming and going, parents greeting each other with light-hearted remarks that belied the anxiety they felt at the prospect of leaving their children, and us half-meeting each other’s eyes, wanting to make friends, but at the same time not wanting the first impression we made to be with our parents there. And filled, too, with our belongings, packed in bags and boxes and trolleys and suitcases, blocking up the lifts and corridors.

Strange, how everyone’s stuff looks kind of the same, especially when seen out of its usual context like that. All the things you have carefully chosen to reflect your tastes, what you like and even who you are, things you like to think are unique, are seen to be just the same as everyone else’s, variations on a single theme. I remember the results of a survey done at universities throughout the country at around that time, which discovered that the same half dozen or so posters were found on something like seventy five percent of all students’ walls. The Dali with the long-legged elephants and melting clock, Monet’s Water Lilies, Klimt’s woman, Bob Marley smoking, the American couple leaning on a beat-up old Ford. Images we had carefully chosen to reveal our inner selves, to say something important about who we were, but which, as it turned out, were the same ones everyone else had. Smile if you like, but if you are the same age as me I bet you had one of them, and even if the posters themselves have changed since back then, the chances are that there are still just as few of them to go around.

I suppose that we were like that ourselves, too. For all our carefully cultivated tastes in music and clothes, our opinions, our beliefs, our insights, all of which bolstered the illusion that we were different or special, really, like the things that we owned, these things too were shared by everyone else. Were like that? Hell, we are still like that, if we’re honest with ourselves. We may have swapped posters for paintings, beers for wines, dreams for experiences, but we’re still choosing them from the same small pool of possibilities as everyone else. It is inevitable, I guess – there simply aren’t enough posters, or opinions, or philosophies, to go around. There are too many of us for any one of us to be unique, or if we are, then only as a snowflake is, different but really the same. And perhaps there is a certain comfort to take from that, from the fact that, at heart, we are all more alike than we know. But all the same, it is kind of depressing when you think about it.

But anyway, as I was saying, there we all were. All of us embarrassed of the parents who, having helped us move in, were still hanging around, not wanting to let us go, or perhaps sensing that a part of us didn’t really want them to. They were a fragment of our old lives intruding into the new, preventing us from beginning the reinvention, the reimagination of ourselves that we longed for, a leaving behind of childish things. Toby once described it as being like in a horror film, when the hero chops off the hand of a zombie clinging to their leg but the hand still stays there, still clutching at them. Which sounds a bit harsh, but we all of us knew what he meant. Especially as I often think that in a film like that there must be a great temptation for the survivors to just give in, because surely there would be a sense of relief, a comfort, even, to be found in just letting go, in joining – or rather rejoining – the mass, the group, the familiar.

Or perhaps it was like in those wildlife documentaries you see, where the baby chicks stand on the edge of the nest, wanting to jump, yet also not, and the parents behind them, wanting to see their babies fly off, but also not. All of us trying to look cooler than we were, all of us with the same hopeful ‘please like me’ expressions on our faces. All of us wondering whether everyone else knew more, had done more, would think our own opinions and tastes childish.

Then again maybe it was just me. But eventually, as the parents gradually left, and boxes and cases vanished into the only slightly bigger boxes that were to be our rooms for the next nine months, people began emerging from their rooms again, all of us imagining that everyone else was doing something exciting, and not wanting to be left out. Except that there wasn’t anything to do, not really, or anywhere to go. So everyone just sort of drifted into the large communal kitchen, under the pretence of bringing in their crockery, or choosing a cupboard, or wanting a cup of tea.

Conversation was awkward; well, of course it was. We’d all spent years interacting, for the most part, with the same small group of people, be they the friends we’d known throughout school, or the family we’d known throughout our lives. And now, suddenly, that sense of familiarity was taken away, leaving us, many of us for the first time, alone among strangers. Of course, if we’d thought about it, we’d have realised that we were all in the same situation. But instead, for some reason we each assumed that the others were more at ease, and had the confidence we lacked, when in fact everyone was feeling just as insecure as everyone else. Well, except for Chris, maybe.

But if nothing else, at least we had the shared experience of having just arrived to talk about, so that the usual questions came and went: what’s your name, where are you from, what A-levels did you take, what course are you on. In fact, it became almost a joke – our first shared joke, offering a tentative sense of belonging that we each of us clung to – as every newcomer was treated to the same questions, before they drifted off in the direction of someone they had something in common with. A bit like when you spill mercury onto a plate then move the plate around – little balls joining into bigger balls.

It wasn’t Doug I saw first though, or even Diane or Chris. It was Toby, of all people. In a place where everyone was desperate to prove that they were individuals and unique but at the same time equally desperate to belong, he managed to stand out. He had dark, wiry hair, ragged and unkempt, which framed sharp features and an angular nose, whilst his eyes peered out intently from behind small round glasses. It was warm in the kitchen, but even so he was dressed in a long grey coat, a torn black jumper and fingerless gloves, as if they were some kind of uniform, or a disguise he didn’t dare take off. He reminded me of pictures of beat poets from the fifties, an affectation I couldn’t help but wonder whether was deliberate or not. In fact, come to think of it I’m still not sure. And there was an air of seriousness about him, too, as if he thought himself above trivial things such as conversations about where we came from. Not that he said as much, but you kind of got that impression anyway.

Don’t get me wrong, I liked him, or at least, I like him now. But I don’t know why on earth we ended up talking to each other that first afternoon. We certainly hadn’t the usual requisites in common, either where we came from – me from North London, him from Leicester – or what we were doing at university – me Psychology, him English Literature. But for some reason we found ourselves in the same corner, sharing that strange mixture of banal generalities and really far too personal facts so common among people eager to relate. Like, for example, we went straight from what A-levels we had done to my telling him all the intimate details about how I had broken up with my boyfriend just before coming to university, and then back to what plates and other crockery we had brought with us, and whether they would be enough.

God, I hope he didn’t think I fancied him. He didn’t, did he?

~ Toby ~

Karen was the first one I met out of what would become our group from university. What did I think of her? I was eighteen, shy, had spent the last ten years attending an all-boys’ school, and a girl was talking to me. So what do you think? To be honest, I’d have liked her if she had told me she came from Mars and ate babies. I was just trying not to sound like a complete idiot. She was posh, or at least, she seemed posh to me. Her voice was the kind I was more used to hearing presenting the news on television than in real life. But it was kind of brittle rather than rounded, if you know what I mean, with an edge to it that wasn’t harsh or mean-sounding, but, well, now I’d know it was from uncertainty and lack of confidence, though at the time I’m sure I wouldn’t have realised that. Hell, for all I knew back then, that was how all girls sounded.

She was tall, and thin, with straight black hair cut the way she still has it, down to her shoulders. Strangely, though, I don’t think I found her particularly attractive, even if, from the way she started talking to me, telling me all these intimate things about her life, I was arrogant enough to think she fancied me. Not that she wasn’t – I mean, isn’t – attractive, or anything. I think it was just that, I don’t know, perhaps we were all so eager to be liked that we weren’t even considering anything more as a possibility. And then, of course, by the time I did get to know her better, there was Diane.

I sometimes wonder, though, whether things would have turned out differently, for all of us, if we’d have got together, Karen and me that is, instead of me and Diane. I mean, obviously the details would have been different, different conversations over different meals, different dates, different first fumblings, different holidays, different meetings of parents...different arguments, different frustrations; a whole set of different shared experiences. And the sex, that would have been different too, wouldn’t it? But perhaps the bigger picture, the overall story, that would have been the same. Or then again, perhaps I just don’t have enough imagination to think of the ways in which things could have been really different, deep down, and not just on the surface of things. This isn’t me having regrets though, not about that, at least. Or rather, only in so much as that if I had ended up with Karen, then Diane wouldn’t have been hurt so much, which I’d give anything for. But then again in that case I’d probably now be wishing that it was Karen who hadn’t been hurt.

Kundera once wrote about the unbearable lightness of being. Not a new idea, of course, but it was new to me when I read it, and it made a big impact on me at the time, so even now I still tend to think of it as his. (Did you know that a recent study showed – though God only knows how – that most of us only have a short period of time in our lives when the books we read can really change us? From about our early teens to our mid-twenties. After that, even if we read something remarkable, even if we read something that would have changed our lives earlier, we are too set in our ways, to fixed in our thoughts and opinions, to truly be influenced by it. So ten years, then, in which to cram in all those books that can change our lives. It doesn’t seem long enough, really. There are exceptions, of course. But certainly it was true enough in my case, and for others I’ve spoken to about it. For me, it was Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. For Doug it was Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and of course Coupland’s Generation X. For Diane, I think it was probably one of Charles Williams’ novels, and for Karen, Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay. Me too, come to think of it. But there are dozens or others they could have been, hundreds, thousands, even. They don’t have to be original, or even good, they just have to be found by us at the right time to strike a chord, to touch a nerve, to inspire or to guide. And given the extent that these books, happened upon accidentally, affect and influence us, you can’t help but wonder whether the control we think we have over our lives is illusory, and that in fact the direction they take is merely the result of chance influence. Doug, of course, would say that we don’t come upon these books by chance at all, but because they call to us, and us to them; that we find what we need to find, when we need it. But then again he would.)

But I digress. That’s what reading Proust does for you, I suppose. Which means that even the style of my writing, and the way I frame my thoughts, is really due to chance and not deliberate choice. But anyway. Kundera, as I was saying, described the unbearable lightness of being. He said that because things only happen once, they have a lightness about them that comes as a result of not knowing whether what we did was right or wrong, whether it would have been better or worse if we had done something else, done something differently. And from this he concluded that nothing really means anything, nothing has any weight, and that it is better, perhaps, to accept Nietzsche’s idea of eternal return – the belief, or at least pretended belief, that every act and moment in our lives is doomed to be repeated an infinite number of times – which thereby lends weight to our actions, and to events. But I’m not sure Kundera was right. Because perhaps this lightness is a good thing, perhaps the not knowing is what makes life bearable, and allows us to live with our decisions, or despite our decisions. It prevents every choice from having such a dreadful weight of unseen consequences that we could never act at all, and would become crushed by uncertainty.

So yes, I do sometimes wonder whether things would have, or could have, turned out differently, if we’d each made different choices in those first days at university which seemed to set in motion the machinery of the rest of our lives. But only lightly.

~ Diane ~

I knew most people were in the kitchen. That’s where Karen had gone, anyway, before popping her head back round the door a couple of minutes later to tell me to come and join her. Karen, my room-mate. God, that had sounded strange. I remember I’d changed my mind a dozen times over whether I should have a single room or a shared one. A single room would have given me privacy, and that seemed like a good thing. After all, I’d always had my own room at home, and I wasn’t sure I could handle sharing – I mean, what if you wanted to get changed when the other person was there, or even just wanted to be quiet and on your own? What if they weren’t studying music like me, and couldn’t stand my practising the flute in the room? Or, even worse, what if I simply didn’t get on with the other person, or they didn’t get on with me? Then I’d be stuck with them, and that would be awful. Except, on the other hand, what if I did get a single room and ended up feeling lonely, or missed out on something as a result? After all, the people you meet at university, they turn out to be your friends for life, right? That’s what everyone always says, at least, and what better way of becoming friends with someone than to share a room with them?

I was still changing my mind about it when the time came for me to return the application form. So that in the end it was almost as if I’d picked an