Anecdotes

13/12/2023

Fiction    Download PDF  

 1 

   He didn't deny it was wrong, but he noticed when he would ask women out, when they would talk about each other’s lives, he was so devoid of life experience, and wasn’t very good at shaping the experiences he had, that he decided to replace his own dismal existence with the more exciting life of a temporary flatmate from a year earlier. This flatmate was passing through Edinburgh for six months, before taking a job teaching at a university in the Highlands. It was a part-time post lecturing on communications, and he took it so that he could devote more time to writing. Joshua had lived in Edinburgh several years before, then once again went travelling, but this time he reckoned he was returning to Scotland for good. He’d been left a cottage fifteen miles from the town centre, and intended to commute in each day either on the electric bike he would buy himself, or on the one he used to spin around Edinburgh on while he was staying in the flat. The cottage belonged to an uncle who passed away. He had no children, and so there Joshua was with a tired, drab place that had a roof that needed repairing, a garden that could benefit from weeding, and an interior that required refurnishing. The work could be done in a matter of months and while he was staying in the flat he would go up every other weekend to the Highlands and stay for a few days working on the cottage before returning down south — where during this time he earned money teaching at a language school. It was a job he’d been doing for ten years, and named all the countries he had taught in and travelled to — often around the dinner table, with the three other flatmates, all of them fascinated. Joshua (or Josh) was probably a type — a ponytail, a tan, a wrinkled forehead and a wide and white smile. But he seemed to Ian a successful version of it, and Josh never seemed to run out of stories. It is the nature of travelling so much, he supposed, and Ian, whose excursions outside of the UK consisted of three family holidays as a child, and a couple of trips with friends to tourist resorts as an adult, was engaged, perhaps even enchanted. 

     Ian was not striking but he had a quiet handsomeness that got lost in his hesitancy and his dress sense. He always wore clothes a little too big and moved through space as though he wasn’t quite entitled to occupy it. His hair often fell into his eyes and he parted the fringe like he was opening curtains. He could never seem to sweep it back, could never use his hair except at the most useless of props. He would look at Josh (whom I met only twice) and see how comfortably he occupied space, often seated at the dining table leaning back and with his legs crossed. Joshua spoke with confidence and with a modulated tone that could intrigue, changing the pace of the telling according to the amount of tension he wanted to extract from the tale. Ian told me of one where Josh was surfing somewhere off the Pacific in Mexico and a wave came crashing in that he knew he couldn’t surf. He stopped for a moment in the telling, lighting a cigarette, and then continued by speaking about the size of the waves at the coastal village where he was surfing, how surfers from all over the world would come and take on the waves there. He added he was not an experienced surfer, that he could look competent enough as long as the waves were small enough, but this was no ordinary wave. He paused again to take a deep puff of the cigarette and said he was well aware that these waves could throw you some distance and that there were sharp rocks nearby. He said he had no interest in trying to ride this wave but just trying to survive the consequences of it, and yet saw no other way than trying to surf it. Amazingly he was successful, and for a few days at this resort he was admired by the community and people would slap him on the back and buy him a drink. His deed had been witnessed by a few people on the beach, and they spoke of this feat to the others. It was a fluke, Josh insisted, but he didn’t say anything to the surfers in the Mexican village. He just knew that his purpose had been to survive the wave, and far greater than his wish to conquer it. He would still surf, he told them, but only when he was certain the waves would be small. When Ian told me of this and other stories Josh would tell I noticed that Josh never told them with aggrandizement. If he came out of them well, if there was a successful outcome, it was usually down to good luck rather than great acumen: he rarely seemed to brag. Yet he seemed in them impressive.

                               2 

    After Josh moved out and settled into his house up north, Ian heard no more from him, and over the next six months, the idea increasingly and insistently came to his mind. What if he tried out some of the many anecdotes Josh offered on dates and claimed them as his own? Identity theft was common enough and very serious, but what about anecdote borrowing; was that not more like a debt than a theft? Ian had never lied on his dating profile, never pretended he was an age he wasn’t, never claimed a qualification he didn’t have or to be doing a job he wasn’t. He didn’t even choose a flattering profile picture. He had instead shown friends a few photos and asked them which one most resembled him. He didn’t want to give a false impression, he would say, and admitted to himself he wished to avoid a look on someone’s face when they met, one that registered disappointment before a word had been spoken. Yet here he was, prepared to take another’s stories as his own.

    He first tried a couple of anecdotes out on a woman he met for an afternoon coffee. The cafe was busy when he entered and he scanned the room looking for someone who resembled the image online. Ian might have insisted on presenting a composite honesty in the photograph he chose, but sometimes others would choose the exception that proved difficult to match with the person he would meet. They were sometimes several years older, often heavier, and on occasion dispiritingly dejected, as though the photograph had been taken during a happier time, perhaps when they were in love with an ex-partner they were clearly no longer with, and why they were on a dating app. Ian thought it odd that someone would put on their profile a photo possibly taken by an ex-loved one when they were part of a happy couple, and then meet a prospective partner looking quite different partly because of that very break up. On several occasions, the date consisted of the person expressing a series of grievances about an ex, or exes, and Ian’s purpose was to listen with the patience of a therapist but with none of the remuneration. The idea of ending up in bed after such an encounter would have seemed almost perverse, and Ian, while sometimes fascinated by the litany of appalling features these exes possessed, or terrible things they had done, wasn’t always bored — but the chance of being aroused evaporated.

     Ian suspected it wasn’t always that people wished to speak of their ex-boyfriends; it was partly that Ian had so little to talk about that he was inclined to listen. He had a girlfriend when he was at school for several years, another at university for eighteen months, and then nothing except online dating since then. His job didn’t seem to offer space for interesting tales either (he worked in admin at the university), and he knew when he started speaking about the lives of various members of his family that the date was becoming as sexually unlikely as when they talked about their exes. 

    He had noticed about Josh’s stories that they were exciting and, even if serious, contained within them a lightness that Ian had supposed would potentially be useful in creating levity during a date. Josh had told them of course to a group of male flatmates and yet, while one or two of them involved sexual adventures, most of them were travel anecdotes a little like the one outlined above. It was this very tale Ian offered to the unsuspecting woman as he found her in the corner of the cafe looking not too unlike the image she offered on her profile. 

                              3

   The conversation was initially agreeable but predictable: she told him what she did, though he knew, and he told him what he did — which she knew also. They said a few additional things about their jobs, and then a little about their hobbies and he could see the date grinding to a predictable acceptance that neither of them were suited to the other. Occasionally both parties accepted this but sometimes, if the date was in the evening, if alcohol had been drunk, and an exaggerated sense of intimacy miraculously created, he would go back to her place. The cafe didn’t serve alcohol and it was three thirty in the afternoon.

   He told the anecdote. He could have told it better, and he knew he lacked Josh’s ironic cadences, his smooth yet gravelled voice, and the easy assumption that what he was saying was true. Nevertheless, as he offered it she seemed more interested than before and even asked a couple of questions to which he had to improvise the answers. She asked him how long he’d been in Mexico, was he aware in advance that the place was known for surfing? He answered well enough, he supposed, and by the end of the date he offered another couple of stories that appeared no less to engage her. It was now five o’clock and the cafe was closing. He was sure that if he proposed carrying on to a pub she would have accepted, but while he thought she was attractive and hadn't at all given a false impression, that is exactly what he had done, and a sense of propriety overcame him as he said he really must be going. He expected no further contact (which was usually so even when an assignation took place), but a few days later she sent a message saying how much she enjoyed meeting up at the weekend and hoped they could do it again. He replied saying that would be lovely but he was very busy at the moment. 

     He went on further dates, told two or three anecdotes over the evening, all borrowed from Josh, and he worked out that he had a repertoire of about thirty. He also noticed that when he told them that he emphasised much more the self-deprecatory aspect. Josh incorporated into them an aspect that suggested he was capable of laughing at himself but this seemed no more than a social nicety to stop him from looking arrogant. Ian well knew he lacked Josh’s looks and frame, and instead played up the unlikelihood of scenarios like surfing on the Pacific coast of Mexico, or finding himself taking the cab driver to hospital when this heavily pregnant woman went into premature labour in Thailand. There he was, driving like a lunatic on roads he didn’t know as she was in the back seat pleading for him to hurry up in a language he hardly understood. 

   When Josh told this anecdote, Ian could imagine a man unflustered, finding himself in yet another situation where he could prove his competence. As Ian told it, he clumsily took the wheel and no less effectively worked his way along roads that only good fortune allowed him to negotiate. He missed every pothole, steered out of the way of oncoming drivers, and arrived at the hospital just before the birth. But this was thanks more to others’ driving than his own, as though all those on the roads between the moment he took over the steering wheel to the hospital were dexterous enough to avoid this oncoming incompetent. When he told this anecdote, his date laughed hard and as she finished, she put her hand on his as though half in pity; half in admiration. He wondered how a woman might have reacted to Josh’s telling and suspected the woman would look admiringly into his eyes and this would be the moment he would seize a kiss, appreciatively reciprocated. After Ian told it and she put her hand on his, he put his hand on top of hers and waited for her to kiss him. She did.

       Over the next three months, he had slept with more women than he had in the previous five years, and he began to believe that the stories he told weren’t only Josh’s; they belonged to the world of storytelling and what mattered was how he told them more than what they were about. I asked him whether this was an excuse, that here he was getting women into bed under not so much false pretences as borrowed narratives — though they were somehow the same thing. He thought not and explained why. He said that a fortnight earlier he was out with someone and he decided to tell a couple of Josh’s anecdotes exactly as Josh had told them to him. He embellished nothing, added no humorous asides, minimised the self-deprecation and presented himself precisely as the person who surfed well in Mexico and drove a pregnant taxi driver to hospital. The woman wasn’t impressed, perhaps not even convinced. He supposed she couldn’t match the person in the story and the person telling it. She cut the date short and ordered a cab, saying, as she left, she would be assuming the driver wouldn’t be nine months pregnant and need her to take over the steering wheel. She offered the remark as though she’d been insulted, that after his tall tales, he needed to be cut down to size and thus the date foreshortened. 

                               4

  I wasn’t sure whether to find her response funny or sad — to see that she hadn’t been fooled or had wasted a couple of hours with a charlatan, one who also happened to be my friend, one perhaps some might have said I should have disowned, as he was taking women into bed after taking them in. Several times I said to him what he was doing was unethical and unfair, and it was after one of those occasions he told me about the woman who didn’t believe what he said when he offered the anecdotes exactly as Josh offered them to him. He said this proved that somehow the stories were his own, that the manner of the telling was usually his even if the events themselves happened to someone else.

   It then occurred to him, he said, that maybe Josh’s stories weren’t true either, that he could have borrowed them from others and turned them into stories that he claimed happened to him. All he had to do was tell them in a way that seemed plausible given his persona, just as Ian had to do the same. I proposed that the stories might never have happened to anyone, as I imagined infinite plagiarism and palimpsest, with no lies being told and yet no truthful event depicted. Yet he was sure that the stories Josh offered were based on incidents in his life, though Ian wasn’t sure how he could explain this, and knew he had no evidence to justify it. That is the case with many stories we hear, yet we put scepticism aside and rely on trust, I said, adding that everything he might have been telling me about the dates he went on happened to be nonsense as well. As we talked that day, we were walking from Clerk Street near the town centre, through Duddingston village and on to Portobello. It was a July afternoon, the weather was hot by Edinburgh’s standards, 22 degrees, and the beach and promenade were crowded, with a few people dipping their feet in the water and two venturing a swim. I saw a mass of bodies but Ian noticed amongst them a woman walking towards him with a child of about four. She was thirty metres away and hadn’t appeared to see Ian, and as he mentioned the woman ahead he asked if we could avoid an awkward moment and go into the bar that was only two metres in front of us. I followed as we managed quickly to find a table by the window, as she and the child passed. 

                                5

I assumed this was one of his assignations and that he was surprised to see her and even more so to see her with a child. I wasn’t wrong and he felt oddly wronged — that the woman hadn’t mentioned during a three-hour conversation and the night together that she had children. I found myself thinking with some amusement that neither had lied and neither had told the truth. He would have told her stories belonging to someone else; she would have withheld information about her life that made Ian feel she had been duplicitous with him. I said he had no high ground here and certainly not after dipping inside the bar to avoid saying hello. He said he did so, partly to protect her, assuming she would have felt awkward meeting this man with whom she’d slept only once and then forced to introduce him to her son. I smiled and said he should be careful: it was one thing to borrow someone’s stories; quite another to lie to himself and expect me to witness the dishonesty. He smiled back and asked what sort of friend was I; shouldn’t I be supportive? I reckoned honesty was the best policy, especially when entanglements became as complicated as they were becoming. By all means, I proposed, continue telling stories, continue using these tales to have the encounters he was having, but he shouldn’t confuse truth from fiction as acts of denial as well.  

   I apologised for sounding harsh, and he asked me about any recent encounters I might have been having. He knew I never dated online, knew too that I sought something close to true love and part of that lay in contingency, knew as well that I’d lost someone in terrible circumstances that perhaps needn’t be divulged here. He knew that I hoped I could find someone again, but that hope was the operative word. He knew I wouldn’t do anything to pursue this possibility, as though I were betraying the memory of Martha. I said there was nothing to report but suspected if and when there was it wouldn’t make for the sort of telling that Ian has allowed me to offer here. 

                                  6

      Ian and I would usually meet around once a month but sometimes my work took me away for several months. I was an environmental engineer and, shortly after that walk out to Portobello, I went off to Morocco to work with a team of people on building eco homes based on retaining the principle features of the villages while developing necessary technologies. It was an intriguing project partly because the village was moving as though almost directly from the agrarian to the digital age and I, along with two other engineers (from France and Morocco), were in charge of the project. It was the sort I most enjoyed, and over the years I’d been involved in developing more than a dozen eco-villages. The first coincided with losing Martha and, without that project, I am not sure I would have had the will to continue living. I suppose many people say that, but I could at least pinpoint the specific thing that made me continue doing so. 

    When I returned I was still busy with the project but Ian contacted me asking if I was free and I felt the urge both to hear his news and to drink some beer. I didn’t have a drink once in Morocco; nobody in the village drank and my fellow engineers didn’t drink either, or at least showed no interest in doing so while working there. Luckily I liked mint tea, and strong black tea from a Samovar that even diluted retained a stewed strength. Ian and I met in a bar near where he lived in Newington, popular with long-term locals, medium-term students, and short-term tourists. It was always busy and for the first hour we stood at the bar. In most circumstances, we would probably have stood and talked the small talk and kept more important matters for when we found a table. But while he asked me a couple of questions about the Morocco trip, I could see he had a far greater need to talk about his experiences than I had about mine. 

                             7

     He told me that for the last three months, he’d been seeing someone regularly. He met her like all the others online but he found after their first meeting he wanted to meet her again, and again. They didn’t sleep together until after a month and it was as though they both knew that so much intimacy and affection had been developed in those first few weeks that, were they to take it to the next stage, it would be serious indeed. As he talked I was sure he was using her language more than his own, just as he had been using Josh’s stories on his dates. But I also sensed that this language had become his own, and who was I to mock him when I had loved and lost and he had yet to love at all? Yet while I expected him to keep telling me how wonderful Gillian was, he instead said that he thought there might be a problem. After the first date, he didn’t feel the need to rely on Josh’s stories; he and Gillian were so comfortable together that why involve a third party? However, on that first evening, he told two stories based on Josh’s anecdotes. She seemed to react differently from anyone else even though he told them in the humorous manner he would usually offer. She didn’t laugh and neither was she bored. She seemed curious, and yet curious not to know more about the story but more about him. 

   This was all very well, he said, but one evening after they’d been together for almost two months, she mentioned to him some travel experiences that were almost identical to ones Josh had told him, stories that Josh had offered where he was travelling with his partner at the time. In one, they were hill-walking in the Highlands when the weather turned quickly and he guessed it was going to be bad for at least a couple of days. Before walking they expected poor weather and took a tent just in case they were trapped overnight and took enough food to cover forty-eight hours. It looked like they might have ended up trapped. They couldn’t get a mobile signal and they decided to set up the tent, his partner would stay and Josh would venture down the mountain, seeking a signal. They agreed he was the stronger hillwalker and he could go down quickly with no additional help. He walked and walked and it wasn’t until he was at the bottom he could phone, calling Mountain Rescue. He expected a lecture since he and his partner probably shouldn’t have ventured out given the weather but no, they were as surprised as he was that the weather turned so quickly, and said he did the right thing. He enjoyed the helicopter ride out to Gillian and felt more like a hero than a fool.     

     Yet there Gillian was telling Ian of what seemed like the same event from another angle again. They were up a mountain when the weather changed and she said they should sit it out. They knew the conditions could turn treacherous and sure enough they had. But wasn’t the point of taking a tent and two days of food so that they could stay where they were and wait for better weather? He thought not and didn’t seem to realise that she was more worried about being left alone than them dying together. She said this to Ian as though she were being foolish and she supposed she was. And her ex was right, the weather remained terrible for four days and they would have gone hungry had they remained on the mountain. But he couldn’t seem to see her fear when he left her, and when she tried to address it when they got back home, he said he did what was necessary, and it worked. There was nothing to discuss. 

                               8

   He didn’t know for sure this was Josh she was talking about, and if he had asked she would surely have wondered why he was asking. But he was confident she was talking about the same man he shared a flat with. The story took place on the same mountain range, the awareness that the weather was likely to turn, the tent, the two days’ food — mountain rescue. True, a lot of these details could be generic, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine Josh going it alone, insensitive to another person’s feelings. What Ian did know was that it was likely enough for him to no longer use any of Josh’s stories as his own. 

     That wasn’t a problem: he found unlike with most people, and those he had gone on dates with, they always had much to talk about. Yet he wondered whether increasingly what she had to talk about were incidents with her-boyfriend who must surely have been Josh. A week after she told him about the mountain incident, she offered him another as he felt there was no doubt her ex-boyfriend was the man whose anecdotes he offered as his own on their initial date. 

   He was left wondering if she had worked out he was telling her about her ex, with Ian inadvertently breaking the rule that you shouldn’t talk about exes on the first date by talking about hers. If she did realise, why didn’t she say anything to him, and why was she still seeing him? 

     I was as bemused as he was. I supposed, if nothing else, his conundrum proved that a more important rule than to eschew speaking of one’s ex on a first date is to avoid using other people’s anecdotes as one’s own. But that wasn’t of much help now. Perhaps he needed to tell her the truth as I proposed another relationship maxim: that people fall in love with a fantasy, initially, and then, after, fall in love all over again based on the reality of the person they have become besotted by. Ian may have actively sought to exacerbate illusion but that might be why the reality would be all the harder to acknowledge. 

                              9

  When Ian, and sometimes others, asked me if I was seeing anyone, the question would never return me to thoughts of women I’d seen in cafes, bars, or in offices, but to Martha, and it was as though the thought of another woman wasn’t a betrayal of my love for her; it was a reminder of the terrible pain loss causes. Why would I want to go through that again I would think, and return quickly to thoughts of work, projects that I could control, rather than to a new person I might also lose? It was a silly thought, but this proposes that thinking is an active choice rather than so often a feeling made manifest. All my thoughts on love had been absorbed by pain and so, when people would talk of building a new life, I would think instead of homes I could construct and villages I could help shape. 

   Yet while I would recoil at questions about my love life (without making that recoil openly manifest), I was often fascinated by stories of love, by tragic tales, impossible romances and doomed love affairs. I wasn’t impervious to being moved by successful romances in films either, even if I found the conclusions pat and trivial. 

   I didn’t see Ian for a few weeks after he told me about the anecdotes Gillian told him. I was working on a project in the highlands, and a month passed as it often would before meeting him again. Yet I was interested to know whether he had resolved his predicament and I planned to contact him as soon as I returned to the city— as if I needed to hear what happened more than he needed to seek my advice. Yet it was someone else I found myself discussing it with before I had the chance to speak to Ian. I talked about it without saying anything specific, without saying it was about a close friend, feeling that perhaps one day Ian and this woman would meet. 

    Gwen was working on the Highland project when I arrived, a group of people that called in my company when there were a few problems that they needed help with. Sometimes and where possible, we would work on projects from the initial stages to final execution; sometimes we worked in a consultancy capacity, and sometimes that consultancy work segued into greater involvement. This was one such project. Gwen and seven others had bought the land two years earlier and usually at weekends and during holidays would be working on the eight houses as well as three other buildings. They were almost there but needed a bit more expert advice, and so I went up with one of the other engineers and we helped as much as we could, at a rate we thought was fair. One of the problems was that they were running short of money, and reckoned it was cheaper hiring the two of us who were sympathetic to their project, than others — who might exploit them and their relative ignorance. All of this isn’t very important, except to say that by the end of the month, the few problems were resolved, and they were ready to move in. They insisted we join them at a pub six miles from their eco-homes; they wanted to celebrate and we couldn’t refuse. 

                             10

   Over that month, Gwen and I had talked a lot but it was always about the project, and in the evening as we sat around a campfire next to the tents we were all staying in, saving money rather than getting rooms at the pub, we were never alone. The fire on those chilly late October evenings seemed conducive to anecdotes about everyone’s travel experiences. It was pleasant sitting there, night after night, feeling the cold on our backs, and the heat on our faces, but nobody quite expressed themselves. I found myself wondering about that distinction. Is that why we have stories, to stop us expressing ourselves? But how do we express ourselves without them?

 It was this question I discovered I was able to discuss with Gwen that evening in the pub. We arrived in the late afternoon and expected a quiet evening as few tables were taken and those that were occupied by people speaking in low murmurs. By eight, the bar was full and the murmurs became yelps, cheers and shouts, made still louder when a folk band started playing at nine. We were all quite drunk despite a bar meal at seven, and most were in various conversations with other customers, leaving Gwen and me at the table alone. I asked her whether she thought stories expressed us. She looked puzzled, so I rephrased it: did she think any of us managed to express ourselves during all those nights by the fire? I added that I enjoyed these evenings, felt I was part of a community, and wasn’t that exactly what they were trying to create: friends together living in their eco homes? However, expression seemed different from that, and she said she was beginning to understand what I meant.

    As people told stories around the fire it was as though the tales they told weren’t chiefly about expressing themselves but about entertaining the others. Maybe I had noticed this limitation more than most because I imagined speaking about what happened to Martha and realised it would violate the tone of the occasion, that I wouldn’t be telling a story but talking about myself, even if apparently everybody was doing exactly that. What were they doing, I wondered and said to Gwen nothing about Martha yet enough about what I was thinking on those nights for me to believe I was expressing myself in the pub that evening. She said that perhaps everybody was performing but they were doing so for me and the other engineer. We were the strangers in the group and the others were not. Gwen knew various personal details about all of the others: they’d been friends long enough to build a small village together, to wish to live in each other’s company, in close proximity. I said I found it amusing that all of them weren’t expressing themselves because I was there, and yet I supposed I had a need to express himself. That evening I chose not to speak about Martha, but I did speak about Ian.

   I said I once knew someone who saw himself as unsuccessful with women, and was, for a time, living in the same flat as a person who appeared very successful with them indeed. This flatmate shared numerous stories with the others in the apartment. After he moved out, the friend wondered what would happen if he took some of these stories as his own, if on dates he would regale women with anecdotes about his various international adventures: risking his life up mountains, driving a car at high speed through streets in the far east that he’d never driven on before, surfing in a sea that turned dangerous. He knew he couldn’t tell quite the same story: he lacked his flatmate’s looks and confidence. But he could tell them with an inflected comedy, as though he was surprised to find himself in such situations and even more surprised he got out of them with such effectiveness. Yet, I told Gwen, he had found himself going out with a woman who seemed to know the stories already: he was seeing his former flatmate’s ex-girlfriend.  

   Gwen looked at me with scepticism, as though undecided whether she didn’t believe the story I was telling, or if she did, she didn’t believe that the woman would still be seeing my friend after realising he had lied to her, and lied to her with an ex-boyfriend’s anecdotes. I shrugged, saying I was surprised too, but I still hadn’t met this person’s partner and it was only recently he told me that she surely knew his stories were stolen. When I returned to Edinburgh I supposed I would find out more. But what Gwen and I also discussed were revelations, which we both agreed were very different from anecdotes. The anecdote was somehow self-protective, a way of talking about yourself without quite revealing yourself, and perhaps Ian stealing someone’s anecdotes was acceptable while stealing someone’s revelations would have been a violation of privacy, as though the anecdote belonged to the community; the revelation to the self. I mentioned again all those stories people were telling around the fire, saying I didn’t only think it was because they all knew each other, and were entertaining their guests, though they were. It was also that the anecdotes were wonderfully communal, adding to the sense that they were creating a community. 

   But there we were, I said, in a pub, the others speaking to the locals and expanding their community, and we were talking of abstract things. She said abstract or intimate things, and I said sometimes we speak abstractly to avoid speaking confessionally. I realised then that I’d never asked her why she wished to join others in creating an eco-village. Of course, I’d asked about practical matters: I knew she had given up her job in Glasgow to move north; knew that she was before a lawyer and had now become a gardener: between the eight of them they had created a firm that would be a general handyman service, with two joiners, a plumber, two gardeners, two bricklayers, a painter, and an electrician. Only the electrician was so by trade; the others had learnt the skills and got the certificates while building the eco-village. Over the month I had been working with them I knew their professional backgrounds but very little about their personal lives, except what they offered in the stories around the campfire. But I wanted to know what was behind Gwen’s decision and knew in the asking I was risking questions in return. It was usually why I was wary of asking others, but on this occasion, it was as if I wanted to know because I also wanted to reveal. 

                              11

    She told me that in Glasgow she worked for a firm, was sleeping with the boss and defended clients she often thought were guilty but had the money to make guilt go away - or to transfer it. There were moments when she won a case where she felt like the guilty party, and it didn’t help that the person who was assuaging her in these moments of despair was the married man who ran the firm. She was in a right moral mess, she said, and wondered for a year after breaking up with the boss but still working for the firm, how she would extricate herself from it. She had a friend who said he was looking for people who were interested in moving up to the Highlands and creating an eco-village. Gwen offered this smoothly and succinctly, and there seemed little revelation in her telling. I asked her to say more about her guilt, and she paused for a moment, said now was the time to order the whiskies and, after returning from the bar with them, agreed to discuss guilt with a capital G. She said that more than a few people knew about what she had just told me, including everyone in the group. She supposed it was her way of explaining herself without revealing herself, but there I was asking her to say more. She told me that one evening, she, the boss, the accused who had won the case and a couple of others, were in a bar celebrating the victory when she went outside for a cigarette. A woman got out of the car and walked towards her. 

      The woman was about fifteen years older than she was, probably thinner than usual, and dressed more casually than her demeanour would indicate. She appeared an odd combination of assertiveness and vulnerability and, as she started speaking to Gwen, Gwen began to understand why. The woman was not at all aggressive; she was desperate. She said she knew her husband was having an affair, and didn’t doubt she was now speaking to the woman he was having it with. She wanted Gwen to know that if this was about feelings and nothing more, maybe Gwen should have been with her husband. She wasn’t sure if she still loved him. But she did love her children, who were eight and six, and were presently at home alone while she was here speaking to Gwen. That is a huge risk, she said. If anything happens to them while I am here, if a fire breaks out, or if they wander across the street and get hit by a car, she will be in jail for years and could never forgive herself. That would be guilt, she said. But she loved her children and loved them enough to risk venturing out and speaking to Gwen, and would remain married to her husband if it meant the children were to have secure childhoods. 

    Gwen finished the relationship that night, saying nothing to her boss when she returned from having her cigarette except at the end of the evening when he asked if he could carry on over to her place. She said no, and added that she didn’t want him to come over to her place any more. He had a home to go to, she said. Your wife and children are there. It wasn’t always so easy working with this man for the following twelve months but she didn’t try to change firms because she suspected she wanted to change careers, or have no career at all. She found she wanted a life, not a career, or rather any career would be subordinate to a life and not the reverse. She believed there would have been no affair with her boss if she had a life but it was almost entirely focused on the legal (her work) and the illicit (her personal life). It was a shambles, and she needed out. 

     I asked if any of the others in the village knew this, knew of the affair and the wife speaking to her. She said no. I said to her I often thought the anecdote is the revelation withheld, or perhaps that people don’t usually ask the questions that turn anecdotes into revelations: that behind many of the tales told around the campfire there were probably more personal details, stronger feelings and even horrors. She said I seemed to be speaking about myself. I said I suppose I was, even if I hadn’t told any stories around the fire. I could have borrowed one from my friend who borrowed them from someone else. Maybe anecdotes are like that: they don’t really belong to anybody. It is the revelation within them that makes them one’s own, she supposed. 

      Gwen and I stayed in contact and a few weeks after the night in the pub, she came down to Edinburgh. We slept together and, perhaps more importantly, I spoke to her about Martha. She held me as I talked, and it was as though I couldn’t have spoken about this without the warmth of human contact, as if my decision to avoid counselling and therapy rested on an assumption I couldn’t have articulated: that it needed to be more than a talking cure. 

                             12

   When I had returned from the village I had contacted Ian, and said we should meet. He agreed, but said he was stupidly busy. There was a new IT system in place and everybody was coming to or phoning reception with one problem or another. Two staff were off and he was sometimes working from 9 in the morning through till 9 at night, hardly legal probably but what could he do? He was the reception manager. His text was longer than usual and I wondered if in the explanation was an excuse. He probably was very busy, and though Ian may have taken to using somebody else’s stories as his own, I couldn’t see him creating elaborate lies of his own. He would have been working long hours, but he might also have been avoiding me. I knew he was capable of excuses. Who isn’t?

   So it wasn’t until shortly after Gwen left after staying in Edinburgh that Ian and I managed to meet. I expected him to be tired from too much work and perhaps exhausted also from the predicament he had found himself in. But while he did look like he hadn’t quite been getting enough sleep, as we started talking in a pub on a Monday night, populated by three men at the bar, the barman, and a couple seated with their dog at a table in the rear, he said all was well. I looked a bit surprised, hardly hoping for misery but at least expecting further complications. 

     Ian told me that, shortly after I went up north, he said to Gillian that it might just have been possible that he had known her ex-boyfriend. He said that someone came to live in the flat for six months and would often regale them with stories, with his adventures around the world and closer to home. When she told him about the incident in the Cairngorms, he sensed that this was with the very man who had told him a story about the mountain range, if from his perspective of course rather than hers. She asked his name; Ian said it was Josh. Yes indeed, she admitted, that was the name of an ex-boyfriend, and she asked Ian a couple of further questions that confirmed it. The thing is, he added, during their first date, and only on that first date, he told two of Josh’s stories as his own. When she told him of various experiences, and that included someone remarkably similar to his former flatmate, he wondered if the person in hers was the person in his. Now he knew he was. She said it was funny she had this recognition much later than she did. She of course wondered on that first night if those stories were Ian’s at all. She knew Josh had moved back to Edinburgh for a brief period, though they weren’t directly in contact, and thought it far from impossible that he would have been regaling whoever would listen to his adventures. She also believed though that the stories didn’t have any of the underlying self-aggrandizement of Josh’s tales. He would sometimes include a self-deprecatory element but that seemed more a moment of artificial false modesty than reflecting a sense of insecurity or failure. If these were Josh’s stories, they had been transformed in the telling: the person offering them had a better sense of himself and his world than Josh ever did. 

    She told Ian this that evening when he confessed, and she also added that after their date she noticed that no other details about his life that he offered resembled the two on that first evening. If he had taken another person’s stories as his own, it wasn’t as though it was simply to get her into bed. They still hadn’t slept together — and even if they were Josh’s, his telling revealed how different a character he happened to be from her ex-boyfriend. She assumed either it was a coincidence or moments of self-doubt on a first date that he covered with the doubtlessness of another’s tale. She even wondered if Ian suspected she knew his stories weren’t his own as he stopped telling further ones that would have made clear he was using Josh’s life experience as his. Whatever the reason, she trusted him and nothing she had seen in the months since indicated she was wrong to do so. He expected her to feel betrayed, cheated and disappointed, but he supposed she had gone through all those feelings with Josh and was happy that whatever form they had taken with Ian they were of such a minor magnitude. Ian did find himself wondering whether this meant that her feelings for him were so much weaker than they had been for her ex, who he knew he couldn’t even compete with when he borrowed the man’s stories. But he also found himself able to accept that he had qualities Gillian seemed to find admirable, and these were ones Josh clearly didn’t possess.

    During our conversation, I’d refrained from saying anything about Gwen. Maybe there was nothing to say — or at least no problem that I needed to share. But it might also have been because I felt that sharing stories had for a long time been for me a delicate matter, a term often enough used but a frangible reality for me. When I first heard of the ease with which Josh could tell his stories, even how easy it was for Ian to use them, I knew that a sense of well-being would be possible for me when I could tell a few of my own. But it was as if there was only one for a long time that I wanted to speak about, and felt very lucky that I eventually found someone to whom I could speak of it. Gwen and I talked later on the phone that evening, just before midnight and with both of us getting up before 7 the next day. I told her about what Ian had told me, and when she asked if I had told Ian about her, I said no.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Anecdotes

 1 

   He didn't deny it was wrong, but he noticed when he would ask women out, when they would talk about each other’s lives, he was so devoid of life experience, and wasn’t very good at shaping the experiences he had, that he decided to replace his own dismal existence with the more exciting life of a temporary flatmate from a year earlier. This flatmate was passing through Edinburgh for six months, before taking a job teaching at a university in the Highlands. It was a part-time post lecturing on communications, and he took it so that he could devote more time to writing. Joshua had lived in Edinburgh several years before, then once again went travelling, but this time he reckoned he was returning to Scotland for good. He’d been left a cottage fifteen miles from the town centre, and intended to commute in each day either on the electric bike he would buy himself, or on the one he used to spin around Edinburgh on while he was staying in the flat. The cottage belonged to an uncle who passed away. He had no children, and so there Joshua was with a tired, drab place that had a roof that needed repairing, a garden that could benefit from weeding, and an interior that required refurnishing. The work could be done in a matter of months and while he was staying in the flat he would go up every other weekend to the Highlands and stay for a few days working on the cottage before returning down south — where during this time he earned money teaching at a language school. It was a job he’d been doing for ten years, and named all the countries he had taught in and travelled to — often around the dinner table, with the three other flatmates, all of them fascinated. Joshua (or Josh) was probably a type — a ponytail, a tan, a wrinkled forehead and a wide and white smile. But he seemed to Ian a successful version of it, and Josh never seemed to run out of stories. It is the nature of travelling so much, he supposed, and Ian, whose excursions outside of the UK consisted of three family holidays as a child, and a couple of trips with friends to tourist resorts as an adult, was engaged, perhaps even enchanted. 

     Ian was not striking but he had a quiet handsomeness that got lost in his hesitancy and his dress sense. He always wore clothes a little too big and moved through space as though he wasn’t quite entitled to occupy it. His hair often fell into his eyes and he parted the fringe like he was opening curtains. He could never seem to sweep it back, could never use his hair except at the most useless of props. He would look at Josh (whom I met only twice) and see how comfortably he occupied space, often seated at the dining table leaning back and with his legs crossed. Joshua spoke with confidence and with a modulated tone that could intrigue, changing the pace of the telling according to the amount of tension he wanted to extract from the tale. Ian told me of one where Josh was surfing somewhere off the Pacific in Mexico and a wave came crashing in that he knew he couldn’t surf. He stopped for a moment in the telling, lighting a cigarette, and then continued by speaking about the size of the waves at the coastal village where he was surfing, how surfers from all over the world would come and take on the waves there. He added he was not an experienced surfer, that he could look competent enough as long as the waves were small enough, but this was no ordinary wave. He paused again to take a deep puff of the cigarette and said he was well aware that these waves could throw you some distance and that there were sharp rocks nearby. He said he had no interest in trying to ride this wave but just trying to survive the consequences of it, and yet saw no other way than trying to surf it. Amazingly he was successful, and for a few days at this resort he was admired by the community and people would slap him on the back and buy him a drink. His deed had been witnessed by a few people on the beach, and they spoke of this feat to the others. It was a fluke, Josh insisted, but he didn’t say anything to the surfers in the Mexican village. He just knew that his purpose had been to survive the wave, and far greater than his wish to conquer it. He would still surf, he told them, but only when he was certain the waves would be small. When Ian told me of this and other stories Josh would tell I noticed that Josh never told them with aggrandizement. If he came out of them well, if there was a successful outcome, it was usually down to good luck rather than great acumen: he rarely seemed to brag. Yet he seemed in them impressive.

                               2 

    After Josh moved out and settled into his house up north, Ian heard no more from him, and over the next six months, the idea increasingly and insistently came to his mind. What if he tried out some of the many anecdotes Josh offered on dates and claimed them as his own? Identity theft was common enough and very serious, but what about anecdote borrowing; was that not more like a debt than a theft? Ian had never lied on his dating profile, never pretended he was an age he wasn’t, never claimed a qualification he didn’t have or to be doing a job he wasn’t. He didn’t even choose a flattering profile picture. He had instead shown friends a few photos and asked them which one most resembled him. He didn’t want to give a false impression, he would say, and admitted to himself he wished to avoid a look on someone’s face when they met, one that registered disappointment before a word had been spoken. Yet here he was, prepared to take another’s stories as his own.

    He first tried a couple of anecdotes out on a woman he met for an afternoon coffee. The cafe was busy when he entered and he scanned the room looking for someone who resembled the image online. Ian might have insisted on presenting a composite honesty in the photograph he chose, but sometimes others would choose the exception that proved difficult to match with the person he would meet. They were sometimes several years older, often heavier, and on occasion dispiritingly dejected, as though the photograph had been taken during a happier time, perhaps when they were in love with an ex-partner they were clearly no longer with, and why they were on a dating app. Ian thought it odd that someone would put on their profile a photo possibly taken by an ex-loved one when they were part of a happy couple, and then meet a prospective partner looking quite different partly because of that very break up. On several occasions, the date consisted of the person expressing a series of grievances about an ex, or exes, and Ian’s purpose was to listen with the patience of a therapist but with none of the remuneration. The idea of ending up in bed after such an encounter would have seemed almost perverse, and Ian, while sometimes fascinated by the litany of appalling features these exes possessed, or terrible things they had done, wasn’t always bored — but the chance of being aroused evaporated.

     Ian suspected it wasn’t always that people wished to speak of their ex-boyfriends; it was partly that Ian had so little to talk about that he was inclined to listen. He had a girlfriend when he was at school for several years, another at university for eighteen months, and then nothing except online dating since then. His job didn’t seem to offer space for interesting tales either (he worked in admin at the university), and he knew when he started speaking about the lives of various members of his family that the date was becoming as sexually unlikely as when they talked about their exes. 

    He had noticed about Josh’s stories that they were exciting and, even if serious, contained within them a lightness that Ian had supposed would potentially be useful in creating levity during a date. Josh had told them of course to a group of male flatmates and yet, while one or two of them involved sexual adventures, most of them were travel anecdotes a little like the one outlined above. It was this very tale Ian offered to the unsuspecting woman as he found her in the corner of the cafe looking not too unlike the image she offered on her profile. 

                              3

   The conversation was initially agreeable but predictable: she told him what she did, though he knew, and he told him what he did — which she knew also. They said a few additional things about their jobs, and then a little about their hobbies and he could see the date grinding to a predictable acceptance that neither of them were suited to the other. Occasionally both parties accepted this but sometimes, if the date was in the evening, if alcohol had been drunk, and an exaggerated sense of intimacy miraculously created, he would go back to her place. The cafe didn’t serve alcohol and it was three thirty in the afternoon.

   He told the anecdote. He could have told it better, and he knew he lacked Josh’s ironic cadences, his smooth yet gravelled voice, and the easy assumption that what he was saying was true. Nevertheless, as he offered it she seemed more interested than before and even asked a couple of questions to which he had to improvise the answers. She asked him how long he’d been in Mexico, was he aware in advance that the place was known for surfing? He answered well enough, he supposed, and by the end of the date he offered another couple of stories that appeared no less to engage her. It was now five o’clock and the cafe was closing. He was sure that if he proposed carrying on to a pub she would have accepted, but while he thought she was attractive and hadn't at all given a false impression, that is exactly what he had done, and a sense of propriety overcame him as he said he really must be going. He expected no further contact (which was usually so even when an assignation took place), but a few days later she sent a message saying how much she enjoyed meeting up at the weekend and hoped they could do it again. He replied saying that would be lovely but he was very busy at the moment. 

     He went on further dates, told two or three anecdotes over the evening, all borrowed from Josh, and he worked out that he had a repertoire of about thirty. He also noticed that when he told them that he emphasised much more the self-deprecatory aspect. Josh incorporated into them an aspect that suggested he was capable of laughing at himself but this seemed no more than a social nicety to stop him from looking arrogant. Ian well knew he lacked Josh’s looks and frame, and instead played up the unlikelihood of scenarios like surfing on the Pacific coast of Mexico, or finding himself taking the cab driver to hospital when this heavily pregnant woman went into premature labour in Thailand. There he was, driving like a lunatic on roads he didn’t know as she was in the back seat pleading for him to hurry up in a language he hardly understood. 

   When Josh told this anecdote, Ian could imagine a man unflustered, finding himself in yet another situation where he could prove his competence. As Ian told it, he clumsily took the wheel and no less effectively worked his way along roads that only good fortune allowed him to negotiate. He missed every pothole, steered out of the way of oncoming drivers, and arrived at the hospital just before the birth. But this was thanks more to others’ driving than his own, as though all those on the roads between the moment he took over the steering wheel to the hospital were dexterous enough to avoid this oncoming incompetent. When he told this anecdote, his date laughed hard and as she finished, she put her hand on his as though half in pity; half in admiration. He wondered how a woman might have reacted to Josh’s telling and suspected the woman would look admiringly into his eyes and this would be the moment he would seize a kiss, appreciatively reciprocated. After Ian told it and she put her hand on his, he put his hand on top of hers and waited for her to kiss him. She did.

       Over the next three months, he had slept with more women than he had in the previous five years, and he began to believe that the stories he told weren’t only Josh’s; they belonged to the world of storytelling and what mattered was how he told them more than what they were about. I asked him whether this was an excuse, that here he was getting women into bed under not so much false pretences as borrowed narratives — though they were somehow the same thing. He thought not and explained why. He said that a fortnight earlier he was out with someone and he decided to tell a couple of Josh’s anecdotes exactly as Josh had told them to him. He embellished nothing, added no humorous asides, minimised the self-deprecation and presented himself precisely as the person who surfed well in Mexico and drove a pregnant taxi driver to hospital. The woman wasn’t impressed, perhaps not even convinced. He supposed she couldn’t match the person in the story and the person telling it. She cut the date short and ordered a cab, saying, as she left, she would be assuming the driver wouldn’t be nine months pregnant and need her to take over the steering wheel. She offered the remark as though she’d been insulted, that after his tall tales, he needed to be cut down to size and thus the date foreshortened. 

                               4

  I wasn’t sure whether to find her response funny or sad — to see that she hadn’t been fooled or had wasted a couple of hours with a charlatan, one who also happened to be my friend, one perhaps some might have said I should have disowned, as he was taking women into bed after taking them in. Several times I said to him what he was doing was unethical and unfair, and it was after one of those occasions he told me about the woman who didn’t believe what he said when he offered the anecdotes exactly as Josh offered them to him. He said this proved that somehow the stories were his own, that the manner of the telling was usually his even if the events themselves happened to someone else.

   It then occurred to him, he said, that maybe Josh’s stories weren’t true either, that he could have borrowed them from others and turned them into stories that he claimed happened to him. All he had to do was tell them in a way that seemed plausible given his persona, just as Ian had to do the same. I proposed that the stories might never have happened to anyone, as I imagined infinite plagiarism and palimpsest, with no lies being told and yet no truthful event depicted. Yet he was sure that the stories Josh offered were based on incidents in his life, though Ian wasn’t sure how he could explain this, and knew he had no evidence to justify it. That is the case with many stories we hear, yet we put scepticism aside and rely on trust, I said, adding that everything he might have been telling me about the dates he went on happened to be nonsense as well. As we talked that day, we were walking from Clerk Street near the town centre, through Duddingston village and on to Portobello. It was a July afternoon, the weather was hot by Edinburgh’s standards, 22 degrees, and the beach and promenade were crowded, with a few people dipping their feet in the water and two venturing a swim. I saw a mass of bodies but Ian noticed amongst them a woman walking towards him with a child of about four. She was thirty metres away and hadn’t appeared to see Ian, and as he mentioned the woman ahead he asked if we could avoid an awkward moment and go into the bar that was only two metres in front of us. I followed as we managed quickly to find a table by the window, as she and the child passed. 

                                5

I assumed this was one of his assignations and that he was surprised to see her and even more so to see her with a child. I wasn’t wrong and he felt oddly wronged — that the woman hadn’t mentioned during a three-hour conversation and the night together that she had children. I found myself thinking with some amusement that neither had lied and neither had told the truth. He would have told her stories belonging to someone else; she would have withheld information about her life that made Ian feel she had been duplicitous with him. I said he had no high ground here and certainly not after dipping inside the bar to avoid saying hello. He said he did so, partly to protect her, assuming she would have felt awkward meeting this man with whom she’d slept only once and then forced to introduce him to her son. I smiled and said he should be careful: it was one thing to borrow someone’s stories; quite another to lie to himself and expect me to witness the dishonesty. He smiled back and asked what sort of friend was I; shouldn’t I be supportive? I reckoned honesty was the best policy, especially when entanglements became as complicated as they were becoming. By all means, I proposed, continue telling stories, continue using these tales to have the encounters he was having, but he shouldn’t confuse truth from fiction as acts of denial as well.  

   I apologised for sounding harsh, and he asked me about any recent encounters I might have been having. He knew I never dated online, knew too that I sought something close to true love and part of that lay in contingency, knew as well that I’d lost someone in terrible circumstances that perhaps needn’t be divulged here. He knew that I hoped I could find someone again, but that hope was the operative word. He knew I wouldn’t do anything to pursue this possibility, as though I were betraying the memory of Martha. I said there was nothing to report but suspected if and when there was it wouldn’t make for the sort of telling that Ian has allowed me to offer here. 

                                  6

      Ian and I would usually meet around once a month but sometimes my work took me away for several months. I was an environmental engineer and, shortly after that walk out to Portobello, I went off to Morocco to work with a team of people on building eco homes based on retaining the principle features of the villages while developing necessary technologies. It was an intriguing project partly because the village was moving as though almost directly from the agrarian to the digital age and I, along with two other engineers (from France and Morocco), were in charge of the project. It was the sort I most enjoyed, and over the years I’d been involved in developing more than a dozen eco-villages. The first coincided with losing Martha and, without that project, I am not sure I would have had the will to continue living. I suppose many people say that, but I could at least pinpoint the specific thing that made me continue doing so. 

    When I returned I was still busy with the project but Ian contacted me asking if I was free and I felt the urge both to hear his news and to drink some beer. I didn’t have a drink once in Morocco; nobody in the village drank and my fellow engineers didn’t drink either, or at least showed no interest in doing so while working there. Luckily I liked mint tea, and strong black tea from a Samovar that even diluted retained a stewed strength. Ian and I met in a bar near where he lived in Newington, popular with long-term locals, medium-term students, and short-term tourists. It was always busy and for the first hour we stood at the bar. In most circumstances, we would probably have stood and talked the small talk and kept more important matters for when we found a table. But while he asked me a couple of questions about the Morocco trip, I could see he had a far greater need to talk about his experiences than I had about mine. 

                             7

     He told me that for the last three months, he’d been seeing someone regularly. He met her like all the others online but he found after their first meeting he wanted to meet her again, and again. They didn’t sleep together until after a month and it was as though they both knew that so much intimacy and affection had been developed in those first few weeks that, were they to take it to the next stage, it would be serious indeed. As he talked I was sure he was using her language more than his own, just as he had been using Josh’s stories on his dates. But I also sensed that this language had become his own, and who was I to mock him when I had loved and lost and he had yet to love at all? Yet while I expected him to keep telling me how wonderful Gillian was, he instead said that he thought there might be a problem. After the first date, he didn’t feel the need to rely on Josh’s stories; he and Gillian were so comfortable together that why involve a third party? However, on that first evening, he told two stories based on Josh’s anecdotes. She seemed to react differently from anyone else even though he told them in the humorous manner he would usually offer. She didn’t laugh and neither was she bored. She seemed curious, and yet curious not to know more about the story but more about him. 

   This was all very well, he said, but one evening after they’d been together for almost two months, she mentioned to him some travel experiences that were almost identical to ones Josh had told him, stories that Josh had offered where he was travelling with his partner at the time. In one, they were hill-walking in the Highlands when the weather turned quickly and he guessed it was going to be bad for at least a couple of days. Before walking they expected poor weather and took a tent just in case they were trapped overnight and took enough food to cover forty-eight hours. It looked like they might have ended up trapped. They couldn’t get a mobile signal and they decided to set up the tent, his partner would stay and Josh would venture down the mountain, seeking a signal. They agreed he was the stronger hillwalker and he could go down quickly with no additional help. He walked and walked and it wasn’t until he was at the bottom he could phone, calling Mountain Rescue. He expected a lecture since he and his partner probably shouldn’t have ventured out given the weather but no, they were as surprised as he was that the weather turned so quickly, and said he did the right thing. He enjoyed the helicopter ride out to Gillian and felt more like a hero than a fool.     

     Yet there Gillian was telling Ian of what seemed like the same event from another angle again. They were up a mountain when the weather changed and she said they should sit it out. They knew the conditions could turn treacherous and sure enough they had. But wasn’t the point of taking a tent and two days of food so that they could stay where they were and wait for better weather? He thought not and didn’t seem to realise that she was more worried about being left alone than them dying together. She said this to Ian as though she were being foolish and she supposed she was. And her ex was right, the weather remained terrible for four days and they would have gone hungry had they remained on the mountain. But he couldn’t seem to see her fear when he left her, and when she tried to address it when they got back home, he said he did what was necessary, and it worked. There was nothing to discuss. 

                               8

   He didn’t know for sure this was Josh she was talking about, and if he had asked she would surely have wondered why he was asking. But he was confident she was talking about the same man he shared a flat with. The story took place on the same mountain range, the awareness that the weather was likely to turn, the tent, the two days’ food — mountain rescue. True, a lot of these details could be generic, but it wasn’t difficult to imagine Josh going it alone, insensitive to another person’s feelings. What Ian did know was that it was likely enough for him to no longer use any of Josh’s stories as his own. 

     That wasn’t a problem: he found unlike with most people, and those he had gone on dates with, they always had much to talk about. Yet he wondered whether increasingly what she had to talk about were incidents with her-boyfriend who must surely have been Josh. A week after she told him about the mountain incident, she offered him another as he felt there was no doubt her ex-boyfriend was the man whose anecdotes he offered as his own on their initial date. 

   He was left wondering if she had worked out he was telling her about her ex, with Ian inadvertently breaking the rule that you shouldn’t talk about exes on the first date by talking about hers. If she did realise, why didn’t she say anything to him, and why was she still seeing him? 

     I was as bemused as he was. I supposed, if nothing else, his conundrum proved that a more important rule than to eschew speaking of one’s ex on a first date is to avoid using other people’s anecdotes as one’s own. But that wasn’t of much help now. Perhaps he needed to tell her the truth as I proposed another relationship maxim: that people fall in love with a fantasy, initially, and then, after, fall in love all over again based on the reality of the person they have become besotted by. Ian may have actively sought to exacerbate illusion but that might be why the reality would be all the harder to acknowledge. 

                              9

  When Ian, and sometimes others, asked me if I was seeing anyone, the question would never return me to thoughts of women I’d seen in cafes, bars, or in offices, but to Martha, and it was as though the thought of another woman wasn’t a betrayal of my love for her; it was a reminder of the terrible pain loss causes. Why would I want to go through that again I would think, and return quickly to thoughts of work, projects that I could control, rather than to a new person I might also lose? It was a silly thought, but this proposes that thinking is an active choice rather than so often a feeling made manifest. All my thoughts on love had been absorbed by pain and so, when people would talk of building a new life, I would think instead of homes I could construct and villages I could help shape. 

   Yet while I would recoil at questions about my love life (without making that recoil openly manifest), I was often fascinated by stories of love, by tragic tales, impossible romances and doomed love affairs. I wasn’t impervious to being moved by successful romances in films either, even if I found the conclusions pat and trivial. 

   I didn’t see Ian for a few weeks after he told me about the anecdotes Gillian told him. I was working on a project in the highlands, and a month passed as it often would before meeting him again. Yet I was interested to know whether he had resolved his predicament and I planned to contact him as soon as I returned to the city— as if I needed to hear what happened more than he needed to seek my advice. Yet it was someone else I found myself discussing it with before I had the chance to speak to Ian. I talked about it without saying anything specific, without saying it was about a close friend, feeling that perhaps one day Ian and this woman would meet. 

    Gwen was working on the Highland project when I arrived, a group of people that called in my company when there were a few problems that they needed help with. Sometimes and where possible, we would work on projects from the initial stages to final execution; sometimes we worked in a consultancy capacity, and sometimes that consultancy work segued into greater involvement. This was one such project. Gwen and seven others had bought the land two years earlier and usually at weekends and during holidays would be working on the eight houses as well as three other buildings. They were almost there but needed a bit more expert advice, and so I went up with one of the other engineers and we helped as much as we could, at a rate we thought was fair. One of the problems was that they were running short of money, and reckoned it was cheaper hiring the two of us who were sympathetic to their project, than others — who might exploit them and their relative ignorance. All of this isn’t very important, except to say that by the end of the month, the few problems were resolved, and they were ready to move in. They insisted we join them at a pub six miles from their eco-homes; they wanted to celebrate and we couldn’t refuse. 

                             10

   Over that month, Gwen and I had talked a lot but it was always about the project, and in the evening as we sat around a campfire next to the tents we were all staying in, saving money rather than getting rooms at the pub, we were never alone. The fire on those chilly late October evenings seemed conducive to anecdotes about everyone’s travel experiences. It was pleasant sitting there, night after night, feeling the cold on our backs, and the heat on our faces, but nobody quite expressed themselves. I found myself wondering about that distinction. Is that why we have stories, to stop us expressing ourselves? But how do we express ourselves without them?

 It was this question I discovered I was able to discuss with Gwen that evening in the pub. We arrived in the late afternoon and expected a quiet evening as few tables were taken and those that were occupied by people speaking in low murmurs. By eight, the bar was full and the murmurs became yelps, cheers and shouts, made still louder when a folk band started playing at nine. We were all quite drunk despite a bar meal at seven, and most were in various conversations with other customers, leaving Gwen and me at the table alone. I asked her whether she thought stories expressed us. She looked puzzled, so I rephrased it: did she think any of us managed to express ourselves during all those nights by the fire? I added that I enjoyed these evenings, felt I was part of a community, and wasn’t that exactly what they were trying to create: friends together living in their eco homes? However, expression seemed different from that, and she said she was beginning to understand what I meant.

    As people told stories around the fire it was as though the tales they told weren’t chiefly about expressing themselves but about entertaining the others. Maybe I had noticed this limitation more than most because I imagined speaking about what happened to Martha and realised it would violate the tone of the occasion, that I wouldn’t be telling a story but talking about myself, even if apparently everybody was doing exactly that. What were they doing, I wondered and said to Gwen nothing about Martha yet enough about what I was thinking on those nights for me to believe I was expressing myself in the pub that evening. She said that perhaps everybody was performing but they were doing so for me and the other engineer. We were the strangers in the group and the others were not. Gwen knew various personal details about all of the others: they’d been friends long enough to build a small village together, to wish to live in each other’s company, in close proximity. I said I found it amusing that all of them weren’t expressing themselves because I was there, and yet I supposed I had a need to express himself. That evening I chose not to speak about Martha, but I did speak about Ian.

   I said I once knew someone who saw himself as unsuccessful with women, and was, for a time, living in the same flat as a person who appeared very successful with them indeed. This flatmate shared numerous stories with the others in the apartment. After he moved out, the friend wondered what would happen if he took some of these stories as his own, if on dates he would regale women with anecdotes about his various international adventures: risking his life up mountains, driving a car at high speed through streets in the far east that he’d never driven on before, surfing in a sea that turned dangerous. He knew he couldn’t tell quite the same story: he lacked his flatmate’s looks and confidence. But he could tell them with an inflected comedy, as though he was surprised to find himself in such situations and even more surprised he got out of them with such effectiveness. Yet, I told Gwen, he had found himself going out with a woman who seemed to know the stories already: he was seeing his former flatmate’s ex-girlfriend.  

   Gwen looked at me with scepticism, as though undecided whether she didn’t believe the story I was telling, or if she did, she didn’t believe that the woman would still be seeing my friend after realising he had lied to her, and lied to her with an ex-boyfriend’s anecdotes. I shrugged, saying I was surprised too, but I still hadn’t met this person’s partner and it was only recently he told me that she surely knew his stories were stolen. When I returned to Edinburgh I supposed I would find out more. But what Gwen and I also discussed were revelations, which we both agreed were very different from anecdotes. The anecdote was somehow self-protective, a way of talking about yourself without quite revealing yourself, and perhaps Ian stealing someone’s anecdotes was acceptable while stealing someone’s revelations would have been a violation of privacy, as though the anecdote belonged to the community; the revelation to the self. I mentioned again all those stories people were telling around the fire, saying I didn’t only think it was because they all knew each other, and were entertaining their guests, though they were. It was also that the anecdotes were wonderfully communal, adding to the sense that they were creating a community. 

   But there we were, I said, in a pub, the others speaking to the locals and expanding their community, and we were talking of abstract things. She said abstract or intimate things, and I said sometimes we speak abstractly to avoid speaking confessionally. I realised then that I’d never asked her why she wished to join others in creating an eco-village. Of course, I’d asked about practical matters: I knew she had given up her job in Glasgow to move north; knew that she was before a lawyer and had now become a gardener: between the eight of them they had created a firm that would be a general handyman service, with two joiners, a plumber, two gardeners, two bricklayers, a painter, and an electrician. Only the electrician was so by trade; the others had learnt the skills and got the certificates while building the eco-village. Over the month I had been working with them I knew their professional backgrounds but very little about their personal lives, except what they offered in the stories around the campfire. But I wanted to know what was behind Gwen’s decision and knew in the asking I was risking questions in return. It was usually why I was wary of asking others, but on this occasion, it was as if I wanted to know because I also wanted to reveal. 

                              11

    She told me that in Glasgow she worked for a firm, was sleeping with the boss and defended clients she often thought were guilty but had the money to make guilt go away - or to transfer it. There were moments when she won a case where she felt like the guilty party, and it didn’t help that the person who was assuaging her in these moments of despair was the married man who ran the firm. She was in a right moral mess, she said, and wondered for a year after breaking up with the boss but still working for the firm, how she would extricate herself from it. She had a friend who said he was looking for people who were interested in moving up to the Highlands and creating an eco-village. Gwen offered this smoothly and succinctly, and there seemed little revelation in her telling. I asked her to say more about her guilt, and she paused for a moment, said now was the time to order the whiskies and, after returning from the bar with them, agreed to discuss guilt with a capital G. She said that more than a few people knew about what she had just told me, including everyone in the group. She supposed it was her way of explaining herself without revealing herself, but there I was asking her to say more. She told me that one evening, she, the boss, the accused who had won the case and a couple of others, were in a bar celebrating the victory when she went outside for a cigarette. A woman got out of the car and walked towards her. 

      The woman was about fifteen years older than she was, probably thinner than usual, and dressed more casually than her demeanour would indicate. She appeared an odd combination of assertiveness and vulnerability and, as she started speaking to Gwen, Gwen began to understand why. The woman was not at all aggressive; she was desperate. She said she knew her husband was having an affair, and didn’t doubt she was now speaking to the woman he was having it with. She wanted Gwen to know that if this was about feelings and nothing more, maybe Gwen should have been with her husband. She wasn’t sure if she still loved him. But she did love her children, who were eight and six, and were presently at home alone while she was here speaking to Gwen. That is a huge risk, she said. If anything happens to them while I am here, if a fire breaks out, or if they wander across the street and get hit by a car, she will be in jail for years and could never forgive herself. That would be guilt, she said. But she loved her children and loved them enough to risk venturing out and speaking to Gwen, and would remain married to her husband if it meant the children were to have secure childhoods. 

    Gwen finished the relationship that night, saying nothing to her boss when she returned from having her cigarette except at the end of the evening when he asked if he could carry on over to her place. She said no, and added that she didn’t want him to come over to her place any more. He had a home to go to, she said. Your wife and children are there. It wasn’t always so easy working with this man for the following twelve months but she didn’t try to change firms because she suspected she wanted to change careers, or have no career at all. She found she wanted a life, not a career, or rather any career would be subordinate to a life and not the reverse. She believed there would have been no affair with her boss if she had a life but it was almost entirely focused on the legal (her work) and the illicit (her personal life). It was a shambles, and she needed out. 

     I asked if any of the others in the village knew this, knew of the affair and the wife speaking to her. She said no. I said to her I often thought the anecdote is the revelation withheld, or perhaps that people don’t usually ask the questions that turn anecdotes into revelations: that behind many of the tales told around the campfire there were probably more personal details, stronger feelings and even horrors. She said I seemed to be speaking about myself. I said I suppose I was, even if I hadn’t told any stories around the fire. I could have borrowed one from my friend who borrowed them from someone else. Maybe anecdotes are like that: they don’t really belong to anybody. It is the revelation within them that makes them one’s own, she supposed. 

      Gwen and I stayed in contact and a few weeks after the night in the pub, she came down to Edinburgh. We slept together and, perhaps more importantly, I spoke to her about Martha. She held me as I talked, and it was as though I couldn’t have spoken about this without the warmth of human contact, as if my decision to avoid counselling and therapy rested on an assumption I couldn’t have articulated: that it needed to be more than a talking cure. 

                             12

   When I had returned from the village I had contacted Ian, and said we should meet. He agreed, but said he was stupidly busy. There was a new IT system in place and everybody was coming to or phoning reception with one problem or another. Two staff were off and he was sometimes working from 9 in the morning through till 9 at night, hardly legal probably but what could he do? He was the reception manager. His text was longer than usual and I wondered if in the explanation was an excuse. He probably was very busy, and though Ian may have taken to using somebody else’s stories as his own, I couldn’t see him creating elaborate lies of his own. He would have been working long hours, but he might also have been avoiding me. I knew he was capable of excuses. Who isn’t?

   So it wasn’t until shortly after Gwen left after staying in Edinburgh that Ian and I managed to meet. I expected him to be tired from too much work and perhaps exhausted also from the predicament he had found himself in. But while he did look like he hadn’t quite been getting enough sleep, as we started talking in a pub on a Monday night, populated by three men at the bar, the barman, and a couple seated with their dog at a table in the rear, he said all was well. I looked a bit surprised, hardly hoping for misery but at least expecting further complications. 

     Ian told me that, shortly after I went up north, he said to Gillian that it might just have been possible that he had known her ex-boyfriend. He said that someone came to live in the flat for six months and would often regale them with stories, with his adventures around the world and closer to home. When she told him about the incident in the Cairngorms, he sensed that this was with the very man who had told him a story about the mountain range, if from his perspective of course rather than hers. She asked his name; Ian said it was Josh. Yes indeed, she admitted, that was the name of an ex-boyfriend, and she asked Ian a couple of further questions that confirmed it. The thing is, he added, during their first date, and only on that first date, he told two of Josh’s stories as his own. When she told him of various experiences, and that included someone remarkably similar to his former flatmate, he wondered if the person in hers was the person in his. Now he knew he was. She said it was funny she had this recognition much later than she did. She of course wondered on that first night if those stories were Ian’s at all. She knew Josh had moved back to Edinburgh for a brief period, though they weren’t directly in contact, and thought it far from impossible that he would have been regaling whoever would listen to his adventures. She also believed though that the stories didn’t have any of the underlying self-aggrandizement of Josh’s tales. He would sometimes include a self-deprecatory element but that seemed more a moment of artificial false modesty than reflecting a sense of insecurity or failure. If these were Josh’s stories, they had been transformed in the telling: the person offering them had a better sense of himself and his world than Josh ever did. 

    She told Ian this that evening when he confessed, and she also added that after their date she noticed that no other details about his life that he offered resembled the two on that first evening. If he had taken another person’s stories as his own, it wasn’t as though it was simply to get her into bed. They still hadn’t slept together — and even if they were Josh’s, his telling revealed how different a character he happened to be from her ex-boyfriend. She assumed either it was a coincidence or moments of self-doubt on a first date that he covered with the doubtlessness of another’s tale. She even wondered if Ian suspected she knew his stories weren’t his own as he stopped telling further ones that would have made clear he was using Josh’s life experience as his. Whatever the reason, she trusted him and nothing she had seen in the months since indicated she was wrong to do so. He expected her to feel betrayed, cheated and disappointed, but he supposed she had gone through all those feelings with Josh and was happy that whatever form they had taken with Ian they were of such a minor magnitude. Ian did find himself wondering whether this meant that her feelings for him were so much weaker than they had been for her ex, who he knew he couldn’t even compete with when he borrowed the man’s stories. But he also found himself able to accept that he had qualities Gillian seemed to find admirable, and these were ones Josh clearly didn’t possess.

    During our conversation, I’d refrained from saying anything about Gwen. Maybe there was nothing to say — or at least no problem that I needed to share. But it might also have been because I felt that sharing stories had for a long time been for me a delicate matter, a term often enough used but a frangible reality for me. When I first heard of the ease with which Josh could tell his stories, even how easy it was for Ian to use them, I knew that a sense of well-being would be possible for me when I could tell a few of my own. But it was as if there was only one for a long time that I wanted to speak about, and felt very lucky that I eventually found someone to whom I could speak of it. Gwen and I talked later on the phone that evening, just before midnight and with both of us getting up before 7 the next day. I told her about what Ian had told me, and when she asked if I had told Ian about her, I said no.


© Tony McKibbin