Runner's High

After losing his long-held job at a rural supermarket, a middle-aged man drifts into isolation, resentment, and emotional paralysis. Convinced his wife is having an affair and unable to imagine a future for himself, he sets out one night intending not to return.

What follows is not redemption in the sentimental sense, but something quieter and more recognisable: the gradual rediscovery of motion, habit, and endurance through running.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:34

Inertia. That was the word again to the end. Not despair. Not grief. Not depression. My doctor might have had one of those words ready in his drawer. Inertia is cleaner. It has had local science about it. A body at rest is likely to remain at rest. Unless acted upon by some force. There I was then. A body at rest. Resting in a chair. Resting in a bed. Resting in a marriage. Resting in my own life as if it had been left out in the field and forgotten. If you asked me where it began, I might say secondary school. Because a man can always blame the brothers. Or I might say it began before that. In the small mornings of childhood. In what was praised and what was not permitted. But the truth, if I'm to be fair to the thing, is that it began when I got the sack from Black's supermarket. James Black did it himself. Thirty-eight years I gave that place. Thirty eight years of pallets and rotas and complaints about bananas. Of people looking for things that were in front of them. Men asking if there were any offers on the slabs of beer as if the answer were a secret between nations. I worked my way up to assistant manager, which is not the same as being valued as I now know. His father had been a better man, not good now. I wouldn't go polishing the dead, but better. James had inherited the shop and the narrow little soul to go with it, though I always held that his mother had sharpened him up wrong. A wretched woman. There, I've said it. I couldn't say it when my bread was buttered that side, but unemployment freezed the tongue, if nothing else. He called it restructuring. There's a word to admire. Restructuring. A thing for falling on your head and telling you it's architecture. I was fifty-four. At the jobs office, the young fellow behind the desk had the smooth face of someone who still believed forms held power. He said I was underqualified and over experienced, and he smiled sadly, as if he'd said something wise. I remember thinking that if there was a drawer in the office for men like me, it was probably labeled surplus. It was hardness all, of course. Nell, the wife, Siobon, the daughter. Fifteen then, and always retreating into that private weather of teenage girls. Somehow I noticed over time the house changed its breathing when I was in it all day. You might not think a house could resent you, but spend six months unemployed in one and tell me again. At first I drank, not heavily, not successfully. I never had the appetite for alcohol that makes a man either tragic or sociable. I tried the pub, but I couldn't stick them. The ones secure in their jobs, loud with the charity of the employed. The ones already long lost to drink, who welcomed you to ward into and through the bottle, with soft friendship of mutually assured destruction. There's a fellowship in the pub, yeah, but it's not always, you know, friendly. Sometimes it's only two creatures in a trap, recognising here's another creature in it with them. So I drank at home. Nell was rarely there in the evening. Yoga, tai chi, amateur drama, crochet circles, and mindfulness group in the parish hall, which sounded to me like a contradiction in terms. She moved through life with the calendar, I moved through it with a glass. Then I saw Siobon watching me one evening from the doorway. Not with fear, but with disgust. The clean, unrelenting disgust only possible of a fifteen year old girl. It went through me sharper than pity would have. After that I took rude in front of the television. There's a great piece to television if you're willing to surrender the last bits of yourself to it. Daytime chat repeats. News channels that turned disasters into wallpaper. I became paradoxically, oblivious to my own life and well informed about the world's misery. There were wars I could describe better than my daughter's friendships. There were economic collapses I followed with more attention than my marriage. Inertia. This was the season of it. It was only after a while that I noticed Nell was out nearly every night. He'll say I should have noticed sooner, maybe. But the unemployed man loses not only wages but scale. Days swell and shrink and blur. They wither into and away from one another. Evenings arrive without much announcement. Other people's movements seem to belong to a world from which you've been excluded. Still, with time, even I began to notice. She looked well. That was the first injury. Not beautiful exactly, though she had been that once in a hard, bright way, but well alive in a manner that couldn't harmonise with the conditions of the house. She had colour in her face. She had reasons to wash her hair. She had, God help me, a lightness about her. And once you notice lightness in someone who lives with you, you begin to ask where are they getting it? Of course, I suspected another man immediately. I couldn't rage. Rage would have been a form of vitality. Strictly speaking, against the inertia. I investigated, which is what small men do when they can't act. Wives have their methods. They can read card statements, check pockets, examine silences. Men are clumsier. I followed her. For a week I made poor work of it. She drove towards Kinfarna, the nearest big town. Though big would be an insult to ambition. The road was straight and open, and I lost her twice because I had to hang back too far. The third time I waited fifteen minutes before following. By then the light was failing. I found her car. Her blue ford. The passenger side scratched exactly where she had once reversed into the pillar of O'Driscoll's garage and blamed the pillar for standing there. It was parked outside a semi detached house just beyond Kilfarna. Over the next few evenings I learned what I could. A single man lived there. Frank Shefflin, mechanic, forty something, decent shoulders, the kind of man who knows what a timing belt is and therefore appears competent in all extrapolated areas. I imagined how it began. The Ford Infrar repairs. Nell making some little joke. Frank leaning in under the bonnet, emerging with grease in his hands and sympathy in his voice. His forearms exposed. I imagined him listening. That was the most unbearable part. Not the body, though that had its own cruelties, but the listening. After that I noticed what had set in in the house. It had become a place of small, steady defeats. Nell and I had only been speaking when necessary about bread and bills. About where is the blue handle screwdriver? Chivon avoided me with the professional skill of a child who's learned the weak points of both parents. Even the dog, Brandy, a bitch of great emotional intelligence and no manners, took to waking me on the couch by licking my face with a pity I resented. I came to live, I thought then, in a house of bitches. No, that was unfair. Bitterness is rarely accurate, but it is fluent. The night I confirmed it, it was a Wednesday. Nell went to Frank's. He came out and kissed her on the lips with the ease of a man who wasn't rehearsing. They got into his car and drove into town. I followed them to the church hall. There was a concert on. Of course there was. Not a sordid hotel, not some lay by, not the pornography or portrayal I'd prepared myself for. A concert, a choir, a hall full of decent people in good coats, all of them listening to something high and human while I sat outside in my car and felt the foundations of myself loosening. I heard the singing through the walls. An aria or something like it. Voices rising cleanly into the cold. My stomach turned. I opened the door and vomited in the car park beside a hedge trimmed into submission. It surprised me, the feeling. I thought myself empty. I had thought Nell could no longer reach whatever part of me, that stillest part of the still contends that remained capable of hurt. But feeling, when it returned, returned without measure. Numbness had been a dam, not an absence. Behind it the river had been waiting. I drove to the coast. I don't remember deciding. One moment I was in Kinfarna, the next I was out beyond the dark fields, and then the road fell away towards the pier. I parked there with the petrol low and the sea moving invisibly below the wall. I thought of doing myself in. There's no delicate way to put it. The thought came not as drama but as an arithmetic. My life insurance would pay the mortgage. It would see Siobon through college or whatever she chose. Nell could go free to Frank Chevlin and his competent hands, and after the decent interval everyone could stop pretending. The difficulty was the clause. Suicide, naturally, would complicate the policy. Even in death the man must mind the paperwork. My father had died of a heart attack at forty six, my mother at fifty eight. There was a family history enough to make an ending plausible. I had eaten badly for years, I'd done no exercise worth naming. Nell had been telling me I was heading for an early grave long enough that if I managed it, she would hardly accuse me of poor planning. A heart attack, then. Natural cause. You might call it cowardice if you like. I call it Providence. I went home. The house was quiet. Chivan was upstairs, music leaking through the floorboards, her voice rising over it now and then on the phone. I pictured her lying on the bed, blonde hair spread on the pillow, though she was likely sitting on a mess of clothes in crisp packets, rolling her eyes at some injustice far away. Nell was out. Brandy slept on the couch, her paws twitching in some dog dream where she was either chasing or being chased. The kitchen clock ticked in the chest of the house. I changed into an old battered pair of football shorts from the junior B days. They'd been tight even then, in accordance with the barbarous fashion of the time. On me now they were an insult to the human form. I replaced them with swimming shorts, which at least would allow death a modest amount of dignity. I tied my runners on the front wall. It seemed important to choose a decent place to be found. Why, I can't tell ya. I didn't and I don't believe in an afterlife. I'd no hope of looking down on mourners, no fantasy of reunion or judgment. Non existence seemed then the only solid promise the universe had ever made yet. Still, a man wants to be found somewhere that doesn't embarrass him. I walked first, past the creamery, dark and sour smelling even years after it stopped being useful. I can relate. Past the national school, the little windows reflecting nothing. Past the church and its empty car park, past O'Hara's, where a smoker coughed and crushed the life out of a butt end beneath his heel. Nobody stopped me. That was a mercy or an accusation or an invocation. At the foot of the hill out of the valley I began to run. Not jog, not pace myself, run. I ran as if chased by every year I'd wasted, as if James Black was behind me with his restructuring, as if Frank Chevlin was calling encouragement in his mechanic's voice. As if Nell Chavon, the man in the job office, the twenty-four hour news channel, the pub, the bank, the dog, the whole grinding machinery of my humiliation gathered at my heels. The wind rose around me, the road barely visible, a dark ribbon between hungry ditches. Each footfall struck through my legs like punchment. My lungs opened into pain. My throat burned raw. My harp again to hammer, not rhythmically, but like an animal flinging itself again the bars of a cage. Good, I thought. Good. Let it come. My arms tingled, my neck pulsed. A pressure grew in my chest, immense and personal. A fist had closed inside me and was squeezing itself in my chest. Sweat ran down my back. I could taste metal. The stars above were few and cold, ancient witnesses with no interest in existence or none. I pushed harder. There's a strange freedom in aiming yourself at an ending. A clarity. For the first time in months I was not waiting for anything. I was causing something. Then my foot caught, a stone, a rut, the edge of the road, I never saw it. I fell heavily, shoulder and hip and cheek striking the ground in stages. The breath left me. The world flashed white, then black. For a time I was nowhere. When I came back I was lying in the wet grass beyond the road, one leg in the ditch, my mouth full of the taste of earth and blood. The night had gathered around me as if to hide what I'd attempted. Far off, a dog barked once and thought better of it. I wasn't dead. My heart, traitorous thing, had slowed, not stopped, slowed. It beat now with a soft, almost embarrassing regularity. My skin was cold with sweat, my chest ached, my hands trembled. Above me the stars went on with their ancient indifference, and then something happened that I've never properly explained. Was not joy exactly. Joy is too bright of a word. It was not relief either, because I'd failed at the only task I'd set myself. It was a clearing. As if some sluice in the body had opened and allowed the black water to run out. The pain remained, the facts remained. I was unemployed, my wife loved or at least preferred another man. My daughter avoided me, my future had narrowed, none of that altered, but it was suddenly bearable. Not solved bearable. That was the miracle. If miracle is not too grand a name for a chemical event in a middle aged body lying in a ditch, I lay there laughing. Not loudly, not happily, a small cracked laugh, like a match failing to light. I gone out to die and discovered to my irritation that the body had other opinions. Eventually I stood, everything hurt. Mud streaked my legs, my palms were torn, one knee had opened, I limped home by the long way, because I didn't want the smoker outside O'Hara to see me and build a story with me in it. When I got in, Brandy lifted her head and looked at me. She gave me one thump of her tail, which was either forgiveness or contempt. I sat in the kitchen chair until dawn, watching the light slowly return to the room as if it had been negotiated. The next evening I went out again. Not to die, that's what I told myself, though honesty requires me to say I don't entirely know why. I walked to the same hill, I ran a little, stopped, bent over, spat, walked home. The following evening I did more. After a week I could run past the creamery without feeling my chest catch fire. After a month I had root. After three months I had shoes bought in a proper shop by a young man who looked at my gate with priestly seriousness. After six months I'd lost weight. After a year I'd become, to the confusion of the town and to myself most of all, a runner. The seasons moved through me. Spring came first as damp light on hedges, then summer with hot tar and flies. Autumn with the smell of leaves softening and drains, winter with my breath white before me and the road shining under frost. I ran through it all. I learned where the potholes were, where the dogs had bark, where the wind cut hardest, where the sea could be smelled before it could be seen, and in the running something gathered. Purpose is too noble a word, habit maybe. Habit has saved more souls than belief ever did. The mind when the body is pushed, loses some of its power to torture. The old thoughts ill came, but they had to keep pace. A many were not fit enough. Bitterness lagged first, self pity gave up near the crossroads. Suspicion of Nell lasted longer, being a wiry little bastard, but even it began to tire. One evening, months later, I asked her plainly, not accusing, not theatrical. I asked who Frank Shefflin was. She looked at me for a long time. Then she said he was in the choir, the concert, the nights out, the classes. Some of them were lies, yeah, but not the lie I'd made out, and she'd been ashamed to tell me because I'd become the sort of man who made another person's happiness feel like an offence against them. Frank had given her lifts. He'd kissed her that night, she admitted, and she'd let him once. She had hated herself for it. And then she'd hated me for having made hatred so available in the house. I asked if she loved him. She said no. Then after a while, not the way you mean. There's another clean answer. Life rarely gives clean answers unless it's about to do something cruel. We didn't repair it all at once. Repair is the dishonest word for marriage anyway. Things break and are glued and the join remains. Sometimes the join is the strongest part. Sometimes it's exactly the spot where it will split again. Chavon noticed the running first as comedy. Jesus, Dad, you look like a boiled ham in Lycra. Later, she began walking with me some evenings for the first mile, then turning back. We talked then, not deeply, which would have frightened us both, but enough. School, music, the idiocy of adults, the moral corruption of teachers who were assigned homework over weekends. It was a start, not a redemption. I don't trust redemption. It's too often a word used by people who like endings. What I found was smaller, motion, a way of refusing inertia without needing to believe in greatness. A body acted upon by a force, a body becoming force. I still had no job for a long time. Then I got to work with a man doing stone walls and odd repairs. Cash some weeks, declare to the taxman others. The way rural economies breathe through both nostrils and call neither of them a sin. James Black's supermarket closed eventually, taken over. Over by a chain that painted everything a bright colour and paid people worse. I didn't attend the funeral of it, though I walked past once and saw him standing outside in a suit too good for the occasion, looking smaller than he had in my memory. I felt nothing much. That was kind of a victory. As for running, I kept at it. There are mornings now where I rise before the house, tie the laces, and step out into the grey. The roads there, waiting without judgment. The hedges hold their dark council. The fields breathe damp into the day. Somewhere a cow complains to God about existence. The sky lightens slowly over the town that didn't save me and didn't kill me either. And sometimes, after the first hard mile, after the chest loosens and the legs remember, there comes that lifting. You'll hear people call it a high that makes it sound like pleasure. And pleasure is too simple. It's more like a permission. For a little while the self thins, the cancer not settle, but they are set aside. The dead do not return. The lost years do not bloom again. The wounds do not vanish. But you move. You move through the place that held you. You move through the life you mistook for finished, and the road, which offers no meanings at all, gives you distance.