The Neurotic

Birthdays are life's little way of mooning at you.


They aren't REALLY about presents and woo-hoo you got born on
this day let's all celebrate your Mum going into agonising labour and
coming out with more swear words than I knew about - it is about Life
and Death forming a conspiracy. Life wants to put you in as much pain
as possible and give you SOME good times so that the bad times seem
even worse. And Death is, in constrast, the nice one. It says to Life,
'Give these poor kids a break, Life.' But Life has this annoying habit
of keeping you going until you're old and gnarled and useless. They
meet up once a year, on my birthday, grinning. They're both pointing
out to me that time is ticking. Death swings his axe as a joke.



Last night I had a dream that Death was standing over me with
an axe, drunk, and Life was watching from the doorway.
'Wooooooooooooooh!' said Death, whirling the axe around my his head.



'But I'm only twenty-five, I'm healthy, I'm a hard-worker -'
I protested, but I was rudely interrupted when Life burst out laughing
at my last comment.


'Death, stop it. Scaring him is my job,' said Life, still
laughing.


'You get all the fun. I want to scare him this time!' replied
Death swirling his axe. He grinned down at me and I thought to myself:
He won't kill me, not really.


'Death, be careful with that axe. That is one of my most
neurotic, depressed living people and he is so fun to torture?put the
axe down,' ordered Life.


'I am NOT depressed!' I protested. Life and Death both
exchanged glances of badly suppressed humour and then Life gave me a
pitying, knowing look. The axe slipped from Death's hands, and they had
got off my head. I woke up yelling that I was not depressed, but when I
saw the anti-depression tablets beside my bed it was not a very
long-lived yell.


On my eleventh birthday I found out that I did NOT pass the
exam to get a scholarship to a private school so I went to the local
comprehensive and had a terrible time. Good people, but add teenage
kids to bored teachers and throw some girls into the mix you have the
brew for barely-contained chaos.


When I turned twelve my parents got divorced. Imagine: you
are half-way through the most enormous chocolate cake you've ever seen
in your life and they tell you they're getting divorced. Put me off
chocolate cake for life - why couldn't they have told me over my
lettuce?


On my thirteenth I had an asthma attack and nearly died in
the same hospital I was born in.


When I was fourteen the girl I had been going out with
proclaimed to all the year that I was pervert because when we had
kissed I'd kept my eyes open (I like to see what's going on, though the
excuse did not suffice and rather, scared her more).


All my birthdays followed suit. They were terrible. It is
Life's way of mooning at me. My twenty-fifth was spent, uncelebrated,
in a coffee shop. My parents (both of them, a big thing though I didn't
care) had called to say Happy Birthday. Mum told me she was expected a
little sister for me. At twenty-five I should have had my own kid by
now, she probably thought. This would be her third kid in the second
marriage.


'That's great, Mum,' I told her. Then I put down the phone
and tried not to cry.


I go to the only coffee shop which does not serve Hot
Chocolate, which I almost always puke at the smell or sight of since
the age of twelve. It was dark and gruff men ususally entered. I drunk
the lot in one go. Then another. Then another. Then another. The waiter
got suspcious.


'Is there alcohol in there or something?' he asked, peering
at the mug, 'Or are you a quitter and caffeine is your alcohol?' I
glared at him.


'If I start drinking I tend not to stop until I keel over,' I
replied dully. That's what happened usually. In bars inhabited by women
that according to my parents I should date - who all thought I was an
alcoholic and did not sit near me again.


'Why so blue?' The waiter was younger than me and too nosy. I
wanted to tell him to go away and serve someone else (several were
looking disgruntled) but he, uninvited, pulled up a
seat.


'It's my birthday today.'


'Really? How old?' The man was beaming at me and I was trying
to work out where he'd lost the point - I was NOT happy that it was my
birthday.


'Twenty-five.'


'But that birthday is a big deal! Twenty-five is a quarter of
a century! You should be celebrating, you know.' This man was a dolt. I
felt worse. I did not want to be a quarter of a century old. I did not
want to have lived through two decades and a half. I wished to go back
to my eleventh birthday and to fix every one of those birthdays, and
though the sci-fi movies were brilliant, they were misleading. I
couldn't do that.


'Mm.' I couldn't bring myself to state that he was wrong.



'I'm seventeen,' he said, 'and people don't trust teenagers.'
He sighed, 'we aren't all hooligans.'


'Can I have the bill please?'


I think he got the point that time.


I walked along the canal and thought about Life and Death and
the Great Beyond. I had long since cast off the dream that there was a
heaven (mainly because if I believed in heaven then I believed in hell
where I would ultimately be going) but it was better than my theory of
two gods, two forces if you like, of Life and Death. They weren't two
guys wearing scary clothes or anything - that was just my imagination -
but when Death visited I imagined my body rotting away, a feast for
maggots. I grinned. I had some use after all - food for the babies of
the ever-evil FLIES.


I am NOT depressed.