from the novel “Bitter Honey”

I met Jason for the first time in almost seven years. We were students together; and though we never belonged to the same crowd, you could say we had a kind of weird relationship. Not only did he not belong to my crowd, he didn’t belong to any crowd. No one really liked him and I never quite knew why. Gill once even said she thought he was smarmy; I never saw him like that. To me he looked somehow … funny. He was a good student who never lowered himself to any unbecoming carry-ons at Union bashes; on the contrary, he looked strangely shy, reserved, and sometimes – when things turned a bit rowdy – ill at ease and downright embarrassed. Veronica summed him up as an undershagged middle class jessie, but I thought she was being a bit over the top there, all in all. There was something else about him, something I couldn’t quite nail down.
At uni, Jason was going out with a lassie called Helen, a student of Italian, a short, plump, couthy lassie who always looked cheerful and seemed to be somewhat motherly. They always seemed to be such a good couple; with his shyness, Jason looked a little lost, and Helen was perfect for him, a mum who’d protect him from this bugger of a world. But still, I always felt he was – unbelievable as this may sound – interested in me in some way. I couldn’t quite describe how.
For one thing, whenever we met he would invite me for coffee with an unusual, quiet kind of enthusiasm. His invitations weren’t casual, over-the-shoulder like those of other students, yours included. Behind them you could feel a genuine desire; they were serious, determined, almost anxious. He actually cared whether I’d go or not. I have no idea what gave me this impression, perhaps something in his body language, in his looks. I wondered if he was inviting other people for coffee like that – did he make this impression on everybody? There was no way of knowing, since I never knew anyone else who was invited for coffee. His eagerness wasn’t conspicuous enough to be presumptuous or even pushy; not at all, I actually liked going. He turned out to be – once he opened up – quite intelligent, a bit of a laugh, funny; he didn’t look bad either. In his own very discreet way he was obliging, which seems to be a fairly rare quality in men these days. And there was something else about him that seemed nice, something I couldn’t really put my finger on. Maybe it was his hands – I always found them so unusually well-shaped. I think Jason had the most exquisite hands of any man I’ve ever seen. Maybe because of that I just made up everything else. Maybe I only wanted him to be interested in me. But I didn’t know how to make sense of this interest; it bothered me. I wanted to savvy it. But to be fair, I never gave him much chance to come clean, really. By then I had you, and I never really had any genuine intentions with him. Our worlds were so different. Still, in a way, I thought it was too bad we’d never met again after uni – I hadn’t even heard from him and nor had anyone else.
We met by accident when I was coming home from work, in Buchanan Street, right in front of the Mackintosh café. He was wearing an ancient-looking beige Crombie, and looked exactly the same as he had at university – somehow mousy. I almost expected him to get a beamer at the sight of me. He immediately invited me for coffee, again in his typically anxious way. I couldn’t help feeling exactly the way I had back then, me confused and uncertain as well. What’s wrong with this bloke? Or with me? He told me he worked for the NHS (salary not too bad, thank God, could be better though), and lived downtown now, in the Merchant City, actually. He and Helen had been married for years. A daughter, three and a half years old. Unruly as hell. As he pattered on, I just kept looking at him and couldn’t understand how quickly the time had passed. Look at the guy – back at university he looked like a laddie embarrassed to hear the word ‘shag’ and now he’s married, raising the fruit of a shag, works for the NHS and pays off a mortgage for a pad in the Merchant City. And me still in the place in Argyle Street I had inherited back in my halcyon student days, with a man who wanders the earth in search of his real self, and at this age I have no idea what to do with my life. The time must have passed so quickly it escaped my notice pretty bloody successfully. What, was I still living through my student days?
After some hesitation, Jason asked me if I’d like to go with him to a gig in an Ashton Lane pub the next night. I’d never heard of the band. Helen was busy, he said, studying for her Mlitt. He said this in a way that made it clear he wasn’t too happy about it (no, not particularly, thank you), so it would really mean a lot to him if I could help him out one way or another. I thought it over. Could there be anything wrong with going? What? Two old pals from college going out for a drink in a pub? It came to my mind that, in the old days, he would never have asked me to something like that: it was hard to imagine him going deliberately to a rock gig, though Ashton Lane kind of seemed the right place for him. He seemed to have changed a bit in other areas too, not only in the professional department. For the better, that was for sure. It was quite amusing, the way he looked at me. Good old Jason. Yes, that was one thing he hadn’t changed. Thankfully.
We went to that pub the next night. It was OK. Jason was fun, he didn’t consume ten pints of lager and then stagger around the bus stop like most men I knew. We had a great time, really. When I was going home he asked me where I usually had lunch. It turned out he knew a good café with North African food just a hundred yards from Sauciehall Street, not far from where I worked. He mentioned he often went there around one.
After that we met there for lunch quite often, say once or twice a week. The café was OK. Jason was a vegetarian and he adored North African and Middle Eastern food. We blethered about loads of things. Gradually I began to uncover a new picture of Jason and Helen. They were not OK, he told me. Hadn’t been for a long time. Actually, he was beginning to think they never had been. Helen’s sonsy appearance and mumsy attitude were apparently hiding – what a cliché – an unconscious, overpowering desire to keep a tight rein on things. At first this may only have showed in her attitude towards him – about which he had no complaints then – but it later turned out that her ambitions were greater. Helen wanted to keep her motherly reins not only on her husband but on other people around her as well: she wanted to have life completely, unconditionally under her control. After the wean arrived, her interest in Jason thinned. At first he saw her sudden coldness as a sign that she had simply redirected her emotions to the daughter for a while, which was only normal; but after a few months of maternity leave, it was becoming obvious that something else was bothering her. Helen was clearly beginning to panic. Yes, she saw things outby going their own way; and she felt her control was slipping and that she might never get it back. She decided something had to be done. If she wanted to stay on top of things, she had to be better than everybody else. She decided to go back to university.