The Patron Saint of Mid-Life

Okay, I'm going to have another go at the fiction thing, starting over again from the beginning. This time, I'll try writing in the 3rd person for a change. This will make it easy to distinguish regular entries from fiction. I'll do it in 1000-word chunks. Ish.

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The Patron Saint of Mid-Life, Part 1

Ronnie Collins was the last person to indulge in a mid-life crisis. In fact, he’d expended a good deal of effort in the arrangement of his life so as to avoid one. He’d seen people have them in their early 30s, and he’d seen that other kind, the mid-20s crisis, the ultimate self-indulgence; and he’d seen friends of both sexes go off the rails after a divorce. Or two. But Ronnie, he was exactly the right age, and he’d had exactly the right kind of problems, these past two years, that he could, no question, just drop one. But as far as he was concerned, everybody else could go first, then he’d have his.

He’d been planning it for a while. Building up to it. He’d already got the car.

The subject on the email was A TRIP TO FRANCE WITH OLD SCHOOL FRIENDS. Sitting in the small control room of his home studio, he almost deleted it without reading; it looked like spam, or possibly a virus, cunningly disguised to appeal to both the latest internet fad and the national obsession with cashing in a high-value British property and moving to the continent. But there was nothing attached to the mail, so he took a quick look.

Dear Ron,
Well it’s been over 20 years since most of us saw each other. Some of us have exchanged a few emails, but the time has come to organise a reunion. But one with a difference: rather than book the old school hall and hire a DJ, they thought it would be nicer to invite a select few to celebrate my 40th birthday and share a long weekend in our holiday home complex in France…

He scrolled to the bottom of the mail to see who it was from, because he didn’t recognise the hmbailey@frenchcountrylife.co.uk name at the top of the page. H M Bailey turned out to be Hazel Brown, one of the many girls he’d loved indiscriminately when he was 17. Intrigued, he read on.
Later, drinking coffee in the lightest and warmest room of the old house, staring at the crows in the stand of trees at the bottom of his garden, Ronnie thought about what he’d do concerning the email.
He’d registered on schoolmates.co.uk about 6 months before. A friend had forwarded the link to Ronnie, with the single comment, “Intriguing. I’ll join if you will.” It took a moment to decide to register his details. His thinking was simply that people would not expect to see his name there, and one thing that had characterised his life was a contnuing attempt not to meet people’s expectations. What he’d really wanted, immediately, was to know what had happened to the two or three people he’d really cared about. Assuming that they, like Ronnie, would normally not be interested in such a thing, he’d gambled on sticking his name on there as an advertisement. He knew they were likely to lurk and not register, otherwise.
It was partly arrogance, thinking of himself as one of the “cool” ones, one of the people too far above that kind of thing. Ronnie had always said to his ex-best friend, no way would he ever go to a school reunion. School reunions are for the happy clappy Christian types who wear matching jumpers, and for attention seekers like his ex-best friend’s ex-girlfriend, though he never said that out loud. The arrogance was all of a piece with the character he’d always been. Ronnie knew that all the people who thought him arrogant when he was 17, 18, would have been surprised to see his name there, would possibly click the link to read all about him, hoping he was living in a mobile home under a motorway flyover somewhere. Needless to say, he didn’t put anything particularly meaningful in his little biog. Just made up some stuff about living in a trailer park with his wife and their 14 kids. It would have been a little embarrassing to try to summarise the facts of his life, in any event.
Ronnie made a list of the people he’d be willing to pay a fiver to speak to again. It was a short list, all female.

Lucy Roberts
Jane Hinchcliffe
Hazel Brown

There was also a B-list, of people he wouldn’t mind knowing, briefly, what had happened to; perhaps people he’d have been glad to hear from, but not worth the registration fee.

Sally Broughton
Julie Feint
Dave Powell

And a (short) C-list, of people whose names he wasn’t clear on. There was a redhead who once flirted with Ronnie on a school trip. Unfortunately he’d been too obsessed with Hazel Brown at the time and paid her no attention. As he’d got older he’d realised that being both fussy and too far up his own arse when he was 17 had led to a lot of missed opportunities. There was another girl he’d been introduced to by someone else at a party. She was so clearly out of his league he’d treated the whole thing as a casual joke. Years later Ronnie wondered, did she really like me? He wasn’t exactly sure of her name, or what school she’d been to.
Ronnie gave some thought to the B-list. Probably 25% of his first hundred songs were about Sally B. She was a kind of early obsession, a reluctant muse. Unfortunately, she wasn’t at all interested, or impressed, and of course the songs turned out to be laughably bad. Julie F was actually from another school in the same town. He met her at his Saturday job, and she always made him think he’d picked the wrong school to go to, because the women at her end of town were obviously much more sophisticated and interesting. So she was a second-string obsession for his 17 year old self. This was before he even started writing songs, so all he wrote about Julie was what he came to think of as laughably bad poetry about her hair and her clothes.
Dave, the only male entrant, was Ronnie’s best friend. They’d been friends for nearly 10 years after they both left school. In fact, they grew closer in those 10 years than they’d ever been in school. But shit happens, and it had been another 10 years since they’d spoken. Dave wasn’t on the A list because all the years of good friendship had worn down to a natural conclusion. Dave was now a minor curiosity to Ronnie; Dave had always been the one with the big plans, the dreamer, and Ronnie wondered if anything had come of them, that’s all.

The A-list was easy to explain. They were the names of people – girls, obviously – he never really got close enough to. These were the intriguing ones, the distant ones, the ones who kept Ronnie guessing at their mysteries. Or not quite.

The biggest disappointment about oldschoomates was that after a period of rapid growth and expansion, it all died down, and the new names stopped appearing. It became clear after a while, too, that most of those registering were working in IT, or in jobs that put a computer in front of their eyes for the duration of the working day. For the rest of society, for the unwired, for the academics and non-deskbound, it might as well have not existed. A critical mass was achieved, and Lucy Roberts name failed to appear.