Sliding Doors
Cast your mind back to the University of Glasgow, summer, 2001; or, as you most likely weren’t there, let me fill y’all in. It was gloriously sunny, warmer still in the Philosophy department right down at the far end of the campus, where the thick windows looked out onto the myriad-bookstored roads which led to Kelvingrove. But I, unlike you, was there, in one of the seminar rooms, tilted casually back onto two legs of my chair in what may or may not have been an ultimately vain attempt to look cool; an attempt to look cool which was inspired by the enormously serendipitous stroke of being assigned for my presentation partner the incredibly yummy, tastefully eye-shadowed girl from my Hegel class who never seemed to speak to anyone and who, sitting across from me here, I was now discovering was sweet and shy and self-conscious rather than aloof. The summer seemed likely to stretch off as far as the roof-topped horizon, and just as prettily. Discoursing upon something or other very clever and erudite, the buzz of a seasonal wasp nearly made me lose my balance, cool, train of thought, hopes of yummy, eye-shadowed making-out on the soft couches of tiny cafés. Trying not to even dignify the distraction with a glance, I lazily flicked out the Coke bottle in my right hand, contents long since devoured by dehydrating warmth, in what I took to be its general direction.
The tiny plastic “Thwock!” was solid and satisying in even the still and sticky air, the little black dot arrowing with dip straight into the pastel green bin. I knew enough about girls to resist my reactive instincts, which were to jump from my falling seat with my arms aloft and a scream of “SCORE! Did you see that?! Did you see that?! That was fucking sweet!” Instead, all that passed to indicate my emotional inner tumult was the clatter of my chair’s front legs to the floor and the birth, like a cosmos, of an immutable smile of surprised joy on my face. No, of course girls don’t find these things as impressive as boys do, best to underplay the whole thing really, but still, it was, as per my initial reaction (which I had had no reason to revise), pretty fucking sweet, anyone could see that.
“Why did you do that?” came the reproachful, wounded voice. “It wasn’t hurting anyone.”
“It… it was a wasp.” I replied with surprise of a different kind, hoping that somehow she had mistaken it for some more benign form of existence, like a bee or a zebra or something.
“You didn’t have to kill it, though.”
Now this was a bit fucking much. To have one of the most impressive achievements of my entire life witnessed only with disapproval was one thing; but to have inexplicably become the villain of some pantheistic Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll was quite another. And nor was I going to admit that it had actually been an accident, not when my whole self-image had already found a new prop in my hitherto untrumpted ability to swat wasps into bins with empty Coke bottles. None of that for me, thanks, no, not today. And then it was all like the writing of some predictable parable of wilful self-destruction, six months of lovelorn pining from a distance about to be swatted like, like a wasp! And from the closet of my myriad personas of indignant self-defence came Just William.
“Well, I s’pose I should’ve just let it sting me, I s’pose that’s what I oughter have done. Yes, I s’pose I should’ve jus’ let it sting me to death, and then I guess you’d be happy, you and your ole wasp, with me dead and you not. Funny sorter an idea that, wasps being more import’nt than people. Funny that there aren’t more lors about it, about people havin’ to get killed dead off wasps just to keep you happy. Yes, I’m very s’prised to hear about that lor. I’m simply statin’ a fact. Huh! Wasps!”
What I had forgotten, because I had at no point up until now given it any consideration whatsoever, was that the Philosophy Presentation was not merely a meet-cute for me and pretty girls but something which actually had to be done, and that whilst adopting the abrasive personality of a character from a children’s book in order to alienate myself from the sympathies of a girl was fairly paradigmatic self-laceration on my part, falling out with someone on whom 50% of my grade for a course depended was not. Tra-la-la.
Looking back on this now, I sense a crucial divergence point in my life, one where an erstwhile Thomas-to-be sighed and shrugged and gave up waiting to exist, wandering off instead into his own parallel universe subplot. But it’s not that that Thomas now has a professorial chair at Cambridge and a trio of yummy, eye-shadowed children, or anything like it. And that’s where Sliding Doors goes so badly wrong. The biggest differences between one choice and another are not the material outcomes but the internal ones; or, to put it another way, the difference is not in the opportunities offered, but in the person who winds up facing those opportunities. In that one moment in that one seminar room, the momentous choice was made that I should henceforth self-identify as childish, self-indulgent, easily wounded, romantically masochistic and masochistically romantic; that, in those moments of self-doubt and identity crisis which are the apparent accoutrements of middle age, I should not have far to look for key and bookmark to my character; in short that, ever after, that moment should be highlighted as fluorescently, irremediably me. What did Gwyneth Paltrow find out? That she was the kind of person who missed trains. Or wasn’t. I forget. Doesn’t seem like much to show for a life of heartbreak.