A Word Of Advice

Contributed by Dan Lester on 21/10/08

“I just can’t stop thinking about her,” Mark said, looking around the room. “Everywhere I look I see something that reminds me of her. Even that graffiti across the street.” He turned back to me, and I looked down at my drink. I had no idea why he had chosen me to spill his guts upon. Surely he had other friends who were better suited, ones who might actually care about any of this stuff.

I looked up at him, and he repeated my move of looking down at his drink. “I just don’t know what to do,” he said, appearing to be addressing his comments toward the half finished pint of beer in front of him, and I couldn’t help feeling that the aforementioned pint was just as ably equipped as I was for this sort of thing, and that Mark could just as easily be doing this on his own. I decided to make a token effort.

“What you need to do,” I said thoughtfully, “is manipulate your penis into an erection and then insert it into a vagina.” Mark looked at me as if I had just suggested that he euthanise his mother without waiting for her to become ill. Which annoyed me, as I felt that it was perfectly good advice, however sarcastically it was delivered. If he got laid it would help take his mind off things. Instead he just shook his head, muttered something about how he knew it was a mistake talking to me, and left. I was slightly upset about having let him down in the whole shoulder to cry on thing but at least I got a free drink out of it.

The next time I saw anything about Mark was on the news that night. It seemed that after he had left the pub he had gone straight to the airport and caught a flight to the middle east, where he had involved himself in the Israeli-Palestine conflict as a negotiator. According to the news report, he was making tremendous progress, and the two states were closer to achieving peace than ever before. I tried to come up with some kind of lesson from this, but thinking about it gave me a headache.

It was a while before I heard anything else. Not that he hadn’t been in the news, it was just that I had been in no position to watch it. I had been visited by the police the next day, several officers with a search warrant, and after they got a look in my basement it was pretty clear to everyone that I would be going to prison for a while. It was a couple of months after the trial, looking through old newspapers in the prison library, that I saw a story about Mark. Apparently he had abandoned the peace negotiations abruptly, after meeting a girl from Skegness, and the Israeli-Palestine conflict was now as far from resolution as it had been before he stepped in.

I couldn’t help feeling disappointed, but then again, who was I to judge?