Ham spent most of his life pretending. He pretended he was happy. He pretended his job was important and that
business was going steady. He pretended
his wife was still enamoured with him, and he with her. He pretended his kids were swell. He pretended about a whole bunch of other
things.
Ham’s face was a wall.
Ham’s face was a very attractive and elaborate lie. Ham’s face was a very attractive and
elaborate lie that hid the fact that in truth everything was just about as
abominable as imaginable.
Ham secretly wanted to blow his brains out. But Ham knew someone would have to clean up the
mess. And some people might miss him. And some more people would pretend to be sad
at his passing. So Ham kept on
pretending. Quoth Shakespeare: ‘all the
world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players’.
Ham was downright miserable.
The other side of the very attractive and elaborate wall, it was about
as much fun as a needle in the eye. His
job, meanwhile, was about as rewarding as a hunt for a needle in the Largest Haystack
in the Universe, and profits had disappeared into a quagmire. Ham’s wife scorned his every attempt at
making things better, and so Ham began to make fewer serious attempts at making
things better. And of Ham’s two kids: one
had become a drug-addled transvestite, living half on the streets, to Ham’s
secret and severe embarrassment; the other, a Doctor, was strongly rumoured to
be practising illegal medicine – and neither was in regular contact with either
of their parents. Although this was
perhaps for the best.
When Ham left his wife every morning and drove to work he
had dreams of crashing his car into a tree, or driving headlong into an
oncoming juggernaut, but he had become so good at pretending that he pretended
to himself that he could still smell the flowers on the roadside verges and
hear the birds in the roadside scrub.
When Ham walked into the office to begin a day’s work he had
dreams of walking straight out again, never to return, but he had become so
good at pretending that he pretended to himself that the secretary at the front
desk smiled at him every morning, and that Dolores, his buxom, and not
unattractive co-worker, had a serious crush on him. Ham also pretended his boss was something
other than a malicious goon.
When Ham went out with his co-workers, he had dreams of
telling them all to go to hell, and longed to tell his boss how he wanted to
throttle him on a daily basis, but he had become so good at pretending that he
gladly bought all his co-workers drinks, regaled them with tales of his two
swell kids, and often, after a few, told his boss how greatly he respected him,
which was, of course, water of an Eider’s back, and a load of baloney.
Then Ham would travel wearily home again, and have dreams of
making sweet, mad, passionate, and pure love to his wife, when in reality she
would go to bed early with a lifestyle magazine, turn over on her side and
switch her reading light out as soon as he appeared on the landing. And Ham would get ready for bed, button up
his PJs, and hope to fall asleep and dream of one of his two sons as a Nobel
prize winning theoretical-physicist, when in reality the only theoretical-physicist
to have won the Nobel prize invented the Atom bomb.
But eventually sleep would come, and Ham, for a few hours at
least, was spared pretending, and his attractive and elaborate face would
become sloppy and slack-jawed, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, his eyes
shut and cancelled on the world.
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