Strangers often mistake me for a good listener. I'm not a good listener; I'm just an exceptionally poor escape artist.
Sensible people excuse themselves from one-sided conversations, but I just don't have it in me. I prefer to go limp and say things like, "Mmm" until it's all over.
Once, a teacher struck up a conversation with me in a classroom between lessons. (He was an older chap, and I'd previously overheard him complaining to another teacher about the school's lack of hide-e-holes -- he had no place to take a nap. "My old school had a cupboard under the stairs," he said. The other teacher nodded earnestly.)
Anyway, this chap was now banging-on to me about his upcoming weekend, about how he had to drive to Wales to visit his poor old mother who was suffering from the onset of dementia; he had to dig a tree stump from the garden, do that to the door, etc, etc. I was nodding, but I was mostly just limp.
"It's hard," he said.
I nodded.
"Last weekend I was down there, after a full day of gardening and what not; I'd just hopped into bed, drifting off, and Mum comes knocking at my door, calling me by my father's name ..."
"Ahh," I said with recognition.
"He's been dead for years …"
"Eee," I grimaced, qualifying that recognition.
"I'd had enough--it had been this and that all day--I just shouted: 'Mum, F**K OFF!"
The words seemed to bounce like marbles down the hallway.
I looked to the side, but the bony finger of Reply was upon me.
"Mmm," I said -- ambiguously this time.
He continued:
"It's tough seein' your parents like that, you know?"
I nodded tentatively.
"Walkin' round like a zombie ..."
I nodded more readily, sensing the pity in his voice.
"Eatin' up your inheritance."
Mmm. Now where's a hide-e-hole when you need one?
