Apathy Sketchpad

I would like to start by emphasising that every word of this article is true. I have not embellished or exaggerated, because it simply isn’t necessary. I have a stalker, who for the sake of this story we will call ‘Tracy’. (And because it’s her name.) She isn’t a very good stalker, because she only knows my routine for about four hours a week, which are the ones on a Wednesday afternoon when I go to the Ship, but for those few hours it can be pretty scary.

I met her on the 3rd of September this year. She ended up talking to me because she got to me last and therefore had already scared everyone else away. It is a rule in the Pub Code that someone has to talk to the scary person, and a sub-clause of that rule states that the last person isn’t allowed to leave until the criteria for a conversation have been met. They were. After a while I took out my phone to check for messages, which was a mistake, because she took it off me a forcibly exchanged phone numbers with me. (When Tracy goes on the pull, she does it like a tug-of-war — persistance and hard work, and completely at odds with what the other person wants. Oh, and she gets a little outside help from her gravitational field caused by her immense bulk.)

Eventually I escaped her by being called up to sing. I sat back down with some comparatively normal people and ran out the clock. (“Comparatively normal” at the Ship means, say, a freelance viking, mentally ill, or maybe a lesbian. We have all three there on a regular basis.) I didn’t turn my phone on for three days. I justified this to myself using the fact that I had left my charger at home and had to conserve battery power until I could pick it up.

She texted me the following week to see if I was going to the Ship again. I answered non-comittally. She showed up. This was getting to be a problem, because I didn’t want her to become a regular feature. The pub quite literally isn’t big enough for the both of us. She says my text didn’t get through, so I can have a clear conscience that I did actually reply, with all the tangible benefits of blowing her off completely. She showed up anyway. Apparently while I was singing No Regrets she enjoyed it “rather too much”. I dread to think what Lee meant by that.

The week after that (the 17th) I put in National Express for karaoke, and enjoyed every second of singing the phrase “Your arse is the size of a small country” not ten feet away from her. That week, we learned that Tracy cannot take a hint. Remember that; we’ll be coming back to it later. I spent the remainder of the evening sat with my friends discussing even more insulting songs I could sing to see if she can take a less subtle hint (Sixteen Tons, Fat Bottomed Girls, and so on) and amusing ways to tell her to get lost.

For a few weeks after that, we didn’t go to the Ship because Lee and Lizzy had launched their anti-social-life campaign and were desperately trying to stomp out any sociable or otherwise enjoyable evenings out we might have. They were quite successful in the endeavour, as well. I next went to the Ship on my own on the 5th of November. She wasn’t there. I thought perhaps Lee and Lizzy had unwittingly set me free from the Tyranny Of Tracy. I thought wrong. She showed up the next week at least as large as life, probably larger. Before she left that week, she accosted me from behind and kissed me. I’m pretty convinced that is not socially acceptable behaviour. Not when she does it, anyway. (See how I spent your birthday, Caroline?)

It is worth pointing out at this point that the selection of songs available on the karaoke discs is not great. If you sing Elvis Presley or traditional Irish songs you’ll be fine, but otherwise the selection is rather limited. For this reason I have made my own disc, and knowing that Tracy might be there I added the Arrogant Worms’ Stalker Girl to the end. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that. This week (the 26th) I put the song in as soon as I saw her. For those of you who don’t know the song, I will reproduce the most relevant parts of the lyrics here, in exchange for which I will link you to the Arrogant Worms’ homepage, so maybe you might buy a CD from them.

She says I touch her in a
Very special way
But I’d never go near her now
Without my pepper spray
And the voices
Inside her head say
Break into my house and
Sleep in my bed
And they also said that
Shaving the cat was OK.

She’s my creepy stalker girl
I’m the centre of her
Whacked out, crazy and delusional world
She follows me everywhere
She’s even got a bag with some
Bits of my hair
Just go away you creepy stalker girl.

Now, I’ve analysed your handwriting
And I’ve got some bad news:
You’re manic-obsessive with
Abandonment issues,
And you think
That all our songs
Are about you and
You’re usually wrong,
Except for now; this song is so about you.
You creepy stalker girl
You creepy stalker girl
You creepy stalker girl

That’s right, the relevant parts of the song are the entire thing except for the first verse, which is about being in a band. Remember how I told you that Tracy cannot take a hint? Good. (One might have thought the phrase “this song is so about you” might have tipped her off, but alas, no.) When I returned she said “Help me!”, so I felt I had to ask what was wrong. I added the word “now” to make it less polite. I didn’t want her liking me any more than was strictly necessary. She pointed across the pub and said “He fancies me.” As well as demonstrating that she has no sense of irony, this was the best news I’d heard all week. I told her she could do worse. She said he wasn’t her type but I stuck to my guns. “What’s wrong with him? He seems like a nice guy.” I had never, in fact, spoken to this man, I was basing this observation entirely on his choice of T-shirt, but I wasn’t going to let that kind of detail throw me off course or else Tracy would have already won. She ignored all common sense, the blindingly obvious, and the unchangable recent past when it suited her to do so. She said “No, I fancy someone else.” It ought to be pretty clear to even the most dim-witted reader who she meant, and it was for exactly this reason I didn’t say “And who’s that, then?” I knew how she felt; I didn’t need to complicate matters by letting her know I knew. “I don’t know if he likes me, though,” she continued. i decided it would be safest if she didn’t try anything she’d regret like asking me out, so I told her I knew how she felt — I had that same problem with a girl at uni and when I asked her out she didn’t like me at all and it was the most embarrassing time of my life. It wasn’t true, exactly, but it was just what I needed her to hear. I got talking to the self-employed viking again, and a while later she nudges me on the shoulder and says partly to me and partly to her friend who presumably had contested she was unreliable, “I’ve never let you down when you’ve texted me and asked me to meet somewhere, have I?” And of course she hadn’t. The fact that I had never, and would never text her unless it was a reply to her and I would certainly never ask to meet her unless I was armed to the teeth and bored with life anyway didn’t seem terribly important to her. She then told him we text each other all the time, and sometimes phone. We have exchanged precisely one text message and exactly zero seconds of phone calls in the entire history of the world. Three possible explanations present themselves:

1. She copied down my number wrongly and got someone who sounds exactly like me instead and hasn’t realised yet. If this is the case, I expect I will be blamed personally for not telling her this during one of our many phone calls she thinks we had.
2. She was lying to seem cooler, or to see if I would play along. I did, in case the next possibility is true:
3. She’s insane.

I like the last one. It has an air of simplicity the other two explanations lack. Occam and his Razor are with me all the way on this one. She’s delusional, just like the Arrogant Worms said she was, and she thinks we have long conversations. The beauty of this theory is that it neatly explains almost everything. If she thinks we have long chats late into the evening, then she has had ample time to get to know me, which explains why she confessed last night to loving me. I asked her not to. Personally I’ve been going to the Ship for over two years and as nice as the people are there, I’m not sure I love any of them. It also explains why my phone never rings when she says she’ll phone me. She’s probably sat at home with a toy phone pretending to ring me. I hope so. That would be an endearingly cute mental image. You know, if she was cute. If there are any further developments, I’ll let you know.