Enduring

Group Meeting 6/4/16

Martin was late, again, claiming he ‘slept in,’ despite there being so many alarm applications on the App Store that the cartilage in my thumb socket was now showing the signs of early onset arthritis due to my willingness to discover just how many there actually were. The meeting time was also not the most typically conducive to being slept in on, being at two o’clock in the afternoon.

I took a mental note to go to his house with a megaphone and perhaps some ice-cold water before next week’s meeting.

Jess, our self-designated team leader, sat in her chair with a patient expression on. I had been quite happy to let her take the reigns on this assignment. In fact, I was wondering whether she would be interested in taking control of my life, that had recently begun spiralling out of control. This complete loss of stability had strangely enough coincided with the start of the university semester, although I was sure that it wasn’t university itself, owing to the fact that I had actually turned up to the first lecture.

I’d given up conversing with Jess almost as soon as I began it. It appears that all she did on her weekend was prepare the content for the meeting and had tea with her 87 year old Grandmother. It was a mental struggle to remind myself that yawning and/or bursting into tears in the knowledge that there was still an hour to go starting from wherever Martin arrived would be deemed as socially unacceptable.

Our other team member turned up, our resident international student, and I froze when I couldn’t bring myself to remember her name. I sat in my chair with the hope that Jess would inadvertently say it while greeting her, but she was as useless at this as she was with using her weekends to engage in any sort of activity that that was even in the same universe as ‘fun.’

I said a clipped, “Hi mate,” and immediately chastised myself for the idiocy of my greeting. I opened up Facebook on my laptop and made myself unavailable for further comment.

Martin turned up fifteen minutes later, and I’m glad he did because I don’t know how much longer I could have sat in silence with Jess and What's-her-name, even with the Best of Tumblr open on screen. Also, Jess had grown immutably angry and quite physically red in that time; I was worried that she might have high blood pressure at the ripe old age of twenty.

“Martin,” she said, quite evenly and devoid of emotion.

“Sorry guys,” he said. He wasn’t sorry. In fact, he smelled like he’d been dusting off a kebab that had had enough garlic sauce to keep him free of the threat of vampires for a century. I tried to move my chair a little to my right, but he only took it as an opportunity to move closer to view the big TV screen that Jess had her laptop hooked up to. His breath wafted over me, and I struggled not to gag. I also struggled with the urge to retrieve the pen from my bag and stab him in his jugular vein. Then, I cursed inwardly as I remembered that I hadn’t carried a pen since high school.

Jess ran the meeting with an iron first. She even had a Google Slides presentation, that first off wouldn’t go full screen, and then she managed to leave the mouse in the middle of the screen.

She blasted through the agenda – a completely unnecessary formality, considering we all knew what we were there for already.

I wished dearly that I had a bottle of Listerine so that I could use it to waterboard Martin and his rotting mouth.

“Now, for Part 1, what I think we should do is…” said Jess, before I tuned out again. Martin was nodding eagerly, either in support of an intention to sleep with her or out of sheer gladness that Jess, it seemed, had already completed the assignment, or both.

What’s-her-name had just broken the record for the longest time of non-participation in a university group meeting, and kept going strong, despite encouragement from Jess for feedback. Even Martin got on this particular bandwagon, “That’s right Helen, I’m sure you have some ideas!”

Helen. Thank God. Martin wasn’t completely useless it seemed. I’m glad I didn’t try to guess something more culturally Asian. I thought that might be racist. I searched for an answer. Google certainly thought it was. Bing tried to get me to set it as my default search function, so I gave up finding a second opinion and volunteered to be the scribe for the session.

I glanced at the time on my laptop, screwing my face into an expression that showed I was actively thinking about the assignment, which I wasn’t, but I had to do something to smother the overwhelming feeling of hopelessness that had washed over me when I found that barely seventeen and a half minutes had passed.

I thought about proposing to the group to move the meeting to the uni bar, but I thought better of it, on the account of Jess and her love affair with tea and old people, to which the uni bar had neither.

I sighed, that turned into a cough as the garlic breath of Martin, that would single-handedly keep him a virgin for the next thirty years(unless, of course, Jess enjoyed wearing gas masks while getting down to funky town) wafted over.

Helen chose the moment to open her mouth, and I imagined our collective hearts jumping at the prospect of hearing her first words, but were left disappointed as she yawned, stretched, and burped.