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2. WHO IS MARK THANE?
Mark Thane has never set the world on fire. He's always been content to just get on with it. He's done the job. His school teachers described him as 'a plodder'. He'd get everything done, but at his own speed.
Mark was born twenty-six years ago and has grown up in and around the same area for almost all of his life. Nine months ago he bought his first house with his fiancé, Jo Palmer, on the opposite side of town to the childhood home where he grew up. To Mark moving away was a big deal. He still finds the distance between the present and the familiarity of the past disorientating, threatening and unsettling. He is already making plans to move back in the other direction if and when he and Jo buy their next home. It certainly seems likely they will have to move again. The property in which they have invested their joint savings (and their salaries for the next twenty-four or so years) is stylish and well appointed but also depressingly cramped and small. There is barely room for the two of them. When people come to stay Mark jokes that they have to take it in turn to stand out in the garden. Having three people in their ridiculously expensive two bedroom shoe box at the same time is, he tells Jo, a fire hazard. That's a massive exaggeration, of course. The real reason he prefers to wait outside when they have people around is that he can't stand most of the people who visit. On occasion he has even considered taking up smoking just so that he has a plausible excuse for leaving the room and standing in the middle of their small, square patch of garden on his own.
Mark's relationship with Jo is, to coin one of his own phrases, evolving. A typical male, many of his formative years were spent playing the field - attempting to meet and mate with as many women as possible before maturity and responsibility finally caught up with him. Jo had started as just another conquest on just another Saturday night, but she had quickly become more. She had refused to let him go. He'd seen her around town a few times and had been about to make a pass at one of her friends when she'd grabbed hold of him and thrown herself at him in the darkest corner of the most expensive club in town. He remembered feeling 'claimed' at the time. She'd put her mark on him. After the initial shock of not being in control had died away he had begun to enjoy her company. They had some good times together. After their first few months as a couple, however, Mark began to feel hemmed in and stifled. But this was his first attempt at anything resembling a relationship, and naively he assumed that was how it was supposed to be.
Mark had continued about his life at his usual lethargic pace. Jo, on the other hand, moved at a much quicker speed and with clearer motives. As long as he got what he wanted (a good time and good sex) he was content to let her get on with it. Jo had plans, however, and Mark remained blissfully ignorant to them until it was too late. He really liked her (maybe even loved her) and she did things to him which no-one else had ever been able (or willing) to do before. She literally had him by the balls, and when she asked him to marry her he couldn't think of a good enough reason not to. It didn't feel completely right, but it didn't seem wrong.
The marriage proposal (which was closely followed by the signing of the mortgage and assuming of various other joint loans and responsibilities) was the point at which the relationship had changed. A subtle shift occurred which took Mark more than a few weeks to become aware of. The evenings out together had reduced in number. Gradually the passion and excitement of their relationship had fizzled away to little more than a dull shadow of what it had originally been. He had heard of married couples losing their sex drive after spending years together, but did it usually happen when people got engaged? Had the seven year itch been reduced to just over seven months? His attempts to discuss his concerns with Jo had been dismissed out of hand as imaginary and fictitious. For the second time in their relatively short relationship Mark had felt claimed and trapped.
The mantle of responsibility and the ominous shadows of debt and of carving out a future together began to weigh him down heavily. Mark's greatest problem, however, was his lack of desire to try and understand and confront issues. It was quicker and easier to turn away or bury his head in the sand rather than face up to the reality of his situation. It was much the same at work. A supervisor of a team working in a busy call centre, the pressure on him and his staff to achieve targets seemed to be mounting at a daily rate. But rather than stand up to his superiors and tell them that their measures were unachievable, he instead shied away from potential arguments and conflicts, even though he knew he was right. Ultimately this approach didn't prevent problems from happening, it simply deferred them. As much as he tried to keep the peace by agreeing to work towards these unworkable targets, a clash with senior management was inevitable when their impossible goals were not achieved.
As a supervisor, Mark was torn in two directions on a daily basis. He and his peers were the most junior level of management, forced to act as mediators and messengers between the higher echelons of control and the generally dissatisfied workforce. The struggle for him on a personal level to carry out these duties, Mark decided, was increased tenfold by the fact that he really didn't care. He spent his days surrounded by yes-men and women who were obviously career-orientated and who wanted to get as far ahead in the company as quickly as they could. Mark, on the other hand, just wanted to go home.
Mark has a sister, two years his junior, who is the apple of his parents' eyes. No matter how hard he tries, he cannot compete with Abigail's effortless achievements. As a result Mark no longer bothers trying. Since moving across town he has seen progressively less of his family. This, he has decided, is a good thing.
Mark is well aware that his life is far from perfect. He knows that he has problems to resolve and issues to confront. He knows that he will have to do this at some point, but not today.
Why bother doing something today, Mark often says, when you can just as easily put it off until tomorrow.
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