Michael took the bus to work, preferring it to the tube as he could look out of the window and anyway he had read somewhere once that a seat on an average Central Line train is less hygienic than licking the bowl of a toilet. Even if he had wanted to go by tube, residing now in the London the tube forgot, he would have to get a bus to Brixton or Elephant & Castle first and then change, down into the crowded tunnels and stairways, and he didn’t like being underground over long distances. To get his stride going he walked the long way through the back streets to the Cobb’s Corner roundabout, his bag slung over his shoulder and in it a small bottle of sanitising hand gel, and waited there for the 176, which took him around the back of Forest Hill via Upper Sydenham, through Dulwich and Camberwell, into the fuchsia explosion of Elephant, onwards to Waterloo, and over the river to the other side. Because he got on near the first stop he usually got his favourite seat, the top deck, second from the front on the left-hand side, and all the way he stared out at the knuckled city trees, the pigeons grouped greyly on the grasses, the early smokers at bus stops, the winter palms outside Dulwich Library, the building projects paused in recession, babies pointing from prams with concern in their faces, the suya hut in the shadows of the fuchsia, the Walworth Road nail salons, the trough-like tenement balconies, the evacuated Aylesbury Estate, the community police officers performing slopey walks, the church steeples amidst the rooftop satellite dishes, the shady high-street hotels, the men on their phones, the women in their clothes, the boys with their boxers showing and their new uncuddly brand of urban pet dog, the rail tracks, the hedgerows, and the peeping greens and streams. On the approach to the river the roads widened into boulevards and became in fleeting moments almost Parisian, the buildings slightly smoother and the stonework somewhat grander, shaking off a downbeat southern mood and a roughness of edge like a woman with messy hair neatening it up as she walked across the water which glittered, which churned and twisted and rolled with the wind as she went, the vista of the north rising up before her, the Houses of Parliament and Somerset House with its pillars and flags and the children in stucco on the roof trim. In the centre of the city it was a different kind of dirt, the dirt of money and extreme lack or excess of it, and it became a little like New York along the glitzy stretch of the Strand, then onwards towards the last stop at Tottenham Court Road there was the great wide opening of Trafalgar Square where Nelson soared up and the galleries flanked, where so many birds swooped, as if it were holy, on to the cold blue fountain pool.
On the bus it was easier to convince himself that he was not part of the rat race. He was wearing a suit, yes, he had three suits, the black, the navy and the grey, two of which he had acquired only recently when starting work at Freedland Morton. But he wore it with nonchalance, with a sense of disconnection between skin and fabric. His real self was untouched, unaffected, was actually wearing khakis, and over the suit he had on a large, quite trendy winter coat so he looked less square, less like a cardboard box with legs. On the bus there was a greater mix of people, and rather than facing each other and staring miserably into the murky darkness of below-ground-level windows, they faced the front. They were private and unscrutinised in their journeying, and not all of them were going to work. Here was a woman in a yellow hat with a little girl a year or two older than Ria, possibly on their way to the passport office in Victoria or Madame Tussauds or the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green (this was a game Michael liked to play in his head, to imagine other types of living, other types of Monday or Tuesday). Here in the front seat in the opposite aisle was a middle-aged man, drunk and pink and grey, slumped forward over the bar and being shifted from side to side with the hurlings of the deck (job centre on Walworth Road, or the pub, to wait at the entrance until it opened, or maybe he was red-bus-rovering without meaning to, he gets to the end of the route and doesn’t know where the fuck he is so gets on another bus same thing again). And here were two teenage boys in school uniform (‘If you beat him, yeah, I’ll give you ten pound. Ten pound!’) who were not on their way to school. Michael knew what youngsters looked like when they were not on their way to school. He himself had been not on his way to school many times as a kid, and there were only three places he would go, the park, the shopping centre or to his friend’s house, with a silly cocksure swagger and a loudness overcompensating for his fear. Down Denmark Hill they came, these strangers, past the hospital where Blake was born, past the rundown Pentecostal church on the shopping parade, and Michael pretended that he too was going somewhere different, somewhere spontaneous, someplace where less was required of him. He didn’t really want to be a corporate responsibility coordinator at Freedland Morton. Deep down he identified with that old pink drunk. He had always thought of himself as the type who could either die young or end up a crying park-bench bum. He had been sure that he wouldn’t make it past thirty, and now that he was thirty-seven he was slightly bewildered, mindful of the projected alternative. If he were ever released, or ejected, for whatever reason, from the grave and beautiful responsibilities of this life, he sensed that he would sink down easily to a truthful reunion with a shabbier self, like a hot-air balloon that had lost its flame.
En route he listened to his iPod. There were a handful of artists on his Most Played list, including Shuggie Otis, Nas, Dolly Parton and Jill Scott, but the Most Played album was John Legend’s 2004 debut Get Lifted, which was a journey of a different kind. It began with a little waterfall of piano and an invitation from John to go with him and see something new, and in a surging sequence of warm, gospel-percolated melodies it followed, as Michael interpreted it, the odyssey of a man changing from a womanising, nightclubbing, phone-number-collecting, good-time cheat into a responsible, mature and committed life partner. It was a slow and difficult road, strewn with conflict and temptation. He loved his girlfriend but he loved his freedom also, and couldn’t his girlfriend see, he sang in She Don’t Have to Know, that just because he slept around it didn’t mean he didn’t love her? Just because he snuck off to Washington DC so that he could hold hands with the other woman in public wearing sunglasses to shield his identity, it didn’t mean she wasn’t still his Number One? No, she did not see, and the thing was that this girlfriend, this Number One, was not just any girl. She was special, she was bombastic, she was ‘off the hizzle!’. Snoop Dogg scolded him about it in I Can Change. He said, ‘When you find one like that, you got to make that change, man, cos they don’t come too often, and when they do come, you got to be smart enough to know when to change.’ It is a moment that warrants a grand and decisive destruction of the wayward phone-number-collecting guy, a passing over on the bridge of justice to all that you can be, your best self, someone who is deserving of her. And he didn’t want to do it. Oh it was tough, he loved those women, all of them, all the warm and luscious women in the world. But he did it. And he spent one song in an agony of uncertainty called Ordinary People, where his love was undeniable but constantly running into hardship and there were arguments every day and no one knew which way to go. There were two choices, to Stay With You, or not to stay. He stayed. And at some point beyond that crossroad he, they, reached a sublime plateau. They came out into the wild and peaceful air of the ninth cloud and there was wonderful lovemaking and deep understanding and they walked onwards, together, So High, into a future that would repeat their parents’ lives, that is, the ones who were still married. When it was cold outside they were a Refuge for each other, a sweet washing of the soul, a sunny path. He came to embrace the value of family and developed a nostalgia for the simple days when the family was central. Those were the important things, to spend time with the people you loved, to continue to love them. He had grown. He had arrived on the other side. He was lost but now he was found, and all the way through, piano, strings flying in the distance, fingers clicking, cymbols whirling, John’s voice like rich autumn gravel. He ended on a high note with Live It Up, a definitive, undulating bassline, the violins euphoric, a final celebration of love, of life in all its struggle and complexity and fullness. It was one of the best soul records ever made.
Michael, in this his thirteenth year with Melissa, did not quite know where he was positioned along this narrative. He would like to say that he was at So High or the less exciting Refuge, but this would not be true, although there were sometimes fleeting moments of these, particularly the latter, for example when the children were asleep in the evenings and Melissa was doing something in the kitchen or surfing the Internet at the dining table and there was a feeling of calm and warmth and safety in the house. He had long ago passed the one-song agony and made the decision to Stay, but it seemed at times that he was slipping back, wondering whether he would be happier with someone else, or on his own, a bachelor again, living in a one-bedroomed flat in Catford, near the children, taking them at weekends to soft play or the Broadway Theatre or to his mother’s. Maybe he should be one of those men, who fathered from a distance. Perhaps he had never really deep down achieved that grand and decisive destruction of the phone-number-collector and he was still in the vicinity of She Don’t Have To Know. Because frankly these days it felt like he and Melissa were nothing more than flatmates. In the not too distant past, when he would arrive back home from somewhere, she used to walk into his arms and embrace him, smile that dust-busting, magnificent smile of hers and they would talk, immediately, in tumults, about what had happened that afternoon or who they’d seen or something they’d read or something cute Ria had said or their next trip away. Their talking was like a river, always flowing, delirious with movement. It was oblivious to their physical separation and continued within, so that their coming back together was merely an increase in volume. It was not like this any more. Now when he got home from work, wearing his suit, Melissa would be standing at the kitchen sink and would hardly look up. There was no smile, no hug. She no longer put kisses on the ends of her texts or emails during the day. Now it was only, ‘Can you pop to Lidl on way hm, chick thighs, pots, tissues, milk’, or, ‘Bog roll pls’, or, ‘Can you be home by 6.30 so I can go to zumba?’ He would go upstairs to change into his tracksuit and there would be three plastic bags on the floor next to the washing basket containing his hair-cutting clothes, which she was waiting silently, with mounting irritation, for him to wash. Then once the children were in bed they mostly retreated into their separate realms, he on the sofa in front of the TV, and she in the bedroom reading. They lived in two different houses in one small house. Relationships can get old, John sang as the 176 approached the river, have a tendency to grow cold.
Michael’s romantic odyssey had been similar, though less brazen, to John’s, this Mr Legend, walking in a better tailored suit than his down the aisle of a church in the CD artwork. Like him, or this man he had created in his music, he, Michael, had also enjoyed his share of women before settling down. He was shy in love, inquisitive, and they had liked him for it, the fellow Politics student at SOAS, the model from Honduras, the girl he’d met in Tesco. With all of them he had held a part of himself back, sleeping with them in percentages, only going to a hundred when he felt it was warranted and when he was sure he would not catch a sexually transmitted disease. He was preserving himself for something, someone, whom he had no concrete idea of, only that she would be softer, purer, higher. His passion was imperious. He was a man who was made for a great love. And in searching for this love, like John in Used To Love U, he also, at one point, had found himself in a relationship in which he was dissatisfied, in which he had fallen out of love, or further still, in which he had come to question whether he had actually been in love in the first place. Her name was Gillian and she had adored him with a molten desperation that had left him suffocated. She was studying to be a paediatrician and played the flute. She had soft, rich, flutey lips. She was gifted, she cared about the world and making it better, she made soaring silver birds with her mouth. But she had wanted him too much, more than everything else she was capable of having. On her twenty-second birthday, when Michael was twenty-three, she had asked him across their table in a Brick Lane curry house to marry her. She was a little drunk but she had meant it, and Michael said ‘maybe’, maybe one day, without really meaning it, because he hadn’t wanted to hurt her, for she had experienced terrible pain in her life. There were men at every turn who had wanted to harm her. Her foster father had fondled her in secret nights. She was molested by an athletics coach when she was twelve. Then there was the man in the cupboard (she didn’t like cupboards because of it, especially when they were closed, she had a habit of keeping them open) who had come initially to fix the boiler, but finding her there, little, in her green summer shorts, had ended up touching her inappropriately in the cupboard while no one was looking, and then fixing the boiler. It was amazing, she told Michael, how many men there were in the world who just wanted to take a girl for a minute to quench some passing horrific urge. It was incredible how many.
Gillian had a thick, downward way of walking as if she were forever going down into a cellar. The only time she seemed light was when she was playing the flute. She cried easily. When she and Michael were in public she wanted them to walk arm in arm or hand in hand, to appear as a woman on whom a claim could be made, a woman who was protected. She enjoyed cooking for him. She liked the spaces tradition had made for a woman and did not object to the alleged constraints, the great shadow of the patriarchal umbrella. While she was with Michael she eased herself into the warmth of his happy family, which was the only happy family she knew, this strange collection of people laughing, these loving smells emanating from his mother’s kitchen, this quiet house in the suburbs. She stayed with him three nights a week, four nights, five, loved him in the early morning when his parents were sleeping in the opposite room, slipped her mouth around him asking for nothing, only that he would lie there breathing beneath her and cover the back of her head with his palm in that mode of protection. Michael thought of her now in the chorus of Used To Love U, although she was not the kind of girl John was singing about, a girl for whom nothing was good enough, who had a high opinion of herself. Gillian had thought nothing at all of herself, it was the central manifestation of her trouble. She considered herself lucky that someone like Michael, someone good and clean, had accepted her, and once she had him she had nestled in his life like a small and fearful animal. His father had adored her. She was just the kind of girl he’d hoped for, someone who would love his younger son in stern abundance, someone with sensible career plans. He came to see her as a daughter (once, while out shopping in Wood Green, he had introduced her to someone as his daughter-in-law).
All of this had made things difficult for Michael. Two years into the relationship, he came to the conclusion that he didn’t love Gillian and never would. They did not, the combination of them, amount to what it took to send two people off the cliff-edge in faith that they would float as one. He tried hard. He tried to position his mind permanently at the exact point during lovemaking when she set him out to sea and he was awed by her power, or at some point in their first few months when she was completely new to him, a gift still to be unwrapped and containing unknown possibilities. But it wouldn’t hold. He slipped back into a sensation of wanting to be away from her, a feeling that she was trampling on his life and preventing him from seeing and thinking clearly, from being. He began to dislike certain expressions on her face, the blank serenity when they were sitting on a train together, the absorbed, oblivious way in which she ate, almost roughly, or the habit she had of playing with the ends of her braids. When he was out at clubs or bars he began to look at other girls. He didn’t have the courage to end it with her, so like John in She Don’t Have To Know he played around, in low percentages, and was eaten by guilt. He found every excuse not to be with her. Eventually she became suspicious, and it was only then, at the tail end of an argument, that he told her he wanted to end it. She responded exactly as he had feared, tears, begging. But then she had quietened. She sat down on the edge of his bed, looking downwards into her cellar. After a while she quickly stuffed some of her things into a bag and left, politely saying goodbye to his parents, not hugging them like she usually did. Eight months later he received a phone call from her during which she asked for him back, but by that point he had met Melissa.
When you find one like that, Snoop said, you got to make that change. Melissa the mermaid. Melissa with the distant eyes and glistening skin. Melissa walking lightly along a London street in khakis, trainers and bracelets and Michael walking behind her with his friend Perry (‘Look how fit she is, she is fit’). She was the softer, purer, higher. She was way, way, way off the hizzle. She liked to swim. That was where the glistening came from. If she didn’t swim she felt too dry, like something beached, her mood would descend. The day after he first met her in Jamaica, at the carnival in Montego Bay (they were both covering it, Melissa for a magazine, Michael for radio), they were on a beach, Michael and Perry and a few other reporters, talking, sunning, playing ball games, and she broke off and went into the water. She was wearing an old-fashioned black swimming costume with a diagonal white stripe across the middle that covered her to the tops of her thighs. He watched. He watched her walk into the waves with her body for days, the water reaching for her as she went, alone, fearless. She swam out. Her brown body twisted in the blue, her mermaid flow, she was a new world turning. She went further and further out and he watched the waves rising and falling, coming in and slipping back. He saw her strong brown arms wheeling in front crawl. He saw the edge of the sea where it turned with the circularity of the earth until he couldn’t see it any more and he saw the rocks and the island across. He kept his eye on the brown arms turning but it became harder and harder, the sea took over in its expanse. Then he lost sight of her. She was gone. She had turned the ocean corner. Or maybe she had slipped under, maybe she was being pulled down. He began to panic. He felt his heart quicken, that she was here, this shining new thing that he wanted to know more of, and now she was not. He couldn’t swim a stroke but something took hold of him then and he started walking. He rolled up his jeans and waded out, long-legged. He had no idea what he was intending to do, and when he got as far in as he could go without swimming he stopped, and waited, looked around the corner as far as he could. But he couldn’t see her. After a while he went back, soaked, and stood stupidly on the shore in his wet jeans, wishing he could rescue her, wanting so much to be her hero, feeling already, as he often would in the future, that he was not enough for her. Then he began to feel angry with her, that she could just go like that and worry someone and act as if she didn’t exist, as if he didn’t exist. She came back twenty minutes later, laughing and out of breath. All the anger fell away as she walked towards him, her strength, her thighs, her face, her happiness, ‘what a sea,’ she said, ‘what a swim,’ and he was laughing too, ‘I thought you’d drowned’. That was she. She was The One. He wanted her. He wanted to make her zoom zoom go boom boom. He liked her so much that it felt dangerous. He said to Perry, ‘One day she’s gonna break my heart. I know it.’
Her hands were small like her feet, she wore silver rings with jade and amber stones. She was doll-like, almost sexless. Her profile was dreamy. He stared at her a lot. She liked adventures. She wanted to go to Argentina. She had heard that there are a series of mountains at the top of Argentina that are red, especially during sunsets. She wanted to go to Seville and the south-eastern coast of Corfu. She wanted to go to Mexico and visit the house of Frida Kahlo and climb the Andes in Peru, to live somewhere other than England, to exist elsewhere from where she had begun; she wanted to eat the world. She was unlike Gillian in every way, self-heeding, self-possessed, defiant. She said that she would never be tied down and she would never occupy a space in which she felt trapped. Michael was full of questions, more so than with any woman before, and she liked him for it, the way he listened, so closely. He wanted to know every corner of her mind, every corridor. There was no end to her unwrapping. The more he found the more there was to explore. She had a mystical perception of the future, in that she seemed to believe that she was going to a different place from everybody else, that life would not happen to her in quite the same way, that in every moment she was preserving herself, enriching herself in secret like Michael Jackson in his glass coffin, remaining at a distance from people so that she would not be distracted. Those far-off eyes, always cryptic. What are you thinking about? he asked her on the beach in the evening, right now, right this minute? He tried to catch her in stills. She was slippery. I’m looking into my thoughts, she said, instead of ‘I am thinking’. She expressed herself in the picturesque literal. Later she would write him poems, a line while she was away in Rome: I miss my mouth in your pubic chin (a reference to his goatee).
What followed, after that first meeting in Montego Bay, were three months of talking on the telephone, during which they discussed their pasts and their futures, the two houses of Edgar Allen Poe, the drama of Mary J. Blige, the depths of Cassandra Wilson, the National Front, the police, Margaret Thatcher and the things she did, volcanoes, their mothers’ countries and the times they’d spent there, the decreasing distinction between R&B and pop. He made her laugh. That was the thing, she used to laugh a lot. She used to laugh so hard that he could hear sticky sounds at the back of her mouth, she embarrassed herself, she told him, because the office she was working in at the time was small and everybody could hear her. During these conversations there was nothing else but the talk, they were completely absorbed in each other’s voices, seeped in chemistry, yet it took him three months to lie with her. She was living in a room in Kensal Rise with a sink in the corner and she would let him stay after a party or a date but he always slept on the floor. Their first kiss happened only after he asked her, he couldn’t find another way, it made him timid, how much he liked her, and this feeling that she would break his heart. They were standing by the sink and they had eaten a meal of spaghetti with fake mince (she also ate pumpkin seeds, muesli and other things meant for birds). She was wearing a blue and pink dashiki with explicit armholes and all evening he had been peeping and trying not to peep into her brownness, her sweet shallow mounds, and now the evening was over and he was about to leave because her friend Hazel was coming over and he still hadn’t kissed her. So he came out with it and asked her, like a boy, to which she said yes, like a girl. He bent. Their lips arrived together, and the softness, the warmth of it was a swirling, explosive surprise, it was a kiss that needed no input, it operated by itself, was fully formed, intrinsically euphoric yet nonchalant, had its own psychology and personality, could be called Franklin or Desdemona or Angelina, and he was so taken that he lifted her up on to the bed so that she was above him where she belonged and went with his hands inside her dress and touched, at last – and then they were interrupted by Hazel’s knock at the door. It was the interruption, the cutting short of the thing, that made it even more momentous.
After that with long nights and hashish she let him in. She was bashful. She was loosely innocent. She hid herself, even after everything, behind the wardrobe door when she was changing, but she also went bra-less and oblivious in her flowing African dresses, allowing him the secrets of her little breasts, the gentle line of her upper back. By the time she moved into the flat on the seventh floor they were more or less itemised and he soon moved in with her, although she still courted him like he was some kind of accessory that she might one day leave on a train. He asked her once, when he was already too deeply in love with her to call it healthy, ‘What is this? What are we doing?’, because he felt like he was drowning, to which she replied, in her infectiously reasonable, noncommittal way, ‘Do we have to define it?’ She was always at a slight distance, withheld. It was not that she was unaffectionate, at least not then. Their lovemaking was constant. It was impulsive and ecstatic. It made them shout. It made the man who lived downstairs bang the communal central heating pipe in protest. They would leave the bed in the afternoon with the light swinging in from the balcony and go to the kitchen for toast, and in the kitchen just sitting there watching the seventh sky beyond the railing and talking, always talking, it would begin again by some long touch on a waist or the comparing of their different-sized hands or a linking of eyes or something else that made her laugh, and they would go back to the bedroom, or to the living room where the windows looked out on the city all the way to the river, and the night would fall in sepia upon their bodies. Every Sunday evening she would steam her face over a basin of essential oils. He remembered one time in particular when he had stood naked in the doorway, watching her like that, swaying under the towel to Tracy Chapman or Al Green or some other steam voice, in her blue satin slip, and she had eventually lifted her head and seen him standing there, smiled at him in that gorgeous way that made him feel so full and happy as if she were pouring sunshine into him. The tower block became the palace in the sky. It glittered like the lesser Eiffel at night. She said that she could ‘just be’ with him, that she didn’t have to pretend or put on a front, and he felt the same way, for they were united in a large disquiet with the world, instilled partly by its everyday cruelty, partly by a common, second-generation distance, that no matter how much they tried to belong here they were never fully accepted, never fully seen. ‘I’ve found you,’ she said. ‘My sweet brown, I’m so glad I’ve found you.’ They warmed each other. They burned for each other. They just be’d, and more than once during these times when they were just being they spoke of marriage, he would ask her to become his empress one day, she would say of course I will, seeing as it’s you, as if it were nothing at all, or as if she were speaking in a dream, it seemed a foregone conclusion, like a station they would arrive at on a train. In that seventh floor palace they went through Ordinary People, Stay With You, Let’s Get Lifted Again, So High and Refuge. If they argued they always came back to a good place, they forged on, they continued, always returning, the flame still high only harder to find. John sang it on the replay, as the 176 took The Strand:
Oh I will stay with you
Through the ups and the downs
Oh I will stay with you
When no one else is around
And when the dark clouds arrive
I will stay by your side
I know we’ll be alright
I will stay with you
Even after eleven years together, on his birthday, Melissa had dedicated a Pussy Cat Dolls song to him, Stikwitu, about how no one else could love her better, no one could take her higher, that she must ‘stikwitu’ for ever. And gliding along now in the dancey haven of his iPod, Michael remembered one day in Finsbury Park after a job interview, back in those first halcyon years. He was wearing his big black puffa coat and it was freezing cold. Throughout the interview all he’d been able to think about was her, his empress, about going home to her, back to the palace, that she would be there, waiting for him, and that was all that mattered, all that he needed. He didn’t care about the job. He didn’t care about money. He just wanted to be with her, to be made complete by her. Next to Finsbury Park station there is a roundabout. In the descending dusk, in the rush-hour traffic, he bounded across the road, bypassing the pedestrian crossing with giant, euphoric strides, and found himself stuck in the middle of the green grass circle. The cars were going round him. He took out his phone. She was on him, in him, all around him, she was the dusk, the greying light, the green, he was dizzy with her, spinning in her universe. He laughed at the sound of her voice when she answered the phone. ‘How did it go?’ she said. ‘I don’t know. I don’t care.’ ‘When you coming home?’ she said. ‘I’m on my way.’ Then, ‘Melissa, I love you,’ he cried. He shouted it, ‘I love you!’
So how do you get from that, to this? How do you get from ‘I miss my mouth in your pubic chin’ to ‘Bog roll pls’ no kiss? What happened to Angelina, to Desdemona? How can all that love just disappear? Michael did not doubt that he still loved Melissa. His passion for her was unwaned. She could harden him at the removal of her rings, a catch of light in her collarbone, the taking off of a sock. She was in his heart through all the hours and all the strides of his day. But he doubted whether she still loved him. Would she listen to Stickwitu now and see her truth? Did she look at him and feel herself melting like she used to, like she’d told him she did? How could she, when she could look at him in that other way, this new way, with utter coldness, as if she wanted him to vanish? He disappointed her, he knew it, his uninteresting job, his inferior thirst for adventure. He embraced the land while she hungered for the sea. Adventures, for him, were inside, of the heart and spirit, whereas for her they were outside things like volcanoes. He was in the way of the volcanoes. He was her dam, her Gillian. There were days when Michael really questioned his sustainability in this relationship, when he wondered whether he had come full circle to Used To Love U, and Melissa was now a different kind of woman, the kind John was singing about, superior, demanding, judgemental. Maybe that other Melissa was gone for good and he should just let go. But he couldn’t. He still believed that somewhere the fire was burning and she remained there as she had been, waiting for him. As the bus moved slowly along The Strand, past Charing Cross station, past St Martin-in-the-Fields where he’d taken Ria to do brass rubbing – the memory of this causing him to well up (the warmth of her small hand in his, her skippy walk) – the words of Used To Love U resounded in his head, about living a lie and being tired of it, no longer being willing to justify it. He felt, with a new, emergent spite, that yes, Melissa was this type of girl now, unkind, materialistic, a Puffy-wanter, a Jay-Z-chaser, that yes, they had come full circle, and all he had to do now was just try to stop loving her. Simple. Simple, yet so difficult. And arriving at Trafalgar Square in the final mist of the morning with the swirl of people and the swift walking and the birds in descent towards the icy pool, he was taken by that memory of the roundabout at Finsbury Park, the world turning around him and she a green universe, the perfection and the joy of it, and how sad it was that even such things disappear.
Coming off the bus, down the dirty narrow stairway, avoiding the poles even though he was wearing gloves, he had an urge to stand in Trafalgar Square and tell her again that he loved her, to make her remember. But he did not. He went down Whitcomb Street. A young woman came out of a building and walked past him, glancing (they often looked twice). He turned left towards his office and just as he approached it he turned off the music. It was very important that the two forces, the music and the office, remained separate, so that the music would retain its power, would remain untouched by the too bright panelled ceilings, the dead serenade of the photocopier. Now Legend was gone and Michael assumed his official façade. He went in through the shiny turning doors. He proceeded through the leafy, marble-speckled lobby, towards the circular island at its centre, another green circle, where three dynamic receptionists spoke coolly yet pleasantly into their headpieces, tapping buttons, crisp, clear and infallible in their rendition of the company’s standard telephone greeting, ‘Good morning, Freedland Morton. How may I help you?’ He went by, taking a clandestine look at the one on the right with the long, thick black hair and the absolutely beautiful eyes, god those eyes, mysterious and somehow mournful, a type of caramel, almost golden, shaded by sharp and sweeping eyebrows. He did not know her name. They passed each other sometimes going to and from the office and they always tried not to look directly at each other for there was an obvious attraction, but it had come to a point where it seemed rude not to say hello, then once they had started saying hello the chemistry between them had become too pronounced and she sometimes flushed a little (she was a flushable colour, olive-toned), so that now they were at a kind of stalemate where sometimes they said hello and sometimes they did not.
Today, he did. He even waved, lightly, by accident. Uncertainly, she waved back. They smiled at one another, embarrassed.