A squawk of siren roused me. My eyes were open at once, my body rigid, and I waited for the next noises: car doors slamming, the chuckle of radios, heavy shoes on the concrete steps down to my flat, gloved knuckles banging on the front door.
De Chauncey had not wanted to contact the police. ‘What would they do?’ he asked me. ‘It was just one of those things.’ These words were spoken with no bravado; on the contrary, De Chauncey made no effort to disguise how shaken he was. We spoke little when the drive home began, but around King’s Cross the silence had become uncomfortable. A backwash of the fright, I guess, the reabsorbed adrenalin making us voluble.
‘I don’t want to rake over it all again with the police,’ he said, as if it had happened years before, not twenty minutes ago.
‘I reckon you’re probably right,’ I said. Naturally I didn’t want to encourage De Chauncey to involve the police.
‘The police won’t do anything anyway,’ De Chauncey said. We had been caught by a succession of red lights, and the car rarely moved faster than its thumping windscreen wipers. He started to count off the reasons for his assertion, raising fingers off the steering wheel one by one, little finger first. ‘One, no one hurt. Two, nothing taken. Three, no CCTV.’
‘No CCTV?’ I said, hoping no secret rejoicing showed through a poker face. ‘That’s a shame.’
‘We keep telling the landlord, but …’ De Chauncey said. ‘He’ll be long gone by now, anyway.’ Evidently I was not the person that he was trying to convince. ‘He saw the car and thought he’d try it on. Just a passing scumbag.’
He drummed his hands against the wheel, keeping time with the labouring wipers. ‘What gets me is that it’s not even right. I mean, I’ve been blessed, but I worked my way up from nothing, almost nothing. Next to nothing. I’m an immigrant, my dad came over from Cyprus in the seventies. De Chauncey, that’s not even my name, my birth name. I’m Alexander Charalambous. I thought De Chauncey sounded a bit more … Well, you know. You have to create an impression, in business. You’ve got to be, I don’t know …’
‘Plausible,’ I said.
‘Plausible, yeah. I’m not playing the victim, mind. I fucking hate that, I know life’s been good to me – the city, this city, it’s been good to me, it opened up to me and embraced me.’ As he said this, the lights turned to green, a nod of agreement from the silent giant. ‘And I guess it just hasn’t for that bloke. On drugs, do you think?’
‘Obviously not well,’ I said.
‘If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else, maybe someone who didn’t deserve it.’
‘The mugging?’
De Chauncey flashed a frown at me. ‘What? No. Success. Anyway, he sees the car, the suit, he thinks … he gets it wrong. It’s not the whole story, anyway. Maybe that’s how we should do this piece? Get away from all that front, all that performance, all that Apprentice bullshit. Because, you know, it worries me. I’m not blind to it. The mood’s changing.’
‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said. And he was right, that was a great angle. All of it. But it didn’t really matter.
Perhaps he had gone to the police after all; perhaps that was them outside now. With considerable effort, I turned my head towards the window. The curtains were closed. All was quiet, but there was something, something in the light, a bluish flicker …
A long, low groan sounded. At first I thought I might have made the sound, but it had come from the fabric of the house. These Victorian terraces made many mysterious noises, mostly when the central heating switched off and they started to cool down.
I snapped from miserable reverie, mind half in last night, to fully awake. If the central heating was off, I was late – late for the Friday meeting, late for the unmissable, utterly mandatory Friday meeting. I snatched up the bedside clock and stared at its treacherous little face. It was a few minutes after nine o’clock. I was late, and more than a little late, but not unsalvageably. If I left immediately, I could be at work at about ten – and possibly the meeting wouldn’t have started yet, and I could squeak in.
Urinating in the bathroom, I saw that a crack had appeared in the white-tiled wall behind the toilet cistern, fresh and sharp-edged, running along the grout lines in between the tiles. When had that happened? The place was coming apart. I made a mental note to email Dave – and remembered, a sickening rising bubble, that there was no Dave, just a few thousand lines of software. Software with the power to evict me. What could I say to log the repair without triggering the termination of my tenancy? What were the words or phrases to include, or avoid? Was this the future, then – trying to second-guess the machines overseeing our fate?
I returned to the bedroom and dressed, the Dave question festering away. But there was no time to really dwell on it. If I left right away, I could make the meeting, maybe only snipping the opening pleasantries. I could at least plead my case. There must be a path to redemption, or Eddie and Polly would not have strung me along so far. But what could I say?
Having spent so long in dread, and with so little achieved, I was oddly calm. No more could be done. There were no escape routes, it was all out of my hands. I wondered how many of the aberrations of the past week – the lingering smoke, the gathering cockatoos – might be manifestations of stress, rather than drink, brought on by my desperate efforts to stave off the inevitable, and my growing knowledge of the futility of those efforts. This morning, the fever had broken. All I had to do was turn up, and let events play out.
I unlocked the front door and pulled on it, expecting it to open, but it did not. It stayed firmly in its frame. I pulled again, with more force, and it did not move – not even the slightest flexing of the wood or shift on the hinges. It was like pulling on a doorknob bolted to a brick wall.
The door was secured by a deadlock and a Yale latch. I checked the deadlock – there have been times I have been so wasted that I forgot to lock it, and then the next morning absent-mindedly locked it while meaning to open it. But it was unlocked, I was sure, and as a test I locked it, watching the bar slide across through the tiny gap between door and jamb, then unlocked it again. And the same with the Yale lock – when I turned the knob, the latch retracted, I could see it.
I braced my right foot against the doorframe, took the little metal handle of the Yale lock in both hands, and pulled as hard as I could. At the very least I should have been able to feel the door bend or strain, but it might as well have been stone.
Fingers aching, I let go, and stood staring at the door, as if it might at any moment reveal its secret, or simply spring open under my gaze.
Time ticked by.
‘This is stupid,’ I said aloud, and resumed trying to yank the door open, again pulling with my foot braced against the frame, then trying a quick succession of short, sharp pulls, as if that might dislodge whatever force was holding the door in place. All I gained was angry red welts on my fingers. Once again I found myself standing and staring at the white-painted wood, breathless with frustration, aware of a rising billow of impotent rage. I had a vital meeting to get to, and I was being thwarted by my own front door. There was an odour, too, a harsh, burning odour, like hot dust in the air …
No. Think. Think about it. People aren’t trapped by their own front doors, not usually. Think. Could it simply be my imagination? A manifestation of a subliminal reluctance to leave the house? But the pain in my fingers was real. Think clearly and a solution will arise. You’ll see what you’re missing.
The door had been sticking. It had been stiff to open, and sometimes I had to slam it to shut it. And now it was stuck. Either door or frame must have warped – and it had been raining non-stop since yesterday morning, maybe that contributed. For the second time I thought about firing off an email to Dave. But there was no Dave. The fury bubbled again. No one would come over, no one would sort it out, I was on my own. But if I broke the door down, if I took an axe to it, they’d take an interest then, wouldn’t they? I couldn’t, of course. This was still my home, even if it was theirs more than mine. What was the cure for a warped door? Sanding back the edge that was sticking – but the door would have to be open for that. Would WD40 loosen it? Where would I spray it, the hinges, the locks? Did I even have any? Maybe in the cupboard under the sink in the kitchen.
The kitchen. I knew what would help me assess the situation. I needed to get out of the gloomy hallway and into the only room in the flat that got any light. Happily it was also the only room with a fridge.
But it was not light in the kitchen. A fractured darkness had claimed the whole rear of the flat, and everything was terribly wrong. Where there should have been a winter morning, there was eclipse. Not night – I was not so intoxicated that I had woken in darkness and imagined it to be the day. The light was blocked out, present somewhere, but occluded.
I imagined rolling banks of fog, or smoke: the plume had reached me, I was in its eye at last, it had enveloped the house, here to choke me. That was not it, of course that was not it; but what confronted me was almost as impossible and threatening. The lime tree had come for me. Its outspread limbs had always interfered with what light made it down to the kitchen, but now the glass roof of the extension was entirely covered in a thick tangle of branches and leaves. They reached down into the garden as well, filling the small space; two days before, I had been obliged to mount the wall to touch the lowest branch, and today I could simply open the back door and lean out. It was as if the tree had vastly grown in the night, like Jack’s beanstalk; that or it had broken its moorings and crept up on the house, leaning down to peer in.
To enter the kitchen would be to move into the tree’s clutches, but I somehow found the strength. Wood scraped against glass.
‘It’s a panic attack,’ I said to myself, and I liked how confident I sounded. ‘You’re having a panic attack. You’ve been having them every day. There’s no smoke in the room, there are no evil birds, the tree isn’t coming to get you. You’re not well, that’s what’s happening.’ I needed to see how the tree could have come so close, to dismiss the mystery as I had the others, to blink and end the hallucination. If necessary I could climb the garden wall again, anything to make the real snap back into place.
Even if I really had wanted to climb the garden wall again, I could not. It was gone. Not quite all of it – but a car-long bite had been taken out of it, visible through the cold jungle that now infested the back garden. I opened the back door to confirm what I could see, and, letting go of the door, it continued to move, falling further open before banging on its hinges. It had never done that before. Once I stepped out, I felt the slope in the poured concrete surface of the garden. A black fissure arced across the ground in front of me, under the dirty white plastic table, to disappear under the kitchen. Everything on one side of this fault line, my side of the fault line, had developed a distinct and novel camber.
No climbing was needed to look into the neighbour’s garden today, but I had to push through the rain-soaked boughs that had descended into my path. Cappuccino-brown water had filled two-thirds of their expensive pit, almost submerging the machinery that had been left at its bottom. It was into this mire that the half-moon section of garden wall had fallen, and so had a portion of the concrete slab I was standing on. Creeping towards the precipice, the swamp-shore, painfully aware of the tilt that was consuming the garden, I could see that the sides of the pit were dissolving away in the rain. The pyramid of retained dirt that had supported the tree had collapsed, exposing a ghastly white fist of roots, and the tree had toppled over, coming to rest against my house and the roof of my kitchen. It was incredible to me that the kitchen roof had not simply caved in under the weight of the tree, and I could only conclude that it must have fallen gradually, silently, and that the house itself must be taking its weight. I started to look for signs of damage on our side of the wall, and at once I saw a thick black crack running vertically from where the kitchen roof met the rear wall, up to the lower sill of the ground-floor window. But it didn’t stop there, it reappeared above that window and ran up to the sill of Bella’s, above; and it continued again through the uppermost level as well, where it was joined by an ugly twin.
And above it, stretching into the heavy grey sky, was the plume. It had not been above the house the other day. Nor had it twisted and tautened in that same urgent way. Was the house itself on fire? No, but it was being consumed all the same. The tree didn’t make that crack, it couldn’t have. I thought of what had brought it down, the pool sucking away at the ground underneath me, underneath everything.
I rushed back into the kitchen, pulling the door closed behind me. But rather than shutting, the door banged hard against its frame and rebounded into the garden. This jarring impact reverberated in the structure of the kitchen, settling back to nothing as the door shuddered on its hinges. One that won’t open, another that won’t close, I thought. After a beat of silence, there was a sharp plink noise, like an old lightbulb blowing out, and a crack appeared across one of the glass panels in the roof.
Staring up at the broken glass, I backed out of the kitchen, into the living room. A high, squeaking groan issued from somewhere above me – wood and plaster under terminal strain. There was another angry crack across the living room ceiling, forked like lightning. Traces of pinkish plaster moult furred the cans arrayed on the table and floor. From behind me, out in the bathroom area, came a sharp pop and a patter of falling dust.
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Time to go.’
I ran down the hall and resumed my desperate tug-of-war with the handle of the front door, but it was still lodged fast. A long, stuttering creak, the building clearing its throat, rang down the corridor around me. I was dimly aware of sounds from outside.
The door was a waste of time. I had to call for help. I took my phone from my pocket and dialled 999. ‘Fire,’ I said. The highness and the hoarseness of my voice startled me. As the call went through I hammered against the door with the flat of my hand.
The door hammered back.
‘Fire service,’ said a voice over the phone.
‘Fire service!’ said a voice through the door.
‘You’re … already here?’ I said into the phone, thumbing an end to the call.
‘Are you in there?’ the voice shouted through the door. It was an authoritative voice, male, accustomed to shouting, in control. There was a frightening urgency to it, like a shot of strong spirit.
‘I’m here,’ I shouted, again struck by the comparative weediness of my own voice. ‘I can’t open the door. It’s jammed shut.’
‘Don’t open the door!’ the voice said, shouted, the insistence sending a chilled spike through me. I thought of Pierce and the knife, and the silly fear of it.
‘I can’t,’ I said, at a loss.
‘Don’t! The whole place is about to come down, your front door might be the only thing keeping it up!’
‘What whole place?’ I said, but not loud enough to be heard through the door. From behind me, in the vicinity of the bathroom, came a sickening grinding noise, rough surface hard against rough surface.
‘We’ve got to get you out of there!’ said the voice.
‘I’ve got to get out of here!’ I cried in return. ‘I’ve got a meeting!’
‘Can you come to the window?’
Yes, I could. I went through to the bedroom and opened the curtains. A firefighter was standing at my front door, in full fluoro-flashed armour and yellow helmet, and another was standing behind him on the stairs. I was stopped by the stance of this second firefighter – her feet were on different steps, not even adjacent steps. She was poised, ready to spring up and away from the house. I was in danger.
With a ping, one end of the curtain rail fell down, spitting plaster and knocking over some of the cans I had left on the window ledge and the desk. A crack had run through the wall where the rail had been attached, and opening the curtains had dislodged the rail from whatever tenuous grip it retained.
The firefighters saw me, but did not acknowledge me, instead conducting a rapid conversation.
‘Prop?’
‘No time.’
‘Quick then.’
‘It’s reinforced.’ The window panes had a grid of wire fired into them, to try to frustrate the burglars who love basement flats. The second firefighter produced a tool, a crowbar interbred with a hatchet.
‘Sir! Sir! Turn away from the window and cover your eyes!’
I didn’t have to be warned, I knew what was about to happen, and they didn’t wait. I shrank back and pressed my arm across my face. The hatchet crunched through the glass. They didn’t pause – more impacts followed, accompanied by the tinkling of shards, an almost restful sound in comparison. There was a particularly loud, splitting crack, and more blows.
‘Out! Out now!’
A hole had replaced the lower two panes of my bedroom window, the splintered remains of the glass peeled back like a sweet wrapper. The firefighters thrust heavy-gloved hands through, beckoning harshly. I scrambled onto the sill, trying to sweep away crumbs of glass as I did, and take their hands, thinking they meant to steady and assist me. But as soon as they had contact with me, they pushed aside my hands and hooked theirs under my armpits, not helping me but hauling me out all at once. I felt jagged edges catch my trousers and dull razors drag against the skin of my legs.
‘Is it just you?’ the male firefighter asked. He didn’t ask it, he shouted it in my face. ‘Is there anyone else in there?’
‘Just me,’ I gasped. Shining flowers of pain were blossoming where the broken glass had caught me. ‘Upstairs maybe—’ Whatever I might have said was lost, as I was gripped again and push-pulled up the steps and onto the pavement. Part of me dimly registered surprise that the pavement was empty – was it just these two firefighters? Where was their vehicle? Was no one else about? But there was no time to reflect, we were between the parked cars and out into the road, and they were shouting ‘Head down! Head down!’ at me – then more hands had me, and my head was pushed under a flapping blue tape, and there were people and lights all around.
Since no one was holding me down any more, I stood up. I was at the end of the street, in a crowd of uniforms and flashing blue lights. A helicopter staggered in overhead. From further away came shouting and siren whoops, and an amplified voice saying, ‘Move back, move back! We need this whole area clear right away.’
‘Is it going to go?’ someone asked. I thought for a second that they were asking me, but the question was directed at the firefighter behind me.
‘It’s going,’ she said, pushing her helmet back to rub her temple with the ball of her thumb. ‘It’s definitely going.’
What was going? I turned back to look at my house. The street appeared as it always did, with the addition of the helicopter, which had passed over and then wheeled back to hover nearby. But then, clear even against the noise of the helicopter, came a series of reports, a heavy board being dragged down stone steps, and then an ascending noise, the tearing of a sheet of heavy cloth. The facade of the house next to mine folded inwards as if it were no more than a tea-soaked biscuit; then my house moved, downwards, seemingly in a single piece, exactly how I couldn’t say, and the facade buckled and everything was on the move at once, crumpling and twisting and turning from solid to liquid, and an uproar of thick grey dust swallowed that part of the street, obliterating our view like a killer whale snatching a mackerel, and everything was noise, not crashing or banging but a continuous rushing jet-engine roar.
The dust arched and twirled and piled outwards, racing itself, and just before it reached the tape cordon and engulfed us, I had the impression of it rising over the broken heart of the street in a thick, malevolent column.
‘It’s gone,’ I said.
Once again, hands seized me, and I wanted to protest, don’t touch me, give me a damned moment. But I wasn’t being dragged – the arms that had been thrown around me were not manhandling but hugging, and a faint note of Jo Malone found its way past the stench of plaster-powder and ruin.
‘You’re OK,’ Bella said, pressing her head into my shoulder. ‘You’re OK!’
‘I’m fine,’ I said.
‘Your legs, oh …’
My trousers had been badly torn, and were now stained by the blood that dripped persistently from a series of scratches and gouges.
‘The glass,’ I said. ‘It’s fine, it’s nothing.’
‘I told them,’ she said, breathless. ‘They didn’t know if anyone was down there, they thought most people had gone to work, and I said, he’s definitely down there, he won’t have gone out, you’ve got to get him out.’
I winced – not at the pain from my legs, which was no more than a distant throb. ‘I do go out,’ I said. I immediately regretted the annoyance in my voice, but Bella did not appear to have noticed it, the proximity of disaster giving her a glittering, jumpy energy.
‘It was so close,’ she said. ‘We saw the tree had moved, of course, and I saw the crack when I got back from my run, and we could hear noises – I called the fire brigade.’
She embraced me again – not swooning onto me, seeking my support, but holding me as if I were the one who needed propping up. Again, I felt the resentment build. But she had possibly saved my life, and she had been made homeless too.
That last thought swung around and struck me like a long plank in a slapstick routine. I was homeless too. I was homeless.
A siren whooped, and then struck up a full wail. A car alarm had started when the houses had collapsed, and continued, only now audible to me. The dust clouds, which had briefly been thick enough to obscure everything but Bella and the luminous moving swatches of the hazard gear worn by the various emergency services, were thinning, beaten and torn by the blades of the helicopter. The line of the street was made visible again, redacted in the middle. All that stood of my former home was the black iron fence and gate.
A firefighter walked towards us, arms outstretched, as if wanting to join in a group hug, but his intention was to herd. ‘OK, folks, we need you to move back in the direction of Belgrave Road, the area’s still not safe.’ He caught sight of my legs and signalled to the green-clad paramedics nearby. ‘This one needs attention.’
My bleeding legs meant that we weren’t rushed to the outer cordon, but directed to the tailgate of an ambulance. However tender the shepherding, though, there was steel in the hand that guided my elbow. A line of spectators was gathered behind the police tape on Belgrave Road, and they gawped at us as we approached – Bella in her running gear, me in tattered work clothes, both of us coated in dust. The crowd’s not-so-secret enjoyment of the sight of us was entirely legible to me: the second-hand thrill of our victimhood, our status as a promontory of the bizarre into the placid sea of the normal, walking exemplars of the not-everyday. They got to enjoy being present at a proper event, while not being as unfortunately over-present as me and Bella. I recognised a couple of the guys who served in the corner shop where I bought my cans. Did they recognise me?
A silver thermal blanket was put over my shoulders, as if I had just run a marathon, and a light was shone in my eyes. I was asked questions. Bella hung nearby, talking into a rose-metal mobile phone, arms clutched in tightly. I thought about my own phone, and took it out of my pocket. Three missed calls. Text messages, too. From Eddie: Where are you? From Kay: GET HERE NOW.
One of the paramedics came at me with a pair of shears.
‘What are you doing?’ I said, shying away.
‘We’ve got to get those off,’ he said, gesturing at my trousers. ‘To treat your legs.’
‘You can’t do that,’ I said.
‘They’re ruined. This is easiest.’
‘No,’ I said, pushing away his hand and standing up. ‘I mean – I’ve got to get to work.’
‘Call your office then,’ he said, indicating my phone with the point of his shears.
‘I have to go, it’s important.’
He stared at me with an expression of weary tolerance. ‘Mate, a building just fell on you. Call in. We’ve got to get you checked over.’
A sensation surged within me, dark and sweet, rich and freeing. I knew it, I knew it by its chemical scent, a cocktail prepared by my own body that was more potent, more intoxicating, than anything I could drink. I had been microdosing on this amazing brew for years, I realised – every time a deadline was extended or I was let off the hook for something, I got a whiff of it. But this was more than a droplet, it was a bucket of it, a tidal wave that surpassed any alcoholic buzz or orgasm. I had only felt this way once, years earlier, in the Olympic summer. And when I remembered the circumstances, I realised it was all a mirage. It meant nothing. Worse, it was a trap. And the chemical tide rushed back out.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You don’t understand.’
The paramedic sighed, and beckoned to a colleague, who busied themselves with my legs, rolling up the trousers and cleaning and dressing my wounds. I sat back down to help them. ‘You really should look in a mirror before going in,’ the first paramedic said. He had started filling out a form.
I didn’t need a mirror. I could see my clothes, and I could see Bella – the dust in her hair, the dirt gathering in black lines on her face. She was off the phone and talking to a police officer, a wide-eyed, serious, short-sentence talk, the frugal conversation of emergency. A third figure approached them, in another shade of hi-vis, red this time, but my view of this newcomer was obstructed by their backs and the ambulance door.
‘I can go, then?’ I asked the paramedic.
‘You really shouldn’t, but I can’t stop you,’ he said, raising his eyebrows and scribbling on the form. It was held to a metal clipboard, and I thought of Polly, laying out the case against me while I was helplessly detained here by force majeure. ‘You’ll need to sign this. It says you’ve refused treatment.’
‘Fine, fine,’ I said. ‘Give it to me.’
Bella and the police officer had turned in my direction – both were pointed at me. The man in red who had been talking with them walked towards where I sat. It was the postman.
‘James Bickerton? Basement flat?’ he asked.
I nodded, although it seemed a trifle fraudulent to lay claim to an address that no longer existed.
‘There’s post for you,’ he said. ‘I suppose …’ He glanced towards the corner of my former street. ‘I suppose I should just give it to you.’
He handed me a cockatoo.
On the rear step of an ambulance, surrounded by professionals, within shouting distance of my cratered home, I was an object of sympathy. The disaster that had birthed my torn and filthy form was obvious and recent, and I was being taken care of, so I could be safely pitied.
On the Tube, I was feared and hated. A bandaged ghoul, separated from my circumstances, I had become a contagious emissary from an underworld of anarchy and corruption. No one knew what had happened to me, but they knew they didn’t want a part of it. People put their bags on their laps and pulled their staring children a little closer as I appeared. Talk died away and eyes followed me. Breaths were held, in case I stank as bad as I looked. I was succeeded by a wake of relief as I did not stop or ask for money. I sat in the last seat of the carriage, causing the man next to me to shift and hitch. Don’t worry, mate, you’re not going to catch anything.
I let out a curt laugh at this thought, and my neighbour shifted again. He was about my age. So I stared at him a while, watching the side of his eyeballs strain with the effort of not looking back at me, before turning my attention to the cockatoo in my lap.
It was a handsome specimen, legs wide on a branch, yellow plumes radiating proudly, a cheeky glint in its eye. I flipped the postcard over to reread what was written on the back.
Dearest James,
We are in Prague again, and saw these splendid chaps at the Zoo. Do you remember Uncle Charles’s cockatoo? Such personality in a bird. I generally think them cruel & stupid creatures but it was neither. It kept us so entertained that time it came to visit. Returning Saturday week, via Bratislava and a night in Vienna. Love from us both.
– Mum (& Dad) xxx
For the tenth or twentieth time, I turned the postcard over and looked at the bird. Uncle Charles had a cockatoo. I had not been lying to my friends. It must have been so unlikely to my child-self that it always had the ingredients of invention. But the foundational lie of my lying life was not a lie, it was the truth.
I was in no way redeemed by this realisation. It had not saved me. It merely showed me that the torrent of lies I had told in my time had eroded through to my core. Everything was a lie. I had forgotten the experience of truth.
The postcard was the only thing I held. My bag had been inside the house, as had almost everything else I owned. (My first thought was not my laptop or family photographs or any of my books, but the fridge and its contents.) Almost everything: I had the contents of my pockets, which included my phone, my wallet and my Oyster card. The bedrock of my ability to function. Wasn’t that supposed to be all we needed – the premise of those adverts in which twenty-somethings in plaid shirts travel the world on their credit card and data plan? Adverts for credit cards and data plans, mostly. I didn’t have a charger or, in all likelihood, a job, so neither could last.
As I walked up the ramp out of Old Street Station, Tamesis chimed. You should update your address information, it said.
‘You have got to be fucking kidding me,’ I said to it.
The column of black smoke was above the obelisk tower of the Hawksmoor church on Old Street, very near the office. That was west of the station – there was no pretence that it might be in Barking. It wasn’t even trying to deceive. And if the cockatoo was real, what else might be?
I was late, but maybe not too late. Even if the meeting had started on time, they could last a couple of hours, and I doubted it would be finished.
But when I arrived in the office, the meeting had already broken up. Or it hadn’t even begun. The atmosphere in the room was all wrong, everything was out of place. My eyes were fixed on the aquarium when I came in, expecting it to be full of people, but only Polly and Freya were in there. Ilse was sitting in her little kingdom, and her posture was unlike anything I had seen from her before: she was sprawled back in her chair, as if very relaxed, but her face was tired and preoccupied. Neither of the Rays were in their own duchy – woman Ray was sitting with Mohit, like they were having a chat, but a bad chat. Eddie was on his own in his stockade, on the phone. Kay was standing at her desk, piling up copies of the magazine. Once she had gathered an armful, she carried them towards the main door, and there she saw me.
‘What happened to you?’ she asked unkindly, before she took in the state of my clothes and face and legs and asked a completely different question, one filled with concern: ‘What happened to you?’
‘My house fell down,’ I said, and the dreaded feeling flickered upwards, and I could not prevent myself from an expression that was almost a smirk. ‘I know that sounds … It’s true.’
‘It just fell down?’ she said, eyes opaque, a faint sneer of disbelief on her lips.
‘There must have been a cause, but really the only important fact is that it fell down.’ Once I had said this, I became worried that perhaps glibness wasn’t quite the right tone, not with Kay. ‘There was building work going on next door. They must have undermined the foundations. I’m sorry, it’s come as a bit of a shock.’
‘Huh,’ Kay said. I expected more. She stepped past me, to the green wheelie bin against the wall. Into this she dropped the heavy load of magazines she had been carrying. They were recent copies, decorated with sticky bookmarks, each one of which represented one of Kay’s contributions.
‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Don’t you need those?’
‘Not any more,’ she said, with a stiff smile.
‘What’s going on?’
‘Why don’t you ask Eddie that?’ Kay said.
Eddie, yes. He had seen me, and his brown eyes, peering over the top of his fortifications, followed me as I crossed the office towards him. My terror of the awaiting possibilities was at last overcome by the need to know.
‘Jack. You’ve come to join us at last.’
‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ I said, although I didn’t put much contrition into my tone. ‘My house fell down.’
He looked me over, and I saw him pass from the dust on my jacket to the tears in my trouser legs to the blood-spotted bandages on my legs.
‘It’s a better excuse than usual, I’ll give you that,’ he said. ‘You missed the meeting. The meeting I expressly said you had to attend.’
‘Well, I’m here now,’ I said. I no longer saw any harm in being blunt. ‘Or am I? I’m out, right? Redundancy? Or dismissal?’
Eddie rolled his eyes, as if bored by these questions, and I felt the heat rise in my chest.
‘You need to speak with Polly.’ He nodded in the direction of the aquarium. I glanced over, and saw that Freya had hunched over, and Polly was leaning across, towards her, grim and concerned.
‘Why can’t you just tell me?’ I said to Eddie.
‘Polly,’ he said. ‘You need to speak with Polly.’ He lifted his phone receiver and began to punch in numbers, signalling an end to the conversation. I was momentarily seized by the urge to put my finger on the receiver switch, ending the call before it was dialled, like they do in TV dramas. But I did not.
Both the women in the aquarium were standing. Polly had come around the conference table and was guiding Freya to the door, a gentle hand on her shoulder. Freya’s eyes were red and her posture shrunken. She sniffed and hurried past me once the door was open. All that time, even while still mouthing comforting final words to Freya, Polly’s eyes had been fixed on me. She ushered me into the meeting room.
It was stuffy inside, spent emotion, like carbon monoxide, pushing out the breathable air.
‘I wish we had more privacy,’ Polly said with a weary exhalation.
I avoided the seat Freya had occupied as if it were unlucky. Not that luck could have much influence over my situation any more; clearly decisions had already been made, and the roulette ball was lodged firmly on double zero, even if the wheel had not quite ceased to spin. Perhaps poor taste was what I was anxious to avoid: disrespect to the fallen.
Polly had moved to sit where she sat before, but seeing me dodge Freya’s chair she changed to sit opposite, pulling all her papers with her. There were a lot of papers. The clipboard was fully loaded, and she had brought through a couple of the purple folders that her documents went into once they graduated from the clipboard.
The Bick file would be in there, for sure.
‘Are you OK?’ she asked. ‘You’re all … beat up.’
I sighed. ‘My house fell down.’
Her frown deepened. ‘What? How did that happen?’
I sighed, again – more a groan than a sigh. This was only the third time I had been asked about the house and I was already finding it a chore to explain. There was that initial hurdle of disbelief to surmount, and then all the repetitive details. I had the drunk’s desire to obliterate the past, where these tedious matters of context resided, and the future, where there lay further occasions on which I would have to explain them. I wanted to go to the sofa, to the fridge, and when I remembered that they were both buried beneath pulverised brick, I only wanted them more. I had watched my flat disintegrate around me, and it made this meeting, Eddie’s opinion of me, everything else, seem trivial. Especially as the chance to avert catastrophe was long past. I was calm. No, not calm – I roiled inwardly. But I was pointed forward, not locked in my usual grid of anxieties.
‘I’ve already been over that with Eddie,’ I said, ‘and Kay. Do you mind if we skip it, for now? I want to know what’s going on, with Kay, with Freya. With me.’
‘Sure,’ Polly said, smiling without pleasure. ‘Of course. You have a right to know. Short version: big changes. Eddie is stepping aside, I’m sad to say, and I will be taking over as editor from Monday.’
She was looking at me, for my reaction. I didn’t have one. How could I react? My worst speculations had been exceeded. But at the same time it made little material difference to the expected outcome. I swallowed, and said, ‘Go on.’
Polly tilted her head, as if she had expected more, and looked down at her notes. ‘As you know, the financial picture isn’t good. In fact, it’s very bad – existential. Eddie has done everything he can to avoid redundancies. But the urgency has become overwhelming. Ilse is taking voluntary redundancy, which’ – Polly let a hiss of air past her teeth – ‘is probably more expensive than keeping her on, because she’s on an Errol contract. We also have to lose Kay, and one of the Rays.’
‘Which Ray?’ I asked, lips numb.
‘Man Ray. I’ll be taking a lower salary than Eddie was. A lot lower, in fact. You wouldn’t beli— another Errol contract.’ She paused, a strange, intense, faraway look in her eyes. ‘And Mohit will move up to be my deputy, but not for a while, six months or more … the freeze …’ She tailed off again. ‘If we can keep him. He’s not happy. No one is. No one likes doing the back. Sorry, I’ve lost my thread. I don’t know what that leaves.’
‘Me,’ I said. Get to the point. She wasn’t handling this well. What did I care about what Mohit would be doing in six months? I’d be gone.
‘Of course.’ She opened the clip on the clipboard and pulled loose some papers. ‘Listen, your work recently …’
I lowered my head. I knew what was coming, I was prepared, but I wasn’t proud. ‘I know,’ I said, voice failing on me, almost a whisper.
‘Exceptional. Really. I can’t thank you enough. We gave you a tough week, I know, but you’ve excelled, you really have. It’s convinced me that I’ve made the right decision.’
‘Excuse me?’ I said.
She was holding a sheaf of A4, fresh from the printer and paperclipped together. ‘I read this when you sent it over yesterday. It’s phenomenal work, really superb. And you say this is just a start? You’ve got more?’
My lips felt dry, and I licked them. ‘I’m not … May I see that?’
Polly pushed the document across the table. The cover was a printout of an email.
Here’s the first part of the Oliver Pierce transcript.
– Jack
I had the distinct sense of having stumbled sideways into a different world. Could one of my blackouts have been … beneficial? A forgotten patch of preternatural organisation and productivity? There were dreams like that, nasty deadline dreams. You imagine it’s all done, all sorted, and you wake, and … Better than a sweat-soaked anxiety nightmare, maybe, but still horrible. The nightmare is the waking world, the dream the false respite. Maybe this was the subconscious trying to soothe a deeply troubled mind, but it always felt cruel, like a trick.
There were tricks, too, that unscrupulous writers could play, trying to cheat an extra hour or two out of a strict deadline. You could send an email saying, ‘Here it is!’, but with no attachment, having forgotten to include your copy; or you could attach a file with only a title or a couple of paragraphs on it, accidentally sending an unfinished version of the file rather than the (not-yet-existent) complete one. An honest mistake! Sincerest apologies. If you were really lucky, you might not get a reply pointing out your ‘error’ until hours later, or even the next day – or the subsequent Monday. By which time you might have actually achieved a draft. And I was forced to assume that this might be a case like that – Polly might be showing me a blank document or one filled with dummy copy, or a Q&A pulled off the internet and stripped of formatting to resemble a transcript – remembering my recent indiscretions, that seemed possible, or at least less impossible than having actually done the work.
I flicked to a random page. It was all very neat, not like one of my transcripts at all.
I had to ‘set the record straight’. As if everything is disordered now, crooked, and when I … If I go on the record it’ll all be properly arranged and neat and tidy. ‘The Record’! As if there’s a single, agreed text of the past somewhere, in a big ledger with metal clasps … Or in one of Quin’s servers, now, I suppose.
That was it, the interview on Tuesday, word for word. All of it.
My stomach twisted. All of it? I flicked back a few pages in the transcript.
| BICK: | I don’t understand. You sounded very eager to talk to me when we got in touch, but now it sounds as if there’s not much you want to say. |
| [inaudible] | |
| PIERCE: | The thing about Night Traffic is that I made it up. None of it happened. None of it is true. |
I stared at that [inaudible]. The entirety of my outing as an alcoholic had been redacted, hidden behind a tiny note that looked as if it concealed no more than a couple of mumbled words. It was brazen, but it was probably what I would have done if I had sat down and transcribed the interview myself. Had I done that? It was all too orderly. To my knowledge, I have never produced a line of writing during a blackout. It was appealing to imagine myself living a whole, productive life during the alcohol-induced voids in my memory, calmly tapping away at my keyboard or running underground boxing clubs or whatever, but it was utter fantasy. Blackouts are not magical. In reality, I came out of them knowing that I was lucky not to have choked on my own tongue or drowned in my vomit.
And I had nothing to transcribe from. The recordings had been lost.
Polly was inclined towards me, head tipped to one side, looking at what I was looking at. Her expression changed from pleasure to confusion as I kept leafing through the pages. I had been quiet too long, and I had furrowed my brow. I un-furrowed it.
‘Everything OK?’ she asked.
‘Yes, yes,’ I said. ‘I’m glad … you got this.’
She had said that I had sent it over yesterday. When, yesterday? I returned my attention to the cover sheet, looking for the time stamp on the email: just before four in the afternoon, around the time I left for De Chauncey’s event. Impossible. I had not sent it. Could I have been hacked? I looked at the sender’s address: jack.bick@bunkmail.co.uk
Bunkmail. I didn’t use a Bunkmail account, although it was possible I had set one up in order to register for one of Bunk’s services. The how of it didn’t matter, though – I already knew the who. Quin had taken my DVRs and selectively transcribed their contents. The why, that was the part I couldn’t get. He wanted all the evidence for himself, that was straightforward enough – but why help me out, at Pierce’s expense?
‘We’ll want to go very big on this, of course,’ Polly said. ‘How many words do you need to do it properly? Four thousand? Five?’
‘Uh,’ I said, trying to begin a sentence, but only producing a croak. ‘We can talk about that.’
‘Sure. And, I have to say, I am very excited about your ideas as well. I didn’t want to pry inside your creative process, but once again, great job.’
‘My ideas?’
‘Your ideas for future interviews.’
For a room-revolving moment I had the ghastly thought that Quin might be able to peer inside my head, and had composed Polly’s list by telepathy. But even if he was capable of cracking open my skull, he would find little of use within. Had he simply come up with his own?
‘I don’t remember sending you any ideas,’ I said, wary.
Polly blinked and shook her head. ‘No. My apologies.’ She opened her clipboard and took out a sheet of yellow notepaper. ‘I came over to your desk yesterday to thank you for sending over the Pierce transcript, but you had already gone, I think – anyway, this was on your pad. I took the liberty of having a sneaky peek.’
The notepaper she passed me was covered in my own handwriting – a list of names. Alexander De Chauncey, crossed out; Boris Johnson; Mike Butcher; Hugo Pleasance … It was the targets list I had drawn up with Pierce, the people we thought might deserve to be mugged.
‘Great stuff,’ Polly said. ‘We could fill half a year, here and now.’
‘This isn’t really …’ I began.
‘It’s a work in progress, I know,’ Polly said. ‘I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist.’
‘They’re all white men.’
‘I know, but we can pad it out with a bit of diversity as we go along. It’s an excellent start. Some really unexpected choices.’
‘I hate all these people,’ I said.
‘And I admire you for getting out of your comfort zone,’ Polly said. She smiled at me, with real warmth.
A faint ringing sounded in my ears, the song of my own blood, and the smell of burning filled my sinuses. Behind Polly was a rank of windows, looking out towards Clerkenwell and, beyond, the Telecom Tower. And there was the plume, plump and oily, an umbilicus filling the sky with the poison of the earth.
The window faced west, away from the estuary and London’s industrial horizon. On Monday, when the Barking fire was raging, we had been watching from the opposite side of the office. This plume had nothing to do with that fire. I feared it might have nothing to do with any fire.
‘So I’m not fired?’ I said, returning my attention to the room, a feat demanding considerable effort.
‘No! We … You’ve more than shown your value to the magazine. I’ve always been a big admirer of your work, as you know.’
‘Kay has value.’
‘Absolutely. I know, I know.’ Polly frowned, saddened. ‘It’s been a hugely difficult decision to make. Almost impossible. But you’re producing exactly what we need.’
‘I’ve got to say,’ I said, shaking my head, ‘that I’m surprised. I know that my attendance isn’t great …’ I glanced at the clipboard.
‘Eddie did raise a concern about that, said I should keep an eye on it,’ Polly said, patting the clipboard gently, like a faithful hound that had earned its rest. ‘But we can work on things like punctuality, and it doesn’t seem to make much difference to your ability to generate stories. You’re unorthodox. A free spirit. I respect that.’
‘I’m not well.’ It was as if I said the words to myself, that I was telling myself, in the sight of the plume, the impossible smoke column in the west. I’m not well.
I’m not well.
‘I know,’ Polly said, face again criss-crossed with concern. ‘You didn’t want to get the news this way. It’s a terrible day. I don’t mind telling you that this has been the worst morning of my career, and it’s been a rough week for us all. It’s awful to have to say goodbye to so many talented colleagues, awful. No one wants this to happen, least of all Eddie.’
I had been staring at Polly’s clipboard, hardly listening, just as she did not seem to be listening to me, but now I snapped to attention.
‘He quit,’ I said.
‘He couldn’t face making redundancies,’ Polly said. ‘Of course, no one wants to—’
‘Of course,’ I said, standing with enough force and suddenness to send my chair rocketing back into the glass wall of the aquarium. ‘No one wants to!’
Polly gaped as I spun around and pulled the meeting room door open. The noise of my chair striking the glass had attracted the notice of the few left in the office, who stared at me, their faces masks, unknowing as to what had happened and what might happen now.
Eddie rose slowly from his chair as I approached him. ‘Jack,’ he said. ‘Take a deep breath, and—’
‘Fire me,’ I said, slashing the distance between us with a few strides. I was at his desk, inside his fort, I could feel my shoulders shaking, my lungs burning, smell the smoke.
‘Sit down and let’s talk this out.’
‘Fire me,’ I repeated, louder, spreading out my arms.
Eddie held up his hands. ‘Polly has made her decision, and I am not about to—’
‘Coward,’ I said.
‘Excuse me?’ There, there it was, an angry light coming on in the eyes, the brows coming down.
‘Coward!’ I made sure the whole office heard me. All else was quiet, but I did not take my attention away from Eddie. No one was intervening, no hands dragged me away.
‘Look,’ Eddie said hotly. ‘You had better stop before—’
‘Before what? Before you fire me?’ I demanded. ‘Couldn’t face it, could you? You had to stay everyone’s friend. You didn’t want to be the bad guy. You gave all that to Polly, always. How long did you delay? How much time did you waste, and money? All because you couldn’t … When one of your writers was falling apart in front of you.’
Eddie was still scowling, but a shade of doubt had entered his expression, either doubt or bewilderment. His lips parted, but he didn’t say anything.
‘You didn’t do anything. Why didn’t you fire me? You could … Should … When I needed …’
I stopped. I was belatedly aware of my tears, which were hotter than my overheated skin, and gritty from the dirt on my face. All this time I had seen my job as a bastion against the Need, the disease – my last strongpoint against final collapse. Now I saw that the Need needed the job more than I did, it had been driving my increasingly desperate attempts to keep it, filling in the gaps left by drinking with copy-pasted quotes and outright fabrications, making me feel that I had to jump through Pierce and Quin’s hoops. All those months of scrambling and stumbling had been on behalf of the Need, or to counter its malign effects, not as a defence against it. The Need and the job worked together, staving off collapse, keeping me going, keeping me drinking, preventing me from admitting to myself that I was not well. I was not averting anything. The only way to survive the disaster was to go through it.
‘Forget it,’ I said. ‘I resign.’
What else could I do? I went to the pub.
No one wants this, of course. No one wants confrontation, no one wants to face the obvious, ghastly truth. It will follow you around, it will put itself in front of you again and again. But if you don’t want to confront it, if you don’t want to have that discussion, that argument … Not wanting can be as powerful as wanting. Great stretches of life can be lived, or half-lived, in the in-between space that is created by not wanting. How long had I been carrying on at the magazine, with Eddie knowing what should be done, and yet not wanting to do it? And me not wanting to face the truth myself? As it happened, I had prevailed, I had secured my place. I had won. The Need had won, I had lost.
No one wants this: it had been the same with Elise. We spent a full half of our relationship in the shadow of the conversation – the conversation that neither of us wanted to have, the conversation that we were jointly prepared to invest vast emotional resources and imagination into not having. The conversation that would contain the forbidden, fatal words, the ones that we thought every day. I did not need to have the conversation to know that they were in Elise’s mind as prominently as they were in mine. But we never wanted to form them in the air, in the outer realness. That one word in particular: alcoholic. I didn’t want to hear that – it was the Game Over sound, when the loop you’re holding touches the bendy wire and completes the circuit and a buzzer buzzes. The wire had grown so twisted, and we hung on to the loop with white knuckles, working through the convolutions. I would watch her, terrified, as we had one of the conversations that was not the conversation, and I would have that word in my mind, burning there so clearly that I fancied it might manifest itself in the space between us, letters dripping oily fire, or appear branded on my forehead like a third eye opening. And I’d see it reflected in her eyes, in the glass of the glasses she wore in the evenings but not at work, and I’d be thinking, She’s going to say it, it’s coming, I know that she’s thinking it and she is definitely going to say it this time, and then this conversation will become that conversation. But she didn’t. We never had that conversation. Not wanting. We went from preferring to stay together rather than have that conversation, to preferring to split rather than have that conversation. What was it all for, then?
To give an example. We were eating dinner in an Italian restaurant near our flat. There are many other examples that I could cite – perhaps this one comes to mind for the setting. It wasn’t a tense discussion in the kitchen, or the bedroom, or the living room, the three places in which these discussions took place nine times out of ten. We had gone to this little neighbourhood restaurant, one of a dying breed, in the middle of the week, for no good reason. We were simply both too demoralised to cook. Talk had turned to the amount I drank, I don’t remember exactly why or how, but it often did. No, I do remember why, and I don’t know why I am claiming I don’t. The time had eased past ten and I had mentioned that I wanted to go to the convenience store before it closed. Elise had asked if that was really necessary – didn’t I have a can or two in the fridge? Which was true, but I had squirmed nevertheless, and she had picked up on my squirm, my reluctance.
‘Jack, the cans, the drinking in the evening,’ she said, voice thin with exhaustion, close to a break. ‘I’m worried …’
And I kept my face calm, all the while thinking, This is it, this time we are going to have the conversation, and she will say the word, and the buzzer will sound and that will be that.
‘I’m worried that it’s becoming a problem.’
That was as close as we came. Not even: It’s a problem. Just, becoming. She said how worried she was, and she considerately emphasised her concern for my health and my work. I was not oblivious to her pain. I wanted to soothe it. That was where we differed: the problem that had to be solved.
She wanted me to drink less, to set myself limits and stick to them, bringing everything back to a healthy level. I wanted to make her concern go away, with as few other changes as possible. I wanted her to stop worrying – it was a problem of perception, her perception. I could do a better job of concealing what I drank, that was one priority. But I also needed to make a show of proving that I didn’t have a problem – that I wasn’t addicted, to use another word that we never spoke.
Hiding the drinking never worked for long. I sneaked pub visits after work, and I filled innocuous containers with lager. I bought the can-crusher. Being drunk, I was sloppy, I made mistakes and the ruses rarely lasted long. They only served to reinforce the impression that I had … that there was a problem. I would have to undergo some genuine deprivation to remove that impression.
The summer of 2012 rolled around. The problem was still becoming a problem – both the problem itself and the problematic impression that there was a problem. Nevertheless, we were often happy. We spent long weekend days in the pub, sitting outdoors, reading newspapers and magazines. I spent a little too long one Sunday and became more or less catatonic. This is impossible for me to describe because I have no memory of it, and Elise’s account was hobbled by her anger and her embarrassment. I could not be moved, and I had to be helped home by Elise and one of the regulars, taking an arm each. The next day I had to miss work. (I claimed food poisoning, and my absences were still seldom enough for the excuse to work.) Elise spent Sunday night sitting awake beside my motionless form in bed, afraid that I might stop breathing or swallow my tongue. Satisfied that I would live, she spent Monday night at a friend’s house. She called me at about 10 p.m. – I had been drinking for hours already, delighted to be out of work and left on my own, and I was unusually drunk for that time on a weeknight. I slurred and forgot things, and she became very upset, and hung up on me.
On Tuesday morning, I called her. Extraordinary measures were needed.
I said I would stop drinking. And I did.
Two empty pint glasses stood on the table in front of me, grey suds clinging to the interiors. A third was full and fresh, still frosted with condensation. My lips had made a little wound at the edge of the foam, but that was the only sign that it had been touched. Perfection. I was in the brightly lit, tacky pub near the office, the one that my colleagues avoided. Friday night was the only time I had seen it busy, full of deafening men in suits and workers from nearby construction sites, but in office hours it had a sleepy air.
Kay dropped herself into the seat opposite me at about four. I would have asked her how she knew where to find me, but I knew already: she would have asked Tamesis for a pub recommendation, perhaps specifying that she wanted to run into people. The app would have done the rest, given that we were T-plus mutuals. No Quin needed – this was just Tamesis doing what it was supposed to do.
She was carrying an early edition of the Standard, and tossed it onto the table, folded to the front page headline: ONE HURT IN PIMLICO STREET COLLAPSE.
‘Cover story,’ she said. ‘Another cover. You’re on fire.’
‘Being on fire would be the end to a perfect day,’ I said.
‘Want to compare days?’ Kay said, with a warning raise of her eyebrows.
‘Not particularly,’ I said.
She shrugged. ‘To be honest, I don’t think I could beat “house fell down”, even today. Although this morning I did think I was going to be homeless.’
The London question, of course – how did she make it work? And Kay’s answer: she shared with a friend, and went payday to payday. My answer, too, although not the sharing part, and that made for bigger gulfs between paydays. I made a mental note to cancel the standing order to Dave, or whatever lay behind the software construct ‘Dave’.
‘This morning? But not now?’
‘I’m back, baby,’ Kay said with an acid smile. ‘Reinstated.’ She put on a voice – a blustering, gruff ‘authority’ voice. ‘Regrettable error, premature, embarrassing, acted without full consultation, sincere apologies.’
‘Polly said that?’
‘The publisher said that. I was taken upstairs. But Polly did it.’
I bent over my pint, and frowned into it. ‘Aren’t you going to find it difficult working for Polly after this?’
‘Yeah. Awkward.’ She widened her eyes. ‘But I did see a side of her that I liked. After you left – I won’t recap the whole thing, but she had a stand-up row with Eddie. Said that she had been kept waiting for years to be editor, doing his dirty work for him, and he couldn’t even step down without making her do all the shit he didn’t want to do.’
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘I know. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Polly get angry. She’s always so calm. It must have been building up a while. It was good. I think she might be a good boss, actually. She might be straight with people. Unlike Eddie.’
‘Eddie’s an arsehole,’ I said, taking a drink.
‘Everyone thinks so,’ Kay said. ‘I need to raise a glass to that. Let me get a drink.’
While Kay was at the bar, I unfolded the Standard to look at the story about my house. The splash picture was an aerial shot of the cratered street. A tattered veil of smoke or dust still clung to the heaped wreckage in the crater, like the caldera of a slumbering volcano. The story itself had a couple of quotes from Bella – edited for length, I imagined. The collapse had been attributed to ‘nearby basement excavations, weakened by heavy rain’. The street was still closed, it said, while the fire brigade investigated the safety of the surrounding houses.
I pored over the picture, trying to make out features amid the ruins. What was I looking for? The fridge, perhaps, tumbled like a dice. Not that I could get to it. In the lower left-hand corner of the picture was a shape, a curl of white plastic – the edge, I realised, of a drone, part of the circular guard around one of its rotors. That was how news organisation got pictures like this, now, so much cheaper than a helicopter. Would I be on the evening news? Where would I watch it?
Kay returned, with a pint.
‘We haven’t had a drink in ages,’ I said.
She gave me an appraising look, and said nothing. I wondered if I had said the wrong thing.
‘This is nice,’ I said, raising my glass. ‘I’m pleased you got your job back.’
‘Are you OK?’ she said, and although she didn’t elaborate on what she meant, the look she threw at my beer said enough on its own.
‘I’m not well,’ I said. ‘I’ll figure it out.’
‘Is that why you’ve been avoiding me?’ she asked ‘I used to enjoy hanging out with you, but the last few weeks, it’s like you don’t want to know.’
I didn’t reply. At first. And then I realised that I did have a reply.
‘Maybe I didn’t want to be asked if I was OK,’ I said.
‘Well, excuse me.’
‘No, no. That not really what I mean. I mean … I’ve been having a rough time. I didn’t want anyone else getting drawn into it, getting hurt. I really enjoyed hanging out with you as well. I suppose I wanted to … preserve that.’
She sipped her lager. I wondered what kind it was, and felt the usual pang of outraged jealousy that came with watching non-alcoholics drink, that it could be so easy for them, that they would reach a point when they didn’t want any more, how could they, how could they.
Kay removed a touch of foam from her top lip with a flash of tongue, and said, ‘Bollocks.’
‘Bollocks?’
‘Bollocks. I think you had it right the first time, more or less, not wanting to be asked if you were OK; you’ve been following your little trajectory, you know where you’re going, and you didn’t want the hassle of dealing with other people along the way. Getting asked if you were OK might mean admitting you’re not OK. You’ve been streamlining.’
‘Bollocks,’ I said.
She shrugged, and made a face. ‘What will you do now? Tonight? Go to a Travelodge or a Way Inn? Do you have family you could stay with? A friend you can call?’
Another time, I might have taken this for flirting, but it was most definitely not an invitation, though the underlying concern was real.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I do.’