Andrew had gone to Bristol Polytechnic the summer after his mother’s death. With Sally in Manchester with her new boyfriend, it had been less about a yearning for higher education and more about finding some people to talk to. Without any real research he settled on some digs in a part of the city called Easton. The house was just off a stretch of grass with the optimistically bucolic name of Fox Park, which in reality was a tiny patch of green separating the residential street from the M32 highway. As Andrew arrived outside the house, hauling his possessions in a bulky purple rucksack, he saw a man in the park dressed entirely in trash bags kicking a pigeon. A woman appeared from a bush and dragged the man away from the bird, but to Andrew’s horror this was only so she could continue the assault herself. He was still recovering from having witnessed this harrowing tag-team display as he was ushered into his lodgings by the landlady. Mrs. Briggs had a fierce blue rinse and a cough like distant thunder, and Andrew quickly realized she had a good heart underneath her stern exterior. She seemed to be constantly cooking, often by candlelight whenever the electricity meter ran out (which it regularly did). She also had an unnerving habit of slipping in criticism halfway through an unrelated sentence: “Don’t worry about that feller and the pigeon, my love, he’s bit of a funny one, that lad—gosh, you need a haircut, m’duck—I think he’s one sandwich short of a picnic, truth be told.” It was the conversational equivalent of burying bad news.
Andrew soon grew fond of Mrs. Briggs, which was just as well, because he hated everybody on his course. He was savvy enough to work out that philosophy was going to attract a certain type, but it was as if they’d all been grown in a lab somewhere purely to annoy him. The boys all had wispy beards, smoked shitty little roll-ups and spent most of their time trying to impress girls by quoting the most obscure passages they knew from Descartes and Kierkegaard. The girls were denim-clad and seemed to spend all the lectures stony-faced, anger broiling away underneath the surface. Andrew only worked out later that this was largely due to the male tutors, who engaged in lively debate with the boys but spoke to the girls the way you might to a rather intelligent pony.
After a few weeks he made a couple of friends, a pudding-faced, largely benign Welshman called Gavin who drank neat gin and claimed to have once seen a flying saucer going over Llandovery rugby ground, and Gavin’s girlfriend, Diane, a third-year who wore bright orange-rimmed glasses and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Andrew quickly realized that Gavin was obviously the biggest fool of all, constantly testing Diane’s patience in increasingly creative ways. They had been together since before uni (“Childhood sweethearts, you see,” Gavin told him for the seventh time one evening, after his sixth gin), and Gavin had followed her to Bristol to do the same course. (Later, Diane would confide that this had been less Gavin’s not bearing for them to be apart and more that the simplest of tasks were too hard for him. “I came home once to find him trying to cook chicken nuggets in the toaster.”)
For reasons that were unclear to Andrew, Diane was the only person he’d ever met in his brief adult life whom he found it completely unproblematic to talk to. He didn’t stutter or stumble over his words when he was with her, and they shared a very specific sense of humor—dark, but never cruel. In the few instances where they were alone—waiting for Gavin to meet them at the pub, or in snatched moments when he was in the toilet or at the bar—Andrew began to open up to her about his mum and Sally. Diane had a natural gift for helping him to find the positives in what he was going through without trivializing anything, so when he spoke about his mum he found himself recalling the rare occasions when she seemed unburdened and happy, which usually occurred when she was gardening in the sunshine with Ella Fitzgerald playing in the background. When he spoke of Sally, he remembered a phase around the time they were watching Hammer horrors with Spike when she started to come back from the pub with presents she’d “acquired” (clearly from a dodgy regular who’d got them off the back of a lorry), including a Subbuteo set, a little wooden instrument apparently known as a “Jew’s harp,” and, most magnificently of all, an R176 Flying Scotsman with an apple-green engine and a teak carriage. He loved that engine, but it was Diane who made him realize that it was more than just an appreciation of the thing itself, that it was really emblematic of that brief period of time when Sally had been at her most affectionate.
Occasionally, through a haze of smoke in a rowdy pub, he would catch Diane looking at him. Unembarrassed at being caught in the act, she would hold his gaze for a second before rejoining the conversation. He lived for those moments. They started to be the only thing keeping him going. He was failing in his coursework to the point where he’d stopped bothering with it completely. He was resigned to dropping out at Christmas. He’d get a job somewhere and save some money. He told himself he’d go traveling, but in truth he’d found it hard enough moving to Bristol.
One night, he, Diane and Gavin were invited to an impromptu party in a fellow philosophy student’s halls of residence room, the caveat to the invite being they had to bring a crate of beer each. A large gang of them crammed into a bedroom and cracked open cans. Nobody wanted to talk about uni work, but Gavin found a copy of On Liberty and began drunkenly reading out passages as everyone tried to ignore him. As Gavin searched for a new book (perhaps Kierkegaard was what this party needed!), Andrew reached for what he was 50 percent sure was his Holsten Pils, but someone took his free hand from behind and pulled him outside. It was Diane. She led him through the corridor, down the three flights of stairs and out into the street, where snow was falling in thick clumps.
“Hello,” she said, putting her arms around his neck and kissing him before he could reply. By the time he opened his eyes again there was a carpet of snow.
“You know I’m going back to London later this week,” he said.
Diane raised her eyebrows.
“No! I didn’t mean that . . . I just . . . I just thought I should tell you.” Diane politely advised him to shut up and kissed him again.
They snuck back to Mrs. Briggs’s that night. Andrew woke the next morning and thought Diane had left without saying good-bye, but her glasses were still on the bedside table, pointing toward the bed as if watching him. He heard the toilet flushing in the shared bathroom and then the sounds of two different sets of footsteps meeting on the landing. A short standoff. Awkward introductions. Diane climbed back into bed and punished Andrew for not coming to her rescue by clamping her ice-cold feet to his legs.
“Don’t you ever warm up?” he said.
“Maybe,” she whispered, pulling the duvet over their heads. “You’ll just have to help me, won’t you?”
Afterward, they lay on their sides with their legs still entwined. Andrew traced his finger on the little white scar above Diane’s eyebrow.
“How did you get this?” he asked.
“A boy called James Bond threw a crabapple at me,” she said.
Five days later, they stood on the train platform as the sun warmed them through a gap in the fence. They’d been on their first official date the previous night, to see Pulp Fiction at the cinema, though neither of them would be able to remember a great deal about the plot.
“I wish I’d worked harder,” Andrew said. “I can’t believe I’ve messed this up so badly.”
Diane took his face in her hands. “Listen, you’re still grieving for goodness’ sake. The very fact you managed to get out of the house is something you should be proud of.”
They stood huddled together until the train came. Andrew bombarded Diane with questions. He wanted to know everything about her, to have as much as possible to cling on to after he’d gone.
“I promise to come and visit you whenever I can afford the ticket, okay?” Andrew said. “And I’ll call. And write.”
“What about a carrier pigeon?”
“Oi!”
“Sorry, it’s just you are talking a little bit like you’re being shipped off to a war somewhere, not Tooting.”
“And remind me again why I can’t just stay here?”
Diane sighed. “Because a) I think you should spend some time with your sister, especially at Christmas, and b) because I think you need to move home for a bit and decide what you want to do next independently of me. I have to concentrate on my degree, for one thing, and when that’s finished I’ll probably end up moving to London anyway.”
Andrew pulled a face.
“Probably.”
After a moment of silence he realized how unattractive his sulking must have been to Diane, but as she hugged him good-bye she gripped him so fiercely that he felt the warmth of her all the way back to London.
He moved into the spare room of a house currently occupied by two Dubliners who’d just discovered speed, and whom he managed to largely avoid apart from when they’d summon him to help settle entirely incomprehensible debates. (He tended to side with the one who looked most likely to set fire to something if he wasn’t declared the winner.) He survived entirely on Rice Krispies and the thought of the next time he’d get to speak to Diane. They had an arranged time every week when he’d go down to the pay phone at the end of the road and call her, Diane demanding they start every conversation with him telling her about the newest “busty” or “exotic” woman being advertised in the phone box. He kept an empty Nescafé jar on his bedroom windowsill where he saved up money for train fares to Bristol. He’d found work behind the till in a video rental store exclusively patronized by shifty-eyed drunk men buying porn, something he’d only told Diane after much carousing in the pub.
By this point he’d all but given up on the idea of coming back to try to finish his degree. Summer was creeping toward them and it made him anxious just thinking about the idea of being back in classes again.
“So you’re just going to sit about in London working in a porno shop?” Diane asked him. “What happened to you making decisions, or is this really the height of your ambition? You need to find out what you want to do for yourself. If you’re not going to finish your degree you need to work out how you’re going to have a career.”
“But—”
She waved away his protests. “I’m serious. I won’t hear another word about it.” She put her hands on the sides of his face and squeezed, turning his mouth into a comedy fish. “You need to believe in yourself a bit more and just bloody get out there. What’s your dream job, your dream career?”
She released the fish and waited for him to answer.
What was his dream job? More importantly, what could he say that she wouldn’t laugh at?
“Working in the community somehow, or something, I suppose.”
Diane narrowed her eyes, searching his face for signs of facetiousness.
“Well then, good,” she said. “So that’s the first positive step. You know the area you want to work in. You just need some experience. That means an office job, first up. So as soon as you’re back in London you’re going to find one. Agreed?”
“Yeah,” Andrew mumbled.
“Don’t sulk!” Diane said, and when he didn’t respond she moved down the bed and blew a fierce raspberry on his belly.
“What about you then?” Andrew laughed, pulling her up so that she was lying on top of him. “What’s your dream job?”
Diane rested her head on his chest. “Well, as much as I spent my entire adolescence saying I’d do the complete opposite of my parents, hence the philosophy degree blah blah blah, I’m thinking about a law conversion.”
“Oh yeah? Brokering deals for drug-dealing informants, that sort of thing?”
“The fact that’s your first thought makes me think you’ve been watching lots of terrible straight-to-video films from your shop.”
“It was either that or the porn.”
“And you’ve not watched any of that.”
“Absolutely not.”
“So if you want to have some ‘alone time’ you just picture . . .”
“You. Exclusively you. Wearing nothing but a smock made out of pages from Virginia Woolf novels.”
“I thought as much.”
She rolled off him so they were lying side by side.
“So, you’re going to be a lawyer then,” Andrew said.
“Either that or an astronaut,” she yawned.
Andrew laughed. “You can’t have a Welsh astronaut. That’s ridiculous!”
“Um, why not?” Diane said.
Andrew prepared his best Valleys accent. “Well there now, rrrright. That’s a small step for man, that is, and a great big giant one for mankind, see.”
Diane huffed and went to climb out of bed, but Andrew dived and grabbed her arm that she’d left deliberately dangling there. He loved it when she did that. Teasing him. Knowing that she would only get as far as a step away before he pulled her toward him.
Back in London, he spent his time behind the video shop counter circling jobs in the paper. He’d just sold a horrific-looking video to a gaunt-faced man who explained, “Wanking helps me with the come-downs,” when the phone rang. Five minutes later he replaced the receiver and considered the possibility that the woman who’d just asked him to come in for an interview might have been hired by Gavin as some sort of cruel act of revenge.
“Firstly, you’re insane,” Diane said when he spoke to her from the phone box later that evening (Bella, gorgeous busty blonde). “Secondly, I’m pretty sure I’m entitled to say I told you so. So we can do that now or wait till after you’ve actually got the job. It’s up to you . . .”
The interview was for an admin assistant at the local council. He borrowed one of the Irish boys’ suits, which had once belonged to his father. Checking his pockets as he sat in the waiting room, he found a ticket stub from a 1964 production of a play called Philadelphia, Here I Come!, which had been performed at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin. Had Sally gone to Philadelphia when she was in the States? He couldn’t remember, and he’d long since thrown away the postcards. He decided that the optimism of the title was a good omen.
The following morning, Diane’s opening line as she picked up the phone to him was “I told you so.”
“What would you have done if you’d said that and I hadn’t got it?” Andrew laughed.
“Um, pretended it was one of my other boyfriends?”
“Oi!”
A pause.
“Wait, you are joking, right?”
A sigh.
“Yes, Andrew, I’m joking. Hamish Brown accidentally touched my boob while trying to fix an overhead projector last week, that’s about as close as I’ve come to cheating on you . . .”
Despite himself, Andrew spent possibly 70 percent (okay, 80; 90, tops) of the time worrying about Diane’s being enticed away by someone. He always pictured a floppy-haired rower called Rufus, for some reason. All broad shoulders and old money.
“Luckily for you, fictional Rufus is no match for a real-life skinny philosophy dropout who works in a porno shop and lives with two speed freaks.”
Andrew was so nervous on his first morning at the council that he was forced to make a decision on whether it was less strange to spend the entire time on the toilet or to be sitting at his desk wincing with stomach cramps every five seconds. Thankfully, he managed to get through the day, and then a week, and then a month, without shitting himself or accidentally setting anything on fire. (“We really need to work on your benchmarks,” Diane told him.)
Then the most glorious of days arrived: June 11, 1995. Diane’s course was over, and she was coming to London. Andrew said good-bye to the two Irish boys, who were surprisingly emotional (though that could have been because they’d been up for three days straight) and piled all his stuff into the taxi waiting to take him to the flat he’d found for him and Diane, who’d managed to get everything into a couple of suitcases and taken the train from Bristol.
“Mum wanted to drive me,” she said, “but I was a bit worried you might’ve rented us a crack den or something and I didn’t want her having a panic attack.”
“Ah. Hmm. Funny you should say that . . .”
“Oh god . . .”
Andrew couldn’t be sure the tiny flat he’d found off the Old Kent Road hadn’t ever been used as a crack den—it was a rough-and-ready sort of building with scuff marks on the corridor walls and a dewy smell about the place—but as he lay in bed that night, Diane sleeping next to him, her knees curled up to her chest, he couldn’t stop smiling. This already felt like home.
Their moving coincided with a summer that brought with it a fiercely cloying heat. July was particularly punishing. Andrew bought a fan and he and Diane sat in their underwear in the front room when it got too hot to go out. They both became mildly obsessed with Wimbledon that month, Steffi Graf being a particular hero to Diane.
“This is just too bloody hot, isn’t it?” Diane yawned, lying down on her front as Graf signed autographs before leaving center court.
“Might this help?” Andrew said before fishing two ice cubes out of his glass and carefully dropping them onto Diane’s back, innocently apologizing as she half shrieked, half laughed.
The heat was unrelenting into August. People eyed each other nervously on the tube, looking out for potential fainters. Roads cracked and split. Garden watering bans were out in force. On the hottest day of the year, Andrew met Diane after work and they sprawled on the parched grass in Brockwell Park as all around them people kicked off shoes and rolled up sleeves. They’d brought bottles of lager but had forgotten to bring an opener. “Not to worry,” Diane said, confidently approaching a nearby smoker and borrowing his lighter to somehow crack open the beers.
“Where did you learn that trick, then?” Andrew asked as they resettled themselves on the grass.
“My granddad. He could use his teeth too in an emergency.”
“He sounds . . . fun.”
“Good old Granddad David. He used to say to me”—she affected a deep, booming voice—“‘If there’s one lesson I’ve learned, Di, it’s never go cheap on your booze. Life’s too short.’ My granny would just roll her eyes. God, I loved him, he was such a hero. You know what, if I ever have a son I really want to call him David.”
“Oh yeah?” Andrew said. “What about if you have a girl?”
“Hmmm.” Diane inspected her elbow, creased with a crisscross patch from the grass. “Oh, I know: Stephanie.”
“Another relative?”
“No! Steffi Graf, obviously.”
“Obviously.”
Diane blew the froth from her beer at him.
Later, at home, she straddled him on the sofa as lightning seared the sky.
The rain came while the city slept, a deluge of greasy water pounding the streets. Andrew stood by the window as dawn broke, sipping a cup of coffee. He couldn’t tell if he was still a bit drunk, or whether there was a hangover lying in wait. One of those nasty ones that creeps up on you, the sort where you’re eating bacon while it’s en route to the plate from the frying pan. He heard Diane stir. She sat up in bed and let her hair fall over her face.
Andrew laughed and went back to looking out of the window. “Have you got a hurty-head?” he said.
“I’ve got a hurty-everything,” Diane croaked. He heard her shuffle over and felt her arms go around his waist, her cheek resting at the top of his back. “Shall we have a fry-up?” she said.
“Sure,” Andrew said. “We’ll just have to grab a few things from the shop.”
“Whadoweneed?” Diane yawned, Andrew feeling it resonating through him.
“Oh, just bacon. And eggs. And sausages. And bread. Beans, possibly. Milk definitely, if you want tea.”
He felt her grip slacken slightly and she groaned in defeat.
“Whose turn is it to do a thing?” he asked innocently.
She buried her face into his back. “You’re only saying that because you know it’s mine.”
“What? Never!” Andrew said. “I mean, thinking back: I changed the channel, you put the kettle on, I put the bins out, you bought the paper, I did the washing up . . . Oh, you’re quite right, it is your turn to do a thing.”
She poked her nose into his back several times.
“Oi,” he said, eventually giving in and turning to take her in his arms.
“Do you promise everything will be better after bacon and beans?” she said.
“I do. I absolutely do.”
“And you love me?”
“Even more than bacon and beans.”
He felt her slide her hand into his boxers and squeeze him.
“Good,” she said, kissing him on the lips with an exaggerated “mwah” and abruptly walking off to slip on some flip-flops and throw a thin sweater over her pajamas.
“Well that’s not fair,” Andrew said.
“Hey, it’s my turn to do a thing, I’m just going by the rules . . . ,” Diane said with a shrug, trying to keep a straight face. She reached for her glasses, grabbed her purse and left, humming a tune. It took Andrew a second to realize it was Ella’s “Blue Moon.” Finally, he thought. She’s a convert. He stood there grinning stupidly, feeling so hopelessly in love it was like he was a punch-drunk boxer desperately trying to stay upright.
He allowed himself two listens of “Blue Moon” before heading to have a shower—guiltily hoping that by the time he came out he’d be able to smell bacon sizzling. But there was no sign of Diane when he emerged. And there still wasn’t ten minutes later. Perhaps she’d bumped into a friend—a fellow Bristol Poly alumnus; small world and all that. But something about this just didn’t feel right. He quickly dressed and left the house.
He could see the gathering of people from the other end of the street where the shop was. “That’s the thing,” he overheard someone in the gaggle muttering just as he reached them. “All that hot weather and then suddenly a big old storm . . . bound to cause damage.”
There were police officers standing in a semicircle, blocking anyone from going further. One of their radios crackled into life, a confusion of feedback and static that made an officer on one end of the ring wince and hold his radio out at arm’s length. Then a voice cut through the interference: “. . . confirm it’s one deceased. Falling masonry. No one’s been able to ascertain who owns the building, over?”
Andrew felt the dread seeping into him as he moved through the last line of the crowd and toward the edge of the police ring. He was trembling as he walked, as if an electric current were flowing through him. He could see some blue plastic sheets ahead on the ground rippling in the breeze, a pile of smashed slate to one side. And there, next to it, perfectly intact, looking just the same as on the bedside table in Mrs. Briggs’s house, was a pair of orange-framed glasses.
A policeman had his hands on his chest, telling him to get back. His breath smelled of coffee. There was a birthmark on his cheek. He was angry, but then he suddenly stopped shouting. He knew. He understood. He tried to ask Andrew questions but Andrew had crumpled to his knees, unable to support himself. There were hands on his shoulders. Concerned voices. Radio static. Then someone was trying to pull him to his feet.
The noise of the pub flitted back in and the policeman’s hands became Peggy’s, and it was like he was coming up from underwater, breaking the surface, and Peggy was telling him it was okay, squeezing him tightly, muffling his sobs. And even though he couldn’t stop crying—it felt like maybe he’d never actually stop—he slowly became aware of a tingling in his fingers, warmth finally returning.