didn’t reply. What was it to Glover? They’d reached the front steps of their flat and the conversation was parked there, by the wheelie bins and the recycling box in which someone had dropped a half-eaten kebab.
On a wet, dark, interminable Wednesday, one of those winter days that lacks an afternoon, Ruth emailed to invite David to dinner. He’d never been asked to her flat before, to the Barbican, and Glover’s email address didn’t feature in the recipients’ section. Her note was casual and he matched the tone, replying with one line: Sure, that’d be nice. Probably nothing would happen, but the night before he was due for dinner, he ironed his skyblue shirt. This action carried a certain evidential weight: he loathed ironing, its peculiar blend of fussiness and tedium, and got away with wearing round-neck jumpers at school. However, that particular shirt, according to his mother, brought out his eyes. He was childishly excited to see Ruth’s natural habitat. He’d never known her to cook before and was envisaging something plain, unfussy. Italian perhaps. Zucchini. Basil. Pecorino. Fruit to finish.
The day itself was a write-off. The only thing achieved was managed after hours when David, on the rota to supervise study group from 4 to 6 p.m., helped Susan Chang, who smelt of vanilla ice cream, remove a paper jam from the photocopier. He felt delighted by his small victory, and to celebrate, and in preparation for the evening, he decided to smoke some of the emergency weed he kept hidden in the locked drawer of his desk. He visited the staff toilet, perched on the edge on the flippeddown lid and skinned up. The joint was small, heavy on green, pointy as a golf tee, and would take the edge off the nervousness he was feeling. It was not beyond reason that it might be tonight. Ruth was unaccustomed to being alone.
He slipped the joint inside the pocket of his jacket and, at six o’clock exactly, headed up the ribbed linoleum stairs, wedging the fire-door ajar with an empty Coke can. Out on the roof of the school the evening sky was enormous. Tidal night was rolling in across the rooftops and the horizon was stacked with sinking bands of oranges and reds and pinks.
Sometimes David saw things and wanted to tell someone about them, face to face, eye to eye. He had had a girlfriend once, Sarah, years ago. They’d met in the students’ union in their last term at Goldsmiths: she’d spilt his beer and then insisted that he buy them both another. Over the next four months it happened that nothing became real to him until he’d told her about it. If they weren’t together, they rang each other in the afternoon to describe what they’d done in the morning, then spent the evening recounting their afternoons.
Back then David still had hair, and one stoned lunchtime Sarah had used her flatmate’s clippers to shave it off. David saw what he would look like bald: insane and shiny, a spoon with eyes. In her bedsit, above a fried-chicken takeaway in Turnpike Lane, they watched a lot of New German Cinema, lit joss sticks and had clumsy, vehement sex. In the moment he’d once accidentally caught her fish-shaped earring and her ear had bled on the sheet. She hadn’t cried but had squirmed below him faster, panting, and then slapped him on the shoulder hard, saying, ‘Now hold me down. Now put your hand across my mouth. Now hurt me, hurt me.’ When she went to India for six months, she wrote to tell him it was over. It did not escape his notice that the letter had been posted, presumably from Heathrow, on the same day that she left. He had only been in love once, and it wasn’t her.
Queuing in the student cafeteria, in his first week at Goldsmiths, he had reached the checkout before discovering, in a hot flush of shame, that he’d forgotten his wallet. The girl in the line behind him had tapped him on the back, and when he turned had pressed a five-pound note into his hand, saying, ‘Take it, really, it’s fine.’ He had never seen anyone be so kind. She didn’t know him at all. He ate his lunch directly behind her and couldn’t take his eyes off her hair. Thick and dark and shiny as an Eskimo’s. Natalie was a third-year, he found out, and when he met her the next day to pay her back, they’d ended up eating lunch together and he’d made her clear green eyes close repeatedly with laughter.
David leaned against the red-brick chimney stack and lit his spliff. He thought how he was growing old and odd, how he was falling prey to calcified and strange routines. The thick unfiltered smoke began to spread its anaesthetic chill throughout his head. Two pigeons sat on the bitumen lid of a water tank, cooing and soothing the traffic below. He moved towards them and they fluttered off, settling on a lower ledge. In the distance the British Telecom minaret rose above the hum, and the satellite dishes on the roofs stood out like white carnations fixed in buttonholes. He stubbed what was left on the lid of the tank and was halted for a second by the presence of the moon. It was cinematic, scaly and yellow, and had crept up silently behind him as if it meant to do him harm.
On the pavement, foggy but relaxed, he put on Elgar’s Sea Pictures and caught a 38 on Oxford Street up into the City. The Christmas lights had been erected, but were not yet switched on. He was going to be early, so he got off by Turnmill Street to walk. This was the hour before the evening started, the hour when anything might happen. It was the hour when the newspapers were skimmed and ineptly refolded like road maps, abandoned on the vacant seats of tubes and trains and buses. It was the hour when the smell of cumin and curry would waft across his parents’ garden in Hendon. It was heaven. It was the dog-walking hour. It was the hour of a million heating systems clicking on and thrumming into life, the hour of a blue plastic bag whipping above the building site on Clerkenwell Road in spasms of desire. Would Ruth be wondering, right now, about tonight? Would she be looking down at London in transition, and thinking anything could happen? This hour must once have been the kingdom of the lamplighters, and subject to their piecemeal, point-by-point illumination, but now the street lights all came on in a single instant pulse, a blink, as David stopped by Smithfield meat market to spark his Marlboro Light, where the floors had been hosed down and water ran in rivulets out into the street, creating tiny eddies round his sensible brown loafers.
Natalie had graduated a few weeks after the incident in the cafeteria. She’d found work in a graphic designers in Ascot, though she came back to London at weekends to stay with her boyfriend in Clapham. Every so often she spoke to David on the phone but was always too busy to meet. So on Friday evenings and Monday mornings David took to hanging around in Waterloo station—along the route where she’d have to walk from the overground train from Sunningdale down into the Underground to catch the Northern Line, and back. He did that for two months and never saw her, not once. He had wanted her so much he could barely think straight. He wrote her hundreds of poems and letters that he never sent, and a few that he did. He wanted her in his arms, in his eyes, in his kidney and spleen and heart. He wanted to unbutton her white shirt and slide the snakeskin belt out of the loops of her Levi 503s. Jittery with excitement in the station, he would take up his position by the ticket machines and scrutinize for an hour or so the unknown faces passing through the barriers until, eventually, he would give up, and move off with a grimace and a heavy gait, as if some part of him ached when he took a step.
As the lift ascended the twenty-three floors to Ruth’s flat David stared at himself in the mirror. Here was the elliptic face. The joint had left his eyes watery and the walk had taken it out of him. His sweaty head shone like a conker, and his cheeks were watermelon-pink. He pulled a tissue from his pocket and blotted himself. At the second knock, he heard Ruth shout from inside, ‘It’s open.’ He tried the door and here she was, walking towards him in dark skinny jeans and a black kimono jacket. Her hair was still damp, swept neatly into a side parting, and such unfussiness lent her face a new authority.
‘Hey hey hey,’ David said, for no good reason he could think of, lifting his arms like some favourite uncle.
‘Wonderful to see you.’ She offered her cheekbones to kiss in turn and then presented a cordless telephone, the mouthpiece covered by
