fruit. Mango, maybe. I pick one, roll it over in my hands and take a bite. Whatever it is, it isn’t ripe. I spit it out, put the cigarette in my mouth and light it. The taste of clove and bonfires. I’m not keen on clove, it ruins apple pies, but the bonfire is OK. It sets fire to my lungs and the coughing rattles the dope hangover out of my head.
‘Keep it fucking down, man. Fuuck.’
The voice comes from the window behind me. Kim must be in there somewhere behind the mosquito mesh. There’s still more coughing to come so I open the gate and step onto the street where I let it out. I look at the cigarette.
‘You evil bastard.’
Putting it back in my mouth, the cloves do their job. The back of my throat is numbing and the cough rolls over and goes to sleep.
Noise is still dormant in this street of white walls and small houses and trees. It is a cul-de-sac that stops at a wall to my right. The sun is already blanching my face and the air is stuffy. Sweat bubbles up on my forehead. I’m going to like this heat. It’s going to bake me into something new. I close my eyes and tilt my face to the sun. New Me is going to be brown and sun-bleached and blond-haired and careless. He’s going to smoke and drink and argue and live and Laura will not have anything to say on the matter. Nothing.
—Nothing?
—Nothing.
—Well that’s not nice, she says, ignoring the fact that she’s dead.
—Sorry, but me and you were one. We were one and you’ve gone. What does that leave? What am I supposed to do? What am I supposed to be?
—I don’t know.
—Exactly. So be quiet. Please.
I open my eyes before she can say more, go back in the house, pull a towel and bag of toiletries from my backpack, take a pee, shower under cold water, dry myself, put on a pair of pants, smoke another of Kim’s cigarettes, go back to my bed, lie down, watch a pale-green lizard no bigger than my little finger crawl across the ceiling. I sweat, sleep, wake up, sweat some more, sleep some more, wake up, tell Laura to be quiet and go back to sleep, sweat, go back to sleep.
She dies. Nothing is linear, everything is flat. Nothing continues in perfect expectation and succession; there is no beginning, middle or end.
She dies, and the moment that lies nearest to this amongst the countless moments laid out like photos on a bed is the bus stop, the farewell. I pick the photo up and turn it so the whole moment is made clear. Studying it, I see that a little gathering of hair has come out from behind her ear and hangs against her cheek. The scent of the sea and fish and chips is being blown from the seafront down through the streets to here. A little white speck of cotton is caught on an eyelash. I remove it with my thumb. She smiles, but there is awkwardness between us that feels alien. She turns away and checks the timetable on the post again. Around us people walk by, unaware of the importance of this moment. Cars carrying families with picnics and buckets and spades roll up and down the street sniffing out parking spaces. At her feet is a suitcase with a shoulder bag sat on its top. In the top of the bag a passport, tissues and her camera taunt me. She is wearing cut-off jeans with straggly white threads hanging over the tops of her calves. A thin ivory cotton top shows a half-moon of her back with lightly tanned skin pulled tight over vertebrae and delicate shoulder blades. My hand goes there. The backs of my fingers stroke gently down between them. She turns and throws her arms around me. Like a fly-trap I close around her.
‘Tell me not to go,’ she says into my ear.
‘Don’t go,’ I say into her hair, breathing in the scent of fruit and bottled freshness.
‘I have to.’ She puts her nose to my neck and I hear her breathe in.
‘You smell like shit. I’ll miss it.’
Through wispy hairs that tickle my face I see the white National Express coach waiting at a set of lights down the road, waiting to come and destroy me.
‘Don’t go,’ I say again. ‘I mean it.’
‘I’ll be back. It’s not exactly far. And you go enjoy yourself too. Go find yourself somewhere.’
‘I don’t need to. I’m happy with me. I’m happy here, with you.’
‘Well, no doubt you’ll sneak a visit out to see me, even if I say you can’t. You lovesick puppy.’ She holds me tight to her, arms reaching far around my back.
This will probably happen. I can’t believe I’m letting her go. I will have to see her somehow. I will have to. After more than three years together, I can’t understand how I’ll go for so long without seeing her, listening to her, watching her.
The lights have changed to green and the bus is moving towards us. My hands pull at the base of her back, pull her nearer.
‘I guess that means you can see my bus.’
‘No. It means I’ve got a boner.’
‘Sicko.’ Her hands grab my buttocks and her nails dig in. She grabs a piece of my neck with her teeth and pulls.
‘Ow. Hurts.’
She releases.
‘Don’t forget me.’ She leans back in my arms and locks my eyes with hers. ‘Do not forget me. I’m doing this for me, but I love you. And I am not leaving you. You’re just a yappy puppy going into kennels and I’ll be back for you soon.’
I howl at the approaching bus.
‘Calm down, Rover.’
‘Nine months isn’t soon.’
‘Nine months is this,’ and she snaps her fingers at the end of my nose. ‘And anyway, I know damn well you’re going to come and find me, because you’ll miss me too much and you won’t be able to resist it.’
‘We’ll see.’ I do see. I see me pacing around the flat sipping malt whiskey, sniffing her old cushions and the one pair of knickers she leaves on the bed as a farewell present, looking from the phone to the clock to the phone to see if I can call her yet. I see this as a nightly routine until I finally break, get on a plane, a bus will be too slow, and go and grab her by every bit of her I can.
‘I can’t just leave. You know I can’t. I can’t pack in the teaching already.’ I kid myself and am not really sure why I say it or why I’m doing it. Of course I’ll leave. ‘You’ve made it clear you don’t really want me there. Not really.’
‘Yes, but you need me, numbnuts. You won’t cope. Don’t deny.’
I read VICTORIA COACH STATION on the front of the bus as it pulls up beside us. It stops and lets out the airy fart noise buses make when they stop.
‘I deny. I don’t need a woman, for god’s sake. You’re never any good at cooking, or cleaning. So be gone.’
The door opens and suddenly everything is going at hyper-speed. How have we come to be here already? Why is she lifting her shoulder bag up and sliding it over her arm and looking at me like that? And her eyes are sparkling with wet. Her eyes never do that. And she becomes blurry because mine are doing the same and I’m a man and I don’t
