moan, hyphenating every syllable with his breath for some sort of extreme emphasis. ‘She’s known about my dalliances before, but this?’ He stroked my arm. ‘This love? She wouldn’t understand that.’
We met in bars on the ground floors of hotels, and then occasionally in restaurants adjacent to those bars. A few times, his wife was away, and we went to his house, where we slept in the guest bedroom, on an undressed mattress and under a naked duvet, in case his wife wondered why the master bedsheets had been changed.
He never came to visit me; I always went to visit him. He left his wife when she caught us one day. Or she left him, I was never sure. I bought my flat, and he bought his, near Liverpool Street. He told me that it was too soon for us to cohabit. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘are you sure that you want everybody to talk?’
When, eventually, I told him my prognosis, his face was perfectly still for a while, until his eyebrow raised, and he said, ‘What a shame.’
As if there was ever a future for us, at all.
On the platform, at Paddington. Waiting for the purple trains, at the doors, perfectly aligned to the opening of the carriages. The people, crowding, with their bags, their lovers, their pasts and futures; every part of human life somehow finding its way to that platform. I watched as train after train passed through the station.
‘Are you OK, sir?’ A woman in a uniform, a tabard, smiling at me. I smiled back.
‘I’m overwhelmed, that’s all.’
‘London can do that,’ she replied. She looked at my over-filled rucksack, the mark of a visitor. ‘You here for a holiday?’
‘No. I’m leaving,’ I said.
She smiled again. She had a lovely smile. Warm, kind. Reminded me of my mother. ‘Let me know if you need anything, OK?’
I stood as she walked off, and I made my way to the marked area of the platform, by the glass doors. Being on a platform would once tousle every part of you as the train rushed towards you; but that time, it was just there.
The doors opened, and there she was: my mother.
Her name was Elizabeth. Betty, she called herself, because – in her words – ‘I’m not exactly the Queen, now, am I?’
Ronnie laughed, from his seat. ‘I told you he’d be back. Didn’t I tell you?’
My mother opened her arms, and I sank into them.
Alice told me about the route she used to take. ‘My whole life,’ she said, ‘this run. This line, these tunnels, they’ve existed for so long. Not these exact tunnels, but adjacent is sometimes the same as the original, don’t you think?’ The train stopped, and people disembarked, and more boarded. Each time I stared, to see the faces and hear the voices.
‘Nothing beats the original,’ my old tutor, Sean, said, ‘though God knows this city tries: constantly self-imitating.’ Sean died of old age, a peaceful passing that made those of us at his funeral somehow envious: his was, we agreed, as if we were all cricketers, a good innings.
‘You don’t like London,’ I said to him, almost under my breath, a phrase I had recited a hundred times or more in the years that I knew him.
‘And you blame him?’ My cousin, Vanessa. Long hours spent playing in Alice’s garden, when she was in her middle age, and Vanessa and I were, for a time, all each other had. Vanessa took scissors to her own wrists, but those scars weren’t visible: in that carriage, she was in her twenties, footloose and free of those fancies that people seem so eager to be free of.
‘Not everybody feels like you do, you know.’ Arnold, the first boy I ever loved, cancer of the insides, a spread that lost all track of its origin point.
‘And not everybody is quite so contentious.’ Samir, from the school I once taught in, while trying to make ends meet between novels. Colleague, first reader, friend, infection that rendered him first slightly stilled, then completely static.
‘Don’t remember Gregory much, then, I take it?’ Adelle, agent, dedicated smoker who overcame the odds of the smoker’s lot and died, elderly, in a crash.
‘As much as I need to,’ Ronnie said. Cutting through them all. Ronnie, who died because – as he said in the letter that he left his friends, which we all gathered around to read in the week following his death – he loved too much. His smile was pervasive, able to somehow commit to whatever situation we found ourselves in: that same smile, somehow consistently appropriate. Even then, with my impending.
I pulled him to one side. ‘How did you deal with this?’ I asked.
‘The parade? I decided that everything’s a parade now. One big to-do.’
We left the city, or the innards of the city. The part that feels as though it’s inescapable when you’re inside it, and then so alluring as to be almost unreachable when you’re not. The built-up gave way to the suburbs, the built-down: two-storeys, bungalows, flats above shops. Comfort and ease; the love handles of my city.
A memory, of Alex poking my sides, before I got ill. Telling me, ‘Well, this is a new addition.’ My stomach, his finger sinking into pink flesh. ‘Nobody told me we were expecting.’
‘I don’t know why you stayed with him,’ Ronnie said, reading my mind.
‘I didn’t ask you,’ I said. Maybe I spat my words, defensive, because Ronnie looked affronted; but still, his lovely smile essentially formed his face for itself.
‘You lived out here, didn’t you?’ he asked me.
‘Once. You didn’t.’
‘Thank God. I died before I could pretend that I wanted to.’ Snark, smirk.
‘I did actually want to, you know.’
‘You didn’t know what you wanted.’ His smile changed. Have you ever seen somebody who looks so happy, suddenly so sad? Or maybe not sad, but withdrawn; understanding, empathic. ‘It’s funny, this. Leaving somewhere. Moving on. The past, going into a place you haven’t been yet.’
The train stopped. Hayes and Harlington. Last stop before Heathrow.
Ronnie looked to the doors. My father, definitely him this time, standing there. In the hat that he used to wear, the perfectly pressed suit. His lip a line, a crease, in an otherwise creaseless face.
‘I’ll leave you two alone,’ Ronnie said. He squeezed my arm, near my wrist; and Alice waved at me, and my mother kissed my cheek. Everybody else faded away, until there was just me and him, him and me, in this carriage, thundering past the houses, on its way.
‘I lived in a house near here,’ I said to him. He sat opposite me, and he did that affectation with his trousers: hitching them slightly, so that they didn’t catch on his socks; so that a glimpse of his ankles could be seen, below the braces on his socks. ‘The first time that I moved in with somebody, it was here.’
‘Nice enough area,’ he said. ‘I remember coming here when you were a kid. There was a shop. For your models.’ I used to build Airfix models. A Sopwith Camel with my grandfather, who saw them during the war. Glue on my fingers, and
