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Kiss and no tell

I woke up and I could hear a shower running next door. I knew I was in his room, in his bed, kind of naked in his bed. None of that was a surprise. I hadn’t been so out of it that I didn’t remember, it just took me a bit of time to piece it back together. I tried to see if my clothes were in reach or if I was going to have to risk ducking out from under the duvet before he reappeared from the shower. I couldn’t see them.

So, last night. From the top. We’d met as planned at the Kandi Klub and as promised the girls had left us alone to talk. I had occasionally caught a glimpse of Leah pulling faces at me over his shoulder but nothing that he would see. He’d seemed a bit more sure of himself than usual which I’d hoped was him finally relaxing around me, the whole shy-nervous-sweet thing was starting to wear thin. I thought there was some chemistry but I didn’t usually like to really judge until I’d kissed someone. Someone said that was a bit shallow but I never thought so; I wasn’t judging him, I was judging us, together, whether or not we were going to be a thing. Okay, I was probably judging him a bit. I’m a spectacular kisser.

He’d had a couple of drinks already and I topped him up. He wasn’t drunk but he was definitely looser, it was the first time we’d danced together. Or, you know, sort of awkwardly facing each other in amongst our circle of friends who were also dancing. I don’t think you can dance together in an indie club anyway. It wasn’t even the sort of place that stuck a slow one on at the end. The DJ usually faded the lights up to Daydream Believer so the most you might manage is holding hands, lifting them in to the air, and swaying in a mass singalong. Anyway, we danced. After a while I beckoned him off the floor, gestured that we should get another drink.

I was probably a bit buzzy from the couple of beers I’d had and the dancing. As we walked toward the bar I’d grabbed his hand, met with no resistance, and guided him off to a table back under the stairs that led down from the entrance. I sat him down and he looked, momentarily, a bit startled, like he’d sobered up very quickly and remembered that he was Mr shy-nervous-sweet. I didn’t really want him to remember that, it was no good for my purposes, and so I leaned in and started to kiss him. He tasted faintly of beer but I assumed I did too so that was okay. I’d closed my eyes so I couldn’t see if we’d managed to banish the unsure guy between us but from the movement of his lips, the push back from his tongue, I was pretty sure we had.

I don’t remember that much about the taxi, other than it was unusual to get one. Most nights me and the girls would walk back home, grab something to eat on the way. He’d suggested it straight after I’d suggested that maybe I should go back to his. I thought I should spare him running the gauntlet with my housemates and, to be honest, I sort of preferred it this way round. It meant I could leave when I wanted to, either that night if our flickering chemistry didn’t catch light, or the next morning. Assuming I could find my clothes.

I remember how it started. I’d asked for the tour, before his housemates got back, and stopped him in his room. I kissed him again and asked if he minded if I stayed over. From that point on I kind of led him through it, unbuttoning his jeans, slipping my shirt off over my head, guiding his hands to my hips. After that it wasn’t so elegant, both of us fumbling at our remaining clothes, removing everything and doing that thing where you’re both sneaking a look but both racing for the security of the duvet at the same time. As I reached to kiss him again I must have caught him with the edge of my MedLet, enough for a short intake of breath, so I whispered an apology and took it off, put it on a table by the bed.

And that was it. Last night, from the top. I’ve missed a bit out obviously but, sad to report, it was quite a short bit in the end. Sweet but short. I don’t want to sound mean but the sex took less time than it took him to get the condom on. I wondered if we’d talk for a bit and he’d be one who might come back around for another go but he fell asleep almost instantly. I toyed with the idea of leaving then but I wasn’t sure if I could find everything in the dark without waking him and I didn’t want to have a conversation about wanting a main course but just getting a starter. I guess I do sound mean. I’ll dress up his performance for the girls though, I’m not that mean.

The shower stopped running and I listened to the sounds of him doing whatever it is that boy’s do in the bathroom. No toilet flushing, thankfully. He came back in, fully clothed, rubbing at his damp hair with a towel. He seemed to clock that I was a bit uncomfortable and picked up my clothes, which I now saw folded in a pile on a chair by the bathroom, and passed them to me. It was weird that all my bravado from last night was as easily undone by the thought of him picking up and folding my knickers away.

He left me to get dressed. I said I’d call him.

Lockdown: April

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April used the time on lockdown like she’d always done: she read and studied, listened to music, drank wine in the evenings. She sensed the slight edginess in the rest of the house but just shut it out, retreated behind her thoughts, and bunkered down with books, a bottle, and Bowie. That first one, six months in the ICU, had been the hardest but even then she felt like she’d coped okay… and that was before she’d added alcohol to her distractions. They frowned on that when you were fourteen. This one was only four days old, routine community contact trace, would probably be over tomorrow.

There were tests coming up at the end of term so she read back through her notes on the set texts. It was probably adding to the tension the others were feeling, particularly the scientists who rarely passed up an opportunity to point out the imbalance in workload between their courses and April’s. She was prepared to cede the point to Cora and Aps but not Leah. Surely Psychology didn’t count? Pseudo science at best. Leah had spent an hour after that comment trying to explore what had happened in her upbringing that might explain her suspicion of trying to understand the workings of the human mind. It hadn’t convinced April any more of the scientific basis of the discipline. She was content to tell her that spending six months in solitary in your formative teenage years was enough time inside of your own head to not need anyone else to try and explain it to you. She mostly believed it.

The tests didn’t bother her. They never did, she’d always excelled at them. All of them except the ones that had been carried out on her. Those ones she seemed to have consistently failed or how else to explain why they’d kept coming back to carry out more? She looked at the faded red lines across the inside of her arm, faint fractured traces of her time in containment. She knew they’d been looking for a vaccine. They never quite came out and said it but she heard enough snatches of conversation between consultants and doctors and nurses to piece it together. Her parents knew more than they were letting on, too. They just kept telling her that there was nothing to worry about, they just wanted more tests because they thought she was special, thought she might help them figure out more about the mutations. April had never asked them much about it after she was released – sorry, reintegrated – because she’d stopped believing they would tell her anything she hadn’t worked out for herself. She didn’t even blame them but when she was older she did wonder exactly what they had known.

They’d talked a lot about her scars in the few months after coming out. Once a week with a dermatologist and twice a week with a therapist. We need to heal your psychological scars as well as your physical ones. Maybe that’s why she was a bit dismissive of Leah’s academic calling. Too much time having her thoughts and feelings prodded and pulled by well meaning strangers. Why don’t you use these crayons to express how isolation felt to you? Have you tried writing a story to explore that? You can change how you’re feeling, April, tell me, what do you believe about yourself? She’d preferred the dermatology. Lie back and let them apply some balms directly to the surface of her skin. None of this scratching around under it.

There had been one therapist, when she was about seventeen, that had stuck at it longer than the others. She was never quite sure whether her parents moved her on to someone new or if, privately, they waved a little white counselling flag and gave up. She won’t talk about how she feels. You can’t administer talking therapy if someone won’t talk about how they feel. The persistent guy was called Dr Lau. Anthony. She liked him despite herself. He’d said to her early on that she was probably going to get fed up with him repeating the same questions, making the same points, regular as a metronome. She hadn’t known what that was and when he’d told her she’d said it sounded a bit like a drum machine; she’d just gotten into the Sisters and told him about the one they used, Doktor Avalanche. It’s settled then, I will be your drum machine and you may call me Doctor Avalanche. She couldn’t really take him seriously when he called himself that but when she thought about it now she wondered if that had been his point. He had gotten her to talk.

What else makes you happy? That was one of his sessions. It was shortly after she’d told him about the Sisters, with probably a more detailed account of Wayne Hussey’s exit than he’d necessarily wanted for clinical purposes, and this was his follow up. Even then she was savvy enough, guarded enough, to recognise what this was. He’d patiently taken notes as she’d enthused about the early singles, listened intently to her make the case for them as punk band, really, not a goth one. It was all in the spirit of the thing, that was her point. She could feel herself speaking, in the moment, and there was nothing self-conscious about it, no division between thought and word, no accompanying bone dry commentary from internal April. And she knew that was what he wanted because she knew he thought that would be the source of her truth. That would be the route to all the insecurities and anxieties and issues that they all thought must be there from the six months locked up on her own. For a moment she had felt out of control but only for a moment. She composed herself and reeled off a pre-prepared list of things that she always said made her happy: her parents, her friends, school, shopping. Avalanche just nodded and made some more notes.

It hadn’t all been a lie. Not in retrospect at least. If she was speaking to him now and if she was honest with him now then she would still say ‘friends’. She hadn’t expected to enjoy sharing a house as much as she had and she couldn’t imagine not seeing Cora, Aps, and Leah every day now. What else would she tell him? Holding a sip of purple-black Shiraz in the roof of your mouth, letting the cherry and tobacco flavours seep into your tongue and down your throat. Reading the description of blank, silent snow drifting into the warm office of William Stoner in John William’s novel. She knew all her therapists would have a field day with that one. So you enjoy the metaphorical encroachment of winter into a place of comfort and security? The ridiculously grandiose choral introduction to This Corrosion; so huge and confident. Wagner and Jim Steinman’s beautiful bastard offspring. Dancing. That made her happy. Particularly on her own. Imagining she could see herself suspended as a sequence of snapshots, frozen through a fog of dry ice by the pulses of a strobe. Listening to the others talk, sitting just on the periphery and observing their lightness, their ease, their grace. She was sure that’s not how they saw themselves necessarily but that was what she saw. Their joy. That made her happy.

All of that stuff’s external, isn’t it? Things you observe or consume or experience. Avalanche would have said something like that. What about you? Inside you. What makes you happy from in there? That was where he’d been going with that line of questioning, that line of attack as she would have seen it then, and that was why she’d put the shutters up again.

She wasn’t sure she knew the answer, even now. She wasn’t entirely sure there was one.

Lockdown: Aps

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I hadn’t told the others yet that he’d started messaging me. I don’t think they’d noticed us talking in the club, it was the week after April had hit that idiot that had been harassing Cora at the bar. They can’t have noticed because there’s no way they would have kept their mouths shut. It had seemed to happen quite naturally in the end, I’d turned away from the bar and bumped in to him, spilling most of my drink over his arm. It seemed natural although I was a bit suspicious that he’d finally decided that the only way he could work up the nerve to speak to me was by forcing us into a collision. He’d insisted it was all his fault – it wasn’t – and bought me another drink. I think the others were dancing to Marilyn Manson but I didn’t like the heavier stuff.

“His real name’s Brian,” he shouted over the noise.

“Your name’s Brian?” I shouted back, mishearing.

“No. I’m James,” he said, leaning in slightly closer to be heard. “Marilyn Manson. His real name is Brian. Kinda funny isn’t it?”

I shook my head, decided to have some fun with him. “Not really, James. My name’s Bryony and I’ve got a brother called Brian. It’s been in my family for generations. My dad can trace us back to Brian’s in the seventeen hundreds.”

For a moment I thought I had him. He looked down, raised his palms in apology, and was just about to stammer an apology when he caught the smile on my face, noticed the eyebrow raised in what I hoped gave me a look of arch amusement and not one of someone who’d had half a botched face lift. He laughed and apologised anyway. He spent quite a lot of the conversation apologising but I found his gentle nervousness kind of sweet. Unthreatening. And he had kind, green eyes that peered out from under a mop of curly brown hair. I wasn’t sure if I fancied him but there was something about him that I liked.

We’d swapped numbers at the bar and he’d left with a bunch of friends before the others reappeared from the dance floor. He’d messaged me the next day. I thought that was kind of sweet as well but I left an industry standard two days before I texted him back. Since then we’d been in touch pretty much every day and just before lockdown I was going to suggest we meet up, it was becoming evident that I’d be waiting quite a while if I wanted him to make the first move. It was still sweet and way preferable to the guy in the first term that had started sending me unsolicited dick pics but I did want him to show a bit of courage. Some backbone. Just, you know, no other kind of bone.

Lockdown had brought a different intensity to the messages. I figured he’d done the same thing as me and was using his laptop to write instead of his phone and it had meant that our exchanges grew longer. It felt almost old fashioned, like we were in a Jane Austen novel. Was that right? Were they the ones where formal gentlemen wrote stately letters of courtship to regal ladies? What did I know. I was a chemist and checked out of English at GCSE. Anyway, we moved from half sentences, emojis and gifs to paragraphs and punctuation. I had a suspicion that he was looking to hit me with some poetry.

On the third night he sent me a link to a livestream happening in a couple of hours. Phoebe Bridgers. I knew her a little bit, my eldest sister, Hannah, used to make me playlists to, in her words, educate me when I was younger. She tended to have songs that she’d regularly string together in sequence, little patterns that she was obviously pleased with, or maybe she just forgot that she’d put them on some of the other mixes for me already. One went from Fiona Apple’s cover of ‘Across The Universe’ in to Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Motion Sickness’ and then out to the whole of Emmylou Harris’ ‘Wrecking Ball’ album. It was a great record but I wasn’t sure if she meant to add all of it or just made a mistake. I never asked her because she got a bit prickly if I questioned anything to do with her music. I always thought she was a bit snobby about it; she still hasn’t really forgiven me for going to that Little Mix reunion gig last year.

It was pretty late by the time the stream started but it was coming from the East Coast in the States so we must have been a few hours ahead. I had my screen divided between the music and a chat window with James. I didn’t really notice at first but after the first few songs I realised that he wouldn’t message me whilst she was singing, like he was at a real gig and didn’t want to talk during the songs. If I was honest I was finding him a bit too intense. It was getting a bit claustrophobic in the house as it was, I knew Cora was particularly finding it tough, and I was looking for an escape, a connection. In a way it wasn’t fair to try and judge how this might go when things went back to normal, everyone coped with the lockdowns differently, but then I guess that these periods of community quarantine were part of ‘normal’ now so maybe it wasn’t so unfair after all. I think I just wanted to imagine that if we ever really watched her play in concert that, at some point he’d reach for my hand and not let go until we were both clapping her back for an encore. It was late and I was tired. I left the laptop running but crawled into bed as she was finishing up another one I knew from my sister. It was another sad one but that was Hannah. I drifted off with the song’s coda whispering me down into sleep: anyway don’t be a stranger, don’t be a stranger.

I guess that was our first date.

Lockdown: Cora

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The second day was always the hardest. There were too many memories bound up in day two, too many things had happened, too fast, that each time she was locked down now Cora knew she would relive them. This time almost too slowly to bear. Day two was the last day she’d spoken to Rob.

‘That’s some cosy looking isolation, wish I could join you’. That first morning he’d called her from the ICU in Inverness, pretty much as soon as he’d cleared the decontamination process and been admitted. They’d talked. They’d both kept it light. People went into isolation all the time, people came out all the time. Cora hadn’t seen inside one of the units before and so Rob gave her a mock tour of the room, flipping the camera from front to back on the tablet they’d given him and walking it round. From some angles you might have thought he’d moved to some new student digs, was settling into a one of those small halls-of-residence bedrooms, maybe ten square feet, bare walls waiting to be covered in posters, single bed, a chair, a desk. The details gave it away though. If you saw the bottom of the bed you could see the metal frame and the hydraulics that would lift and move its mattress; you’d see the wheels locked by brakes; you’d see pristine sheets tucked tight under the corners with a precision that didn’t belong to a first year undergraduate. If you saw the floors you’d see them flow up and into the walls, all nooks and crevices that might host dust or debris sculpted away in the design. If you were shown the tiny wet room adjoining, separated by a hanging, plasticky curtain, then you’d see the pull cord next to the toilet marked emergency, and you’d see the fold out shower chair attached to the wall. Most of all, as the camera swung around, Cora saw the medical monitor, a black LCD screen criss crossed with lines and numbers she didn’t understand.

Cora had some old video on her phone of the day they’d gone up to Fort George. It was the footage she always came back to when she missed him; she liked to see him move, it was how she remembered him, full of energy and life. It was just a couple of sequences of them goofing around: Rob marching across the wooden slatted bridge at the Fort entrance and swapping salutes with a party of young kids being shepherded out by their teacher; Rob sitting astride one of the cannons overlooking the battlements out to the sea, her calling ‘if only’ and then the film shaking, briefly flipping to a view of the sky, as he jumped down and ran across to lift her in a hug. The video stopped but the memory ran on in her mind.

All through that first day they’d been in contact. There were times that he’d have to dial off, the hiss of the door decompressing signalling the arrival of a masked nurse or doctor. She never saw what they did, never really saw them at all, not properly at least. All she could see was just a pair of eyes behind protective goggles. In those gaps whilst they couldn’t speak she imagined their lives, sketched out a fictional version of these people that she had never met, these people that were looking after Rob. She gave them names and friends, lovers, family. She sent them on holiday, stripped them out of their scrubs and put them in swimming trunks and bikinis, let them splash in a hotel pool or swim some stretch of deserted shoreline. Somewhere hot. She made them endless cups of tea. She stole into their houses on Christmas Eve, after they went to bed, and padded out the pile of presents under their trees. She knitted them scarves, gave money to their favourite charities, watched them cheer on their football team (she always made it Caley), listened to their dreams, and whispered hope in their ears when they got scared. The first couple of times it was the same nurse. Cora had managed to blurt out her thanks before he’d made Rob switch off the camera, he’d waved to her briefly and said sorry that he had to cut them off. The others never had time to acknowledge her but that was okay. She understood. She was the one with all this useless time and so she imagined them all, talked to them all, thanked them all.

However many lockdowns she’d been through Cora knew that they’d all, always, be about that first one. When they’d taken her to soft isolation – no symptoms, all screening clear, just a precaution – she’d been so numb that she could barely process what was happening. There was someone inside of her screaming, scorched in agony, but she had hidden her away. She wasn’t for anyone else to see. Nobody could help her anyway. Everyone said the same thing, that it would take time, that it would get better with time, give it time, take your time, time heals. She didn’t believe it then and, now, she knew that time didn’t change how you felt about what happened: you just learned to carry the pain better.

The second day they only spoke once, early in the morning. Contact was restricted during the night so that patients could rest. Cora hadn’t really slept, impatient for the time that they were allowed to restore their link. She was tired from her restless night and from keeping up the face they’d both, undiscussed, agreed on as their way to see this through. When her phone started to vibrate she almost dropped it in her eagerness to answer. She slid the ‘call accept’ button on the screen and Rob’s face appeared. All her pent up anticipation melted into anxiety. He looked pale, stubble on his cheeks standing out in contrast to his grey-white pallor. He was coughing almost as soon as the call started and seemed to need a few moments after each sentence to catch his breath. She told him to rest, to not speak, just lay down and listen to her voice. She stumbled over repeated reassurances that everything would be okay, that he was in the best place, that he was young and healthy and there was nothing to worry about. It’s just a bad strain, this one, everyone’s saying it. Just a bad one but we’ll get through it. Just lie down and rest. She didn’t know whether she was saying it all for him or for herself. They spent a few minutes in silence. Rob had rolled on to his side on the bed and had propped up the screen against the wall, facing him. It seemed to help his coughing and she watched his chest settle into a steady rise and fall. They stayed like that until she heard the door open in his room and a gloved hand reached over to switch off the screen.

She’d never told him that she loved him. That was what she remembered in lockdown now. That second day, in those few moments on that call, she hadn’t told him. She knew that he’d known, he must have known, but she hadn’t told him. On the days that she was kinder to herself she knew it wasn’t anybody’s fault, that neither of them could have known that they wouldn’t speak again, but she didn’t always have days when she was kind to herself. And she never had them during lockdowns.

April and April

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“How long were you in?”

We’d talked for a while before I asked her. I thought it came up naturally but as soon as I said it, as soon as I saw her eyes glance at the floor, I knew it’d been too soon. And now it was too late.

“I..,” she started.

“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have asked. It’s not my business.”

“It’s okay,” she said. There was a pause, her eyes now scanning the ceiling, a drawing in of breath, before she looked back at me. “I thought it was in the records but I can understand why you might want to know. I was in for six months. It was the 27 strain. I don’t know if you remember but it was a bad one.”

I nodded. I felt like I wanted to reach across and touch her hand. Something to signal that I understood but that felt too soon as well. Everyone was more guarded about their personal space now.

“Well, at the start they wanted me away from people for a good two months to be sure and then I turned out to be asymptomatic so they held me longer. Hardly anyone got off without symptoms on 27 so then they kept me to run tests. Just bloods and monitoring. Regular stuff. I got some scars to show off.” She rolled up the loose sleeve of her shirt, showed me the inside of her arm. It was criss-crossed with faint scratches and one longer, angry looking red line towards the crook of her elbow. She saw my face, I must have looked shocked. “It’s cool. It never hurt. The big one was just a new nurse, they all trained up on people a little less pale than me I think. Always took them a bit of time to work up a vein when they were new.” She laughed.

“Six months. Jesus. That must have been rough.”

“It wasn’t too bad. I’m pretty good in my own company and they gave you like the fastest wi-fi you’ve ever had. You never been in an ICU?”

I shook my head. “I got lucky. Tested every week and never seemed to pick anything up. I do remember 27, there were a few in our year that went in but nobody for six months. We all kept in touch with them….”

“At the start. You kept in touch at the start, right?”

She was smiling and I didn’t feel like it was accusatory, or at least not directed at me. I nodded. “Yeah, I guess. It was easier at the start. We were just kids. I like to think I’d be a bit more considerate if it was happening now.”

“It is happening now,” she replied. “Just not to us anymore. We’re clean, right? Too old to be a high risk spread and too young to be a high risk victim. There’s kids in ICUs every day.” She paused and seemed to note my look of apology. “I’m not blaming you. I’m not in contact with anyone in a unit, it is what it is. I guess we could all do more.”

There was an awkward silence. I broke it by pushing back my chair and offering to make tea. I hovered by the kettle, waiting for it to boil, whilst we continued talking.

“How come you didn’t know I wasn’t in a unit?” I asked. We’d all had our records shared.

“I didn’t look,” she said. “It’s not important to me.”

“Because you’re immune?” I started.

“Not that. It’s just not important to me. And they don’t know about immunity. They said I was so unusual in how my system responded to 27 that they thought I might be okay against all strains but I don’t think they know.”

“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought this all up. It was clumsy. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Honestly, it’s okay.” She smiled, held out her hand as if she sensed my earlier desire to physically connect. I crossed the room as the kettle clicked, at boil, behind me and touched her. She gave my fingers a squeeze and released. “Listen, all of this is hard. No-one gave out rules for how you’re supposed to navigate this stuff. I don’t take offence and I get why you’d be curious.”

“Thank you. I thought I’d blown it on day one.”

“No way. You kidding? Us April’s have got to stick together, right?”

“Too right. About that. Isn’t this going to get confusing?”

“What? You want me to be April 27 or virus April or something?” She raised her eyebrows, tilted her head. I thought she was joking. “I’m joking,” she clarified. “Just in case you haven’t figured me out yet. My sense of humour can be a little dark.”

“Let’s just play it by ear, then. Anyway I suppose it’s not a problem for us. It’ll just be the other two that might get mixed up.”

Almost on cue the buzzer rang. We both looked up and April indicated that I should go and answer it. I looked into the intercom camera for the second time that day and saw a short, slim woman, blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, finger still poised over the door bell. A gloved finger. Disposable, surgical gloves.

“Hey,” I said into the intercom. “You must be Cora, right?”

There was a brief moment of static. “Yes, I’m Cora. Can you let me know which April you are? I’d prefer to be let in by the one that never isolated.” A slight pause. “No offence but I just like to be careful.”

I looked across at April to see if she’d caught the exchange. She shook her head, smiling. I couldn’t tell if she found it funny or insulting. She stood up and went across to the kettle to finish up making the tea. Pulled out three mugs. Just as I pressed the button to let Cora in April spoke:

“Let her drink some first but please let me tell her that it was me that made the tea.”

April, too

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I didn’t know what to expect at the time. We all just got the notice that the Uni had put us in a house share which was fine for me; I grew up with two sisters so I was used to having my space occupied. All the usual safe guarding stuff was in place, so they’d given us names, a picture, and a link to check medical records – just the relevant bits, they still redacted where something wasn’t infectious – and I’d had a quick look. I was curious but not really bothered. I’d known people that had spent time in the ICUs and it hadn’t changed how I’d been around them. I don’t know, sometimes I thought we were all over-reacting but I guess I didn’t really see the ugly side of it so I kept that to myself. There were strong views on both sides and my opinion didn’t much matter. I was more interested in the names, trying to imagine these new house mates, my mysterious new companions for the year ahead. Leah. Cora. My namesake, April. Mostly I was interested in April.

The dates on April’s ICU were in ’24 so she must have been mid teens when it happened. Pretty rough. I’d been lucky and never picked anything up in the window when you got treated as a high risk to everyone else. Ages 8 to 18 they reckoned. Like I say, I knew people that got isolated – one day they’d be in school, the next they wouldn’t. The first time it happened it was a big deal and we all made a real effort to keep connected – Paul Jacobson was the one I remembered. He was just one of the class, I didn’t really know him or his friends but overnight he became the most popular guy in the school. Those first few times, when it was a big deal, we really tried with the people put on ice – that was what we called it, isolation containment. No-one ever agreed on what the E stood for. I don’t know when we stopped trying so much but after a while it lost its novelty, was just something that happened. People got iced and until they thawed we sort of forgot about them.

The other two, Leah and Cora, didn’t have flags on their records. It showed as clean the same as mine. I was never that comfortable with the language, the inference being that, you know, if you’d isolated you were dirty, but everyone said it was just a reference to being virally clean. Just a medical thing, nothing else. There wasn’t much else to figure out about the three of them. Nobody connected up on social anymore before they met, it was one of the weird things that happened afterwards, the more people’s personal history was made public the less they wanted to share. I still had a private Insta and sometimes dipped back into Twitter but mostly to remind myself why I’d never really bothered with it: getting called out as the toxic generation in an endless echo chamber wasn’t my idea of being social. None of my pending housemates had any kind of footprint online, other than the legislated stuff. Nothing public anyway.

I moved in first. I was back from my year out travelling a little early, there was an alert in Melbourne about a possible recurrence of Covid-32 and the FO advice was to come home. It was okay. I was on the last leg of my trip and felt pretty lucky, I’d made it across most of South America and had a few good weeks in Australia before anything had happened. I knew some people the year before who’d got caught in the big 31 outbreak and got stuck in local lockdown for three months. No one our age could afford travel insurance anymore so they just ended up loading on debt before they’d even started their studying. I was back unscathed and at a loose end so had asked if I could move up to Bristol a week early, try and get a sense of the place. Mainly I just wanted to bag the best room. The house buttressed up against a row of Georgian terraces but it had obviously been built later. It started a new run of more modern houses, individually painted to mark them out as separate: ours was green, our neighbour pale blue, before the rest of the run exploded in pink and yellow. It overlooked the Downs and that alone made my decision to arrive first worthwhile as only two of the bedrooms had that outlook, the other two facing back onto an unloved stretch of concrete instead of a garden and the rear of flats in an adjoining road. I picked the front room on the top floor. It was small but it had the best view.

The day the others were due to arrive I had made an effort to clean the place up for them. Got a bottle of wine for the fridge, picked up some flowers from a shop in Clifton which I haphazardly arranged in a cheap vase someone had left in one of the cupboards, and I pushed the ancient Dyson round. I’d never seen one before. It wheezed a bit. Maybe that’s why people stopped using them, maybe they were all banged up in ICUs, maybe it wasn’t that government contract stuff. It did the job anyway, if the job was to displace dust from one location to another; I managed to make it look presentable as long as you didn’t get too close to the skirting boards. If anyone got that close to the floor they’d probably be drunk so I decided it would be okay.

When the door buzzer rang I jumped up without thinking, surprised myself how much I’d missed company in the last week, how much I was looking forward to meeting some new people. Our intercom had a camera and through the small lens I could see a mess of black hair, dark upturned eyes, lots of mascara. It was April. I buzzed her in.

April

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April liked to be alone. Not lonely, that was different, that felt unasked for, unchosen, but alone was fine. Alone had always felt safe. She didn’t know why it felt safe and, in a way, it really shouldn’t have. When she was fourteen she contracted a viral infection and had been sent to one of the Isolation Containment Units that had been built after the big Covid-19 outbreak in 2020; she’d picked up one of the mutations that seemed to surface every couple of years. Sent away to the ICU. Or, the ‘I don’t see you’, as they quickly came to be known. She didn’t feel special, it happened to lots of kids.

When she’d applied for University they’d asked her about it. There were rules around disclosure and changes to the privacy of your medical history, all for the greater good but there was no hiding your viral record anymore. They seemed as interested in how she’d coped with six months on her own as her physical health, lots of questions about how she felt she’d integrate with the student body, how she worked with others, what the experience had taught her. What had it taught her? That she liked to be alone. Was that it? She was savvy enough not to say that, primed as she was through endless rounds of re-integration therapy to talk up the importance of social connections, the work she’d done in remaking friendships, and learning to physically be with people again. We are social creatures. She’d nodded through enough sessions with a succession of earnest counsellors to be able to regurgitate that stuff by rote. Sometimes she’d even believed it. Sometimes.

They couldn’t really turn her down in the end. Her grades were outstanding: they would have been good but six months soaked in syllabus and then, more and more, off syllabus had set off fires in her mind. She’d found it hard coming out but not for the reasons they’d anticipated: she was bored, hemmed back in by a curriculum she felt she’d outgrown. In turn that had just made her withdraw more, retreat back to her safe place to be alone with Shakespeare and Sartre, Plath and Plato, Joyce and Nitetzsche and Austen and all the other dead intellectual heavyweights she counted as friends. She’d heard them whisper round school that she was intense, up herself, aloof, distant, but it wasn’t that. She felt as insecure as the rest of them but held it all inside, looked for answers in the past from people that had thought all this before, not people stumbling around in the present trying to figure it out for the first time. That’s how she saw it then. Now, sometimes, she has doubts. Same as her doubts about the difference between being alone and being lonely.

In the ICU she’d spent long days listening to music and had latched on to a bunch of bands from the 80s that no-one else seemed to remember. The Cure and Bauhaus and Sister’s Of Mercy. Nick Cave. She’d find one band, listen to them on repeat for days, and then the algorithms did the rest, leading her on to the next like a virtual version of an older sibling she never had. It wasn’t fool proof. She listened to so much stuff from the late 80s that her recommendations started to fill up with hair metal and house music. She never understood house until later, feeling it vibrate up through her feet in a club, watching a tangled mess of aloft arms, slack jaws, saucer eyes, from the throng on the floor. It wasn’t music to be alone with. The hair metal she never understood. But it did point her to the New York Dolls and so she always chalked it up as a win.

It wasn’t that she missed it. There had been hard nights, video calling parents in tears, scrawling out angry diary entries, sinking into a withdrawal deeper than being alone, sinking into depression. It wasn’t all literature, music, and a Zen like state of self reflection. She was a kid. A lot of them were. Most of the ICUs were stacked with either kids – Aggressive Virus Spreaders – or the elderly or people with poor auto-immunity. Some of the doctors had started calling them the AVS and the AV nots. She didn’t blame them, it had sounded pretty funny to her, even locked up, but some of the older patients had complained. She’d had a fairly dark sense of humour before isolation and nothing in the experience lightened it.

April was nervous. They’d told her when they’d offered the place that they couldn’t guarantee her accommodation on her own. In fact, she’d had to avoid requesting it, just in case it appeared as a black mark against her application: not adapting post isolation, unwilling to risk placing with other students. It wasn’t that. She just liked being alone. The lack of guarantees had proven prescient.

April hesitated at the door. There was a discrete plate next to the letter box identifying the house as the property of the University of Bristol. She pressed the buzzer, turned her face towards the small, circular security camera and waited. The intercom crackled.

“Hey, you must be April. I see you. Come on in.”

Riffs and variations on Abba, Dark Souls, charity shops, and bad analogies for grief

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“It is not about Agnetha’s sexual awakening.”

“I didn’t say it was Agnetha…”

“Okay, then,” said Jen. “It is not about either Agnetha or Anna-Frid’s sexual awakening, no matter how much you might wish otherwise.”

“We’re just going to have to disagree,” replied Pete. “The whole song is one extended metaphor for learning about sex. All that stuff about being under a spell, finding new horizons, riding on the breeze. Spreading my wings. Spreading. C’mon, it’s not subtle.”

“Really? Learning about sex? It’s not that at all. It’s just Abba doing a 70s stoner anthem. Benny and Bjorn – probably Benny, he always looked like he liked a smoke – stayed up one night wired to the gills and wrote a song about soaring with the eagles. Maaaan. They even made the girls emphasise the ‘high’ in the chorus. You’re right that it’s not subtle but it’s about drugs, it’s not about sex.”

“You’ve got to view it in the context of their broader work,” said Pete.

“How so?”

“Name Of The Game. All that ‘I’m a bashful child, waiting to grow’ stuff. Does Your Mother Know. Possibly underage girl propositioning older man. Gimme Gimme Gimme. Frustrated, repressed desire. When I Kissed The Teacher. Do you need me to go on? They had loads of songs about young women being shepherded into womanhood with the help of an older man…”

“I don’t agree on Eagle but you’ve got a point about some of the others,” said Jen. “To be fair I don’t think you could release Does Your Mother Know now.”

“It hasn’t aged well. I know it was the 70s but…”

“Which one was your favourite?” interrupted Jen. “Agnetha or Anna-Frid?”

“Agnetha, obviously. Mostly for her voice. I barely noticed her blue eyes, blonde hair, or her perfect behind in those purple jump suits.”

“Now we’re getting to the bottom of your sexual awakening…”

“Boom and indeed tish. Very good,” acknowledged Pete. “She can’t lay claim to that though. I was too young. Maybe something stirred in my sub-conscious but it was really Jenny Agutter in American Werewolf In London that made me a man.”

“It was Simon Le Bon for me. Maybe Nick Rhodes. Maybe the thought of both of them together. Possibly on a yacht.”

“Easy tiger.”

“I was never the same after that ‘Wild Boys’ video,” said Jen.

“Georgie hated Duran Duran,” said Pete. There was a pause as there often was at mention of her name.

“Yeah, I know,” replied Jen. “After we first met it came up, I can’t really remember how but I presume we were drunk. She said she hated them but I used to put on ‘Planet Earth’ sometimes when we came home from the pub when we lived together and she knew all the words. I think it was like me pretending to hate house when she got into that.”

“I’ve still got all of her records, back from when she was DJ’ing a bit, a load of limited edition, white label, 12 inches that I don’t recognise. They’re with all her stuff. I can’t bring myself to get rid of it.”

“I think I can understand that. I don’t think she’d have wanted them to stay unplayed though. She always loved it when she could fill the floor and she wasn’t too snobby about what she played to do it, Duran Duran notwithstanding. In fact, speaking of Abba, didn’t she used to occasionally slip Mamma Mia in? Said it used to tip the night into a mess – place would go insane or everyone would go to the bar but either way it ended up in a mess,” said Jen.

“Yeah, she did. Maybe you’re right, maybe I should get rid of her records at least. She’d want someone to be making a mess with them if they could. Where’d you get shot of stuff like that though?”

“Charity shop?”

“Not much chance round here anymore, they’re hardly ever open to taking things now,” said Pete. “I think people were just dumping stuff off on them all the time. It was like middle class fly tipping: great piles of Dan Brown books, Fifty Shades Of Grey, three quarter size guitars that little Harry didn’t take to after all, Friends boxsets on VHS, twice worn tuxedos that used to fit, and stacks and stacks of CDs long since replaced by Spotify playlists.”

“I guess you could trek over to Notting Hill, see if the Record & Tape Exchange would take them?” suggested Jen.

“That would involve leaving the house and visiting a place we used to go to together. It’s been three years and I still don’t know if I’m ready for that. Every time it feels like it’s getting a little easier I trip over something and I’m right back where I started.”

“Two steps forwards and one step back?” offered Jen.

“It feels more like one step forwards and two steps back most of the time,” said Pete.

“Sorry, I guess it was the wrong expression.”

“It’s okay. There’s no way to get it right in words,” said Pete. “I think I’m going to write a book called ‘Bad Analogies For Grief’. I’ve been collecting them. The ones people offer by way of condolence, the ones you pick up in counselling, the ones you come up with yourself. There’s no proper way to express how overwhelming it is so you come at it from an angle, think you can pin it down and force it to make sense if you can put it into some sort of words… Want to hear my latest one?”. Jen didn’t fill the pause and so Pete continued. “I was pulling a glass down from a cupboard last week and it slipped, fell, and broke on the floor. Pieces everywhere. And the first thing you do after it happens is that you don’t move, because if you move you’re probably going to get cut. You freeze. And then you notice the big pieces. So you pick those up first because you know they’re going to hurt like hell if you step on them. But broken glass is hard to handle and even when you see a piece that looks like it broke clean it’ll sometimes surprise you with a sharp point and the more you pick up the more you start to notice that there are fragments everywhere, small diamond slivers scattered across the kitchen floor. And then you remember it’s the kitchen floor you both used to walk barefoot across in the morning. And you remember something stupid like making coffee and toast and taking it back upstairs to read the papers under the duvet on a Sunday morning. And then, as you’re remembering, you stand on a piece of glass you hadn’t noticed and the shock of it, the pain, makes you step again without looking and before you know where you are you’ve stepped into more and more unseen pieces. Each one a tiny broken fragment of the perfect, whole thing that you remembered. Just the smallest splinter, the tiniest memory, is enough to start it. Enough to bring you back to a halt.” It had come in a rush, Pete’s words tumbling over themselves. Neither spoke until Pete finally concluded. “That’s my latest one. My new analogy. The breaking glass one.”

“God, Pete, you know I don’t know what to say,” offered Jen apologetically. “I guess I’m supposed to say that eventually you sweep up most of the pieces?”

“Yes, you are,” said Pete. “Only grief doesn’t work like that. It’s like there’s a new glass dropping on the floor every single day. Maybe you’re supposed to say that eventually you go a day when a glass doesn’t drop. All I know is that I haven’t had one of those yet.”

“But you will.”

“But I might. That’s my best guess. Right now I think I’m getting a little better at spotting the shards even if I can’t stop the glass falling,” said Pete. “I guess I need to git gud.”

“You need to what?”

“Oh, sorry.” Pete laughed. Some of the tension on the line dissolved, eased. “It’s from Dark Souls. Video game I’ve been playing a lot instead of having to interact in the real world. It’s a really hard RPG where you die over and over again and when you get stuck and look up advice online people tell you that there’s no short cut to it, just that you have to git gud…”

“Get good?”

“Yeah. But spelled g i t and then g u d.”

“Why don’t they say ‘get good’, then?” asked Jen. “What’s with the ‘git gud’ thing? Doesn’t sound very nice either way.”

“I don’t know where it came from,” said Pete. “Gamers with too much time on their hands. The funny thing is that it doesn’t sound very nice but there’s a weird kind of community in the game. If you get really stuck you can ask other people to come into your game and help you out – online obviously, you don’t literally invite them into your house or anything.”

“There you go. That’s a ready made metaphor or analogy if I ever heard one. You need to add a chapter to your book – maybe a post script – about ‘Bad Analogies for Help With Grief’.”

“People helping? I hadn’t really thought of it that way but I guess you’re right. There have been moments, stupid as it sounds, when some random character popping up in my game and getting me past some impossible boss fight has been the highlight of my day.”

“I like the sound of this game,” said Jen. “I thought all those online things were just people trying to shoot each other and shouting abuse about getting owned.”

“I feel bad for spoiling it for you and wrecking the metaphor but people can invade your game in Dark Souls and just randomly attack you too. It’s all a bit arbitrary and chaotic.”

“Like I said. It’s a ready made metaphor. Analogies aside, Pete, are you alright?”

There was the same pause he always left before answering and then the same exchange before the line went dead.

“This is just like Dark Souls, Jen. Repeating the same thing over and over again until you’re strong enough to move on. No. I’m not alright. Not today. I need to level up. But ask me again tomorrow. What about you ?”

“No. Me neither Pete. But ask me too.”

Careering

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Sunday

The terrace was the reason they’d taken the house originally. It had been further from the tube than they’d wanted and the only pub in spitting distance was the Three Feathers, stubbornly untouched by the estate agent’s claims for gentrification, but the little roof space had woven a spell on all of them. It was just a flat space, maybe four feet square fringed with a low wall and adorned with a battered old deck chair, a couple of stools and a plant pot, now sans plant. The house had taken a direct hit in the Blitz and when the money for renovations had run dry a flat roof had proven a cheap short cut to making it habitable again. They were unaware of this happy accident arising from the house’s unhappy past and had simply fallen in love with the views it afforded down and across Islington and, more importantly, up and out, over the the London skies.

There was usually an hour in the evening when the light was still good enough for Sarah to paint but the first hint of the muted constellations above began to glow, tempting Alex out to join her on the roof. He would name the stars as they appeared while Sarah and Rob, if he was back from work, would gently tease him by picking out planes in the stack over Heathrow and asking whether they were comets or UFOs. Or they’d pretend to forget that he’d told them that the brightest point they could see, one of the few celestial bodies that did cut through the London light pollution, was Venus and not a star at all. Alex would patiently explain it to them again.

Sarah was cleaning her brushes, watching paint leech from the tips into the water in her jam jar, a blue, swirling blur. It reminded her of a Japanese print she’d had in her room as a student, back when all futures seemed possible. She glanced over at Alex. He was slouched back in the deck chair, a pair of binoculars resting on his stomach.

“You know what happened last time you looked through those…” said Sarah.

“They are strictly for star gazing,” replied Alex. “That incident with the couple on Woodfall Road was not entirely my fault.”

Rob’s head appeared in the hatch at the top of the steep stairs that served as the route up to the terrace.

“The One With The Naked Neighbours And The Surprising Things You Can Do With Fruit,” he announced. “Still can’t believe they called the police.”

“It wasn’t an episode of Friends, Rob.”

“No, it was funnier,” said Rob. “Although if it was I’d be Joey, right? The good looking one.”

“It’s not much of a choice. The funny one, the good looking one and the…the other one. What was the point of Ross anyway?” said Alex.

“He was the nice one, wasn’t he?” said Sarah, still idly stirring her brush in the jar, the water now a murky grey. “You’d be Ross, Alex.”

“Thanks a lot,” he replied. “So I’m the dull, wet guy who’s so lacking in character that he gets given a pet monkey just to make him more interesting.”

“Well I didn’t mean it quite like that,” smiled Sarah. “Anyway, you don’t need the monkey, you’ve got that whole neighbourhood peeping tom thing going on as a character quirk…”

“I was star gazing.”

The natural light was fading fast now, steadily replaced by the soft glow of the city. Sarah finished cleaning her brushes and sat down on one of the stools, accepting a quick swig of the beer that Rob had brought up with him and was offering round. He stood looking at the picture Sarah had left drying on her makeshift easel. It was an abstract series of blue and grey circles, bold and well defined in the centre and then progressively distorted and smudged towards the periphery of the page. He liked it although, if he was honest, he preferred her pencil drawings, preferred things rooted more directly in reality. Sarah caught him looking at the picture and raised a quizzical eyebrow. He smiled and nodded approvingly but knew better than to offer more; too many well intentioned observations about her painting had ended with the critiqued picture in pieces. He pulled up the other stool, took his beer back from Sarah and offered it to Alex who was now peering up towards the sky through his binoculars.

“What are you looking for up there?” asked Rob. “Trying to see our destinies?”

“God, no. Nothing like that. There’s no glimpse of the future up there, just lights from the past,” replied Alex.

“That’s deep.”

“It’s just physics.” Alex adjusted the focusing ring on the binoculars, tried to get a better view of the Moon. It was only a quarter full but still one of the few things bright enough to cut through the light sodden sky. It’s just physics. He remembered saying something similar three years ago as his justification for jacking in the PhD, walking away from all that conceptual stuff about gravity and relativity to take up a graduate place with Deloitte. Swapping Lorentz transformations for double entry bookkeeping. It paid better but it was a mental downshift and he still felt the nagging, gravitational pull of his old studies.

“I didn’t expect it to be like this,” interrupted Sarah suddenly.

“Like what?”

“This… This… I don’t know. This scratching out our days.” Sarah pushed her hand through her hair and frowned. “What happened to what we wanted to do?”

“You mean you didn’t want to design towers for video games?” It was Alex’s usual tease.

“Hey, those games need a lot of towers… and my correct title is Concept Artist as you well know.” Sarah straightened on her stool and extended her arm with a flourish. “Concept Artist responsible for initial design of player climbable structures. Should I continue to impress with my sketched portfolio of traversable in-game terrain then I have a very decent shot at being Lead Concept Artist in two to three years’ time”.

“It’s something to dream about.”

“Every day on the 153, believe me.”

“Maybe this is just a phase,” said Rob. He drained the last of his beer. “Maybe we need to go through this while we figure it out.”

“But we had it figured out,” protested Sarah. “When I met you… at that talk, what was it?”

“NGO roles in provision of public services,” said Rob.

“Sounds like quite the party,” said Alex from behind the binoculars. Sarah ignored him.

“Yeah, at that. When we met you knew exactly what you wanted to do. It was the thing that struck me about you. The passion. You were absolutely going to work in the public sector, or the third sector or whatever it’s called, and you were going to help people.”

“And hopefully I still will,” said Rob. “The social media thing’s just temporary, just to get some money behind me early on. It’s not forever.” They all fell silent, slightly awkward. Sarah tentatively touched at the paint to see if it was dry and rolled up her picture. Alex put down his binoculars and tried to lighten the mood.

“What were you doing at that talk anyway Sarah? Doesn’t strike me as your sort of thing.”

“What makes you think I’m not interested in social enterprise?”

“She was in the wrong room,” said Rob.

“You promised you wouldn’t tell anyone that,” smirked Sarah. All of them laughed and Alex wagged a finger in admonishment. “Alright, alright. It was at the Barbican and I’d gone to see a Murakami exhibition but I was running late, got a bit lost, and ended up in a room full of earnest liberals listening to someone talk about co-operatives and sustainable funding. They all seemed so nice that I thought it’d be impolite to just walk out.”

“Just imagine the vicious tutting you could have been subjected to…” said Alex.

“We could be quite scathing in our shows of mild disapproval,” agreed Rob. “Some poor guy turned up to another talk one time with a coffee from Starbucks, it was just after the whole tax avoidance thing, and I think we briefly created a vacuum in the auditorium as everyone took a simultaneous sharp intake of breath.”

“Well it wouldn’t have technically been a vacuum…” started Alex before being drowned out under a mock chorus of tuts from his flatmates.

The early evening dusk was giving itself up to the beginnings of night now and the last of the sun’s warmth that had baked itself into the terraces was fading. Sarah rubbed her bare arms with her hands before gathering up her painting equipment.

“I think I’m going to head in,” she said. “Early start tomorrow.”

The other two didn’t move. She knew they liked to sit out for longer, eke out the weekend and delay the onset of Monday morning. Alex would usually be last to come back downstairs, pulling the hatch behind him. Sometimes he’d sit and try to wait until all of the lights across the surrounding streets winked out, hoping that the progressive darkening of the neighbourhood would allow more illumination from above. Once there’d been a power cut and he’d been able to just pick out Mars, seemingly tucked away behind Venus, just a trick of their relative positions and rotational orbits. The others teased him about how scientific, how clinical, he was about it all but he saw the beauty in it too. When he told Rob he wasn’t looking for destiny up there it was true but he was perhaps looking for something. Perspective? He wasn’t sure anymore.

“Good night,” said Rob. “Don’t forget our guest arrives tomorrow.”

“Guest?” said Sarah pausing at the head of the stairs.

“God, Sarah, do you read anything the landlord sends us? We talked about this last week. He’s offered up the spare room on Air BnB. We’re splitting the money, remember? He’ll take half and then take the other half off the rent. Said we can stop it anytime we want if it doesn’t work out.”

“Vaguely,” said Sarah. “Might be nice to have someone else around anyway. And I could definitely use the cash.”

“Tell me about it,” said Rob.

Monday

It was already dark by the time Alex returned from work. He walked down Shakespeare Street underneath the orange-white glow of its streetlights, his shadow lengthening as he got further away from each one, and then shortening as he approached the next. He paused at the mid point between two of them and briefly tried to remember the maths. Why would his shadow grow? He figured it was just triangles. He used to know this stuff. As he continued down the street the light closest to his destination, number 42, faded and winked out. That’ll save the Council about 27p tonight then. He’d just finished a project reviewing potential infrastructure savings for all the London Boroughs; something the Mayor’s office had commissioned. That was the stuff he knew now. Next door’s cat, tabby with white feet, watched him from the wall outside the house, both of them now in darkness.

“Alright Schrodinger? Still alive then. Bet you’ve had a better day than me,” he said to the cat, cracking his usual physicist’s joke. The cat began to lick its paw. “I guess you’ll only answer to Socks, eh?”. Socks remained silent and Alex, shaking his head at himself, let himself into the house.

He could hear voices from up on the terrace as he stepped into the hallway, almost tripping over a large, flower patterned carpetbag that had been left behind the door next to a propped up umbrella. Rob and Sarah and a woman’s voice he didn’t recognise. They seemed to be laughing a lot. Their guest. Air BnB. A bag and brolly he didn’t recognise. Slowly he put the pieces together and somewhat reluctantly headed up to join them.

“…so then Rob moved in a few months after we’d met at some event.” Sarah was just finishing the story about how they’d ended up in the house as Alex emerged on to the roof. She was sat forwards in the deck chair talking to a small, immaculately dressed lady. Late 60s? Alex was terrible at gauging ages. The first time he’d met Sarah he’d guessed she was 35, largely on the basis that she had been wearing a cardigan and had just told him that she was a big fan of Countdown. She’d been 25 at the time. Their guest had short, grey hair, pushed back on one side with an ornate mother of pearl hair clip, a bright white flower design above her left ear. She was looking at Sarah intently and smiling. She sat straight, upright and there was something immediately confident and calm about her. Sarah described it later as like that moment when a passer by intervenes at an accident you’ve witnessed and announces ‘don’t worry, I’m a doctor’.

“Hey, Alex, you’re back,” said Sarah jumping up from her chair. “You must meet Maria.”

“Hello part timers,” replied Alex before more formally turning towards their guest and extending his hand. “Hi, Maria, lovely to meet you. I’m Alex.”

She stood and took his hand, her grip firmer than he’d expected. They held eye contact for a few seconds before she closed her other hand on top of their handshake and squeezed, smiling. “It’s lovely to meet you too Alex.” She spoke softly and slowly, drawing out her vowels.

“Was your journey okay? Did you have far to come?” he asked, now curious about her accent.

“I’m over from Kansas. It’s been a fun trip so far.”

“We’ve done the Wizard of Oz joke,” interrupted Rob before Alex could reply.

“All you London folk do sound a little like munchkins to me though,” said Maria, eyes twinkling. She sat back down smoothing her skirt on her lap before folding her hands together. She was precise and graceful in her movements. “I was saying to Rob and Sarah how much I adore your roof terrace. It’s the reason I booked the room.”

“It’s the reason we took the house,” said Alex. “It’s just a shame we get more light from the streets than we do from the sky. You must have more luck at home?”

“Oh sure. Out in the countryside it’s glorious. And if you ever get a chance to get over to Bryce Canyon then it feels like the stars are laid out across the sky like diamonds that you could just pluck down and claim as your own.” She briefly paused and looked down at a ring on her left hand, turned it on her finger, rubbing its single stone. “But it’s good to see a different view of it all once in a while.”

“Maybe we should swap,” laughed Alex. “I don’t seem to be able to make out what I want to see up there.” He gestured up and out at the night sky.

“When things get dark you’ll see what you need to see,” she replied.

The four of them contemplated the London sky for a few minutes, lost in their own thoughts. Sarah broke the silence, insisting that they were being terrible hosts and rushing downstairs to fetch glasses and a bottle of wine. Maria sat and had a drink with them for half an hour or so before declaring that jet lag had defeated her and that she ought to retire to be fresh for her planned tour of London’s galleries in the morning. She asked Sarah if she’d like to accompany her. Alex filled in the blanks and realised they must have been talking about her painting before he’d arrived home. Impulsively Sarah agreed, shushing her house mates’ queries about work. Looking quietly pleased Maria left them and went downstairs to her room.

“How are you going to get out of work?” asked Rob after Maria had gone.

“I’ll chuck a sickie or something,” said Sarah. “It’ll be okay. Besides there’s a game in the production schedule for next year set in London so it’ll double as research if I take my sketch book with me.”

“But we don’t know her?” said Alex.

“And yet we’re perfectly happy to have her stay in our house,” said Sarah. “That’s kind of how AirBnB works.”

“I think what Alex is saying is that it’s not AirBnBnTourGuide,” said Rob, trying and failing to enunciate each ‘n’ clearly.

“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” said Sarah. Rob faked a silent laugh, sarcastically, by way of reply. “It’ll be nice. She’s over here on her own, doesn’t know the city. Why not show her that Londoners don’t deserve their less than legendary reputation for hospitality? What do you think, Alex?”

“I guess it’ll be fine,” he said. “I don’t know. There’s something about her that I can’t really describe though. Like she’s got a…”

“An aura?” said Sarah. “Really? Coming from you, Alex?”

“Not an aura,” sighed Alex.

“A dark and mysterious past that haunts her?” said Rob, affecting a fake film voice over.

“Not that either. I don’t know. A presence. There’s something assured about her. She just seems utterly and completely herself if that makes sense. And, no, Sarah, I haven’t started believing in auras.”

“Sounds a bit like it to me,” teased Sarah. “I think I know what you mean. That’s why I’d like to spend the day with her.”

“I’m going to bed,” said Rob. “One thing’s for sure, none of us are in Kansas anymore. He theatrically clicked his heels together, muttered ‘there’s no place like home’ and left Alex and Sarah sat out on the terrace looking up at the night. Out of habit Alex looked for Polaris but there was too much light. It seemed rare that he could find it these days.

Tuesday

The late morning sun was struggling to break the clouds over Trafalgar Square as Sarah and Maria emerged from the National Gallery. Making their way down the steps they linked arms, like old school friends, and Sarah felt her companion lean into her slightly as she took the stairs. It was almost imperceptible but there was just a sense that Maria wanted, or needed, some support. Well she’s not a young woman. Probably mid 60s ? Sarah hoped Alex hadn’t made any observations about their guest’s age at breakfast. He was hopeless at things like that. Could tell you how old Saturn’s moons were but ask him to judge something, someone, staring him in the face and he’d be off by eons. She patted Maria’s arm and suggested that they stop for a bit, told her that she really needed to make some sketches of the square.

They perched on the bottom step in silence for a few minutes as Sarah swiftly penciled the grey, granite lines of Nelson’s Column into her notebook. Feeling vaguely guilty at her absence from work she started to embellish the drawing a little, adding details that might be useful as hand holds or points that someone could hook a rope around. She started to pencil in Nelson’s details but couldn’t get the angles of his bicorn right and so gave him a makeshift fez instead. Nelson continued to stare stoically in the opposite direction, seemingly untroubled by her alterations. Maria had spent the minutes gazing at the square, watching fellow tourists idle past, but now she looked over at Sarah’s sketch, curious.

“That’s great but what are those extra bits sticking out ? And what’s with the hat ?”

Sarah flipped her notebook closed. “I thought he might fancy a change. The extra bits are for work. When they take my drawings and use them in the games they often need to change them so they’ll work for the player.” She sensed Maria wasn’t entirely following. “So in this game there’ll probably be lots of things to do in London, lots of things they want the player to explore and find. I was just making the column easier to climb up. They always like things you can climb.”

“Why’d they make them like that?”

“Oh I don’t know. It gives the player something to do. They call it goal oriented game design or something. Lots of little, achievable tasks. Apparently you get a hit of… what’s that brain chemical that makes you happy?”

“Dopamine?” suggested Maria.

“Yeah, you get a hit of dopamine every time you complete one of these little tasks and that keeps you playing.”

“Sounds like life, wouldn’t you say?” said Maria looking at Sarah intently. Sarah hadn’t really noticed how green her eyes were before; she had a slight cloudy patch in her left pupil, a smattering of blurred white dots. It reminded her a little of the view from their terrace at night. Like stars fighting to break through the haze.

“Well it depends on the tasks,” answered Sarah finally. “Put it this way, I’m not sure how much dopamine I’ve been getting lately.”

“Perhaps you need to go and climb up that,” said Maria pointing up at Nelson’s Column, laughing.

“Well, assuming I didn’t break my neck, then it would certainly give me a hit of something.”

“And a great view.”

“And a great view,” agreed Sarah. “That’s the other reason they make them like that – the games I mean, why I spend my life drawing towers. In the game, whenever you get to the top of something tall it opens up the world to you. Shows you new things to do and places to go.”

“So your art shows people where they are and where they might go ?”

Sarah shook her head. “I hadn’t thought of it like that but… at a stretch, maybe. I used to think that my painting outside of work was trying to do that. Or at least that it was trying to show where I was and where I might go and that that would resonate with some people.”

“You shouldn’t distinguish between the two,” said Maria. “What you call your work and what you call your painting outside of work. It all comes from you. It’s all how you spend your days.” She patted Sarah’s arm and smiled. “Anyway, would you listen to me, doling out advice to talented young artists. I have to say that, personally, I liked the flowers. Back in the gallery. The Monet and the Van Gogh.” She sounded out the Gogh to rhyme with dough, extending the ‘o’ sound, and caught Sarah frowning at her. “What’d I say ? Van Gogh ? How’d you say it ? Goff ?”. They both laughed. “You prefer the abstract work, don’t you ?”

“I do,” said Sarah. “And thank you for the advice. It’s nice to hear.” She wrinkled her brow, her nose crinkling in concentration, lost momentarily in thought. “I like the flowers too but there’s always something slightly sad about them to me. Something so beautiful, yet so fragile. Those paintings are just a snapshot of something fleeting, something that’s going to disappear.”

“Oh my dear. That’s not sad. That’s the very definition of joy. Come on, I sense you need something more modern. Take me to the Tate and I’ll buy you lunch on the South Bank.”

Inside the Tate Sarah felt a deep feeling of calm; the peace and vastness of the canopy above seemed to absorb her anxieties. Gave them room to lift and dissolve. They walked in with nothing but the echo of their footsteps for company. Outside the South Bank bustled, in here it was still. For a long time they just walked the floor, absorbed in the space, watching dust motes dance in the slats of light falling across the concrete from the high, vertical windows above. Eventually Maria pointed out that there was an exhibition running. Yayoi Kusama. They bought tickets and ventured into a world of coloured dots and circles and impressionistic shapes, endless patterns repeating, forms stretched and mutating. Another room filled with nothing but giant, monochrome canvasses on each wall, monolithic blank tranquility. And then, at the end, a darkened room with mirrored floors, walls and ceiling. They cautiously ventured in, eyes adjusting, and a myriad of LED lights overhead began to blink on and off. Pulses of colour that reflected back from the surfaces and into infinity; there, everywhere, and then they were gone. Sarah felt like she was standing in the centre of the universe watching its evolution on fast forward. The flash of the Big Bang, stars exploding into life, collapsing in on themselves, and then darkness. Or like she was a single neuron firing inside her own mind, watching the millions of other chemical reactions trigger and blaze in her cerebral cortex. It was dizzying and euphoric. They both sat down and lost themselves in the ineffable dazzle of lights.

Later they ate lunch on the roof garden of the Queen Elizabeth Hall. A green oasis atop a brutal concrete slab of a building. The sun had won its struggle with the clouds and they sat watching a faint shimmer of heat haze dance across the Thames.

Wednesday

It was still dark as Rob and Maria left the house. The early start had been her idea; jet lag had her on American time and so she said she’d sooner go out first thing rather than in the evening. Rob thought she must have been up for a full hour or so before they left because she was as perfectly elegant as she’d been the day before: there was a precision and neatness about her that he thought must require serious time. He looked like he’d rolled straight out of bed, planted his feet in his trainers, and pulled on whichever coat he’d passed en route to the front door. From under the duvet to the porch in thirty seconds flat. It was cold. The heat from yesterday’s late Autumn sun had faded fast, up and out as evening cooled to night with no cloud cover to cap its escape. They’d all sat on the terrace and watched it sink over towards Highgate. They were up too early to see it reappear.

“This better be good,” said Rob.

“Well, good morning to you too,” replied Maria brightly. “It’s nice to see you made an effort for me.”

“Believe me. Being up at this time is an effort.”

“I can’t believe you’ve never seen the dawn before, Rob?” smiled Maria. “Open your eyes, it’s beautiful.”

Rob glanced up and mentally conceded that there was something magical about the half light and quiet of this hour. He had seen it many times. It’s just that he usually saw it woozily soft filtered through the alcohol of the previous night before he found his way to bed. The idea for this morning’s early start had germinated the previous evening. They’d been on the roof listening to Sarah rave about the Kusama installation at the Tate, none of them wanting to point out the smudge of paint on her cheek that lifted and fell each time she smiled. She’d spent the late afternoon absorbed in a fresh canvas. Rob couldn’t remember seeing her so passionate since the day they’d met, back when she insisted on dragging him round the Murakami exhibition that she’d missed after he insisted that she stay and listen to the talk from Vision Housing and the various other social enterprises speaking that evening. They’d both been so certain then. Both fit to burst with ideas and energy. For a while he’d mistaken their mutual passion as a spark between them, a shared attraction, but as they spent longer together they settled into an easy friendship. There was a drunken kiss one night shortly after they’d moved in to the house but it had marked the end of any romance rather than the beginning. They’d both laughed it off: you can’t fake chemistry. Alex had told them that the mutual attraction of objects into each other’s orbit was actually more of a physics thing. This story had come up during the evening, Maria was curious as to how they all wound up together in the house. In turn that had led to a conversation about how Rob had fallen into his current job rather than pursuing the idiosyncrasies of London’s housing policies. He’d told her how those things had happened but he hadn’t really told her why. He wasn’t sure if he knew why. He knew the lines he said out loud when people asked him – it’s just a stop gap, I’m just getting some money behind me, it’s just a temporary thing – but he couldn’t remember now whether they were true.

Maria had insisted that she wanted to see London’s homeless crisis (Rob’s words) for herself. The others, surprised, had listed a host of alternative ways to spend a morning in the city but she wouldn’t budge. She said wanted to experience the place as it was, not as its people presented it for visitors. After he’d first moved into the house Rob had done some volunteering at the various homeless shelters round Islington and so he’d offered to take her down to one of them; he hadn’t been for about a year but if the circuit hadn’t changed then breakfast would need serving at Union Chapel. They took the tube down from Finsbury Park to Highbury and Islington, sitting quietly in half empty carriages with early rising, suited commuters and late returning nightshift workers, stifled yawns marking the beginnings and endings of days.

There were soft slashes of pink in the dawn sky, sunrise’s forward scouts, as they approached the church. The Union Chapel spire was bathed in the early morning glow, red brick framing high vaulted windows and gothic revival detail. A pair of magpies took flight from a perch near the top of the tower squabbling in their rattling, staccato voices. Rob was halfway up Compton Terrace, almost at the church, before he realised that Maria wasn’t with him. Turning back he saw her standing beneath the overhang of a spreading Oak, leaning on an iron railing, just gazing at the building. He was about to urge her to hurry up but something in her reaction gave him pause. He walked back to her and together they stood for a few minutes and watched as the rising sun slowly warmed the russet tones of the old spire. Watched it come to life in the light.

“Do you believe in God?” asked Maria, relinquishing her hand on the railing and taking Rob’s arm instead.

“No, I don’t I’m afraid Maria,” he answered. “But it’s kind of magical this time of the day though, I’ll give you that. I can see why people see something bigger.”

“Oh no, don’t misunderstand,” said Maria. “I don’t believe either. Not anymore at least. Not since my late husband passed away. There’s nobody and nothing controlling our futures. There’s just here and now. Come on, you promised you’d show me the shelter.”

They ended up working the morning shift, changing bedding, washing up, serving London’s lost bacon and eggs and endless cups of tea. The centre manager, Jenny, had remembered Rob and had set them straight to helping out. Maria was a novelty for the patrons of the shelter and she spent most of her time sat quietly talking with each of them individually, laughter following her around the room. She was deep in conversation with an older man when their shift finished. He had a grey flecked beard and a nasty scar running between his right ear and the corner of his eye that gave him an intimidating look. The smell of stale alcohol and tobacco clung to him. Maria was sitting opposite him, holding his upturned hands in her own, gently massaging his fingers with her thumbs. Rob stood, arms folded, and watched them from across the room.

“He’s in a bad way.” Jenny had noticed Rob watching the odd couple. “He shouldn’t be here to be honest. He’s got stomach cancer. Late stages. They’ve told him its incurable and so every time he gets checked in to a hospital he just checks himself out again. Says he’d rather live out his last days on the street than lie down in a ward.”

“Hasn’t he got anybody?” asked Rob. He knew what the answer would be, he’d had this conversation so many times before in the early days of his volunteering. Surely everyone has someone. The truth was that everyone didn’t have someone. This was a community to pick up the pieces for people without a community.

“He had a wife. From what he’s told me after she died he lost his way, took to drinking too much, lost his job. You know the story. You’re only ever…”

“You’re only ever six bad months away from the street,” interrupted Rob. “I remember.”

They went over to join them. Maria was whispering something to him and, in response, the man had reached up to touch her hair clip. He had started to cry. As his fingers found the carved flower in her hair Maria quickly reached for his hand, moved it, and pressed it to her cheek instead. Eventually she released his hand and said her goodbyes.

“Come on,” said Rob. “Let me show you inside the church. It’s quite something.”

Maria shook her head. “I’ve seen the church,” she replied. “I’ve seen your church. It’s all here, in this room, in the bedrooms we cleaned and the pots we washed up. Sarah showed me the Tate, I don’t need to see another grand and imposing space.”

Rob smiled at her. “Let me buy you a coffee then. There’s a kiosk in the foyer that does a great cappuccino and all the money comes back into the shelter. You don’t have to look at the stained glass window or the chandeliers or the balustrades. Just have a drink with me. You’ve reminded me of something today and I wanted to say thank you.”

“Alright, it’s a deal,” said Maria. “And just what have I reminded you of today young man?”

“You’ve reminded me of who I used to be,” said Rob.

“No, no, no,” replied Maria gently. “Not who you used to be. Who you are.”

Thursday

“Explain it to me again,” insisted Maria. Alex leaned forwards in his seat, elbows on knees, to narrow the gap between them across the tube carriage. He didn’t want to raise his voice. Around them people examined their phones.

“Are you just humouring me now?” he asked. “I’m sure there’ll be things that explain it all when we get there.”

“No, I really want to try to understand it,” she replied. “And I like hearing you talk about it. I want you to humour me, not the other way round.”

The train slowed into its next station. Alex watched the blur through the window resolve itself into a platform, waiting people, a name. Camden Town. He always thought it was like watching a film slowing down into a series of still photographs and, finally, a single, framed shot. There was a moment, even if it was just a fraction of a second, a heartbeat, when everything stopped before the train doors slid open and exhaled its passengers onto the platform. Mind the gap.

“Okay. Imagine the world and imagine a big line drawn all the way around the equator,” started Alex.

“I think I have this part,” said Maria. “I’m imagining parallel lines horizontally stacked on top of each other…”

“And underneath each other…”

“And underneath other other,” she continued. “Reaching to the North and South Poles. If you take the equator as your start point, then you can measure how far north or south you are. Degrees of latitude. Seems straightforward enough.”

“Well, allowing for a certain degree of latitude in your explanation, you’re right,” acknowledged Alex with a smile. “But latitude was always the easy part because it works from a fixed physical point – the lines you draw north and south around the earth don’t move relative to the equator. And if you know your stars and a bit of maths then you can work it out by looking at the sky. Longitude was where it got messy because all those imaginary lines are now running vertically and without a natural reference point.”

“This is where I lost you last time,” said Maria. “What do you mean there’s no natural reference point?”

“Because the Earth is spinning. Longitude is a distance in the planet’s daily rotation. Unless you agree an arbitrary fixed point to measure against then no one will ever agree on where they are. The Earth is always moving. One degree every four minutes.”

“Well I never did like to sit still anyway,” laughed Maria. “So the good folks at Greenwich offered to be the fixed point of reference for measuring how far east or west you were?”

“We’ve missed out a bunch of stuff about how they standardised solar time for everyone first so that you could always know what time it was wherever you were but, yes, I guess you have it about right.”

“Not bad for an amateur,” smiled Maria with a satisfied nod of her head. “We can’t all be… what was it again?”

“A physicist. Technically an astrophysicist I guess although I never finished my thesis.”

“Well, I don’t know about physics but I do know that you’ll never find your way to where you want to go unless you know where you are now.”

The tannoy on the train interrupted them, announcing that there were suspensions on the Northern Line from the next stop in a tone that Alex recognised as more apologetic than Maria did. They changed at King’s Cross with a plan to follow part of the circumference of the Circle Line and then take a boat up the Thames. It would take longer but Alex figured that some time on the river would allow Maria to see some of the sites and might give him a better chance to explain the intricacies of a system of navigation that had, after all, arisen to guide people lost on the waves. He wasn’t altogether sure why he’d agreed to the trip but Maria had suggested it and had been roundly supported by Sarah and Rob, the three of them nagging him through yesterday evening until he’d agreed to show her the Observatory at Greenwich. Despite himself the idea of it had got under his skin, sparked something of the curiousity he’d often felt in his post grad days. He wasn’t booked out to a specific client this week so he’d taken a couple of days leave. He was long overdue holiday anyway. It was a standing joke in the house that he had so many days in lieu stacked up that he could spend all of next year in Cornwall. It had taken Rob some time to explain this to Maria. Looe. It’s a place in Cornwall. In lieu. Oh never mind.

The disruption that had forced the change of route seemed to be causing problems across the network. They made halting progress on the Circle Line before the train stopped at Liverpool Street. Alex felt his phone vibrate in his pocket as it picked up the station Wi-Fi and he reflexively pulled it out to check his messages. Maria watched his expression change as he stared at the screen, the frown, the slight slump in his shoulders. He looked up and took a deep breath. She saved them both the awkwardness.

“Do you need to be somewhere else?”

“I’m sorry. Really sorry. It’s a work thing. There’s a client audit that’s over running. They need an extra pair of hands to get it over the line by this evening. I don’t want to leave you in the lurch but…”

“Don’t worry about me,” said Maria. “I will find Greenwich just fine. 51 degrees north and zero degrees west, right?”

“You were just humouring me,” said Alex. “How did you know that ?”

“I like to know where I am and where I’m going. Now, go on, go do whatever it is that your job needs you to do. I’m a grown woman. Go count things. Just promise you’ll let me tell you all about it tonight.”

“Okay, that sounds good. Just stay on this train to Tower Hill and then you should be able to pick up the boat service.”

Alex left the train, left Maria, just as the doors slid shut again. He turned to wave and she lifted her arm in response, a brief flash of white as her watch caught the glare of an overhead light. Somewhere in the back of his mind he remembered Prof Miller testily explaining relativity to them again, three of them sitting in his dusty study in Oxford, listening to the rain outside. He remembered listening for patterns and order in the rhythmic fall of water on pavement. Remembered debating the apparent randomness of rain with colleagues who went on to help discover gravitational waves. Discovered the universe’s pulse. Remembered letting his mind roam, untethered, to fathom the smallest particles and the largest spaces and the longest times. He knew, dimly, that he and Maria would observe that light on the train differently. Her from inside the carriage. Him watching her move with the train from the platform. They would see the light relative to their perspectives. The train cleared the platform and, buffeted by the sudden back draught, Alex turned and headed for work.

Maria closed her eyes. The contrast was a little too bright when the carriage was plunged into the darkness of the tunnel. She felt the familiar, nagging tingle in her hands and rubbed them together until it faded.

Friday

Maria had blacked out somewhere between Mars and Jupiter. She’d woken up in the University Hospital Lewisham. They told her that she’d passed out in the planetarium at the Royal Observatory but in the darkness of the auditorium nobody had realised until the audience was returned from its tour of the solar system and the lights came back on. She remembered seeing the sun. Distended solar flares erupting across its writhing, fiery surface. It looked, to her, like an angry, malignant tumour seen in detail through a microscope. She remembered the perspective pulling away from the sun and the sensation of spinning, facing out towards the neighbourhood of planets. Accelerating past Mercury and Venus and Earth. Fragments of the commentary stuck in her memory. Not the scientific facts but the more human attributions. Mercury, named for the messenger of the gods. Blake writing in tribute to Venus. Speak silence with thy glimmering eyes, And wash the dusk with silver. She remembered Mars. Another angry, red circle. Remembered it growing on the screen above her until it filled her vision, seeming to throb and pulse, bringer of war, until she slipped from consciousness.

She was sitting up in bed when they arrived.

“God, we were so worried,” said Sarah. “When you didn’t come back, we just didn’t know what to think.”

“Are you okay?” asked Rob. “They won’t tell us anything because we’re not family or something. We tried to tell them that you’re our guest and that you don’t know anyone here but they said they can’t disclose information.”

Alex was silent. He hovered at the end of the bed, head down, shifting his weight between his feet.

“What happened?” said Sarah.

Maria closed her eyes. The telling was the thing she had found hardest in the last few months. The shock that she had felt in being told was something she felt again each time she passed on the news. She resented it. Resented seeing herself reduced to the victim of something random, an object of sympathy, in the eyes of those with whom she shared the shock. There were many things she had chosen to be in life and she wanted to be remembered for them. Not for this. Not this arbitrary act of war that her own body had declared on itself.

As she opened her eyes she pulled the delicately carved hair clip from its position above her left ear and laid it on the sheet in front of her. Tipping her head forwards she lifted her hair deftly from her scalp and placed it next to the clip, dark grey strands spread across the crisp whiteness of the bed. The exposed skin was smooth and pale save for a blotchy, swollen lump, crimson stained behind her right ear, the size of a dollar coin. It used to be the size of a dime. Look after the dimes and the dollars will look after themselves. That’s what Mom always used to say. She looked up at the three of them. Sarah had covered her mouth with her hand, eyes pricking with tears. Rob was shaking his head. Alex had pulled his arms across his chest, colour drained from his face. And then Sarah’s arms were round her and they were both crying.

In the aftermath, with the three of them perched on the edge of her bed, Sarah closest, Alex furthest away, she told them all of it. She told them that she had been diagnosed nine months ago, had been told the chemo wasn’t working three months ago, and that she’d taken the decision to abandon the treatment and live what time she had left. Maybe six months. They didn’t really know. It had brought a certain clarity to her thinking. Not peace exactly, she felt restless for life rather than reconciled to death. She told them that she’d lost her husband ten years ago. That they’d never had children – she paused as she recounted this, an unspoken regret – and she’d found herself alone. Initially, she admitted, she’d felt lost and had only really made sense of her new circumstances when she’d moved away from Wichita and deeper into the country where, eventually, she’d found a new sense of perspective under the broad and sweeping Midwestern skies. Found enrichment in the amplified solitude of a small town rather than the isolation she’d felt in a bustling, busy city.

They listened in silence, letting her talk. Sarah held her hand. Rob poured a glass of water. Alex grew increasingly agitated, rising from the bed and pacing the floor. When she seemed to have finished speaking he started to rock backwards and forwards on his heels. He spoke quietly and urgently.

“It’s unforgivable. I’m sorry. To leave you like that.” Words tumbled from him in a torrent, addressed as much to himself as to Maria. How could I have done that? Someone should have been with you. I should have been with. I was with you. And then I left. For an overdue audit. Left to count things when you were counting on me. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. He was shaking his head, fists clenching and unclenching until Rob put his hand on his shoulder.

“Hey, hey Alex. It’s alright. This wasn’t your fault. You didn’t know. None of us knew.”

“Rob’s right,” said Maria softly. “Don’t blame yourself for this. I chose to take the trip and I don’t regret it. Whilst I still have choices I’m damned if I’m not going to use them. Please, please don’t blame yourself.”

“But I should have been there,” said Alex.

Maria stared at him until he met her gaze. He noticed the cataract in her eye, the smudged white dots, stars through an unfocussed telescope.

“Not for me,” she said. “You shouldn’t have been there for me. I made my choice and don’t need looking after Alex. You need to make your choices. Trust me. Make them before they get made for you.”

Saturday

It was late by the time Rob and Sarah arrived back at the house with Maria. She’d stayed at the hospital for twenty-four hours, reluctantly agreeing that she might need the rest but impatient to be away from the array of medical equipment and drugs and professionals that could do nothing for her. She’d joked with the nurses that she was like a diabetic with a sweet tooth in a candy store. You got nothing I can have but boy do I want it all. Sarah had insisted on organising a taxi, worried about the hustle and bustle of the tube on Saturday evening. Maria had agreed on condition that she paid, they use a black cab, and that they make the driver cross the Thames via Tower Bridge. She told Sarah that it’d be another landmark she could sketch for her game, another little source of dopamine for people playing, another marker to help them navigate. Sarah thought there was more of the tourist in Maria than she cared to admit and that she probably just wanted to see the strange castle on the river.

They crossed the Thames as the sun was going down, the towers on the bridge short and squat against the skyline in comparison to the jagged thrust of the Shard which dominated the view to the west. London was a city of silhouettes in the dusk, the fading light leaving just familiar shapes, the impression of places. Rob pointed out the sights as they appeared, sometimes just a momentary glimpse between office blocks and flats, and then a broader sweep of buildings as they crossed the bridge. A jumble of shapes and styles from the past and from the future. St Paul’s. The Gherkin. The Tower of London. City Hall. Traffic was unusually light and they didn’t get stuck as they crossed. Rob had hoped that perhaps they would so Maria would have more time to admire the view but she had to absorb it in less than a minute before they plunged into Whitechapel and everything closed in around them again.

When they stopped outside their house it was dark. The streetlight hadn’t been fixed and all of the lights inside were off. Rob let them in and called for Alex. There was no reply but it was then that they heard the shouts from outside.

……

Alex hadn’t gone back to the hospital. The others knew he blamed himself for what had happened but didn’t realise how hard it had hit him. He’d said he wanted a bit of time on his own and they’d respected that. In the time they’d lived together it was something they’d become used to. Rob teased him for being grumpy and they knew he’d never really settled into corporate life but neither of them thought there was more to it than that. If he was honest with himself he knew that the way he felt had a name. Depression. He should have been more clinical about it, more scientific, but he found it hard to apply his usual, objective mode of thinking to his own internal emotional landscape. He knew it had been getting worse and he could trace some of it to the small sets of decisions that had taken him further and further from the things that he’d thought of as making up who he was. He remembered the genuine disappointment that Prof Miller had expressed when he’d told him that he was giving it up. He hadn’t been angry and he’d even understood it – noone’s getting rich mapping the universe – but there was almost a resignation to it. A sense that another bright talent was about to be eclipsed by the need to make the rent. There had been occasional rational moments when he realised that he could just jack it all in, walk away from the office and start again. Lately those moments had come less often. The sane and reasonable voice in his head drowned out by a chorus of anxiety and regret and sadness.

Seeing Maria in the hospital had shattered what was left of his fragile inner peace. It wasn’t just the guilt, on some level he knew that it wasn’t his fault, but the stark confrontation with mortality that had shaken him. There seemed to him to be a pointlessness to it. He’d always valued order and structure, causality and consequences, and whilst he could understand the facts of her disease he couldn’t explain why it was happening anymore than he could explain his own illness.

He put on his suit, straightened his tie, and headed up to the terrace.

……

Up on the roof Alex had his back to them. There was a small wall that ran round the sides of the terrace at knee height, there as a gentle reminder if someone got too close to the edge. You could perch on it and dangle your legs over the side of the house if you didn’t mind the guttering. None of them had ever thought of it as particularly dangerous. Early on the landlord had offered to put up a taller set of railings but they thought it would obstruct the view and had told him not to bother. Alex was standing on the wall, seemingly oblivious to the shouts from people in the flats in the adjacent street telling him to get down.

“What are you doing, Alex?” Rob spoke quietly, holding his arms out, palms down, trying to signal a sense of calm that he didn’t feel to Sarah and Maria.

“Alex, please,” said Sarah. “Just step down and let’s talk.”

Alex didn’t reply and didn’t move. It had been a cloudless day and the temperature was dropping now that the sun had gone, the air was still. Alex didn’t feel the cold through his suit. Pure wool. He vaguely remembered that fact had been important at work, they’d all been given pointers on personal presentation in the first year on the graduate scheme. A couple of the partners, knowing his background, had joked that he’d have to leave the cords and the elbow patches behind now that he was a professional. There’d been no malice in it. He hadn’t been offended. It wasn’t until later that he’d begun to reflect on his decision and wonder whether he’d got it badly wrong. It was Maria that broke the impasse.

“Where are you Alex?” He didn’t turn but this time he did reply.

“I don’t know. I honestly don’t know.”

“Latitude. Start with that. Tell me our latitude,” nudged Maria.

“I don’t know,” said Alex. “How would I know that?”

“We’re not so far from Greenwich. I bet it’s roughly 51 degrees north and a touch over zero degrees west. How would you know if I hadn’t told you? You taught me this Alex.”

“A fixed reference point. You need a fixed reference point and then you can work it out.”

Across Islington the lights went out. Later it was reported as a power cut, some problem with a sudden surge on the National Grid causing fail safes to kick in and the electricity to switch off. Around them the shining rectangular frames, the windows of the surrounding flats and houses, winked out. The streetlights snapped off. Shakespeare Street went dark. As their eyes adjusted to the absence of light Maria walked across the terrace, reached up, and took Alex’s hand.

“Tell me what you see,” she said.

“You can never see much here,” he replied. “Usually just Venus and some of the brighter stars. The moon obviously, when it’s out.”

Rob and Sarah cautiously crossed the terrace and stood on Alex’s other side from Maria. Sarah took his other hand.

“I saw Mars at the planetarium,” said Maria. “It’s the last thing I remember before I fainted. Where would it be if we could see it now?”

Alex described its position relative to Venus and slowly began to tell them what he could remember about the positions of the distant objects they could see and the ones that they couldn’t. He was a little rusty but none of them would have known if he got anything wrong. He showed them Orion’s Belt, the three stars in a line that they could usually see above them, bright enough even when London wasn’t dimmed, and then he noticed the slightly skewed rectangle of Ursa Major. It was just visible now that the glare from the ground had been subdued and, just a slight turn of the head on from that, if he followed an imagined line from its two pointer stars, then he could make out Polaris. The North Star. He described it to the others.

“So you know where you are now,” said Maria squeezing his hand.

“It’s a start,” said Alex. “I could work out the latitude but you know longitude is always trickier than that.”

“Because we’re always spinning, always moving,” said Maria.

“Yes. Yes, we are. I just wanted to make it stop.”

“You can’t make it stop Alex,” she answered. “Not like this. It’ll stop for you, sure, but everything else keeps on spinning. You’ve got your fixed point up there,” she gestured at the sky, “and maybe you just need to pick your own fixed point down here. Your own Greenwich.”

“I think I had it,” said Alex. “I think I used to have it. Maybe I just need to find my way back to it again.” He stepped down from the wall and quietly accepted Maria’s embrace. Rob and Sarah clutched at his back and the four of them stood on the roof holding him as he wept.

They stayed out on the terrace until the power came back on about an hour later. Sarah had made them all tea and they’d sat staring across the rooftops, hands wrapped round warm mugs, steam rising into the night air. When the lights returned the stars overhead faded but all of them swore they could still see the North Star, unwavering, the sky rotating around it.

Sunday (One Year Later)

They had promised Maria that they’d watch the sun rise over Bryce Canyon and remember her. She had died in the Spring, the emails and Skype calls that they’d all maintained after she returned home from London becoming steadily less frequent as her illness took hold. They’d all wanted to fly out but she had insisted that they shouldn’t.

I am well cared for, come and remember me when I’m gone, she’d told them. Come and pick me out a diamond from the sky. Don’t let Alex tell you that stars and diamonds aren’t the same things either. I’ve been reading a lot now I’m stuck in bed and all the carbon in our solar system might just be the scattered dust from a dying star. Some of it must be diamonds and some of it must be us. I kinda like the idea that I’m built from a supernova. Don’t spoil it for me.

Alex, back now at Oxford, had called in a favour from one of the professors in the Chemistry department and persuaded him to send Maria a letter, on very official looking University headed paper, confirming that essentially, yes, she was made from stardust.

They had travelled to Kansas for the funeral. Sarah flew in from Montreal, Rob and Alex from Heathrow. Sarah’s design work from her sketches around London had picked up positive critical notices when the game had shipped and she’d taken a larger role in the Canadian office. She’d held firm on a flexible arrangement that left her enough time to paint and she’d just exhibited for the first time in a small downtown gallery. The others teased her when they met up – lead concept artist, putting on shows at Station 16, get you – but she could see how pleased they were for her. Despite them all leaving the house they were closer now than when they’d lived together. Rob had stayed in London but had needed to move a bit further out, his new job at the housing association didn’t pay well but he knew why he was doing it. Alex was back in Oxford, picking up the thread of his unfinished thesis, looking again for order in the chaos.

The three of them sat in silence as the first light of dawn stole over the jagged formations of the canyon, orange rocks warming into life, shadows extending. The last of the visible stars overhead slowly faded from view but they knew they were still there. Sarah had brought a flask and shared out paper cups of hot coffee to ward off the last of the night’s chill. It was a long time before anyone spoke.

“Thirty-seven degrees north. One hundred and twelve degrees west,” said Alex.

“What’s that?” said Rob.

“It’s where we are, isn’t it?” asked Sarah. “Co-ordinates.” Alex nodded.

“You’ll never find where you want to go unless you know where you are now,” he said softly.

“You getting all deep on us again,” said Rob. “Who said that?”

“Someone who always knew where she was. Someone who’ll be missed.” He raised his coffee in salute and the others held their cups up in a quiet toast as the sun began its steady ascent marking the new day.

Union

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Reunion

Your lips wear the same smile but your eyes look like they long tired of trying it on. There are creases at their corners. The lines around your eyes, the lines traced across your forehead, outnumber the ones at the turn of your mouth, on your cheeks. You look like you have cried more than you have laughed. There’s a hint of grey in your roots that the highlights don’t quite disguise. The fringe you used to look out from under has gone. Those rare glances, that flash, that spark. Back when you gave yourself up in glimpses. Back when you had something to give up. Now you meet my gaze openly, laid bare and empty. All given up.

It’s been what ? Eight years. Nine ? Ten ? We joke about the passing of time as a way to pass the time. What else should we say ? Hey, we were wrong. There won’t be someone else, someone better.

You wanted someone to travel the world with, someone you could curl up with under blankets reading the Sunday papers, someone who’d tag along round another visit to the Tate, someone who liked jazz and dancing and singing along to big power ballads after too much vodka. What should we say ? I hated airports, not the travel particularly, but airports specifically. That was a problem. I liked to kick back the covers, glance at the sports section, and then go search out more coffee. Tate, schmate. I don’t know if it’s art but I know what I like. And, yes, I can belt out “Don’t Want To Miss A Thing” with the best of them. But jazz ? You know I drew the line at jazz.

I wanted someone who liked clubs where sweat dripped from the ceiling, someone who’d share a sneaky joint before catching a matinee re-run of Bladerunner at The Gate, someone who’d idle away the summer in the pub, someone who liked punk and bars with more beer pumps than seats and shouting the words to “God Save The Queen” in a late night taxi up The Mall. There’s nothing to say. You hated the smell of my kind of clubs in your hair in the morning. Like washing your hair in cigarette infused beer you said. It always smelled like being young to me. You wouldn’t smoke in public and preferred the original cut of Bladerunner with the voiceover. No-one prefers the version with the voiceover. And you said summer was too short to waste in the pub and that bars were for sitting and talking and that it was disrespectful to sing the Sex Pistols that close to the Palace. I think you were joking about the Pistols. And you were right about summer.

It’s been what ? Eight years. Nine. Ten. It’s been too long and not long enough. We joke about all the ways in which we just didn’t fit, just didn’t work, as a way of distracting ourselves from all the ways in which we did. What else should we say ? Hey, we were wrong. Turns out there wasn’t someone else, someone better.

My lips don’t smile quite as much as they used to and my eyes don’t even pretend to. There’s not so much creases at their corners as cracks, chiselled in place over years of screwing themselves closed. Shutting out the light and embracing the dark. I haven’t cried but I haven’t really laughed either. Just some numb state in between. There’s grey scattered across my hair that the tightly cropped cut doesn’t quite disguise. I used to stare at you, brazen in my attention. I couldn’t help it. My desire was an open secret back when I had something to offer. Something for you to take. Now I can’t meet your gaze, don’t want to see any trace flicker behind your eyes fade and fail. All burned out.

Union (him)

“We’re going on to Sally’s.”

It’s noisy in the club. Some band I didn’t catch the name of are hacking their way through The Jam’s “Start!” and our group, gathered loosely at the bar, are shouting to be heard over them. It’s noisy but I heard you clearly. I pretend I didn’t, exaggerate a cupped ear, point towards the band, and shrug. I just wanted to feel you lean in closer, feel your breath on my ear, smell the faint trace of perfume mixed with lemon vodka. You take a step in towards me and lightly rest your fingers on my arm. As you rise slightly on the balls of your feet to close the gap I catch a flash of green eyes hidden somewhere under layers of fringe and mascara. You smile.

“We’re going on to Sally’s. After this. If you wanted to come along then that’d be cool.”

It’s noisy in the cab. I don’t remember who flagged it down but I guess maybe Sally or Mike had sorted it out whilst we were talking on the pavement. You were telling me about backpacking through South America and wanting to learn the Argentine tango. I’d hooked my leg round the back of a lamp-post and thrown my head back with a triumphant “ole”. You’d laughed and pulled me into a dance hold – “not like that, like this” – and I felt your heel slide up the back of my thigh. I stared at you until you broke eye contact, shook your head laughing, and said: “Ole is Flamenco, twinkle toes.” The cab’s running through the main arteries of the city, taking us away from its heart. As the pulse of the night dims the more I become aware of my own. The windows fog up and I sketch a smiley before wiping it clean so I can try to see your reflection in the glass. You’re on the pull down seat opposite listening to Sally talk about the time she met Sister Bliss from Faithless. I’ve heard it before. The cabbie’s got the radio on and “God Save The Queen” rattles out of the speakers just as we turn up The Mall, circling the Palace. Me and Mike join in with a loud rendition as the girls try and drown us out with the national anthem. Fascist regime. Send her victorious. We mean it man. Long to reign o’er us. No future, no future, no future.

It’s quiet at Sally’s. Her and Mike have disappeared, apparently so she can show him some book he’d been asking her about. I’ve known Mike a long time and he’s not much of a reader. Me and you are sitting on a blue futon. I’m picking the label off my beer bottle and you’re idly swirling an ice cube around the inside of your tumbler.

“Sally hasn’t got that book,” you say.

I look at you. You’re tilting your head, hand behind your neck. Your hair has fallen away from your face and I trace the line of your jaw. Your lips twitch in a smile and there’s that flash of green again as you catch my eye. This time you don’t look away.

“Mike’s never heard of it anyway,” I reply. You laugh and I put a finger to my lips. Shh!

“Well I’m not going to sit here quietly and listen to them shagging,” you protest loudly. There’s a pause and then Sally calls from the next room: “we’re not shagging”. Another pause: “not yet anyway.” And then laughter followed by a few mock gasps and groans.

It’s quiet when we kiss. I was always bad at reading the signs. If you’d left it to me we’d have still been sat there arguing playfully about why jazz sounded like something musicians do before they start playing the song or swapping war stories of terrible first dates or how you couldn’t talk in pubs anymore or… You moved across the futon quickly, whispered “enough talking now, twinkle toes” and kissed me. Later you swear I said “ole”. It sounds like something I’d say but, honestly, I don’t remember anything after that kiss.

Union (her)

We had met before. I thought so anyway although you didn’t seem so sure. It had been at some mutual acquaintance’s house party just after I touched back down in London. I guess I might have come off as a little moody, everything had just seemed smaller somehow – narrower – than the possibilities of travel. I think Sally had introduced us and she probably didn’t help. She knew you from the crowd at the pub and presumably at some point you’d had a conversation about books as she pointed at you, declared that you were reading Kerouac’s “On The Road”, and then pointed at me and said “just back from travelling” before leaving us to work it out. (I’d known Sally a long time and talking to men about books was pretty much her default chat up approach: a shortcut to gauge taste, intelligence, and sensitivity quickly according to her although that didn’t quite square with the number of blokes she seemed to end up in bed with who hadn’t made it beyond Andy McNab and Dan Brown. I assumed either Kerouac or you hadn’t done it for her). Anyway we awkwardly shook hands – you had soft hands – and I said some stuff about Bolivia that always sounded better in my head and you said some stuff about Sal Paradise which I nodded at, not wanting to admit that I’d never made it past the first twenty pages of “On The Road”. Sparks didn’t fly. I wasn’t surprised you couldn’t place me. I remembered your hands. I didn’t feel that would be the right thing to say now.

There were a few of us catching up in some bar in Soho. I was enjoying it. It was quiet enough to talk but occasionally a snatch of “Sketches Of Spain” would float across the room from a hidden speaker. If I looked over my shoulder, back to the bar, I could see us reflected in the mirror between the optics. Maybe it was the drink but in reflected candlelight, filtered through stacked glasses and half empty spirit bottles, we looked kind of glamorous: a snapshot of how I always imagined living in London in my 20s would be. I teased my fringe, tried to find the right balance between hiding my eyes and being able to see, and it was then that I saw you looking at me. I don’t think you realised I knew. You were watching me directly, I could see you in the mirror. You were smiling. You had a soft smile.

I didn’t really enjoy the club and if I hadn’t have been staying at Sally’s I probably would have cried off. It was too loud, some crappy three chord wannabes were on stage and I missed being able to hear you. We’d talked in the bar. Not chatted; talked. I guess it had started as small talk, getting all that “have we met ? yes I think we’ve met. are you sure ? I think I would have remembered” stuff out of the way before settling into conversation. You were serious but there was a lightness to it, you always skewered yourself when you thought you were getting pretentious. And you were funny. Not that overbearing blokey version of funny where everything has to be banter, just, I don’t know, just dry and self deprecating and funny. I knew I was laughing enough and running my fingers through my hair enough that Sally would notice. She didn’t disappoint, chasing me into the toilets for an interrogation before making several indelicate comments about what she was planning to do with Mike later. I hadn’t met him yet. She chastised me: “that’s because you’ve been talking to the same guy all night”. And then: “want me to invite him back with us ?”

I didn’t get much say in it in the end. Sally did what she figured was best and next thing I knew we were spilling out of the warmth of the club, static hiss buzzing in our ears, and on to the street. I felt that fresh air head rush, an oxygen and vodka kick, and turned to see you wrapping yourself around a lamp-post. I thought you were propping yourself up but eventually clocked that you were showing me what you thought was an Argentine tango. I grabbed you and showed you the basic step, felt you tighten as my foot found the back of your leg. Felt your soft hands. Watched your soft smile. I think we might have kissed then if Sally hadn’t yelled that we needed to get our dancing asses into the cab.

Back at the flat Sally had long since pulled her literature to lover trick and was subjecting Mike to all of the things she’d described to me earlier. As far as we could tell Mike seemed okay with it. We talked and I realised that nothing would happen unless I moved first. I think that was one of the reasons I felt myself fall for you a little that night. There was never any presumption. You seemed serious again, vulnerable even. There was a tension between us now, when it had been so easy before, that would only be broken if that soft smile from those soft lips relinquished themselves in a soft kiss. I moved towards you. Eyes closed, hands touched, it started.

Communion

We all fall in love sometimes.

“Why’d you ask me back that night ?” He was playing with her hair, she was lying back across their sofa, head in his lap.

“I didn’t ask you back. Sally did. She’s always doing stuff like that. Just trying to speed things up, that’s what she usually calls it.”

“That’s not how I remember it. In the club, you asked me. I made you repeat it because I wanted you to lean in closer to me. I thought maybe you were just looking out for Sally, didn’t want her to have to go back with Mike on her own or maybe…” He played out a length of hair between finger and thumb, let it fall back across her cheek.

“Really ? Before the street tango ?” She shifted, pushing up onto an elbow, twisted her head to look up at him.

“Yeah, before I taught you to dance…”

“As if, twinkletoes. And, yeah, maybe I wanted to keep talking.” She paused, rolled her eyes up to look at the ceiling, slumped back into his lap. “Really ? I asked you ?”

Time doesn’t pass as a constant. It stretches and slows in the heady rush of the fall, snaps back to speed when reality intrudes. They’d been stretched out in their own little bubble of time for what felt like weeks, months, years. Enough time to open up the deep seams in the mines of each other’s hearts. Enough time to compress what they found and shared there into something precious: they surfaced something hard and pure and unbreakable from their core. That’s how it felt inside the bubble. Like they were perpetually on London Underground time: next train in two minutes but no train ever arrived. Always two minutes. If you could have watched the bubble, timed them on that imaginary platform of artificial time, you’d have only been there ten days. They’d spent every one of those ten together. Time’s not constant. They believed, in the bubble, that love was.

We all fall in love sometimes.

“What do you want to do ?” she asked suddenly, looking up at him, pushing her fringe out of her eyes.

“What now ? This afternoon ? They’re showing Bladerunner at The Gate. I’d be up for catching that if you fancy it.”

“No, I didn’t mean today,” she said. “What do you want to do about us ?”

“What do I want do about us ? I didn’t realise I got to decide all of that…” he said, smiling.

“Well, okay, I see what you mean. I didn’t phrase it very well. I mean…”

“How do I feel about you ?” he interrupted gently.

“Yeah,” she said softly. “I guess that’s what I was asking.”

Silence isn’t always empty. It has shape and weight when felt by two people connected by the terror of sharing their deepest vulnerability, and that weight changes and lifts as relief replaces the terror. The recognition that the prickly, discomforting swell of feeling in your guts is matched by its source. Butterflies seem to dance effortlessly except when they’re in your stomach. They’d both figured it out within a day of meeting, maybe even that first night, but neither would commit to giving it a name, giving it voice. Even inside the bubble.

“I… God, it feels so soon and I didn’t want to scare you but…” He tips his head back and picks out shapes in the cracks in the ceiling. Like the lines astronomers draw to show constellations but without the stars. A route map through the heavens. He measures each word carefully in his head. There’s Pegasus. That could be Orion. Just say it. If that’s Orion then the North Star would be just there. Say the words. My North Star. “I’m falling in love with you.”

She smiles and sits up. Leans over to kiss him on the cheek. Puts her arms around him. “Good. Because I’m falling in love with you too and I don’t want to do it on my own.”

The silence that settled now, as they embraced, holding each other fiercely, wasn’t empty. It carried the weight of the words spoken out loud, the sound long gone but the meaning, the implications, lingering, and it carried the weight of all their hopes, their fears, and their dreams. Silence isn’t empty. And they believed that love wasn’t either.

We all fall in love sometimes.

Disunion (him)

I wasn’t sure if you were pissed off because I didn’t want to come with you to Prague or pissed off that I didn’t want to look at throws in Ikea. Or it could have been the sheets again: you hated it when the smell of my Saturday night seeped its way into your Sunday morning. Lately, after a big night, I’d been crashing at Mike and Sally’s. You said you didn’t mind; I don’t remember when you stopped coming out with us. We tried to mix it up a bit, early on. Did things you were into. Ronnie Scott’s and piano bars and films on the South Bank, earnest discussions about the transient nature of things after we saw “Remains of The Day” with groups of men in roll neck sweaters and goatees and women styled exclusively in black: black hair, black nails, black clothes. (I was dying for the BFI to put on “Spinal Tap” just to see if the usual crowd showed up. I would have had a field day). Mono no aware. I got it. I just didn’t want to watch an entire festival of Japanese anime or another Ishiguro adaptation to reflect on it further. There’s only so much cherry blossom I need in my life. I wanted to stop standing around talking about how melancholy we all were, all are, and to get out there and live a little.

I’m guessing it was Prague. There was some piece you’d read in the Guardian on one of those long Sunday mornings with the supplements that listed the ten best jazz clubs in Europe. You’d seemed quite excited about it, started telling me about this place called Reduta, and how we should go. I think I made a vague noise to signal that I was listening which must’ve been lost in translation as next thing I know you’re checking flights on Skyscanner. The row didn’t start until you were asking me for my passport number. I tried to explain my whole thing with airports again – the apprehension, the stress, the people – but I’m not sure you believed me. I guess it does sound a bit weak, a bit like someone just making some shit up to avoid your European city break. It was true though. I couldn’t really handle airports. I’m an okay flier, it’s not that. It’s the anticipation of it. There’s just something funny that happens in my head when I have to queue up with hundreds of people to check that none of us are going to blow each other up. You said it was bullshit and went with some old friend instead.

I like London. I don’t really need anywhere else and I couldn’t understand your need to explore. To be honest it was even narrower than that. I liked specific bits of London. Three or four dirty clubs, usually down some half hidden set of stairs off a street in Soho and usually the sort of place you didn’t worry too much about why your feet stuck to the floor. A couple of pubs. Proud Mary’s for coffee and an unfussy breakfast. And The Gate serviced all of my re-run cinema needs. That was pretty much it and it was enough for me. I could live a little in my little corner of London. But it wasn’t enough for you. At first we at least shared The Gate together and you’d tagged along on my semi regular afternoon excursions, laughing as I puffed a hurried joint as we walked into Notting Hill. It was cheaper to go the The Gate and chemically enhance the experience than mess about with a Multiplex. You always declined when I offered you the roll up although we used to share a smoke sometimes curled up in bed late at night listening to Jeff Buckley. I think that was as close as we got musically. Enough blue notes for you and enough distortion for me. That was when we seemed happiest though, watching tendrils of smoke curl to the ceiling before you’d nudge your head into my neck and ask if I wanted to dance. That was your code for sex. You always thought it sounded more romantic and I guess it did. We’d dance whilst Jeff crooned “Hallelujah” and, on a good night, “Lover You Should’ve Come Over” as our soundtrack in the background, our rising sighs eventually eclipsing his.

I had this idea of us when we started out. The idea us would catch a tube up to Queensway, walk through Hyde Park, dodge the tourists visiting Diana’s memorial. We’d pull our coat collars up against the cold, you’d slip your hand into mine inside my pocket and drag me down to the gallery at the Serpentine. You’d try not to laugh as I gave my considered judgements on whatever exhibition was running. I’d try to pretend I wasn’t impressed, moved even, by your reflections on the art. You understood that stuff but you wore it lightly; it was all bluff with me. Then we’d walk past the lake, if it was really cold there’d be fog rising where the water touched the bank and we’d head down towards it. I liked to imagine us as two translucent figures disappearing from view, suspended in the magical mist. Mono no aware. I guess I’m not immune after all. As the afternoon faded we’d mooch over towards Mayfair, waltz into one of the big hotels like we belonged and settle in for the early evening; drinking cocktails we couldn’t really afford. Like we were just about to pass “go” and the two hundred pounds was coming. Then we’d find a quiet restaurant up on the outskirts of Soho, talk into the night, before heading home on the tube. We’d put on Jeff, share a smoke, and then dance ourselves to sleep. That was the idea of us and, for the longest time, that was the reality of us.

You used to say that love was like the bit in the middle of one of those circle pictures we used to do in maths. What do you call them ? Venn diagrams. The middle was the bit where we overlap. We don’t spend so much time in each other’s circle anymore.

Disunion (her)

I was aware it was happening but I didn’t know what to do about it. I hesitate to use an analogy from jazz – because I know you don’t like jazz – but there’s sometimes a moment in an extended piece, in an improvisation, when the players realise that they’ve lost the spark of what they were doing. They’re still producing notes, occasionally riffing back on refrains that previously worked, but something has changed and the music has gone stale. I’m finding myself reaching for sequences that have always served me well before. I can be your art loving, free spirited traveller if that’s what you want me to be. I can be your serious talker; setting the world to rights, musing on the impermanence of things, and arguing the toss over the voice over in Bladerunner. I still can’t believe you thought I was serious about that. Give me some credit: nobody thinks it needs the voice over. Maybe if things were different we could have a real discussion about that unicorn dream sequence though. Is that the trouble now ? I used to be all of those things but I used to be funny as well. And I used to be just me. Not a version of me that was for you but just me. In fact, I was never more me than those first few months that I was with you.

So I knew something had shifted. If we’d have been having dates at the beginning like we were having dates now then we’d have never made it this far. There was something there still between us but it wasn’t enough. We were waiting for someone to telegraph a concluding descending scale so that we could clumsily end our improvisation. A cue for the song to finish. There would be no polite applause. Who am I kidding ? Impromptu musical jams might end like that but relationships don’t. It would be more likely that one of us would hurl our instrument to the floor and exit stage right leaving a squall of feedback in our wake, the other left alone on stage blinking in the spotlight. Part of me wishes that one of us would. It’d be better than this drawn out decline.

You’re out again. I think you were meeting up with Mike and Sally and I guess you’ll end up treading your familiar route from The Adelaide into the West End. Recently you’ve been trying to persuade me to come to some 90s night at the Borderline so maybe you’re there. I didn’t really fall for Britpop the first time round so I’m not sure that nostalgia is going to lend it anything emotionally for me this time round. You were babbling about how you’d had a drunken moment of clarity the week before during “Live Forever”. We see things they’ll never see. That’s us, you declared. Me and Mike and Sally. I wasn’t sure which “me” you’d meant. I didn’t see those things that they, apparently, will never see so I wasn’t convinced it was me you meant in your boozey epiphany. But I did remember when we – just me and you – did see things that no-one else saw. When we were so in tune that we could sit in a group, noise and chatter flying about us, and we’d exchange a glance, the slightest look, and each other instantly knew what the other thought.

You’re out and I’m home and I’m mainlining power ballads like some Bridget Jones cliche. I’m a lousy drinker when I’m on my own but I’ve made an effort with a makeshift cosmopolitan. There’s no triple sec so, technically, it’s vodka and cranberry juice but that just seems slightly pitiful. Sitting home alone drinking vodka cranberry is for losers but sitting home alone making cosmoplitans is a different thing entirely. I’ve even got one of those little umbrellas. I can toast our demise with a degree of class. And various love lorn anthems. I’m giving a full throated if slightly off pitch rendition of “Total Eclipse Of The Heart” when upstairs bang on their floor in irritation and I have my own moment of clarity: I’m through half a bottle of vodka, enough cranberry juice to permanently cure all cystitis in West London, and murdering Bonnie Tyler. I crawl to bed.

You’re not there, not even in traces, the usual faint residual scent of you absent on your pillow. I washed the sheets and now I wished that I hadn’t. I miss you.

Reunion (reprise)

You look surprised to see me and maybe even a little embarrassed. Perhaps she hadn’t told you that I might be coming. Most of all you look older. I know that’s a stupid thing to say after nine years but it’s what strikes me the most; you’ve hastened your hair’s natural retreat by cropping it back and it’s fading to grey. You’re carrying more weight now. Not a tummy exactly but everything’s a little looser, I have to work at making out the line of your jaw. I suppose that if we’d seen each other more often – or at all – then the change wouldn’t be so marked. I can see how the increments would have accumulated over time, I just get to see all of them unfolded at once. It’s enough to send me to the toilets so that I can find a mirror, try to see what the impact of nine years has had on my own face. I can’t judge. I’m too used to seeing it every day and it’s been a long time since I was the person that you knew who peeked up and out from under a fringe. I think I used to hide behind it in the hope of being found. I don’t hide anymore and I’m not looking to be found.

When we talk it’s less awkward than I’d expected. There’s a moment as we meet when the slightest inclination of your head suggests that, maybe on auto-pilot, you’re thinking of greeting me with one of those cheek brushes that seems to have become the standard in our 30s. The older we get the less contact we seem to want. In our 20s it was all hugs and embraces. And, for me and you, the tango of course but it’s a long time since I did any dancing. I shift backwards slightly and offer my hand. Less contact. We touch and I remember the softness of your skin.

When you meet back up with someone after a long absence there’s only really two places the conversation can go. What are you up to now or do you remember when…? We start with the now and keep it light; you’re working up in Harrow, a tech start up that I didn’t catch the name of, and I’m dividing my time between travelling and freelancing, sometimes combining the two. Writing about jazz clubs ? You offer it with a tentative smile, a cautious prod at the thin ice covering the deep waters that are our former lives together. You were always good at that. Finding ways to get me to open up, unlocking the private chambers of my heart, leavening and lightening my seriousness without belittling it. You wouldn’t have let ‘private chambers’ pass without a gag either. I catch myself missing that. Missing the fun we had, even when it was innuendo and bad puns. Writing about jazz clubs. You know me too well. I haven’t really changed. And he nods, sadly, and says: no, no you haven’t.

We’re saved from our small talk by the arrival of the cake. Mike’s carrying it in, thirty five candles flickering and illuminating Sally’s name spelled out in icing. I knew that there’d been a similarly large celebration at her 30th but I’d been out of the country, it was the summer I spent in New Orleans. She’d never been one to pass up a party and this gathering had been billed as the warm up event for her 40th. It wasn’t clear if her and Mike were planning to do this every year but I already knew this’d be the last time I saw them. I didn’t know how I’d feel when I saw her again. Watching her about to blow out the candles, the flames dancing under her easy smile, I could see why it had happened. She’d been a pretty girl and now she was an attractive woman, lively and confident and larger-than-life. The size of her personality was still in inverse proportion to her dress size. I don’t know whether she’d ever told Mike but something about the way they are together, the way he still tracks her movements around the room, rests his hand lightly around her waist when they’re close, makes me think that she never did. Maybe she never thought it was a big deal. Better to hide the truth to stop people from getting hurt; it was just a drunken mistake.

I can clearly remember when you told me. That morning in the kitchen in the flat. Things hadn’t been great for a while but the connection between us held fast. A little frayed but it held. I don’t think either of us really knew how we were going to resurrect what we’d had at the beginning but if you’d asked us then I think we’d have said we wanted to. We were incandescent falling in love but didn’t know what to do when the boil settled to a simmer. Maybe we’d have found the right ways and the right moments to turn the heat back up if we’d had more time. I slept with Sally. Four words that took three seconds to say between two people and to break one heart. I slept with… You were half way through saying it again, tears forming in your eyes, but I didn’t hear it. I was shaking my head, trying to dislodge the words. You stepped towards me extending your arms, saying you were sorry over and over and over again, but for each step you took forwards I took one away until my back bumped against the front door. It was our last tango. I held onto my tears until I’d slipped out the door and fled to the street.

I wound up on Shepherd’s Bush Green sobbing on a bench until some homeless guy offered me a swig from his last Special Brew. Looking back there was something blackly funny about it I suppose. Perhaps I should have invited him to sit down, maybe we could have gotten drunk and duetted on some power ballads, howling incoherently at the early risers and late finishers making their way across the park. He looked a bit like Meatloaf and I had enough mascara smudged around my eyes that I could’ve passed as that witchy woman he sometimes sings with. Anything for love but we won’t do that. Instead I smile at him, decline the proffered can, and ask if he’s okay. We chat for a bit and I give him some change for a coffee or something. I’ve seen enough bad movies that I was half expecting him to turn out to be a philosophy lecturer down on his luck offering up wisdom for the lost, or an angel testing people to see if they’re worth saving, or a lonely multi millionaire in disguise, waiting for the right person to bestow his fortune on. The best he offers is “people aren’t reliable, you can’t trust them” before he shuffles off across the Green towards the Off License.

Sally leans forwards and chases the flickering flames across the cake with the most extravagant exhale she can muster. She gets them all bar two. Thirty three candles marked now by a smudge of black smoke slowly rising into the air and two that stubbornly still burn. I look up and you’re staring at me. I hold your gaze as Sally swoops on the final pair, snuffing them out with another quick puff of air. Each reduces to a glow, like an echo of the fire they once were, and are then extinguished.

42 @ 42

42 records. 42 stories. 42 years.

Tag Archives: short story

Kiss and no tell

Lockdown: April

Lockdown: Aps

Lockdown: Cora

April and April

April, too

April

Riffs and variations on Abba, Dark Souls, charity shops, and bad analogies for grief

Careering

Union

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