A week later Nick called me again, as I knew he would, this time on a Sunday at 3am from his waterfront apartment with river views and twenty-four-hour security. The uniformed guard who sat in his cabin all night long just outside the electronic gates obviously did not make Nick feel safe and sound.
‘Tom? Um. . I’m not feeling right.’
I caught a cab straight away, and actually wish I had not been so hasty. Nick was in boxer shorts when he opened the door. The man’s chest was still tanned from Spain. A beautiful man with tears in his eyes.
‘We are stardust, Tom.’
‘That’s what you said in Almería.’
I thought I’d better give him something to do and suggested he make us some strong black coffee. He was remarkably composed, given the circumstances. True, his hands shook as he put the espresso pot on the gas, and I observed that his eyes flickered over the ceiling as he asked me strange questions.
‘What’s your name? Can you spell it for me?’
‘T-h-o-m-a-s.’
Nick frowned.
‘No. No. Um. I mean what’s my name?’
‘Your name is Nikos.’
I could see some kind of agony leak from inside Nick and fill his eyes, which were already full.
I sat at the table smoking too many cigarettes while he looked around for cups in his orderly, stainless-steel kitchen.
When Nick finally sat down he was sweating.
‘I’ve had a very bad night, Tom.’
‘How bad?’
‘I keep thinking I should visit my mother. I hear her voice all the time.’ He started to mimic a pinched, choking female voice. ‘Devon is lovely at this time of year. We can eat crab sandwiches in that pub you appreciate in Salcombe.’
Nick’s mother does not live in Devon. She lives in Kentish Town, where she is a teaching assistant at the local primary school. Needless to say, my mother does live in Salcombe and she always insists we eat a crab sandwich at the Fisherman’s Arms with the other widows she has grown fond of over so many lonely years. I sit with them, the only man in their lives, a thin wreck of a man in a smart suit, while they talk about the weather and TV soaps and how appalling it is that teachers don’t wear suits like mine any more. Of course my mother and I cannot talk about my childhood, so it is better to talk about the lack of English as she understands it in England. I always carry my briefcase with me on these occasions and slip outside as often as I can get away with for a gulp of cognac in the fresh air. Whenever I visit my mother I am in a right old state.
‘You are in a right old state, Nick.’ I patted his brown neck with my scabby hand.
‘Tell me about it,’ he groaned.
I was tactfully silent for a few minutes, but I was excited too. Nick had somehow made my biography his own. Rather him than me, I must say. To be honest it was a tremendous relief to see how distressed he was. I started to tell him more about that afternoon when I ran into the meadow.
‘I was eight years old. . the year Britain went decimal and John Lennon wrote ‘Imagine’. The year A Clockwork Orange was released and I lost it with my father. . ’ I gave him a clear picture of myself as an eight-year-old boy running at my father with a kitchen knife in my hand. I told him how I was too small to take on a big army man but my tutor helped me. That is what tutors are supposed to do after all — they help their pupils. Her blond plait was tied with a white ribbon. A gold crucifix attached to a fragile gold chain glistened between her breasts. She smelt of milk and mown grass and I was her calf. After she wrestled him to the ground, her eyes told me what to do. I plunged the knife between his ribs.
And then she ran out into the meadow.
My father was lying very still on the kitchen floor.
And then my own warm urine trickled down my legs.
What if my father suddenly stood up and chased after me?
How I described it to Nick was like this:
‘Imagine a butterfly displayed in a glass case suddenly flying towards you with the pin still in its body.’
Nick shook his head and tugged at his unshaven cheek with his fingers.
It was then that I realised we were not alone. Someone else was in the apartment. Listening in the hallway. From Nick’s open-plan kitchen I saw her. A short woman with long black hair, dressed in pyjamas, walked towards me with my coat in her arms.
‘So you are Tom Banbury-Mines.’
She threw the coat into my lap and said something to Nick in Greek. He shook his head and groaned.
‘This is my sister, Elena.’
He stood up and disappeared into the bathroom. We could hear water begin to trickle from the shower.
Elena stood so close to me that I noticed her pyjamas were patterned with moons and suns. Rather childish for a woman in her thirties.
‘I’ll tell you something about my brother, ok?’
‘Ok.’
‘If Dad has earache, Nikos gets earache. If I’ve got bronchitis, Nikos gets bronchitis. If my mother cries, Nikos cries. So it’s lucky that none of us are mad isn’t it?’
She pointed to the door.
‘I am looking after my brother, so you can go home. Shall I call you a cab, Mister Money Bags?’
Thanks to our agency’s generous health insurance package, the hospital Nick ended up in looked more like a small castle for the rich and unstable than a lunatic ward. The Abbey even had a moat with two white swans that seemed permanently asleep as they drifted on the stagnant algae-covered water.
Two very attractive resident female doctors carried hypodermics between their fingers as if they were carrying cocktail cigarettes from one party guest to another. As I parked my Porsche in the almost empty car park, I wondered if the doctors had somehow tranquillised the swans in the same way they had tranquillised Nick. Large doses of colourless liquid were injected into his nervous system via the azure veins in both his arms. I liked to think the doctors filled their syringes from the water in the moat, which, like Lethe, the River of Forgetfulness, made their patients forget the troubles of their earthly life. I held Nick’s hand in my hand and felt peaceful and calm for the first time in many years.
Unfortunately his sister was at his bedside too. Elena had to be polite to me because she knew The Abbey was better than an overheated institution with no windows. She sat on a chair on the right side of his bed and I on a chair on the left side of his bed. As Nick lay between us, moaning on two white pillows, I came to think of his sister as a sort of guard dog. That is how she appeared in my dreams anyway, often with three heads, informing me that it was her duty to guard the sick. The doctors left me alone with Nick the few times his sister was absent, but one afternoon, when Elena brought him food his mother had cooked for him and stayed by his side to watch him eat it, he suddenly started to speak in a voice that was rather like my own.
‘I am eight years old. The year Britain went decimal and John Lennon wrote ‘Imagine’. The year A Clockwork Orange was released and I lost it with my father. . ’
‘Nikos?’ Elena murmured something in Greek and tried to clamp her hand over his mouth but he shrugged her away. His words were my words and I listened in a cognac-soaked trance.
‘This is the year I run into the meadow. My Dutch governess is picking mushrooms on her knees. She says. . “Ah, you have a knife in your hands. May I use it to cut the fungi?” I am shaking. She says, “How is your heartbeat today?”
‘“My heartbeat is jumping all over the place, danke.”