When Nathan was eighteen, he'd come to the Greek Islands with Chloe, his girlfriend. It was their first and only time away - and for its three weeks they were happy-sad, because they knew this trip was an extended goodbye. They were about to start at different universities, and they knew that what was to come would change them. There was no way to maintain their relationship - Chloe had seen her two brothers make that mistake, and it had brought them nothing but unhappiness.
Now -- alone on the dock at Icaria -- he saw that over the last few weeks he'd followed almost exactly the route he and Chloe had taken, when he was a child who thought himself nearly a man.
He spat into the dark and watched it loop and spin into the lapping, oily Mediterranean. Then he got up, brushing the grit from his arse and slinging the rucksack over his shoulder. He found an all night bar and sat in the corner drinking Amstel until the sun came up. Then he slapped a pile of euros on the bar, didn't wait for his change, and walked out to greet the early morning ferry. His flip flops slapped to the rhythm of his feet.
He watched the ferry dock. It was rusted and ponderous, weathered as a coastal rock.
At length, it discharged blinking, fuzzy-headed young backpackers, American and German and Dutch, British and Canadian and Australian, on to the dock. Some of their faces were still marked with the weave of the ferry's dirty carpet.
Nathan was one of three or four people to embark. He sat in a patch of ringing sunlight, cooled by the sea breeze, and stared past the corner of a lifeboat, into the ferry's frothing wake.
In Goa, he saw a Hindu funeral. The corpse, draped in white, garlanded with roses and jasmine and marigold, was carried on a stretcher to a riverside pyre. On the pyre, it was arranged with its bound white feet facing south - the direction of the dead.
The chief mourner walked round the pyre three times, sprinkling water. Then he put the pyre to flame.
Nathan watched the body burn. The perfumed smoke, billowing, diffusing against the sunset. The yellow flames. The brown river.
He grabbed his bag and walked away.
He flew from Delhi and walked wearily through UK customs.
He stood in the English airport, ridiculous in his gap-year student clothes -- this man with no idea who he had become.
Before leaving Heathrow, Nathan called Sara at work. She answered on the fourth ring.
'Nathan?'
He swelled with a violent nostalgia. It took him a moment to speak. And then, all he could say was: 'Hi.'
'Where have you been ?'
It seemed to her that losing his job, his girlfriend and his flat within a couple of weeks had worked something loose in Nathan's head. She'd told her friends (in a grave, not unhappy tone): Nathan had a breakdown.
He said, 'I'm okay.' It sounded true when he said it. Then he told her, 'I've been to Greece,' and it sounded like a lie. Before she could ask any more questions, he said, 'Look, I've no right to ask this. But I need a reference.'
'What kind of reference?'
'A landlord's reference. I need a place to live.'
'So what you're phoning to ask is: pretend we never went out, and write a letter saying what a fabulous tenant you were.'
Pretty much. I know it's a shitty thing to ask.'
It was a shitty thing to ask. But she said 'Fine' because she pitied him.
He caught the train home and booked himself into a cheap hotel, then showered and shaved and went to buy a local newspaper.
The next afternoon, armed with Sara's reference, he paid the deposit and two months' rent in advance on a small, clean, one-bedroom flat.
It was on the top floor - into the eaves - of a big, Victorian building.
On the ground floor was a day nursery; his little bedroom overlooked the playground.
Since it was summer and the nights were short, Nathan could afford to wait until the first comforting signs of dawn before trying to sleep - which meant that, often, he woke to the pleasant screams of young children at playtime. He lay in bed listening to them, just as he might lie in a sun-warmed tent, listening to a chattering brook.
The sound of the children made him happy. Their existence seemed so tremendously unlikely, he took comfort from it. He never watched them playing, because he thought that from their perspective his face -- peering down from the small, high bedroom window -- would look ghostly and lost, and he wanted to spare them that.
But even their tears and tantrums, from this high place, sounded good to him.
He lay there, listening to them, and wondered what he was going to do about getting a job.
It was easy.
He visited an employment agency, where his agent displayed contempt for his paltry CV, enquiring in a frigid tone why he'd left his 'previous employment'.
He took in a slow breath, held it for a moment and then told her: 'I was kind of made redundant.'
'Kind of. Was there a restructure?'
'Not really. Kind of
'Kind of
'The show I was working on - it was called The Mark Derbyshire Solution!
After a moment, she said 'I see' in a manner that Nathan had learned to recognize; it was the way people chose to hide their sudden, incandescent interest in celebrity, even minor celebrity. She looked Nathan in the eye and said, 'It must have been terrible for you.'
'It wasn't good, no.'
'And if it's all right to ask - how is he?'
'How's who? Mark? I haven't spoken to him.'
'I see,' she said. 'Yes. That poor girl.'
So Nathan went on the books of the employment agency, and a week later, the agent called to let him know she'd lined up an exciting interview with a prestigious company he had never heard of.
Nathan no longer owned an interview suit or good shoes; they'd gone into the washing machine and then to a charity shop, scrunched up in a carrier bag. So that afternoon, he went shopping.
On Monday, he was interviewed for the position of sales executive at Hermes Cards, Ltd. The interview was conducted by two men and two women, who sat behind a long desk like the top table at a wedding.
Nathan
told them he had no sales experience, and that he had no particular interest in greetings cards. Nor had he ever stopped to consider the profound part greetings cards had to play in observing British rites of passage - birth, marriage, illness and death.
But I've certainly been thinking about it over the weekend,' he said, and the interviewers laughed. From one of the women there was even a little flirtatious pen-playing.
When the chuckles had died down, he said, 'The truth is, when times were good, working with Mark taught me about working under pressure. And when times were bad, it taught me a lot about loyalty.'
When he'd done talking about Mark Derbyshire, a certain gloom settled on the room.
They thanked Nathan for coming along. He shook their hands one by one - and thanked them, and left, and went directly to the pub. He sat in the garden. The sun shone so bright he could barely read his newspaper.
Hermes Cards called back the next day: they wanted to see him again next Tuesday.
He bought a new tie, a raincoat and a folding umbrella, in case it was raining on the day. He wondered how the person who wore these clothes related to that lost man in Greece, in his Gap cargo shorts and Nike sandals; and how that man related to the wired madman in the Paul Smith suit, scrabbling with bleeding nails at the cold, wet earth. He could draw no line of connection between them.
He was a series of disconnected dots, a Morse code.
The second interview took place in a different room. This time, they sat round a shiny oval table, and Nathan knew before anyone spoke that he'd got the job.
He was to start on the 1st of July, which gave him ten days of nervousness.