Maurice hasn’t mentioned the boss in a while. New angers blossom daily.
“Freakin’ personalised numberplates,” he says this morning. “Don’t you hate them?”
“They have their uses,” I say. “Easy to remember.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not forgetting this one in a hurry.”
And he goes into a spiel about being cut off by a red sports car at the weekend. Maurice was entirely in the right. These twits in their flash motors: Decapitation would be too quick.
“She was driving,” he says. “But it’s him I remember. Shaved bald, and when did that get to be cool? I remember in the good old days, your chrome-domes had the grace to be ashamed.”
He wore an earring, too, and Maurice has much to say on this subject.
“I figure he had his hand up her skirt, and that’s how come she was in a rush. Looked old enough to be his big sister.”
The train pulls into platform 8, and the long forever of its gradual halt begins; the release of its doors.
“Whoosh,” he says, and I think he’s imitating the doors, but he isn’t. “W-H-O-O-5-H. The S was a 5.”
On the concourse, we make our usual farewells.
“Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” he warns me.
“Remember,” I tell him. “They can kill you. But they’re not allowed to eat you.”
But I say it distractedly, because my mind is elsewhere.
If you want to know where it gets you — letting the rage inside — keep your eyes open as you slog around the city. You’ll see people behaving like all kinds of weather at once: fizzing and spitting; boiling and baked; grey and grim. Just by walking where somebody else wants to be, you’re making mortal enemies for life. Somebody asked me “What the hell?” last week because I slowed to check a shop window, and I’ve no doubt he thought it a reasonable question. Trench warfare has its critics, but city life is no picnic either. A Daily Mail columnist once spent a morning on the pavement outside Bond Street station, and not a soul stopped to check he wasn’t dead. Though to be fair, they might have recognised him. One less Mail columnist would brighten anyone’s day.
Remain detached. Stay in control. Or you will rupture; burst a complicated valve.
Trust me, because I know about this. I killed a man once. It was mostly an accident. It happened years ago, when I was a student, over a girclass="underline" a girl I hadn’t even spoken to, but told a friend about, and next thing I knew they were going steady. It seemed to me that he would never have looked her way if I’d not pointed her out. You dream your dreams aloud, and they come true for someone else. I waited for him after the pubs shut one night, on the towpath he used as a shortcut. He was drunk, and might well have ended up in the canal even if I’d not been there — which, as far as the world was concerned, was the case. The following day it seemed like a strange dream. Now, I recall it as a warning: Remain detached; stay in control. There are angry places in each of us, and we visit them at our peril. I can’t even remember that girl’s name.
The things that are precious remain worth fighting for. But I’ve learned to let go of the space around me. I don’t ask strangers “What the hell?” because I already know what the hell.
I’ve only ever told one person about the man I killed.
I don’t see Maurice on the evening train, because he usually goes to the pub. Instead, I stare out of the window as the world goes whooshing by. I have bought flowers for Emma, which is something I do: It’s not a birthday thing, or an anniversary thing, or even a Friday-night thing. It is a recurring statement of intent: I will always bring you flowers. Tonight they are roses, and to my fellow passengers possibly look like an apology. But I have nothing to be sorry for, and intend to keep it that way.
Emma hums as she arranges the roses in a vase.
“How was your day?” she asks.
“It was fine. Yours?”
“Same old, same old,” she says, and this is our private joke. Emma does not work — I earn enough for both of us — and her same old is someone else’s leisure.
I potter around the sitting room as she prepares the supper. I drink a glass of white, and pick things up and put them down — ornaments, books, a candlestick; a pale silk scarf left draped across a chair — and remember where each came from, and which were my gifts to her. It is not only flowers I bring her: I buy gifts. That scarf; this candlestick. I made her a present long ago of my deepest secret: of the man I killed on a lonely stretch of canal, unobserved by God or anyone. She wept — we both did — but she understood what my telling her meant: that I was placing all I was, and ever hoped to be, in her hands. Ever since, I’ve known we’ll never drift apart.
I bought her those books, those CDs, and the pictures on our walls.
And last year, for her birthday, as a special treat, I bought her a smart red sports car.
With a personalised numberplate.
Remain in control. Stay detached.
Maurice says, “Why so interested? I told you all this yesterday, you’re like yeah, yeah, are we nearly there yet?”
We have seats this morning. There’s never any telling which days are going to be crowded; which are going to be like somebody declared a Bank Holiday and never told you. Maurice sits opposite me, and I can see he’s missed a spot shaving; one of those difficult places under the chin that mirrors don’t always notice, but wives do.
“It’s just bad behaviour,” I tell him.
“Well, it wasn’t the only kind of bad behaviour on their mind. I can promise you that.”
He reminds me that it happened in the Cotswolds, then goes off on a tangent, telling me why he was there himself. I spend the interlude recalling that Emma had gone shopping on Saturday afternoon.
“Couple of miles along the road, I see the car parked by a wood. Like they’re nature-lovers, right? Guy with a shaved head, a freakin’ earring, the only wildlife he’s interested in is a bit of outdoors horizontal jogging.”
Maurice can be loud sometimes. His words riffle through the carriage like a cat in long grass.
That day, I call Emma twice from work. She answers both times. I say I just wanted to hear her voice.
“That’s sweet.”
And in the evening, I dig out our most recent phone bill. Emma has a mobile — of course she does — so there’s no earthly reason a landline should betray her. Even so, there are numbers I don’t recognise. But Google tells me they’re innocent. Mail-order firms; the local library. A plumber. For a while I entertain visions of Emma wrapped in highly coordinated intercourse with an overalled handyman, plungers and piping arrayed all around. But then I recall a leaky tap in the upstairs bathroom. Of course she called a plumber. Who else is going to fix a leaky tap?
“You’re very quiet,” she says over supper. “Is everything all right?”
She’s a beautiful woman, Emma; more beautiful to me than anyone else, it’s true. But beautiful. It always surprises me that she doesn’t take a good photo. I buy her gifts; when you get down to it, I feed and clothe her. But none of this makes her my possession. She is my wife, and that places her deeply inside my space, but she’s not my possession. In my absence, who knows where she walks?
“I’m fine,” I tell her. “Everything is fine.”
“We’re strictly audio-visual, our end,” Maurice says. “And v. much aboveboard. Public stuff, like the South Bank getout, plus offices and home security systems and all that. What you’re talking about’s bugging. You can buy phone taps over the counter, or over the Internet, same difference. But it’s legally touchy. You put up signs saying this area’s under remote surveillance, everyone knows where they stand. Nobody puts up a sign saying this phone’s tapped. And if you did, you could put up another one saying out of order, you’d get more traffic on it.”