‘A break? You became homeless. No, not home-less. You became a homeless person.’
The criticism lying in those words is given life so that I can’t ignore it.
‘I didn’t become a homeless person, you judgemental—’ I bring myself up short. There is anger swelling that I have to keep from flowing over.
‘I left my house,’ I say calmly. ‘I left some bricks and mortar. That’s all. I didn’t need it. Or any of the stuff,’ I add, looking around.
‘But you need it now, don’t you?’ he says. His tone isn’t unpleasant. It’s enquiring. Soft. But my hackles are up.
‘Really?’ I say. ‘I don’t think this is a good idea after all.’ I get up. Before I have made it fully to my feet, I feel his hand on my arm.
‘No. I didn’t mean that,’ he says, looking up at me. ‘I just meant. If anything, I meant to say that I was sorry. And you should stay here. As long as you need to. And I know you’ll be wondering about the Bens,’ he continues.
That word Bens was something he said before and I didn’t know then what he meant. ‘What are you talking about?’ I say. My temples send signals that they are being squeezed in a vice and I groan as the pain washes over me.
He’s silent for a while, careful of my distress. When next I look he is staring at me.
‘You’ve forgotten about the trunk?’ he says, testing the ground.
‘The trunk?’ Whatever it is he means by that, I have clearly forgotten it.
He is about to say more when the bell rings. ‘Food,’ he says brightly and gets up.
I hear him walk down the hallway and click open the door. The exchange there at the door is muted and jovial.
The word softens as I turn it over in my mind. Bens? Or is it Benz? Bends?
My memory has been crumbling for years, like it has for everyone, probably. But the concussion and the lack of sleep must have rubbed away some of the finer details. When they return, the memories come not as you would imagine, in gossamer threads, but in waves. And again, as I remember remembering, I see the madeleines, and Proust. All of that is embedded now, entwined with all remembering. It is enough to exhaust any mind.
The door slams and then Seb is rustling through the corridor with what must be bags of food.
As I enter the kitchen, he says, ‘Just grab some plates from that cupboard.’ He points with his chin as he lands the bags carefully on the table.
We eat mostly silently. He is avoiding something and I am too. But everything in the air between us is heavy and fecund and wants to be born. We eat until there are only ruins. He flicks his eyes across to me every few seconds, on the verge of saying something. Eventually he can’t help himself.
‘Can I ask you a question?’ he says, squeezing the foil edges of a container together.
I don’t look up or speak but he reads it as assent anyway.
‘How were you okay out there for so long?’
I stare at him because I can’t believe he thinks I was okay. I begin to speak when he adds, ‘I mean mentally. Psychologically. Being—’ he stops. ‘I just. I’m not sure I could have done it and survived like you.’
I think about this while he decants the empty boxes into a bag. ‘I don’t know,’ I say at last. ‘I’m not sure I have survived.’
19
Sunday
It is late and the house shrouded in darkness should be enough to help me drift off, but it isn’t. There is wine in my veins but not enough to bring on sleep so I go downstairs. In the living room I see that Seb has left the turntable spinning. Then in the back of my head I remember that as a student he’d leave his record player spinning empty – something to do with the mechanics suffering more wear by being switched on and off. The smoothness of the motion throws me back and the memories come. All at once. Sheets of them.
It was after the fight with Grace. We sat on our bench at the Horniman and started again. Something had shifted in our relationship and we began to like each other again. At first we went for walks again in the Horniman grounds. Then later we explored more and more of London. We shopped in markets on cobbles behind Borough. We hung around Soho cafés and Whitechapel bagel shops and on hot summer nights we’d chew through hot salt-beef and rye. We went like tourists to Greenwich to see where Mean Time started. Every weekend gave us another chance to both escape and dive into the world. When I remember it now, I remember it imperfectly, memory filtering out the flies and grit of ordinary happy life. When I remember how we attacked our new lives, I see only the stylised memory. Diving into the waves and always coming up glistening. Camden Market, Portobello Road, St Paul’s Cathedral.
It wasn’t long before we began to look for a real home. Not the rented extravagance that we’d been living in near work, but something we could bed our roots into. Something that was capable of anchoring us, harbouring us, together.
Money was no object, or no obstacle at least. Work was so good at that time that it’s hard to explain to people who weren’t there to see it, just how idiotic it was. We had so much spare cash that it was unthinkable that we wouldn’t just buy something outright. So, we began to save. At first just a slice of extra cash diverted into a savings account. But then, after the first few thousand pounds, the lunacy of it hit us.
‘Well, what else shall we do with it? I’m not sticking it into one of your funds,’ Grace said, over takeaway Chinese food one evening. She was sitting cross-legged on the carpet. Ra-ra skirt. Black tights. Her hair shining a clover-honey blonde in the low light. She touched her shell pendant absently.
‘Not the stock market. I’m not saying that, but the market’s about to become quite volatile. That’s what the modelling is telling us at any rate.’
‘What, then?’ she said, rubbing her chopsticks against each other to remove the splinters.
‘Maybe vary the portfolio a bit?’ I said. ‘We could take a selection of low-risk bonds maybe and you know, let the money work.’
‘No way. Inflation risk too high,’ she said through a mouthful of rice. ‘Not to mention the currency risk. And we’d be tying it up to the maturity date however long in the future.’
Currency was really Grace’s thing and I trusted her instincts.
‘But we’d get gilts, obviously, so there’d be no currency risk. It’s all sterling,’ I said.
She nodded and put her sticks down. ‘There’s still inflation and the lock-in. It’s not looking good out there, inflation-wise. We’re much better off getting, what, six per cent in our special interest account?’
I nodded. I hadn’t expected anything, I was just having the conversation. One of those conversations without any pressure or urgency. We could do it or not, it didn’t matter that much – it made a difference of just a point or two. But we were mathematicians still. At heart, we wanted the maths to make sense. It wasn’t really about having more money; it was just getting the numbers to chime in a way that felt rhythmic to us.
‘Though,’ she said finally, ‘we could just buy dollars. That’s going only one way at the moment.’
It was all just money. If we lost anything or made anything, it wouldn’t be life-changing. Solid international currencies were pretty safe.
I skewered some chicken and black bean sauce with a chopstick.
‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said.
After Grace. After the whole thing. After she left, that final time, I emptied out the account and took it home in hundred-dollar bills. Hard cash. It sat there in the living room – the same room we’d spent so many nights in, curled on the sofa, watching TV into the vanishing night – a quarter of a million dollars. In cash.