“It’s not about being cool,” I told him. “It’s about just being. De Niro was just being; I can never do that now.”
Greg stopped in the middle of the pavement and turned to face me.
“Do you think you could before?” he asked. “Do you think I can? Do you think that anyone outside of films lights cigarettes or opens fridge doors like that? Think about it: the lighter doesn’t spark first time you flip it, the first wisp of smoke gets in your eye and makes you wince; the fridge door catches and then rattles, milk slops over. It happens to everyone. It’s universaclass="underline" everything fucks up! You’re not unusual. You know what you are?”
“No,” I said. “What?”
“You’re just more usual than everyone else.”
I thought about that for a long time afterwards, that conversation. I decided Greg was right. I’d always been inauthentic. Even before the accident, if I’d been walking down the street just like De Niro, smoking a cigarette like him, and even if it had lit first try, I’d still be thinking: Here I am, walking down the street, smoking a cigarette, like someone in a film. See? Second-hand. The people in the films aren’t thinking that. They’re just doing their thing, real, not thinking anything. Recovering from the accident, learning to move and walk, understanding before I could act-all this just made me become even more what I’d always been anyway, added another layer of distance between me and things I did. Greg was right, absolutely right. I wasn’t unusuaclass="underline" I was more usual than most.
I set about wondering when in my life I’d been the least artificial, the least second-hand. Not as a child, certainly: that’s the worst time. You’re always performing, copying other people, things you’ve seen them do-and copying them badly too. No, I decided it had been in Paris, a year before the accident. That’s where I’d met Catherine. She was American, from somewhere outside of Chicago. She worked for a large humanitarian organization, some kind of lobbying outfit. They’d sent her on the same intensive language course my company had sent me on. It strikes me as odd, thinking about it now, that she couldn’t have learnt French back in Illinois. Considering they’d lose me in a year, my company were making a bad investment-but they didn’t claim to be making it on behalf of starving children.
Anyway, I met Catherine while on that course. We hit it off together straight away. We’d get giggling fits in classes. We’d go out and get drunk in the evenings instead of doing homework. One time we found a rowing boat tied up on the Quai Malaquais embankment, climbed inside, untied it from its moorings and were just about to paddle it away using our hands when some men came along and turfed us out. Another time-well, there were lots of other times. The point is, though, that in Paris hanging out with Catherine I felt less self-conscious than I had at any other period of my life-more natural, more in-the-moment. Inside, not outside-as though we’d penetrated something’s skin: the city, perhaps, or maybe life itself. I really felt as though we’d got away with something.
We’d corresponded pretty regularly since then. It had dropped off on my part after the accident, of course, but as soon as I’d got my memory back I’d written to her and brought her up to date. In February, just as I was coming out of hospital, she’d written to tell me that she was being sent to Zimbabwe and would pass through London on the way back. We wrote more frequently after that. Our letters acquired a sexual undertone, something our in-person friendship had never had. I started imagining having sex with her. I developed various fantasy scenarios in which our first seduction might take place, which I’d play, refine, edit and play again.
In one of these scenarios, we were in my flat. We were standing in the hallway between the kitchen and the bedroom, although flashes of Paris and a Chicago which I’d never seen broke in, brasserie windows flanked with skyscrapers and windy canals jostling with the yellow walls. I’d say something witty and suggestive, and Catherine would reply You’ll have to show me or Why don’t you show me? or You’re really going to have to show me that, and then we’d kiss, floating towards my bedroom. In another version, we were somewhere in the country. I’d driven her out in my Fiesta, then drawn up and parked beside a field or wood. I’d have her standing in profile, because she looked better this way, with curly hair half-hiding her cheek. I’d move up close beside her, she’d turn to me, we’d kiss and then we’d end up making love in the Fiesta while treetops full of birds chirped and shrieked in ecstasy.
I never got this second sequence quite down, though, due to the difficulty of manoeuvring us both into the car without bumping our heads or tripping on the belts that always hung out from the doors. And then I’d worry about where I’d parked it, and whether someone might speed round a bend and crash into it like the drive-off guy from Peckham. The other scenario too, the corridor one: as we floated to the bedroom I’d remember there were loads of mouldy coffee cups beside the bed, and that the sheets were old and dirty. If it wasn’t that then it was that the neighbours were right outside and I hadn’t drawn the curtains and they’d start up a conversation through the windows, or-well, something always came along and short-circuited these imaginary seductions, fucked them up. Even my fantasies were plastic, imperfect, unreal.
When Catherine flew into London on the day the Settlement came through, I arrived at the airport just after her flight was due in. I saw from the Arrivals screens that it had landed and I hurried over to the area where the sliding screen doors separate the customs and immigration area from the public terminal. I leant against a rail and watched passengers emerge from these doors. It was interesting. Some of the arriving passengers scanned the waiting faces for relatives, but most weren’t being met. These ones came out carrying some kind of regard to show to the assembled crowd, some facial disposition they’d struck up just before the doors slid open for them. They might be trying to look hurried, as though they were urgently needed because they were very important and their businesses couldn’t run without them. Or they might look carefree, innocent and happy, as though unaware that fifty or sixty pairs of eyes were focused on them, just on them, if only for two seconds. Which of course they weren’t-unaware, I mean. How could you be? The strip between the railings and the doors was like a fashion catwalk, with models acting out different roles, different identities. I leant against the rail, watching this parade: one character after another, all so self-conscious, stylized, false. Other people really were like me; they just didn’t know they were. And they didn’t have eight and a half million pounds.
After a while I tired of watching all these amateur performances and decided to buy a coffee from a small concession a few feet away. It was a themed Seattle coffee bar where you buy caps, lattes and mochas, not coffees. When you order they say Heyy! to you, then they repeat your order aloud, correcting the word large into tall, small into short. I ordered a small cappuccino.
“Heyy! Short cap,” the man said. “Coming up! You have a loyalty card?”
“Loyalty card?” I said.
“Each time you visit us, you get a cup stamped,” he said, handing me a card. It had ten small pictures of coffee cups on it. “When you’ve stamped all ten, you get an extra cup for free. And a new card.”
“But I’m not here that often,” I said.
“Oh, we have branches everywhere,” he told me. “It’s the same deal.”
He stamped the first cup and handed me the cappuccino. Just then someone called my name and I turned round. It was Catherine. She’d cleared customs already and had been standing in the coffee bar all the time I’d been watching the sliding doors.
“Heyy!” I said. I went over and hugged her.
“I tried calling you,” said Catherine as we disentangled, “but your phone’s not working.”