But that train will not be her train.
Still, it will be all right.
But it’s not the correct train.
But it will take her home.
The pair are persistent as the woman’s fear.
The woman stops sobbing and is stilled, only fretful and slightly irritated by reality as it fails her.
The pair move aside as they undertake to wait for the woman’s train. They talk to each other softly. They say, ‘Leaving her like that … Everyone ignoring her like that …’
‘Disgusting …’
‘My mother didn’t raise me like that.’
They stay with the woman until her unsatisfactory but necessary train arrives. They make sure that she is on-board it and that she can manage from hereon and will be OK. And then they change their minds and they climb on-board with her and are taken away.
Rather than return to Tothill Street, Jon struck out for Birdcage Walk. He dodged along, slightly stooped, as if live fire were passing overhead. He then cut across and into St James’s Park, where it seemed he could straighten.
And he wanted to tread on grass, to be in the care of trees and green shades. And he needed to — dear God — really did need to — sod it — just where no one would exactly see — urgently — he really did need to vomit.
I should be glad this is simply nausea, rather than nausea plus migraine. The migraines make everything seem to be viewed through a translucent screen of Clarice Cliff. And I hate Clarice Cliff — dreadful pottery. Additionally, she looked like a stubby man in half-hearted drag.
Not that it isn’t sexist of me to criticise her on those grounds — I wouldn’t comment on a male ceramicist in that manner.
I’m not aware, actually, that I know what a single male ceramicist has looked like.
Oh, dear Christing fuck …
This was more a process of heaving and spitting than actual vomiting: maudlin convulsions going on in his torso and producing a watery mouth and sourness and no real improvement.
He was clammy and shaky after.
I need a shower. Must find a moment to nip down and use the office showers. I need to be made more palatable. Or palatable at all.
But he supposed he’d feel cooler and steadier, might walk it off — whatever it might be — here beyond the breadth of plane trees and in amongst the blown daffodils and vacant deckchairs, here with the scent of spring turf being good and clean and animal and rising forcefully, having a strength about it that he could aim to borrow in some manner.
Here and heading for the gloomy pelicans — out of their proper place and ugly, sad-faced.
No, but the overall effect of the park is cheerfuclass="underline" the stridency of blossom, tumults of leaves — visibly, almost visibly, unfurling and so bright. They possess that fiery green.
And if the green is still green, still comes back after winter, after trampling … If it endures …
Jon considered hiring a deckchair, but guessed sitting on one might make him feel too folded over. He was trying to avoid that position.
Besides, I can’t stay long — I’d be a mug to pay the hire fee for ten minutes.
Being a mug the required thing these days, of course. Britain is the land of mug punters, fat smokers, of underqualified assistance arriving too late in unmarked vans — full and undisclosed charges payable in advance.
He could have tried moving further up and finding a bench, but he decided — swiftly and borderline violently, an unwarranted savagery in his need — not to do that.
Instead, he sat down in his new corduroys — well, they are supposed to be for country use — then he scooped out his phone, turned it off. The thing throbbed once in farewell before surrendering, going dark. Jon returned it to his jacket and parcelled himself up cross-legged on the ground, peered into the grass. He picked out the tiny paths between stems, the miniature clearings and overhung passages. Ant Land geographies.
I would do this for hours when I was a kid. The scale of it cheered me — something smaller than I was — and I was small, small, small. And the overall ambience was restorative.
It comes to you, kisses you, the livingness of things — you have only to wait for it.
That was why he loved the garden so much, the inexplicable garden in Bishopsgate.
‘Nobody lives in Bishopsgate.’
‘I do.’
For the whole of yesterday’s sweet evening Jon had been sitting with Rowan Carmichael in the garden. In Bishopsgate. Where no one was supposed to live.
‘I know you do, Rowan. That’s what I said, I told them. I said Rowan Carmichael lives in Bishopsgate, that’s why I go there in order to visit him at his home — because that’s where his home is located … It’s address fascism all the time, these days. You can’t utter an unwelcome postcode and not be forever cast out. And you’re central. No one could say you’re not central …’
Rowan had smiled at him, indicating tranquil disapproval, which was an established speciality with Rowan.
His disapproval is why I seek him out, of course, and would like him to be my friend, would hope that he is my friend. I am aware that Rowan is aware that I am lacking; I therefore find him to be wise and therefore need him.
Who wouldn’t want to have the company of a wise and remarkable man?
Also a kind man.
And Bishopsgate really is central and has excellent transport links — it simply seems unlikely, that’s all. Not blighted. Not like the Junction. Where I choose to be.
Nobody lives in the Junction.
Lots of people who are nobody as far as anybody who is anybody might be concerned … They live in the Junction. They live in the parts of Camberwell which are without beauty in the monochrome air that blew on along Coldharbour Lane and across John Major’s childhood, that made him too Brixton and not quite right. Wise in spasms, but not quite right.
I fit in there.
To a degree.
Rowan had pottered to the kitchen to fetch biscuits: shop-bought and not great. He pottered now — had an old man’s walk — and Jon could not remember when that had started to be the case.
I am aware — I think I am aware — that Rowan is fond of me despite my failings and that he is therefore remarkable. He has my affection and respect, both of which are useless. Poor Rowan — a man to whom time has happened.
Gets us all in the end — if we’re lucky.
It did still surprise Jon when somebody close to him thought he was being foolish, but did not allow this to rouse their contempt: their shouting, threats, or — for that matter — the withdrawal of their sexual favours, should the somebody be his wife.
Ex-wife.
Somehow, she’s always my wife, though — more now than before.
And they always were favours, the marital encounters involving sex: never gifts to exchange, agreements, negotiations to achieve a greater good — never the things I have guessed about in letters I have sent by agreement to strangers, never what I have tried to describe until it can become perfected.
In love, I could currently pass the theory paper with most colours flying.