‘It’s not that …’ Jon had stretched his arm slightly behind him to keep a grip round Rowan’s knuckles and hold on. He’d kept his face hidden and been subject to irregular breaths.
A person of any quality could stop himself from polluting an emptied garden with his own self-centred grief.
Over the wall was a construction site, stilled by the evening. For most of the previous year it had oppressed the little sanctuary with successive dins and dust storms that rendered everything distant and tainted, laid a filmy scum on the water.
The heart is a pool which must be cleansed.
The new building planted next door was tall and cast an unfortunate shadow. There was nothing to be done.
Filya died while the disturbance, the intrusion, was at its worst.
Jon kneeling and eventually sobbing next to Rowan, as if he were begging for something, but he couldn’t say what, as if he were on his knees for a confession. He hadn’t been able say anything.
I want her last time in the garden to have been nice, pretty, lovely, and it wasn’t.
Jon had clung to Rowan’s fist and, finally, had managed, ‘I have to keep on, but I can’t, but I have to … I thought I had to, but I do no good. It does no good. I stayed in, because I think, I thought I have to … I can’t …’
And Jon had felt the heave of his ribs, his muscles, beneath this dreadful burden, this minor tearing in his heart, and had understood he was walking out into wilderness.
It had been quite bad.
‘This girl, woman, person … I didn’t mean her … and now she is and … There’s all of this other … It’s all happening at once, all together, and I’m too small for it … I’m …’ Weeping — there had been a bit of weeping and a reversion to what he had left of his earliest accent. As his words fought to emerge — hot and breaking — he’d sounded to himself like the child who’d left Nairn: a boy filled up with a cleverness and finding no comfort in it.
It had been his cleverness that made him unsuitable for Society Street. It made him have to leave. It spoiled his character with fraudulent self-belief, long before he’d put on the posh blazer, learned the appropriate slang.
Being clever was supposed to help. It’s still supposed to help.
An odd storm in a garden — that’s what he’d been.
Being in and of the world is supposed to be unavoidable and that means you find out about it and you plant it with sweet things and hopes and … confessions …
An ugly fit of spinning shook his head and then subsided.
He coughed. He sniffed.
He did feel a bit better now, here in this big garden, everybody’s garden — here in St James’s Park. He was better — in some ways, recovered. Apart from the recurrent throwing up.
And he had explained his position — some of it — to Rowan and it hadn’t seemed — some of it — insoluble. With Rowan there and listening it had appeared to be a story one could tell.
Although it would be interpreted as a cautionary tale. I am not walking into wilderness, I am running.
No.
It’s not that.
The park reasserted itself: tourists, gusty sunshine, his own longer-than-useful limbs.
I can sit on the grass and there is blossom and a luminous green in the April leaves which is compelling, such a mercy, so kind and — even so — I am running into wilderness.
Here it is. It’s always here, the wilderness. Maybe the people who like and want to make more of it, maybe they’re right.
Here it is. The very place to make an old boy run.
Here it is.
He turned his phone back on.
A man is kneeling in a quiet afternoon shopping arcade. Sun shines. The man is a busker, has his sweatbanded and slightly exotic hat upturned before him to catch donations, has weather-proof clothes and a demeanour intended to be engaging. He is in his twenties, perhaps something older. He is playing a saxophone, holding it high to be sure that it clears the ground. His posture seems slightly strained, but his face is happy and intent.
He is offering a rendition of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ with absolute clarity. He is at the feet of a small boy who is caught, it would seem perpetually, between wonder at the instrument’s large sound and his urge to press his fingers against the glimmer of its bell, to peer into the breathy depth of that.
A couple, plump and comfortable together, stand just behind the child. He is most likely their son. They are enjoying his enjoyment. They are also a touch embarrassed by their situation. It is unclear whether they or the child have requested the tune. Probably the kneeling in supplication has been added as a flourish by the musician. The child appears imperious about his treat, taking these signs of obeisance as his natural right.
Pedestrians pass the scene without pausing. Heads do not turn as a child is attended to specially and pleased. This happens to children quite often. If he were an adult, the interactions taking place would be more difficult and complex. He is perhaps being ignored by others older than himself, because they are jealous of him, or else as an effort on their part to avoid nostalgia.
15:00
MEG WAS HAVING a late lunch, or early tea. She wasn’t meeting anyone.
I am by myself. Apart from some dogs. And apart from some people.
But not one of them is anything at all to do with me.
She had caught the bus that took her home and then ended up allowing herself to loiter and be a bit cold outside the community café round the corner from her house. She was sipping a coffee, because she didn’t feel especially like eating. She also didn’t feel like spending the fag end of the day haunting her flat.
Bastard.
What I feel like doing, obviously, is making a slightly unhappy situation worse. Why not threaten myself with chucking it all in, giving up?
I am already miserable, so why not be really despairing.
Fretting over what I even mean by ‘it all’ will set me up wonderfully well for when we do meet.
Because it is still our plan to meet — only we’re going to do it all later. Not now.
Whatever ‘it all’ means.
Everything is going to happen later and not now — the usual.
I will meet you, but sorry not right now …
The usual.
But I can trust the idea of it.
I have to.
I have decided to.
You have to trust something, here and there, and I have decided to trust that our plan really is a plan.
Friday afternoons were unpleasant enough. And here she was, having a coffee she could have made in her own kitchen for no charge.
No — be fair — I couldn’t have made a cappuccino. I lack that particular skill.
Among others.
You know, this would, this truly would be a lot easier if I weren’t such a whiny cow.
I should just have stayed in at work — said there’d been a change of plans.