Your aim is to not mind anything any more.
You wish to go away.
In every sense, you wish to go far away and have no intention of ever coming back.
Meg had got and then stayed drunk.
It had taken her more than a year to retrieve herself.
Blinds drawn and a minicab to fetch the bottles when you get too scared to send yourself outside, too ashamed in the off-licence. Selling the telly. Selling all manner of odds and ends that your parents kept and cared for and left you so that you could love them — not love death — so you could remember earlier, gentle days.
They left you their house, or you’d have wound up homeless. And even then, you nearly drank the place.
Only a whisker away from the full drop — and no net there to catch you. There’s no such thing as a net to catch you, not any more.
And you don’t deserve one.
Silly cow, you are.
There’s no such thing as anything.
Silly cow, she was, old Maggie.
But I’m sillier.
Letting her almost kill me.
And, since then, Meg had agreed it was wise not to dwell — several people had mentioned this — wise not to dwell on politics and the meaninglessness of hope. She was properly sober now and wanted to stay that way. So she tried not to think of politics, not in any form, songs included.
I fill my head with other things.
I just collect all the good stuff that I see and I save it up and write it down and I try to be grateful. I bear it in mind.
A couple stand in Shepherd Market, a corner of Mayfair that harmlessly pretends to be a village square. The pair are just outside a restaurant and may have eaten a meal together, although it is too late for lunch and too early for dinner. They have the look of people who are interested in each other, who are attentive.
The man is taller than the woman by a quite significant amount and so when they embrace her head meets the height of his heart, or thereabouts. Their attempt to hold each other is a little clumsy initially, the man trying to stoop at first, to shape himself both around and away from the woman, perhaps in the hope of avoiding excessive contact. He may not wish to seem overly forceful, he may not wish to feel overly forced. The woman stays still, perhaps unsure of her response, although there is a calm about her which suggests she is concentrating, perhaps finishing a decision, or pressing herself to particularly take note.
Thereafter, the man straightens his back and their bodies meet, fit, they clasp. Their movements are slow and gentle to a degree that suggests a knowledge of previous injury, or mutual illness. Their hands dab and pat, as if they are hoping to offer reassurance after some past calamity. Equally, they may be attempting to furnish support as some present calamity runs its course.
The little courtyard is quiet around them. No one arrives to visit the stationer’s, or the parcels office, the small cafés, the restaurant. The couple’s privacy is undisturbed, is extending to touch the prettily painted brickwork that confines them, keeps them safe. Their affection is reflected in a number of windows, an echo of care.
At the end of their embrace — which is heralded by more dabbing, smoothing, a hesitant stroke at the woman’s hair — the two part by a hand’s breadth and then pause once more. They seem puzzled.
The woman reaches up to cradle the man’s head between her palms, slips her fingers loosely over his ears and this causes a visible relaxation that seems to pour downward and into his spine. His face takes on the softness of a sleeper’s. She then stands on tiptoe to kiss his forehead and he bows mildly to receive her.
Then they let go, the one from the other. They withdraw.
For a moment the man looks above the woman’s head, stares far beyond the high and nicely maintained and drowsy Georgian brick which surrounds him. His expression is one of deep, deep surprise. He has the smile of a man who has stolen something wonderful and not been caught, found something wonderful and not been seen, been given something wonderful and got away, got away, run away with it.
The woman watches while her companion is happy and apparently finds his happiness surprising.
Something about the man’s condition means that she takes his hand.
Jon was taking the long way round as he headed back to Tothill Street and a meeting he didn’t want. Birdcage Walk, then Buckingham Gate, then Victoria Street — that still didn’t add too many minutes, but it was something. Milner was going to be tricky and Jon couldn’t handle tricky today, in part because, as he’d told Rowan last night … As he’d said … He couldn’t quite seem able to recall his words absolutely, but …
I didn’t tell him about the Natural History Museum and I should have.
A place to meet women, I suppose.
It’s not that.
I would imagine that individuals do stroll around there and possibly seek out this or that person who seems to share an interest in hawkmoths, or glass models of sea anemones. An opening conversational gambit could be offered — ‘Do you like that moth, or are you staring at your own reflection in the glass of the case and thinking you are not at all who you were and that many of the changes have been for the worse?’
I didn’t go there to meet women.
The first time, I was simply in South Kensington on a Saturday afternoon and I’d wandered in and been enveloped by the hell of kickingly bored children and of squeakingly overinterested children and the intensified hell of French teenagers. It was rather relaxing. Everything was louder than my head.
And I loved the small display on human evolution — our sad forebears posed dimly behind glass: life-sized and naked and unable to suggest any yearning to use tools, cooperate, learn above themselves, stand upright and prosper. They seemed endearingly devoid of any aspiration.
It became a quite innocent habit to go there for lunch breaks. I wasn’t establishing an alibi in advance.
Jon paused in sight of Buckingham Palace and thought once again how disappointing the building was. It always put him in mind of a novelty cake, or somewhere that would have bad room service.
He watched the wide and blue-white delicacy of a spring sky, drifting massively behind the solid pediments of the east façade. He felt the moment when the building came loose from its moorings and seemed to fly, while the high race of clouds locked in place and stood above him, watching him back.
Mustn’t be sick.
He tried smiling at a pair of older women tourists, but his expression must have failed him. They turned tail and walked briskly the way they’d come, rather than pass him.
Jon fumbled at his collar, intending to take off his tie, and then realised he wasn’t wearing one — that sensation of constriction was therefore entirely illusory and should be treated as such.
Like the palace. Like the sky. Like the progress of my evolution.
He started walking again.
Maybe once a month, if I could, I’d rush out at lunchtime, flag a cab and head for the museum, the warm stone façade. All those mad sculptures of animals, reptiles, the living and the extinct: the monstrous swarm of life carved all over the exterior — terracotta gargoyles defending evolution’s temple — I grew fond of it.
I liked walking within work built to last, effort drawn from hope and a need to progress, a joy about it, inspiration drawn from fact … It made me feel furious at certain levels, of course — furious and desperate. But also content.