Which you can’t help feeling on your skin.
And in the end you say things to each other.
I will meet you.
You say that and he says that and then it’s out loud and in the open and so it might happen.
Which is the sort of thing that can make you disappointed.
I think maybe that it always does. Always is the same as forever.
I will meet you.
Serious sweet.
A man sits at the foot of a staircase inside Bond Street Tube Station. He is slightly an obstacle for commuters who want to make the turn for access to trains heading roughly west for Ealing Broadway and West Ruislip, or else the turn for those that head roughly east towards Leytonstone and so forth. This is a busy station at a busy time and the weather up above is hot, violently sunny. This is a Central Line stop — that particular route noted for its sticky air in summer, baking carriages, its general discomfort. Passengers look at each other as if they are both being an imposition and being imposed upon.
The man is not exactly begging, but he is also not a traveller. He is sitting with his legs crossed tidily, a soft bag at his side and a baseball cap upturned beside one knee. He is not asking for money, he is simply being the series of startling absences which is himself. Each of his arms ends just below what might have been a functional elbow at some other time. Thinned stubs of limb can be glimpsed through the loose sleeves of an oversized T-shirt. There is scar tissue, reddened skin, the signs of aftermath. The man’s head is bald and covered, like his face, with grafted skin — it looks flushed and painful, it sits in sections and planes which do not meet in quite the usual way for a face. His ears are of the customary sort, as is his nose, but his eyelids aren’t quite practical.
People pass him with expressions which suggest that he has injured them, or that he is a type of intolerable puzzle — this man who must at some point emerge into bright light with wounded skin and no eyelids, who must function without hands, who must be as hot and thirsty and discomfited as they are and yet also beyond them, peering in at them from some raw and unthinkable space.
A woman in her forties pauses against the flow of the crowd, bends and speaks to the man whose age it is impossible to guess. Age is one of the things burned away from him at another time and in another place, both impossible to imagine. She talks to him, but also reaches out her purse and folds what is probably money into her hand. Their chatting seems separate from his hooking one arm under his bag’s handle and lifting it and her placing what is probably money inside.
It is possible to hear him say, ‘I’m just not doing very well at the moment.’
16:42
JON WAS CARRYING soup out to his daughter. She didn’t want the soup, but also hadn’t eaten all day, apparently, and so he’d heated it anyway, in her dismaying kitchen.
Which is not a galley-style kitchen, it is more a 1970s caravan-style kitchen. Galley is altogether too kind and jolly a word for it. Becky always intended to rip it out and upgrade — maybe now she will.
But I mustn’t suggest domestic renovations as something she could do to take her mind off her current … Even though I’d swap a new work surface and a halfway decent sink for Terry Harper any day.
Jon had taken a cab to his daughter’s place, pausing at the first decent supermarket he saw to let himself buy groceries. That would be necessary, he knew — the bringing of food from outside. Jon felt of no use to Rebecca when she was happy, but was glad that — because he understood being sad — he could be helpful in showing her how to accommodate sadness gently.
The first time you’re hit in your heart, you stop wanting … Because you can’t have what you do still need, because it’s been taken away, your mind and your body together assume that the rest of the world will be inadequate as a replacement for your one dear thing. You no longer want to dress yourself, or wash, because you no longer intend to be out in that vastly disappointing and punishing world. You forget to buy milk. Or, indeed, cartons of ready-made soup that will keep you going when you’re stuck in the worst of the impact.
I do remember how the process runs — she’s at the start of it and that’s horrible.
But one gets through it. One does survive.
In a manner of speaking.
His mind was filled with the idea that even if he managed not to say something impolitic, he was going to drop the soup tray. He was anticipating a fast-approaching future in which he failed to control the spoon, the bowl, the scalding liquid (organic chicken and vegetable) and the thin slice of proper wholemeal bread and the plate for the thin slice of proper wholemeal bread. In the mid-air ahead of him, Jon could almost see his care of her spilling up and then horribly down in a violent mess that caused damage.
But he padded cautiously and safely onwards, in stockinged feet because of her ludicrous wood floors — easier to bruise than peaches, more vulnerable than intelligent and attractive young women’s hopes — and then he stood by the sofa where Becky was resting. He’d persuaded her to take a bath and now she was dressing-gowned and snuggled and warm-pink-skinned and resting on her side with a cushion bunched under her head. Her hands were curled close to her mouth and seemed wounded, although they were perfect. She was a twenty-eight-year-old who’d recently dropped the twenty.
My girl. My wee girl.
The sight of her sang in him and felt like honey.
To be a proper dad, you do have to be useful.
And, of course and naturally, seeing her pain felt like having his sternum opened.
Opened so I can display where I keep my selfishness.
‘Darling, are you awake? I do think, if you could — not to be annoying — that you might try some of this. It’s just soup and not much, although you can have more.’
She reached and patted his calf, then simply rested her hand there against his trouser leg. He didn’t quite know what this meant.
‘I know. It’s horrible. I do … Your freezer, by the way — I filled the freezer. Do you want me to call someone at work?’ The hand curled round his shin and held on, as if he might manage to be an anchor in the current disturbance. ‘If you could maybe … prop yourself up a bit and I’ll sit next to you and we can … I’ll get another spoon and we can share the bloody soup, if you’d …’
And a wail rose from her that could have raised one from him, too, but this wasn’t his day for wailing. ‘It’s OK … No, Becky. I promise. It is. It will be.’ He disengaged his shin, while delivering a stream of, ‘It’sOKit’sOKit’sOK.’
‘It’s not.’
‘Well, no …’ Jon stepped out to set the tray down on the table behind him and then returned to kneel by her and to let her roll and cling to him, sob tight against him. And this was dreadful, but also — well, as he’d said — OK. You did this bit and then you dealt with the next bit and you continued to be alive. ‘Baby girl, really. It’s all right. I’m here.’
Her clutch round his waist strengthened and he cupped the back of her head in one of his hands. Under his palm there would be the dark swim of bad ideas, the trouble in her head, the inheritance of sensitivity with which he’d undoubtedly cursed her. Becky’s mother was more, as one might term it, emotionally robust. ‘I’m here.’