No one else is noticing. Only me.
Because I want something to keep me down here and away from his having left no message and this never properly working out and …
I am down here with my drunk’s head — down in the shelter to keep off disappointments.
Because an alky doesn’t drink St John’s wort, or meditate, or phone a reliable friend, or leave things alone for a bit and relax — an alky worries. Why else would you always need to drink?
Forever.
The cold seeped and stroked around her and there was something too old about it, something beyond a human lifespan, which made it seem unreasonable. She was beginning to shiver. The sense of being shaken by her own body, the chill of shock, seemed to take her back beyond the morning’s examination and uncoil memories she didn’t want.
Why else would I always need to drink?
Already, she had this nervous pitch in her stomach, this straining of something intolerable nuzzling her spine, this repeating fact of emptiness. She was dealing with the symptoms of hope. Hope felt very much the same as emptiness, as panic.
Forever.
I should go. I really should go.
She turned into the flow of travellers and began the last little journey to the surface.
I have to go.
It is late on a Sunday afternoon at the end of a warm autumn. Across London, people are heading for home, for meals, for rest after perhaps the last outdoor weekend of their year.
A Northern Line Tube train is travelling down from King’s Cross. Its carriages are not overfull but most of their seats have been taken.
One car holds a snug assembly of couples, families with children, individuals. They all seem to share this afterglow of tired pleasure. Some hug backpacks on their laps, a few carry sleeping bags. They stand in the wider spaces near the doors, they sit on the long, upholstered benches and face each other across the width of the carriage. And they are quiet.
A very large man is sitting tight up against the glass partition beside an exit. He is asleep.
He is both unusually tall and solidly built. His broad knees and long, substantial feet extend quite a way into the aisle. In every direction, he gives the impression of being only just able to fit. His heavy-looking hands are folded together across his stomach, rising and falling placidly as he sleeps. He is so tall that his head — which leans joltingly against the partition — also almost grazes the ceiling. Although the passengers are wearing coats, scarves, hats — responding to the little shock of winter’s first real cold — the monumental man is in his shirtsleeves. It seems that he is a person of strength and above such things as temperature, weather.
As each station dashes in along the windows, as passengers arrive and leave, as each station creeps and then darts away again, the man keeps sleeping.
Behind him, propped against the window, is a huge square cushion. It is supporting his shoulders, neck and skull. It is new, still wrapped in clear plastic, and made of felt and other soft fabrics. The cushion has been marked out into sections and each one shows a simple picture of an animal, built up in embroidery and cloth. The creatures — beyond the zebra — are quite hard to identify because they have been created mainly to smile and seem reassuring, rather than to reflect any zoological reality. They are illusions to please children.
Like a vast child, the man rests and is peaceful, this peace spreading into the carriage. Everyone inside has decided to follow the invisible rule that a child — of whatever size — should never be disturbed.
No one speaks. Those who leave do so on tiptoe. Those who arrive drop quickly into a nursery gentleness.
Faces calm and smooth, books are read with tiny glances to the sleeper. The wakeful are taking exaggerated care and when they meet each other’s eyes they look happy, they look like people with a happy secret. They rock together with the motion of the carriage. The man rocks, too.
‘Oh, for—’ Jon was apparently rolling across cobbles, this assailing weight above him.
‘Hold still.’
‘What?’
‘I said hold still, you moron.’
Jon realised that both the weight and the voice belonged to Milner while worrying that his coat was going to be ruined and wondering if the lack of pain in his face was due to some kind of numbing hysteria, or the fact that Milner’s blow had been glancing. ‘You fucking maniac.’ It hadn’t felt glancing.
‘That’s good. Go with that.’ Milner was now kneeling astride Jon’s chest — the belly even more alarming in the half-light than usual.
‘You stupid fucking bastard!’ Jon allowed an instant of fury to lever him out from under his attacker. ‘You fucking …!’ And then the passion didn’t stop — it yanked him up, hotly breathless, into a raggedly standing position. ‘You stupid, stupid—’
And for the first time in his life, Jon was wholly furious. He swung fists that had never been guilty of such behaviour and connected with sneering air.
Jon spun round on his heel — the side of his right hand beginning to sting now, along with his right knee, likewise his left cheek — and there was Milner swaying with glossy, early-evening drunkenness.
What the hell is the idiot up to?
At the blind end of the mews they’d just tumbled across: ‘You fucker!’ At the end of the mews was the picturesque Victorian pub. It was once frequented by guardsmen. Now it was tucked away enough and charming enough to host a smattering of celebrities wishing to recreate a London that never was. Drinkers lingering outside the prettily painted front steps and quaint novelty sentry box might not relish an outbreak of violence.
Jon bent forward, hands on his knees, and caught his breath while Milner chuckled wetly. ‘You big pansy, Jon. Gotta take your lumps, you know. It’s the modern way …’ He was enunciating well for someone who was meant to be fighting drunk.
‘You fucking, fucking, shitting … You …’ Jon was hissing now, while trying to get his bearings. ‘What are you trying to do? What, exactly? Destroy me? I’m already destroyed — you’re too late. I’ve been all over bar the fighting for years and — oh, look, we’ve just had the fucking fighting.’ He suspected that he might be sick.
‘I’m saving you, fuckwit.’ Milner patted at Jon’s back with admirably judged inaccuracy. ‘This way, you’re not meeting that naughty girl Lucy and giving her another instalment of the crown jewels, you’ve been waylaid by that terrible old soak Milner and taken one for the team.’
Jon felt Milner’s clammy paws grab briefly at his hips. ‘Get off me.’
Milner stood close behind Jon’s thighs and made jokey thrusts at him. The feeling of that belly pressing and giving as it thumped against Jon’s buttocks was entirely as repellent as intended.
Jon broke loose and stood. ‘You …’
Impossible to call him a cunt, I refuse to associate him with … I’m not bloody having that used as an insult, but so help me …
He settled for, ‘You fat, useless prick.’ And then attempted to shake out his coat, dust himself down. ‘Prick. Cock. Dick. You are a dick.’
Milner laughed like a pantomime devil and murmured, ‘We’ll nip into the bar — best of mates now — nothing like a little anal action to soothe you public-school survivors, put you at ease. And I will buy you a drink to make up for my joke that went wrong. There’s no one about who’s looking, nobody paying the wrong kind of attention. The bar’s preoccupied with tonight’s touch of glamour — the place is mildly famous for hosting the extremely famous: caps doffed and come in for an offbeat pint in Good Olde Lahndahn surroundings …’