He released himself into the little shock of darkness, night. There was a languid straggle of smokers loitering outside at the foot of the steps, murmuring in bands and clouds of conversation and carcinogenic breath.
When I walked away from the woman, there was this guy sitting on the wall beside the jerk chicken place. He was smoking. Off duty from the kitchen. I knew him — he’s called Samson, he’s a nice person. We chat. I’ve tried his chicken. But that evening he sucked his teeth at me and laid this long stare down against me and he said, ‘Ought to be ashamed.’
And I couldn’t tell who he meant should be ashamed.
I didn’t know who he meant.
I’m out there in my ex-council bedsit at the Junction, because that is where I chose to be, but I don’t have to stay … I have access to other possibilities and could leave at any time. But living in the Junction — really living there — has to do with having no access to choice, about having only frailties in most directions; it’s about mildew and noise and lousy window frames and botched repairs and no repairs and policemen giving out crime numbers, so that victims can keep an eye on their ongoing crimes, this daily cascade of smaller and larger risk. I am not unaware of this. And at any time I can step away and leave it. So I don’t really live in the Junction. I’m playing a game, acting out some kind of purposeless mortification in a scruffy patch of SW9 — tough enough, but not so very tough, not too harsh an imposition …
And, conversely, I have submitted myself to the Junction as if it can only be a punishment — but it’s a home to people and must be loved, at least liked and sometimes loved by its residents …
I am a patronising charlatan.
Oh, and Christ knows, if I hold on for a couple of years the whole bloody postcode will really commit to being upwardly mobile — the whole of London being upwardly mobile, the cost of each metropolitan square yard of earth becoming as miraculous as unicorns and mercy. And the Junction’s residents are trying to improve it, so as soon as they succeed they will be cleared and then replaced with much more palatable people. Like me. People who do not quite have to live in places — who can always manage to investigate other options.
I’m permanently elsewhere. I’m an elsewhere man.
It doesn’t make me a bad person.
It’s all of the other failings — they do that.
Samson was right.
And I did know who he meant.
And I ought to be ashamed.
And I am.
Of everything, something, myself.
When Jon started walking, his feet didn’t cope with the cobbles as well as they should. To anybody watching he’d look drunk — like a man who’d thrown it all away and then got wasted.
21:52
MEG, I CAN’T talk and I don’t think I wish to talk at this time and I can’t meet you tonight. I am very sorry. I can’t do this. I can’t do any of this and should not have begun what I would be unable to pursue and please forgive me. It’s for the best. I never intended to make you angry or sad and I know that I have and I regret it. You should never be hurt. Please don’t pursue this. I am so sorry. X
22:50
IT WAS BEST to expect your disaster — then you could be ready.
Meg was in Pont Street. She wasn’t exactly lost, it was more that she knew exactly where she was and couldn’t leave. She was walking and walking unstoppably, back and forth between the tall ranks of salmon-pink mansions, the too-much terracotta and red brick: apartments stacked up underneath their Dutch gables, Victorian window glass showing and showing and showing high rooms full of brightness and there’s fresh pain on the railings … no, fresh paint on the railings … fresh everywhere … Everything here was expected to be like new — as good, or as bad as new.
I was sure that he’d end up doing this.
Brass nameplates at front doors had a rime of old polish around them after years of pressing care.
I was expecting it.
The rub of hard attention has left a stain along the brickwork — it’s slightly like a greenish or greyish moss, or a smeared unease.
But I wanted to find out that I was wrong and stupid and worrying over nothing because that’s what I always do. I wanted to be me and love a clean man.
He was supposed to be a man who didn’t fucking …
Being sad about a man … I’m not going to again.
It ends badly.
I won’t.
And fuck you and fuck you and fuck you, Jon Sigurdsson.
I bet you could afford to live here.
So go ahead and why don’t you fucking live here.
You go and have everything you fucking want.
Jon Sigurdsson, you don’t have me.
Jon Sigurdsson, you don’t want me.
No one would want to live here, though — not if you were sensible, not even if you could — you’d have to suspend too much of your disbelief, ignore everything but the prettiness you came home to. Although Meg, of course, does not especially come home to prettiness — at least she does her best, she is a work in progress and so is her home — and so she can only make guesses about prettiness and how it would be, having no clear idea herself and — fuckit fuckit fuckit — she had this … There was this …
Eventually she would have to go back to the Hill and her street and her front door and … It wasn’t a good place to be. It would have …
His letters were inside it.
She was going to open the door and she would know they were there and she’d have to forget them or else she would be in this pain — this … It was like somebody reaching inside you and doing what you hadn’t asked or wanted or needed and what you did not deserve. Even you did not deserve it.
I won’t sleep. And If I don’t sleep then I’ll be … I’ll need …
All around her there must be old money and new money, wrapped up snug indoors and being happy, or being — you never knew, but it generally happened one way or the other — being junked up, or drunk, or married, or living with someone, or being with someone in dangerous ways — all of the usual mess and disaster, like anywhere else, but with nicer carpet, nicer worries, much more expensive fixes for much more expensive mistakes.
He was too scared and once you’re frightened then your plans all come apart. I fucking know that, I fucking know, but I get scared and I was trying to hold it together, I was holding it together, I was being better than I am, better than me.
I did that for him.
She’d been up and down these few Knightsbridge blocks, making a rat track, wearing this furrow between the point where Pont Street was forced to cross over Sloane Street and the junction where the pavement lost its name and had to be called Beauchamp Place.
And he fucking liked me. He said it. He said. He said love. There was … He said.
He didn’t even phone me — he ran away by text.
Meg didn’t seem able to go any further than Sloane Street.
I can’t go back to not sleeping.