I headed down the Kentish Town Road toward Camden, so wrapped up in heroic melancholy that I nearly got myself run over at the junction with Prince of Wales Road. Rather shaken, I stumbled back onto the curb, dazed by a passing flash of yellow light and a blurred obscenity. Fuck that, I thought, and crossed at a different place, sending me down a different road, toward a different evening.
Camden was, as ever, trying to prove that there was still a place for hippie throwback losers in the 1990s, and I skirted the purposeful crowds and ended up in a back road instead.
And it was there that I saw Alice. When I saw her I felt my heart lurch, and I stopped in my tracks. She was walking along the road, dressed in a long skirt and dark blouse, hands in pockets. She appeared to be alone and was wandering down the street much as I was, looking around but in a world of her own. It was too welcome a coincidence not to take advantage of and, careful not to surprise her, I crossed the road and met her on the other side.
We spent the next three hours in a noisy, smoky pub. The only seats were very close together, crowded round one corner of a table in the center of the room. We drank a lot, but the alcohol didn’t seem to function in the way it usually did. I didn’t get drunk but simply felt warmer and more relaxed. The reeling crowds of locals gave us ample ammunition to talk about, until we were going fast enough not to need any help at all. We just drank, and talked, and talked and drank, and the bell for last orders came as a complete surprise.
When we walked out of the pub some of the alcohol kicked suddenly in, and we stumbled in unison on an unexpected step, to fall together laughing and shh-ing. Without even discussing it we knew that neither of us felt like going home yet, and we ended up down by the canal instead. We walked slowly past the backs of houses and speculated what might be going on beyond the curtains, we looked up at the sky and pointed out stars, we listened to the quiet splashes of occasional ducks coming into land. After about fifteen minutes we found a bench and sat down for a cigarette.
When she’d put her lighter back in her pocket Alice’s hand fell near mine. I was very conscious of it being there, of the smallness of the distance mine would have to travel, and I smoked left-handed so as not to move it. I wasn’t forgetting myself. I still knew Nancy existed, knew how my life was set up. But I didn’t move my hand.
Then, like a chess game of perfect simplicity and naturalness, the conversation took us there.
I said that work seemed to be slackening off, after the busy period of the last couple of months. Alice said that she hoped it didn’t drop off too much. So that I can continue to afford expensive computers that don’t do quite what I expect? I asked.
“No,” she replied, “so that I can keep coming to see you.” I turned and looked at her. She looked nervous but defiant, and her hand moved the inch that put it on top of mine.
“You might as well know,” she said. “If you don’t already. There are three important things in my life at the moment. My bike, my stories, and you.”
People don’t change their lives: evenings do. There are nights that have their own momentum, their own purpose and agenda. They come from nowhere and take people with them. That’s why you can never understand, the next day, quite how you came to do what you did. Because it wasn’t you who did it. It was the evening.
My life stopped that evening, and started up again, and everything was a different color.
We sat on the bench for another two hours, wrapped up close to each other. We admitted when we’d first thought about each other, and laughed quietly about the distance we’d kept. After weeks of denying what I felt, of simply not realizing, I couldn’t let go of her hand now that I had it. It felt so extraordinary to be that close to her, to feel the texture of her skin on mine and her nails against my palm. People change when you get that near to them, become much more real. If you’re already in love with them then they expand to fill the world.
In the end we got on to Nancy. We were bound to, sooner or later. Alice asked how I felt about her, and I tried to explain, tried to understand myself. In the end we let the topic lapse.
“It’s not going to be easy,” I said, squeezing her hand. I was thinking glumly to myself that it might not happen at all. Knowing the way Nancy would react, it looked like a very high mountain to climb. Alice glanced at me and then turned back toward the canal.
A big cat was sitting there, peering out over the water. First moving myself even closer to Alice, so that strands of her hair tickled against my face, I made a noise at the cat. It turned to look at us and then ambled over toward the bench.
“I do like a friendly cat,” I said, reaching out to stroke its head.
Alice smiled and then made a noise of her own. I was a bit puzzled that she wasn’t looking at the cat when she made it, until I saw that another was making its way out of the shadows. This one was smaller and more lithe, and walked right up to the bench. I was, I suppose, still a little befuddled with drink, and when Alice turned to look in a different direction it took me a moment to catch up. A third cat was coming down the canal walk in our direction, followed by another.
When a fifth emerged from the bushes behind our bench, I turned and stared at Alice. She was already looking at me, a smile on her lips like the first one of hers I’d seen. She laughed at the expression on my face and then made her noise again. The cats around us sat to attention, and two more appeared from the other direction, almost trotting in their haste to join the collection. We were now so outnumbered that I felt rather beset.
When the next one appeared I had to ask.
“Alice, what’s going on?”
She smiled very softly, like a painting, and leaned her head against my shoulder.
“A long time ago,” she said, as if making up a story for a child, “none of this was here. There was no canal, no streets and houses, and all around was trees, and grass.” One of the cats round the bench briefly licked one of its paws, and I saw another couple padding out of the darkness toward us. “The big people have changed all of that. They’ve cut down the trees, and buried the grass, and they’ve even leveled the ground. ‘There used to be a hill here, a hill that was steep on one side but gentle on the other. They’ve taken all that away, and made it look like this. It’s not that it’s so had. It’s just different. The cats still remember the way it was.”
It was a nice story, and yet another indication of how we thought in the same way. But it couldn’t be true, and it didn’t explain all the cats around us. There were now about twenty, and somehow that was too many. Not for me, but for common sense. Where the hell were they all coming from?
“But they didn’t have cats in those days,” I said nervously. “Not like this. This kind of cat is modern, surely. An import, or crossbreed.”
She shook her head. “That’s what they say,” she said, “and that’s what people think. They’ve always been here. It’s just that people haven’t always known.”
“Alice, what are you talking about?” I was beginning to get really spooked by the number of cats milling softly around. They were still coming, in ones and twos, and now surrounded us for yards around. The stretch of canal was dark apart from soft glints of moonlight off the water, and the lines of the banks and walkway seemed somehow stark, sketched out, as if modeled on a computer screen. They’d been rendered well and looked convincing, but something wasn’t quite right about the way they sat together, as if some angle was one degree out.