‘You should get one of them, gobshite. You might as well get something for free.’
‘I don’t want to think about eating thirty of these between now and September. Look at it. They should be dropping fried bread on Iraq instead of bombs. Far deadlier.’
‘You will eat them, though. I’ve seen you eat twice that many. Chuck us a napkin.’
‘Yes — but I don’t want to plan on it. It’s a commitment thing. You’re married, you wouldn’t understand.’
My palate was sleepy and inert at that time in the morning and I liked to shock it with English mustard on the sausage and Tabasco sauce on the scrambled egg. That tingle was the most reliably pleasurable feature of my entire life at that time. Sometimes I accidentally overdosed, and the mustard on the roof of my mouth gave me the feeling that someone was removing my nasal hair with a blowtorch. It made it painful to talk, so when Tom asked me what my news was, I was telegraphic in my replies. ‘Not much,’ I said, ‘uncle died.’
‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’ He paused, realising that his consolations had exceeded my grief. ‘Your uncle?’
‘Patrick. Writer. Lived in the States. Hadn’t seen him in years.’ The burning sensation had mellowed into a tolerable buzz.
‘I always forget you’re a Yank,’ said Tom.
‘Yeah, me too.’
‘You don’t seem so upset.’
‘You know me, I keep it all locked up inside.’
*
Later that morning, I returned a guest to reception and walked back up the stairs to the seventh floor to find that dawn had happened: London was bathed in a greyish light, as unflattering as the neon tubes in the newsroom. From the seventh-floor landing I watched a Hammersmith train labouring silently through a veil of drizzle.
I breathed on the glass of the window and rubbed off the mist with my sleeve. It seemed odd that until recently Patrick and I had been inhabiting the same planet. But we had: Ionia wasn’t Never-Never Land, it was over there — three thousand miles west of the kebab shops outside Shepherd’s Bush station.
I went back to the newsroom and told Wendy I was feeling ill. Something had been threatening me for days with symptoms that were almost indistinguishable from the disorienting effects of night shifts. I had the ghostly sensation of being at one remove from my own body, as though I were trying to operate it by remote control.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You look a bit peaky.’
That’s funny coming from you, I thought. In spite of all those oranges, she had the night worker’s vampiric pallor. I suspected that she flew home at dawn and went to sleep in a box of dirt. ‘I wondered if I could go home early,’ I said.
‘That should be okay. Just check Fergus is all right for the seven o’clock bulletin.’
As I travelled back home on the underground in my sunglasses, a deep gloom settled over me. Patrick dead.
I never slept well after night shifts, and I was dreading lying awake through the morning, so I took two of the Temazepam that Laura had left in the bathroom cabinet along with a travel-size pot of moisturiser. I don’t know if it was the flu, or the pills, or something more deep-seated still, but I slept right through the day and woke up at 3 a.m. the following morning. I was feverish and confused. I wasn’t really thinking in any accepted sense of the word: I felt as though I was being made to watch clips from a movie about my life called Damien March: The Low Points. At that hour, and in that state, it seemed to have been nothing but wrong turns. I was thirty-five — which seems young now, but didn’t then — without anything I could call a relationship, and doing a job that I didn’t enjoy. Equally, of course, I wasn’t destitute, disabled or — as far as I knew — terminally ill. But at three o’clock in the morning, the glass is always half-empty.
In a moment of fevered inspiration, going to Patrick’s funeral suddenly seemed like the only way I had of reminding myself who I was. I couldn’t face a long conversation with Dad on top of everything else, so I called my aunt in Boston, guessing that, with the time difference, she would still be up. She was, and she seemed pleased to hear from me.
She said Patrick had died suddenly of a heart attack, alone on Ionia, some months short of his sixty-fourth birthday. He had been out jogging.
Judith said his body had been discovered at the side of the running track by a member of the Junior Ionics — not, as you might think, a doo-wop group, but the local high-school baseball team.
Patrick had died of a massive myocardial infarction. He had been estranged from his family for years. His death was sad and premature. But no one has the final say on the genre of their demise, and Patrick’s also contained elements of comedy. His toupee had become detached from his pate and was found alongside his body. The boy who saw it first mistook it for a puppy lying loyally beside its fallen master. But though Patrick had owned many animals over the years (African geese, peahens, a pony, a goat, a sheep named Bessie, a parrot, four cats, dozens of chickens), he had always had an aversion to dogs.
Judith said she would understand if I couldn’t make it to the funeral. No one was expecting me to come. She imagined I’d be far too busy. In fact, she gave me so many opportunities to opt out that I began to wonder if she was going herself. For my part, I was possessed by a dangerous certainty about what I wanted to do. I told her I’d be there, and then hung up the phone.
My body clock was by now totally skewed. I decided to administer a knock-out dose of two more sleeping pills, which I chased down with a toothmug of red wine. I lay down again, and my body appeared to dissolve from the feet upward. I fell asleep and dreamed about Ionia.
First, I found myself floating just outside the window on the seventh-floor landing of Television Centre. Instead of falling, I began to rise, slowly at first, but then so quickly that my eyes watered from the wind. As I looked down, the frozen traffic on the M25 seemed to twinkle like one of the rings of Saturn. Up ahead, I could see the Bristol Channel, separating the pig’s-head outline of Wales from the long shank of southwestern England that points into the Atlantic. As I drifted west across the sky, I watched the channel empty into the dark mantle of the Irish Sea. I was moving fast but silently, like a weather balloon sweeping along the upper atmosphere — over Eire, past the deserted crofts of the Great Blasket Islands, and through the edge of the giant shadow that had been travelling westward ahead of me: night itself rotating around the planet. It was suddenly chilly, like diving into the deep cold currents of a lake. The scattered fragments of the Azores passed by me on the left, and I came to the lights of America’s eastern coastline. At its northerly end, the tiny arm of Cape Cod flexed around its bay. Ionia, Patrick’s home, was a tiny comma of rock and trees and sand dunes just off its triceps.
The island was lying bathed in darkness. Along the main roads, the seasonal businesses hadn’t opened — yet. The ice-cream stores were shuttered; the mini golf courses weather-beaten from winter. The wind was still whipping up white caps on the sound and hammering the screen door with the broken catch. But watching it, you could sense that in a few weeks the rhythms of summer would have taken over: the sporadic knocking of new homes being constructed; buzz-saws pruning trees and bushes; the smell of tanning cream and sawdust; clams sizzling in the deep-fryer; nose-to-tail traffic from Boston on Friday afternoon; sailboats ruffling the cold blue water of Cape Cod Bay; twice the number of ferries making the crossing to the island; gleaming brown skin on the public beaches; a song — no one yet knew which one — that would play on the radio until it marked that summer as indelibly as the blue anchors on the harbour-master’s forearms.