“It’s the wrong part of the cycle,” says Tony. “We hunker down, stay busy, give it twelve months, repackage…”
“And that’s it?” says Gavin. “That’s your answer?”
Tony pauses and says, “Gavin. You can fuck other people off, up to a point, but you do it to me and it’s curtains.”
At which point the process of decline might still be reversible so long as Gavin tightens his belt, accepts all the public speaking engagements he’s offered, writes the text for The World’s Most Amazing Buildings, a children’s book Walker have commissioned, and does a few of the less-than-appealing adverts his agent is putting his way. Instead he does something so stupid that he will never be able fully to explain it either to himself or to anyone else.
He is in the Hospital Club in Covent Garden, the membership of which is one of the expenses he might be wise to forgo until he has a steady income again. He is sitting in the bar writing the book for Walker because he dislikes being alone for long periods, which is one of the reasons he is unwilling to forgo the membership. He is drinking, just enough to take the edge off. It is shortly before three in the afternoon.
“Gavin?”
He looks up to find Edward Cole smiling down at him. Pastor Manders, the owner of the house to which his wife fled when she left him. The man makes him uneasy. Gay men in general make him uneasy. It’s the physical aspect, of course, but it’s also a sense that he is being mocked in a language that sounds superficially like English but which he doesn’t quite understand.
“How are you doing?”
“Yeh. I’m doing fine, Edward. Cheers.”
“Emmy says she’s worried about you.”
The following day Tony will say, “You’re a public figure, for Christ’s sake,” though the more pertinent fact is that Emmy is a public figure and Gavin is particularly galled to see that every article describing the incident describes him as “the estranged husband of…”
He says, “Fuck you, Edward.”
“Goodness.” Edward raises an eyebrow. “I see what she means.”
“You have no fucking idea what she means.”
“If you want my advice,” says Edward, because if someone snaps your olive branch then you are surely allowed to poke them with the broken end, “I’d stick to Earl Grey before the sun’s over the yardarm.”
In the photo you can’t see the punch landing, which is one of the reasons why Gavin doesn’t end up being prosecuted for GBH, though there will be times, later in the year, when he thinks prison might have been the preferable option.
He spends the night in the cells at the West End Central police station and is granted bail the following afternoon. He calls Tony but doesn’t realise the depth and nature of the shit he is in till Tony throws a copy of the Daily Mail into his lap. Their relationship, personal and business, ends before they reach Richmond. Walking the last two miles home Gavin is stopped by a boy of nine or ten who wants a joint selfie. Gavin tells him to go fuck himself and the boy starts to cry. He realises that the boy knows nothing of what happened the day before. The boy’s father says to Gavin, “What is wrong with you?”
His financial adviser is “tied up with other clients” so he sits in one of the smaller meeting rooms at Crace & Lawner being talked at by a pustular underling who advises him to draw up a budget, liquidate some of his investments, rent out the house and move into a flat, and whose tone says, unmistakably, “We are no longer flattered by your custom.”
Martin comes out of hospital with his femur pinned. He walks slowly and will use a frame for the first few weeks. Madeleine assumes that it is the pain and the drugs he is taking to dull it which are making him blurred and unmotivated, but when the dosage comes down and he begins walking unaided she can see that the fall has shattered something which is not physical, and that his redoubtable grip, on himself, on his family and on the world, had been a prolonged act of will he no longer has the energy to repeat.
In Durham David puts a plastic bag over his head, pulling it tight by holding the loose material at the base of his skull like a ponytail. If he rides out the automatic reflex to uncover his mouth and nose he enters a place of great calm. He begins to feel woozy, his fist uncurls, the bag comes loose and he starts to breathe again. He does this often. He imagines his parents finding his body on the bedroom floor. He imagines a dog walker finding his body on nearby waste ground, decayed and bloated after a week’s search. He imagines being in a persistent vegetative state. All these things comfort him in different ways.
Gavin remains drunk for most of the next three months, never blind, never stumbling, but starting with a whisky at breakfast and maintaining a modest but steady intake during the day so as to keep the world at two or three removes.
When the Hospital Club withdraws his membership he transfers his custom to a string of less salubrious establishments in Covent Garden and Soho, moving on each time friendly advice is offered concerning his health and welfare.
He does not open his post. He does not answer the phone. He does, however, open an email from Kirstin in Sydney. It says, “You forgot Thom’s birthday. I reminded you and you still forgot. If I write any more I will just get angry and I’m tired of being angry. Please don’t contact us again. Thom has a new father now. He is kind and generous and reliable. There is nothing good you can add to his life.”
Every night for the next week when the stranger appears he is holding Thom by the scruff of the neck, pressing the barrel of the shotgun to the side of the boy’s head. Gavin tries to reach them but the intervening air is viscous and obstructive, the way it is in dreams, and the stranger pulls the trigger before he is halfway across the room so that Thom’s head becomes a spray of wet, red vapour.
He is sitting in the Mem-Saab on Stukeley Street pretending to eat chicken tikka shashlik. It is the price of spending several hours in the warm human buzz, drinking his way through four bottles of Cobra. He has a ring-bound notebook with him and a big Phaidon volume on the architecture of Alvar Aalto so as to look and feel purposeful.
Amber, whose name is very possibly not Amber, would have rung alarm bells three months ago: the confidence which doesn’t quite hide the damage, the blowsy, dog-eared glamour, a blurry tattoo swallow just below her left ear. What catches him off guard, however, is the way she sits herself down across the table and says, “I’m more of a Mies van der Rohe fan myself. Clean lines, white space. You want to be modern? Be modern. Don’t go off half-cocked.”
She doesn’t pry or criticise. She says, “Life’s a bitch,” and while she’s referring explicitly to her father, who died when she was five years old, her eyes hold his long enough to let him know that she understands that he has been through a hard time himself recently. It should worry him, the speed and ease of this seeming rapport, but he is lonelier than he dares admit.
She’s been an art student and an architecture student, though she finished neither course. She’s lived in Barcelona, Dublin, Norwich and Copenhagen. She has a pilot’s licence and knows how to build a drystone wall and the Swedish poem she recites sounds convincing to his untutored ear. The swift hop from story to story suggests that she wants none of them examined too closely but she has genuine charm, and when she disappears to the toilet and returns wiping her nose and talking too fast he is not dismissive and superior as he might previously have been.