Serious Sweet (39 page)

LONDON BRIDGE.

In the end it is –
please
 – possible to reach.

Jon had asked the cab to drop him just a little before the station, his intention being – perhaps – to catch his breath.

He steps out of the cab and pays his fare while experiencing this flapping and plummeting sensation – as if he has opened the door of a plane, stepped out bravely.

He walks up the narrow street that will lead to the station, his body progressing while other parts of him seem to be scuttling low and then lower, keeping to the cracks in the pavement – lizarding along.

The route he has to take shoves him past a succession of restaurants where it would now be completely pointless to try and dine.

Too late.

I don't think I'm hungry.

I hope she's not hungry.

I hope that she has forgiven my unforgivability.

The air is unsympathetic against his face. He presses the heels of both hands to his eyes and rubs. He guesses this might look to sensible observers as if he is newly arrived in a country he does not know, a country where one's surroundings may blur and shine and turn to a wide pelt of light, spines of light.

There are no observers, not as far as Jon can tell.

At the head of the street the architecture seems almost entirely composed of glass: slabs of bright, high glass.

It's like walking up the throat of a closing box, or into an aquarium, terrarium …

It feels clear to him that he is a clumsy-handed, apeish man, soon to be trapped in this huge and over-elaborate case. He is about to be absurd and lonely –
please, Meg, do be here, be with me and see me
 – and then afterwards he's going to have the memory of that –
of waiting while she doesn't turn up
. And at some date, as yet undisclosed, when he's sacked, arrested, punished, destroyed – at that point he will have nothing to sustain him.

I did the best I could in the end, but doing it in the end wasn't quick enough. I wasn't fastidious, not as I should be. I wasn't who I thought, not a properly tuned man.

How to tune oneself to the relevant scale.

Usually it's E-A-D-G-B-E. Elephants And Donkeys Grow Big Ears …

But I tune to open G, I tune to D-G-D-G-B-D because I like the repetition, because repeating known things which have done no harm is always a comfort, or should be a comfort.

I taught myself to remember it with my mnemonic, my very own.

Do Good Do Good Be Determined.

Do Good Do Good Be Despairing.

Do Good Do Good Be Deserted.

No.

Do Good Do Good Be Determined.

I did try.

The pavement is echoing under his shoes as if it is tensed above some vast and peculiar nowhere. Still, Jon proceeds. Above his left shoulder rises the new and ardently modernistic head office of a rebranded newspaper group.

They wouldn't let Milner over their threshold: all of those shiny surfaces he'd smear. And the place would make him look Cro-Magnon, look like me.

The building's vast foyer – glistering and mainly transparent – does manage to have one solid wall, which is blocked across with dark, impressive letters, capitalised words that build into phrases of fugitive, yet stirring meaning. They provide just enough to
occupy a reader without embarking on any kind of communication – a wash of elevated intentions.

I think I have real intentions. I think …

He tucks his head lower and pictures the shades of all the pubby, grubby, digging old hacks gone on before, the ghosts who still knew about subbing and sources, there to doorstep the premises and haunt –
if they could be bothered
 – chucking about lead type and pissing into corners.

At the end of the high-concept, low-content display are four last words.

THE BUSINESS OF STORYTELLING

The Four Last Things, I was taught, are Death and Judgement and Hell and Heaven. I like to close the list with Heaven, although others may not choose to.

The foyer gives itself a dashing exit line, truthful as death and judgement and nobody's ever too clear about the hereafter so never mind.

Here it is.

THE BUSINESS OF STORYTELLING.

Which is now all the business there is, all the truth there is. No goods, no services, nurses, teachers, doctors, artisans, soldiers, warders, guardians, leaders, technicians, experts, knowledge, justice, privacy, safety, dignity, mercy and so forth.

This is what we have instead.

THE BUSINESS OF STORYTELLING.

And I am in this business.

I was in this business.

I think I have decided to retire.

Fuck the lot of 'em, I say.

Yeah.

Shining directly ahead is the tower that blades up into the soft sky above the station: overmastering height and bleak windows, illumination that gives an impression of festive threat. The thing is too big to be comfortably visible, even comprehensible, once you have drawn this close.

Here it is.

The open piazza beneath it is blighted by its influence and even on a sunny day those who pass under its glimmer and shadow tend to scuttle anxiously, rather than linger, rather than wait.

But Jon is going to wait.

She isn't here.

Beyond him is even more glass: the walls and doors to the station concourse – another wide and immanent space.

She isn't here.

Peering through he can see –
of course
 – no rush-hour crowds, no heads raised to watch the indicator boards, intent like worshippers, like animals standing ready to be startled.

She isn't here.

Without its people, the place seems burdened, packed with a strange energy, on the verge of being reckless.

She isn't here.

One of the late, of the final, trains must have straggled in, because now a small wave of passengers appears. They amble, or rush towards the Underground. They head out of the exit that leads past him and walk in the outside air, gravity serving them nicely. A man by himself and draped in, no doubt, significant colours trots by and lets loose the kind of cries that end a Friday and start a weekend. The man's calling does not summon companions, does not stir up echoes of agreement, as he seems to expect. He shakes his head and sways on.

Jon studies the angles of backs and shoulders, the differences of walks and hair, bags, coats and …
I've no reason to bother – they're not her.
Jon doesn't know these people: they are strangers, they are irrelevant to his purpose, they are in the fucking way.

If this were a film, they would be the crowd. You don't need to care about the crowd when it's a film – the crowd is only there, all dressed up and shifting about, to make the world look real and populated. The people aren't people, they're scenery, the backdrop.

She isn't here.

This entire experience is becoming very much like watching a film, or dreaming a film, or discovering a film has opened up and folded one inside its working.

Jon can't tell if this is good or not.

She isn't here.

He wraps his arms around his chest. And it is past midnight and they haven't wished each other sweet dreams and this fact seems terrible and sad.

But I can fold my arms and I can feel and believe this is me. I am holding on.

And all of this fucking glass and all of this fucking waiting and all of this fucking …

Please. Please.

The pervading emptiness of an almost closed railway station has started to invite a weird ascension, to demand that he drift up, unanchored, clawing at glass to slow himself until he breaks into the depth of the night and becomes all lost and gone.

No, no, no. Feet on the ground.

He clings tighter to his own ribs – caught in the arms of someone he does not love and who cannot love him.

I am stressed. This is simply stress. I am not in danger, I only feel as if I am in danger. A feeling is not a fact.

Men with unnamed professions might arrive soon to ask him questions he can't answer – soon, or this Monday, or this week, tonight – without making a proper appointment, without warning – in four minutes' time, or in no time at all – and disgrace and disgrace and disgrace will follow after.

But I am not currently in danger.

He moves, still hugging this invisible parcel of nothing, palms on his shoulder blades, and he eases into the actual station precincts. This is not an effort to put a solid roof over his head, not an attempt to prevent any type of yanking levitation, a wildly floating display of guilt.

Like the test for witches.

There he is – the informer, transgressor, traitor, coward, the too-little-and-too-late man.

Another train deposits a scatter of travellers. He knows none of them. He loves none of them.

It would take a while – if I can be logical – for Meg to get here and I'm not sure – night bus, night train, Tube – how she would be arriving, if she is arriving …

The city's provision of public transport, while not ideal, still offers a varied and flexible …

It wouldn't be that hard. She has choices …

I should have offered to send a cab …

I should have said I would come to meet her wherever she was …

I should have arranged to be somebody else …

He wasn't even sure which direction he should face: outside for buses or inside for trains, for the subway … The tiny, repeated bewilderments of his situation, the turning, the shuffling, the knowledge that he was so extremely, pathetically obvious –
a man expecting someone who never arrives
 – these factors combined to mean he was viewing the world – again – through a wet haze of splitting light.

A man expecting someone who never arrives and therefore makes him weep.

If she finds me like this …

Infantile.

If she finds me with my back turned …

Discourteous.

He has so many worries, like dogs scratching at a door.

He has so many pleasures and they scratch too and he does want to let them in, in, in.

I like the way she shouts.

I am of the opinion that hearing her shout has made me a different shape.

Jon blinks to regain his composure and then rolls his gaze back and forth and round and round, scanning.

His briefcase should be set down neatly between his feet.

But he can't recall when he last had his sodding briefcase. It has gone absent without leave. He has maybe left the thing at Becky's flat. If it is genuinely lost, gone astray, abandoned, this will be both a professional failing and a shame.

Additional disgrace.

Before he can avoid it, he recalls another time –
lost, gone astray, abandoned
 – a previous wait on a railway platform. The memory falls on him like water, soaks in.

He was in the big –
it seemed big
 – main station at Inverness and holding his dad's hand and they were both standing to meet a train, because Jon's mum was coming back on it from somewhere, from her own mum's perhaps, or else perhaps she'd been at Auntie Bartlett's. And the whole occasion had been not as advertised.

Dad had said the expected and inevitable things –
We'll be glad to see her, won't we?
He'd gone on about tiredness in women and the need for pleasant resting and a quiet house and Jon being a good boy for ever to keep the Sigurdsson household free of further tiredness. Jon had not exactly seen, but certainly perceived this threat of illness in his mother as a kind of smoke, black and thick around everyone's ankles, eager to trip them up.
We'll all go to the pictures tomorrow, would you like that?
Other treats were suggested as possibilities – Jon's mother not being herself exactly a treat – and every offer was only a promise that showed what came next was going to be appalling.

Inverness Station was where, for the first time, Jon had been able to watch while what someone said and what was the truth were peeled right apart from each other, like skin from muscle, like muscle from bone. This was proper lying, important and adult lying. This was the kind of lying that meant reality hung about them in sticky shreds and that it was ugly and made no sense.

Dad's face smiling but not happy and his hand being almost violent around mine and I was thinking that we'd enjoyed ourselves while we were being alone together and that it had been different from how it was with Mum in a way that I'd liked – different from the stuff before which I couldn't quite remember, but which was bad. Dad told me the badness would never happen again. He told me so unconvincingly that it was almost not a lie. Mum always brought the badness in with her – we knew that. We couldn't please her. We did try. I did try.

Dad told me how wonderful everything would be. His eyes were frightening while he spoke to me, because they looked scared and that made me scared. He dropped us both inside the whale, let us be Jonahed.

I am the spineless son of a spineless man.

Jon had done what his father plainly wanted and believed several unbelievable things, as hard as any heart could. There on Inverness Station, he had agreed that sadness would be happiness and badness would be right and that all would be well. Because Jon was a child then and children understand such matters absolutely, he had been certain that make-believe never works.

Jon had caught sight of his mum – one little case with her, small and serious woman, wiry, and approaching him along the round-shouldered, metal perspective of the train. The big carriages, just arrived, seemed to be lending her stability. When she reached him, Jon was already crying. The tears had been open to multiple interpretations and had therefore suited the occasion.