Serious Sweet (26 page)

Of course I was – the longer she was with me, the more she would see and I am too much and really not enough for anyone to have to see.

But then there had been a fairly amicable, genuinely quite a delicate and pleasing kind of rush they could share while, yes, they did exchange their numbers and, yes, also a promise they would meet up properly and, yes … In fact, he'd forgotten to leave a number … He'd only wanted to, but it had felt … inappropriate … He had wanted to … He wasn't going off into hiding or anything like that.

Yes, I took her number.

Yes, I wanted to kiss her.

But, yes, I ran away.

I walked fast away from the café and then made it to Piccadilly and bolted like fuck. Over the road and into the park and ran and ran. Unseemly.

Full tilt.

It felt so wonderful to get away.

But I kissed her first.

Full tilt.

It felt completely …

It felt like I was an overly lucky man.

And you don't want to get lucky, not too much.

And Jon clamped his eyes shut and attempted again to unrecall the darting woman, her sensibletender hands and the way they greeted him that first time.

He leaned his head back against the sofa, against his resting daughter and her pain, against his duty.

Being with Maggie felt like walking about inside music, inside maybe ‘The Healer' – all those coolcool Bs and Ds. D7s are always worth it. I was walking about and then running and also being mellow and not me and – fuckit – being all right, being partially mended and all right. Something in me felt like how each thread gets fitted together on ‘Stripped Me Naked': the pulse they set in to run under the riffs, the one they put out there to tell you that when you're wholly done for, when everything you could care about, or cling to, is absolutely gone – even then here's this, still this, your blood full and roaring with music.

That's not to say I was being John Lee Hooker, I wasn't. I was also not pretending that I could be Carlos Santana, I was just bloody well being me and fine, so fine, so fine. I was all right.

It was so …

But I don't think I can any more. I don't think I can manage.

It was so completely wonderful.

A crowd has gathered in St Pancras Station. They form an arc around one of the pianos placed ready for public use. The instrument isn't absolutely in tune and it jangles slightly – loose wires – there is something sly and sideways and lounge bar about its tone.

Sitting at the keyboard is a slim young man. His entire body speaks of intent effort and also of being transported. He is both here and elsewhere in a way that makes him fascinating, illuminated. He bends forward, sways, reaches, pushing himself into a complex classical piece that leaps, tumbles, repeats, leaps and trills, tumbles again. It sounds slightly like silver and slightly like being happy in a serious manner, like a very considered response to joy. Somehow, the sidle and echo of the instrument exactly suit the character of the melody.

The people who listen share the same expression: this peaceful type of absence with faint smiles. Some have closed their eyes.

The young man pounds on. In the most polite possible way, he is ignoring all observers. This makes it easier for them to observe. They are here together for something which is not quite him, but is of him – for this surprise of music. They are inside an event which makes itself plain, announces that it will never quite happen again. Everyone enjoys being, in this manner, unique. Everyone enjoys being, in this manner, together.

The piece romps and flurries, runs.

And then the pianist is done – the violence of the conclusion, the hammering, the flourish – and there is silence. There is apparently silence clear along the shopping mall that is necessary to every major railway station. The stillness may even reach far out and touch the pausing, dozing, sliding trains.

Then, of course, there is a little applause. It almost surprises the man, seems to push him a touch off-centre as he stands and looks for the bag he set down when he started, when he
chose to produce so much music. He glances at a young woman who is obviously his girlfriend and obviously pleased about him, while also being mildly protective.

Several members of his audience walk to shake his hand. An older woman wearing a large hat stops and asks him about himself. He is from Taiwan, as is his girlfriend. His English is good but very slightly laborious. He tells the woman, when she requires him to, that the piece was
La Campanella
by Franz Liszt and that it means ‘The Little Bell'. He isn't a music student. He just loves to play.

MEG STARTED TO
leave the AA meeting smartly, briskly, fast as fuck, as soon as it ended – no hanging around. She'd joined everybody in nodding her head down and closing her eyes and addressing the variable blur which was her Power Greater Than Herself – the weather, gravity, evolution, AA people … today it was The Universe. Meg put in a request – another request – for help to tell the difference between the problems she could alter and the ones she was stuck with for life, then she was on her feet and dodging.

That's more than enough communal activity for the day.

Please Someone – Something – grant me the wisdom to know the difference between the soluble and the insoluble …

Otherwise I'll spend the rest of my life banging my head off walls that won't fall down – rather than the more forgiving ones that might surrender before my skull cracks.

She was aware this line of thinking was probably making her frown, because people were giving her looks of concern and a meaningful
hello
here and there as she headed for the door without mucking in to stack chairs, or to reassure the lady who'd been crying that everything would eventually be OK.

She doesn't need me – there's a bloody queue of people all having a try at that. And I can't say I'm honestly sure if everything will turn out well in the end. We die in the end – is that a good result? Or is that an assurance that any available god sits on high with a stack of razor blades, each of them ready for use on one of us? Is all of that singing and religion just about assisted suicide?

She gathered her drunk-from polystyrene cup and threw it in the bin.

Which shows I am willing to lend a hand.

I don't have to. Like I don't have to be perpetually in the mood to talk. That's not a requirement. I have to maintain a desire to stop drinking and stay clean and sober – I haven't signed up for some low-rent social club.

Or very high-rent social club – after all, you don't get in without losing everything you cared about. The entrance fees are substantial. Dress code informal.

I didn't care about anything when I first came in, though. Having something to care about came later. Having something I might lose came later.

She made it to the door after dodging several chats and gaggles and then making a final lunge past someone with their hand vaguely outstretched, for reasons Meg chose to find uninteresting. The outside air was aggressive with exhaust fumes, but also great because pressing on through it didn't involve Meg in having to tell anyone that she was fine, thanks, and OK and just great and leaving and leaving and leaving.

She walked back towards Tottenham Court Road, the air darkening by mild degrees towards evening and shop lights becoming cosier as a result.

If I want to talk, I will talk to Jon later. That's what normal people do – they talk to the people they care about, their someone to care about, their someone in particular they don't want to lose.

I will meet you.

If he says that, if he goes to the bother of saying that, then why would he not meet me and why would I not meet him? It's only a matter of time until we're in the same place today – that has been decided – and I have time. I have all the time that's left in this twenty-four hours, just for me to do with as I'd like.

And Jon involved waiting – that seemed to be in his nature – and waiting was a pain in the arse, but also less scary than actually being with him. Being with what you care about is a little like
sipping at something good, sipping half a glass of this or that in company and understanding that you can't quite cut loose yet. It's like being compressed in your enjoyment and unsure if you'll disgrace yourself later, or else drown in remarkable feelings, in joys you can't repeat and that are to do with some mystery process that meant some specific mouthful was exactly the right one to work the miracle and make you delighted – only you can't tell which mouthful. You were already drunk when you took it and so it's lost. Your miracle got lost.

It is unhealthy, I have been told, to think of the people I love – the person I love – in the way that I thought about substances and liquids. It's better to see them as humans, not drinks-cupboard treats.

As if I kept an orderly drinks cupboard … a cocktail cabinet full of dainties, decorative and unopened possibilities …

As if I feel absolutely human when I'm next to a real, live human …

I try, though. I do try.

I am very trying.

And we've made that joke and we make other jokes and we're something that works, me and Jon. I believe that.

Meg continued to be surprised by how much she believed that. She wasn't a creature of faith and yet she had spent all those hours and inexplicable hours in the little café in Shepherd Market, simply waiting for Jon.

I went there, not to be crazy, not to be a stalker, not to jump out on his doorstep – just to see where he lived. The letters all went to a Mayfair address – I wanted to see how he lived, because Mayfair is something beyond me and I couldn't match that, I couldn't keep up. It had worried me, this idea that I'd be of no use to him. Just the difference in quality between his writing paper and mine – I mean, it was clear … Sometimes his paper depressed me as much as his letter cheered me up …

Only then I went there, to Shepherd Market, and the place was a PO box and that was sort of good. I took a couple of weeks and thought things through and decided that it was good. He wrote letters for strangers and needed to be safe, so he'd taken a PO box and … He'd never given me his private address. But that could be OK. He could be cautious. I'm cautious. I like cautious people. They are like me. Not that I like me …

The thing was, I could never have waited outside his house – that would have been unforgivable. But I could wait outside a place with PO boxes, outside a shop. And maybe I would see him coming to get the letters, to get my letters, and then I would know what he looked like. I thought I needn't do anything more than have a look.

I'm a cautious person.

I knew that I'd recognise him.

I knew that when I did, it would make things all right.

I wouldn't need to meet him – just seeing who he was would be enough.

I am a cautious person.

And I'm a liar, of course.

She'd sat by the window with rationed cappuccinos and the patient waiters and read a book, or stared at a book and waited. She had imagined the company of a man, being with a man and sober. Her drinking had ended as a solitary occupation. Earlier it had contained all sorts of people … Her sober life, though, that was … It had an emptiness … It was clean, because it was empty.

Empty space and counting days and being happy, looking for how to be happy, and letters. I had letters.

And nobody gets to know about the letters – they're ours, they're mine. We write them and we read them and they're beautiful and make us that way, too, and in one of them he told me that every night at midnight he'll think of me and go to sleep wishing me excellent dreams, the finest, the ones reserved for children and animals and innocence and rest.

Every night at midnight he wishes me sweet and I wish him back. We wish each other sweet and we know what that means.

We're together. When I'm tired, or I'd rather be with him, or the midnight habit seems stupid, or it gets to be a duty – it still happens and it means that we're together.

That's not a lie.

And the certainty of this got her through how strange and tricky it was to meet and the endless guessing about which part of which day might release him and let him be with her. In the same way, their letters –
one every week, sometimes two –
could get her through those long waits in the café, before she'd caught sight of Mr August or heard him say his proper name.

I guessed that lunchtimes might be likely for a sighting, but that was going to depend on what his hours were and I knew he worked in Whitehall, but not where … Maybe he couldn't get out to the PO box until the evenings. And that would be awkward because the café would be shut … weekends … Sundays would be terrible – no chance of seeing him unless … I didn't know … I could maybe sit on the pavement. But not really. When you've been looked at by strangers when you've fallen in the street and been looked at by off-licence staff when you've been trying to buy what's needful, or looked at by mothers who don't want their children frightened, or looked at by neighbours who might be tired of you, or sad for you, or bored by you, but who always are disgusted by you … You've got no room left for being ashamed and exhausted. You can't be doing with it any more.

So I can't sit on pavements.

So she had sat in a civilised manner and sipped at coffee and waited as much as she could bear to and been almost relieved that her limited efforts might not work and she might never have to face him.

I wanted his company, but I thought he maybe ought to be spared mine. Women are lousy company – they usually don't drink enough, or if they do, they get strange too quickly. They get nasty. Or they cry, which is too complicated to deal with. Men are simpler.

Men see you're not right and they find where you're soft and get in there and hurt you more. They pick who's easiest to hurt. That's simple.

But Jon isn't like that. And I'm not drinking.

Even when he was Mr August, when he was Corwynn, and he was just his letters – he still made you different. What he wrote worked in under your clothes and kept you cosy. You could be in the world by yourself, but not look alone.

And when he turned up at the PO box, I did know him. He moved in exactly the way that he wrote. He was all of a piece – that's what happens when you're honest.

That funny little drag step he does sometimes, it's got the same bounce that he slips in his voice, that he seals up in envelopes and sends me.

He wants to be an R & B man which is silly, because he already is – he has an R & B body.

Nobody told him.

But it's really clear and so I knew him.

But if I'm honest and all of a piece myself I will eventually tell him – when I'm sure he won't mind – that I dived out of that fucking coffee shop four times before I ran to him.

The first time was a sort of misunderstanding: in the letters Jon said he was ‘unfortunately tall' so I caught sight of this bloke who was massive, just huge, and he didn't look a proper fit in any other way, but I had a go and went and asked if he was Corwynn. Silly – thinking some wrestler-looking creature would be him. That was more for practice than a proper mistake, I think.

The man had been startled and then amused that he might be confused with someone else. He had a small tattoo on the side of his neck. Mr August wouldn't have a tattoo. He wouldn't have a frame that suggested protein shakes and whey powder and sweating over weights.

Silly cow. Don't know what I was thinking.

I wasn't thinking – I was scared.

Then there was the one who looked fussy, somehow, and who was tallish and dressed for an office job – but I realised, once I was outside, that he'd gone in with letters and come out with none and that was probably the wrong way round. And his eyes weren't as they should be. When he looked at me, they had the wrong type of light.

She had only glanced at him and not advanced across the square and into asking him if he was Mr August.

And there was a ginger person in a very lovely suit. I wasn't sure about him. I thought gingerness would have been mentioned, if it had existed. Jon said he was going grey … and there was no sign of grey. So I said nothing to Mr Ginger – we just stared at each other and then I ran for it, because I'd needed to get in close to check the hair properly. He may have thought that I had some problem with his crowning glory …

My dad always talked about his crowning glory – didn't just call it hair. My dad whom I chose to know less and less as he got older and I drank more. He was delicate with himself over going bald. I did notice that. Not much else.

The idea is to notice who you love before they die.

That would be the civilised idea.

Meg had seen Jon once through the café window, stood up and made it as far as the entrance before she was foxed, pressed back by what seemed to be the rapidly congealing air. If you believed you could tell from letters and letters and letters the way that a person should be, then he was Jon. This man was neat and tired-looking, soft in the ways that he moved, careful. He was wearing a quiet suit – the relative silence of the jacket and trousers, of the unbuttoned coat both concealing and framing them, didn't stop them being plainly good. The way he'd groused about other people's clothes let you be sure that he'd watch how he turned himself out for fear of being ugly. You could guess that he hated and pondered his own appearance more than anybody else's, that he walked about inside this rawness, this sense of horror.

Another man being delicate about what he thinks are his failings.

He had a haircut that made him seem a tiny bit like a schoolboy – the haircut of someone who doesn't quite take himself seriously. He had gently, tenderly thinning hair. And he'd carried a briefcase that wasn't new, or gimmicky, that seemed to fit his hand and be used to him.

Most of all, I knew he should be Corwynn August, the man who was calling himself Corwynn August, because he seemed to be walking under something – like a man who had to be brave and walk about beneath some swinging danger, something not quite securely fastened up above. You could see that he'd stopped expecting the something would go away.