My eyes had adapted, so I opened the windows and left the lights off while I drank a bottle of beer, listening to warm rain beginning to fall. The spattering steadied to a hiss, spreading coolness through the air and releasing the smell of school football pitches from the park across the road, and as it grew heavier it made a sound-map of the trees and glass roofs nearby. I swigged a cold mouthful and placed the bottle on the table: a bubble swelled and broke at the lip, and a tiny catastrophe of froth worked itself out in the neck.
I’m telling you this because I want you to see that in the end I’m like you, Ulya, trying my best, getting by, hopefully getting it right sometimes. I’m not some faceless administrator. I’d hate you to think of me that way, because we have the potential for so much more, you and I.
If we’re to make sense of the predicament in which Nicolas finds himself, we have to try and imagine his state of mind in the months and weeks prior to the events at Communion Town. I hope you don’t find it impertinent, me telling you this. I feel I’m claiming to know more about him than you do yourself. His motives were basically good, I do believe that, but the fact is he was reckless on occasion.
That café of his was a run-down warren, crammed in around the back of Communion Town station; and cheap food or not, I would have preferred not to see him spend his time there. Grease clung to the plate-glass window, deposited by the clouds of steam that filled the interior, and you could tell at a glance that the plates would be grubby and the bacon and eggs swimming in fat. Even so it was always packed in the early mornings. Nicolas sat down to his breakfast elbow-to-elbow with students in dishevelled finery after a night on the town, tram drivers and rickshaw kids at the end of their shifts, backpackers fuelling up between hostel and railway station, civil servants heading for the offices of the Autumn Palace. There were immigrants who had just finished cleaning those same offices, or who were on their way to the building sites across the river; there were men with nose-rings and women with shaven heads who looked to have been up all night, dancing violently in cellar clubs or publishing underground magazines. There were less identifiable types, too. A lot of talk went on in there and I found it impossible to make out any single conversation above the spluttering griddles and clashing cutlery. But I knew it was not what Nicolas needed, given his propensities. Too often through that clouded window I saw him in impassioned discussion with some near-stranger, their heads together. It bothered me, I have to tell you. I could never quite decide what he was thinking as he swigged his tea and walked out to Halfmoon Street, vigorous and stern-faced, to plunge back into the metro.
Communion Town station itself was a city in miniature, with a specialised urban ecology flourishing in its tunnels, a functional society from the ticket sellers and engineers to the lavatory attendants and platform-arabs. Daily, after his night’s work and his grease-soaked breakfast, Nicolas shouldered his way through the station’s Upper Hall to board the ancient lifts down to the platforms.
Most people on the metro will look straight through their fellow commuters and out the other side, but that was a skill Nicolas didn’t seem willing to learn. He studied the traders of the Upper Hall with tight-lipped intensity; he made no attempt to hide his interest in the sallow man with the too-small suit and the dabs of tissue paper stuck to the shaving cuts on his throat, who tirelessly informed the commuters that the misfortune soon to come upon them would be a punishment for their degenerate lives; or the personable youngster in the cagoule who handed out leaflets advertising walking tours of the Old Quarter, saying welcome, folks, you’re very welcome to our fine city, but make sure and look to your valuables, ladies and gentlemen, there are criminals about so make sure your valuables are secure! – so that hands moved for assurance to certain points on bags and bodies, and the leafleteer’s beady-eyed associates, slouching nearby, knew where to concentrate their attentions.
At least I can set your mind at ease about the night of the black eyes. He’d been foolhardy, nothing worse. He had witnessed a more or less everyday spectacle in the Hall, a gang of roaring boys who had encircled another youth and, amid laughter, were spinning him around by pricking his behind with their knives. Well, you know what Nicolas is like. He had waded in to put a stop to it, and had been rewarded with a crisp headbutt and a discharge of abuse from the bullies, in which their victim joined.
That didn’t put him off, though. Whatever he saw, he took it personally. I couldn’t quite make him out; he would scowl at the skinny youths who hauled their rickshaws past the front of the station to pick up rich couples. He’d give filthy looks to such harmless types as the five middle-aged monks who strolled through the Hall in their saffron robes, all with close-shaved heads, rimless spectacles and digital cameras, or the undergraduates complaining languidly to one another about the length of the cashpoint queue: ‘This is abzurd.’ On the other hand, he always had a friendly word for the two smartly dressed women who ran the cosmetics kiosk, and for the leather-tanned, tattooed guy who could usually be found patrolling the Hall with a can of cider in one hand and the other thrust down the back of his tracksuit trousers. I can admire it, the instinctive conviction with which Nicolas responded to all that jostling life, but I’m sorry to say that it served him badly in the end. It’s all part of the story of how you lost him to the city.
I wish his judgement had been better, we both do, but there was something wilful in his conduct. It was as if he wanted to put himself at risk. He had taken to buying breakfast every day for one of the other patrons of the Rose Tree Café, a person who it pains me even to describe to you. I knew his sort well, and I could not have imagined a less desirable companion. It’s strange. I like to think I’m pretty tolerant, but with some people you just can’t help how you feel.
He was often to be seen around the streets of Communion Town, this one: he was no older than Nicolas himself, but his face was ruined, a mask of putty on a skull, and he made a show of walking with a limp, cautiously, as if he were favouring a hidden injury. Nicolas, I think, had mistaken him for a genuine casualty of the city, taking pity on his sickly look, his unwashed clothes and scrawny frame, and perhaps on his attempts at dandyism: he actually affected a carnation in the buttonhole of his jacket, and his long hair had been clumsily bleached. As he sat down opposite Nicolas, he combed his fingers through the oily locks as if folornly hoping to be mistaken for a member of the opposite sex.
I could understand why Nicolas felt sorry for him, but he failed to see the arrogance behind the frailty. The fellow wolfed down his plateful each morning without a word of thanks. Then, after another mug of coffee, he would launch into a tirade, staring at Nicolas greedily and plucking at his cuff as he spoke, like someone imparting urgent secrets. He was a fraud, of course: in spite of his appearance I would not have been surprised to learn that he had a trust fund to support his loafing, his radical posturing. Now and then you saw him plaguing the shoppers around Vere Street, going from person to person like a beggar and delivering his spiel with an unnerving show of anguish. He held the sleeves of his targets as if his life depended on getting them to believe whatever line he was spinning.
A fraud, but a dangerous fraud for someone in Nicolas’s situation to associate with. I fumed to see him deceived, and wanted to tell him that this personage was laughing up his sleeve at the fine joke of it. Nicolas could be so unworldly. I watched them through the grease-fouled window, hazy figures leaning seriously towards one another. I could only guess what lies were being told in there, but, if what happened later was anything to go by, I fear very much that he believed them.
You saw the nature of the situation better than he did. I’m only sorry you couldn’t help him understand. I’m thinking of the afternoon you took him picking blackberries down by the canal. The brambles beside the cycle path were dense with shiny black flesh, so you and Nicolas took plastic supermarket bags and struggled in among those alien castles full of cobwebs and dead matter and tiny sharp barbs, threaded through with nettles and loaded with decayed, insect-ridden fruit, some of it soft enough to turn to pulp at a touch and much of the rest pinkish and shrivelled. You walked home scratched and stung but your bags were heavy and wet with purple juice. I often think of you like that, the two of you, blackberrying in a revealing light that lay longways across everything, stirring up the colours of the hedges and the banks and resonating off the water. Sludd’s Liberty had retreated from you. The evening moon was up, and behind the city and the trees the sun was setting in a sky like a sheet of cold copper