spread of honest warmth.
‘I can’t believe it,’ I said.
‘Jesus,’ he said, ‘Greggy! What a delight!’ He embraced me, elbows into the other passengers – he was never one to care for what others thought of him, and his celebration was stronger than the personal space of anybody else in the carriage – and pulled me tight. ‘Look at you! You look good, considering.’
‘And you,’ I stammered. Our considerings were aligned: I might have been dying, but he had already been dead for going on forty years.
He sat opposite me, his long limbs extended then snapped back, arms folded and legs crossed. ‘This is a bit fancy, isn’t it?’ He looked down the carriage. ‘I remember when this was all fields.’ A joke; and a grin so delightful that I almost forgot the strangeness of his being there.
‘Yes,’ I replied, because I didn’t have any other words.
‘You got old,’ he said. Matter-of-fact. ‘Still, only as old as you feel.’ I remembered him then, in that moment, as he was when he died: gaunt. Not the same as my father, because one was sunken, the other collapsing. A vital difference. I wondered: would I sink? Or would I collapse? Was that what I was doing at that exact moment? ‘I knew I’d get here first.’ A glint in his eye. ‘You lazy shit, taking your time over something so important. I always said that you were a little behind.’ Bond Street, and the squash of people, suitcases and children tightly gripping hands.
‘Don’t think I’m rude,’ I said, ‘but I have to ask: why are you here?’
They looked at each other, as if the answer should be obvious; and they smiled, because they were in on a private joke that I most definitely was not.
‘Think of this as a parade,’ Alice said. ‘A farewell and mind your way.’
‘Death doesn’t need to be as dour as the world would have it. We’re here to celebrate with you.’
‘And what if I don’t want to die?’ I asked. ‘What happens then?’
‘You don’t have a choice,’ Ronnie said.
The train pulled in to Paddington. I waited, for a moment, and then—
I was gone, from my seat, to the platform, rucksack strap gripped in my hand; my worn old knuckles white with the force of my hold. And the doors hushed shut behind me, and I turned to see Alice and Ronnie staring through the glass; and I said, out loud, ‘I am not dying today,’ and I walked along the platform, watched until the train moved out of sight. ‘Not today,’ as I sat on a bench. Put my hand to my head, and swore I could feel something under the skin, under the bone, beating alongside my pulse.
Alex drove me to my first appointment, at University College Hospital, back when my illness was nothing more than a persistent headache and an elevated blood-cell count. He sat in the car and said, ‘I’ll wait here for you.’ And I should have known then, really. Because so much with him was, Let’s not make a big deal out of this.
As I was led through to the test chamber, they asked if I was alone. I told them, ‘My partner’s in the car,’ and they said, each nurse with a slightly different inflection, ‘They can come inside, you know,’ and I replied, ‘Oh, he prefers it.’ As if that was justification. Each nurse their own version of a consolatory nod.
‘It’s hard on the loved ones,’ that’s what one of the nurses said to me, later; when the prognosis was dealt, and I was reeling, and Alex wasn’t with me.
‘Yes,’ I said, placid as you like; because I didn’t want to say, well how do you think it feels to be here alone?
That day, when I got home, my head shaven, hat perched defiantly on my smooth, round skull, he told me that he had spoken to his ex-wife; that they had more to sort out, regarding their children, their house, their possessions.
He asked me if I minded him going to see her.
‘Of course not,’ I told him. Why would I mind?
I rode the city, the length and breadth of it. I went to whichever line would take me. Every line, every length. Every destination, every station with their shared darknesses in the tunnels, running off for as long as you can imagine; this intricate webbing, underneath the city – my city – that links everything, everyplace together. To Pinner, to my old flat, bought when I was in my fifties, the fifth floor of a block that felt craningly high even at only six floors, all vulgar Eighties carpets and wooden kitchen, but so very, very mine; to Kensington, to Alice’s house, remembered briefly from when I was a child and she, most definitely, was not, but after the war and she had money and my mother telling me to not touch anything; to Hackney, where I lived in the years before it was trendy to say that you lived there, when it really was council terraces and warehouses that couldn’t even dream of being turned into communes; to Richmond, to the bars that felt like a part of me when nowhere else was open, where I sat and drank quietly, waiting to be noticed; and to the bookshops at the lower end of Soho, no longer hiding their content in blank covers, smuggled out in my teenaged pockets, no longer hiding anything at all.
I went to all of these places, and yet to none of them; I remembered them all perfectly, a lifetime in just the blink of my eyes; just as people said happened. A flash, so bright in that extended moment as to be almost entirely blinding.
I met Alex when he was already lying to his wife. A friend of mine that I knew online told me about an app, and he explained how to install it onto my phone, and from there I met Alex. He was ten years younger than I was, but he spoke about time as if he was some sort of master of it: the things that he had done, the people he had known, the life he had lived. He had two children, but he never spoke about them and didn’t want me to either, as if my saying their names might somehow alert them to my existence. He had a wife, whose name I was allowed to say, but only in a way that suggested I was appreciative of the pain he was enduring by staying with her. ‘Oh, Deborah wouldn’t understand,’ he would moan, hyphenating every syllable with his breath for some sort of extreme emphasis. ‘She’s known about my dalliances before, but this?’ He stroked my arm. ‘This love? She wouldn’t understand that.’
We met in bars on the ground floors of hotels, and then occasionally in restaurants adjacent to those bars. A few times, his wife was away, and we went to his house, where we slept in the guest bedroom, on an undressed mattress and under a naked duvet, in case his wife wondered why the master bedsheets had been changed.
He never came to visit me; I always went to visit him. He left his wife when she caught us one day. Or she left him, I was never sure. I bought my flat, and he bought his, near Liverpool Street. He told me that it was too soon for us to cohabit. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘are you sure that you want everybody to talk?’
When, eventually, I told him my prognosis, his face was perfectly still for a while, until his eyebrow raised, and he said, ‘What a shame.’
As if there was ever a future for us, at all.
On the platform, at Paddington. Waiting for the purple trains, at the doors, perfectly aligned to the opening of the carriages. The people, crowding, with their bags, their lovers, their pasts and futures; every part of human life somehow finding its way to that platform. I watched as train after train passed through the station.
‘Are you OK, sir?’ A woman in a uniform, a tabard, smiling at me. I smiled back.
‘I’m overwhelmed, that’s all.’
‘London can do that,’ she replied. She looked at my over-filled rucksack, the mark of a visitor. ‘You here for a holiday?’
‘No. I’m leaving,’ I said.
She smiled again. She had a lovely smile. Warm, kind. Reminded me of my mother. ‘Let me know if you need anything, OK?’
I stood as she walked off, and I made my way to the marked area of the platform, by the glass doors. Being on a platform would once tousle every part of you as the train rushed towards you; but that time, it was just