Although the Circle line isn’t a circle any more, of course. A tadpole, Cyril used to call it. ‘Look at its little tail,’ he’d say and laugh. Gone are the days when you could rotate around the bowels of London uninterrupted. Now, we are all tipped out at Edgware Road and forced to make a decision about ourselves.
Obviously, my decision is very easy.
I just catch the next train and travel all the way back again.
Everything began just after Cyril died. At least, I think it did. It might have been going on for the longest time before then and I didn’t notice. We knew Cyril was going to pass away. The consultant told us several times, and in no uncertain terms. Do you understand what I’m telling you? he’d say, after every third sentence. Yes, yes, we’d say, we understand. Perhaps we didn’t seem distressed enough. Not quite the right amount of sorrow. I hadn’t realized there were guidelines on how to behave when someone is told they are dying, but clearly, we had fallen outside their parameters. Getting upset shrinks a person though, doesn’t it? Because once you allow the misery to escape, it takes with it your resolution and your determination and your resilience, and it feeds them all to your problem. Until the problem grows big and fat, and you are left behind, emptied and almost disappeared. Much better to remain logical. To hold onto your strength.
‘Everyone dies,’ Cyril said, on the journey back from the hospital. ‘It’s not as though it comes as a surprise, is it? We’ve known it would happen since the day we were born.’
We were walking home from the tube station, along avenues the estate agent had once described as ‘leafy’, but which were now unburdened of their charm by an early December evening. Cyril was wearing his old brown lace-ups. Shoes I had begged him to replace for the past two years. I studied them as he walked in front of me along the pavement, and I said to myself, ‘He’ll never agree to replace them now, will he?’ The thought pierced my mind so suddenly, and so deeply, that for a few moments I couldn’t remember how to breathe. It’s not the big thing that tears you apart, is it? It’s all the smaller things that gather at its edges.
‘We’ll need to go through the box files,’ he said. ‘Sort out any paperwork.’
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we will.’
‘Tie up any loose ends.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Loose ends.’
I studied his silhouette in a smudge of orange street light. The angle of his trilby. The faint stoop of his shoulders. The way he crooked his left arm ever so slightly, as though he was always waiting for me to join him. I stared at all these things and as I stared, I wondered how long they would remain firm in my memory, and how long it would be before I had to start imagining them instead.
‘And of course, we need to make a decision about Jessica.’
He carried on walking as he said the words, sending them back over his shoulder in the casual way one might talk about the weather.
I didn’t reply.
Whenever I travel on the underground, the thing that fascinates me most, is below my feet and above my head, countless other people are all doing exactly the same thing, yet each of us is completely unaware of the others’ existence. All those ordinary lives held together in the darkness. A puzzle of people. People whose lives are inexorably linked to our own, yet who will always remain invisible to us. I think about them, as I travel the Circle line all day. I search, past the smeared windows coated in the breath of strangers, past the white reflection of my own staring, and I wonder who is out there in the darkness, staring back. Just out of reach.
There’s a need for vigilance at the stations, though, so I can’t daydream too much. Wood Lane, Latimer Road, Ladbroke Road, Westbourne Park. I could recite them before I go to sleep, like a small prayer. I never used to notice the names when I was a commuter. I would drift from one station to the next without a second thought, relying on the sway of the carriage and some strange, deep-rooted sense of place to know when I should stand and begin making my way through the wall of people towards the doors. Now I follow the map. Now I silently mouth the place names along with the electronic voice. Since Cyril died, I have the quickened eyes of a tourist.
The consultant was wary of a time frame, but in the end, his caution was pinpoint. Six months. Almost to the week. Those were a strange six months, because when Cyril first became ill, we spent all our time searching for encouragement. Each evening, we sifted through the events of the day to feed our optimism. Archaeologists of hope. Once we knew he was dying, the treasure hunt was over. We were on a road of inevitability, and no matter how attractive we tried to make the landscape, the certainty of our path made each day seem less fruitful. More of an obligation to get to the other side. It’s at times like those you realize it’s only really hope that glues everything else together.
As luck would have it, Cyril was reasonably well until the final two weeks. There were days so mundane, we celebrated in the reassurance of their ordinariness. The comfort of small routines, the absence of hospital appointments and doctors who had run out of ideas, the small seed of absurdity that perhaps they had got it all wrong. They hadn’t, of course. The drawer spilling with medication told us that. The cheery ‘hello’ of the Macmillan nurse. Ridiculous things like the best before dates on tins of soup and the day the daffodils finally died away. We tiptoed around the illness for fear it would waken at the sound of our voices and grow larger. On occasion, though, it needed to be mentioned, even if it was indirectly.
‘You’ll remember where we keep the spare fuses,’ he said.
‘I will,’ I replied.
‘And that back door always starts sticking when the weather changes. You just need to push it with your foot. Right at the bottom.’
‘I know, Cyril,’ I said. ‘I know.’
We sorted out the box files. Cyril spent entire mornings at the dining room table, peering over the top of his glasses at pieces of paper, making a decision about each one and putting them all into piles. Keep. Throw Away. Undecided. It felt as though he was going on annual leave, temporarily handing over custody and giving me an opportunity to be solely in charge of our lives for a short while. Except it wouldn’t be our lives any more. It would just be mine.
After a few weeks, he finally reached the bottom of the last file. The only things remaining were errant paperclips and receipts so faded, no one would ever know what had been received. It was only at that point he turned to me, took off his glasses and placed them very carefully on the tablecloth.
‘We need to tell Jessica,’ he said.
I straightened the piles of Keep, Throw Away, Undecided. I gathered up the paperclips. I stared out of the patio doors into the watercolour of a spring lunchtime.
‘I don’t think there’s any need to tell her,’ I said. ‘Why does she even have to know?’
Cyril pinched at the bridge of his nose, where his spectacles had left the dent of a morning’s work. ‘She’ll wonder where I am, Margaret.’
‘I’ll tell her you’ve gone away,’ I said.
Cyril shook his head very slightly.
‘I’ll tell her you’ve left me, then. That’s it.’ I put the paperclips back into a box file. ‘That should do the trick.’
Cyril gave a very large sigh. ‘She needs to know the truth, Margaret. She’s not stupid.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, she’s not stupid.’
Feeble-minded. That was the term they used about Jessica. I was a small child, but I still remember it. Not stupid or thick or backward, but feeble-minded. Perhaps in an attempt to make the whole thing sound more elegant. No one’s fault. One of those things.
My mother said she always knew Jessica was different as soon as she was born.
‘Jessica wasn’t like you, Margaret,’ she would tell me. ‘You were the only baby I had to go by, but I knew there was something