Our London Lives

2. Pip

2017

March

WHEN HE COMES out onto the street, he finds spring is waiting.

He had noticed it all right, these past few days, through the various windows. Or coming at him over the wall of the long back garden: buds and stretched evenings and the dawn chorus of course, adding another hour onto an already overlong day.

Earlier that morning, when the nurse told him that in two days' time it would be April, he had said, 'Yes, I suppose it must be.' But still, it catches him off guard - the warm air, the light, the whole sense of renewal.

He can remember waiting for snow. There had been warnings on the news, and in the garden, that peculiar silence. He had been looking forward to viewing it anyway, from a warm, safe distance. Glancing up now and then from his ringside seat overlooking the garden. Into the feathery maze. Coming back to his book then, and turning a page with warm, moveable hands. Beauty without pain. That would have been back in January. As it happened, the snow had barely lasted the night, and since then, he has had little or no sense of the weather beyond a vague impression of grey and rain, broken with an occasional shot of milky sunlight.

'A good time to go home,' the nurse had said. Broad smile and small, happy eyes. He thought she might be from the Philippines. The other staff members called her Tracey, but he doubted that was her real name.

'And where is your home?' he had asked by way of a little conversation while they waited for Dom to arrive.

'Oh, many, many miles away.'

'How many?'

'Thousands. Ten thousand.'

'Do you get to go back much?'

She didn't answer that one, just gave a little shrug. Her hand soothing the cover on the end of his bed. After a few seconds she flipped the question back at him. 'What about you - where is your home?'

He wanted to tell her that he had no home, that he hadn't had one - not a proper one anyhow - since he was ten years old.

But it had seemed a churlish thing to say to a woman who'd probably left it all behind - husband, children, even her name - just to keep the wolf from the door.

'My home, for the moment anyway,' he said, 'will be my brother's house.'

'Ah, nice, and where?'

'Notting Hill.'

'Ah, very nice then.'

'It's a nice house, right enough,' he had said, 'so far as I can remember.'

Soon after that, the receptionist had appeared in the doorway and beckoned Nurse Tracey out. Low voices in the corridor and then, the nurse turning back in, nervously passing the message on. 'Your brother, is not possible. So sorry, he says.'

'He says or his secretary says?' he asked.

'Oh, I don't know about that,' she said, handing him the receptionist's note.

Stuck in rehearsal, quicker to meet at house, be there by 5.

'Your brother, he is famous trumpet player? Sister Margo told me,' she says.

'So I believe.'

'You want a cab now?'

He stood up, pulled the bag off the bed and said, 'That's all right, I can find my own way there.'

Then he'd turned his face away in case she could see the relief written all over it.

Three nurses seeing him off. He stands on the street and looks in at them waving out at him from the hallway. A blaze of white against a dark interior. One brown face, one black, one pale Irish. Already he feels it, fragments of time falling away. The life in there, the other life waiting out here. The two-way mirror that divides one from the other. Moments ago, he had been standing in the hall while they fussed over him like he was a little boy going off to school. Now he is out here in the searing light, wondering how a day in March could be so warm, and trying to decide which direction to take.

The Irish nurse had walked him to the door. Then, standing on the step for a few minutes, she laid down the law in a crisp country accent: 'Now. Your brother said he won't be long. There's a café down the road from his house, he said - you can wait there if you prefer not to be standing out on the street. Eat something because you didn't touch your lunch. Remember, don't let yourself get hungry. Or thirsty. I put a bottle of water in the bag.'

'You forgot to say resentful,' he said.

'Sorry?'

'I'm not supposed to let myself get resentful. Hungry, thirsty, resentful. It's one of my triggers.'

'And is there need to remind you of resentment already - no? Good. So, your pills and prescription are in there. You've three days' supply - make sure you don't run out. And your discharge pack - don't lose that now, whatever you do, all your phone numbers are in there. As soon as you get your new phone, put them in - and don't forget, you can call your sponsor any time, day or night, any hour. Will we get you a taxi?'

'No, really, I'd like to walk, I can pick up a new phone on the way.'

'Well, if you get tired, hop into a taxi. The next few weeks will be crucial. Take it day by day and before you know it you'll have April behind you.'

'The cruellest month.'

'Why do you say that? It's a lovely month. Enjoy it. Just be careful, that's all. Have you sunglasses - no? Well, better buy yourself a pair so before you do anything else.'

'I'm not even sure the sunglasses work, to be honest.'

'Well, get them anyway,' she said.

The Irish nurse disliked him; she felt bad about it too, he could tell. The puzzled, guilty look on her face as if she was trying to figure it out: why do I dislike him?

He could have told her: it's your ancestral memory, love, that's all, recalling all the useless drunks that your foremothers would have had to put up with.

He could have told her, too, that he'd never had a better nurse, nor one that was so thorough.

She nodded at him a couple of times. 'Well, good luck then. And no offence or anything, but I hope we never meet again. Now, what have you to buy first thing?'

'A nice pint of Guinness and a whiskey chaser?'

She cocked her head to the side, gave him a look.

'Sunglasses,' he said.

A slap on his arm, then a warning finger. 'And you behave yourself now, do you hear me?' she said.

And he'd smiled as she turned to go back inside and thought: God, I just love Irish women.

He crosses to the shaded side of the street, his mind flicking through the parks of London, as it always does, whenever he needs to locate himself. Park to park, railing by railing; a tangle of concrete miles in between. He knows he is in the area of NW1. So that's: Regent's behind him, Hyde below him. Green Park and St James's to the left.

Something moves over the skyline. Grey, odd-shaped, slightly laboured. A heron. He stops to watch its short, inelegant flight blundering over the chimney pots. Coming from Regent's Park, he reckons, like himself, heading south-west.

He wonders what time it is now, and he's about to turn his wrist to check when he remembers: there is no watch there. The imprint of the watch has long since faded, the hairs it once flattened sprung back into place. You lost it. Or pawned it. Or gave it away. You may even have allowed it to get stolen. How many times do you have to be told? You stupid bastard, your father's watch is no more.

A young woman gets out of a car up the way, pips it shut, then begins walking towards him. He could ask her - do people still do that? Ask for and give the time - stranger to stranger? He can't recall the last time anyone asked him. But then again, they probably wouldn't be so inclined. As she nears, he sees her phone pinned to her ear and decides not to disturb her. She toddles right past, uncertain on heels, so close to him now that a whiff of her perfume slips into his mouth, startling him. He had been expecting her to give him a wide berth. Why hadn't she given him a wide berth?

Because you are not that man now, he tells himself. Now you are somebody else.

At the corner, he turns onto a long straight road, an afternoon lull hanging over it. Hardly anyone about that's not tucked into a car, van or bus. Bar an elderly couple on the far side, and on this side, a lone figure in the distance. Although that could be a tree either. Two rows of traffic: southbound, sluggish; northbound a little more fluid. He reckons it's somewhere between half past two and three.

If he could arrange it so that he's barely there before Dominick has to go out again. Even better, if there was just enough time to pass each other in the hall, one coming in, one going out, with a pause in between for essentials: key, alarm code, whereabouts of bed. That way, he could be fast asleep by the time Dom comes in tonight. And then, first thing tomorrow, be in a rush to go out. Where, though? The chemist, the social, the physio. But no, tomorrow is Saturday so physio and social are out. It doesn't matter - the thing is to get out early. By the time he comes back, Dom would probably have gone out to work or a concert. Sunday morning, he could say he has to...