I made her acquaintance in the ladies’ lavatory towards the end of a fantastic birthday bash held in the upstairs room of a north London pub. I was incoherently drunk, and I think she was too, because I can’t remember either of us managing anything more than gestures or monosyllables. She was a committed, even violent kisser. And because she seemed keen to wrap me up and take me home straight away, we left without saying our goodbyes. Outside on the pavement a cab with its light on appeared right on cue, and 20 minutes later we were back at her apartment where she shoved me backwards on to a low divan, tore off both of our clothes and sexually assaulted me.
In the morning, after stirring awake, we spoke sensibly, it seemed to me, for the first time. I asked her what her name was, and she said it was too early for conversation. A little later I heard her mutter to herself, ‘I can’t breathe.’ Then I felt her roll off the bed and heard her go to the bathroom and after that the front door open and close. Then I fell asleep again. When I woke next, the light edging the curtain said the day was now well advanced. I got up and went to the bathroom and noticed that the apartment was a well-equipped, expensive one, and that I was left alone in it. Discarded clothes were strewn all over the floor. I picked mine out and was wildly elated to find my wallet and phone intact. I dressed, then pulled on the curtain cord, revealing yet another miraculous October day. I thought about leaving a note saying it had been a wonderful relationship but it just wasn’t working out, but couldn’t find any paper. Then I exited the apartment and found my way out of the block with fewer difficulties than I’d anticipated.
I’d missed my train back to the West Country, but remembered I had been offered a lift to Exeter, leaving from Parsons Green in west London at three o’clock. So I caught the Tube across the city to Parsons Green, where there was still, as I’d hoped there’d be, a green. I bought the papers and a coffee and croissant to go from an incredibly posh Boulangerie artisanale and carried them across to a bench on this green where I gratefully collapsed and read the papers in the sun for three hours until my lift arrived.
Nice place, Parsons Green. Leafy. Solid, brick-built Victorian buildings. On that particular Sunday afternoon, it struck me as a kind of middle-class urban Utopia, where every house is worth at least three quarters of a million quid and everyone is young, beautiful, healthy, articulate and sort of intelligent, and the children address the adults as equals. My bench was on the main thoroughfare across the green, and I watched them pass singly, in affectionate couples, or en famille. One or two children glanced backwards in frank disapproval of the two empty cans of Diamond White (not mine) under the bench, then at me, as though a public alcoholic was something of a rarity in that part of the capital.
Presently, a black clergyman came along. ‘Good afternoon, sir!’ he said, as he sat down beside me. In my devastated, paranoid state I couldn’t trust myself to sustain a conversation, either rational or spiritual. So I returned his greeting with all the affability I could muster and returned my full attention to a piece in the paper about an important, lately rediscovered Ted Hughes poem, describing his feelings the moment he heard that Sylvia was brown bread. Fascinated by all things Ted, I instantly forgot about my new neighbour but, as I read on, I became dimly conscious that a small tension had arisen between us.
Glancing secretly sideways, I saw that he was sitting in an attitude of despondency, or prayer, or both. His eyes were open and he was staring down at his hands, which were loosely joined. And the small tension had arisen because the subject of his despondency or prayer was, I suspected, me. Surely it wasn’t possible that, mindful of his church history and eccentrically dutiful, this chap had spotted the empty tins and my trembling pages and come to petition the Lord on my behalf? It seemed that it was.
I let him get on with it. Let him put his shoulder to the wheel of my recalcitrant soul if he felt like it. But he couldn’t expect any assistance from me. Not today. I delved back into the Ted piece.
And after a minute or so this conscientious chap suddenly leapt up and thrust out a hand. ‘God bless you,’ he said, huffily. ‘Enjoy the rest of your life.’ And then he stalked across the grass to the oldest, most dilapidated car in sight, got in and drove circumspectly away.
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