Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

She turns once again to the kitchen window, looks down at the bins. Those blue roofs wind unnoticed over the hill.

‘I expect he’s left all kinds of rubbish down there.’

‘I shouldn’t have thought so. He’s only been here a day. What sort of rubbish did you have in mind?’

Angelica snorts.

‘All kinds of rubbish,’ she repeats firmly. ‘He always does, the great lout. He leaves a trail of the stuff wherever he goes.’

When I go back later in the day, I find Angelica outside.

She almost never ventures down the stairs – a van delivers her shopping and the man carries the bags up to her – but now she’s come down, and out through the front door, and into the great terrifying space under the sky. As I arrive, she’s making her way round the back of the house, using her left hand to maintain contact with the building’s reassuring wall, and keeping up a constant muttered monologue to hold the world at bay. She hasn’t noticed that I’m here.

‘All kinds of rubbish,’ she says to herself, with that haughty little snort of a laugh and, though she herself lives in Flat E, she heads straight for the bin marked 27D.

‘Aha!’ she mutters as she lifts the lid. ‘I knew it.’

At the bottom of the bin she’s seen a small plastic bag, such as might line a wastepaper basket. She still hasn’t noticed me as she reaches in, with a grunt of effort and pulls out the bag, emptying its contents onto the ground. There’s an apple core, a free newspaper, a box that once contained a ready-cooked beef lasagne, and the soiled metal tray in which the lasagne was cooked. But what interests her is a little scrumpled ball of blue paper. It looks like a discarded letter, or a draft found wanting and thrown away. One corner is stained brown by the lasagne.

Angelica kneels on the ground to smooth it out against the concrete. Yesterday’s date is scrawled at the top and after that…

But I can’t watch this in silence any more.

‘Aunty Angelica?’ I murmur.

Still on her knees, she wheels round like some small cornered animal.

‘What are you doing here?’ she hisses, clutching the crumpled paper against herself as she clambers hastily to her feet. ‘I really can’t stand the way you keep creeping and snooping round me. So like your mother. I’m a grown-up woman, for goodness sake, David. Do you really think I can’t look after myself?’

‘Well, sometimes you do need a bit of help, Aunty, and you did seem very upset earlier. I was just calling by to make sure you were alright, and then I noticed you down here by the bins.’

‘So you thought you’d have a bit of a laugh at old Angelica, did you? Have a bit of a laugh, eh, and then get in your mother’s good books by telling her the whole story? Go away, David. I don’t want you. Just go, go, go!’

But a few hours later, she calls me in tears, begging me to come back over.

I let myself into the flat with my own key and find her sobbing on the floor beside her dresser. She’s still clinging to that little piece of paper, though she’s scrumpled it back up into a sodden ball. Gently I remove it from her hand and set it down.

Some time later, when I’ve poured her a brandy and tucked her up for the night, I have a look at it, but there’s almost nothing to see. All that’s written there, apart from the date, is the single word which most letters begin with.

I meet James on my way out. He’s coming back from the shops with a few purchases in a carrier bag.

‘Good evening,’ he says blandly – whatever the truth about his memory, he recognises me perfectly well every time he sees me – and then he gives me that smile.

There is poor David, that smile seems to say. There is David with all his responsibilities and pressures and painful attachments. There is David the ever-anxious juggler, still trying desperately to keep those clubs in the air. And here, on the other hand, is lucky James, with his life-long sick note, giving him permission to let them fall.

On that particular morning I’d travelled down to London by train from Cambridge, where I’d been participating in a conference on problems of governance in emerging economies, and had stayed overnight with some friends. I arrived at King’s Cross at 8.15 or thereabouts. I stood in a queue at a food stall for a couple of minutes, meaning to buy myself a croissant and a cappuccino, then decided that I really didn’t need them. I’d already had one breakfast and I was, and still am, over two stone overweight. So I abandoned the queue and headed down to the southbound Piccadilly Line in order to travel to the Holborn offices of a certain NGO, small, but highly regarded in the field, which funds experimental agricultural projects in southern Africa. They’d commissioned me and an old colleague of mine called Emily to do an evaluation of one of their projects, and we were due to present our provisional findings at 9.30.

There was a train waiting at the platform. I climbed onto it near the front and, although of course it was pretty full at that time of the morning, I was lucky enough to find myself a seat. On the way up from Cambridge, I’d gone over our provisional report and jotted down some key points. Now, as the train moved off, I went back over the notes I’d written to make sure I’d got them clear in my mind. I was keen to make a good impression because I wanted to pick up more commissions from this particular outfit. They paid well and I needed the work. My wife and I had recently separated, so we had two houses to pay for instead of one, and my daughter Jasmine was about to start at university.

The doors closed. The train picked up speed and plunged into the southbound tunnel. I looked up for a moment at my travelling companions: Londoners – black, white, brown – reading, playing with their phones, listening to music, or just quietly sitting or standing in that little capsule of air and electric light and thinking their private thoughts as they hurtled through concrete and clay. People sometimes talk about the loneliness and alienation of big cities but I felt a surge of affection for these city folk, who every single day encounter many times more human beings than they could hope to get to know in an entire lifetime. How many other species would sit quietly and harmoniously in such a confined space with so many fellow creatures they’d never met?

I arrived at the office in time to get a cup of coffee before the meeting, and have a quick word with Emily, who’d travelled up from Brighton. Two more people arrived, Peter and Amina – we knew both of them pretty well: the overseas development community is a small world – and the four of us went through into the meeting room to wait for the most important person, Sue, who as head of the NGO’s research section, had commissioned our work.

Sue arrived late, looking very agitated.

‘Haven’t you heard the news? There’s been a whole series of bomb attacks in the Underground. The whole tube system has shut down.’

We put off the start of the meeting. Amina set up her laptop on the table so we could watch the unfolding story, both to figure out its immediate implications for our day and to process it in a more general sense. There were suggestions at first that as many as six bombs had gone off, but the reports gradually settled on three: three different trains, one at Aldgate, one at Edgware Road and one at Russell Square. But then, just when that seemed to have been clarified, another bomb went off on a bus. How many more would there be?

I don’t remember the timing of it all, but at some point I figured out that the train bombed at Russell Square was on the southbound Piccadilly Line and must have followed directly after the one I travelled on. I looked back at my peaceful space capsule, hurtling through the earth, and imagined another one just like it, another collection of ordinary London people – white, black, brown – reading, listening to music, or just thinking their own thoughts, as they followed my train into that same dark tunnel. But, in their case, this familiar scene had been abruptly torn away like some flimsy canvas backdrop. Some of them would have been buried under corpses, or trapped by bits of train, or impaled by other people’s bones. Some would have been blown to pieces. Some would just be terrified. I imagined a second or two of silence and then screaming voices everywhere, from up and down the train, like the voices of the damned in hell.