A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

Well, I do have my reasons.

But Mr August was too far away to touch her and too far away to be bad news. And he was polite.

He was unforgivable and lovely and being lovely is unforgivable and also it made her not run.

I will begin by saying that nothing bad will happen while we’re in here together. And please do call me Corwynn, or Corey, or Mr August, whichever you would prefer. Please don’t worry about the choices. If you would prefer, you can pick them all. We will be safe together. I can promise you that.

Meeting alcoholics, your tribe, you get used to strangers who still know you, understand. They sit in the echoes with you and talk you through the turns and tunnels, the mine workings in yourself. You get used to that.

This means that someone who guesses you need to be safe, only from reading a note you sent him — he doesn’t seem impossible. That good kind of man does not seem entirely unlikely. You try and guess, you try and feel what he’d be like: a man who writes lots of letters? A man who makes his living out of letters? A man who’s used to noticing, guessing? A man who reads closely? Lawyer? Therapist? Adulterer? Someone who lies in wait?

But he didn’t feel like that, didn’t seem like that. And, after we’d properly started, once he was writing by hand and not typing — who types any more? It was lovely that he typed, had a typewriter, was in some place where things were like that: slower, painstaking, private — when I saw the way he wrote by hand … I could find him better in his words, in the shapes of them, in the lines and dips and dots across his pages, the places where it seemed he might have paused, the paper he’d touched.

And I sent him paper to touch. My mother’s paper. My best inheritance.

I knew it would be with him. It would feel his breath.

Please write what you think I would enjoy. And thank you. And please call me Sophia. And thank you again. You are very kind.

There was something about that he understood.

Dear Mr August.

Be very kind.

That’s all I would have needed to say, Mr August. Not even that — you were being kind already.

MEG STOOD AT her kitchen window — Meg, still having her birthday and wishing it might have gone better so far. Meg sober and sober and wholly sober, Meg with the evening still ahead.

She saw the afternoon light colouring the flagstones, the ones she had scrubbed last year when she felt weird and harried one Sunday — they’d given her something to do. They had filled hours and hours with a nice mindlessness. She liked them. They’d been laid out nearest the back door, so you could sit in the sun if there was some. Her mother’s idea.

The flags needed to be cleaned again. And the garden required love, detailed and applied affection. Meg was going to tidy and weed it and then she’d plant things. She would grow stuff she could eat — stuff that was healthy. And she’d prune the roses and fill in the gaps she would leave once the weeds were gone. There’d be places she could find that could sell her cheap plants.

It would be satisfying.

She looked through the window, which she polished weekly.

She kept busy with maintenance tasks, because they lent dignity and reassured. The glass was almost invisible, but still there: the surface which had taken her father’s gaze, her mother’s, which had seen them every day.

I still get so scared and I don’t know why, or I don’t want to.

Here it is.

An older woman, mildly frail and bundled against the weather, steps on to an upward escalator at London Bridge Station. She has a shopping bag in one hand: not plastic, but a traditional cloth bag which is therefore saving hypothetical trees in some distant forest, or the environment in a wider sense. Her other hand holds the lead of a Labrador: a plump and older and honey-coloured dog, who seems a touch unsettled by the escalator and the lifting and rearing of its unforgiving metal steps, its constant shifting. The animal is positioned quite far below the woman on the long and otherwise empty escalator. Its leash is pulled taut.

The dog, only a little, tugs to and fro and the woman tries to turn in order, perhaps, to calm it. Then the Labrador pulls again and gently, gently, this begins to lean the woman backwards in a way that will soon become physically unsustainable.

It is possible to watch the woman and her pet for an amount of time as they begin to have their accident. They are, to a degree, on display. The woman’s leaning becomes a twisting, backward sway and then breaks into a tumble that drops her spine and shoulders down on to the metal steps and their harsh edges. As she flails out her arms for support, she loses her bag. Its contents spread, tipping after her. She hits her head. There is an instant when the impact is clear, jarring. She rolls, exactly as she is fighting strenuously not to, down and over her dog — her full weight pressing on her dog — the animal making one high and bewildered noise and then lying flat and, it would seem, frozen in bewilderment. Meanwhile the steps climb away from the woman who rolls again, head over heels. This rolling seems unlikely and frightening in someone of her age and her body seems very soft and very caught by the movements of such a hard place.

And, as this sadness unfolds, people run.

From all over the station, so many people run.

So many strangers have seen this woman and this dog and now they are pelting, racing in from the upper and lower concourses of what had appeared to be an almost deserted, mid-afternoon space.

A man sprints and lunges for the Emergency Stop button, hits it and stills the offending escalator. A woman, about the same age as the one who has fallen, runs down from above, speaking as she does, asking questions with a kind of authority, ‘Do you feel sick? Do you know where you are? Do you know what has happened? Can you move? Where are you hurt? No, don’t worry about your dog. Not just now. Don’t worry about your dog.’

A younger man kneels by the Labrador and talks to it, strokes its head. The fallen woman continues to be concerned about it, as she struggles to sit, dishevelled, trying to gather herself. Shock is plain in her flickering movements, damage and shock. She prefers to be more worried about her pet than her banged head, or her bleeding shin, or whatever else is injured. This is a way of having dignity — to hold cares beyond oneself.

A station employee arrives and he speaks on his radio and seems inexperienced, unsure of where to place his feet, his limbs, but he is trying to be confident and to assist. He pulls across a tape to block off the top of the escalator and pre-empt further confusion. He is thinking ahead. The he leans in and talks to the woman softly.

A dozen human beings who do not know each other are together, doing this one thing, supplying this care for a tumbled woman and her dog.

They ran. They all ran. They all ran beyond themselves.

Something bad had happened and they wanted it to stop.

They wanted things to be OK again.

They all ran so fast.

JON WASN’T SUITED to pubs. He’d recently begun to dislike them on personal principle. Apart from anything else, the tables never did quite accommodate his length of leg. They gave him knee compression, which must be unhealthy.

And this pub is a tiny slice of Chiswick — same brewer in charge. I would also say that the fish and chips aren’t pleasing me, although I’m not best placed with my digestion at the moment and I’m sure they are, in fact, a fine example of their type.

Across two plates of beer-battered hake with chips — Jon’s portion hardly attempted — sat Milner, the shine of two lagers and significant additional pre-refreshment brightening his forehead and glinting in the wet hollow of his collarbone. He was pressing what was — according to him — the world’s only ethical mobile phone tight against what Jon suspected would be a greasily damp ear.