A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

The man had been startled and then amused that he might be confused with someone else. He had a small tattoo on the side of his neck. Mr August wouldn’t have a tattoo. He wouldn’t have a frame that suggested protein shakes and whey powder and sweating over weights.

Silly cow. Don’t know what I was thinking.

I wasn’t thinking — I was scared.

Then there was the one who looked fussy, somehow, and who was tallish and dressed for an office job — but I realised, once I was outside, that he’d gone in with letters and come out with none and that was probably the wrong way round. And his eyes weren’t as they should be. When he looked at me, they had the wrong type of light.

She had only glanced at him and not advanced across the square and into asking him if he was Mr August.

And there was a ginger person in a very lovely suit. I wasn’t sure about him. I thought gingerness would have been mentioned, if it had existed. Jon said he was going grey … and there was no sign of grey. So I said nothing to Mr Ginger — we just stared at each other and then I ran for it, because I’d needed to get in close to check the hair properly. He may have thought that I had some problem with his crowning glory …

My dad always talked about his crowning glory — didn’t just call it hair. My dad whom I chose to know less and less as he got older and I drank more. He was delicate with himself over going bald. I did notice that. Not much else.

The idea is to notice who you love before they die.

That would be the civilised idea.

Meg had seen Jon once through the café window, stood up and made it as far as the entrance before she was foxed, pressed back by what seemed to be the rapidly congealing air. If you believed you could tell from letters and letters and letters the way that a person should be, then he was Jon. This man was neat and tired-looking, soft in the ways that he moved, careful. He was wearing a quiet suit — the relative silence of the jacket and trousers, of the unbuttoned coat both concealing and framing them, didn’t stop them being plainly good. The way he’d groused about other people’s clothes let you be sure that he’d watch how he turned himself out for fear of being ugly. You could guess that he hated and pondered his own appearance more than anybody else’s, that he walked about inside this rawness, this sense of horror.

Another man being delicate about what he thinks are his failings.

He had a haircut that made him seem a tiny bit like a schoolboy — the haircut of someone who doesn’t quite take himself seriously. He had gently, tenderly thinning hair. And he’d carried a briefcase that wasn’t new, or gimmicky, that seemed to fit his hand and be used to him.

Most of all, I knew he should be Corwynn August, the man who was calling himself Corwynn August, because he seemed to be walking under something — like a man who had to be brave and walk about beneath some swinging danger, something not quite securely fastened up above. You could see that he’d stopped expecting the something would go away.

She’d loitered until he came out of the PO box office again and she could study his face. She was trying to be quick about it … She didn’t want to scare him. She didn’t want to spoil everything. But she did have to be sure. And would her Mr August be so tense and have a mouth kept tight with what was perhaps irritation … and also these straight-scored lines coming down from near his hairline to his eyebrows — the marks you get from being angry. These details made her doubtful.

I avoid the people who get angry, the men who do that. What might have been true, shown to be true when you saw his face, was that he had sad habits and also rage, but also this softness. The rage was mostly about himself.

The softness came first and last — it held him.

I think that’s what made me believe it was him.

Her man was a fast walker, though. He’d been gone before she could guess what she should do, before she could fight the solidified air, or else give up and leave him and never come back there — surrender. Alcoholics, after all, are fond of giving in.

Self-defence. Self-harm.

And he seemed very formal and our letters weren’t and I didn’t want formal. Formality’s just a way of not being around.

And if it was him, he was a man who worked at speed — alive and fast and with someone who rushed like that you couldn’t quite be sure of what would happen …

She’d let him go and done nothing, just slipped back into the café and watched what was left of her cappuccino go cold. Then she’d gone home.

It’s Jon’s outside that’s formal. That part of him is to do with his job, but it’s self-defence, too. And self-harm. I’ve watched the insides of his wrists and how he hides them — where he’s tender — and I’ve noticed his fingers comforting each other and the way he bends his knees a little to be level with you so he can speak — he doesn’t want to loom — and then there’s the way his intentions, soft intentions, make themselves plain in his eyes. There’s this quick light that shows. It makes you think you’ve spotted where he really is.

I don’t see him often, haven’t met him often, but I have noticed him a lot. I make up for our lost time. I have studied the way that he is.

Jon’s an education .

She’d kept going back to Shepherd Market, kept waiting, kept close to the time when she’d first caught sight of him.

And then he was there again and I was there and I was walking over and saying his name, calling it out so that something familiar would reach him before me — and then he heard, he realised …

The way he’d stared at her …

I was a shock. I was a shock to him. Even though I didn’t mean to be.

I’d made him nervous.

That wasn’t only a fault, though, it proved what type of man he was — he’s safe.

You’ll always be safer with somebody who gets scared. That’s how it works. You can be like two animals, hiding together.

But first you are scared and then you scare him and then both of you get more scared, because of each other and it hurts you and it’s fast.

The way he’d stared at her.

Sorrysorrysorrysorry.

Don’t hate me.

He had been definitely like an animal then: all startled and ticking and sprung.

His stride had stopped and then turned into a tiny stagger and — because she knew of nothing else to do — she’d said who she was and then hoped.

That’s the terrible thing about being sober, sober in an organised way. They tell you it’s to do with having hope, when that’s what you’ve always been avoiding.

Once they were inside the café, Jon had ordered and fought down his cappuccino so fast it must have burned him. And only her hold on his hand had allowed their meeting to be real.

If you’re scared you need someone to do that. And if you have trouble with hope, then giving out your hand and feeling it taken helps you, too.

She could remember the feel of his fist, hers cradling it and trying to seem sane for him and calm and safe and to touch his knuckles only as she might touch any nervous animal. They’d walked to the café with her hand on his, visibly linked. He’d dropped the contact as they worked themselves through the doorway, but then — she remembered this clearly, often — they both made this reach across the table towards something that could keep them steady — hand into hand — while apparently the tabletop and the walls and windows and so forth all shifted, all made her feel they were weathering large, unpleasant seas.