A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

I don’t mind it now, though. Not so much.

Meg could stand on the platform and wait for a Piccadilly Line westbound train without much considering how remarkably easy it would be to step off in front of the next one that pulled in and solve herself.

Everyone thinks that a bit, though. Everyone. It lets them feel extra-comfortable, once the idea has gone past and they don’t need to and won’t scare the driver, won’t cause delays and tutting amongst strangers. That’s all you get for killing yourself in London — tutting. There’s been a lot of tutting lately. We live in peculiar times.

I’m all right, though. I am. My name is Meg and I’m an alcoholic and it’s not like how you see it in the movies when you say that, not like on TV, the whole room doesn’t gasp and weep and stare at you like you’re a unicorn and you’ve just started speaking French. You’re in an AA meeting — it’s the one thing that everybody thinks you’ll say.

And my name is Meg and I’m an alcoholic and I have a plan because I am better than not having one, than what might happen if I try to improvise.

I am going to have a nice dinner later, that’s all that’s going on.

My shoes are the wrong shoes for all of this walking about, but otherwise I’m in promising shape.

And I have a medallion with me and it has ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’ on it, along with a great big fuck-off Roman numeral —

I

— for one year, because sober years are so important, you get them in Latin, and I can take it out and look at it and it will prove that I’m all right and it has that bloody prayer embossed on the other side and I can’t pray — not exactly — but I can have a loud think and the words I might use are written down in any case and I choose to believe — because it’s a nice idea — that having written the words down will now mean they are permanently reciting. It’s like an open channel, and the words are saying themselves in my pocket the whole time.

Like a letter to Nowhere.

She put her hand in her jacket pocket and ran her thumb over the metal disc, the raised letters, let her nail read what she knew by heart, having heard it spoken so many times, by so many people.

Myself being one of those people. I can have faith in words. I like words. I like them more and fucking more. The Universe I can have my doubts about, but words can be proper and sweet.

GOD GRANT ME THE

SERENITY TO ACCEPT THE

THINGS I CANNOT

CHANGE, COURAGE

TO CHANGE THE THINGS

I CAN AND WISDOM TO KNOW

THE DIFFERENCE.

It says that without me, right in my hand. I don’t have to do a thing.

And I’m wearing a not nice jacket. But it’s the best that I can do. I have to accept my jacket because it can’t be changed. I don’t think I need drag a God in to assist. My clothes don’t fit well, but I’d have no respect for a deity who cared. Why should it?

With the booze, you gain weight and then you lose it and you stop being sure of which shape you are at any given time and you also stop caring — which makes you resemble the high and finer type of God.

I do care now, though — about the jacket. I accept that: not the jacket, just the caring.

I am wearing the jacket as if I do not accept it. I think that’s what would show to an observer, but that’s also the best that I can do.

And the caring makes me feel sick, so I would rather change that. And looking bad and ugly and pathetic makes me feel sick, too. One thorough glance at me and you’d see: there’s a struck-off accountant forever in a jacket and skirt that nobody could trust — which also makes me feel sick.

I would rather change the fact that I feel sick.

And I would rather not feel sick about tonight and about the meeting, or the maybe not meeting, because it does seem unlikely to me that it will happen — it does seem already too far away.

Which I want to change.

Jon seems far away.

And I do not wish to accept that.

I mean — fuck it. I can’t do it, the accepting and not accepting and changing and not changing and I would ask — I don’t know who — but I would ask what is the fucking point of having a prayer and writing it down and putting it on medallions as if it’s important and can help when all it does is make your head hurt?

Should I apply to the God I do not believe in for clarification? The razor-blade one, the faraway one, the beard-and-a-frock one, the one of some religion I’ve never tried, so I would never even have a chance …?

And then again, if God has a hurt child to help and a landslide and a cancer ward and a crashed bus full of pregnant women and jolly families to deal with and nice people who are dying — which would mean God was having a pretty quiet day — then I shouldn’t be bothering God about anything.

I could leave God out of dealing with decisions about my lapels.

Jon cares about lapels. He probably cares about mine and doesn’t like them. They probably make him sick.

And it’s a problem, all this. And worse because he’s seen this suit before — twice before. It’s all she’s got that’s even bearable. How do you explain to someone with suits and shirts and enough comfortable things that you don’t live in their world and that they’re sensible and understanding but nevertheless, somewhere in their head they must be filling out this kind of temporary visa so they can come and visit you in your ugly country, examine you and then be glad they can get the hell out again.

God grant me …

Meg let the next Tube train arrive without making it kill her. The thing opened its doors kindly and let her in and then took her away while she sat on the blue, blue seat that ran the carriage’s length and decided to remember lunch with Jon, because that made her happy.

I was in this bloody awful suit when I met him outside the PO box place. Then in this bloody awful suit when we managed to have lunch, a sort of lunch. I am now in this bloody awful suit and waiting. Again.

There’s being busy and then there’s being unwilling and then there’s being evasive and then there’s being Jon.

After Jon ran for the park it took months to fix another time with him, then change it and change it and change it — this bounce and apology and slip and apology and dodge and apology becoming part of what might be a process.

If somebody wants to meet you, then they meet you — that’s how it works.

But you still hope, because you have been told that hoping is good for you.

I will meet you.

That’s a kind of hope.

Rather than have to make any new decisions, they’d returned to Shepherd Market for a lunch which wavered and slid back to three o’clock and then four and then half past.

But in the end …

Shepherd Market had become a sentimental place — is what Jon had said.

Silly.

The train rocked her, while Meg pushed it to one remove and let Jon arrive in her mind — on a January Thursday, practically dark already and the day dead and the square quiet.

We were warm, though. We were … I think I was shaking a bit, actually, and you have no idea, at the time, that something will work out, so you worry beforehand …

He had been his formal self, talking past her. ‘A lot of people don’t have satisfaction in their work, I can see that and I realise I don’t deserve satisfaction any more than somebody else, but there are days when one sits back and considers and … For more than a century now, you see, I think, many sensible people think, Britain’s been circling nearer and nearer the drain, all Parliament does is provide a running commentary and speed the revolutions.’ And somewhere round about then, he’d properly noticed her, met her eyes, and then made this smile that was polite, or embarrassed, or upset and trying to hide it, and he’d told her, ‘Not actual revolutions, not … I do apologise, this must be very tedious for you.’ Then he’d swallowed in a way that was quite loud.