Текст книги "One Day"

Автор книги: David Nicholls

Соавторы: David Nicholls
сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 24 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

So like I said, I didn’t think you deserved her but I know from my brief contact with Emma that all that changed eventually. You were a shit and then you weren’t a shit, and I know that in the years you finally got together that you made her very, very happy. She glowed, didn’t she? She just glowed with it all shiny and I would like to thank you for this and say no hard feelings mate and wish you best of luck for the rest of your life.

I am sorry if this letter is getting a bit weepy. Anniversaries like this are hard for all of us, for her family and you especially, but I hate this date, and will always hate this day every year from now on whenever it comes round. My thoughts are with you today. I know you have a beautiful daughter and I hope you get some comfort and pleasure from her.

Well must close now! Be happy and be good and get on with life! Seize the day all that bollocks. I think that is what Emma would have wanted.

Best wishes (or at a push, love I suppose)

Ian Whitehead

‘Dexter, can you hear me? Oh, God, what have you done? Can you hear me Dex? Open your eyes, will you?’

When he wakes, Sylvie is there. Somehow he is lying on the floor of his flat, jammed between the sofa and the table, and she is standing awkwardly above him, trying to pull him out of the narrow space and get him into a sitting position. His clothes are wet and sticky and he realises that he has been sick in his sleep. He is appalled and ashamed but powerless to move as Sylvie grunts and gasps, her hands beneath his armpits.

‘Oh, Sylvie,’ he says, struggling to help her. ‘I’m sorry. I fucked up again.’

‘Just sit up for me will you, honey?’

‘I’m fucked up, Sylvie. I am so fucked up. .’

‘You’ll be fine, you need to sleep it off that’s all. Oh, don’t cry, Dexter. Listen to me, will you?’ She’s kneeling with her hands on his face now, looking at him with a tenderness he rarely saw when they were married. ‘We’ll get you cleaned up and into bed, and you can sleep it off. Okay?’

Glancing past her he sees a figure loitering anxiously in the doorway: his daughter. He groans and thinks he might be sick again, so powerful is the sudden spasm of shame.

Sylvie follows his gaze. ‘Jasmine sweetheart, please wait in the other room, will you?’ she says, as levelly as possible. ‘Daddy’s not feeling very well.’ Jasmine doesn’t move. ‘I told you, go next door!’ says Sylvie, panic rising in her voice.

He wants very much to say something to reassure Jasmine, but his mouth is swollen and bruised and he can’t seem to form the words, and instead he lies back down, defeated. ‘Don’t move,’ says Sylvie, ‘Just stay exactly where you are,’ and she leaves the room, taking their daughter with her. He closes his eyes, waiting, praying for all of this to pass. There are voices in the hall. Phone-calls are made.

The next thing that he knows for sure is that he is in the back of a car, curled uncomfortably on the back seat beneath a tartan blanket. He pulls it tight around him – despite the warm day he can’t seem to stop shivering – and realises that it’s the old picnic blanket which, along with the smell of the car’s scuffed burgundy upholstery, reminds him of family days out. With some difficulty he lifts his head to look out of the passenger window. They are on the motorway. Mozart plays on the radio. He sees the back of his father’s head, fine silver-grey hair neatly trimmed apart from the tufts in his ears.

‘Where are we going?’

‘I’m taking you home. Go back to sleep.’

His father has abducted him. For a moment he considers arguing: Take me back to London, I’m fine, I’m not a child. But the leather is warm against his face, he doesn’t have the energy to move, let alone argue. He shivers once more, pulls the blanket up to his chin and falls asleep.

He is woken by the sound of the wheels on the gravel of the large, sturdy family home. ‘In you come then,’ says his father, opening the car door like a chauffeur. ‘Soup for tea!’ and he walks towards the house, tossing the car keys jauntily into the air as he goes. Clearly he has decided to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary has happened, and Dexter is grateful for this. Hunched and unsteady, he clambers from the car, shrugs off the picnic blanket and follows him inside.

In the small downstairs bathroom he inspects his face in the mirror. His bottom lip is cut and swollen, and there’s a large, yellow-brown bruise down one side of his face. He tries to roll his shoulders, but his back aches, the muscles stretched and torn. He winces, then examines his tongue, ulcerous, bitten at the sides and coated with a grey mould. He runs the tip of it over his teeth. They never feel clean these days, and he can smell his own breath reflecting back off the mirror. It has a faecal quality, as if something is decaying inside him. There are broken veins on his nose and cheek. He is drinking with a renewed sense of purpose, nightly and frequently during the day, and has gained a great deal of weight; his face is podgy and slack, his eyes permanently red and rheumy.

He rests his head against the mirror and exhales. In the years he was with Emma he sometimes wondered idly what life would be like if she weren’t around; not in a morbid way, just pragmatically, speculatively, because don’t all lovers do this? Wonder what he would be without her? Now the answer is in the mirror. Loss has not endowed him with any kind of tragic grandeur, it has just made him stupid and banal. Without her he is without merit or virtue or purpose, a shabby, lonely, middle-aged drunk, poisoned with regret and shame. An unwanted memory rises up of that morning, of his own father and his ex-wife undressing him and helping him into the bath. In two weeks time he will be forty-one, and his father is helping him into the bath. Why couldn’t they just have taken him to hospital to have his stomach pumped? There would have been more dignity in that.

In the hallway he can hear his father talking to his sister, shouting into the telephone. He sits on the edge of the bath. It requires no effort to eavesdrop. In fact it’s impossible not to hear.

‘He woke the neighbours, trying to kick his own door down. They let him in. . Sylvie found him on the floor. . It seems he had a bit too much to drink that’s all. . just cuts and bruises. . Absolutely no idea. Anyway, we’ve cleaned him up. He’ll be fine in the morning. Do you want to come and say hello?’ In the bathroom, Dexter prays for a ‘no’, but his sister clearly can see no pleasure in it either. ‘Fair enough, Cassie. Maybe give him a call in the morning will you?’

When he is sure his father has gone, Dexter steps out into the hall and pads towards the kitchen. He drinks warm tap water from a dusty pint glass and looks out at the garden in the evening sun. The swimming pool is drained and covered with a sagging blue tarpaulin, the tennis court scrappy and overgrown. The kitchen, too, has a musty smell. The large family house has gradually closed down room by room, so that now his father occupies just the kitchen, living room and his bedroom, but even so it is still too large for him. His sister says that sometimes he sleeps on the sofa. Concerned, they have talked to him about moving out, buying somewhere more manageable, a little flat in Oxford or London, but his father won’t hear of it. ‘I intend to die in my own house if you don’t mind,’ he says, a line of argument that’s too emotive to counter.

‘Feeling better then?’ His father stands behind him.

‘A little.’

‘What’s that?’ He nods towards Dexter’s pint glass. ‘Gin, is it?’

‘Just water.’

‘Glad to hear it. I thought we’d have soup tonight, seeing as how it’s a special occasion. Could you manage a tin of soup?’

‘I think so.’

He holds two tins in the air. ‘Mulligatawny or Cream of Chicken?’

So the two men shuffle around the large musty kitchen, a pair of widowers making more mess than is really necessary in warming two cans of soup. Since living alone, his father’s diet has reverted to that of an ambitious boy-scout: baked beans, sausages, fish-fingers; he has even been known to make himself a saucepan of jelly.

The phone rings in the hall. ‘Get that will you?’ says his father, mashing butter onto sliced white bread. Dexter hesitates. ‘It won’t bite you, Dexter.’

He goes into the hall and picks up. It’s Sylvie. Dexter settles on the stairs. His ex-wife lives alone now, the relationship with Callum having finally combusted just before Christmas time. Their mutual unhappiness, and a desire to protect Jasmine from this, has made them strangely close and for the first time since they got married they are almost friends.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Oh, you know. Bit embarrassed. Sorry about that.’

‘That’s alright.’

‘I seem to remember you and Dad putting me in the bath.’

Sylvie laughs. ‘He was very unfazed by it all. “He’s got nothing I’ve not seen before!”’

Dexter smiles and winces at the same time. ‘Is Jasmine okay?’

‘I think so. She’s fine. She will be fine. I told her you had food poisoning.’

‘I’ll make it up to her. Like I said, I’m sorry.’

‘These things happen. Just don’t ever, ever do it again, will you?’

Dexter makes a noise that sounds like ‘No, well, we’ll see. .’ There is a silence. ‘I should go, Sylvie. Soup’s burning.’

‘See you Saturday night, yes?’

‘See you then. Love to Jasmine. And I’m sorry.’

He hears her adjust the receiver. ‘We do all love you, Dexter.’

‘No reason why you should,’ he mumbles, embarrassed.

‘No, maybe not. But we do.’

After a moment, he replaces the phone then joins his father in front of the television, drinking lemon barley water that has been diluted in homeopathic proportions. The soup is eaten off trays with specially padded undersides for comfortable laptop eating – a recent innovation that Dexter finds vaguely depressing, perhaps because it’s the kind of thing his mother would have never let in the house. The soup itself is as hot as lava, stinging his cut lip as he sips it, and the sliced white bread his father buys is imperfectly buttered, torn and mashed into a puttycoloured pulp. But it is, bizarrely, delicious, the thick butter melting into the sticky soup, and they eat it while watching EastEnders, another recent compulsion of his father’s. As the credits roll, he places the padded tray on the floor, presses the mute button on the remote control and turns to look at Dexter.

‘So is this to become an annual festival, do you think?’

‘I don’t know yet.’ Some time passes, and his father turns back to the muted TV. ‘I’m sorry,’ says Dexter.

‘What for?’

‘Well, you had to put me in the bath, so. .’

‘Yes I’d rather not do thatagain if you don’t mind.’ With the TV still muted, he starts to flick through the TV channels. ‘Anyway, you’ll be doing it for me soon enough.’

‘God, I hope not,’ says Dexter. ‘Can’t Cassie do it?’

His father smiles and glances back at him. ‘I really don’t want to have a heart-to-heart. Do you?’

‘I’d rather not.’

‘Well let’s not then. Let’s just say that I think the best thing you could do is try and live your life as if Emma were still here. Don’t you think that would be best?’

‘I don’t know if I can.’

‘Well you’ll have to try.’ He reaches for the remote control. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing for the last ten years?’ On the TV, his father finds what he has been looking for, and sinks further into his chair. ‘Ah, The Bill.’

They sit and watch the TV in the light of the summer evening, in the room full of family photographs and to his embarrassment Dexter finds that he is crying once again, very quietly. Discreetly, he puts his hand to his eyes, but his father can hear the catching of his breath and glances over.

‘Everything alright there?’

‘Sorry,’ says Dexter.

‘Not my cooking, is it?’

Dexter laughs and sniffs. ‘Still a bit drunk, I think.’

‘It’s alright,’ says his father, turning back to the TV. ‘ Silent Witnessis on at nine.’

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE. Arthur’s Seat

SATURDAY 15 JULY 1988

Rankeillor Street, Edinburgh

Dexter showered in the shabby mildewed bathroom, then put on last night’s shirt. It smelt of sweat and cigarettes so he put the suit jacket on too, to hold the odour in, then squeezed toothpaste onto his index finger and polished his teeth.

He joined Emma Morley and Tilly Killick in the kitchen, beneath a greasy wall-sized poster of Truffaut’s Jules et Jim. Jeanne Moreau stood over them laughing as they ate an awkward, bowel-tweaking breakfast: brown toast with soya spread, some kind of aggregate muesli. Because this was a special occasion, Emma had washed out the continental-style espresso maker, the kind that always seemed to be mouldy inside, and after the first cup of oily black liquid Dexter began to feel a little bit better. He sat quietly, listening to the flatmates’ self-consciously larky banter, their big spectacles worn as a badge of honour, and had the vague feeling that he had been taken hostage by a rogue fringe theatre company. Perhaps it had been a mistake to stay on after all. Certainly it had been a mistake to leave the bedroom. How was he supposed to kiss her with Tilly Killick sitting there, babbling on?

For her part, Emma found herself increasingly maddened by Tilly’s presence. Did she have no discretion at all? Sat there with her chin cupped in her hand, playing with her hair and sucking her teaspoon. Emma had made the mistake of showering with an untested bottle of Body Shop strawberry gel and was painfully aware of smelling like a fruit yoghurt. She badly wanted to go and rinse it off, but didn’t dare leave Dexter alone with Tilly, her dressing-gown gaping open on her best underwear, a red plaid all-in-one body from Knickerbox; she could be so obvioussometimes.

To go back to bed, that’s what Emma really wanted, and to be partially dressed once again, but it was too late for that now, they were all too sober. Keen to get away, she wondered aloud what they should do today, the first day of their graduate lives.

‘We could go to the pub?’ suggested Dexter, weakly. Emma groaned with nausea.

‘Go for lunch?’ said Tilly.

‘No money.’

‘The movies then?’ offered Dexter. ‘I’ll pay. .’

‘Not today. It’s lovely out, we should be outside.’

‘Okay, the beach, North Berwick.’

Emma shrank from the idea. It would mean wearing a swimming costume in front of him, and she wasn’t strong enough for that kind of agony. ‘I’m useless on the beach.’

‘Okay then, what?’

‘We could climb up Arthur’s Seat?’ said Tilly.

‘Never done it,’ said Dexter casually. Both girls looked at him, open-mouthed.

‘You’ve never climbed Arthur’s Seat?’

‘Nope.’

‘You’ve been in Edinburgh four years, and you’ve never?. .’

‘I’ve been busy!’

‘Doing what?’ said Tilly.

‘Studying anthropology,’ said Emma and the two girls cackled unkindly.

‘Well we must go!’ said Tilly, and a brief silence followed as Emma’s eyes blazed a warning.

‘I haven’t got proper shoes,’ said Dexter.

‘It’s not K2, it’s just a big hill.’

‘I can’t climb it in brogues!’

‘You’ll be fine, it’s not hard.’

‘In my suit?’

‘Yes! We could take a picnic!’ But Emma could feel the enthusiasm starting to slip away, until Tilly finally spoke:

‘Actually, you two should probably go without me. I’ve got. . stuff to do.’

Emma’s eyes flicked towards her, catching the end of a wink, and Emma thought she might very easily lean across and kiss her.

‘Alright then. Let’s do it!’ said Dexter, brightening too, and fifteen minutes later they were stepping outside into the hazy July morning, the Salisbury Crags looming over them at the end of Rankeillor Street.

‘We’re really climbing up there?’

‘A child could do it. Trust me.’

In the supermarket on Nicolson Street they shopped for a picnic, both a little uncomfortable in the strangely domestic rite of sharing a shopping basket, both self-conscious about their choices; were olives too fancy? Was it funny to take Irn Bru, ostentatious to buy champagne? They loaded Emma’s army surplus rucksack with supplies – Emma’s joky, Dexter’s would-be sophisticated – then doubled back towards Holyrood Park and began the ascent along the base of the escarpment.

Dexter tagged along behind, sweaty in his suit and slippery shoes, a cigarette held between his lips, his head thumping with red wine and the morning’s coffee. He was vaguely aware that he should be taking in the splendour of the view, but instead his eyes were fixed on Emma’s bottom in faded blue 501s, cinched in tight at the waist, above black high-top Converse All-Stars.

‘You’re very nimble.’

‘Like a mountain goat, me. I used to go hiking a lot at home, when I was in my Cathy phase. Out on the wild and windy moors. Dead soulful I was. “I cannot live without my life! I cannot live without my soul!”’

Half-listening, Dexter assumed that she was quoting something, but was distracted by a strip of dark sweat forming between her shoulder blades, a glimpse of a bra-strap at the slipped neck of her t-shirt. He had another momentary image of last night in bed, but she looked round at him as if warning him off the thought.

‘How you doing there, Sherpa Tenzing?’

‘I’m fine. I wish there was some grip on these shoes, that’s all.’ She was laughing now. ‘What’s funny?’

‘Just I’ve never seen anyone smoke and hike at the same time.’

‘What else am I meant to be doing?’

‘Looking at the view!’

‘A view’s a view’s a view.’

‘Is that Shelley or Wordsworth?’

He sighed and stopped, his hands on his knees. ‘Okay. Fine. I’ll look at the view.’ Turning, he saw the council estates, the spires and crenellations of the Old City beneath the great grey hulk of the castle, then beyond that in the haze of the warm day, the Firth of Forth. Dexter had a general policy of not appearing impressed by anything, but it really was a magnificent view, the one he recognised from picture postcards. He wondered why he had never seen it before.

‘Very nice,’ he allowed himself and they kept climbing towards the summit, wondering what would happen when they got there.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO. The Second Anniversary

Unpacking

SATURDAY 15 JULY 2006

North London and Edinburgh

At six-fifteen that evening he pulls down the metal shutters of the Belleville Café and snaps the heavy padlock into place. Nearby Maddy waits for him, and he takes her hand as they walk together towards the tube station.

Finally, finally he has moved house, recently taking possession of a pleasant but unshowy three-bedroomed maisonette in Gospel Oak. Maddy lives in Stockwell, some distance away at the other end of the Northern Line, and sometimes it makes sense for her to stay over. But not tonight; there has been no melodrama or portentousness about it, but tonight he would like to have some time by himself. He has set himself a task tonight, and he can only do it alone.

They say goodbye outside Tufnell Park tube. Maddy is a little taller than him, with long straight black hair, and she has to stoop a little to kiss him goodbye. ‘Call me later, if you want.’

‘I might do.’

‘And if you change your mind, and you want me to come up—’

‘I’ll be fine.’

‘Alright then. See you tomorrow maybe?’

‘I’ll call you.’

They kiss goodnight again, briefly but fondly, and he carries on walking down the hill towards his new home.

He has been seeing Maddy, the café’s manager, for two months now. They have yet to tell the other staff officially, but suspect they probably know already. It has not been a passionate affair, more a gradual acceptance over the last year of an inevitable situation. To Dexter, it has all been a little too practical and matter-of-fact, and he is privately a little uncomfortable about the transition that Maddy has made from confidante to lover; it casts a shadow over the relationship, that it should have originated in such gloom.

But it’s true they get on very well, everyone says so, and Maddy is kind and sensible and attractive, long and slim, and a little awkward. She has ambitions to be a painter, and Dexter thinks she is good; small canvases hang in the café, and are sold occasionally. She is also ten years younger than he is – he imagines Emma rolling her eyes at this – but she is wise and smart and has been through her own share of unhappiness: an early divorce, various unhappy relationships. She is quiet, self-contained and thoughtful and has a melancholy air about her, which suits him at present. She is also compassionate and fiercely loyal; it was Maddy who saved the business during the time when he was drinking the profits and not turning up, and he is grateful to her for this. Jasmine likes her. They get on well enough, for the moment at least.

It’s a pleasant Saturday evening and he walks on alone through residential back streets until he reaches the flat, the basement and ground floor of a red-brick mansion block not too far from Hampstead Heath. The flat retains the smell and the wallpaper of the elderly couple who lived there before, and he has only unpacked a few essentials: the TV and DVD, the stereo. It’s a frumpy kind of place, at the moment anyway, with its dado rails and appalling bathroom and its many other small rooms, but Sylvie insists that it has great potential, once they’ve knocked the walls through and sanded the floors. There’s a great room for when Jasmine comes to stay, and a garden too. A garden. For a while he joked about paving it over, but has now decided that he is going to learn to garden, and has bought a book on the subject. Somewhere deep in his consciousness he has become aware of the concept of the shed. Soon, it will be golf and pyjamas in bed.

Once inside and past the boxes that clutter the hall, he takes a shower then goes into the kitchen and orders Thai food to be delivered. In the living room he lies on the sofa and begins to compile a mental list of the things he must do before he can begin his task.

For a small, diverse circle of people, a previously innocuous date has taken on a melancholy weight, and there are certain calls that must now be made. He starts with Sue and Jim, Emma’s parents in Leeds. The conversation is pleasant and straightforward enough and he tells them about the business, how Jasmine is getting on at school, repeating the conversation twice for both the mother and the father. ‘Well, that’s all the news really,’ he tells Sue. ‘Just to say, you know, thinking of you today, and hope you’re alright.’

‘You too, Dexter. Look after yourself, won’t you?’ she says, her voice unsteady, then hangs up. Dexter continues to work through the list, speaking to his sister, his father, his ex-wife, his daughter. The conversations are brief, ostentatiously lighthearted and don’t mention the significance of the day, but the subtext is always the same: ‘I’m fine.’ He phones Tilly Killick, but she is mawkish and over-emotional: ‘But how are you reallysweetheart? I mean, really? Are you by yourself? Are you okayby yourself? Do you want us to come over?’ Irritated, he reassures her, then ends the call as quickly and politely as he can. He calls Ian Whitehead in Taunton, but he’s putting the kids to bed, the little sods, and it’s not a good time. Ian promises he’ll call back in the week and maybe even come down and see him sometime, and Dexter says that it’s a great idea in full know ledge that it will never happen. There’s a general sense, as in all the calls, that the worst of the storm has passed. Dexter will probably never speak to Ian Whitehead again and this is fine too, for both of them.

He eats supper with the television on, hopping channels and restricting himself to the solitary beer that came free with the delivery. But there’s something saddening about eating alone, hunched over on the sofa in this strange house and for the first time that day he feels a rush of despair and loneliness. These days grief seems like walking on a frozen river; most of the time he feels safe enough, but there is always that danger that he will plunge through. Now he hears the ice creak beneath him, and so intense and panicking is the sensation that he has to stand for a moment, press his hands to his face and catch his breath. He exhales slowly through his fingers, then rushes into the kitchen and throws dirty plates into the sink with a clatter. He has a sudden overwhelming need to drink, and to keep on drinking. He finds his phone.

‘What’s up?’ says Maddy, concern in her voice.

‘Just a little panic that’s all.’

‘Are you sure you don’t want me to come up?’

‘I’m fine now.’

‘I can get a taxi? I can be with you in—’

‘No, really. I’d rather be alone.’ He finds that the sound of her voice is enough to calm him, and he reassures her once more then says goodnight. When he is sure that there is no conceivable reason for anyone to call him back, he turns the phone off, draws the blinds, goes upstairs and begins.

The spare bedroom contains nothing but a mattress, an open suitcase and seven or eight cardboard boxes, two of which are labelled ‘Emma 1’ and ‘Emma 2’ in her own handwriting in thick black marker pen. The last of Emma’s possessions from his flat, the boxes contain notebooks, letters, wallets of photographs, and he carries them down to the living room and spends the rest of the evening unpacking them, sorting the meaningless ephemera – ancient bank statements, receipts, old take-away menus, all of which he stuffs into a black bin-liner – from the stuff he will send to her parents, and the items he would like to keep for himself.

The process takes some time, but is carried out in an entirely dry-eyed, pragmatic way, and he stops only occasionally. He avoids reading the journals and notebooks with their scraps of youthful poetry and plays. It seems unfair – he imagines Emma wincing over his shoulder or scrambling to knock them from his hand – and instead he concentrates on the letters and photographs.

The way the material has been packed means that he works through it in reverse chronological order, digging back through the strata, starting with their years together as a couple, back through the Nineties and eventually, at the bottom of box 2, into the Eighties. First there are dummy covers from the ‘Julie Criscoll’ novels, correspondence with her editor Marsha, press cuttings. The next layer reveals postcards and photos of Paris, including a snap of the famous Jean-Pierre Dusollier, dark-skinned and very handsome, the one that got away. In an envelope with Metro tickets, folded menus, a rental agreement in French, he stumbles on something that’s so startling and affecting that he almost drops it on the floor.

It’s a Polaroid, taken in Paris during that summer, of Emma lying naked on a bed, legs crossed at the ankle, her arms stretched languidly above her head. The photo was taken on a drunken, amorous evening after watching Titanicin French on a black and white TV, and even though he found the photograph beautiful, she had snatched it from him and insisted that she would destroy it. The fact that she kept the Polaroid and secreted it away should please him, suggesting as it does that Emma liked the photo more than she let on. But it also slams him up against her absence once more, and he has to take a moment to catch his breath. He places the Polaroid back in the envelope and sits in silence to gather himself. The ice creaks beneath him.

He continues. From the late Nineties he finds an assortment of birth announcements, wedding invitations and orders of service, an over-sized farewell card from the staff and pupils of Cromwell Road Comprehensive School and, stuffed in the same envelope, a series of letters from someone called Phil which are so sexually fixated and pleading that he quickly folds them up and stuffs them back into the envelope. There are flyers from Ian’s comedy-improv nights and some tedious paperwork from solicitors concerning the purchase of the flat in E17. He finds a selection of witless picture postcards that he sent while travelling in the early Nineties – ‘Amsterdam is MAD’, ‘Dublin ROCKS’. He is reminded of the letters he got in return, wonderful little packets of pale blue air-mail paper that he re-reads occasionally, and is embarrassed afresh by his callow twenty-four-year-old self: ‘VENICE COMPLETELY FLOODED!!!!’. There’s a copy of the photostat programme of ‘Cruel Cargo – a play for young people by Emma Morley and Gary Cheadle’ and then old essays, dissertations on ‘Donne’s Women’ and ‘Eliot and Fascism’, a pile of postcard reproductions marked with the tiny holes from the pin-boards of student houses. He finds a cardboard tube and in it, rolled up tight, Emma’s graduation certificate, untouched, he imagines, for nearly twenty years. He verifies this by looking at the date – 14 July 1988. Eighteen years ago yesterday.

In a torn paper wallet he finds the graduation photographs and flicks through them without any great nostalgia. Because the photos were taken by Emma herself she barely features in them, and he has forgotten many of the other students anyway; she was part of a different crowd in those days. Still, he is struck by the youth of the faces and also by the fact that Tilly Killick has the power to annoy him, even in a photo at a distance of nineteen years. A snap of Callum O’Neill, skinny and self-satisfied, is swiftly torn in two and plunged deep into the bin-bag.

But at some point she must have handed the camera to Tilly, because there is finally a sequence of Emma by herself, pulling mock-heroic faces in mortar board and gown, her spectacles perched bookishly on the end of her nose. He smiles, then gives a groan of amused shame as he finds a photo of his old self.

He is pulling an absurd male model’s face, sucking in his cheekbones and pouting while Emma wraps one arm around his neck, her face close to his, eyes wide, one hand pressed to her cheek as if star-struck. After this photo was taken they had gone to the graduation tea-party, the pub and then to the party at that house. He can’t remember who lived there, only that the house was packed and virtually destroyed, the party spilling out onto the street and the back garden. Hiding from the chaos, they had found a spot on a sofa in the living room together and stayed rooted there all evening. This was where he had kissed her for the first time. He examines the graduation photo once again, Emma behind thick black frames, her hair a bottle red and badly cut, a little plumper in the face than he remembers her now, mouth split in a wide smile, her cheek pressed to his. He puts the photo to one side, and looks at the next.