“Had he died?” the therapist asks him.
“Yeah,” he says.
The therapist asks him how often he thinks about what happened.
“Every day,” he says.
“Every day?” she says.
“Yeah,” he says. “Literally.”
She asks him if he’d be able to write something down every time he thought about it.
“Write something down?”
“Yes.”
“What?” he asks.
She tells him that he should write down the thoughts he has and also the feelings he has about them, trying to be as precise as possible.
When he sees her the following week the therapist looks at what he has written.
He sits there, on the low brown armchair, with his face turned to the window while she looks at the sheets of paper with his writing on them.
The window is open. It’s late summer now.
The lace curtains move slightly in the draft from the open window.
The therapist says, “You say more than once that you think you could have done more to save Riki’s life.”
“Yeah,” István says, turning his head to her. The word comes out as a sort of throat-clearing sound.
“Do you mind if I ask you some questions about that?”
István shakes his head and lights a cigarette. His cigarettes and lighter are on a low table next to the chair.
The therapist asks him what he thinks he could have done that would have saved Riki’s life.
“I don’t know. I could have got there quicker,” he says.
She asks him how long he waited before leaving his own vehicle and going to Riki’s.
He says he doesn’t know.
“A minute?” she asks.
“Maybe,” he says. “I don’t know. Probably less than a minute.”
“Probably less than a minute?”
“Yeah.”
Does he have any reason to think, she asks, if getting to Riki less than a minute before he did would have made any difference to what happened.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“But you have no particular reason to think that it would?” she asks.
“No,” he says.
“And were there other people closer to Riki than you were?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Who?” she asks.
“The drivers of the tankers,” he says.
“And yet they didn’t go to him.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. They were frightened. They were civilians. Maybe they weren’t used to situations like that.”
“They were frightened?”
“Probably.”
“And what about in Riki’s vehicle?” she asks. “Was there anybody else in Riki’s vehicle with him?”
“Yeah, the driver.”
“Was he a civilian?”
“No. He was one of us.”
“Was he injured?”
“No, actually.”
“And yet he didn’t do anything.”
“He was in shock. That’s what they said.”
“Still, the fact is he didn’t do anything and you did, even though you were much farther away.”
István doesn’t say anything.
The therapist is looking at him.
After a few weeks she says that she’s going to prescribe him something called Seroxat.
“What is that?” he asks.
“It’s an antidepressant.”
He reaches for his cigarettes.
“I think it might help you,” she says. “Would you agree to try it?”
“What is it exactly?” he asks.
She explains that it works by increasing the serotonin levels in his brain. “If the serotonin levels are too low,” she tells him, “you might suffer from feelings of depression and anxiety.”
He finds it strange to think that it’s some chemical in his brain that makes him feel how he does about things. He tells her that.
“Yes, I know what you mean,” she says, with a smile. “It does seem strange sometimes. Would you agree to try it?”
He shrugs.
“I think it might help you,” she says again. She says that they will monitor how he feels and if he doesn’t think it’s helping he can stop taking it. “I just think it’s worth trying,” she says.
He starts taking the Seroxat and soon notices that he is actually feeling different. It’s quite hard to say exactly what the difference is. He feels less weighed down by everything or something. He sleeps through the night more.
After a month he and the therapist agree that he should keep taking the pills.
He stops seeing her every week.
They agree that he will come to see her again in six months to talk about how he’s doing.
4
TONIGHT IT’S RAINING. He stands under the pert little awning where there’s a patch of dry pavement. It tends to be quieter on rainy nights. There’s something melancholy about them, the way people hurry along the narrow street, hidden under umbrellas. The traffic squeezes past, showing the falling rain in its headlights.
Later the rain stops.
After about one o’clock there are fewer arrivals.
It’s mostly people leaving.
At three he stops letting people in altogether. Not that there are many of them at that hour, especially on a weekday like today. There are sometimes a few. Like these three, still in yesterday’s suits, although two of them have lost their ties, approaching loudly along the pavement, seeing the sign and deciding they want to go down.
“We’re closed,” he says.
One of the young men tries to offer him money—he has what looks like a twenty in his hand and is pushing it at him.
István shakes his head.
The young man with the money persists.
“Can’t do it,” István says, with his hands in his pockets.
“What can’t you do?” the young man says, laughing.
“We’re closed,” István says again.
“What can’t you do? He can’t do it,” the young man says to the others. “He can’t do it.”
They’re all laughing now.
They walk away.
He watches them go and lights a cigarette.
The last patrons leave at around three thirty. He helps to throw them out. It smells of sweat down there and feels like a sauna after the damp freshness of the street. The lights are on, which makes the place look small. The main stage and the “private” ones at the sides look small and shabby. As he makes his way to Freddy’s office, he passes a few of the girls, leaving in tracksuits and raincoats, with earbuds in their ears and don’t-even-think-about-talking-to-me expressions on their faces.
He doesn’t talk to them.
He finds Freddy in the office. “You weren’t around earlier,” István says.
Freddy looks tired. “No,” he says.
István has no idea where Freddy’s from. Not England. He might be an Arab or something. Are there Arabs called Freddy? Something about it doesn’t make sense.
Freddy pays him.
“Thanks,” István says.
“No problem,” Freddy says, in his unplaceable voice.
Pushing the envelope into the inside pocket of his jacket, István goes up the stairs.
It’s nearly four. The streets are as empty now as they’ll ever be. Which isn’t entirely empty, of course. There are still a few people around.
He arrives at Cambridge Circus and starts to walk toward Tottenham Court Road and the night bus home. The illuminated top of Centre Point is visible above the nearer buildings and through the branches of the trees. He knows this walk well. He does it every night that he’s working. There are some tatty pubs, and then the huge bookshop with its faulty sign—some of the letters not lit—and after that the dead-end street with the alley at the end.
As he’s walking past he notices that something seems to be happening there, in the alley. He stops in the light of the bookshop’s display window and stands there for a few seconds trying to work out what it is that he’s seeing.