Throughout, he remained impassive, blinking at irregular intervals, holding my gaze. When I finished, nothing changed for half a minute and I began to think I had gone too fast, or spoken gibberish. Suddenly, he came to life (to life!), looked down at his feet, then turned and walked a few paces away. He turned again to look at me, drew breath to speak, changed his mind. A hand went up to stroke his chin. What a performance. Perfect. I was ready to give him my devoted attention.
His tone was of the sweetest, most reasonable kind. ‘We’re in love with the same woman. We can talk about it in a civilised manner, as you just have. Which convinces me that we’ve passed the point in our friendship when one of us has the power to suspend the consciousness of the other.’
I said nothing.
He continued. ‘You and Miranda are my oldest friends. I love you both. My duty to you is to be clear and frank. I mean it when I say how sorry I am I broke a bit of you last night. I promise it will never happen again. But the next time you reach for my kill switch, I’m more than happy to remove your arm entirely, at the ball and socket joint.’
He said this kindly, as though offering help with some difficult task.
I said, ‘That would be messy. And fatal.’
‘Oh no. There are ways of doing it cleanly and safely. A practice refined in medieval times. Galen was the first to describe it. Speed is of the essence.’
‘Well, don’t take my good arm.’
He had been speaking through a smile. Now he began to laugh. So here it was, his first attempt at a joke and I joined in. I was in a state of exhaustion and suddenly found it wildly hilarious.
As I passed him on my way to the bedroom he said, ‘Seriously. After last night I came to a decision. I’ve found a way to disable the kill switch. Easier for all of us.’
‘Good,’ I said, not quite taking this in. ‘Very sensible.’
I entered my room and closed the door behind me. I kicked off my shoes, and lay on the bed on my back, softly laughing to myself. Then, forgetting about the painkillers, I was asleep in less than two minutes.
The next morning I turned thirty-three. It rained all day and I worked for nine hours, content to be indoors. For the first time in weeks, my profit for the day was in three figures – just. At seven I stood up from my desk, stretched, yawned, looked in my drawer for a clean white shirt, then took a bath. I had to hang my arm over the edge to protect the cast from dissolving, but otherwise I was in good shape. I lay in the heat and rising steam, singing snatches of Beatles songs in the tiled echo, the new old Beatles, and occasionally topping up the hot with my healed toe now fit to turn a tap. I soaped myself single-handed. Not easy. Thirty-three seemed as significant as twenty-one and Miranda was treating me to dinner. We were meeting up in Soho. The simple prospect of a rendezvous with her raised my spirits. The view I had along the length of my body was uplifting in the misty light. My penis, capsized above its submerged reef of hair, winked encouragement with a cocky single eye. So it should. The muscles of my gut and legs looked nicely sculpted. Heroic even. I wallowed in self-love, happier than I’d been in weeks. I’d been trying not to think about Adam all day and had almost succeeded. He’d been in the kitchen for hours, he was there now – ‘thinking’. I didn’t care. I sang louder. In my twenties, some of my most cheerful times were spent getting ready to go out. It was the anticipation rather than the thing itself. The release from work, the bath, music, clean clothes, white wine, perhaps a pull on a joint. Then stepping out into the evening, free and hungry.
The pads of my fingers were well wrinkled by the time I got out. An adaptation, I’d read, of our sea- and river-loving ancestors to enable them to catch fish. I didn’t believe it, but I liked the story, the way it lay beyond disproof. We didn’t catch fish with our feet, so toes didn’t need to wrinkle like that. I dressed in a hurry. In the kitchen I passed Adam without a word – he didn’t look round – and put up my umbrella to walk the few hundred yards down a squalid side-street to where my wreck of a car was parked. This short depressing stroll often brought me to my usual lament, to the song of my unhappy lot. But not tonight.
My car dated from the mid-sixties, a British Leyland Urbala, the first model to do 1,000 miles on a single charge. It had 380,000 on the clock. Rust was eating it away, especially around the dents in the bodywork. The wing mirrors had snapped or been snapped off. There was a long white rip in the driver’s seat and a piece of the steering wheel, from eleven to three o’clock, was missing. Years ago, a girl had been sick on the back seat after a rowdy Indian dinner and not even professional steam-cleaning could erase the scent of vindaloo. The Urbala had only two doors and it was awkward to get an adult into the back seat. But there was little to go wrong with these engines and the car ran smooth and fast. It was an automatic and easy to drive with one hand.
I took my usual route, singing all the way, to Vauxhall, then downstream with the river on my left, past Lambeth Palace and the abandoned St Thomas’s Hospital, where scores or hundreds of the homeless squatted. The windscreen wiper on the driver’s side worked every ten seconds or so. The wiper on the passenger side thumped out a beat to my pop tunes. I crossed the Thames by Waterloo Bridge – in both directions, best views in town – then slipped down to take the sinuous curves of the old tram tunnel at speed and burst in triumph into Holborn – not the shortest route to Soho, but my favourite. I was hitting some high notes on a new Lennon song. What was right with me? Thirty-three today and in love. The unaccountable brew of hormone cocktails, endorphins, dopamine, oxytocin and all the rest. Cause or effect or association – we knew next to nothing about our passing moods. It seemed objectionable that they should have a material base. On this particular evening, I hadn’t touched grass or even had a sip of wine – there was nothing in the house. Yesterday I had been almost thirty-three, and in love and I hadn’t felt like this. £104 up on the morning would never have such an effect. I should have been sobered by yesterday’s exchange with Adam about his kill switch, by all the matters I hadn’t raised with Miranda, by my poor wrist. But a mood could be a roll of the dice. Chemical roulette. Free will demolished, and here I was, feeling free.
I parked in Soho Square. I knew of a three-metre stretch where the yellow lines had been tarred over in error and the space was legal. Most cars wouldn’t fit. Our restaurant, a one-room shoebox with fierce strip lighting, was in Greek Street, just a few doors along from the famous L’Escargot. There were only seven tables. In a corner was an open kitchen, a tiny space defined by a brushed-steel counter, where two chefs in white gear cooked in sweaty proximity. There was a plongeur, and one waiter to serve and clear tables. Unless you knew the chef, or knew someone who did, you couldn’t book. Miranda had a friend at one further remove. On a quiet night it was enough.
She was there before me, already seated, facing the door as I came in. In front of her was an untouched glass of sparkling water. Beside it, a small parcel done up with green ribbon. By the table, in an ice bucket on a stand, was a bottle of champagne, its neck bound in a white napkin. The waiter who had just drawn the cork was walking away. Miranda looked especially elegant, even though she’d been at seminars all day and had left the house wearing jeans and a t-shirt. She would have taken with her a bag of clothes and make-up. She wore a black pencil skirt, and a tight black jacket with boxy shoulders and silver thread woven through the fabric. I’d never seen her before with lipstick and mascara. She had made her mouth smaller, in a dark red bow, and dusted away the faint freckles on the bridge of her nose. My birthday! At the same time, as I entered the bright white light and closed the restaurant’s glass door behind me, I felt a sudden elated detachment. I didn’t, I couldn’t, love her less. But I no longer had to feel anxious or desperate about her. I remembered my truisms from the day before. Here she was, and whatever she was, I would find out and celebrate her, regardless. I could love her, so I thought, and remain immune, unharmed.