In another place, as I explained.
When I finally came back after more than two months, apparently I was babbling, wanting to know what had happened, why they’d shot the dog, why hadn’t they let it tear me to pieces? I’d prepared myself for the end and they’d offered it to me on a plate before taking it away again.
Annie had come to the hospital as soon as they found her phone number in the back pocket of my jeans and gave her a ring. She had sat by me and talked to me for days on end, forcing herself to remember tiny details of our short time together that might break through the barrier my mind had erected.
‘They even got me to try ringing you, talking to you on the phone while someone held the receiver to your ear. We’d spent so little time together and part of it had been on the telephone just talking. The doctors thought it was worth a try.’
‘What did you say on the phone?’ I asked her.
‘I wasn’t sure this was such a good idea, but the doctors thought I ought to appeal to you for help, say that I needed you, that it was terribly important.’
‘You got through, Annie. You got through.’
She laughed. We could laugh about it now. ‘But you never got back to me,’ she answered.
By now we were on the Curry Mile and we’d ordered. The waiter brought us a huge jug of Cobra beer and Annie poured two glasses.
‘One of the doctors said there was, and I quote, “a fuck of a lot going on” in your head,’ she said.
‘Or if he didn’t, he should have done,’ I said. ‘I wonder how they knew.’ I recalled White Coat and Gledhill in King’s Hospital and then the man in the white coat in the hospital-like interior of the football ground. Green tiles, paved corridors.
‘They knew. They know these things.’
We grinned and drank more beer.
‘Good stuff,’ I said, looking at the golden liquid.
‘The best,’ Annie confirmed.
We were quiet for a moment. In the weeks since I’d been back, we’d talked around the whole thing a great deal and slowly it was making sense, to Annie as well as to me. They said it would take me a while to get back to full strength. Indeed, as far as my mental condition was concerned, I was suffering from frequent anxiety attacks. Whenever I walked under a railway bridge at night and heard a freight train rattle overhead, or crossed a bridge over a canal and happened to look down, I would go weak at the knees and start shaking.
As for finishing Un Régicide, that would have to wait.
‘You battled long and hard to come out of the coma,’ a doctor had said to me, ‘so it’s no wonder you should still be feeling the repercussions of that struggle.’
I tried to avoid walking through the interlocking streets of Moss Side at night unless Annie was with me: it was a little bit too much like taking a walk through the coils of my brain. A grey area indeed. I had considered selling the shop and moving back to Manchester. Annie was happy to look after me until I felt myself again, she said. But after a week or two, I realised I needed to know my flat and the shop were there to go back to when I was ready. Consequently, I planned and looked forward to a grand reopening perhaps in a few weeks’ time.
‘Let’s drink to your mother,’ Annie said, raising her glass.
‘Too right,’ I agreed. ‘To Mum.’
Without her I might still have been stuck in the City. My mother’s spirit had broken after my father’s suicide and she had spent many years in hospital, emerging only when the government’s Care in the Community programme kicked her out to fend for herself. She went to live in a sheltered housing project and hardly spoke a word to anyone. When Annie went to her and explained how badly I needed her help, some door must have opened in her mind and she agreed to come. She had never harboured any ill will towards me but equally was oblivious to any emotional damage I might have sustained as a result of the suicide.
She had come and sat and talked to me — Annie Risk on one side of the bed, my mother on the other — and that had done the trick.
Later I unscrambled the sense of that final stadium PA announcement in my head. Something about the Queen emerging from exile to issue a pardon. My life had been spared, my guilt rubbed out.
‘To you,’ I said, lifting my glass to Annie. ‘If you hadn’t gone to see my mother I wouldn’t be here tonight.’
We both drank, I lit a cigarette and at that point, naturally, the food arrived.
I went down to see Jaz for the first time since coming out of hospital. I didn’t drive, because I didn’t have a car any more. You could have offered me a Mini Cooper S, a Mark II Jaguar or a Jensen Interceptor and I still wouldn’t have driven. I’d done enough driving for a while.
I went on the train.
I glanced up every branch line that veered off into the trees. I knew where they led now. I sat back, feeling more relaxed than at any point since I’d come out. Gradually my life was getting back to normal. I reached into my left boot for my cigarettes and took one out, lit it and inhaled deeply.
Arriving at Euston I thought about taking a short ride up to the Caledonian Road and having a look at the shop, but decided to go straight to Jaz’s place in Bethnal Green. I went south on the Northern Line and headed out east on the Central. I’d cleaned my jacket as best I could. In the crash it had got covered in engine oil and blood, both mine and the dog’s. My hair, which they’d shaved so they could open my skull, was growing back. It would take many months before it got to my preferred length, but I could wait.
I walked through the damp, blowy streets of Bethnal Green, crossing the road to avoid the requisite stray dogs in the council block car-park, and enjoyed the solid feel of my boot heels on the stairs up to Jaz’s flat. It smelt as glorious as ever.
‘It’s open,’ I heard Jaz shout from some distance as I knocked on his door. I pushed it open and wandered inside. ‘Won’t be a minute,’ he called. ‘Just finishing up in here.’
He was in the darkroom.
‘I’ll get a beer,’ I said. ‘Do you want one?’
‘Yeah,’ he shouted. ‘In the fridge.’
I looked in the kitchen. He had some strange-looking Thai beer in brown bottles in the fridge. I took two, levered off the caps and set one down on the work surface for Jaz. I took a swig and reached for another cigarette, wandering into the main room. My boots went clump, clump on the bare boards. I swallowed another mouthful of Singha beer and approached the wall to have a look at Jaz’s photographs. Clearly he was still doing his urban landscapes thing. The first grim picture — they were all monochrome — showed the tatty car-park opposite his building. He’d caught three dogs sniffing each other. The next was a desolate scene down at Rotherhithe. In the background was a half-full gasholder. I looked back at the first picture of the car-park: the two big gasholders on the other side of the canal were just visible over the top of the old building.
In the third photograph I recognised a pair of gasholders at Wood Green.
The beer sloshed uncomfortably in my stomach as I progressed to the fourth picture: an exterior shot of the Tube station at Bromley By Bow; in the background, out-of-focus but deliberately in the frame, a cluster of gasholders. I counted nine. And they were all full.
I felt a bit sick. A chill crawled spider-like up my spine and I shivered.