A beggar was squatting halfway across the bridge, disturbing the pedestrian flow. He was wrapped up much too warmly for the temperature in his coat and his blanket and his sleeping bag and, probably, everything else that he owned. Adam turned back towards the beach. The girl and the man were gone.
‘She there?’ he asked. ‘Put her on.’
‘Just a sec… Ruu-beee…’
The rustle of ear on phone.
‘Go on then, lollipop.’
‘The sloth bear is the only bear that carries its young on its back.’
‘I like that one. That’s a great one. Any others today?’
‘When are you coming home?’
‘Who’s my favourite girl?’
‘I know, Daddy.’
‘Love you.’
‘I know.’
‘Is it Laurel?’ Claire said.
‘What?’
‘Me too,’ Ruby said in the background.
‘Is it Leisure Services, then? Why you’re late today.’
When Claire told him, Adam had got her to show him the email immediately. He had felt a constriction in his throat, and tears that would have needed only a little encouragement. He hadn’t forewarned her that it would be tonight: he didn’t want to jinx it.
‘Office karaoke,’ Adam said. ‘Three-line whip, unfortunately. Thought I told you. Sorry, Clezz.’
Adam smiled at his lie. Fleetingly he had a vision of himself as one of those Japanese men you sometimes heard about, who get dressed in the morning, go out as if to work, and sit on a park bench all day, their calls forwarded to fake clearing-house secretaries.
‘Don’t overdo it,’ she said. He heard their doorbell ring. ‘Shopping’s here.’
‘Love you,’ Adam said.
‘No, you won’t answer it…’
He descended into the claustrophobic, white-tiled maze of the station. On the platform he picked up an evening paper from a cubby-hole shop, like a child’s model of a shop, and scanned the front page without taking in the words. Electric adverts in the underpasses, electric music in people’s ears: boredom had become a dread threat that had perpetually to be resisted, as if all of life were an American basketball game, all its gaps and pauses filled with diversions and analgesics. Adam got off the train and emerged into the bonus evening sunshine.
People who wanted him to help save the tiger. People who wanted him to save Darfur. A person urging him to take out a gym membership on a soon-to-expire special offer. A bearded man wearing boots without laces who wanted twenty pence for a cup of tea; a better-dressed, more ambitious woman who wanted a quid for her bus fare (Inflation!, Neil thought). People in suits and miniskirts and veils, lots of them talking on mobile phones, in English and Arabic and Russian and other languages that Neil couldn’t identify, meandering and gesticulating and obliviously halting to the rhythm of their conversations. Shops that invited you to call home, fly home, change money from home and send it there, eat like you do at home, read newspapers from home, tan or cover up as you do at home. Walking down a London street had become a financial and moral obstacle course. You could feel virtuous, callous, conned and xenophobic in the space of a hundred metres.
Neil had left his taxi and its catastrophist driver (Trafalgar Square: nightmare! The Olympics: meganightmare! West Ham United: what a nightmare!) on Bayswater Road and walked up Queensway. He and the doorman outside the hotel nodded at each other, a consoling evening ritual that had somehow evolved between them, though they had never actually spoken. It was a hot, blue evening, the kind that, every now and then, lets London feel Mediterranean, or Californian. Neil took off his jacket and swung it over his shoulder. He cut off the main road and turned into his street.
He saw the legs first, emerging from the doorway onto the pavement: the ankle-booted feet and besuited calves; the inflection at the knees, a pair of hands resting on them; the downslope of the thighs, descending to an unseen waist in the recess. One of the legs jiggled nervily at the ankle. Shit: he was supposed to pick up some milk and… something else.
He took out his phone to reread Roxanna’s message. Milk and wet wipes. He would be coming out again later to meet Dan at the hospital. He would do the shopping then.
When he looked up from the screen, the torso in the doorway had leaned forward into view. Also, in profile, the head: dirty blond hair, the handsome face bisected by the tortoiseshell arm of the sunglasses, the visage familiar but receding into obscurity again as the body rotated back.
Neil froze. He crossed to the other side of the street for a squarer view. Another five paces and he would be sure.
He thought he might be hallucinating; that the figure in the doorway might be an urban mirage. He screwed his eyes closed, and when he opened them again the view was blocked by a stationary van. Instead of what he thought and hoped might be Adam (and, mixed in with the hope, feared, because of the momentousness and the delicacy), he found himself staring at a man with a crew cut and a cigarette behind his ear, who was incongruously mouthing the words to a love song on the radio. I hate that I let you down… I guess karma comes back around.
Neil stood still until the van moved. The driver glanced at him as he pulled away, and Neil half-expected a finger or an insult, but the man only smiled.
It was him.
The thought occurred to Neil that he could run off. Adam hadn’t seen him; he was wearing his sunglasses but seemed to be looking down at his shoes. Neil chased the thought away. This apparition was what he had hoped for the previous week, though not with much faith, when he sent Claire his long-shot email.
Neil smiled — a freakish, Blairish sort of grin, it must have been — but Adam still hadn’t looked up. Should he thank him? Make a joke, tell one of their lies, ask after Claire? Maybe he shouldn’t mention Claire. She had evidently passed on his message, but he didn’t know how things stood between them. Their kids: Adam might have another one by now, for all Neil knew. He had a child — he, Neil, was a father, a fact of which, astoundingly, Adam was still ignorant. He worried whether he should repeat his apology, or, on the contrary, should never mention that day and the sofa again.
They had been apart for four years. It was eighteen years since Yosemite. After she gave him her scrap of paper that morning Neil had said ‘Thanks’, as if she were a sales assistant handing him his change. That was all.
He had to pause in the middle of the road, perched on a white dividing dash like a shipwrecked sailor on flotsam, while high-spec four-by-fours eddied behind and in front of him. It was while he was crossing the second lane, when he was no more than ten metres from the doorway, that Adam looked up and saw him.
Adam had stood for the first half-hour. Standing was better for his back, and it had seemed to him more fitting to be upright when or if Neil arrived. To be eye to eye (or nearly). When he came to look for it he had found the building easily. There was a row of them, richly anonymous Edwardian mansion blocks, red-brick with white detailing, bay-windowed, blinds drawn, all of them called Something Court. But only this one had black-and-white chequered tiling in the entrance, and filigreed ironwork around the ground-floor windows, both of which Adam recognised. For a few minutes he patrolled the pavement outside, in a little circuit that took him twenty metres past the door in both directions. Then he worried there was a chance, a small chance, that Neil’s entry or exit might coincide with one of his turns, like a POW blindsiding a guard in an old war film. He squatted on the marble step, trying to smile harmlessly at residents who left or arrived, exactly as he had imagined he might do on that night four years before, now with the opposite purpose.