Jet Pack

(For Ed.)

Explanation i

β€” Some people, I say, go when they have to and whoosh, they’re out of your life. But you’ve got that connection, right. So when you catch up again a few years later, you just pick up like right where you left off. I pause. You ever had that?

β€” Yeah, she says. Couple of people. We both stop, watch the people pass by outside the cafΓ© window. So Dennis, she says. One of those people?

β€” We’ve met up maybe three times since uni. And each time… Memories. You know?

She nods.

β€” Do I know him?

β€” Dunno. He might’ve been before your time. Although. Were you at Annie’s wedding?

β€” Mm-hmm.

β€” He was there. Pretty much conquered the karaoke. Little guy. Really deep voice.

β€” Oh! Yeah! With the hair, right? She mimes a white man’s afro with her hands, a big round motion.

β€” That’s him. Guy with the hair. I smile, nod, sip coffee.

β€” How long’s he down for?

β€” Couple days.

β€” Lovely.

1

The mobile sounds. I pick up.

β€” Hi.

…Yeah, I’m at the station.

…About ten minutes, I expect. How you doing?

…That’s good. Danny? I can hear him. What’s he up to?

…Aww, no way! I’m kind of gutted I missed that.

…Yeah, I know, but it’s not the same. Can you put himβ€”?

…Hello, Danny! Mummy says you had a really exciting day today. What did you see?

…Oh, wow. That’s really great. And what else did you do?

…Really? And did the dog say hello back?

…Oh, that’s great.

…OK. Daddy loves you, Danny. Bye, bye.

…Ha. Yeah, I’m fine. Yeah. Already done.

…I know. Listen. I’m missing you.

β€” Yeah, I haven’t seen him yet. Bugger. It’s raining.

…No, I’m at Llansamlet.

…Yeah, yeah. This is him all over. He always does this thing, right, where he comes up with these crazy convoluted travel plans, and it’s to save money or time or it’s like for some reason that makes rational sense to no earthly agency apart from Dennis.

…Mm-hmm. So it turns out that his train is coming in at Llansamlet.

…Yeah, but then it’s not you travelling, is it? He’s got this intricate and closely-timed journey that’s added something like three changes and ninety minutes to his travel time, booked two weeks in advance, and it’s saved him seventy-five quid.

…Seventy-five quid. Who am I to argue? It’s just that it stops at Llansamlet and not in town.

…I know. But he’s a mate.

…Yeah. I think it’s going to arrive. Listen. Send my love to your mum and dad.

…Oh, I think I can manage that.

…Love you. Talk to you tomorrow, I expect.

…Yeah. Love you. Bye.

2

I press the hang-up button, look at the phone for a minute as if anyone’s texted me, out of a sort of reflex action. Dennis doesn’t own a mobile.

Here’s the rumble of a train; automated voices, Welsh and English, man and woman, confirming that this is indeed the train that Dennis will arrive on.

It’s a little two-carriage affair. Hardly anyone is on it, and only two people get off, the first a thirtysomething woman in a business suit, good-looking enough that I feel guilty for looking at her and watching her until she has gone from the platform, and I do not see the figure in front of me, who says, in a familiar bass baritone:

β€” Hello.

I jump; I do not recognise him. He is shorter than I remember. He wears a plain black scarf wrapped around his mouth and nose. Under his battered leather jacket, he wears a wash-worn grey hoodie, and the hood is pulled up over his head. It’s dark now. I have been here a long time.

β€” Hello, he says again. His voice is always as it was, a baritone, but the kind that comes from the back of the mouth rather than the chest, which always gave the voice a kind of quiet, halting quality, emphasised by the habit he had of swallowing sometimes in mid-sentence.

β€” Dennis! How are you, man? I put out a hand. He pauses, looks at it, shakes. His hand is very bony, very hard and very cold.

β€” I’m well. Thank you.

I reach for the larger of his two bags.

β€” Good journey?

β€” Fine.

β€” Shall weβ€”? I wave a hand towards the car.

β€” Actually, he says, would you mind if we wait here for a minute? There’s something I’d like to see.

β€” Um, OK. I put the holdall down on the bench, put one hand on the back of my neck, look along the rail tracks. Dennis looks at a digital watch with a threadbare strap.

β€” It will only be a couple of minutes.

I sit on the bench next to the holdall. He joins me, on the other side of the bag. His footfalls are small and closely paced. He was always a little stiff, but I can see now that he has a small but definite hunch on his back.

The automated voice (Welsh and English, man and woman) says that the next train shall not be stopping here. Dennis stands, takes a couple of paces across the platform.

The train is a full-length Cross-Country. It whizzes past at full speed. In the split-second I see it, it looks like it’s lit dimly red inside, like the people are all standing and in shadow. I see for the briefest moment a man, face pressed against the window, looking like he’s shouting, and a split-second later something that gives the illusion of being large and winged. I’m tired. It’s dark.

β€” We can go now, says Dennis.

We head to the car.

3

β€” Oh, no, he says. I didn’t mean to give you the wrong impression. It’s OK?

I am driving.

β€” Uh, yeah. Yeah. Completely.

β€” You hadn’t gone to too much trouble?

β€” No. No. Not at all. I have cleaned the spare room from top to bottom. I have filled the fridge and freezer with vegan food. No. it’s cool.

We stop at a set of lights. I look across at him, wonder what is up with the scarf. Maybe it’s an affectation. He’s done that before, like when he went around wearing a set of NHS glasses without any glass in them. He is looking out of the passenger side window; he turns and looks at me. In the dark, he is only lit by the red light, and I cannot see his eyes. I give him a tight-lipped smile; the light changes. I return my eyes to the road, set off.

β€” So whose place is it you’re staying at?

β€” Joe and Sarah’s. I don’t think you know them.

β€” No. It doesn’t ring a bell.

β€” They’re not around anyway. I’m just house-sitting.

β€” Oh.

β€” It’s a good base. It means I can catch up with some other people who I was wanting to see.

β€” Oh yeah? Who’s that, then?

β€” People. You don’t know them. Maybe you’ll meet them on Sunday.

β€” OK.

I drop him off at the house, one of the really big, nice places at the West Cross end of the Mumbles Road, with the really long drive and maybe six bedrooms. I would have known about someone who lived here. Wouldn’t I?

He has a key.

I help him carry his bags in, look around the hall. It’s beautiful. No pictures, anywhere. But lovely. Except that the cupboard door under the stair has a broken panel, the lower right-hand side one, like someone bashed a hole in it from inside with a really big hammer or something.

β€” Hey, I say. What happened there?

β€” No idea, says Dennis. He shuffles towards the kitchen. Tea?

β€” Yeah.

He watches me drink it. He doesn’t have any of his own. I head back to mine. I watch TV.

4

I decided to walk. I am in no hurry, and it already a beautiful morning. The traffic on the main road, on the other side of that wide grass verge, seems very far away. Hardly anyone else is on the esplanade, and by the time I get as far as Blackpill Lido, no one is there at all.

The beach on Swansea Bay is very wide and very flat. The tide comes in and out a mile or more in minutes, and it comes in while I walk, the sea lapping against the wall on which the south side of the path sits, that keeps Swansea from the ocean. A band of light, like a path to somewhere else again, stretches across the sea from me to the still-low sun, and follows me, and I imagine hopping over the crumbling path and walking along the path, and vanishing into the light. And I would be the last to go, because everyone else has gone.

5

At the top of the drive, in front of that big white West Cross house, there’s Dennis, first person I’ve seen today, sitting on the path next to the flower bed, hands clasped over his knees, staring at the flower bed. He’s still wearing the kerchief. I stand next to him, look down, and I am a little shocked at how grey his tight brown curls have gone.

β€” Hey. What are you looking at?

He points at the earth. His finger is longer than I remember it being, the nail long and filthy, like a storybook witch. He is pointing a mass of something pinkish under and around the daffodils, a lump of something like flesh that seems to twist and fold in on itself as I watch. It takes me a moment to figure out what it is I am looking at.

β€” That’s an awful lot of worms, I say.

β€” Mm.

β€” What do you think they’re doing?

He doesn’t reply immediately. A movement behind his kerchief reminds me of how Dennis used to lick his lips before saying something, and how you knew how he was choosing his words.

β€” Did you know that there are a million earthworms for every human being on the planet?

β€” No. No, Dennis. I did not.

β€” When we’re gone, they’ll take over. They’ll replace us.

β€” Wasn’t that supposed to be the cockroaches?

β€” No. He is in earnest, as he always was, serious or joking. No, the earthworms. Definitely the earthworms.

β€” Oh.

I put a hand in my hair, tongue in cheek, look down the path at the silent main road. I let a breath out, lower lip pushed out.

β€” Listen, I say. Wanna do the charity shop thing?

Explanation ii

β€” So when’s he coming?

β€” Friday. Through to Monday morning.

β€” And you’re going to watch TV and visit charity shops. She sips her coffee, faintly amused.

I laugh.

β€” It’s like a tradition. The Great Charity Shop Crawl. Dennis, right, he’s massively into science fiction. And he’s a big reader. And he’s a completist. And he’s poor. And you know what that makes?

β€” No.

β€” It makes a man whose obsessions are hampered by a perennial lack of funds. He can’t just go to Borders or Amazon to find the stuff he’s after. Besides, most of the stuff he collects is rare or completely out of print. So he like developed this terrifying ability to learn by heart the exact location of every single charity shop and second-hand bookshop that exists in like the whole country.

She raises an eyebrow.

β€” And you have too?

β€” It’s like he’d visit, and swear to God he’d spend a whole day, maybe two and we’d scour every junk shop in the city, like the whole city, and he’d be like looking for the middle book in a set of juvenile sci-fi paperbacks from the sixties or seventies and he wouldn’t have started reading them until he had the whole set, and he’d've have had some of these books for years. Years. Or this one specific Fighting Fantasy book. Do you remember those?

β€” No.

β€” They’re like the Choose Your Own Adventure books, only with dice.

β€” I haven’t heard of those either.

β€” You’re hopeless. Anyway, he used to find stuff for me that he knew I wanted. So I get a whole run of the Valkyrie Luther Arkwrights and like the illustrated hardback version of Elric at the End of Time. Or some old Judge Dredd books he knew I didn’t have.

β€” None of this means anything to me.

β€” And I’d help him out. Music with me. So I’d make him mix tapes and send him vinyl and CDs I’d found in Rowlands and the fairs. So he got all the Syd Barrett and the Viv Stanshall and some Half Man Half Biscuit.

β€” Still, she says, miming her hand going over her head, whoosh.

I sigh.

β€” Look, the point is that our relationship was largely founded on sharing this stuff. Like we were the Great British pop culture archaeologists. Amicus horror movies and Robyn Hitchcock on vinyl and dog-eared copies of Warrior and Misty.

β€” Aren’t you a bit old for that sort of thing?

β€” Well, yeah. A bit. I mean, it’s a young man’s pursuit. Not every young man’s pursuit. A certain sort of young man. But it was a long time ago. And we were young men.

β€” So it’s nostalgia.

β€” Yeah. It’s been years.

And this is what I don’t say: that it won’t be long before no one’s ever going to call me young again. And that it’s a very long time since I was that sort of young man, and that I am a little frightened that I have forgotten what it is like.

6

We have by this point ranged across Mumbles, West Cross and up as far as Derwen Fawr and Clyne, a circle of several miles, and we have visited shops I have never heard of, tucked away in streets I barely knew existed. The main roads are exceptionally quiet today. At times it seems like I haven’t seen a single car or pedestrian, but I know for a fact I must have seen someone.

Now the side roads; I can accept that no one is there. They are dead.

The shops represent charities I have not heard of, names painted on faded board. Indigent Support. British Asylum Builders. International Euthanasia Guild. Feed the Wretched.

Every shop, if it appears to have anyone inside it at all, contains as its presiding spirit a single grim-faced old biddy, sitting behind a counter cluttered with porcelain knick-knacks and cheap discoloured cuddly toys, in a grotto walled with unwanted ornamental jugs and out-of-fashion clothes and jigsaw puzzles depicting seaside scenes from the other end of the country. Each time, the old woman smiles briefly at Dennis with his kerchief and shuffling gait, as he heads for the books, but fixes me with an eye like a chipped glass marble, and does not look away until I have left the shop.

The smell of age hangs in my nostrils. I shift my feet. My neck itches.

By about third or maybe the fourth of these shops I start imagining things. Behind neatly folded chintz curtains and plastic baby-walkers and racks of those little old lady hats that I cannot imagine anyone makes any more, here is a foetus in formaldehyde. An electric lamp with brown twisted flex and a once-white 13 amp plug made from someone’s skull. A curved, brown knife, with the label in wobbly handwriting, Sacrificial knife, 75p.

In this last shop, a cardboard box on a chair sitting just outside the door has a sign made from one panel of a very old cornflakes packet, on which is written FREE. Donations gratefully received within. Dennis is already squatting by the bottom shelves, head cocked to one side, reading every spine, one by one, occasionally taking a book out, flipping through it, putting it back.

I’ll wait out here, I think. Absently, I pick up a fat, tatty paperback with plain white covers, turned yellow at the spine, with the sour, decrepit smell of old cigarette smoke hanging from the paper. It falls open in my hands. I read a couple of paragraphs in which the writer discusses the best way to degrade and murder a child. I close it, without looking at the title, and put it back between The Da Vinci Code and some Jilly Cooper novel. I look up, see the old woman smirking through the window. Her shoulders rock gently. She is laughing at me for taking offence.

I decide to stay outside in the sun. I sit on the front garden wall of the boarded-up house next door and wait. It is beautiful today. Red-brown leaves litter this street. The sun is bright and the wind is low. It is a golden, melancholy Autumn day like the ones in which years ago I used to take solace in a comfortable kind of loneliness, or in friends like Dennis and the collections we shared, whiling away the time until I was no longer single, no longer without children.

I cannot hear traffic anywhere.

As Dennis comes out of the shop, he slips something whitish and I think evil-looking into his jute shopping bag. He sits on the wall next to me. It surprises me a little how small he is. How his feet dangle next to the ground.

β€” Find what you were after? I say.

β€” Some things.

I run a hand through my hair, let out one of those sighs that sometimes used to serve when I was younger as a conversational gambit, when I was uncomfortable with nothing being said. The breeze turns cold.

β€” You know, I say. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Mumbles so dead. We’ve barely seen a soul.

Dennis grunts. It’s an odd, wet noise, as if made around the base of the tongue and rolled around before coming out. His kerchief moves a little. I put my hands on my knees, turn to look at him. It is late in the afternoon and the sun is in my eyes. I cannot clearly see his face.

β€” Dennis, I say. I have to ask.

He makes a throat-clearing sound.

β€” Hmm?

β€” You know your β€” I wave my fingers around in front of my mouth β€” I was wondering why you were wearing it. I mean, it’s not like the glasses. Is it?

β€” No. It’s not like the glasses.

β€” OK. So, can I ask β€” ?

β€” Do you remember, he says, where you were twenty-three, perhaps, and you said…you said you felt how if you were in trouble… or felt trapped. That you did not have to stay. Anywhere. That there would always be a way out? You remember.

β€” I remember. It was a long time ago. I don’t β€”

β€” You were wrong.

He is looking away from me, toward the sun. He is unsteady in his posture, swaying, not solid. For a moment, against my will, I imagine that he is not my old friend, but that he is a double made from hundreds of worms, and that I could poke him and he will disintegrate into a wave of worms that would wriggle and slither away from an emptying heap of clothes.

β€” I was young, I say. You say things like that when you’re young. Because you have to. Because when you’re that age you think you’re invincible. And you wouldn’t achieve anything if you didn’t.

He clears his throat again. As has always been Dennis’ way.

I stand.

β€” Where to next? I say.

Dennis hops down, smooths his hands on his cords as if they are wet or dirty. He gestures up the hill.

β€” One more. It’s just around the corner.

7

β€” So, I say, are they on holiday or something?

We are standing in the hall of the big West Cross house and I am hanging up my jacket on a brass wall hook.

β€” Something like that, says Dennis.

I got a bag of chips at Dick Barton’s. Dennis said he wasn’t hungry. He never ate much, I tell myself. He sorts me out with a plate and fork, and watches me.

But I admit to myself a faint disappointment that I shall not see him eat.

I’ll walk home, I say. I should start soon, I say. Maybe I’ll be in time for the last bus, I say. Tomorrow, I say?

β€” Not in the daytime, he replies. I promised a few people I’d catch up with them.

β€” But in the evening. Film and Who?

β€” I would like that.

β€” Tomorrow night, then. Maybe, I say, giving in to my curiosity, you can get your mysterious mates along.

β€” Maybe.

8

A bus pulls up at the stop before the roundabout. The 3A, my bus. Its doors open and the driver turns his head towards me.

He looks like he’s made of earthworms, thousands of them all knotted together, writhing, imperfectly forming and reforming eyes and lips as worms wriggle away into the mass and new ones take their places. Overflowing from and wriggling back into a filthy FirstBus Cymru uniform. No one else is on the bus.

I step back, as you do; the uniform shrugs and shudders. A pulpy hand presses the button, closes the door. The bus moves on. I shake my head. I’m tired. It’s dark.

I shall walk home.

Explanation iii

β€” So Dennis knows The Prisoner and Blake’s 7 and Space: 1999 all by heart, but his first love has always been Doctor Who. Long before it was everyone else’s.

β€” That doesn’t surprise me.

β€” Heh. Yeah. He’s a huge β€”

β€” Geek?

β€” Aficionado.

β€” Sorry.

β€” It’s OK. I don’t think he’s as self-conscious about it as I am.

β€” OK.

β€” So every time he rocked up, he’d bring a little stack of videos, and it’d be like a classic story I hadn’t seen. And also maybe like a cult film I haven’t heard of. I shift a little in my chair. We’d bond over it.

I give her the look that says, I am soliciting your approval, because you are a friend, and this is what you do.

β€” I mean, it’s not everyone’s idea of fun, I say.

9

I spend most of Sunday at home. I catch up on my reading. I walk along the seafront as the sun sets.

I don’t see or hear from a living soul all day.

10

On the massive flatscreen television that would consume the wall of any other house, but which looks in place here, Tom Baker runs in that somewhat sedate way 1970s British actors do through a corridor, pursued by marching, black-clad gun-toting aliens in round helmets. My eyes grow heavy. He runs through the TARDIS. He runs through a public swimming baths. I drop off.

I wake up; still in the lounge of that big West Cross house, and the room is dark and the TV is still on, and now Dennis and I have company, six or seven others perched on a footstool, the sofa, the floor. The lights are down. Their faces are in shadow. They’re all watching the TV. It takes me a minute for my eyes to get used to the dark.

Every face is covered, every figure is small and skinny, mostly male as far as I can tell, although one wears a floral dress and black tights, without having any other sign of gender. Every one has his or her face covered, at least in the lower half. A huge Tom Baker woolly scarf, wrapped up round and round over a nose. A hockey mask, or something like a hockey mask, not like the bloke in the horror film, more modern than that. A black bandana, printed with skulls and roses and thorns and 1980s rock band images. Someone sitting on the floor near the door, peering through the gap between the sofa and the armchair in which I am sitting, is wearing a motorcycle helmet.

Here is Dennis, on the other side of the room, sitting on the arm of the big armchair by the bay window. It is hard to see, but I am convinced that he glances at me and sees that I am awake, and nods towards the TV screen. I squint into the dark, trying to make out these people. Did Dennis introduce me to his friends? Was I so tired I don’t even remember?

Someone on the TV screams.

On screen, a corpse, the big reveal. A young son and a teenage daughter have found their father, his face eaten off, one of his arms missing, and they are sick with shock and fear. They hold each other, mouth reassurances, and it becomes apparent, though it is not spelled out, that these words have long ago become unfamiliar to them.

The scene cuts to a woman in her forties. I assume she is their mother. Someone is pursuing her through the run-down, deserted streets and alleys of a provincial British town by a figure or figures half-revealed.

Wait. This is a slasher film. I hate slasher films. Dennis knows I hate slasher films.

The shadowed pursuer is short, and wiry. A shot of a hand pressed against a wall shows long, filthy fingernails, bony knuckles. Another shot, a split-second, in close-up, depicts a long tongue running over wide, stained teeth.

The woman collapses at a corner. Her back is against the wall of an end terrace house. She looks over her shoulder, around the corner, up the street, listening for footsteps, her breath irregular, made in little yelps and gasps. The shot pans back. Behind her, from the alley, three stiff, hunched silhouettes approach under a streetlamp. She turns, sees them, tries to get to her feet, to run, trips, falls on her face, tries to crawl. Cut to her face and shoulders; something is pulling her backwards. She clutches at a lamp post. She screams. Blood from out of shot spatters the pavement around her. She stops screaming. Her eyes roll back into her head and she goes limp, falls on her face. Cut to a shot from above. The bottom half of her body is almost completely gone, a few bloody bones from the waist down.

Cut to the boy and the girl. They are in the kitchen, and they are arguing again. They do not know what to do. The girl is begging her brother to take a carving knife; he is near-hysterical. The boy runs to the lounge, tries to curl up behind the sofa. The girl chases him, sits on the floor beside him. She tries to calm him down, stops shouting, holds the boy tight, tells him, perhaps for the first time in a very long time, that she loves him, that everything will be all right.

The lights go out.

The girl holds her brother tight, and then slowly, they get up. She takes her brother’s hand, and tells him to be quiet. They advance to back of the house. They keep to the wall. The girl holds the knife out in front of her. They get to the back door. It is locked. The key is just there, across the kitchen. She puts her finger to her lips and smiles, and leaves the boy at the back door as she crosses the kitchen, walking around the wall of the room. She puts out her hand to get the key from its hook.

Something stiff and strangely apelike reaches down from above the cooker and grabs her, lifts her kicking and screaming from the floor and up out of shot. Cut to a close-up of the knife dropping to the kitchen floor and clattering, and drops of blood, first one or two and then great splatters, falling on it. The screams continue. The boy snaps and runs past the falling blood, back into the house, dives into the cupboard under the stairs, closes the door, curls into a ball.

Cut to his face, streaked with tears. He tries his absolute best to collect himself, not altogether successfully, and it is then we see something terrible dawn upon him. He is not breathing raggedly; the sound of panting continues. The camera pans up from his face. Behind him and above him we see a grinning maw, full of those broad stained, uneven teeth. They part. A long pointed tongue licks around a huge lipless mouth.

Cut again: a simple view of the cupboard door under the stairs, central on screen. The handle moves once, twice. Something inside bangs against the door. A brief scream, muffled. The lower right-hand panel of the door buckles suddenly from the inside with a single loud crack, like it had a smart impact from a sledgehammer, or if someone kicked it really, really hard. Then silence.

The credits roll over the shot of the door.

And I think, wait. The small smothered figures around me watch intently, silently as the names of actors I have never heard of roll up the screen and it fades to black. They have all moved slightly closer to the screen. I am no longer sure which one is Dennis. My eyes are so, so heavy. I am warm. I am not, I register with sleepy surprise, frightened. I nod off.

11

It is full morning and I am lying on the sofa with a crick in my neck. The plush upholstery is damp under my face, where I have drooled on it. Someone has draped a blanket over me.

The bay window faces south and slightly east, and although the curtains are closed, the room is filled with soft golden light. Dennis is sitting on the arm of the chair nearest the bay window. By the time I have seen him, he has turned away. He stands, steps to the side of the bay, pulls the cord. The curtains open with a sort of hiss.

Bright sunlight fills the room. Dennis approaches. I sit up, hand on the back of my neck, the thumb and index finger of my other hand on my eyelids. I put my hands on my knees, blink, squint into the light. Dennis stands almost in silhouette in front of me.

β€” Sleep well? he says.

I make a non-committal sort of noise. My eyes get used to the light. Dennis is not wearing his kerchief.

The lower half of Dennis’ face is wholly taken up by his grinning moon-on-its-side mouth, vast and wide, chipped teeth like piss-streaked gravestones. The gums are bordered by choppy scar tissue as if someone cut the lips off with a Stanley knife to make room for the mouth. A slightly raised area of reddish flesh, dotted with blackheads, sits where a nose should be. His eyes are perfectly round, sit under heavy, low brows, and are indeterminate in number: one, two, more, I can’t tell.

And Dennis’ voice.

β€” Cup of tea?

I screw up my eyes again, try to squeeze the picture out of my head, open them, look straight at him. Teeth. Eyes. Ruined flesh.

β€” Yes. That would be nice.

So we head to the kitchen, past the cupboard door with the wrecked panel, and we sit at the kitchen table, me and the old friend with the charnel mouth, and he makes me a cup of Earl Grey, and I am stiff and shivering and I am breathing irregularly with little yelps like I’m about to hyperventilate, or already am hyperventilating, only I haven’t realised that I am yet. He watches as my hands shake and I fight to raise the mug to my lips and drink, and I think I spill some, and Dennis show no sign that he has noticed. He watches with no drink of his own, hands clasped on the table, grinning, grinning, grinning.

And he says to me, after a time,

β€” It’s been really good to see you, Simon.

I put the mug down.

β€” Yeah. Thanks.

β€” I thought of you often.

β€” Yeah. I did, too. I realise that this is true.

β€” I used to count you as one of the best friends I had ever had. He sounds terribly sad. He grins. I was so glad when we caught up. It’s been great catching up. It has.

I nod. He clears his throat.

β€” It means a lot that you would come to visit me, he says.

And this makes no more sense than the face, but I know I should reply with yes, great, let’s do it again sometime, but I cannot, and it dawns on me that perhaps Dennis knows full well that I cannot, and that he approves of my honesty.

β€” You’re still one of my oldest and best friends. I hope you know that, he says.

I am facing the hall. I can see the door to the cupboard under the stairs.

β€” I think I do, I say. We have history, don’t we?

12

I shake his hand, which is cold and hard and lumpy and which has appallingly long nails. I do not offer to accompany him back to the train station, because I think I would be unable to keep from guessing what train he will take, and where it will go, and I don’t think that I could cope with that.

So we say goodbye, and although it has begun to drizzle, I ignore the bus stop, and I cross the still-silent Mumbles Road by the West Cross Inn, and walk along the esplanade and watch the tide come in and grow whiter and angrier. By the time I rejoin the main road a good hour later, I have to press the button on the Pelican crossing at the bottom of Brynmill Lane and wait for the green man because the road is too busy to cross without waiting.

And I walk up the hill, passing the usual traffic of young mums and hungover students and pensioners, and the seagulls and swans are in fine voice across the lake at Brynmill Park, angry and hungry and declaring they are alive, they are alive.

And I unlock the door, and pick up a letter for my wife from the bank and a Jiffy bag containing a Scott Walker CD I won off of eBay last week. And I sit in my lounge and let the cat come and sit by me, and I absent-mindedly stroke him, and I wonder what I am going to tell my wife, when she brings my young son home and asks me, how was your weekend?