Sottopassaggio E-Book

Nick Alexander

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Beschreibung

Following the loss of his partner in a car crash, Mark, the hero from the bestselling 50 Reasons to say "Goodbye", tries to pick up the pieces and build a new life for himself in gay-friendly Brighton. Haunted by the death of his lover and a fading sense of self, Mark struggles to put the past behind him, exploring Brighton's high and low life, falling in love with charming but unavailable Tom and hooking up with Jenny, a long lost girlfriend from a time when such a thing seemed possible. Moving, witty, truthful and wise, this is a story that digs deep into what it is like to lose someone you love and start again.

Leseprobe

Sottopassaggio

Nick Alexander was born in Margate, and has lived and worked in the UK, the USA and France. When he isn’t writing, he is the editor of the gay literature site BIGfib.com. His latest novel, The Case of the Missing Boyfriend, was an eBook bestseller in early 2011, netting sixty thousand downloads and reaching number 1 on Amazon. Nick lives in the southern French Alps with two mogs, a couple of goldfish and a complete set of Pedro Almodovar films. Visit his website at www.nick-alexander.com.

Also by Nick Alexander

THE FIFTY REASONS SERIES

Fifty Reasons to Say GoodbyeSottopassaggioGood Thing, Bad Thing Better Than Easy Sleight of Hand

SHORT STORIES

13.55 Eastern Standard Time

FICTION

The Case of the Missing Boyfriend

Sottopassaggio

Nick Alexander

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by BIGfib Books.

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2011 by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Nick Alexander, 2005

The moral right of Nick Alexander to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-0-85789-639-1 (eBook)

Corvus An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Surprise

Family Ties

Spinning Free

Double Entendre

Disneyland

Past Tense

Past Imperfect

The Gift

Different Days

Defrosting

Incompatibility Issues

Lost and Found

And Lost Again

Déjà Vu

French Pickup

Pavlov’s Terror

Different Truths

Entrapment

Boulevard of Broken Dreams

Public Offer

The Devil You Know

Partial Truths

Leap Of Faith

Strategic Decisions

Look-alike

Fat Fighters

Profound Discoveries

Life Goes On

Chasing Rabbits

Ghosts

Red Means No-Go

General Stickiness

Lost In Action

A Difficult Client

Food For Friends

Keyhole Truths

Nightmare Reality

The Only One

What Needs To Be Done

The Paths Separate

What Friends Are For

Perspective Lines

Limits

Cold Blooded Manipulation

Improbability Drive

Dogs And Babies

Pizza Picnic

Desperate Plans

Bad Karma

Morning Clarity

Last Minute Gestures

Close Brackets

Here and There

Sottopassaggio

After It’s Over

The Big Picture

Epilogue

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks to Fay Weldon for encouraging me when it most counted. Special thanks to Davey, with-out whom Tom would have been speechless, to Rosemary and Liz for their help with the final manuscript and to Claire at Turnaround for her help with getting the book out into the wider world. Thanks to everyone who has filled my life with these stories and to everyone who shared their memories with me when I ran out of ideas. Thanks to Apple computer for making such wonderful reliable work tools, and to BIGfib Books for making this book a reality.

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.

John Lennon

Prologue

A son, remembering packed lunches and childhood picnics, makes a flask of coffee for his mother and tells her to be sure to drink it as she undertakes the long drive back to England. He is worried about her leaving, for she is not, emotionally speaking, in the best of ways.

But she reassures him. “I don’t know how I’ll be when I get there, but the drive will do me good,” she says.

As he waves her off, he has one last moment of hesitation, but his boyfriend slides an arm around his waist and says, “Don’t worry she’ll be fine.”

He hands the flask of coffee through the window, kisses his mother on the cheek and, as she drives away, he makes a meow sound, mimicking Riley, the caged cat next to her on the passenger seat.

As Sarah drives, she marvels at her convincing acting.

“He shouldn’t have let me go,” she thinks briefly. “He should have realised.”

She discounts this as a bad thought. It’s not her son’s fault after all if he can’t read her mind, is it? It couldn’t really be his fault if his imagination isn’t big enough to see the terror of driving back alone to all that mess. Could it?

After half an hour on the monotonous Italian motorway the cat quietens and Sarah’s mind drifts over the absurdly dramatic events of the last few months. Her shocking realisation that she didn’t, or perhaps had never really loved her husband of 27 years, and then in the middle of that crisis, her son’s revelation …

And now this so-called holiday. “Out of the frying pan and into the fire”, she thinks.

Away from Pete and the terrible drama of “home”, to be sure. But two weeks of trying to get her mind around the fact of those two together, trying to think about her son, trying find a new way of relating to him while also trying not to think about it; specifically trying not to think about the sex thing, the reality of their two bodies together.

But more than anything else, she has spent the time trying not to think about what she will do when she gets back, if she gets back to Wolverhampton.

As she drives past motorway exits for Monaco, Nice, then Antibes, she pictures each of those places, memories from 20 years ago, before Pete decided to hate travelling. She is tempted to leave the motorway and re-visit them all, to never go home. She wonders if French hotels take cats and briefly her hatred focuses on Riley; it becomes the cat’s fault she can’t do what she wants.

The desire not to return to Wolverhampton is overpowering. She could just carry on, just drive and drive until …

Until what though? Until her bank account is empty? Until both their accounts are empty?

The future strikes her as deep and dark and endless, and she wonders if she can face it.

“Am I capable of doing any of this?” she asks out loud. But what is the alternative?

As tears well up in her eyes it starts to rain. She swallows determinedly and in strangely symmetrical acts, she brushes away the tears and flicks on the windscreen wipers.

A sign shows that she will have to change motorways soon, to turn the wheel and swing north towards home, or continue straight-on towards Marseille, Perpignan, Barcelona.

A tiny smile spreads across her face as she contemplates the choices. Wolverhampton or Barcelona. It seems absurd that she will choose England as she knows she must.

Outside it gets darker and the rain gets harder and starts to hammer against the windscreen. She flicks on the radio, which glows cosily and scans briefly before settling on FIP FM. A woman is talking with a late night voice even though it is mid-afternoon. Sarah doesn’t understand the actual words but the language, the foreign-ness of it sounds beautiful.

Another sign announces the beginning of the A7 and she braces herself to turn the wheel towards home. To turn her wheel away from the adventures she always dreamt of, and towards the resumption of her life in Wolverhampton, her trips to the shops with her husband, and to establishing some kind of platonic relationship with the man she secretly loved all these years.

It’s still too painful to even think his name. Having had his life of adventures without her he has now returned and will be living down the road! “How absurd!” she thinks. “How selfish!”

She thinks about what it means, this turning of the steering wheel, for turning onto the A7 is hugely symbolic.

It is the final and ultimate acceptance of her ordinariness. It is acknowledging, once and for all, that at 56 she isn’t going to become anything else. That it’s too late for adventures, too late to leave Pete, and too late for the lover. Only she doesn’t feel old inside; inside she doesn’t feel like it should be too late at all.

She glances at the cat. “It’s not a life of Riley at all,” she tells it.

The cat replies with a plaintive meow and Sarah nods.

“You know that already huh?” she says.

As she stares out through the windscreen at the road, her eyes start to tear again, and through two layers of running water it’s hard to see the road works.

As she enters a tunnel, a sign tells her to move to the right-hand lane for the A7, so she waits until the end of the road works and then slows and slips in behind a truck.

“Am I doing this then?” she asks, suddenly shocked by the loudness of her voice as the noise of the rain bashing against the windscreen ceases.

The tears start to flow again and she’s having trouble seeing in the darkness of the tunnel. She puts on her hazard lights and starts to slow and shift onto the hard shoulder.

As the car halts, only feet before the exit from the tunnel, she thinks of another option she hasn’t considered – turning around and going back. But it’s not really an option; her son will be flying home at the end of the week and his lover …

She swallows and re-phrases the thought. His friend will be heading back to wherever it is his parents live, and another different family will bring their own set of hopes and fears into the villa.

She pulls a tissue from her sleeve and blows her nose. She opens the cat’s cage, but it doesn’t move. As she reaches into the glove compartment for the flask of coffee, a passing truck blares its horns at her, and she is momentarily aware of the danger of where she has chosen to stop, glad yet again that she traded the tiny Daihatsu for a Volvo.

“OK, just a minute,” she mutters, filling the cup and trying to consider her options.

“But I don’t want to do any of it,” she thinks. “I’m sick of it. I’m tired of it all.”

A motorcyclist with a dirty visor is travelling back from a romantic weekend.

Riding much too fast in his haste to be home, he misjudges the bend inside the tunnel, misses the grey Volvo parked on the hard-shoulder but clips the crash barrier beyond, loses control and skids across the tarmac, out of the tunnel and into the safety of the bushes.

A yellow Calberson delivery truck, with a tired driver who spent the weekend arguing with his wife, swerves to avoid the motorcycle and starts to skid and jack-knife across the glossy wetness of the three lanes.

Behind him, a juggernaut swerves bravely towards the hard shoulder and for a moment the reactive, nervy driver thinks that he might make it. For a few exhilarating seconds he thinks that he might be able to squeeze his huge articulated truck through the tiny space, but as he glides through the gap with only the slightest of scrapes, as he squeezes past the yellow Calberson truck on the left, and the crash barrier on the right, he sees a parked Volvo on the hard shoulder, then glimpses the aterrified eyes of the woman within. As he ploughs into, then over her grey Volvo, sweat pours from every pore of his body.

In the terror of this collision he forgets to steer and as his truck piles into the curved wall of the tunnel it starts to tip and slide and scrape and he thinks he knows from other accidents he has witnessed that he will die right here right now. He feels terror then a strange silent peace as he gives up and slides into grey.

Behind that, a little white Fiat with a rain-spotted windscreen starts to skid. Inside it are two young men who, as chance would have it, are, at this very instant full of more love and hope for the future than either of them have ever experienced in their entire lives.

Cesaria Evora is incongruously singing her heart out through the car speakers, and the two men hold their breath and stare wide eyed as their car slews hopelessly towards the rear of the juggernaut, now on its side.

A split second before the moment of impact, the driver – Steve – removes his foot from the brake enabling him to steer to the left. His half of the car will be stopped dead by the huge piercing bumper of the truck while the passenger side of the car will rip and sheer and twist and fold, catapulting to safety two freak survivors of the year’s worst traffic accident; his most loved possession, a saxophone and his passenger, Mark.

Surprise

I don’t know how I ended up in Brighton; I’m in a permanent state of surprise about it. Of course I know the events that took place, I remember the accident – or rather I remember the last time Steve looked into my eyes – before the grinding screeching wiped it all out. I remember it so vividly and with such a terrible aching pain that I feel as though my heart will stop every time I run the image through my mind.

As for the accident itself, I’m no longer sure what I remember or have dreamt, what I have been told or read in the newspaper clippings Owen, my brother, collected.

The headline I remember is, French M-Way Pile-Up. 27 dead, Hundreds Injured, but only one death mattered to me, and only one of the injuries. I know that could sound callous, but my heart just doesn’t have space for anyone else’s pain.

I know how I got from there to here as well, how I got from that unrecognisably deformed Fiat near Fréjus, to this sofa in Brighton. I know the mechanisms of humanity that dialled numbers, rushed people to the scene, cut me from the wreckage and drove us all, sirens screaming, to hospitals around the area.

Intellectually at least, I understand the unravelling of obligation, shared history and love that made Owen, my brother, leave his wife behind in Australia and fly half way around the world to sit holding my hand before scooping me up and bringing me here.

But it all seems so unexpected, so far from how things were supposed to be, that I am at a total loss to see how things will pan out, to see how things can ever pan out again.

I had a life and a job and a new boyfriend. I was supposed to hear him play saxophone, supposed to spend a dirty weekend of sex and laughter before sitting at work on a Monday morning pretty much like any other, and trying not to fall asleep at my computer screen. That’s all that was supposed to happen.

So I am surprised, and my surprise is confounded by just how familiar Brighton feels, just how like Eastbourne where I grew up, it is; by how normal it feels to be sitting in this bay window, in this seaside town and to be hearing the sash windows rattling behind me as a distant seagull screams. How obvious it seems, to be sitting here looking at Owen opposite reading The Guardian.

It’s all such a surprise, and so unsurprising, that I sit in numbed, stunned disbelief as I try to work out whether I am having trouble believing that I am here, or trouble believing that I was ever there. Did those twenty years since Owen and I last sat on opposite sofas in a seaside town really happen at all?

I open my mouth to ask him but think better of it. He’s worried enough about me as it is, and, logically at least, I know the answer.

As if he has captured my thoughts Owen looks up at me and frowns.

I wonder what he is going to say to me, wonder what he will ask, how I will reply, what reassuring answer I will find to his concerned questioning.

But Owen just smiles at me. “You want a cup of tea?” he says.

I exhale. “Yes,” I reply.

The reply came a little too quickly. I sounded breathless and I realise that I am also frowning, so I force a smile.

Owen raises an eyebrow at me, shakes his head and sighs. I think he’s decided that I’m taking the piss but he says nothing.

He stands and turns towards the kitchen.

Family Ties

I sit and stare at the spring light falling through the bay windows forming hard geometrical squares on the varnished floorboards. Particles of dust jump and float in the light, pushed by invisible currents of air.

I drift, thinking of the same squares of light on another floor in another time; a carpeted floor dusted with Lego and Meccano from the big wooden box. I can almost feel the tension in the house, the alertness that I, that we all grew up with, our hidden antennae constantly scanning the horizon for the next breach of the peace.

I pull Owen’s dusty bike from the cellar and pump the tyres. The bike, which is filthy, but apparently new – the tyres still have those little rubber mould-marks on them – sits next to an equally unused ab-machine and a sprung chest expander. I grin at the idea of Owen buying this stuff.

It’s another grey day. I had forgotten just how terrifyingly grey England can be, even in springtime. Out of sheer habit, not from here but from Nice, I head down to the seafront and west.

The sky and sea are a uniform grey and the seafront is quiet. A very workaday atmosphere has descended upon the town. Men in suits stride purposely, replacing the casual strollers of the weekend. I reach the pier and move onto the cycle path.

I pass the Grand Hotel where Margaret Thatcher was nearly bombed out of existence, and remember actually being disappointed that she had escaped unscathed.

Opposite the Odeon, a man is painting the railings, slowly covering the faded blue with fresh paint. I smell the paint and remember when they repainted the railings of Eastbourne, remember the fuss that my parents made when they changed the colour, and I realise that these towns, Eastbourne, Brighton and Nice for that matter, are profoundly similar.

Of course working-class Eastbourne is clearly not Brighton, and gay-trendy-Brighton is clearly not poodles-and-gold Cote d’Azur, but these south-facing coastal towns, with their big facades and their pebble beaches; well there’s a symmetry that cannot be denied.

I wonder just how much the destiny of a life is influenced by the desire for one’s lost childhood; even Owen, I realise, lives on the seafront of south facing Melbourne, cycles along his very own east-west cycle path, halfway around the world to recreate the experience of his earliest memories.

When I get back home, Owen has returned. He’s listening to classical music and leafing through a mass of paperwork spread across the dining table. He looks up as I enter and frowns.

“Hiya,” he says. “We need to talk.”

I make tea and sit opposite him. “This music’s lovely,” I say. “It seems really familiar.”

Owen stares into the middle distance, still thinking about the documents before him, or searching for the name of the composer, or lost in some other reverie, I’m not sure which.

“Corelli,” he says eventually. “Dad had it,” he adds. “This very recording in fact.”

I nod. “So what do we need to talk about?” I ask.

Owen stares into the distance again, apparently lost in the music, which is swelling to a sumptuous climax.

As the music wanes he snaps back into the room and looks at me.

“I spoke to the estate agent,” he says. “About this house.”

I nod.

“The guy is coming around to do a new valuation of the house but basically everyone agrees that it’s not the best time to sell right now. They all say that house prices are still rocketing and that the best place for my equity is right here.” He taps the table to show where here is.

I nod again and sip my tea.

“I don’t want to rent it again though. It was so much hassle last time.” He looks around the room before adding, “So I guess, what I need to know is if you’re going to stay here. Or are you going back?”

I open my mouth to speak, but then close it again.

“Maybe you haven’t decided yet?” Owen prompts.

“Yeah …” I say.

Owen nods. “I have to get back to Melbourne,” he says.

I nod.

“I’m missing Beverley and we have that trip planned for the beginning of May,” he says.

“Trip?” I question.

Owen nods. “We’ve rented a camper van. We’re driving along the south coast. I thought I mentioned it.”

I shrug. “I don’t think so, but yeah, that sounds great.”

I picture our father’s camper van parked outside the house. Forever gleaming. Forever outside the house, always ready for the imminent, but never actually realised trip across Europe.

“So?” Owen nods at me, his eyebrows raised.

I frown at him.

“Will you be OK?” He leans across the table and stares into my eyes.

I glance away to avoid the intensity of his gaze. Since the accident expressions of love or sympathy just make me cry, and I’m exhausted with crying.

“If you need me to stay longer,” he says.

I sigh. “No, I’m fine,” I nod. “You’ve done so much already, I’m sorry to have …”

“No, this has been good.” Owen lifts a pile of papers from the table. “I had to deal with all this,” he says.

I nod.

“So?” Owen asks.

I realise that this is the third time he has asked the question. I look at him blankly and perform the mental equivalent of pulling straws.

“Here,” I say. My voice has an unintended aggressive quality.

Owen smiles at me, encouraging me to continue.

“I can’t really think about anything else right now,” I say. “I need the space I guess.”

Owen wrinkles his brow in concern and sighs.

The music is swelling again and I can feel pressure building behind my eyes, so I force a smile and stand.

As Owen shuffles paper behind me, I stand in the window and watch the sea and think about the dozy dreamlike quality within my mind.

I once dreamt I was falling from a skyscraper and when I awoke, I was convinced that I knew something new; that I knew how it feels to fall from a skyscraper, and though it was only a dream, though it never happened, I can still remember the sickening, free-fall sensation today.

Right now, I feel as though I have dreamt my own death; I feel like I know how it feels to have died.

I feel detached from the outcomes I always worried about, detached from the endless goals I was building towards, a relationship, a good job, a home of my own … They’re all gone, all irrelevant. Equally all of the options seem to fit just fine. Here or Nice, what’s to choose?

I lie down on the sofa and close my eyes and listen to the rise and fall of the music and the rustle of paper behind me. The feeling of dozing while someone works nearby is reassuring and wonderful. It will be hard when Owen leaves.

As I doze I forget where I am, and then as I linger on the edge of dreams I become confused about which sofa this is and I think I am back home in my flat in Nice, and then that I am on the sofa of our childhood home. As sleep overtakes me I think that Owen, behind me, is my father.

When I open my eyes everything looks more, almost too much. Too much like itself.

The information from my senses seems fresh and different; everything looks a little sharper, like when I took acid.

The colours are brighter, the sounds more distinct, and the floating dust strikes me as a little more beautiful than usual, perhaps a little less usual than usual. I yawn, stretch, then sit and scratch my head.

Owen looks up from his paperwork. “Nice sleep?” he asks.

I cough. “Yep,” I say standing and heading for the door. “It was good.”

Spinning Free

A grey Saturday morning, Owen and I alight at Victoria and trundle through the London underground with his suitcase.

We are talking about which museums I should visit after his departure and are completely unprepared when suddenly, mid-phrase, the moment is upon us; Owen must take the right hand path, I must take the left hand one. This suddenly is where the lives split. It’s obvious and natural but we’re not ready.

Owen looks at me shiny-eyed. “Um, I have to go this way,” he says.

It’s a strange moment, and the simple division of the tunnel belies the profundity of the moment.

We were born from the same womb, shared a house, toys, and even at times a bedroom. From that simple accident our lives will forever be intertwined. We will be together, then apart, then together again, as chance and need dictate, and right now, right here, one path leads to the Piccadilly line, Heathrow airport, then Singapore and Melbourne, and the other to the Northern line, to something called, “Life in Brighton.”

It’s arbitrary that I have decided to go back to Brighton, to live in Owen’s house rather than return to Nice. It would seem more logical if Owen went back to his old house in Brighton, but bizarrely that life fits me too. I’m perfectly at home lying on his sofa in his lounge listening to his records.

In fact, it strikes me that any of these lives, in Nice, Brighton or Australia would suit either of us, and I have the strangest notion that in some way our lives are not only entwined, but almost interchangeable. We are in some profound way the same thing; we are at some level a single set of desires.

We are the lives our parents accustomed us to; we are their preferences for seaside towns, their love of France, their unrealised dreams of cross continental camping trips. We are the dreams they built for themselves and also, maybe more so, we are the dreams they didn’t managed to realise, the ones they saved for us, passed on through their angst as the only route to true happiness, to true self realisation. We are that vision of a shiny camper van waiting to go somewhere else, somewhere better, somewhere happier.

I swallow hard. I feel shaky and scared but I bluff through it. “Yeah,” I say, “I know.”

Owen and I hug rigidly. “You look after yourself,” he says.

I nod. “You too!” and aware of a tidal wave of emotion swelling suddenly from a distant undersea tremor, I whack him on the back, force a grin, and head off down my tunnel.

I don’t look back until I hear his suitcase trundle into the echoing distance.

Slightly dazed, I wander along the tunnel towards the Circle Line.

I think about Owen heading off at a different vector, being pulled back towards his wife, his projects, his camper-van, and I think, not for the first time, how amazingly centred heterosexual lives are when compared to mine; just how many ties and stays – mortgages, dinner parties and schools – straight families have holding them centred, bang in the middle of their lives.

My own life seems so fragmented, so un-tied to anyone or any one place, that spinning like a top, or perhaps circling like an electron, the slightest nudge and I could oscillate out of control and spin off into space. I could end up just about anywhere. The possibilities are infinite, terrifying.

The greatest tie for most is the responsibility to feed and clothe and educate. It’s something I will never have, and something I will never have to worry about either. My straight friends are so often jealous of my freedom, jealous precisely of the free-electron aspect of my existence, and I wonder briefly who actually gets the better deal.

I descend a small flight of steps and catch a glimpse of a poster advertising the National Gallery, which my father loved with a passion. As a child of course I thought it was boring and would watch my own feet scraping along the floor as he dragged me around the building.

As I head out onto the deserted platform, I decide, in memory of my childhood, to take my eyes, which are in some way his eyes too, not only to the Tate Modern, but to the National Gallery as well. I wonder if other peoples’ childhoods are as intense, as all consuming as mine was. Can they too pause at any moment and sense in every atom of their being, the events of childhood that made them what they are today?

It’s a shame we didn’t organise this differently, I realise. Owen would have loved to visit the National gallery too. It’s going to be hard without him. I knew that of course, but it’s just hitting me now, quite how difficult everything will be.

I wonder if even Owen realises. I wonder if even he understands that I can do anything, go anywhere, and that in some way it matters not one jot. For what’s the point in going to the National or the Tate on your own? What’s the point of spending a day in London if you have no one to tell about it when you get home?

I take a deep determined breath. I will snap out of this. I will make this OK. I will get myself to the National, and then the Tate, and then back to Brighton, and it will all be fine.

The platform is deserted. There are only four of us: three standing waiting for the train, and a wide-eyed tramp on a bench muttering to himself.

“I can do this. It’s easy,” I tell myself. “Life is just one step at a time.”

Wind from the tunnel blows a crisp packet along the floor and a distant screeching announces the train’s arrival.

As the headlights of the train appear in the darkness, I absently note that at exactly the same moment the two other people standing on the platform move in opposite directions. The man in the sombre suit with the fluorescent pink tie steps backwards, and the ashen grey woman in the woollen coat forwards; it looks almost as though their steps have been choreographed.

As the train bursts from the tunnel, at the precise moment its leading edge thrusts into our presence becoming a rumbling, shrieking reality, the grey woman – for everything, her clothes, her hair, even her skin is grey – takes another step forwards. It’s one step too many.

With unexpected grace she drifts and tips and pivots over the edge of the platform. In a strange weightless movement, drifting like an autumn leaf, she tumbles and vanishes beneath the hulk of the train.

The train shudders to an early halt halfway along the platform. The man in the suit sprints past me, tie flailing, to an intercom beside the tramp. My own mind is empty, possibilities of action have not even started to form, so I stand mouth open, staring at the space where the grey woman once existed as the image of her fall, of the weary elegance with which she tumbled out of life plays over and over in my mind.

A driver jumps, green-faced and shaking from the front of the train. Two staff in yellow jackets push me towards the exit. A tannoy bursts into life with a recorded message.

“Evacuate the station,” it shrieks.

People from other platforms are flooding up the escalator, running terrified from an unknown menace.

“A track incident,” the tannoy echoes. “Please leave by the nearest exit.”

I let the machinery carry me slowly upwards and watch the people stream past.

“Why did she do that?” I wonder. “What can make someone so desperate, so completely hopeless that falling in front of a train seems like the best option?”

As I reach the top of the elevator, and am carried by the panicky swell out through open ticket barriers and into the dingy daylight of Leicester Square I think, “I can’t tell Owen.”

Owen has gone, and I realise with a shudder that there’s no one else I want to tell, no one I can tell. I lean back against the wall and watch people gushing past, streaming away from me, trying to put maximum distance between themselves and the unknown horrors of the tunnels.

It’s such a brutal thing to have witnessed; I’m amazed to have seen such a thing and to have been simply ejected onto the pavement. Surely that can’t be right?

Some distant part of my memory conjures up my own accident. It’s not a visual memory but a physical one, the subsonic thud of the impact.

My hands are shaking so I thrust them into my pockets and stare at the crowds and wonder if it’s actually possible to survive this world alone. As a single soul, isn’t the world maybe just too hard-edged to actually be survivable?

I lean against a wall and stare numbly at a man selling newspapers. Stupidly I look at the posters to see if the tube suicide is already in the headlines.

I watch a Japanese woman fighting her way through the sudden crowd with a mass of high-class shopping bags and I see the tramp from the platform as he appears at the top of the stairs.

“Was he watching too?” I wonder. “Is he feeling shaky and alone as well?”

Carried by the crowd, he drifts along still muttering to himself. But as he passes in front of me, moving from left to right, I hear his voice.

“She had nobody,” he says.

I’m not sure if he’s talking to me or just rambling.

“That’s why she did it,” he says. “She had nobody.”

I watch, frozen, as he disappears around the corner. My mouth fills with saliva and for a moment I think I might vomit, but then the feeling passes, and I cry instead, salty tears dropping shamelessly onto the tarmac as a hundred indifferent strangers stream past.

Double Entendre

I spend my days wandering along the pier, surfing the net, sleeping rather more than is normal, and watching English TV – a novelty.

I feel lonely and disjointed, as though this isn’t my life, which of course it isn’t.

I read Owen’s old books, listen to Owen’s old records, look through Owen’s old windows at the sea. It’s not even Owen’s life that I’m living. It’s his past.

I battle on, waiting for the wind to change and for things to start to feel like they fit, but on Friday as I stand looking at the sea, I realise that I haven’t actually spoken to a human being for three days. I haven’t uttered one word since the woman in Safeway said, “That’ll be twenty-two-fifty.”

I know that this isn’t healthy. I know from experience that the time has come to be brave, and acting quickly, before I have time to chicken out, I swipe my keys from the counter and head out the door.

The Bulldog Tavern is shouting, heaving, laughing.

It’s only 8pm and my initial shock at how busy the place is fades as I remember that unlike France it will close at 11pm. Back in Nice, people don’t even go out until midnight.

The noise and the laughter are also a big surprise after years of living overseas. French bars are such a serious affair; here people look like they are actually having fun.

As I push towards the counter, I scan the diverse shapes and forms around me, none of the homogenous thin, olive skinned posing of the Côte d’Azur here. There are fat guys with beards and thin guys in suits, and old men in leather, and, more than anything, I note that there are lots and lots of people, of all shapes and sizes, with buzz hair cuts and goatee beards. I have slipped, unnoticed, into the fold.

I randomly select a pint of bitter and move back to the centre of the room in order to free up the limited access to the bar.

For a while I fidget, unable to choose a point amongst the crowd and a position, leaning, sitting or standing that feels comfortable. I finally settle against a pillar, hanging up my denim jacket and placing my pint on a little shelf.

I have never been good at hanging around alone in bars, it has always made me feel self conscious, but by the time I have drunk half a pint the place has become so full that it would be impossible for anyone to realise that I am alone.

I note a few people watching me. I guess that Brighton remains a small town, and I am fresh meat after all.

“Here we go again,” I think. The thought depresses me.

I glance around the room again and my eyes settle on a couple against the opposite wall. They are the most identical pair I have ever seen, the same height, the same shaved heads, matching goatee beards. Even their jeans are the same tone of blue. They look slightly ridiculous but, it has to be said, cute.

One of them winks at me and, slightly embarrassed to have been caught staring, I turn away and face the other side of the bar.

I end up wedged between a fit-but-knows-it guy in cycle shorts on the left, a very ugly man in beautiful one-piece motorcycle leathers behind, and a diverse group of slightly drunken men in front.

To distract myself from the two clones and they from me, I stare vaguely into the group in front as though I am involved in their conversation. They are talking about someone’s holiday plans and whether his boyfriend will cancel just before the departure. Most people seem to think that this is what will happen.

I’m so pushed into the group I start to feel as though I am involved and the main man, a big guy with a beard and a beer gut glances at me with smiling eyes as he entertains everyone with his spiel. After a while I realise that he does think that I am with them.

His neighbour – a thin guy in a suit – asks him how the man in question managed to take four weeks leave.

“Well exactly!” the big guy laughs. “Especially because his boss is his ex … I mean, they’re not exactly on the best of terms.”

“Apparently he put the form in on the day Joe went on holiday, so it just slipped in without anyone noticing,” comments an older guy in a leather jacket.

Without thinking, I lean forward and comment, “fnarr, fnarr,” a mocking laugh I recall from way back that indicates an unintended double entendre.

It’s the beer talking, and I immediately realise how rude this is, especially as I don’t know anyone in the group or even who they are talking about. But a couple of the guys laugh heartily and the others smile at me.

“Try that in France and you’re dead,” I think.

The guy in the suit says, “I can’t believe you missed that one Burt; you’re losing your touch.”

The group opens to let me in; I feel I have to say something.

“Hey, do you know how they say double entendre in French?” I ask.

“Um, double entendre?” asks one.

“Nah, I know this one,” says the fat guy. “Jean told me.” The guy glances behind him, then shrugs and continues. “Apparently they don’t have a word for it in French.”

“They don’t,” I agree.

A man appears at his side. It is one of the clones. His double is just behind him holding two pints of beer.

“We say double-sense, but that isn’t necessarily rude, so it’s not really the same,” he says, his voice smooth, his accent French.

“We don’t really use what you call double entendres in French humour.”

“So what you’re saying,” laughs the guy in the suit, “is that we use your language better than you do.”

Jean smiles wryly. “Maybe,” he laughs.

The conversation drifts around France and the French. Jean and his twin partner – who amusingly turns out to be called John – take position either side of me and chat. I can feel a move coming and I find the idea amusing and actually quite flattering.

By my third pint I am feeling amazingly relaxed, and this in turn has created a happy feeling of homecoming. It’s a surprise to me, but I am realising that despite fifteen years in France it is still only in England that I can strike up an instant rapport, only in England that I can feel comfortable enough to join in an overheard conversation.

As I start my fourth pint, the crowd is diminishing, and the clones are standing either side of me, touching me regularly as they talk, a prod here, a playful punch there.

John tells me that they have been together for eleven years.

I nod impressed. “I don’t know how you do it,” I say.

Jean winks at me. “We’ll show you if you want.”

I laugh. “No, I meant how do you stay together so long.”

Jean smiles at me. “We’ll show you if you want,” he deadpans. “The thing is to keep the sex life healthy, the rest is following.”

John leans in and says “And our sex life is very healthy. With a little help from our friends.”

“Here it comes,” I think, and I wonder how I will reply.

A strange feeling comes over me. A sensation that I am not myself, or rather that I am watching myself.

I surprise myself by wondering what he would have done, the he in question, being Mark.

Mark didn’t do threesomes. He may have fantasised about them, sometimes he even almost got involved in one, but he never quite did it. I wonder, what with life being so fragile, and what with everything Mark thought so important turning out so elusive and temporary, well, I wonder if he was right.

“We have a great set-up,” Jean is telling me with a salacious smile, adding in French, “Notre cave est un veritable Disneyland.” – Our cellar is a veritable Disneyland.

John, feigning surprise at an idea that has supposedly just popped into his head, exclaims, “Hey! Why don’t we go back and have a drink there now?”

Though intrigued by the idea of visiting Disneyland and turned on by the idea of having sex with the identical clone-show, I don’t feel ready for anonymous sex. It would somehow seem disrespectful of Steve. Plus a voice within is outraged and imploring me to say no to the proposition. “Have a threesome?” It says. “You are joking?”