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And so we just knelt there without talking, looking at them looking at us, unblinking, expressionless.
By the time we came out the sun was heavy and low in the sky, we were both hungry but I didn’t want to go home.
We went and bought soup from a coffee shop, we sat on high stools at the window-counter and talked without looking at each other, our reflections laid thinly across the glass.
He said you’re not too tired are you, we haven’t done too much walking have we?
I said no, no, I’m fine, I’m a bit knackered but it’s okay I said, I’ve had a good day I said.
And we both sat there with mouthfuls of hot soup and I wondered again what sort of good I meant, I thought about the last few days, I thought about why he was here, about who he was and why he had come looking for me, what he had been expecting, what he was thinking now.
He said, my brother, he said I only met you a week ago and already I feel like I know you far more than my brother ever did, he said it doesn’t seem fair somehow.
I said oh but I feel like I know him, I said you’ve told me so much about him that I almost feel like I’ve met him properly, and he said I suppose but it’s not the same.
There was a pedestrian crossing further up the road, the signal was red and I looked at all the people waiting to cross, a huge crowd of them, motionless, blankfaced, looking up at the lights.
They looked like the figures in the art gallery.
There was a white van parked outside, two men in fluorescent jackets were loading huge reels of cable into it, shovels, traffic cones.
He said what’s the most frightening thing that’s ever happened to you?
I started to speak, I was going to say that day, that afternoon, seeing that moment, watching his brother moving to where it was, but he said I mean really happened to you, not something you’ve seen or read about but happened to you.
I stopped, and I looked at him, and I realised what an important distinction it was.
I said, I don’t know, maybe when I was a kid and I got lost at the funfair but, I’m not sure, let me think about it I said, what about you? and I sucked at the thick red soup, I wrapped my hands around the warm paper of the cup.
He said I was in the back of a transit van driving across rough ground, I didn’t know where I was and I thought I’d been kidnapped.
I looked at him, I thought he was joking but he didn’t smile or say not really.
He said it sounds worse than it was, but at the time I was terrified, I thought I was going to die.
I look at him, he’s staring at the van and he says, sorry, it reminded me, that’s all, the van, I just remembered.
I said and so what was it, what happened?
He said I was hitching home once, and I’d been there a long time, and this van stopped and these two men said I could get in the back.
He said there were no windows, just a couple of thin slits in the roof, and these shafts of sunlight were scanning around the inside of the van as we turned corners and I was catching glimpses of things in the van, bricks, ropes, a spade.
He said they kept braking really suddenly, and laughing these really high-pitched laughs.
And we’d been driving for too long he said, and they’d stopped laughing, and then we were driving along some kind of dirt track, bumping up and down, and I didn’t know where we were.
I said oh my God what did you do what happened, he said nothing, nothing happened, they dropped me off at the end of my street in the end, it was just some kind of joke he said.
He was talking quite slowly, breathlessly, he said and the worst thing was, it was strange, the worst thing, more than the fear of what might happen to me, what they might do or how I might get out of it, the worst thing was thinking that nobody would ever know, that I would just be missing, disappeared, vanished.
He looked at me
and he said can you imagine that?
He said can you imagine anything more lonely?
When I got back to my flat in the evening, the green message light on my answerphone was flashing.
