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The kitchen and the sunroom are extensions to the original structure. Mine runs parallel to my neighbour’s, so we can see straight through into each other’s houses. Marius would forget and wander around with his shirt off. “It’s all right,” I’d tell him. “She appreciates ornamental young men in their natural habitat.” And I remember, unfaded by time, a streak of viridian on his inner wrist. A curl of purple madder at his throat.
The light was on across the way, so I could see Mrs. Peaberry with her kettle. I waved at her through two panes of glass and a rainstorm.
The truth was, we always said goodnight this way. And goodmorning just the same. Bookending each other’s days to stop them collapsing into heaps of jumbled time.
When we’d moved in, she’d welcomed us. When Marius moved out, I sat on her floor and cried. I suppose I could have called any number of our friends, but that was the problem. They wereourfriends. Even now, when I see them, which isn’t as often as I should, I feel less. Less than I used to be. When I was with him.8
She picked up the whiteboard she was meant to keep for emergency numbers, scribbled, and held it up. It was hard to read through the rain, but I thought it said,fuck this weather eh.
I nodded and mimed out,Are you okay?
She shrugged.
I wondered if she was worried. She’d been flooded out in 2007, but her husband had been alive then.
“I’m coming round.” I accidentally spoke the words aloud, my voice so alien in the silence of my kitchen.
She held up a packet of Hobnobs: an octogenarian Eve with an oddly shaped apple, and I pretended—cartoonishly—to come running.
Something strange happens to me sometimes behind my kitchen window. It’s as if my body forgets itself, and tries to make jokes without me.
I pulled my coat over my oh-so-stylish tartan lounge trousers and T-shirt combination and hesitated by the half empty shoe rack. I really didn’t have anything suitable for the weather.
When I was at university, I’d developed a semi-ironic preppy image: chunky scarves, cable-knit jumpers, and tweed. But theirony wore off long before I hit thirty, and now how I think I look is old.
About five years ago, in a charity shop, I spotted a pair of sparkly purple cowboy boots. I think I was hoping to rediscover my irony, or perhaps something else entirely, but I must have lacked conviction because the moment Marius saw them, they weren’t quirky at all. They were just incongruous and trying-too-hard, and I never dared to wear them again.
I tugged them on and plunged into the rain. I was outside for less than a minute, but it was still enough to leave me chilled through and dripping apologetically all over Mrs. Peaberry’s hall.
She was waiting for me in her raincoat, with a big yellow sou’wester jammed firmly on her head.
I hid my smile. “You look like…whichever of them is the dog inWallace & Gromit.”
“Gromit.” She unhooked her stick from the radiator. “Now, come along, Edwin.”
“Are we going somewhere?”
“To the river.”
“But why?”
“To see what we can see.”
“I really d-don’t think…” We were going to end up as newspaper headlines:PENSIONER AND HOMOSEXUAL FOUND DEAD IN RIVER—COINCIDENCE, TRAGEDY, OR SATANIC RITUAL GONE WRONG?
“It could be dangerous.”
“It will be”—she glinted at me—“an adventure.”9
I have a sort of…thing, I suppose, for certain words. Theyspark inside me, somehow, turning me to touch paper, but I don’t know what they are until someone says them. Once, on a very ordinary day, Marius—in some odd, theatrical humour—had leaned across a table in the café in the modern art museum and whispered that he couldn’t wait to get me home so he couldravishme. And I sat there, electric-bright and honey-sweet, staring at my hands, undone in all the ways by a single word. I don’t think he realised, because he never said it again, and I didn’t know how to tell him. Or ask.10
I think I also likesecret. The way it hinges on its centralc, like a box opening. Orpod, enclosing itself always.
And, of course,adventuregets me too. Not quite in the same way asravish, but it gets me. It makes me fizz a little. I don’t know how or even when Mrs. P worked it out, but she’s been exploiting it ever since. Weeding her lawn is an adventure. Replacing a lightbulb is an adventure. Taking her bin out is an adventure. Or perhaps it’s just easier for both of us than admitting she struggles to do these things herself.
Moving at Mrs. P’s pace, slow but relentless, we battered our way through the rain to the end of the road, navigating the old churchyard in the hazy glow from the last streetlamp. By the time we stumbled onto the footpath, the darkness was a damp fist closing round us.
Living in a city, it’s so easy to forget how absolute the night can be.
