Chapter 15

Friday night found me at home in the flat I'd shared with Phil, alone and with nothing very pressing to do for the first time since he'd died just a few weeks before. Everywhere there were memories, reminders of good times and bad times between us, souvenirs and mementos from things we'd done together, places we'd been ... Most of his clothes were still in the bedroom, of course, a tooth brush of his sitting in the bathroom, even his smell lingered round the place, I swear. I sat on the floor for a while, not wanting to use the sofa we'd shared – well, before he'd ended up in the wheelchair – not really wishing to do anything very much ... trying not to remember and remembering all the same. I'd loved the guy more deeply than I'd ever imagined loving anyone; he was gone; I had to live with it. Or without it, I thought, giving myself a grim little smile.

I was hungry, I thought – or, at least, I knew I should be hungry – so I ought to cook. I also ought to look at some of the mail that had accumulated while I'd been away – I'd been genuinely too tired to do anything with it earlier in the week – and begin to get things sorted so that I could sell the place. Instead, I sat on the floor and felt sorry for myself. Sorry for Phil, too, sorry for all the things that might have been ... but mainly sorry for me. Not what all those helpful books on managing the grieving process would recommend, I'm sure, but that was what I did. Frankly, I wallowed. At least for a while.

Then I pulled myself together a bit – I could imagine how a lot of my friends and colleagues would react to seeing me this way and the thought at least sufficed to get me up on my feet. Once vertical, however, I still couldn't really get myself interested in doing anything even marginally productive, so I sort of slumped against the wall for a while. I realised that I needed to get out of the flat, even thought about finding a hotel for the night, then concluded that a drink and distraction was probably sufficient for my purposes ... except that the sort of distraction I would inevitably get if I wandered into any of the local bars on my own on a Friday night was unlikely to be helpful. So I thought about getting something organised, running through the very brief list of people I'd be happy to meet up with in a mood like this – of whom Dave was in hospital, May had already done her bit in looking after me After The Event ... and in a way that made me hesitate slightly about setting up anything similar, this being another distraction I felt I could probably do without ... and, well, a few others, mostly people I'd worked with over the years or people I knew through Phil. And the latter options would presumably be keener on talking about either work or the dear departed than I could cope with, so ... I was a bit stuck.

In fact, I'd just resolved to risk the Napier – the pub on the corner, where I knew some of the bar staff, could rely on a certain degree of shielding from predatory males – when my mobile rang. I was distracted enough to answer the thing without checking who was calling – I think I assumed it would be Dave – and it took me a moment or two to recognise the voice: Gareth, our new lawyer, apparently just escaped from an impromptu leaving do from his now former employers. My heart fell, to be honest – I really wasn't in the mood to talk about work, let alone with someone who I might just have caused to screw up a promising career – but I kept my voice cheerful enough while he explained that he was at a a loose end, too, wondered if I felt like a drink, even promising not to talk about the business, like he was a mind reader or something.

Without even thinking about it I agreed a venue with him, made a call for a taxi and within five minutes I had my coat on and was off out the door.

In fact, Gareth turned out to be the answer to a maiden's prayer – or, at least, he would have been if I'd been a maiden and/or in the habit of praying. Whatever, the pub he'd suggested, just south of the river but on a back street and almost quiet for a Friday night, turned out to be both friendly and comfortable, Gareth's conversation both witty and amusing – and strictly not work related, as he'd promised – and, hell, the place even did reasonably priced food when the hunger pangs finally did catch up with me.

Instead of work we talked about ... stuff ... his adventures on the end of a climbing rope and some of the dafter things people did with ice axes, for instance, my early attempts to master Teutonic philosophy and both of our various excesses as students and as actual grown adults. Inevitably, this brought us on to the subject of relationships but he knew enough about my recent events that even this was an OK topic. I expressed some surprise that he was stolidly single – genuine surprise rather than the polite platitudes I think he might have expected: He was a bright, intelligent bloke, funny when he wanted to be and, as I put it to him, not bad looking for a dwarf. Even that got me no more than a guffaw in return – well, a guffaw and something acerbic about my own relatively elevated height – and so the moment passed. Perhaps significantly, I didn't talk to him about Dave – I assumed he'd picked up on the implicit arrangement between us either in Cumbria or when he was visiting Hertford Square and to be frank just at that moment I didn't really want to go into that situation ... because I wasn't sure that I could explain what was actually going on, quite what the implicit arrangement actually was...

So I steered the conversation onto safer ground, things moved on and we had a very pleasant evening. Neither of us drank enough to get seriously intoxicated – we really had been talking a lot, I realised – but both of us were surprised when the pub started closing around us. After which, he graciously – maybe even chivalrously – walked me up to a nearby station to pick up a cab and wandered off into the night. He shook my hand on leaving, didn't give me a hug or a kiss or anything, just a smile and a friendly wave goodbye.

I wasn't sure how I felt about that.

Back in the flat, I found the memory of the evening was a reasonable solace – or maybe it was just the alcohol. In any event, I found myself doing the routine stuff one does on returning home, without getting hung up on memories and stuff, successfully making coffee, undressing and getting myself to bed without renewed bouts of angst. OK, I chose to sleep in the spare bedroom – having to find an old sleeping bag as I couldn't be arsed to actually make the bed up – but all in all I felt a little better about life.

Not that I could sleep, of course ... there were too many thoughts whirling away in my subconscious. I deliberately tried to think about work – the lesser of many evils, in the circumstances – and that made me realise that I'd plain forgotten to phone the Hospital, find out how Dave was getting on. Which caused me another brief moment of angst, till I reasoned to myself that Hospitals were twenty four hour facilities, so it wouldn't be too much hassle to phone them now, despite its being gone midnight. I even had the main switchboard number in my mobile's memory – it was another of Phil's regular haunts, at least in the earlier stage of his illness – so no excuses really ... and what did I care if they thought I was a bit odd?