2013 part 3.

He was still talking, Kevin, talking in a monotone voice about what had happened to Mark, all these facts and all this information and it didn’t fit in with the way I was seeing things, Mark’s face, Mark laughing, Mark at his table drawing maps, plotting, planning. Kevin was still saying it, insisting on it, and I was standing for the tenth time in as many weeks feeling awkward because I knew they wanted me to react differently. And all I could do was stand there staring at particles of dust in a shaft of sunlight struggling to show some emotion, thinking instead, inexplicably of Boxing day back home.

Michelle had the room next door. She had a map of the British isles on the wall, it was all drawn on, areas covered in red felt tip circles, other areas just scrubbed out in black marker pen. I lay red eyed looking at the ceiling. I was submerged by grief and guilt and relief that it wasn’t Ish. I thought about that other place, the place we scoffed at before but had to believe in now or there was nothing but suffering and turmoil. It was an escape route I held close, a comfort I could cling to. Mark had gone there, and so many before, why not me, why was I better suited to this hell than them?

Boxing Day, the revelry and shouting, bawling and laughing, falling in heaps, shepherds and angels and girls in tinsel and mini skirts, the whole town out on an all day session, revellers mixing with families and couples shopping, we could never go back to the way it was then, I was here, it was all I had. And now with the shadows hanging everywhere there was a return to an old London, a place that existed at the back of my mind when I was much younger still, of secret pathways, of shadows and fear. And I thought of him sitting at that desk alone at night with all his maps, ashtrays, lighters and those little pills arranged in lines.

The boarded up place I grew up in, that house made my earliest memories and haunted my dreams still. The ceramic trinkets in the little glass cabinet, china teacups in pink and gold, the Toby jugs and horse brasses from when they ran the pub. And the bathroom all in pink, the tiles with little roses, the strange shower attachments and space helmet hairdryer, the smell of shampoo. And in the later years, her looking out of the window from a yellow dreylon settee surrounded by piles of Daily star and TV listings magazines. I knew that house, the carpets, swirls of pale green and black, the kitchen looking out on a bare garden punctuated by rocks and struggling rose bushes. The table with fruit bowl, copies of woman’s own, remote controls and sometimes bourbons or a plate of iced fancies. I made the tea, then went into the lounge, she would say bring that tin of biscuits in and two plates.
And now all that is gone, she is away, not dead, but hidden from the world, shrunk back in a diorama of memories and fictions.
It seemed to just happen at once. But you had to keep going, a voice came in saying it and saying it, that same voice that always came and I was never sure if it was mine, or my Mum’s or one of the ones who had gone already, that you had to keep going because there were others who needed you, others you had to stay for.

I had to find him.

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