Chapters (46)
‘Anyway, I’ve had a hard time recently, and I sort of decided enough was enough, and that we’d be together again, if you see what I mean. But, well.’ But what, he wondered. It wasn’t as if he’d been talked out of it. Events had just stopped him. The universe, if you believed in phrases like this, had had other plans. Somebody else had died, though; that was all he could really think about. She had been lost by other humans; they had reclaimed him, for some reason. ‘But: it didn’t work that way. And I just wanted to say that I’ll try to take advantage of that, and – not to worry about me.’ He cleared his throat. ‘And I’ll – I’ll see you soon. Of course.’
‘All done, fam?’ said Karl, linking his arm into James’s as they walked back towards the hotel. It was the same one they’d stayed in on the day the ashes were scattered: James didn’t know if that was a coincidence or not. There were a lot of things he didn’t understand, for the time being. There was time ahead, he supposed, for clearer thinking.
‘If you need anything,’ said Karl, in the hall outside their two rooms. ‘I’m only next door, all right.’ Karl’s eyelids were sagging; he looked as if he’d barely make it the distance from here to the bed.
‘I know,’ said James, and in the middle of the closing embrace – which mirrored the one he and Sally had once had, in this building – they stepped out of the way to let someone past, a man in a rugby jersey who eyed them with fleeting curiosity. James pressed the card against the sensor to open the door. It was more than a full day since he’d left his house. He drew the curtains across and looked out at the city, lit up for the evening, defying the gloom.
People will expect this to be a new start, he said to himself. Or something like that. They would talk about him ‘surviving’. They’d express the hope that he was feeling better, and had moved on from the drama of today. And perhaps he would be; perhaps he would have. But a lot of it would depend on them, because, when it came to it, everybody depended on everybody else. It wasn’t as if he could send a text like that ever again. Next time it would be for real; or there wouldn’t be a ‘next time’. Those were the choices.
For now, he was alive, and in the morning he would start to think about what that meant.