Chapters (46)
Between this bracket of contacts and those (like Steffi and Michaela) most affected, there was a bank of people who found themselves worried to think of someone like James being so stricken, but worried in a manner too passive to interrupt their plans – which mostly involved drifting into sleep. Almost all of them had a memory of something generous James had done, since he’d accrued a reasonable résumé of small kind acts simply by living forty years as that sort of person. They remembered him giving them a lift because he was the only one not drinking that night; or even coming to pick them up in his private hire car, and not charging them. They recalled taking credit for a pub quiz answer James had come up with, or owing him a drink because he’d gone for a round without even being asked. He had made a kind comment about someone’s haircut – although fearing it was a gauche thing to say in the flesh, he’d done it by text, and so long after their meeting that they had already booked their next haircut. He became friends with older people whose computers he’d fixed; helped them to write emails to family members; went out shopping for them, took them to hospital. A solid guy, you might say. Enough so that it was a shock to learn he was thinking of doing something so rash, or talking about it for effect, or whatever he was up to.
Some of them did attempt replies, in tones of wary but genuine concern. Hope you’re OK. Call someone. Things aren’t as bad as you think. Please speak to someone for help if you’re serious. A couple of them even tried impulsively to ring James, but were not surprised when the call went straight to the ‘not available’ brush-off. They consoled themselves with the knowledge that someone higher up James’s chain of acquaintance must, surely, be sorting this out. Most of the recipients, as they finally went off to sleep, had either got the weird little incident out of their minds altogether; or convinced themselves that whatever was going on, it would probably be fine when they woke up.
There was another category of people, of course: those who did not receive the message, were not on James’s phone, but would find that their lives were affected by James’s even in the time he had left. These people could be anywhere, because of the paths technology had built, because nobody was very far from anybody any more. Indeed, one of them was on his train.