It took him another few seconds to assess the situation and to decide that I was not just trying to wind him up. Then he said: ‘I’m lost, man. I’m completely fucking lost. Which way’s the station from here?’
My heart swelled when I heard these words.
‘Well there are two stations. Where are you trying to get to?’
‘Central London, man. I’ve got to get back to London pronto.’
‘Then your best bet is Watford Junction. It’s about ten, fifteen minutes from here. Keep going straight down this road – back towards the Lower High Street – then hang a left and keep straight on till you get to the big junction with the ring road …’
‘The ring road, yeah? Where all the traffic lights are.’
‘That’s right. Then you cross the ring road, and you go past the entrance to the Harlequin on your right, and the big Waterstone’s …’
‘OK – OK – I know the Harlequin, I know my way from there. That’s fine, man. That’s great. I’m sorted.’
‘Pleased to be of help,’ I said, smiling at him directly now – but this was a mistake, because it just made him scream, ‘And don’t look at my face, man, don’t you
I must have been seriously jet-lagged, because I wasn’t thinking straight. As I trudged over to the convenience store, all I could think about the mugging was ‘This will make a good story to tell to Poppy’, and in fact I was so pleased to have this story to tell her, so pleased to have a ready excuse for contacting her this morning, that I spent the time quite happily composing a quirky, downbeat text message about the episode in my head. It wasn’t until I reached the store and rested my suitcase outside that I realized I couldn’t send her a text message, because I no longer had my phone, and also, because I no longer had my phone, I no longer had her number, or any means of contacting her.
So, that was that.
I went inside to buy the milk.
7
As I pushed open the front door of my house, I expected to feel the dead weight of piles of junk mail behind it. But there wasn’t that much. Maybe a dozen envelopes. To be honest, I would have expected more than that, after an absence of three weeks.
Leaving my suitcase in the hall, I scooped up the letters and carried them into the sitting room. It was freezing in there. Needless to say, there was no sound of a radio drifting in from the kitchen, no smell of freshly brewed coffee wafting through the hall. Caroline and Lucy were – as I’d known they would be – more than 200 miles away. Maybe they had written one of these letters, all the same. When they first went away, Lucy used to write to me quite often – every couple of weeks or so – usually enclosing some drawing, or collage, or piece of writing that she’d done at school. But the letters had been slowing down lately. I think the last time I’d received one had been in November. Let me see … I skimmed through the envelopes, and could quickly see that there was nothing from her. Three credit card bills. Letters from gas and electricity suppliers touting for business. Bank statements, mobile phone bills. The usual crap. Nothing of interest there at all.
I went into the kitchen to turn the heating on, and boil the kettle, and while I was there I glanced at the answering machine mounted on the wall. It blinked a number back at me. ‘Five’.
While I was plucking up courage, I went upstairs and into the back bedroom to boot up my computer. The trick, as always, was to walk into the room and do whatever I had to do there without really looking around me. I’d become quite good at it by now. It had to be done this way, because this bedroom used to be Lucy’s. The sensible thing would have been to redecorate it after she and Caroline had moved out, but I hadn’t been able to face doing that – not just yet. In the meantime, it still had the pink girly wallpaper that she used to like, and the Blu-Tack marks on the wall where she used to stick all the posters from her animal magazines – big close-ups of sleeping hamsters and impossibly cute wombats and things like that. Luckily the posters themselves were gone. But the wallpaper itself was a painful reminder. Maybe this was the week I should do something about it. There was no need to strip it off, I could just paint over it – three or four coats of brilliant white emulsion ought to be enough to hide the flowery pattern. In the meantime, I just looked straight ahead of me, limited my field of vision to the things I was meant to be concentrating upon. It was easier that way.
Back in the kitchen, I made a mug of strong tea and took a couple of sips before pressing the ‘Play’ button on the answering machine. But my mood of trembling anticipation was short-lived. There was a message from my employer, reminding me to come in for a final meeting with the Occupational Health Officer in a few days’ time. There were two messages from my dentist: an automated one, reminding me of my appointment for a check-up two weeks earlier (which I had forgotten all about) and one from a real person, left the following day, asking me why I’d failed to turn up, and reminding me that I would have to pay for the check-up anyway. Then there were two blank messages, consisting simply of long electronic beeps followed by the noise of somebody hanging up. One of these might have been from Caroline, of course, but I couldn’t dial 1471 to find out, because both of these calls pre-dated the messages from my dentist.
So much for the telephone.
Well, maybe Facebook would cheer me up. I had more than seventy friends on Facebook, after all. Surely that must have created some activity while I’d been away. I took my tea upstairs, settled down in front of the computer and logged in to my home page.
Nothing.
I stared at the screen in shock. Not a single friend had sent me a message or posted anything on my wall in the last month. If the evidence was to be believed, in other words, not one of those seventy people had thought of me once during my absence.
My stomach felt suddenly hollow. My eyes started to sting: I could feel tears coming. This was worse than I could possibly have imagined.
There was only one thing left: email. Could I bear to open Outlook Express? What if my inbox told the same story?
My fingers moved mechanically, robotically across the keyboard. I clutched the mouse in my right hand and never took my eyes off the screen as it filled first with the programme’s welcome message, and then with the subject headers of emails previously received. Slowly, my heart thumping, a pit of dread opening up in my abdomen, I moved the cursor across the screen and clicked on the fateful button: ‘Send/Receive’.
