Sarah sat next to Adrian in the office, but they never talked much. She spent most of her time on a laptop and directed questions at Jake or me. I’d sit on the edge of her desk sometimes and triangulate between her and Adrian. I think he was intimidated by her easy intellect.
Adrian had worked there for a couple of years before I arrived. I must try to look at him objectively at that time. I suppose he grew on my younger taste buds because he was purposeful, without seeming to impress his purpose on those about him. Dear God, is that the best I can do for him now? Well, sorry, looking at him dispassionately is exactly that – perhaps there never was any passion.
He would fill his day effortlessly, just doing one thing after another with the same paced intensity, without apparently noticing that he was doing it. He never seemed to whine about his rent like the rest of us; or what to eat, his lost travel card, the cold when the office heating failed. He was just relentlessly Adrian. We called him Ade, and inevitably Foreign Ade and Relief Ade, even Christian Ade when I discovered he went to church, though there was precious little evidence that faith was his motivation, other than what he did for those luckless enough to be born into the worst cesspits of the world. He didn’t really notice money, but he would give a fiver he couldn’t afford to rival causes if he thought it would buy someone a clean drink.
I can probably pin our beginning to a bright and sharp September evening, sitting out on the decking beside the return of the terraced house that was the London office, after fixing a supply of maize to Addis Ababa, I think, and drinking cider from cans. He had finished his and was thumb-tipping the ash from his cigarette into the empty. It had been a highly charged day, when the hours hung on to what we were doing. He’d have gone on with the phone calls into the night and beyond. But he’d cracked it by late afternoon – I’d found a supplier in Notts and Ade had persuaded them to deliver without VAT if he provided the transport, which we could, and the task had blown away into a rolling, grey London sky like bonfire smoke. We could stop, suddenly.
It was just the two of us in the back room. I ran to get cigarettes and cider from the Bangla corner shop and we sat out the back in our self-righteous hiatus. In other circumstances, it could have been post-coital.
I said something inane like, “Why do we do it?”
He had replied in the first person: “I have to. There’s no option. There’s a war on.”
After all that came later on, and the pathetic creature into which he evolved, it’s hard to imagine him as I saw him then. It’s like looking at old photos of yourself in implausible fashions; you can’t feel the body under the clothes any more. But Adrian was like a young man who had failed to get commissioned in the armed forces in a great war, perhaps through colour blindness, or a congenital abnormality, or perhaps because he had some great gift for martial intelligence, and so he was expiating his guilt in some brightly lit bunker on the Home Front, punishing himself with one brief after another, birching himself with administration so that some fewer of his comrades might die in the field. Pale and undernourished by sunlight, his attitude remained that of the front-line combatant. His life was forfeit, but as long as he had it he would commit small acts of defiance in the face of the unseen enemy and, so long as his friends did the same, by tiny increments we would one day prevail.
Ade was at war with poverty, with disease and dispossession, marshalling weapons at our disposal against them, so that those crushed under the oppression of hunger, dysentery, malaria and those random acts of Ade’s God – the hurricane, the earthquake, the flood – might be liberated.
Our joint enterprise in southern Sudan was yet to come. But on the splintered decking of NW5, by a damp, untended ivy trellis, with the taste of dry cider lining my mouth and the sun setting on my first realisation that there was a war on and that he was a warrior in its theatre, I suppose I thought I fell in love with Adrian.
3
There is a final moment, I think, when the old life ended and the new began. Through a glass darkly, I remember. Me, standing in the bathroom shower, the time directly before my exile. There’s a chasm between me then and now and, if I look down dimly into its depths, I can see the shadows of people and acts that make me scream silently, as in a dream, numb to virtue and stripped of any capacity even to feel guilt. Guilt requires some small measure of responsibility and I never asked to be here, on this side of the bottomless pit.
It’s funny, because a detail of the start of that day is very vivid, as when the victims of a disaster, like an air crash or the outbreak of war, recall the tiny, prosaic images just before it happens. As when you look away from a running child and its image is frozen for an instant on the mind’s photographic plate. Adrian had said that the computer had crashed, or the broadband line had gone down, or something. I was in the shower, the steam of the day’s first hot water rising.
“Did you use it last night?” Adrian was shouting through bubbled glass, his head and the collar of a pink shirt presented in large blobs, as in a Derain painting.
I remember watching him from my steaming geyser. I had one foot on the side of the bath, and had just dragged
