‘Do you still feel like that? I mean, are you going to come back to work soon?’
I thought about it, even though I didn’t need to, and then shook my head.
‘I don’t think so, no.’
Even if I found Amy, I wasn’t going back. I’d let my life unravel to such a point, now, that it would be all but impossible to tie it back together again. For once in my life, there were no plans for the future. I really couldn’t imagine what was going to happen.
Okay, so what was she like?
Amy had brown curly hair, with streaks of gold that seemed yellow in the sun, and a warm, happy face that always looked flushed and enthusiatsic. Not exactly beautiful, but pretty – and far too confident and in love with life for it to be an issue anyway, at least to begin with. I know that’s a cliche – but for what it’s worth she was in love with life in the real way, not the fairytale way. Most of the time, she adored it; some of the time, though, she could barely face the day. That’s love for you.
She was slim, but curvy. And she was sexy as anything, but you’ll have to take my word for that. Imagine your ideal person. Amy probably didn’t look like that, but she had the effect on me that the person does on you. There were days when I almost had to pinch myself. It seemed like a whole fresh side of me had opened up.
I told her that I loved her after a few months; I don’t remember exactly when that was, but – if you really want to know – she told me first. In fact, she was very definite about it: she loved me from about the fifth week, and then, at three months, she was
I mean, have you ever seen joy in someone? Not just happiness, but actual joy? That was one of the only times I ever have, and it was like the sun came out inside her. Like everything just flipped right-side up. Suddenly, I couldn’t hold her tightly enough, and she held me back just as hard, with the back of my shirt bunched up in her small hands and her knuckles digging into my shoulder blades. Have you ever had somebody grip you with a passion you never thought existed outside the fucking movies? As though they found you the most precious thing in the world? I felt it then, and couldn’t believe that somebody would actually want me that much. I don’t believe in Heaven as a place, but I sometimes think that if a person could write down how I felt at just that moment – if they could describe it perfectly – then that sentence would be something like Heaven to me. And as a final resting place, I’d be happy to have my name shrunk down and rested, invisibly, on the collar of the full stop at the end. That would be fine for me.
‘What are you going to do?’ Charlie said.
‘You miss making me coffee?’ I did my best to smile, but I could still feel the ice cold water rushing over my hands as I drowned Kareem. My bones hadn’t quite thawed out yet.
She smiled back, playing with the neck of her bottle but then looked away.
‘Yeah. I miss making you coffee.’
The way she said it made me realise I’d come off as sounding too playful.
‘I kind of miss it, too,’ I said. ‘But that’s all I miss, and most of the time I don’t even miss that. It’s moments like those that cloud everything over.’
‘Cloud what over?’
I shrugged.
‘The fact that we work for something intrinsically evil. In a benign way, if that makes any sense. We spend our days fucking good people out of their money. That’s the reality. The appearance is that you make me coffee in the morning, and we have a laugh, and we take the piss out of Williams behind his back. We’re okay people. I mean, we are okay people.’
‘Well, yeah.’
‘We take our cheques at the end of the month, and that’s the only important thing.’
‘Everybody’s got to eat, Jason.’
‘Yeah, everyone’s got to eat. Exactly.’ I sat back, listening to the cars shoot past outside. ‘Everybody has to eat. So it’s all okay.’
‘Is that why you’re not coming back? Because of this.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, not really. Maybe a bit. If Amy was here then I’d still be in work; still carrying on like before. But she isn’t, and it’s put things in perspective for me. It’s a waste of our fucking time to be doing something so worthless.’
That was an understatement, but I couldn’t describe it any better. The thing is, a working life is one of those things you’re taught to respect and admire. Because a man pays his way. A man supports his family. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. And so on. In reality, what you have are thousands of people doing the same thing, day after day, and it’s not admirable: it’s tragic. It’s just a convincing fiction. So for a while after she disappeared, I shuffled back to work, all the time knowing deep down that the most important thing was Amy and the fact that she wasn’t with me. It got harder and harder, as though I was tied by elastic to something in the past, and each day was one miserable footstep forwards. So I stopped going in – just made the decision one day – and it felt like an enormous weight had been lifted off me.
I felt like I had a purpose again.
I felt like I was looking at the scenery, for once, rather than just speeding past.
What I didn’t feel was guilty, worthless, small, tragic or pitiful. For the first time in years, it felt like I’d taken hold of my life by the scruff of its neck, like a spitting, scratching cat, and turned its angry face around to have a good, honest look into its eyes. If I ever let go I’d have myself slashed to shit, but that didn’t feel important: whenever you grab a tiger by the tail, you know you’re going to get scratched eventually. You don’t take it as a career path. It’s not a long-term thing. It’s just an awesome thing.
‘Are you looking for her?’ Charlie said.
‘As much as I can. I have a friend who helps me. We’ve made some ground.’
‘What about the police?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
‘They won’t help.’ I sipped my drink. ‘She left a note.’
We spent the next year of University doing exactly the same things: getting drunk, jumping up and down in time to loud music, grinning, fucking and hanging around, as though life was a bus we were waiting for that wasn’t due for a while yet. Certainly, looking back, I have a tendency to see it as a time in my life when nothing felt urgent or pressing, and when everything seemed fun and new. The week would see casual study. The weekend would find us in pubs and in clubs, or propped up in single beds: logged on to illegal internet movie channels, the monitor flashing harsh light around the dark bedroom as we tucked into takeaway pizza and drank bottles of cheap Cabbage Hill vodka mixed with superstore cola.
The third year of University – our second as a couple – we moved in together and started The Collection. Crockery and cutlery. Pans and dishes. Furniture. Posters and paintings. Mutually agreeable albums, videos and friends. All sorts of things that didn’t exactly belong to either of us, but to this weird new thing called both of us.
You start The Collection because you have to, of course, but it always struck me that there was more to it than that. It’s like your relationship is a very beautiful, delicate cloth that either of you could accidentally blow away and ruin at any time, and the more stuff you pile on top of it – to weigh it down – the less likely that is to happen. So that’s what we did. We put our new stereo on it. We put the signed Kimota hardback anthology down. And so on. We put a hundred things on top of it and then a hundred more, and with each came the knowledge that if we wanted to do anything so dumb as to blow that cloth away, we’d have to move our friends and our books and our casserole dishes first, and then we’d have to figure out where to put them.
We both graduated. Our parents’ houses have very similar pictures in them on the mantelpiece: Amy and I, side by side, dressed in our black gowns and holding our degree certificates. Apart from our smiles, we look like we’re in mourning. During the ceremony, along with a handful of others, we’d both worn A3 sheets of paper on our backs, denouncing the University’s investment in various overseas arms companies, but our parents had made us take them off for the photographs. I guess it wouldn’t have made for a nice picture. We did it to keep them happy – rebellion was okay so long as it was nice and controlled. The kind of rebellion that you can probably brand a pair of
