He grabbed his bag and walked away.
He flew from Delhi and walked wearily through UK customs.
He stood in the English airport, ridiculous in his gap-year student clothes -- this man with no idea who he had become.
Before leaving Heathrow, Nathan called Sara at work. She answered on the fourth ring.
'Nathan?'
He swelled with a violent nostalgia. It took him a moment to speak. And then, all he could say was: 'Hi.'
'Where have you been ?'
It seemed to her that losing his job, his girlfriend and his flat within a couple of weeks had worked something loose in Nathan's head. She'd told her friends (in a grave, not unhappy tone): Nathan had a breakdown.
He said, 'I'm okay.' It sounded true when he said it. Then he told her, 'I've been to Greece,' and it sounded like a l
'What kind of reference?'
'A landlord's reference. I need a place to live.'
'So what you're phoning to ask is: pretend we never went out, and write a letter saying what a fabulous tenant you were.'
Pretty much. I know it's a shitty thing to ask.'
It was a shitty thing to ask. But she said 'Fine' because she pitied him.
He caught the train home and booked himself into a cheap hotel, then showered and shaved and went to buy a local newspaper.
The next afternoon, armed with Sara's reference, he paid the deposit and two months' rent in advance on a small, clean, one-bedroom flat.
It was on the top floor - into the eaves - of a big, Victorian building.
On the ground floor was a day nursery; his little bedroom overlooked the playground.
Since it was summer and the nights were short, Nathan could afford to wait until the first comforting signs of dawn before trying to sleep - which meant that, often, he woke to the pleasant screams of young children at playtime. He lay in bed listening to them, just as he might lie in a sun-warmed tent, listening to a chattering brook.
The sound of the children made him happy. Their existence seemed so tremendously unlikely, he took comfort from it. He never watched them playing, because he thought that from their perspective his face -- peering down from the small, high bedroom window -- would look ghostly and lost, and he wanted to spare them that.
But even their tears and tantrums, from this high place, sounded good to him.
He lay there, listening to them, and wondered what he was going to do about getting a job.
It was easy.
He visited an employment agency, where his agent displayed contempt for his paltry CV, enquiring in a frigid tone why he'd left his 'previous employment'.
He took in a slow breath, held it for a moment and then told her: 'I was kind of made redundant.'
'Kind of. Was there a restructure?'
'Not really. Kind of
'Kind of
'The show I was working on - it was called The Mark Derbyshire Solution!
After a moment, she said 'I see' in a manner that Nathan had learned to recognize; it was the way people chose to hide their sudden, incandescent interest in celebrity, even minor celebrity. She looked Nathan in the eye and said, 'It must have been terrible for you.'
'It wasn't good, no.'
'And if it's all right to ask - how is he?'
'How's who? Mark? I haven't spoken to him.'
'I see,' she said. 'Yes. That poor girl.'
So Nathan went on the books of the employment agency, and a week later, the agent called to let him know she'd lined up an exciting interview with a prestigious company he had never heard of.
Nathan no longer owned an interview suit or good shoes; they'd gone into the washing machine and then to a charity shop, scrunched up in a carrier bag. So that afternoon, he went shopping.
On Monday, he was interviewed for the position of sales executive at Hermes Cards, Ltd. The interview was conducted by two men and two women, who sat behind a long desk like the top table at a wedding.
Nathan
told them he had no sales experience, and that he had no particular interest in greetings cards. Nor had he ever stopped to consider the profound part greetings cards had to play in observing British rites of passage - birth, marriage, illness and death.
But I've certainly been thinking about it over the weekend,' he said, and the interviewers laughed. From one of the women there was even a little flirtatious pen-playing.
When the chuckles had died down, he said, 'The truth is, when times were good, working with Mark taught me about working under pressure. And when times were bad, it taught me a lot about loyalty.'
When he'd done talking about Mark Derbyshire, a certain gloom settled on the room.
They thanked Nathan for coming along. He shook their hands one by one - and thanked them, and left, and went directly to the pub. He sat in the garden. The sun shone so bright he could barely read his newspaper.
Hermes Cards called back the next day: they wanted to see him again next Tuesday.
He bought a new tie, a raincoat and a folding umbrella, in case it was raining on the day. He wondered how the person who wore these clothes related to that lost man in Greece, in his Gap cargo shorts and Nike sandals; and how that man related to the wired madman in the Paul Smith suit, scrabbling with bleeding nails at the cold, wet earth. He could draw no line of connection between them.
He was a series of disconnected dots, a Morse code.
The second interview took place in a different room. This time, they sat round a shiny oval table, and Nathan knew before anyone spoke that he'd got the job.
He was to start on the 1st of July, which gave him ten days of nervousness.
He had no idea how to go about doing a proper job.
He went to the Business section of his local bookshop and spent seventy pounds on titles that promised to make him a more effective communicator -- but none of these books seemed to tell him anything that was not already perfectly obvious.
During the sleepless nights he lay in his bed, clamped between the past and the future. In the morning he lay listening to the children play.
And then the day came, and he went to work.
At reception, he introduced himself, saying: 'I'm the new boy.'
The receptionist said, 'If you'd like to take a seat, Roy will be down in a moment.'
Nathan had no idea who Roy might be. He sat with his briefcase on his lap, and waited.
Behind the reception desk was a wall-to-wall, ceiling-high, hardwood bookcase. Ranked on it were hundreds of greetings cards.
There were bawdy cartoons; floral tributes to the sick and the bereaved; congratulations for new parents and new graduates. Blank inside, they were rich with the passage of lives yet to be lived.
The receptionist saw him, scanning their ranks.
Nathan said, 'Is there a Congratulations on your new job ?'
She swivelled in her chair. 'There must be one up there, somewhere.'
He
smiled, then turned to the ping of an elevator door. A man he took to be Roy came striding towards him. Roy was trim and sprightly, not far from retirement; his handshake nearly pulverized Nathan's finger bones.
'You must be Nathan.'
Roy put an arm round Nathan's shoulder. Nathan had not been touched by another human being in many months; he tried to relax into Roy's paternal grip, as Roy said, 'I've heard a lot about you.'
'Okay,' said Nathan. 'Good.'
