Читать книгу You Left Early: A True Story of Love and Alcohol - Louisa Young - Страница 9

Beirutsbridge Road, he called it. This neighbourhood! Between charming Holland Park and its neighbour Shepherd’s Bush there is a difference in life-expectancy of eight years. A six-foot woman pushing a buggy yells ‘I’ve got my child wiv me ’ave some fuckin’ respect’ at me for no reason I can imagine, unless it’s that I’m wearing only one blue paper flipflop following a pedicure-related broken-blue-paper-flipflop incident. Then a big West Indian man comes towards me, with a tiny Thai man trying to pat his – the big man’s – back and wipe something off his – the big man’s – front at the same time, both of them giggling. A scrawny pasty-faced undertaker in his frock coat walks by, swigging Diet Coke from a bottle. A tiny pregnant person who says she’s Greek but I’m not sure she is wants some money, so I give her some and direct her to the Greek church, but I don’t think she understands. An old Spanish man informs me that he’s seventy-one; I say Happy Birthday, he howls with laughter and says ‘Happy New Year!’ There are giant yellow tubes piled up all down the middle of the road. A barefoot man goes by on crutches, his feet swollen and dry and sad; he gives me a glance of barefoot complicity, but mine are bare out of vanity, not need. I wanted to get home, but I didn’t want the nail polish to smudge. It’s Dickensian. A barefoot man on crutches.

Always, walking down this road, heading west from the Tube station to the street where I have lived for twenty-five years, to the house where he had so often pitched up over the decades, and kind of lived with me for ten years, I look for Robert: leaning in the doorway of Paolo’s cafe, beaky nose, skinny legs, having a cigarette; coming out of Jay’s newsagent, hobbling across the road from the Nepalese restaurant popularly known as the Office, in the brown velvet-collared tweed coat I gave him after he left the dark blue one on the train to Wigan; or the old leather jacket, or the new old leather jacket, in his jazz-cat hat, hunched like a grey heron at the edge of the city street, being liminal, looking about him, in the rain, or the sunshine, perhaps sitting outside a cafe, newspaper, cigarettes, espresso, pencil, sketches of a melody in the margins of the sports section. In later days, glasses, and crutches, or the two ugly black walking sticks with ergonomic handles shaped like bones.

In his youth he was beautiful like an off-duty Bowie – skinny, pale, romantic-looking, naughty, with something fugitive about him; he was always about to leave. In maturity, a craggy battered face, Northern, a big bent nose, a small chin, no eyebrows to speak of, cheekbones, a broad brow, small scar to the left, brown to grey hair tending to the fine and fluffy unless smoothed back, from which it benefitted, plenty of it, usually either too long or too short, always badly cut, because I did it, because he wouldn’t go to the barber. Widow’s peak. A bashed pale mouth, thin lips, curled in some sardonic look often enough. Big flat English ears. Beardwise, kind of bald on one side, a bit goatee-ish on the other; a wiry moustache which could have been elegant with the slightest bit of care. The odd pockmark. Glasses – whoever’s, it didn’t matter much. A bit Ted Hughes, a bit Samuel Beckett. All crag and stoop. Eyes? Yes, he had eyes. They were blue, and much clearer than they had a right to be. I may come back to them. Right now they are staring at me from various photographs, and, writing this, I see him looking at me, and my tears come up again and I need to go and rail against horrid fortune which made him as he was and not just a tiny bit different.

I see him, sometimes, in the criss-crossing currents of people. But he is not there.