I pocketed my change. I couldn’t blame her for being angry, but it still made my own temper rise.
“And the other bloke, the one you left me for? Still being nice to him now Simon’s back?”
I felt a vicious satisfaction as I spoke. “Same bloke.”
I picked up my bags and left her, white faced and angry.
Outside I walked with my head down against the sharp wind, my stomach churning with hunger and nauseous anxiety. I didn’t like fighting, or arguing, and meeting Emma had made me feel heavy chested and sick.
I was walking over the covered bridge that connected the supermarket car park to that of the Homebase opposite, and I almost didn’t see Nate. If a pigeon hadn’t flapped its way into my path, startling me, I wouldn’t have looked up.
Nate was sitting on a bench at the side of the broad, oily green river. The bank was covered in trees and swamped in ivy. Usually it was where the alcoholics gathered of a night to drink White Ace and sleep under the shrubs. Nate was bundled into his coat, staring out over the water and at the gulls that were going through the rubbish on the towpath.
As I watched, I saw him close his eyes to the eddies of the river and lean forwards, resting his head in his hands. His shoulders shook, and I knew that he was crying.
I couldn’t stand watching him fall apart, and not being able to help. I knew that if I went over, he’d be embarrassed, that he might even get angry with me, so I went home and stashed the shopping away.
I put together a casserole of apples and sausages, and experimented a little by making buckwheat flour pancakes with cider. It was one of the recipes that Nate had stuck on the fridge, and I thought he’d appreciate it.
He let himself into the flat at about six that evening, about two hours after I’d started to get worried. I tried not to show it.
“Hey, you’re back. Are you hungry?”
Nate shrugged off his jacket and said quietly, “yes. Something smells nice.”
“I made sausage casserole, but I’ve got batter for those pancakes you wanted to make.”
His face smoothed out, looking less stressed and more normal. “Oh yeah? Want some help?”
“You know I’ll just mess it up.”
Nate waved me off. “You’ll be fine.”
My pancakes were fairly wobbly affairs, but Nate’s turned out quite nice, crisp at the edges but thick and tasty in the middle. He put them on plates and folded them around the apples and sausages. He seemed a bit more animated, but still not very talkative. I let him watch TV and eat in silence, and, once we’d put the plates away, I leant against him until he put his arm around me.
Still, that night he slept away from me, and I felt as if the day was weighing on him, and me.
For the next three days, Nate disappeared right after breakfast, sometimes before I’d even woken up. The only sign that he’d even been there was a dent on his side of the mattress, and an empty cereal bowl and mug in the sink.
He never told me where he went, and I never found out really. Aside from the bench by the river, I had no idea where he spent his time. I passed by there a few times during those few days, but I didn’t see him again.
Whatever Nate was doing, and wherever he was doing it remained a mystery. All that I could be sure of was that Nate would be home to eat dinner and sleep.
I bumped into Gregory while I was out for a walk, having been informed by a leaflet at the chemists that depression was helped by exercise and fresh air. I was on a walk to the pub, but still, it probably balanced out.
“Connor, haven’t seen you in a while,” he said, stopping to chat in front of the cut price emporium. He was wearing a parka over jeans and thong-sandals, and judging by the look on his face, he’d clearly heard about my brief break-up with Nate.
“Yeah I...moved out for a while.”
“But you’re back now?”
“Yes.”
“Good,” he grinned, “Nate was a miserable bastard the whole time you were away, snapping at us when we tried to talk to him, keeping off to himself. He even punched some bloke down at the pub. Didn’t know him, ironed joggers, floppy? ‘parently ‘e works at the leisure centre?”
“Bradley, my ex-supervisor,” I said, “why’d Nate punch him.”
Gregory looked uncomfortable. “He was saying stuff, overheard Nate asking the barman if ‘e’d seen you. Started making out that he was really shocked about you and Nate being together. Called you...well, some people’re just piss mean. Nate punched two of his teeth out.”
I winced, but I was half-pleased that he’d smacked Bradley, I’d have loved to have seen it. “So did he get barred?”
“The other bloke did, but the barman? Matt? He’s a nice kid, went to school with my niece, and him and his girlfriend Tracey kept Nate in drinks the whole night. Said they couldn’t be putting up with arseholes spewing their shite all over the bar.”
I snorted. Nate, hero of the hour. It made me miss him all the more. His spark had gone, the jaunty terrier had been kicked out of him by the revelation that he was really someone else. He’d lost himself, and I’d lost him to.
“Have you seen him around, recently?”
“What, Nate?” Gregory shook his head, “I thought you and him were staying in, you know, getting reacquainted.”
I sighed. “We found some stuff out, about Nate’s past, and it’s shaken him up.”
Gregory whistled through his teeth. “Did he have a flashback? Sometimes that happens you know.”
“No, it wasn’t anything like that. Just...we found some of his old stuff.”
“Ahhh. See, what I wouldn’t give for a little blast from the past,” Greg said, “I mean, I’ve been going to the group for the last year, and I still haven’t worked out anything about who I was. Marg has been going even longer, almost two years, and she had to move over from London to even find a group with a qualified counsellor, if you can call Sal qualified.”
I shook my head. If Neither Greg nor Marg had had an epiphany as to their old selves, what hope did me and Nate had of getting our memories back? It was different, watching a DVD, reading an old letter. I wanted to know what it had felt like, yet at the same time, I was scared. What if I’d loved Simon more than Nate?
What if he hadn’t loved me at all?
“Greg,” I began, “would you want to know if you and Marg had been a thing before your accidents?”
He looked at me like I was mental. “But she was in London, I was here.”
“Just, if you’d both been in London, say you went down there for a lad’s weekend, and you and her slept together. Then you both forgot. Would you want to know?”
He looked stumped for a moment, thinking hard. Then he shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, it isn’t the kind of thing that I think would bother me but...I suppose you never know ‘till it happens, right?”
“Right.” I said, feeling worse than ever. I had been hoping for some advice from someone in more or less the same situation as me and Nate. But I was fast coming to realise that our situation was unique, and I was stuck in it all on my own while Nate wasn’t talking to me.
“If I see Nate I’ll tell him you’re looking for him, shall I?” Greg said.
“No just...just leave it,” I said, “he’ll find me when he’s ready.”
I only hoped that it would be sooner rather than later, before either of us went crazy with wondering.
While Nate was gone I kept busy, cleaning the flat, cooking our dinners (always leaving something for Nate to do when he got home) and keeping up with my job search.
With Nate not talking to me, I was at a loss as to how to help him. I’m grateful now that I had my medication sorted by then, because it gave me the energy to try something, anything, to make things better for him.
I decided to find out everything I could about Simon Cooper.
Maybe, if I could show Nate that he’d been the same person before his accident, as he was now, he would be more at ease with the idea that we’d been
together before.
I suppose I was fortunate to be living in the ‘information age’. Fifty, or even thirty years ago, I would have been hitting my head against a brick wall as far as Simon was concerned. If no one had come forward to report him missing, what chance did I have of finding out about him?
As it was, all I had to do was go down to the internet café and type ‘Simon Cooper’ into google.
There were a lot of results, the name being quite common, but eventually, I struck lucky on Facebook, because Simon had a profile picture. It was weird to look at a picture of Nate, and see someone else behind his eyes. Some stranger. He looked so much easier, almost arrogant, and confident too. There was none of Nate’s wariness, his defensive attitude. The man in the picture couldn’t have been more than a few years younger than the man I knew, and they might almost have not been the same person at all.
I read the profile information that Simon had up, and felt a growing sense of anxiety. The man described on the page in front of me was nothing like Nate. What did that mean? Was Nate really so different to the man that I’d loved before the accident? Had he lost a chunk of himself to his amnesia? Did that mean that I loved him less that I’d loved Simon, even though I didn’t want to?
Simon Cooper was apparently a lover of travel, and he’d been to Greece, India and Egypt on package deals. He didn’t mention reading, but he did like superhero films and running. He played golf, he boxed, and he was a Spurs fan.
Even as I read these things, something stirred in my brain, like a small animal had been sleeping and was now getting restless. I felt each facet of Simon resonate with me. There wasn’t another word for it. Each fact was like the striking of a bell in my chest, and it made me shiver. I knew him. Even without remembering him completely, I knew what he was like.
I got a small flash, nothing more than the t-shirt memory had been, but a fragment that fell into place in my head. Snow Patrol. Part of a song, the slap slap slap of my feet on the ground, the air in my lungs bursting, face hot with effort but cold in the night air. Simon next to me.
“Keep up, you’re going to lose.”
“I’m not losing to you!”
I could remember that, his voice. Nate’s voice. It made me feel twisted up, confused and freaked out. Nate was there in my memory, only he was someone else, someone who I’d been someone else with.
In the photo’s that Simon had on Facebook, he was standing on the ruins of Greek buildings, shielding his eyes from the sun. He posed with statues on holiday, lying on the grass with his arms over his head and a grin on his face. There were pictures of him in a gym uniform, leaning on a weights machine.
I clicked through the albums wonderingly, and finally stumbled upon a picture that made me freeze in my seat.
It was me, and Simon, and Emma.
We were sitting on a blanket, in what looked like the park near our house, with plastic plates around us, and the legs of some other people in the background. I had my arm around Emma, a tan making my face look younger, and I was grinning at the camera. Emma was smiling too, her cheeks pink and her face seemingly caught in the middle of a laugh.
Simon, Nate, wasn’t looking at the camera. He was looking at me. His smile was slight, sweet, and he was watching me, a curious tilt to his head like he was examining me for the first time, up close.
I looked at that photo for a long time, because the expression on Simon’s face was the same one I’d seen on Nate’s, when he looked at me.
Chapter Twenty
On the day of my interview, I woke up to find that Nate was already gone. He hadn’t left any sign of remembering that it was my interview that day, not even a note on the fridge. I tried not to take it personally, but I was a little wounded. I thought of the card he’d dropped off to wish me good luck for my exam, and of how much had changed since then.
I put on my suit, with was clean and ironed, and tied my tie. The shoes I’d found were a little bit small, but I could put up with it for one interview.
The interview itself was at the innovation centre, a sort of all-purpose office building in the centre of town. Even though I’d be working for a supermarket as a shelf stacker/checkout assistant if I actually got the job.
I got showered and took great pains to get my hair neat with a bit of gel. I cleaned under my nails, trimmed them and used a can of deodorant that I’d bought from Boots the previous day, it was expensive, but at least it was nice and subtle.
I had to walk all the way into town to catch the bus. The innovation centre was in the next town over, where the supermarket was. I walked forty minutes to it from the bus stop, and still arrived too early. I got a cup of tea from a café down the road and collected myself after the walk.
I felt nervous, and I realised it was because I’d never had an interview before, not that I could remember anyway. It was something that the job centre hadn’t prepared me for.
When I went in, the receptionist was all smiles, and offered me a cup of tea, which I was too nervy to accept. She sat me down in a glass walled waiting area with primary coloured sofas in weird shapes. The magazines on the perspex table in front of me were all about finance and business. I picked one up, but didn’t understand half of the articles, still, I held onto it and tried to look intelligent. The flat screen TV on the wall was tuned to an international news station.
“Mr Ray?” a woman with square, utilitarian glasses and a black suit asked.
I stood up.
“Come with me please.”
She took me down a corridor, and into a glass walled office with curvy, steel chairs. She took a seat behind a desk on which my CV was clearly visible. Next to her was an almost identical man in a black suit, with the same glasses and almost the same asymmetric brown hair.
“So, Mr Ray, talk me through your CV.”
I remembered what was written down on my CV, a file that had been on Emma’s computer, so I outlined my work experience and education.
“And how have you been incentivised towards meeting targets in the past?”
I had no idea what that meant. I muttered something about getting extra money in my wages for bringing in new clients to the gym and fitness classes. Which was true, but from the looks on their faces, I could see they thought I was bullshitting.
The man turned to the woman and said, “I don’t think he’s qualified.”
I blinked, unable to believe that he’d said that right in front of me.
The woman turned to me and said, “there’s actually nothing on your CV that makes a good case for you getting this job.”
They looked at me with expressions of faint suspicion, as if I’d conned my way into the interview.
I stared back at them, almost too embarrassed to speak. Somehow, I found my tongue.
“So, why did you invite me in for an interview then?”
They looked taken aback, as if they’d never heard such a question before, and had no idea why I was asking it now.
“I don’t think-” the man started to say, but I cut him off.
“No, clearly, you don’t. Because if you did, you would have looked at the CV I sent you and thought, ‘thanks, but no thanks’. You wouldn’t have even had to reply. But instead you got me all the way over here, which has cost me money, and time, and you’ve made me sit through this...farce.”
“We have an equal opportunity interview policy,” said the woman, her voice brittle.
“So that means dragging unqualified blokes in to jump through hoops?”
It was then that I remembered the ‘equal opportunities’ part of the application, where I’d filled in my nationality (British) my religion (none) and my sexuality (gay).
“Is this because I put ‘gay’ on my application?”
Both of them looked incredibly nervous.
“For fuck’s sake,” I stood up and went to the door, “if you don’t want me complaining to whoever’s in charge of you two dipshits, you’d better send a cheque for £5.90 bus fare to the address on that
CV.”
I walked out the same way I’d come in and found myself stalking towards the bus station, still fuming. What the hell was wrong with everyone? All I wanted was a job, and I was qualified to stack shelves and operate a till, whatever they said. It would take me maybe half an hour to learn to do it. But they weren’t interested.
I got on the bus, thoroughly pissed off, and steamed the whole way back to town. The sky was cloudy by the time I got off of the bus, and as I walked in the direction of home, it started to rain. I hadn’t brought a coat, mainly because my jacket was too shabby, and my wool coat was too thick for the sporadically sunny weather. I stopped at a cheapy clothes shop to buy a black umbrella, and continued on my way.
As I crossed the covered bridge, walking towards the edge of town, past Homebase, I saw Nate, sitting on the same bench as before. I faltered, then pressed on, crossing the bridge and picking my way around through the trees until I reached him. He jerked in surprise as I held the umbrella over him.
“You’re getting wet,” I said, sitting down and looking at where the muddy bank had ruined my interview shoes and the cuffs of my trousers.
Nate glanced at my clothes, and then hissed through his teeth. “The interview, I completely forgot.”
“It’s OK,” I said, “I didn’t get it.”
“Shit. Why not?”
“They said I wasn’t qualified.”
“Didn’t they know that from your CV? And who’s not qualified to work on a bloody checkout?”
“That’s what I said.”
“To their faces I hope.”
“Yep.”
Nate smiled, but it was a straggly grin.
“Have you been coming here every day?” I asked carefully.
He shrugged. “I’ve been around, but, I usually end up here.”
His eyes were red, and I realised that he was wearing yesterdays clothes, his shoes thick with mud. I touched his hand, which was red and mottled, it was freezing cold from sitting in the damp shade.
“Do you want me to get you a cup of coffee before I go?” I asked.
After The Fall Page 20