By Matthew Dodd
It had been some years since I’d seen him. We’d last met in the early hours of the morning at opposite ends of a dining table in the house of a mutual friend neither of us knew particularly well. We didn’t talk about anything very substantial, though we must’ve been there for some few hours. We were just filling time and the air between us. I suppose, on some level, we both had a dim notion that we were unlikely to meet again, that these were the final verbs, nouns and infrequent adjectives that we’d ever share. We had, quite literally, run out of things to say to one another. These last few pleasantries were the aftershock of a friendship, eulogising a camaraderie that had meant something to us both for some years. We had nothing in common but circumstance. And yet, sat there, asking that man what his plans for the coming days were, how he was finding the weather, whether he envisioned a successful season for Arsenal, I wasn’t sure there was all that much to our little back and forth. Had I ever thought to ask what love meant to him? Or whether he had ever known grief? Or if he’d seen The Godfather? What did I really know of this man, or he of me, beyond vague likes, dislikes, phone numbers and shoe sizes? Cynically, I could conceive that this was, in fact, all there was to life, but as I left that house and nodded him farewell, I knew this couldn’t be true. There were too many songs on the radio for me to believe that life meant so little. And yet, still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the paintings of one another which existed, and would continue to exist, in each of our memories were nothing more than pencil sketches. It was a troubling notion. He beat me to hailing a taxi, so I was able to watch as he, in the animus of an Austin FX4, receded over the horizon and out of my life. I managed to get a cab about ten minutes later and was home in bed by five-thirty.
Once, when we were in our late teens – he 17, me 16 – I remember us trying to smuggle a crate of inexpensive lager his older brother, Stephen, had bought for us into the sixth form graduation dinner. It was the end of the summer term and, though we still had a year left, we fancied joining in on the older year’s celebrations. We’d planned the whole thing between a maths and geography lesson under two pushed-together desks in Mrs. Deacon’s old classroom. We would wait about an hour, so that the teachers would assume all the students had already gone in, and then go round the back entrance to the dining hall, as though we were working the catering. Then, so he said, all we had to do was act casual and hope nobody recognised us. He kept guessing at how certain teachers would react if they caught us, doing wholly unrecognisable impressions of each of them. As he went on, the impressions became more and more outrageous, and we descended further and further into hysterics. By the end, he was doing our English teacher like Bugs Bunny and our headmaster like Popeye. I don’t know if I ever laughed as hard as I did that day, screwed up under that desk making notes on half a dozen pages torn out of a textbook. It didn’t work, of course. Mr. Amersham – who incidentally did sound a little like Popeye in the moment – found us almost immediately as we left the kitchen, threw us out and placed us in detention for the remainder of the year. It didn’t matter to us: we spent those endless hours in detention suppressing laughter at the thought of Mr. Amersham back in his office eating copious amounts of spinach and getting into fights on the seven seas with various miscellaneous sailors.
It was an uncharacteristically warm morning at Moorgate tube station when I saw him next. If memory serves, it was a little after nine o’clock, putting me vaguely in the realm of lateness for a meeting the details of which I struggle to remember. Droves of conservatively clad big-city types piled through a woefully insufficient number of ticket barriers and out into the street. For my sins, I was one of them. The cavalcade splayed in a multifarious passage towards central London’s many large buildings and unreasonably priced coffee shops. I had long since given up on keenly observing my surroundings on these sorts of commutes so had my attention firmly pointed towards nothing more than an article I’d read in the Times that morning about the surprising health benefits of artichoke hearts. As I walked, I’d been faintly aware of a head popping out of a car window and a related arm springing out of it, waving incessantly, but I hadn’t thought much of it until that head started shouting my name. Turning around in an accidentally-quite-delicate half-pirouette, I caught sight of the upper half of a man who looked strangely similar to someone I had known years before, only with thinner hair and darker eyes. He called out again and I, realising that this was someone I’d known years before, walked up to the car. My preeminent thought at the time was bewilderment that he had recognised me after all these years. I liked to think that I had changed at least somewhat but, I suppose, we weren’t all that different: I was an awkward adolescent then and an awkward adult now. He excitedly told me how wonderful it was to see me, how unlikely it was that we’d bump into each other here of all places, how terrible it was that it had been so long, how – ah sorry! – he must get to a meeting himself but that – oh – we must meet, how did Finsbury Circus at six sound? I agreed with him on all points and nodded a cheerful goodbye as his car – a sensible Volkswagen – set off in the direction of Old Street.
A day’s work passed uneventfully and, ten minutes early, I was sat on a bench in Finsbury Circus waiting for my friend. On time, he arrived. This surprised me, frankly, as the man I knew in the hinterland years of our youth was anything but punctual. Quick-witted, stubborn, smart-arse – never punctual. It wasn’t a bad thing, but it certainly was a shock. We shook hands, alleviating the tension the decade’s silence had accrued, before he brought me into a suffocatingly long embrace. After about twenty seconds, he released most of my body but kept a firm grip on my respective arms. Holding me in place, he looked me up and down, measuring his thoughts before sharing his final judgement: ‘you look really well.’ I began to reciprocate the compliment but he cut me off before I’d a chance – ‘come on, there’s this great Chinese place near here I’ve been meaning to try out.’ Dropping my arms he began walking away out of the park. Immediately and without my having to say a word, we had fallen back into old rhythms.
The ‘great Chinese place’ in question was a Korean restaurant about ten minutes from the park, positioned unassumingly between a newsagents and an upmarket shoe repair shop. The owner, a short man whose face was bifurcated by a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, led us to a table which, at the request of my dining-partner, was equidistant between the bar and the toilet. We took our seats and, while he went on a tangent about the colleague who’d recommended the restaurant, I had a chance to look, really look, at this man for the first time in years. It was him, certainly. And yet, there was something in his aspect which spoke to time-won wisdom, to a concerted difference in his nature. Wrinkles ran crevices along his forehead; silver hairs peppered his eyebrows at random. His earlobes sagged to nose-level – though I can’t say for sure this was a change or whether I’d simply never made a point of considering his earlobes.
Eventually, his ramble ran out of steam and he relaxed into a placid smile. ‘It’s so great to see you mate’. I nodded and we sat with the thought. ‘So,’ he drummed the table, ‘what have you been up to?’ It’s an affronting prospect, trying to sum up one’s life and achievements within the confines of a convivial comment, but I tried my best. ‘I’m an English teacher, in the city.’ The explanation wasn’t quite finished, but this was enough to entertain him, somehow, and propel him out of his seat temporarily. ‘Do you remember Mrs Baxter in Year 10? I reckon the title of Macbeth was about all I learnt of it in two years with her.’ This made him chuckle. I remembered Mrs Baxter quite well, as it happened; she’d been a great help in directing me towards some University pre-reading. For an hour or so we proceeded in this way: I relaying some fact of my recent life and he returning with a remembrance from our far-flung history. Having got him started on the subject of sports, I managed to eat my starter of seafood Pajeon without once having to offer my opinion. Apparently, our old football team – whose scores I did not realise were publicly available – had been doing especially well that year. In those days I’d played left-wing defence and he striker. In practice, this usually meant that I stood about idly watching his frequent attempts to overdramatically punt the ball towards the boys’ changing rooms just west of the goal. Predominantly, I was just happy that he distracted any crowd of spectators – usually about seven old men none of us recognised and a handful of younger boys skiving off – from my, at that stage, severely awkward physical appearance; I hated how I looked in those shorts.
At some point, a squat waiter with a ruby tiepin came to deliver our main course. He’d gone for a cut of pork belly, rendering my kimchi somewhat dwarfed by comparison. ‘There’s a ring on your finger,’ he keenly observed, ‘who’s the lucky lady? Or is it just a statement?’ I considered the ring, an unintrusive gold band which had protected a sliver of my finger from tanning for nearly five years. ‘I don’t know if she’d call herself lucky.’ He scoffed. ‘We met on our postgrad, she – Annie – was a few doors down in halls. One night she fell into my room by accident and, in a way, I suppose she never left.’ He looked at me gormlessly as if this wasn’t a complete account. ‘We got married a few years ago.’ – and, in order to mitigate any potential awkwardness – ‘it was a small ceremony, just family’, I lied. A glass of wine by his hand had mysteriously emptied whilst I’d been talking. ‘No kids then?’, he asked. I shook my head: ‘not yet, but soon I hope.’ The squat waiter dropped a bottle of sparkling water at the adjoining table. ‘And you?’ I began, ‘kids, wife, etcetera?’ This wasn’t very tactfully put, I think in retrospect. ‘No, no.’ His eyes were fixed on my lapel. ‘I guess I never really had the time,’ he rubbed his temple roughly, ‘or the opportunity, if I’m honest.’ After our main courses were dispatched, the waiter returned to offer a dessert menu. I declined, citing a weight-loss routine I was at that point somewhat agnostically following, and he followed suit. I adjourned to the bathroom for a moment and returned to find two Old Fashioneds sat at our table. ‘I really shouldn’t’, I chuckled over-apologetically. He didn’t accept this and, invoking the same wanton vim with which I’d once watched him volley a football into the forehead of our chemistry teacher, passed the drink to me: ‘I’m sure Amy wouldn’t mind.’ Forgetful, that was another one.
While we drank – or rather, while I drank – he went into more depth on his earlier comment, explaining in gross detail the vast maze of divergent paths which had led him away from anything like a family. ‘There was a girl, I think, a few years ago. I really thought I loved her and, I guess, I think I thought she loved me too.’ There isn’t much to do but nod at times like these. ‘But I was wrong – typical me! Do you remember how everyone used to groan when I was called on to answer a question in maths? I never got any better at understanding the complicated things.’ I tried to steer us to safer shores by asking him about work and the meeting he’d had to rush off to earlier. ‘Oh,’ he paused, ‘that. Well, it pays the bills and I guess that’s all it needs to do.’ I didn’t question this, but he continued as though I had. ‘It’s not a bad life, you know, really. I drive a nice car, I eat nice meals,’ – he reached over and jostled my shoulder – ‘I see nice old pals!’ I smiled and touched his hand with a warmth I hope read as affectionate. He leant back in his chair and gripped his glass somewhat defensively – ‘not a bad life at all’, he said to the air beside him.
Our conversation had run dry, as had my glass. I ostentatiously sat it back on the table, attempting to project the image of a man about to leave a restaurant. This caught his attention. He simpered into the middle distance, laughed at something neither of us had said and turned back to me: ‘shall we have another, before they close?’ I smiled into my lap and shook my head. ‘Sorry,’ I was reaching for my wallet, ‘I really should be getting back.’ The waiter, who’d been wiping the same corner of the bar for about twenty minutes, looked up at us expectantly. He laughed once more, looked to his left twice, ran his hands through his hair and nodded, as if he didn’t really care either way. We both stood up, almost simultaneously, and produced our respective wallets. ‘No’, he said, thrusting his arm between my hand and the table, ‘let me, please’. There was a measured pause between those last two words, though I can’t say with any certainty that this meant anything. It would seem churlish to suggest I allowed him to pay for my meal, it was of course a great kindness on his part. Nevertheless, it seemed that depriving him of that little victory, that little reminder that I was still the gangly left-wing defender to his star striker, was an unnecessary cruelty. Besides, it had the added benefit of leaving me with enough cash on hand – I’d drawn just enough for my meal out of a cashpoint machine earlier that day – to treat myself to a taxi home.
He waited with me as I flapped my arm hopelessly into the street at a succession of unstopping cars. Eventually, after a hideously long wait, I attracted one’s attention. It veered alongside the pavement and I jogged, lightly, over to meet it, a definite spring present in my step. He laughed at my disproportionate joy in this minor success, ‘you never changed, did you?’ I turned back and smiled: ‘I yam what I yam!’ The weather had held firm throughout our dinner, so it was against the backdrop of a pleasantly clear sky that I saw him nod to me as my taxi joined an unceasing flow of traffic swimming upstream to Dalston. My driver was neither talkative nor the sort to make excessive use of the radio: it was a silent journey home and I was in bed by midnight.
The next I heard of him was a few years later, when news spread that, after a brief but consequential interaction with a Fiat Punto, he had shattered most every bone in his body. In time he made a full recovery. I sent some chocolates and a card to his hospital bed, I think. God, I hope I did.
Featured Image: Kenneth Josephson, Front Street, Rochester, NY