*
Nicholas moved into Goldhawk Road a month after I did, making the house feel, to my mother, like a temple of unemployment. He arrived from residential rehab unannounced and told us he would be back to self-medicating in twenty-four hours if he had to go back to Belgravia.
Because he had always been unpredictable in ways that reminded me of my mother, and periodically depressed in ways that reminded me of me, I had always liked Nicholas the least out of my cousins. But his being there meant Oliver began coming over at night to watch television with him, or sit while he stepnined his former friends by phone.
Oliver brought his laundry, and he brought Patrick whenever he was in London because although the flat in Bethnal Green was conveniently situated, he told me, between a takeaway that specialised in all world cuisines and Yesmina Fancy USA, purveyor of human and artificial hair extensions, it did not have a washing machine, hot water after five p.m. or what the estate agent said he was legally allowed to advertise as a bathroom.
Patrick and I met in the kitchen, the first time he came to the house. I was emptying the dishwasher and a wet bowl slipped out of my hand when he came in.
He looked the same. I had moved in and out of an apartment, been married, abroad, ill and thrown out, and Patrick was wearing the shirt he’d had on at Jonathan’s dinner, the last time I had seen him. I could not make sense of it, that I was entirely changed and he wasn’t changed at all. I got down and started cleaning up, remembering it had only been three months.
He came over to help me and there with him, kneeling opposite, not saying anything except to tell me that some of the smaller bits were really sharp, Patrick’s sameness seemed to collapse time, until none had passed, nothing had happened and it was just the two of us, picking up bits of bowl.
I did not expect him to say, all of a sudden, ‘I’m sorry about Jonathan.’
I said yes, right and got up quickly to go and get a broom because I did not want to cry in front of him. He wasn’t in the kitchen when I came back with it, and there weren’t any broken pieces left on the floor for me to sweep up.
Oliver and I hadn’t revisited the topic of our conversation under the awning or acknowledged the conversation itself since we had it. I did not know if he had told Patrick, whose level of discomfort in the kitchen wasn’t obviously higher than it always was whenever he was around me. I did not know if Patrick had detected mine. Because of it, I didn’t join them in the living room that night, or any night afterwards. Still, when they were there and I could hear the television, the sound of their voices, the thump of the dryer in the under-stairs cupboard, food being delivered, I felt less on my own.
*
Early in the morning, Nicholas went on walks and filled the rest of his day by going to meetings and journalling and talking to his sponsor on the phone. Having deduced, in a short time, that I had even less to do than he did, he asked me if I wanted to go with him.
That day, we made our way from Shepherd’s Bush to the river, along it as far as Battersea; the next, all the way to Westminster. From then on, we took circuitous routes to the city, followed canals, went up into Clerkenwell and Islington, inventing ways home that took us through Regent’s Park, eventually walking for so many hours a day that we started buying energy bars and Lucozade. By the time we had worked through every flavour varietal, I loved Nicholas. He felt like my brother, and never asked why I was twenty-six and jobless and living with my parents and why I only owned one outfit. When I volunteered it, he said, ‘I wish marrying a total fuckwit was the worst life-choice I’d ever made.’
But, he told me, ‘Everything is redeemable, Martha. Even decisions that end up with you unconscious and bleeding in a pedestrian underpass, like me. Although ideally, you want to figure out the reason why you keep burning your own house down.’ We were somewhere in Bloomsbury, sitting on the edge of a fountain in a gated garden. I asked him why he kept burning his house down, then said he didn’t need to talk about it if he didn’t want to.
He did. He said no one ever talking about anything when he was growing up was the reason.
I told him Ingrid and I were always desperate to ask about his origins.
Nicholas said, ‘God, my origins.’
I’d said it the way Rowland did. I thought he would find it funny but it was clear he didn’t.
I apologised. ‘It must have been horrible, having something about you that was unspeakable.’
Nicholas sniffed. ‘Being something unspeakable, you mean. If you were so desperate to ask questions, why didn’t you? Did your parents tell you not to or something?’