His best friend
How many people has Nimesh been over the course of a lifetime?
When he was younger, it would frustrate him, the idea that he’d only get to live one life.
He wanted to do all of it. He didn’t want to choose between university and the band, between being a vet and being a rockstar.
He would have been a thousand different versions of himself, if he could.
So, he grew his hair, because if he didn’t, he never would have.
He got one tattoo, at Seb’s insistence, so he wouldn’t be someone who never had.
He became a vet, but because he became a vet, he never found out what his life would be like as a playwright, or a political activist, or a parish priest. It seemed like a tragedy, back then.
Now he’s starting to think that every one life contains many, and that one might be enough.
Nowadays, Nimesh is a runner. His younger self would make fun of him for getting into triathlons, for wearing Lycra and putting tape on his nipples.
But Nimesh is a father now. Less prone to embarrassment.
More motivated to keep fit. That’s the noble reason.
Really, he enjoys the escape. Kids are tiring.
He gave up his job as a head vet for this, trading time with animals for time with his family.
He bores himself with his clinical director chat, talk of inspections and applications and endless stacks of paperwork.
But he no longer works weekends, and that alone is worth being boring for.
This Saturday night, dinner has happened, and bathtime is yet to come, because Finn is busy kicking a ball about in the garden, and Maisie is keeping Priya occupied with finger paints at the kitchen table.
Nimesh will take a moment to be himself.
He leans forwards into a calf stretch, hears his phone vibrating on the windowsill.
He knows who it will be, despite the fact that he never calls. Tonight is a big night for Seb.
‘Hi, mate,’ Nimesh says, taking the call through his running headphones. ‘I can’t pick you up, no matter how scared you are.’
‘That’s funny,’ Seb says on the other end of the line.
‘Seriously,’ Nimesh says. ‘You nervous?’
‘Tell you the truth?’ Seb says. ‘I’m shitting myself.’
‘You’ve done it all before,’ Nimesh says. ‘Just think back to everything awkward you did on your old dates with Clara. The stuff that’s kept you up at night. Then, don’t do that stuff.’
Seb breathes heavily. ‘That doesn’t help.’
More than anything, Nimesh has tried to be someone helpful.
He spends half his time being Seb’s therapist, half being Maisie’s creative sounding board, and the other half trying to be a half-decent dad.
He knows that’s more than two halves. He is full to the brim, and yet he feels like he still has so much more to give.
He has kept up his habit of adopting dogs, and now there are too many for this house, a veritable pack of them circling his legs as he tries to warm up, to work some life into his sluggish muscles.
It was a joint decision, to move up here.
Maisie’s PhD, an opportunity for Nimesh at a local practice.
More space than they’d ever have found in London.
Back then, they’d been living together in the flat that used to neighbour Seb and Clara’s, drawn together even after those two had split apart.
‘The divorce rate for vets is very high,’ Nimesh had warned Maisie, right at the start.
‘That’s fine,’ she’d replied. ‘All the best poets die alone.’
They’d survived. Each still regularly tells the other that they’re the smartest person they’ve ever met.
It was exhilarating, conducting their kind-of affair, texting in secret before her boyfriend became her ex-boyfriend.
He’d been awful to date, always cancelling with a grovelling apology because of another surgery, another overrunning shift.
It was Maisie who helped Nimesh realise that life wasn’t just work, that there was more to one than the other.
He’s a better husband than he was a boyfriend, just as he was a better vet than he was a trainee.
He was a terrible roommate, once, to a man and his dog.
Nimesh still can’t talk about Jasper without crying.
He’s never been able to think about work without getting stressed.
People have always said he cares too much.
He was a vegan before it was fashionable.
Girls used to like it when he brought out his acoustic guitar.
Now he’s taken it up again, to play for his kids.
Soon, he’ll be closer to fifty than forty. And forty already felt fucking old.
‘It isn’t like old times,’ Seb says. ‘Or maybe it is. The stuff we didn’t talk about then, we still haven’t talked about. Clara’s obsession with work. Me wanting…’ He still can’t say it. ‘Other things.’
‘But now you have Nora,’ Nimesh says.
‘Do I?’ Seb says.
Nimesh is surprised. ‘You love Nora.’
‘I do,’ Seb says, his voice heavy. ‘But it doesn’t make it any easier.’
‘She’s a kid.’
‘She’s a constant reminder,’ Seb says. ‘Of what we could’ve had.’
‘It’ll pass,’ Nimesh says.
‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Seb says. ‘It happened for you.’
Nimesh holds his quad stretch for a little longer than planned. On the other end of the line, Seb clears his throat, shifts a little.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘That sounded bitter.’
‘It did,’ Nimesh replies. ‘But you’re nervous for your date. It’s like talking to a thirteen-year-old.’
Seb laughs. Then he sighs. ‘That’s it, though, isn’t it?’ he says. ‘One day, Nora will be thirteen. What am I going to do when she starts asking about him? When she gets to the age where she can just look him up?’
‘I think you’re getting ahead of yourself.’
‘Or I’m getting out ahead of it.’
‘You’re doing that thing,’ Nimesh says.
‘What thing?’
‘The thing where you talk to me instead of the person you’re supposed to talk to,’ he says. ‘Clara needs to hear all this. You’re not going to scare her away.’
‘She doesn’t have the time,’ Seb says. ‘It’s not going to be an easy conversation.’
‘Which is exactly why you need to have it.’
The sound of Seb scratching his beard. ‘When?’
‘Tonight,’ Nimesh says.
‘Cheerful first date.’
‘Is that what we’re calling it?’
Seb laughs. It still gives Nimesh a flutter, when he manages to make that happen.
They were barely teenagers when Seb’s sister died, and for a long time, it had seemed like Seb would never come back to him.
Nimesh would do a funny impression or butcher a joke from a film they both liked, something so trivial there was no chance of him remembering it now.
But it had made Seb laugh. And Nimesh had thought, at the time, that he could devote his entire existence just to this.
Because it was so hard to do, but it felt so rewarding to do it.
After Ellie, Nimesh had sworn to himself that his friend would never have to go it alone.
Three decades later, he thinks he’s done a pretty good job of keeping his promise.
‘Why are you really calling, mate?’
Seb takes a moment to respond. ‘I wanted your opinion,’ he begins.
‘Not as a mate. Not as Clara’s mate, either, and not as Maisie’s husband, and not as the sensible vet who gives out advice like he’s writing prescriptions for a fucking guinea pig.
’ He breathes slowly. ‘You’re my brother, so you have to answer as a brother would. ’
‘I’m not hearing a question,’ Nimesh says.
‘Am I making a massive mistake?’
Nimesh exhales slowly. He thinks long and hard.
‘I think you need to take a step back,’ he says, eventually, into his headphones. ‘This isn’t about some bigger story, or what’s happened before. What you’re worried might happen next. It’s about how you feel when you walk into a room and she’s there.’
‘You’re right,’ Seb says on the other end of the line.
‘And how do you feel?’
A pause. A long pause. Nimesh stares off down the road, pictures his running route ahead of him. He imagines Seb waiting for Clara’s arrival, tattooed fingers drumming nervously against a crumpled bouquet of flowers. The image makes him smile.
‘I love her,’ Seb says, eventually, as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world, as if he’s said it a million times before, and not only a lifetime ago. ‘I’ve always loved her.’
‘Well,’ Nimesh says, ‘what the fuck are you telling me for?’
The day is losing its heat, which couldn’t suit Nimesh better.
When he says goodbye, when he sets off and starts running, he becomes a heartbeat, a cool breeze, a pair of trainers on a road.
He takes his usual shortcut and finds himself on a dirt track and then, shortly, in a wide-open field.
The sky is turning pink above him. He’s playing music, the kind of thing he used to listen to back when he was young and still trying to convince girls in smoking areas that he was the guy from the Horrors.
Perhaps Priya will be in a band one day.
Finn is already a better footballer than he ever was.
What did Nimesh want, as a child? His early years in Leicester bleed into one.
His dad took him to Sri Lanka as a kid, and he remembers only vague flashes.
The steaming mounds of kottu, the deafening caw of the house crows, the stray dogs on the street and his fervent desire to patch them all up and bring them home.
His ailing grandfather told him that elephants in captivity live longer for having dentists, because they don’t grind their molars down and starve to death like the happier ones in the wild.
It’s funny what sticks with you. It’s funny, the paths a life can take you down.
Nimesh is sweating. He stops for a breather, resting his hands on his knees and closing his eyes.
Seb is probably already at the bar with Clara, mumbling his way through some pre-prepared speech that she’ll no doubt recite to Maisie in the morning.
He laughs to himself, but the sound is more like a grunt.
He rubs his chest with the knuckle of his thumb.
He’s tired, feels an overwhelming need to rest, doesn’t feel surprised to realise that he’s taking a seat on the grass.
He can’t catch his breath. He should have, by now.
But there’s something here, and it’s something that lingers.
A constriction, a weight, pressing into his ribcage.
Then, heavier. An elephant sitting on his chest. Nimesh has always been quick to diagnose, medical professional being one of many mantles he has worn, but it takes him a fraction too long to diagnose this.
He looks around, but there is no one else in the field, no one even on the periphery.
He taps his smart watch, tries to make a call, but his arm drops, a failure of muscle rather than will.
He’ll have a lie down. Gather his strength.
He is on his back now, the evening air swimming above him,
iridescent, and it’s as if he’s forgotten something,
as if he’s trying to get to the bottom of something,
as if something is not adding up.
It hurts in his neck, and his jaw,
and he thinks he knows why and he’d tell someone why
if he could only get their attention.
But he can’t shout, and his eyes are heavy
and he just about manages to turn over on to one side
to see a plane overhead to smell his own sweat
to taste something metallic t o feel the grass
ag ainst his face and a d og barking
in the distance now as if
s a y i n g get up
wake up wake up
w a k e u p
the breeze is licking him
and the grass is cradling him
and Nimesh doesn’t think about
who will find him even if he already knows
that he will have to be found
because he
won’t can’t
get up
and it feels a shame
but
he has been
everything
and then
suddenly
nothing