Chapter 18
EIGHTEEN
The gannets are the ones you want to watch, Josie told you, over the tomato salad and the bread, after the argument that wasn’t quite an argument that felt too bright, like the sunlight through the cloud, neon-white, hard to look at.
The way they dive like silver arrows into the water, she said. It’s mesmerising.
She looked like she enjoyed saying that word. Used her hands, to show the movement. You’d not brought your camera to the Easter lunch, but you’d wished you had, in that moment.
I’ve seen them, once, in real life, Josie said.
In real life, you repeated, which was a gentle joke she did not get, because when else is life not real?
And you are thinking about this on the train home, after the bus, which was a blur, a hot shady discoloured blur before the railway station, a non-place, a term you’d discussed with Nora on your fifth or sixth date but was it a date when you were in each other’s pockets, by then, sharing a toothbrush holder, a bedside water glass, spending hours in bed when you should’ve been in the studio or the darkroom or the lectures you missed by accident because you lose all sense of time and duty and daylight when you are with her, when you were with her, which you’re not any more, you don’t think.
A non-place. You remember the term, vaguely, from an art seminar, as you get off the carriage.
Somewhere that is not your own, shared by others before and after you, rush of the trains and white noise and thunder of metal on tracks.
Generic places like bus depots and hospital rooms and airports which remain faceless, alienating, no matter who you are, what you’ve done, what have you done, you wonder, as you move through the motions, the memories, streets and alleyways and dead ends with graffiti on the pavement until you’re home with the wrong keys in your hands
you ring Goose
you tell him
something’s not