Myer, or How Love Gets Old

Myer, or How Love Gets Old

A Story written in the Past Perfect and Hypothetical Conditional

He  lived, nestled up to the walls of his home. It hadn’t mattered for a while, inched up to one of those heaters, whether it was a castle, a flat or a house. Molten, laced neon glowed past the grill, toasting the dust, charring his nails, which had a slow curl and a yellow tinge, unfelt and unwatched,  just another part of himself.

They met in the gorged innards of that mirrored lift. The blonde dog panting, legs splayed, too grand for the younger man’s dirty carpets. A cherry tongue tossed out, drained brown eyes swaying in their stare, colour smudged beyond the boundaries of his pupils.

The old man bent over and offered him a white sphere, calling it ‘a mint’ in broken vowels racked up from another time. From those naked streets shorn by war where moments of self reliance and inverted realisation were both so quiet you couldn’t whisper them and so loud they blew your memory away. Truths neither old nor new, ill fitted to the timely national appeal they filled them up with afterwards. Put stale, instead of left, in children’s minds.

The dog sniffed it with a customary consideration and lowered his nose. Compensating, the young man looked up

“I don’t think he knows much about mints”.

 “Not his taste, I suppose. Would you like one?”

The young man took it, a pinch of fire in his smile. The old man laughed a disabling splutter and leant back on the plastic, NHS issued stick.

  “Well, if you’ll ever be wanting a meal just give me a knock, its flat 63, ninth floor”

The young man nodded, swallowing the mint. His face was full of a new kind of concentration, but had he minded to scour closer, the old man would have found his eyes still shunned capture.

“They send them by the box load, more than I can eat. Always got a spare knocking about”

He spoke with his whole face, lips, cheeks, nose, exaggerating the gesture that accompanied each sound. In the old East End way.

Folds of black hair tipped like untied plumage over the young man’s forehead as he raised his head. Old pools lay inside him, whose surfaces hadn’t quivered for a while. There, on a Wednesday afternoon, as he arthritically performed the dues expected of a person much older, untouched by the stretch or tug of the city that lay below them.

They stepped  crookedly out of the lift. Like the men, gravity beguiled the dog, but he countered it in concentrated, measured steps. Claws well practised, gripping stoically onto the rubber circled floor.

The red walls met them blankly as soon as they reached the ninth floor. Both put their heads down. Neither wanting to take a sip, by labelling it, of the pity or shame that crouched upon the other’s hunched shoulder. Weaker than words or actions, names nevertheless now linked them. For the older, the disaster had been averted only by space, and for the younger, by time as well. They were both Jewish and that particularity hinted at a brilliance or an enforced understanding of one’s being that had long ago escaped from God without losing him. It was their exception from the production line of empty names to marry and get old.

They saw each other at the same time on the landing the next day. Each squinting, each still waking up as the sunlight started its determined withdrawal.

“Come in”

 Myer ushered, in a weak kicking of assorted brown parcels, addressed on peeling labels, which obstructed the inner hallway of his flat. 20 years of accumulation (her age) out of the  83 years of his.

“You might want this. I’ve no need for it. I’ve got a couple of them in the front room”

He handed Seth the old electric heater which the latter took obediently, staring with what seemed like lucidity into his elder’s eyes.

This was no parade, Myer didn’t make a self conscious display of his domesticity or indulge in the coy hospitality that Seth had come to expect when received by his rich uncles, cousins, aunts and parents. The simplicity with which he was ushered in reminded him of days long lost, when family had meant knowledge and understanding, before farce had accompanied and then overpowered intimacy. Nor did Myer concede to any of the embarrassment or shame with which strangers normally reveal their inner dwelling spaces to each other. Perhaps this was because they both lived in the abstract rather than physical world, relying more readily on melodious memories and humours of the mind rather than material objects. Each had constructed intricate, codified boundaries; a secret scaffolding that organised their space in an arrangement understood only by their own hardened eyes. And abstract forms which held emotional and historical significance were clearer to them than the furniture and wallpaper others might see in their place.

Myer was speaking the beginning of an old and unintentional autobiography. It needed no acknowledgement from Seth, but nor was it composed of mere anecdotes, to be whipped away by thin vessels of wind immediately on their utterance. Seth held their bulk obligingly. Each tacitly understood the other’s need. He’d later tell his girlfriend, the girl who rushed up the stairs after bar jobs and lidos and lectures that didn’t really open anything up, but added a maze like complexity to every problem, urging a quick escape she took too seriously to ever consent to.

She’d wonder why people used such things when central heating glowered in each room and anyway the insulation in their building was maintained to its technological prime.

It must have something to do with that narcotic world she took all pains to avoid. But she didn’t understand appendage, possessions for the sake of themselves. She didn’t understand why anyone ‘used’ anything.

Seth told her in the stultified tones of a mournful sort of loving which had bypassed himself in its regard for others, that his ‘mum and dad’ were having dinner on Friday for Rosh Hashanah.

Fabienne froze that date in her mind. Etching her way away from it as soon as she’d pinpointed it’s place in the long spine of her week. She immediately began to think of multiple clauses which could legitimise her escape.

He looked at her and smiled something all encompassing. He stood up and took her in his big hands. She shrunk.

Not much could be seen through the misty windows. Only the old spines of surviving orange lights. She liked to blank out what she could.

So true and yet so curtained, she’d learnt design from his eye lace. And yet, assuming that she had wanted to, she couldn’t fathom how to unravel it. He was balanced lightly on the sheen offered by the oft repeated sitcom playing on television. She got up and left his warmth before its brilliance faded into autumn slumber. Once standing, she told him she couldn’t come. He nodded

“Maybe I’ll ask Myer to go with me”

His mummer quietened and he was back inside the lull of the television program.

The nights furled forwards in the privacy variously stolen underneath the dark blanket they called their sky, in the juxtaposing of their limbs, with his retreat later when she wanted to sleep, ‘to the other room’ after much nagging and whining. After much rehearsal of all the tones and ruses she knew she couldn’t expose to anyone else. Things had never seemed further from the muffled order of family life, the path pre destined by her parent’s blundering design. She heard less from her mother and father  each month, stumbling upon them now only by chance, in the corridors of the University where they worked and she studied, upon which, in fear of silence, they’d quickly retreat into academic generalities, which shouldn’t rein between offspring and their progenitors.  She’d attempted to completely replace them.

That evening, at the turmoil of her crab crawled notes, she rose to say goodbye to him. She hugged him deeply. He, so much taller and yet always with those planet like eyes hung at her level. Her computer flickered industrially. It smelt sweet as the tea with honey or hot chocolate she indulged in as she typed. It glowed bright as the newly cut pictures tacked in the corners she had wanted to highlight in the tact around her.

She held the door open to blow him kisses as sweet as but not to match his sallow, stubbled cheeks. Only to touch them. There’d been a time when she’d reached out for every taste of him, when a landmark as mundane as an old run down bank could set her heart on fire because of its symbolic proximity to an old flat of his. And there’d be a time when he stood in her shoes, cruelly compromised, in need as worn as a habit or a laugh. And both of them knew that now they were inbetween.

Then she watched him through their spy hole as he sauntered across the hallway, towards number 63. As soon as the young man rang the bell, the door was opened eagerly, dutifully, humbly and yet not un hungrily. She watched his shuffling feet and the steady balance of the old man’s contorted frame on the crouching stick, which maintained and measured the distance between his head and the ground. Forced on like a loose weed deep in the sea, dislodged from its bed, with his limped step, into the sway of time. He seemed strangely malleable to any change offered by this dull world.

Seth had told her only last week that Myer had expressed the kind of burning passion for Chinese food that could only be maintained by a man brought up with an impression of great, imperial distance between one’s ‘own’ and the foreign. Seth had enquired about his taste for Japanese and Myer had admitted he hadn’t ever tried it, trips to dinner having become sparser in the last few decades. Now Seth was counting his disability living allowance cheques carefully, waiting for some accumulation that would elude the general demands of his other habits, the ones on which he made compulsive and less considered expenditures, which, like misbehaving youngsters, must take precedence because of their rabid irrationality. His plan was  to take Myer out for a special dinner next month to celebrate his eightieth birthday. Myer hadn’t had any children. He’d taken his San Francisco flower days too seriously, probably fallen too far in love with those with whom he could never procreate. Seth said this with the assumption that whatever a man’s preferential form of hedonism, he would always regret the heady decisions of his youth when they did not culminate in conventional rewards. Fabienne trusted his insight in this and yet, like many of his other counterparts, was always surprised by the strand of conservativism (or was it fatalism?) it demonstrated. Myer’s only known about family member was a nephew who made relaxed rather than dutiful visits. He was 23, from a suburb further north, fired and hopeful. The fact that he was called Asif and appeared to all intents and purposes to be a British Asian of probably Muslim descent made a further anecdote for Seth to bring Fabienne. While in Seth’s family, Jewishness meant propriety and conformance, an acceptance of the status quo coupled with an inkling of distrust for all outsiders, it refreshed them both to see that Myer saw it as no such handicap.  

 As always, she ensured his bank balance precluded her attention. Seth was certainly saving up, but the rakish thin weeks seemed to come quicker than the gilded ones, and she found herself hawkishly guarding the debit card she still occasionally permitted him to take out. Their bond of trust, which she sometimes fantasised about dramatically escaping, prohibited her from changing the pin. That would have broken it in an under-handed, non romantic way.

Back wordlessly to her essay, typing on, appreciating the channels and sentences. She slipped glances of stolen time through the black paned window and looked forward to the car ride call he’d make her, with its background noise cushioned in the snuggled tone of his homeward direction.

Sometimes, nowadays when the father and the son went away to the coast to see their team play on a weekend afternoon, the mother would call her in a sort of commiseration. She’d try to introduce a duality to her boxed tone, a long echoey conversation, over-heard and over-said, which seemed to Fabienne only like a burlesque description of a state of static feminity. But to the mother, it was a tentative attempt to form a fragile bond, which needed much nurture given the turmoil of their initial relationship. Early on, Fabienne had decided the mum must be pathologically un happy. It began the minute she saw the skeletal frame wrapped up in all the pretensions  of beauty of the long purchased kind. Although the warmth in her voice must have come from further in. It had given Fabienne the impression, when overheard on Seth’s telephone, on those first musty mornings hardly woken from childhood, as they lay in a bed together and a ringing alerted her to school’s impending gaze and him to work’s, of a mother sunk in a wise reverie. With a humorous capacity for understanding and beholding the seriousness of life and its destruction, rather than one clinging to a kind of girlishness. But on meeting her, Fabienne immediately sensed hostility.  On her first visit to that flat which, accompanying their son, she was supposed to take up timid tenancy in, though the downy plaster walls wouldn’t say a so for definite yet, the mother’s eyes chased the pinprick fall of a small screw Fabienne was fingering and let slip from the closet of her palm. Noting its snug position amongst the lush new carpet blades, she probed snakishly 

“Aren’t you going to pick that up?”

Abashed and suddenly automated, Fabienne stooped. The mother didn’t stop, her voice, like the squeak of an over opened door, had acquired a droning whine.

 “Would you do that in your own house?”

Long before, Fabienne had realised that the mother wore a mask of icy nervousness which infected all those with whom she spoke and smiled. Its sharp corners allowed sly slipped words to pierce their targets in loosely formed ambiguity which no one else in the group appeared to notice. In the rare situations when she and Fabienne were alone, even on the telephone, this competition subsided and Fabienne was unprepared for the honest companionship that the mother sought and slightly perturbed by the intimacy with which the mother perceived her of adult and equal opinion. It at once justified and excused all her chiding, which would now seem bosom, jesting, an inevitable deference paid between two equally able characters playing opposing roles. Fabienne’s own parents, uncomfortable with any kind of personal proximity and yet eager to preserve their familial impulses, maintained the eternal, invisible distance of generation, even when it had no physical or intellectual meaning left. Even then, Fabienne knew the mother’s social face was as removable as makeup and did not penetrate her core. But her own insecurities fed its venom and she sensed that the mother was pleased, when, 7 years later, she could at last assess Fabienne out of the family circle, no longer destined to reunite with her son. Not anymore to be an added presence waiting by her death-bed in that distant part of the future which embodied all resolution and eventuality.

Shortly after their initial visit to the flat together, the first emerging winter after Fabienne left school, Seth had told her, at a low lit wooden panelled restaurant, that they couldn’t move in together. They sat opposite each other,  their Valentine’s dinner still and slowly steaming between them as he retracted their earlier arrangement, which she hadn’t previously had the foresight or that habitual post-adolescent suspicion to doubt or prod. She was 19, fresh out of a  girl’s school. No one she knew spoke in chidingly or courageous cliché about the idiosyncrasies of male behaviour unless they were speaking directly about sex, a simple act which, at least in words, was so easy to isolate from the rest of human behaviour. Commitment, loyalty, fear, resolve had not yet been hardened, rehearsed and therefore abstracted by the free flowing currency of habitual conversation. Rather than being universal concepts, they retained an intense specificity to herself and the dark intimacy of her feelings for him as she contracted their meanings from silently read novels whose plots she didn’t discuss. These novels, whose appeal stretched right back into the earliest expectations one has of fiction’s fallacy, bypassed all logic and classification. She could not shed their words of all the intimate depths of her feelings for him which were in detachable from the deepest, least explained and best hidden parts of herself. Concepts such as ‘insecurity’ ‘need’ or ‘affection’ were like poisons misplaced in a medicine cabinet, condemned in sole purpose to self disguise. Accordingly, they appeared, in everyday life, to be as meaningless as mathematical symbols, long removed from the contexts in which they commanded influence and now used only as substitutes to compensate for what might otherwise be great silences bellowing the inadequacy of communication between those who are closest. Much later, she would realise that anecdotes such as these, related in comparative honesty, were the main locomotive of after office drinks gossip. But their expression had met  its second scaffold, presumed female prerogatives which are leased and half created by tabloids and fossilise inbetween people’s words, robbing them of the autonomy in their expression. She realised that even she had forgotten the pure, primal force of their meaning.

It was the night before they were going to transport their stuff to the building with the blood red landings and the mirrored lift, to the flat where she’d dropped the pin. Her landlord was exchanging the keys tomorrow. The bath was the only piece of furniture that remained, and she’d watched the last beads of water slip reluctantly down its caved surface as she got ready that evening. In after thought, Seth told her she could stay with him until she found somewhere else

 ‘Of course’

She ran to the only distant friend she could and lived in the dark for a week, moulding each day on her decided journey to the library, just above the avenue she’d lived in as a child, where house doors used to open in spontaneous refuge during a game of hide and seek. On her return, she’d found that it was now muted with dumb grey faces that seemed devoid of expressive capacity or feature.  There she could punch out a novel on the old PCs with free scheduled access, after the father of that house had told her their machine was only for ‘family members’. As is true to that time of year, it wasn’t long before she was emerging to the pressed shapes of crystallised  leaves as they conspired with each other on their high clung branches. She’d begun a job selling media deals to Oil and Gas companies and she stilted London bridge every lunch hour and walked to where the large brick warehouses lounged, their bellies full of art, her resort when she was most gutted and abandoned. She’d let the long river string her out til its very end, where it opened luxuriously, licentiously, gulping in the currents and salts regurgitated from the innards of whales, suggesting whiffs of the places that lay beyond.

She spent five pounds of her fifty a week reaped from the pub job at the opera. The man at the ticket desk had told her it didn’t matter if they weren’t great seats as she’d only spent a fiver. She smirked and wondered how someone so removed could be employed by such a visceral institution, which claimed to represent and redefine the contrast between light and dark and silence and sound. In the interval she saw an old woman, masked, wigged and lavender plumed with the sharpest and most refined young protégé. Her great nephew or some such acquaintance of influence and incidental privilege. He spoke in a way that made her wonder whether he had ever ridden a bus as he suggested to the lady that the wine that filled the two glasses they’d just purchased was perhaps corked. And back into the stalls, the audience, its eccentricities in close tact, to watch humanity spill itself in the second act. It was the first time she’d heard of a wine being corked, and the phrase stuck with her ever after, as knowledge gleaned freely from the crowds around her, a kind of general public in the opera foyer.

She had to tell her office colleagues she didn’t have a boyfriend, which was at once defeat and surrender. She quickly found the smallest, cheapest flat listed and moved into it that Wednesday, providing her first pay-check, supplemented by something very reluctant smothered from her father, as a deposit.

And her life was mooring itself while he slept with page three girls in his fusty apartment. She visited one evening and left after the sex with a plain blatancy, a wish not to blemish the silence with affected pretension. She strayed a naked glance into his bedroom on her way out, which lay blue, cold, un moulded, life as yet unarranged around the large bulbousness of his empty bed. Standing on the bedside table like a vase, she saw the pint glass she’d stolen from a pub last summer at the pinnacle of her love for him, on a late afternoon spent gushing it to a friend, coolly sandwiched by his nightly embrace.  Its rims were dogged by froggy finger prints and curled patterns magnified to appear cell like. Half filled, it was trawled right up to his bed, where his thirsty hands could reach it in their fumbling, un wakened blindness. A curious portent, though she hardly realised it then, of the guttered dependence that their relationship would become. A reminder that it too, would lose its freedom, joy and joint conspiracy, and become their own negotiation past the beasts that inhabited the world beyond. Unclear glass, ethereal up against that empty double bed. His transparent night-time thirst, pulled close because the shake of his feet couldn’t wiggle out of that new wood chip existence.

When he came back to her later that month, he begged her, saying he loved her more than the big spectre of heart break in his adolescence. And these were the charm words she’d hinged her conditions on. But still she refrained somewhat, leasing his requests, whilst searching inside him for the deepest of todays, the hardest confirmation of them still knowing each other. She found him beneath and inside her hands, and cradled it though its honey sweetness was led astray somewhat by the looming edifice of his flat. He told her that in refusing to let her move in, he’d acted on what he’d thought his mother wanted, rather than on what he really felt. And a thousand times she dreamt up delirious hazes, in which she could neither sleep nor sigh a full breath next to him, hallucinating about what ‘his mother wanted’.

But she’d passed rugged adolescence and was now was a reluctant employee chiselling a living in the maze of city streets. When she moved in, she spoke to his visiting friends about the horrors of the metropolis. By the river bank, she chanced on old regulars from the pub she’d worked at, with whom she mused about how strange and mirror like life had become, while jointly admiring The Girkin.

But all of this was only at the very back of her mind, like a dulled instinct or the shadows of the actors as they manoeuvre backstage, while she skimmed through her essay as it hung on its feverish screen and she listened for the earliest tinkle and the proceeding opening up of their parcelled flat. Waiting for the realignment of their shared, consensual need, on his return. The old lights of London grew pretty, distant, dwindling as she stretched her narrowed gaze through them, wondering which piece of their brocade the car he was passenger in was snaking through at that moment.  

He came back carrying the cold and opened the door to her small study, planting an icy kiss on her bare cheek before rushing off to the bathroom and then to the kitchen where he could rummage, uninhibited, for the supplements to food that he really needed.

She turned her pinked cheeks to him and emerged from her room.

‘Did Myer like it?’

They snapped back into the old roles, the theatrical exchange of gestures and positions that they played without really even knowing it. She inched out as she waited in the girth of her question. He answered in the clink of pots of pans that he was arranging. She waited for his long brown eye to turn out of the gloom, which cloaked his triangled behind and long curled over back. He had found the juice squeezer, and he brought it out triumphant, as if the whole motivation of his discovery had now been realised. He looked up.

“What?”

“Did Myer like it?”

He twisted his ankle around and in the wool bottom of his sagging socks they were off again, spinning into another room, in the heart beat of their co-existent lives. He scratched the lower part of his nose

“You know what my family are like”

She sprung onto the fleshy upholstery of their leather sofa. She lay one arm long and luxuriously on the tobacco smelling side rest, this was her dance too, of distraction, her spin of denial from the forced logic inside the box computer, humming impatiently in the other room.

“I think he was a bit confused. You can’t really get a word in edge ways when my grandma and aunt are both there”

Those old used words that like the hanging of damp wallpaper, divide us most. Ask for our attention, spell the livid distinction between people that one’s grandmother discusses.

“But did he talk to anyone?”

“Yeah, he spoke with Jerry a little bit. But I don’t think he could really hear what was going on”

So vivid were Seth’s descriptions of Myer’s life and existence, that he naturally accepted her interest in a person who had only acknowledged her in passing.

He looked around at her with burning eyes, and switched the television on, while the juice squeezer lay lonesome in the middle of the ruckus which spread, complicating the reflective sheen, over their kitchen counter. He was absorbed before she could carry the conversation on, so she lay down in his lap and smelt the stale humours caught inside the thick denim of his worn, designer jeans. They had succeeded in creating a loving environment. But its static bored her sometimes. As just one of those thousands of London’s disembodied box lights which began to twinkle at dusk, she felt detached and disassembled. She knew that for all their stability now, they had not instated themselves, if that meant hearing the deep sound of contact with a harder, more stable ground beneath the sand. She sometimes succumbed to painting the idea that this was only her fear of commitment. But she spoke too confidently, too happily, using the oft-pronounced words of disinterest, to be able to convince those closest to her, who nevertheless had drifted away somewhat during this stage in her life. She would sometimes find him dank and crying, muted by disbelief in himself and exhilarant only when not otherwise medicated, in those dark channels he avoided in her presence for politeness’s sake. She later knew that every day he stuffed the curled pieces of blackened kitchen foil under the sofa as soon as he heard her step by the door. This happened in absences she hadn’t realised the true breadth of, and inside his intricate planning. She feared even for the dog’s health, their acrid, pungent smell. And yet her consciousness of his habit surged and relented, helped on by his flighty comments which rarely contained factual information. They lived in harmony, but although it involved many kinds of communication, it was also built on utmost silence.

As usual, his change came in one flicker of an evening. And reminded her how little she really knew him. He would speak to her in words she hadn’t heard since last Christmas. After a night without sleep he would not relent and succumb to his body and collapse on the bed but remain standing, in conviction, as if communing now with all the phantoms that he otherwise shunned confrontation with and allowed to oppress and sedate him.

She recognised but could not truly foresee or remain detached from the stewing and steaming and waning of his mind. She cried blot paper for it, she screamed and shouted and yet this could not alter him. He was at once realer and less real, wiser and less wise, at once colder and more loving. Most of all, he seemed to be a spectator rather than the instigator of his choices and actions now. She would feel invigorated at his renewal and re-emergence from his former blankness and yet his curled self hatred pierced them both. Maybe it was at this time that the mother took her out for a gracious coffee. She’d removed all the pins from her voice, and yet, looking back, Fabienne realised that the stark force of her motivation had been to convince her to leave Seth.

“You’re speaking like a battered wife, excusing him of everything”

She insisted, while Fabienne wondered what the impetus would be behind his mother’s piling of blame upon her obviously troubled son. But although it confused her, the pity also encroached upon her. Yes, this time there’d been two slaps and the spillage of blood (he scratched her with a toothpick) in public. The later had been in front of all her long assembled friends and family at her twenty first birthday party. Thus had begun the petition, its slow inching in her own mind, she was of the oppressed, she must escape, before he transformed her, took her over. To say nothing of his own best interests, which she alone seemed intent upon. Her father, in a rare display of his own wrath, chided her to leave him straight away as she couldn’t do a degree living with a man like that. And yet, they were only partially divided by these suddenly emerging interested parties and fully reunited when she returned to the flat one afternoon after reading and coffee with a friend at the library and found a band of scarlet haired and trilby hated psychiatrists, two policemen and three casually dressed social workers crowded behind his ire some, stunted father. They seemed to be having some difficulty accessing the building, or on closer gaze, they were coordinating their combined strategy.

The father flagged her as soon as he saw her. He may have preceded it all with a nonchalant  ‘how are you?’ before commencing his tirade.

“I’ve just come from work. I don’t have any time for this. Any time for it at all”

It was only much later that Fabienne re saw the mother’s appeal as her own latent desire to have left Seth’s father long ago. He continued chiding about his finances and his son’s degradation of them by having this preposterous ‘episode’, as if it were entirely wilful. After they’d gone up, Fabienne rang the buzzer and warned Seth via the intercom, of the approaching party. She wanted to prepare him for that most essential of composures, in front of the lime trousered psychiatrists, who, reeling from their recent hair perms and late night excursions to theatre bars, would have the instant power to decree his legal incarceration for up to a month if his behaviour was deemed to be irrational enough. She feared that with their companions, the three uniformed policemen, the party would offset even coolest of inhabitants of a one bedroom flat, by crowding into it unannounced, let in, of course by the father. She then followed tentatively and found that Seth had escaped down the stairs as they ascended by lift, but that one of the social workers and two police officers had followed him down. She left the leather booted, Hackney dwelling, 40 something vaguely feminist specialists to stare shyly at each other in the open doorway of the flat and walked back to the doorway of their building. She found Seth engaged in a short scuffle with a police man of his own age, being frowned at by a both disapproving and genuinely startled neighbour as he attempted to get past.

Once caught, Seth soberly complied to entering the lift and began to engage in forcibly mild conversation with the social worker. To the apparent surprise of Seth’s uninvited guests, their host was engaged in sensible discourse rather than physical struggle as he was reunited with the entourage.

Seth stood awkwardly in the only space there was left in their hall and reassured them that all was well and he didn’t really have to go into hospital, he’d just lapsed at taking his meds during the past week. Eager to contribute a characteristic comment in this commotion, one of the psychiatrists immediately confronted him about the unwatered state of the plants.

Fabienne saw this as much as an attack on her own homely protectionism as his, and wondered how it could be used as justification for the state to forcibly detain him.

Seeming to ignore this, the social worker who’d convinced him to come upstairs then breached another point

“So you’ve been using?”

“Yes”

Seth admitted

“How much?”

“Not very much. A £10 bag a day”

The social worker paused

“It doesn’t sound like very much now, but given the nature of addiction, it’ll probably become a £20 bag a day before long and you’ll find it harder and harder to control”

No one could argue with this, and they all remained impressed by the relative calm that ensued. Fabienne admired the courage of this man in his contextualisation of what could otherwise be seen as a vengeful familial dispute. The team of police men and psychiatrists were then asked to step outside, as the social worker calmly outlined how Seth could commence a detox program as an outpatient at the local council clinic. Abandoning the thoroughness of their mission, they congealed into their expected social groupings and bustled out with a chirpy professionalism. She was relieved to hear their voices dwindle as each profession beamed about their colleagues’ weekend plans. The father left frustrated, muttering, and Fabienne and Seth stared at each other with drained eyes and silently came together in a long hug of reconciliation.  His hot sharp tears soaked into the secret ducts inside her armpits and they sat together on the sofa, shielded from the outside.

A few weeks later, placed back in the narcotic haze he’d come to know as the most accessible form of sanity, he told Fabienne that Myer had refused to open his door when he called. Fabienne looked around

“Are you sure he’s alright?”

“Yeah, I saw that old busy body downstairs who saw me with the police man talking to him at his door. I owed him 20 quid too”

Fabienne looked at him in disbelief

“You borrowed money off him?”

“Yeah, just a tenner when I needed it”

She stared at him sceptically

“He didn’t mind helping me out til I got paid”

Everyone else knew what Seth spent it in on and tenners as lump sums were especially suspect. She looked out the window at the bare haggard branches in silent uproar in the blank white sky and felt sad that Seth had lost his friend. They carried on living in the flat for a year and a half and Myer disappeared into the haze that all their other elderly neighbours, apportioned by their respective walls, lived in and they remained unsure whether he was dead or alive.