You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [44]
You will be glad to know I’ve been responsible about my money. Everything’s been drawn up and signed. Mum should have no problem with it. I find you now and again here on the common, bits and pieces of you scattered in the woods, but as the days go by, so the need lessens. I’ll be coming home soon.
He remained seated at the end of the bench, listening to the trees and the music from the flat behind. His breath was shallow, though not from excitement. In the vestibule, his hands shook as he held his key to the lock, and he had to steady himself against the wall. On the stairs, he made good use of the banister.
IT WAS A rainy morning later that week when the doorbell rang again. Wary of the bill collectors, James looked through the curtain to identify the visitor. It was Patrick, his colleague from Shipley’s. James was supposed to have returned to work five days ago, but by that time he’d unplugged the phone. If they had been trying to call, he knew nothing of it. He considered letting the doorbell ring, pretending to be away, but his nerve gave out and he went round to the hall. Patrick stood in the doorway in a raincoat, his red hair clustered into dark strands by the rain.
“James! You’re here!” he bellowed. “What’s the story, mate? We thought you were dead down a ditch somewhere.”
James stood staring at this young man over whom he had fretted so during his year at the office, catering, invisibly, to his whims and preferences, whims and preferences James had likely imagined to begin with—an elaborate set of spinning wheels, attached to nothing.
He hadn’t spoken to anyone in over a week and found himself caught off guard by Patrick’s presence, as though this person ought to have moved on by now, the way a thought passes from the mind. But there he was, dripping rain, a dopey half smile playing across his face.
“Come in,” James said.
Patrick hesitated, glancing at James in his bathrobe and slippers, unshaven, sensing, it appeared, that he’d wandered into something larger than expected. “Simon was worried,” he said. In the twilight of the hall, he narrowed his eyes. “You don’t look so great. Have you been sick?”
“Yeah. This rash, I . . . It won’t go away. I’ve had a head cold too. I was going to call but there was some problem with the phones—in the building, I mean.”
Patrick was looking through to the living room, taking in the clothes strewn on the furniture, the mantel cluttered with jars of ointment and old prescription bottles.
“As a matter of fact, I won’t be coming back to the office. I’m moving.”
“What’s this, then? Does Simon know?”
“No. I should tell him. You see, I’ve decided I need to spend some time with my family, so I’m not going to stay on here. It’s a bit sudden, I know.” He felt himself balking at the ruse and yet beneath that feeling was a relief, an unsentimental farewell to the bond of simple honesty, to the assumptions they might ever have shared. He had occupied himself with the idea of this man’s happiness and now he could cast at him a distant glance, fiddling with the truth.
“Pardon me, I should have taken your coat,” James said, suddenly all politeness. “Won’t you come in and sit down?”
“I should be getting back.” His expression grew confused, the expression of a man who has wandered into the wrong cinema and finds himself in the dark with strange or disturbing images.
Before he knew what he had done, James had his hand on Patrick’s cheek and was passing his thumb over the soft, freckled skin beneath his eye. “Thank you,” he said, “thank you for everything.”
Blushing, Patrick turned his head away and reached back for the handle of the door. “I must go.”
He stepped down the walk to the gate and didn’t turn back on the street but kept moving until he had disappeared behind the bus shelter and was gone.
JAMES DIDN’T CALL Simon. At first, he harbored a feeling of guilt,