The Sense of an Ending

I didn’t expect any reply from Adrian, nor did I get one. And now the prospect of seeing Colin and Alex by themselves became less appealing. Having been three, then four, how was it possible to go back to being three again? If the others wanted to make up their own party, fine, go ahead. I needed to get on with my life. So I did.

Some of my contemporaries did VSO, departing to Africa, where they taught schoolkids and built mud walls; I wasn’t so high-minded. Also, back then you somehow assumed that a decent degree would ensure a decent job, sooner or later. ‘Ti-yi-yi-yime is on my side, yes it is,’ I used to yodel, duetting with Mick Jagger as I gyrated alone in my student room. So, leaving others to train as doctors and lawyers and sit the civil-service exams, I took myself off to the States and roamed around for six months. I waited on tables, painted fences, did gardening, and delivered cars across several states. In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travellers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods – the long-distance phone call, the telegram – were marked ‘For Emergency Use Only’. So my parents waved me off into the unknown, and their news bulletins about me would have been restricted to ‘Yes, he’s arrived safely’, and ‘Last time we heard he was in Oregon’, and ‘We expect him back in a few weeks’. I’m not saying this was necessarily better, let alone more character-forming; just that in my case it probably helped not to have my parents a button’s touch away, spilling out anxieties and long-range weather forecasts, warning me against floods, epidemics and psychos who preyed on backpackers.

I met a girl while I was out there: Annie. She was American, travelling round like me. We hooked up, as she put it, and spent three months together. She wore plaid shirts, had grey-green eyes and a friendly manner; we became lovers easily and quickly; I couldn’t believe my luck. Nor could I believe how simple it was: to be friends and bed-companions, to laugh and drink and smoke a little dope together, to see a bit of the world side by side – and then to separate without recrimination or blame. Easy come, easy go, she said, and meant it. Later, looking back, I wondered if something in me wasn’t shocked by this very easiness, and didn’t require more complication as proof of … what? Depth, seriousness? Although, God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness. Much later, I also found myself debating whether ‘Easy come, easy go’ wasn’t a way of asking a question, and looking for a particular answer I wasn’t able to supply. Still, that’s all by the by. Annie was part of my story, but not of this story.

My parents thought of getting in touch when it happened, but had no idea where I was. In a true emergency – presence required at a mother’s deathbed – I imagine the Foreign Office would have contacted the Embassy in Washington, who would have informed the American authorities, who would have asked police forces across the country to look out for a cheerful, sunburnt Englishman who was a little more self-assured than he had been on his arrival in the country. Nowadays all it takes is a text message.

When I got home, my mother gave me a stiff-armed, face-powdered hug, sent me off for a bath, and cooked me what was still referred to as my ‘favourite dinner’, and which I accepted as such, not having updated her for a while on my taste buds. Afterwards, she handed me the very few letters that had arrived in my absence.

‘You’d better open those two first.’

The top one contained a brief note from Alex. ‘Dear Tony,’ it read, ‘Adrian died. He killed himself. I rang your mother, who says she doesn’t know where you are. Alex.’

‘Shit,’ I said, swearing for the first time in front of my parents.

‘Sorry about that, lad.’ My father’s comment didn’t seem exactly up to the mark. I looked at him and found myself wondering if baldness was inherited – would be inherited.

After one of those communal pauses which every family does differently, my mother asked, ‘Do you think it was because he was too clever?’

‘I haven’t got the statistics linking intelligence to suicide,’ I replied.

‘Yes, Tony, but you know what I mean.’

‘No, actually, I don’t at all.’

‘Well, put it like this: you’re a clever boy, but not so clever as you’d do anything like that.’

I gazed at her without thinking. Wrongly encouraged, she went on,

‘But if you’re very clever, I think there’s something that can unhinge you if you’re not careful.’

To avoid engaging with this line of theory, I opened Alex’s second letter. He said that Adrian had done it very efficiently, and left a full account of his reasons. ‘Let’s meet and talk. Bar at the Charing X Hotel? Phone me. Alex.’