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Well, at least this installment is no longer hanging over my head, anyway. Muse does play a long game, yes...
***
"I'm sorry, man," Jason says. Again.
She left me her condo. (There was a note, when the police searched Jill's cubicle. With her old mobile lost they hadn't known where to find me. Not that an overworked bureaucracy had been much arsed to undue exertions, with ample CCTV footage of one lone woman walking calmly from her office at lunch, crossing the street, waiting for a seemingly unobserved moment to slip over a railing... Too unremarkable, in a city this size, even to have rated mention on the evening news.) I'm still trying to work out whether I dare claim it.
It's too much, the note says.
The delay was an issue, for the county, but it's been worked out that they'll look the other way to arrangements being made to lay her to rest and settle her affairs. After all, so long as someone is willing to claim responsibility, who's not them. (It's the sort of thing Max is best at, this laundering of lives.) Jason baulks at the thought of a plot in the nearby cemetery. Would she have wanted to be with her family? But she hadn't one, not really. Not anymore. Only the likes of us.
I'm sorry, little brown bat.
There's a sort of logic to it that I'm resisting. We can choose conscience, or we can choose our souls, and the gap between yawns, too easy to hesitate and fall. Or jump.
It tasted so good.
It's been a week of it, to say the least. I've not even realised I've sat up past half-three until my flatmate shambles out of his bedroom, eyes sleepy but, if not quite alert, at any rate making conscious note of his surroundings. Checking why the light's still on, I reckon. "Yeah, was just about to --"
But Jason yawns wide, bleary but game for something, and sits beside me on the settee. "Aw, you don't even have it on? Are they doing, like, red-carpet interview shit for another six hours or something?"
"Sorry?"
He looks at me as if despite everything I've still managed to find a new and worrying depth of distractedness to plumb, and explains: "The royal wedding? I guess all that pomp and crap is against your religion, but, I mean, so long as they're going to the trouble, and all..."
Jason is a Royalist in the abstract way of someone who's never had to live with the consequences. I pass him the remote to sort himself a station whose coverage he likes. Cameras pan across a London built up from my memories, settle to look over the dignified old shoulder of the Abbey into a white-girdered Eye --
Something twists inside me, then, and I'm sobbing into my hands, choking gulps that feel as if they're tearing their way free. "Hey," I hear Jason say. There's an awkward sort of pat, and then he's gathered me in to wail against his neck. Shh, Trevor. Trev. It's all right. I've got you.
I've got you.
***
"I'm sorry, man," Jason says. Again.
She left me her condo. (There was a note, when the police searched Jill's cubicle. With her old mobile lost they hadn't known where to find me. Not that an overworked bureaucracy had been much arsed to undue exertions, with ample CCTV footage of one lone woman walking calmly from her office at lunch, crossing the street, waiting for a seemingly unobserved moment to slip over a railing... Too unremarkable, in a city this size, even to have rated mention on the evening news.) I'm still trying to work out whether I dare claim it.
It's too much, the note says.
The delay was an issue, for the county, but it's been worked out that they'll look the other way to arrangements being made to lay her to rest and settle her affairs. After all, so long as someone is willing to claim responsibility, who's not them. (It's the sort of thing Max is best at, this laundering of lives.) Jason baulks at the thought of a plot in the nearby cemetery. Would she have wanted to be with her family? But she hadn't one, not really. Not anymore. Only the likes of us.
I'm sorry, little brown bat.
There's a sort of logic to it that I'm resisting. We can choose conscience, or we can choose our souls, and the gap between yawns, too easy to hesitate and fall. Or jump.
It tasted so good.
It's been a week of it, to say the least. I've not even realised I've sat up past half-three until my flatmate shambles out of his bedroom, eyes sleepy but, if not quite alert, at any rate making conscious note of his surroundings. Checking why the light's still on, I reckon. "Yeah, was just about to --"
But Jason yawns wide, bleary but game for something, and sits beside me on the settee. "Aw, you don't even have it on? Are they doing, like, red-carpet interview shit for another six hours or something?"
"Sorry?"
He looks at me as if despite everything I've still managed to find a new and worrying depth of distractedness to plumb, and explains: "The royal wedding? I guess all that pomp and crap is against your religion, but, I mean, so long as they're going to the trouble, and all..."
Jason is a Royalist in the abstract way of someone who's never had to live with the consequences. I pass him the remote to sort himself a station whose coverage he likes. Cameras pan across a London built up from my memories, settle to look over the dignified old shoulder of the Abbey into a white-girdered Eye --
Something twists inside me, then, and I'm sobbing into my hands, choking gulps that feel as if they're tearing their way free. "Hey," I hear Jason say. There's an awkward sort of pat, and then he's gathered me in to wail against his neck. Shh, Trevor. Trev. It's all right. I've got you.
I've got you.
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