And it would not be a bad life. He knew that, too. Sometimes there is nothing you can do.
When Gary came back from the toilet, he looked around in puzzlement. Everyone was there except . . . “Dick?” he asked “Has anyone seen Richard?”
The girl from Computer Services shrugged.
Gary went outside, to Berwick Street. The cold of the night air was like a splash of water to his face. He could taste winter in the air. He called, “Dick? Hey? Richard?”
“Over here.”
Richard was leaning against a wall, in the shadows. “Just getting a breath of fresh air.”
“Are you all right?” asked Gary.
“Yes,” said Richard. “No. I don’t know.”
“Well,” said Gary, “that covers your options. Do you want to talk about it?”
Richard looked at him seriously. “You’ll laugh at me.”
“I’ll do that anyway.”
Richard looked at Gary. Then Gary was relieved to see him smile, and he knew that they were still friends. Gary looked back at the pub. Then he put his hands into his coat pockets. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s walk. You can get it off your chest. Then I’ll laugh at you.”
“Bastard,” said Richard, sounding a lot more like Richard than he had in recent weeks.
“It’s what friends are for.”
They began to amble off, under the streetlights. “Look, Gary,” Richard began. “Do you ever wonder if this is all there is?”
“What?”
Richard gestured vaguely, taking in everything. “Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?”
“I think that sums it up, yes,” said Gary.
Richard sighed. “Well,” he said, “for a start, I didn’t go to Majorca. I mean, I really didn’t go to Majorca.”
Richard talked as they walked up and down the warren of tiny Soho back streets between Regent Street and the Charing Cross Road. He talked, and talked, beginning with finding a girl bleeding on the pavement, and trying to help, because he couldn’t just leave her there, and what happened next. And when they got too cold to walk they went into an all-night greasy spoon cafe. It was a proper one, the kind that cooked everything in lard, and served cups of serious tea in large chipped white mugs shiny with bacon grease. Richard and Gary sat and Richard talked while Gary listened, and then they ordered fried eggs and baked beans and toast and sat and ate them, while Richard continued to talk, and Gary continued to listen. They mopped up the last of their egg yolks with the toast. They drank more tea, until eventually Richard said, ” . . . and then Door did something with the key, and I was back again. In London Above. Well, the real London. And, well, you know the rest.”
There was a silence. “That’s all,” said Richard. He finished his tea.
Gary scratched his head. “Look,” he said, at length. “Is this real? Not some kind of horrible joke? I mean, somebody with a camera isn’t about to leap out from behind a screen or something and tell me I’m on Candid Camera?”
“I sincerely hope not,” said Richard. “You . . . do you believe me?”
Gary looked at the bill on their table, counted out pound coins, and dropped them onto the Formica, where they sat beside a plastic tomato ketchup container in the shape of an oversized tomato, old ketchup caked black about its nozzle. “I believe that, well, something happened to you, obviously . . . Look, more to the point, do you believe it?”
Richard stared up at him. There were dark circles beneath Richard’s eyes. “Do I believe it? I don’t know anymore. I did. I was there. There was a part in there when you turned up, you know.”
“You didn’t mention that before.”
“It was a pretty horrid part. You told me that I’d gone mad and I was just wandering around London hallucinating.”
They walked out of the cafe and walked south, toward Piccadilly. “Well,” said Gary, “you must admit, it sounds more likely than your magical London underneath, where the people who fall through the cracks go. I’ve passed the people who fall through the cracks, Richard: they sleep in shop doorways all down the Strand. They don’t go to a special London. They freeze to death in the winter.”
Richard said nothing.
Gary continued. “I think maybe you got some kind of blow on the head. Or maybe some kind of shock when Jessica chucked you. For a while you went a little crazy. Then you got better.”
Richard shivered. “You know what scares me? I think you could be right.”
“So life isn’t exciting?” continued Gary. “Great. Give me boredom. At least I know where I’m going to eat and sleep tonight. I’ll still have a job on Monday. Yeah?” He turned and looked at Richard.
Richard nodded, hesitantly. “Yeah.”
Gary looked at his watch. “Bloody hell,” he exclaimed. “It’s after two o’clock. Let’s hope there are still a few taxis about.” They walked into Brewer Street, at the Piccadilly end of Soho, wandering past the lights of the peep shows and the strip clubs. Gary was talking about taxis. He was not saying anything original, or even interesting. He was simply fulfilling his obligation as a Londoner to grumble about taxis. ” . . . Had his light on and everything,” he was saying, “I told him where I wanted to go, he said, sorry, I’m on my way home, I said, where do all you taxi drivers live anyway? And why don’t any of you live near me? The trick is to get in first, then tell them you live south of the river, I mean, what was he trying to tell me? The way he was carrying on, Battersea might as well have been in bloody Katmandu . . . “
Richard had tuned him out. When they reached Windmill Street, Richard crossed the road and stared into the window of the Vintage Magazine Shop, examining the cartoonish models of forgotten film stars and the old posters and comics and magazines on display. It had been a glimpse into a world of adventure and imagination. And it was not true. He told himself that.
“So, what do you think?” Gary asked.
Richard jerked back to the present. “Of what?”
Gary realized Richard had not heard a word he had said. He said it again. “If there aren’t any taxis we could get night buses.”
“Yeah,” said Richard. “Great. Fine.”
Gary grimaced. “You worry me.”
“Sorry.”
They walked down Windmill Street, toward Piccadilly. Richard thrust his hands deep into his pockets. He looked puzzled for a moment, and pulled out a rather crumpled black crow’s feather, with red thread tied around the quill.