Page 71 of Vigilante Twink and the Cop

He’s probably found it by now.

I wonder what he did when he found it. Whether he picked it up and threw it in a drawer or left it where it was or stood there looking at it for a moment the way I stood there looking at the spot on his sofa where my coffee mug left a ring on the fabric, the thing I almost said sorry for and then didn’t because saying sorry would have broken the moment and the moment was good and I was in it and now the moment is the only place I can find my way back to in the hours since I’ve been in this room.

This is the longest I’ve been alone in weeks.

I didn’t realize, until I wasn’t, how much of my alone had been filled. Not loudly. Not with events or conversations that anyone would write down and call significant. Just with the specific quality of another person’s presence, the sound of them on the other side of a wall, the particular warmth that comes from sharing air with someone who isn’t a stranger, and I had underestimated, profoundly and completely, how much difference that makes when you’ve spent most of your life not having it.

I pick up my phone again. There’s nobody to call. There’s nobody to call because the one person I would call is the one person I can’t, because calling him would be exactly the kind of thing the person who manipulated him would do next, and I have no way of proving I’m not still being that person, and he has no reason to believe I’m not, and I understand that with a clarity that doesn’t make it any better.

I put the phone down.

At some point I realize I haven’t eaten since the lunch I made in a galley kitchen this morning for a man who is never going to eat anything I make again, and the thought of room service in a beige room is enough to get me off the bed and pulling my jacket on.

I keep my head down in the corridor. Hood up in the lift. The lobby is busy enough at this hour that one more person in dark clothes moving quickly is invisible, which is the only thing this hotel has to recommend it, and then I’m outside and London is doing what London does, just getting on with it, and I join the current of it and walk.

There’s a Tesco Express two streets away. I go through it with the deliberate blankness of a man who is not going to look at anything too hard, and I pick up a sandwich from the shelf without caring what’s in it, and a bottle of water, and I pay the self checkout with cash and leave.

I eat on the steps of something official looking across the road, the steps wide and empty at this hour. The sandwich is fine. It is absolutely fine, it has the correct components in the correct proportions, and I eat it methodically and watch London pass.

A few nights ago I was sitting at a small corner table in Richmond and a silver-haired man was taking our coats and there was a candle between us and a handwritten menu on a card and the specific sound a wine glass makes when it touches another wine glass in a quiet room.

What are we drinking to, he asked

This, I said.

This, he agreed.

He said it looking at me across the candle like there was nothing else in the room worth looking at, and I felt the key in my jacket pocket and I let myself believe, just for that one night, that everything was going to be alright.

I finish the sandwich. I sit there for a moment longer, watching a cab go past, watching London be London, enormous and indifferent and entirely unaware that I’m sitting on these steps holding the weight of having had something I wanted and finding out I was right to want it, and that being right is the one thing that helps least.

I go back to the hotel.

The room is the same. The same beige carpet, the same television still off. I stand in the middle of it and the decision settles over me the way decisions do when you’ve been avoiding them long enough that they stop waiting for permission.

There is one name left on the list.

I’ve been carrying it the same way I’ve carried all the others, which is to say constantly, which is to say it’s become the background condition of my existence the way any long-held thing does, the thing you’re always aware of without always thinking about. He’s been quiet for weeks, since the press coverage started, careful in the way that men like him get careful when the world is finally paying attention to the wrong people, but not gone. Not gone because men like him don’t run, not really, they adjust and wait and trust the protection that’s always protected them before.

It’s the only thing left that makes sense to do.

I’m not safe in the loft. I’m not safe anywhere traceable. I’m sitting in a beige hotel room with my bag and my laptop and the specific feeling of someone who has lost the only thing they weren’t expecting to lose, and the list has one name on it, and after that I don’t know.

I never planned the after.

For a little while, I thought the after might be a small flat in Brixton with a terrible cooker and a lamp I could angle the way I liked it. I thought the after might be someone who looked at me without calculation, who saw something in me worth looking at that wasn’t connected to anything he could use, who said be careful with two words instead of all the words it would have taken anyone else and meant every single thing I needed him to mean.

I thought the after might be real.

It was real. That’s what I can’t explain, what I have no language for that doesn’t sound like the thing I’d say if I was still trying to deceive. Every breakfast I made, every evening on a sofa, every moment, it was all real. I don’t know how to prove that. I don’t know how to prove it to him or to myself in the moments when I’m honest about how it started, and I understand why he hung up, and I understand why I’m in this room instead of anywhere connected to an actual life.

I understand it, and it is the most alone I have ever felt.

I pick up the bag.

One name.

Then whatever comes after.