Well, B says. We’re sitting at the bar, neither of us have eaten. I’m floating somewhere way above myself. Well. I say. Nothing changes. She smells the same, she looks the same. They’ve been together for two years. She will, one day, be a solicitor. She is moving house, even that is nothing new.

 

What I really want to talk about is a large pink body plastered against the window pane, waiting, about the netted curtain pattern dappling the kitchen wall, the chlorine smell of a turquoise towel hanging on the balcony in the sun, and half a bottle of bad vodka a day. I tell my grandmother, water. She clutches my hand at every dip in the road, at every curb. We walk very slowly and still I’m sweating. ‘Don’t stay away long,’ she pleads, and the next morning she says she thinks she might die, the world lurches and spins when she moves. Perhaps this is the last time we’ll see her, C and I decide. ‘When I die you can take my rings, they won’t fit you, and when I die I will leave money for driving lessons.’ By nine every night she is tearful, shakes up half a bottle of Klarer in an old chocolate sauce bottle we had the last of with ice-cream. She pours the chocolate alcohol residue from the bottle and squirts cream into shot glasses. C retches. One night she pulls out the old photo albums, the first time since he died. In my favourite photo she wore a white dress, stitched the hearts on herself, and danced flamenco with my grandfather, who was eight years older. Even in black and white she is very colourful, at twenty-two. ‘I used to be thin,’ she says wistfully, ’56 kilo. How much do you weigh?’ She really really wants to know, she’s leaning forward in her seat. I pretend I only know in stone, and she sighs disappointedly.

 

For breakfast, a glass of proseco, one bread roll – butter salt – soaked in black unsugared coffee.

 

The love of her life  will always live on a mountain in Bayern. Sixteen, tall, blond-haired blue-eyed boy. C and I laugh, we need photos to believe her. When she dies we will find the lost box of photos. At 6:15 am the day we leave she listens to her old voicemail messages. ‘What are you doing?’ I ask, angrily into the voice of my great uncle talking about his new Mercedes, at a soft-around-the-edges shape in a dressing gown. ‘Checking,’ she answers, and makes fleishwurst-und-senf breadrolls, a Hanuta in tinfoil, a bruised apple. This is the first time I have left angry; when we were younger we cried and waved from the back window of my father’s newest fiat, but then that was when she used to stand on the curb and wave back.

 

Instead B talks about J’s drugs, J about B’s leaving early. People shoot snide side-ways looks across the no-man’s land which is me. I walk home in the rain, fall into a shrub on the way, run past the ominous noises in Sainsbury’s carpark, like foxes screaming only worse, and eat a pepper muffin.