You Are Here

by David Nicholls

There is who we want to be, she thought, and there is who we are. As we get older the former gives way to the latter,

The point is to remember this process doesn’t stop just because humans are here. It’s happening now and it’ll happen when the last human is long gone. Mighty forces beneath your feet. Nothing permanent, everything changing.

He was sincere in his passion for the subject but sincerity invites ridicule and the more passionate he sounded, the more they’d laugh,

For Cleo, the solution to a problem lay in the presence of other people, while Michael depended on their absence, and while the kindness of a friend was a precious and touching thing, it could also feel like an imposition.

As a civilian reader she might, she supposed, be turned on by all this, sleazy and facile though it was, but a certain professional distance was required and so she worked on methodically, wondering if anyone’s sex really did taste of the ocean and, if so, was this a good thing? Maybe it was a question of which ocean. No one wanted to taste of the English Channel.

I think he might be here for a good time not a long time, if you know what I mean.’ ‘I don’t.’ ‘Whereas you’re here for a long time not a good time.’

Private, intimate, a book was something she could pull around and over herself, like a quilt.

People who said they were separated, not divorced, were like people who insisted that a tomato was a fruit, not a vegetable: technically correct, but on shaky ground. No one ate tomato ice-cream.

The last week had changed her and now she must change back. For the most part she’d been offline, so she set about restoring her own default settings, scrolling through her old websites and social media. Deep-sea divers returning to the surface have to acclimatise to their old environment, and this is how the internet felt, absorbing the fights and feuds she’d missed, the rage and the predictions of the world’s end until she got the old feeling back, tension tightening her shoulders, all sense of pastoral well-being gone.

But life seemed fuller, more populated than it had a year ago. She went to exhibitions and films, sometimes alone, sometimes with a friend, and when she’d saved enough of Neil’s money, which was her money, she went on a solo trip to Italy, role-playing a character in a Forster novel.

Instead they went to fashion stores in Soho – stores not shops – where customers queued as if it were a nightclub. She’d not queued to enter a shop since the pandemic but she loved seeing his excitement, and once inside she’d find a chair and read her book, nodding to the music, godmotherly but never grandmotherly. In the evenings they’d get take-out – take-out not takeaway

She’d had her hair cut a week before so that it could settle a little and considerable thought had gone into her outfit too. A long black coat, long black pleated A-line skirt, black tights, black jumper in budget cashmere, the look was ‘wronged woman in modern-dress Chekhov production’.