How Not to Die Alone

by Richard Roper

They sat there in rigid silence,

Cameron immediately scrabbled to close the window.

horribly at odds with the

Cameron shut down his laptop and made a swift exit, like someone who’s just given a short statement outside court escaping the paparazzi, ignoring Meredith, who’d started to ask him the obvious question of what that e-mail had been about.

feeling shell-shocked.

Andrew decided to try to stay calm rather than add fuel to the fire.

The calm quickly deserted him.

of grime. “It’s a photo,” Peggy said, wiping it clean with her sleeve to reveal two people looking back at them.

They wore slightly sheepish smiles, as if they’d been waiting a long time to be exposed by someone clearing the dirt away.

His silver hair was fighting a losing battle against the win...

There were pronounced crow’s-feet around his eyes and wavy wrinkles on his forehead l...

an element of fortune-teller about her. She

The photographer had cut them off at the waist, making enough space for a sign above their heads that read: “And a few lilies blow.”

Peggy ran her fingertips slowly over the photo, as if hoping to glean information simply by touch.

or at least be given the opportunity to be there.”

and more often than not it’s just out of laziness that they’ve fallen out of touch.”

Andrew went to speak but Peggy jumped in again.

She quickly changed the subject and offered to buy him an “overpriced, possibly stale” cookie.

Peggy scratched at an imaginary stain on the tablecloth.

Andrew narrowed his eyes.

“Maybe,” Peggy said, her mouth twitching as she tried to hide...

“So you’re saying you want to go to this bookshop on the off chance that the person in the photograph with Alan is still working there?” Andrew said.

Peggy nodded emphatically, as if there had been a language barrier and she had finally broken through to him.

Andrew floundered, trying to think on his feet.

panicking at the thought that she wasn’t convinced by this story.

He hadn’t quite thought this last bit through, and it came out halfway between a normal question and a rhetorical one.

of staff appeared from nowhere and cleared up the mess with the efficiency of Formula 1 mechanics in the pit lane, and the moment passed.

“So what’s Barter Books like, then?” he said, trying to restore normality to the conversation.

scuppered

for reasons that were unclear,

But recently, in parallel with his mood, the whistle had become a low, melancholy sound, like a farmer instructing his sheepdog on its last outing before it was to be put down. It was by this method that Andrew was beckoned into Cameron’s office.

Please just be a bit more nimble about things, okay? It’s so easy to cascade this sort of thing.”

but Andrew couldn’t help but enjoy how illicit that seemed to make it.

It was at that point that Keith wandered into the office, humming

something a semitone out of tune and brandishing a heart attack between two slices of bread.

“What have I missed?”

a taste of what it would be like to send cold food back in a restaurant, or ask people to move down on the tube.

Not ideal, as you can imagine.

happens. So thanks, I suppose.”

but he hoped the ellipsis would get the general gist across.

Would it be too much of a stretch to think he looked handsome?

They were only feet away from Andrew now, and suddenly he was overcome with a desperate desire to stop and bottle the moment. To see Peggy rushing toward him like that, for him to be needed, to be an active participant in someone else’s life, to think that maybe he was more than just a lump of carbon being slowly ushered toward an unvarnished coffin; the feeling was one of pure, almost painful happiness, like a desperate embrace squeezing air from his lungs, and it was then that the realization hit him: he might not know what the future held—pain and loneliness and fear might still yet grind him into dust—but simply feeling the possibility that things could change for him was a start, like feeling the first hint of warmth from kindling rubbed together, the first wisp of smoke.

Andrew jammed the doors open, incurring both the anger of the guard on the platform and the unbridled tutting of passengers in the vestibule.

imagine this is the same feeling you get after a skydive.”

“What a hell-raiser you are,”

When she looked at him she seemed to do a double take. “W...

None of that patronizing, slow-talking nonsense. They’ll spot such bullsh*t a mile off. Just ask lots of questions and essentially treat them like you would

Her younger sister, Suze, on the other hand, conversed entirely through the medium of “would you rather” scenarios, which made things infinitely easier than Andrew was expecting.

She had a twinkle in her eye that made it seem like she was constantly on the cusp of laughing, so Andrew was finding it hard to treat the questions with the gravitas they clearly warranted.

“Would you rather be a horse that can time-travel or a talking turd?” was...