Phil looks at the page I’m on.
‘Can we call them “dirty”? Isn’t that a bit contrary to health and safety?’
‘It’s accepted to mean “calorific stuff dumped on top”, now. Marks and Spencer do dirty fries.’
‘Oh. Right you are.’
Phil shakes his head in dismay at his monitor.
I drag an image of the El Gringo Dog – jalapeños, avocado and crushed tortilla chips topping – onto the page and wish I did a more useful job, like Ed teaching kids or Justin caring for old people. It’s pretty hard to tell yourself to soldier on so that the region gets vital information about the Triple XXX Ringstinger Chilli Dog.
What would Susie want me to do? I ask myself, as an antidote for feeling useless. I know the answer immediately. She’d want me to check on her dad, beyond one stilted phone call. It’s intimidating, given I’m unsure about who I will encounter.
I remember when she first mentioned he was struggling, a couple of years ago. She said: ‘I caught my dad looking up “ice cream” on Wikipedia. I was, like – “Dad, are you thinking of a retirement business, churning your own?” He said ‘“It’s the darndest thing, I can’t remember what ice cream is. Is it ice, and cream?”’
Susie talked him through mint choc chip and vanilla flavours and cornets by the seaside, and he laughed and said, ‘Of course!’
At the time, we brushed it off as a slightly worrying but ultimately quirky bout of senior forgetfulness.
It sounds ridiculous, but Susie’s dad used to run his own engineering company and was an amateur tennis champion. Iain Hart, with his soft Caledonian burr, was a self-made, old-school, head-of-the-family type, with a bristling moustache. He was a very involved governor at our school, a member of the Masons, a bootstraps Tory who brooked no self pity. It didn’t feel as if he could get dementia. We were sure he’d kick dementia’s arse until it apologised.
In my early twenties, I was briefly in a house share with two others where my female housemate was never there due to shift work, and my male housemate was a lunatic and a creep, given to throwing furniture around and warning me he’d pursue me if I tried to leave.
Susie told her dad. In absence of me having a dad (in the UK) to do the same for me, he barrelled round in his BMW 5 Series, parked right outside with a noisy screech of brakes, audibly pulling the handbrake on so hard it was like he was cocking a gun. He banged on the door, marched in and told me to pack my things in front of the perp. Mr Hart then calmly informed him if he touched a hair on my head, he’d find himself floating in the Trent. My housemate suddenly wasn’t such a bully, and insisted meekly that I’d misunderstood. I’ll be forever grateful for that intervention.
After work, I catch a bus heading the other way out of town and walk the short distance from the bus stop to the Harts’ family home. It’s too cold for kids to be playing out – and possibly too much in the age of Minecraft – and the streets seem eerily quiet, compared to my less expensive postcode.
These houses with their bay windows and neatly delineated, walled territories used to seem like imposing castles to me when I was small, in the long summers of childhood. They’re far more quotidian suburbia in my thirties. Which is ironic, really, given I’m even less likely to inhabit one after piddling away my career chances in my twenties: they’re further out of reach than ever.
The cost of this area means the demographic skews older – not within the reach of young professionals and families, who, if they do take on this size of mortgage, would probably go for something more fashionable they could stick bifold doors and a marble kitchen island into.
I walk up to the Harts, No. 67, and as I do, I think: how many times did I stand on these very paving flags as a kid and think nothing of it? Looking forward to a swimming trip, or tossing gaily about in Susie’s huge bedroom, gossiping and trying on lip glosses, the consistency of runny honey.
The wrongness of all this hits me once again.
Life’s veered sharply away from the script. We’re travelling a branch of an alternative future we were never meant to be on. Some other Eve, in a parallel place, is having after-work drinks with Susie right now. Not only is that Eve a different person, so is the one at the pub quiz. That night was the last night of The Past, and we had no idea.
My heart speeds up as I press the old-fashioned button doorbell that ding-dongs dimly in the hallway beyond. I guiltily hope Susie’s dad’s not in. But within seconds the inner door opens and he appears.
‘Hello, Eve!’ he says. He looks a little more sunken in his sweater than I remember, a little thinner on top, but otherwise incredibly well and unchanged, all considered.
‘Hi!’ I say. And: ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d remember me,’ which is meant as politeness and, I think, maybe not what you say to someone with Alzheimer’s.
‘Of course I do. You’re Susie’s lovely friend.’
I am momentarily so wrong-footed I can’t speak, both by him knowing my connection to his daughter, and the mention of his daughter.
‘Yes!’ I say. ‘Well. Hope I’m lovely, haha.’
‘Come in, come in, good to see you,’ he hustles me in, seemingly with real enthusiasm and pleasure.
The hallway beyond is a time capsule to me – the same round table by the side of the wide stairs, with the cream plastic rotary landline sitting on a doily kind of mini tablecloth. The thick plushy pile beneath our feet is the colour of a hamster.
Fashions of all kinds passed the Harts by. Susie’s glitzy, ritzy mum liked Dubonnets and lemonade, a Dynasty blow-dry and her downstairs loo to be a symphony of shrimp-pink. Adolescent Susie declared it all ‘naff’; I loved it as pure exotica.
‘I wonder if you wanted any shopping getting in, see how you’re getting on?’ I say.
‘Hah, thank you, I’m not that useless yet! The only drive out the car gets is to Sainsbury’s.’
My plan with Mr Hart was simply: make him this non-specific offer, which, if he seems entirely lucid and announces he has no need of such help, I can row back from without too much embarrassment. It didn’t seem worthwhile plotting out a strategy when I had no idea what his state of mind would be like.
Now what?
‘No, I’m very well, thank you, Eve. But how are you? I’ve not seen you in ages! Susie never brings you round.’
I flinch at the mention of her. I had guessed he wouldn’t have held onto the fact she’s dead, but it’s still a shock for him to demonstrate it.
‘I’ve been busy,’ I say.
‘Sure you two haven’t had a falling-out?’ he says.
‘Definitely not,’ I say, and then, haltingly: ‘Close as ever.’ As I say those three words, my voice suddenly thickens and my throat closes up, and I pray he doesn’t notice.
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ he says, and I accept, thinking, I will get a look at the state of things, domestically.
Susie insisted that while her dad didn’t have a grasp of which year it was, or correspondingly, his time of life – thinking he was off work, marvelling that his holidays felt so lengthy – he was absolutely himself regards every practicality. She’d been through his bank statements, made sure his clothes were clean, checked the fridge. There was never anything to do. Chunks of his memory had fallen away like masonry, but tasks right in front of him were fine.