The new girl from Computer Services smiled at Richard a lot, as the evening went on, and he had nothing at all to say to her. He bought a round of drinks for the party, and the girl from Computer Services helped him carry them from the bar back to their table. Gary went off to the men’s room, and the girl from Computer Services came and sat next to Richard, taking his place. Richard’s head was filled with the clink of glasses, and the blare of the jukebox, and the sharp smell of beer and spilt Bacardi and cigarette smoke. He tried to listen to the conversations going on at the table, and he found that he could no longer concentrate on what anyone was saying, and, which was worse, that he was not interested in any of what he was able to hear.
And it came to him then, as clearly and as certainly as if he had been watching it on the big screen at the Odeon, Leicester Square: the rest of his life. He would go home tonight with the girl from Computer Services, and they would make gentle love, and tomorrow, it being Saturday, they would spend the morning in bed. And then they would get up, and together they would remove his possessions from the packing cases, and put them away. In a year, or a little less, he would marry the girl from Computer Services, and get another promotion, and they would have two children, a boy and a girl, and they would move out to the suburbs, to Harrow or Croydon or Hampstead or even as far away as distant Reading.
And it would not be a bad life. He knew that, too. Sometimes there is nothing you can do.
When Gary came back from the toilet, he looked around in puzzlement. Everyone was there except . . . “Dick?” he asked “Has anyone seen Richard?”
The girl from Computer Services shrugged.
Gary went outside, to Berwick Street. The cold of the night air was like a splash of water to his face. He could taste winter in the air. He called, “Dick? Hey? Richard?”
“Over here.”
Richard was leaning against a wall, in the shadows. “Just getting a breath of fresh air.”
“Are you all right?” asked Gary.
“Yes,” said Richard. “No. I don’t know.”
“Well,” said Gary, “that covers your options. Do you want to talk about it?”
Richard looked at him seriously. “You’ll laugh at me.”
“I’ll do that anyway.”
Richard looked at Gary. Then Gary was relieved to see him smile, and he knew that they were still friends. Gary looked back at the pub. Then he put his hands into his coat pockets. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s walk. You can get it off your chest. Then I’ll laugh at you.”
“Bastard,” said Richard, sounding a lot more like Richard than he had in recent weeks.
“It’s what friends are for.”
They began to amble off, under the streetlights. “Look, Gary,” Richard began. “Do you ever wonder if this is all there is?”
“What?”
Richard gestured vaguely, taking in everything. “Work. Home. The pub. Meeting girls. Living in the city. Life. Is that all there is?”
“I think that sums it up, yes,” said Gary.
Richard sighed. “Well,” he said, “for a start, I didn’t go to Majorca. I mean, I really didn’t go to Majorca.”
Richard talked as they walked up and down the warren of tiny Soho back streets between Regent Street and the Charing Cross Road. He talked, and talked, beginning with finding a girl bleeding on the pavement, and trying to help, because he couldn’t just leave her there, and what happened next. And when they got too cold to walk they went into an all-night greasy spoon cafe. It was a proper one, the kind that cooked everything in lard, and served cups of serious tea in large chipped white mugs shiny with bacon grease. Richard and Gary sat and Richard talked while Gary listened, and then they ordered fried eggs and baked beans and toast and sat and ate them, while Richard continued to talk, and Gary continued to listen. They mopped up the last of their egg yolks with the toast. They drank more tea, until eventually Richard said, ” . . . and then Door did something with the key, and I was back again. In London Above. Well, the real London. And, well, you know the rest.”
There was a silence. “That’s all,” said Richard. He finished his tea.
Gary scratched his head. “Look,” he said, at length. “Is this real? Not some kind of horrible joke? I mean, somebody with a camera isn’t about to leap out from behind a screen or something and tell me I’m on Candid Camera?”
“I sincerely hope not,” said Richard. “You . . . do you believe me?”
Gary looked at the bill on their table, counted out pound coins, and dropped them onto the Formica, where they sat beside a plastic tomato ketchup container in the shape of an oversized tomato, old ketchup caked black about its nozzle. “I believe that, well, something happened to you, obviously . . . Look, more to the point, do you believe it?”