G: The Go-Between

Having nothing else to do I simply wandered through the wet
sodium-lit streets of a city as endless as the night sky, drifting
aimlessly through a moving ocean of humanity that went on and on in any
direction that I cared to walk. Around each crowded corner, beyond each
traffic-locked junction, more shops, more lights, more houses, more
people staring through me, hurrying past with a nervous glance in my
direction, forever on the move, forever striving to be somewhere else.
As my feet grew tired and the slow drizzle began to soak through my
clothing I gravitated as always to the kind of pub that catered for the
likes of me, the people with nowhere else to go. Bright lights outside,
dim lights inside, unobtrusive vaguely sentimental music just loud
enough to permit relaxed conversation or to cover up its absence. A
seating plan that blurred the distinction between those who were on
their own and those who were not. The honey smeared on the human
fly-paper that gathered up the rootless.

I ordered a drink and stood with it in my hand, scanning the faces of
the people at the tables, making use of that radar by which we who are
alone and don't want to be can detect others like ourselves. The
highest reading came from a young black woman huddled into the far
corner of the room, sitting alone at a table for four, with an almost
full glass by her hand. I made my way directly to where she sat.

"May I?"

She smiled and motioned towards a chair. I introduced myself and sat
down. Her name, she told me, was Sammi. My opening question was easy
and obvious: where was she from? It was almost all that I needed to
ask. She launched, hesitantly at first, into a long and detailed
account of a life that had begun in an African missionary hospital and
taken her eventually to a shared apartment in the student nurses'
residence of another grander hospital, thousands of miles away in west
London. Between there and here she had known good times and bad, love
and loss, pain and joy, children and commitment, family and the leaving
of family, the hope of a dazzling future in a far off land, the slow
coming to terms with a much less glamorous reality. In essence it was
the story of everybody who had ever responded to the lure of the neon
fairyland that was permanently just out of reach where the end of the
rainbow touched the ground. When it was my turn I told my story too,
beginning with my arrival as an innocent and unworldly teenager from
rural Ireland, standing transfixed between my two big suitcases on the
Liverpool landing stage, too scared to ask the way to the train
station. I told her of the jobs that hadn't worked out, the
relationships that had floundered, the dreams that had somehow slipped
away as the years piled one upon another.

We were both of an age when all such things ought really to have been
resolved. Apart from the shallowest of externals, I thought, there was
no significant difference between us.

I was certain that neither of us wanted to be alone that night, and
that each was waiting for the other to make a move of some kind. It was
a situation in which I had always felt particularly clumsy and inept,
but bolstering up my confidence with the clich? that I had absolutely
nothing to lose I finally managed to gather enough courage to ask if I
could walk her back to the nurses' residence block where she lived. We
left the pub hand in hand and within a couple of hundred yards I was
shielding her from the rain with my right arm and the flap of my jacket
around her shoulder. We shared our first kiss in a darkened doorway
beneath the awning of a shuttered pawnbroker's shop.

I could feel her eagerness, the way her lips seemed to cling to mine,
her hands covering all the territory from my head and neck down to my
back and my buttocks, circling around to my chest, to my tummy and my
belt, and below... I slipped my right hand beneath the end of her
blouse and gently eased it out of her jeans so that I could feel the
warm flesh of her back, then very slowly moved my caresses around to
the front.

Breaking her lips free she whispered in my ear: "Can I ask you
something?" I nodded and waited for her to find the right words.

"It's about my room-mate," she said almost apologetically.

"Your room-mate?" I was puzzled.

"My room-mate is very unhappy tonight," she explained with obvious
embarrassment. "Maybe... tonight... you could make her happy instead of
me?"

I took my hand out of her clothing. "Make your room-mate happy instead
of you?" This was positively the weirdest situation in which I had ever
found myself. "What are you talking about?"

"She is a very nice girl. A white girl. Do you like white girls too?" I
nodded inanely. "Tonight, you go with Natalie. Okay? Maybe another
night you go with me."

I swallowed hard. "Maybe you would like to explain to me exactly what
you're talking about," I repeated weakly. Suddenly feeling rather cold
and insecure I instinctively began to tuck Sammi's blouse back into her
jeans.

"Natalie had a bad day today," she said quietly. "Very bad day. She had
a row with her lover. She needs you more than I do. You go with Natalie
tonight."

Although my head was slightly reeling I could see a kind of logic and
honesty in what Sammi was saying. We weren't in love. What we had to
offer one another we could get from almost anyone. Closeness. Physical
pleasure. A little tenderness. A shoulder to cry on perhaps. What was
the point of pretending that we were special to one another?

The traffic sped by on the big dual carriageway beside us, making a
hissing sound as each set of tires traversed the wet tarmac. The
headlights intermittently lit up the features of Sammi's small and
elegant face. I stared into her eyes and wondered what it was that so
offended me about her suggestion. It was the breaking of the illusion,
I realized. It was her refusal to collude in the fiction that we cared
about one another, that we had achieved some kind of contact that made
us less separate, less alone.

"What makes you think that Natalie would like me, Sammi?" I asked
quietly.

"I know the kind of men that Natalie likes. I always choose for
her."

My puzzlement deepened. "You always choose for Natalie?"

"Natalie is shy. She... isn't very good with men."

I felt my brow wrinkle with perplexity. "If she's shy, how can she cope
with&;#8230; this? With you taking men back for her?"

"It's hard to explain. Come back with me. Talk to Natalie. See for
yourself."

Before I could get a grip on the strange mixture of feelings that were
pulling me in different directions Sammi had taken hold of my hand and
was leading me briskly through the drizzling rain towards the entrance
of the brooding grey nurses' residence. In the lift we said nothing,
Sammi merely smiled at me reassuringly, after which her face relaxed
into an expression that most resembled quiet satisfaction. Totally
unfamiliar with this strange role into which I had somehow become
slotted I no longer held Sammi's hand or touched her, but just stood
impassively by her side, rather wishing that my ordeal might come to a
speedy end.

Sammi unlocked the inner apartment door and stepped aside to let me go
in first. Her room-mate, small and blonde and really very pretty, had
been sitting at the window looking down at the rain and the traffic. No
doubt she had seen us come to the front entrance. She turned around and
smiled at me and I could see that she had been crying. I was beginning
to feel a little better about the weird situation. Natalie was indeed a
tempting prospect. She looked at me for a moment, then looked past me
at Sammi. "He's very nice," she said quietly, "you are good to me." It
was strange to be talked about by a woman with whom I was supposedly
about to spend the night. A woman who had said nothing to me, not even
hello.

She walked towards me, raising her arms and opening her hands,
seemingly to embrace me, but continued straight past, and when I turned
around she was kissing Sami no less passionately than I had kissed her
myself only minutes before.

Stunned, I watched the two of them for a moment, then instinctively
drew back towards the door and the corridor leading to the lift. They
made no attempt to stop me or to communicate with me in any way.

I looked back and their embrace was becoming ever more abandoned, so
that I felt like a voyeur of something very private and rather
beautiful. I gently closed the door and left them alone. My head reeled
with incoherent emotions, a twinge of disappointment, acute
embarrassment, but absolutely no bitterness or malice or resentment. I
knew that I had served my purpose.

In the street below, the river of people was still on the move and the
next pub was only a couple of hundred yards down the road. I buttoned
up my coat and stepped back into the endless human stream, feeling its
comforting anonymity close in around me