Friday night found me at home in the flat I'd shared with Phil, alone and with nothing very pressing to do for the first time since he'd died just a few weeks before. Everywhere there were memories, reminders of good times and bad times between us, souvenirs and mementos from things we'd done together, places we'd been ... Most of his clothes were still in the bedroom, of course, a tooth brush of his sitting in the bathroom, even his *smell* lingered round the place, I swear. I sat on the floor for a while, not wanting to use the sofa we'd shared – well, before he'd ended up in the wheelchair – not really wishing to do anything very much ... trying not to remember and remembering all the same. I'd loved the guy more deeply than I'd ever imagined loving anyone; he was gone; I had to live with it. Or without it, I thought, giving myself a grim little smile.

I was hungry, I thought – or, at least, I knew I *should* be hungry – so I ought to cook. I also ought to look at some of the mail that had accumulated while I'd been away – I'd been genuinely too tired to do anything with it earlier in the week – and begin to get things sorted so that I could sell the place. Instead, I sat on the floor and felt sorry for myself. Sorry for Phil, too, sorry for all the things that might have been ... but mainly sorry for me. Not what all those helpful books on managing the grieving process would recommend, I'm sure, but that was what I did. Frankly, I wallowed. At least for a while.

Then I pulled myself together a bit – I could imagine how a lot of my friends and colleagues would react to seeing me this way and the thought at least sufficed to get me up on my feet. Once vertical, however, I still couldn't really get myself interested in doing anything even marginally productive, so I sort of slumped against the wall for a while. I realised that I needed to get out of the flat, even thought about finding a hotel for the night, then concluded that a drink and distraction was probably sufficient for my purposes ... except that the sort of distraction I would inevitably get if I wandered into any of the local bars on my own on a Friday night was unlikely to be helpful. So I thought about getting something organised, running through the very brief list of people I'd be happy to meet up with in a mood like this – of whom Dave was in hospital, May had already done her bit in looking after me After The Event ... and in a way that made me hesitate slightly about setting up anything similar, this being another distraction I felt I could probably do without ... and, well, a few others, mostly people I'd worked with over the years or people I knew through Phil. And the latter options would presumably be keener on talking about either work or the dear departed than I could cope with, so ... I was a bit stuck.

In fact, I'd just resolved to risk the Napier – the pub on the corner, where I knew some of the bar staff, could rely on a certain degree of shielding from predatory males – when my mobile rang. I was distracted enough to answer the thing without checking who was calling – I think I assumed it would be Dave – and it took me a moment or two to recognise the voice: Gareth, our new lawyer, apparently just escaped from an impromptu leaving do from his now former employers. My heart fell, to be honest – I *really* wasn't in the mood to talk about work, let alone with someone who I might just have caused to screw up a promising career – but I kept my voice cheerful enough while he explained that he was at a a loose end, too, wondered if I felt like a drink, even promising *not* to talk about the business, like he was a mind reader or something.

Without even thinking about it I agreed a venue with him, made a call for a taxi and within five minutes I had my coat on and was off out the door.

*  **  ***  ****  *****  ****  ***  **  *

In fact, Gareth turned out to be the answer to a maiden's prayer – or, at least, he would have been if I'd been a maiden and/or in the habit of praying. Whatever, the pub he'd suggested, just south of the river but on a back street and almost quiet for a Friday night, turned out to be both friendly and comfortable, Gareth's conversation both witty and amusing – and strictly not work related, as he'd promised – and, hell, the place even did reasonably priced food when the hunger pangs finally did catch up with me.

Instead of work we talked about ... stuff ... his adventures on the end of a climbing rope and some of the dafter things people did with ice axes, for instance, my early attempts to master Teutonic philosophy and both of our various excesses as students and as actual grown adults. Inevitably, this brought us on to the subject of relationships but he knew enough about my recent events that even this was an OK topic. I expressed some surprise that he was stolidly single – genuine surprise rather than the polite platitudes I think he might have expected: He was a bright, intelligent bloke, funny when he wanted to be and, as I put it to him, not bad looking for a dwarf. Even that got me no more than a guffaw in return – well, a guffaw and something acerbic about my own relatively elevated height – and so the moment passed. Perhaps significantly, I didn't talk to him about Dave – I assumed he'd picked up on the implicit arrangement between us either in Cumbria or when he was visiting Hertford Square and to be frank just at that moment I didn't really want to go into that situation ... because I wasn't sure that I could explain what was actually going on, quite what the *implicit arrangement* actually was ...

So I steered the conversation onto safer ground, things moved on and we had a very pleasant evening. Neither of us drank enough to get seriously intoxicated – we really had been talking a lot, I realised – but both of us were surprised when the pub started closing around us. After which, he graciously – maybe even chivalrously – walked me up to a nearby station to pick up a cab and wandered off into the night. He shook my hand on leaving, didn't give me a hug or a kiss or anything, just a smile and a friendly wave goodbye.
I wasn't sure how I felt about that.

*  **  ***  ****  *****  ****  ***  **  *

Back in the flat, I found the memory of the evening was a reasonable solace – or maybe it was just the alcohol. In any event, I found myself doing the routine stuff one does on returning home, without getting hung up on memories and stuff, successfully making coffee, undressing and getting myself to bed without renewed bouts of angst. OK, I chose to sleep in the spare bedroom – having to find an old sleeping bag as I couldn't be arsed to actually make the bed up – but all in all I felt a little better about life.

Not that I could sleep, of course ... there were too many thoughts whirling away in my subconscious. I deliberately tried to think about work – the lesser of many evils, in the circumstances – and that made me realise that I'd plain forgotten to phone the Hospital, find out how Dave was getting on. Which caused me another brief moment of angst, till I reasoned to myself that Hospitals were twenty four hour facilities, so it wouldn't be too much hassle to phone them now, despite its being gone midnight. I even had the main switchboard number in my mobile's memory – it was another of Phil's regular haunts, at least in the earlier stage of his illness – so no excuses really ... and what did I care if they thought I was a bit odd?

So I called them, got a particularly dozy switchboard person to put me through to the ward and finally got to talk to someone there. Someone who'd actually never heard of Dave, denied having a patient anything like him anywhere about the place. Which I thought was a bit odd, but, eventually, when I got to talk to the nurse in charge of the shift and when she'd gone through a bunch of paper notes – did these people not have computers? – the problem became clear: He'd been discharged earlier in the day, they had other people to care for, I could presumably get him at home.

Which, of course, I could have done – late though it was – except that, as soon as I'd ended the conversation with the nurses, a flood of new thoughts struck me: Why hadn't he let me know directly? How, in fact, had he got home? I knew there were a bunch of stairs leading up to his flat, doubted whether he was fully fit to deal with them, thought he'd probably needed assistance of some sort, knew that the NHS couldn't afford that degree of helpfulness ... So who had he called?

I lay back on the bed and thought about it all ... and didn't get a lot of sleep for the rest of the night.

*  **  ***  ****  *****  ****  ***  **  *

I finally bestirred myself about seven the next morning – quite late for me – and dragged myself into the shower, mind still clogged with unresolved difficulties and a whole heap of worries that my subconscious just wouldn't let go. Not that the rest of me felt up to dealing with them, just at that point, so I tried for a burst of focused procrastination – a useful way of getting stuff you don't really want to do done by using it to avoid doing something even less desirable – and began to bag Phil's stuff. Or, actually, I sat and drank several litres of coffee and *mentally* sorted it all – things his family might like to have, a very few things I thought I'd keep and the majority to go to one charity shop or another. I did get round to taking all his excess medication back to the pharmacist, but that was only really an excuse to get me out of the house, spend some time in one of the local parks.

After a couple of hours of this sort of dithering I began to feel that the day was beginning to spin out of control, a little, and more to the point I was beginning to worry that if this sort of mood took hold I would never get the stuff I actually *needed* to do sorted in time for our Big Showdown on Monday ... or in about forty eights hours time, to put it another way. Which thought concentrated my mind a little, so I got it together to dig out the laptop, began to play with my ideas for the meeting – trying to get the ducks in a row, as Carla might have said, or at least pin down the inchoate sense of possibility I felt, put it all into some form that I could usefully present to the world.

In fact, after a while things *did* begin to make sense, or – at least, a little *more* sense – but there were still major gaps, areas that might or might not represent potential threats ... or even opportunities. Chief amongst these were the position of the Californians, our initial funders not having even told us even who would be attending on their behalf, while I'd had no luck in contacting the apparently recuperating Carla directly. Then there was the legal stuff – Gareth and I had been through the relevant contracts in great detail, thought we saw some possibilities in the finer details but then again the whole set up was so strange that we weren't entirely sure that we hadn't missed something – or maybe couldn't believe that PCW *had*, given that they'd drafted the things in the first place ... albeit with Carla's and – hah! – Dave's input at the time.

Similarly, we still had a lot of questions around quite who might carry the can for outstanding liabilities if the whole thing did finally collapse ... or who might to stand to gain if Seffi and Naz were right about having a couple of lucrative contracts 'almost in the bag' – and the impacts and ramifications for a large number of more or less innocent by-standers. Obviously, we would all be out of a job – though, with the exception of Gareth we'd all probably agree that it was a fun experience while it lasted and get on with our lives regardless if it all got taken away – but there were others such as Colin the architect and his practice, Rosie, working away fixing stuff up in Cumbria, Jane-the-teachers dream of creating an eco-paradise on 'our' land, a variety of hotels and hostelries who could have expected business from us ... hell, even the local development agency, set to lose their big success story of the year.

Actually, I briefly wondered about whether the last could prove useful to the argument – Dave had told me that he'd had to *turn down* grants from them – but quickly realised that what I really needed was to sit down and talk to someone about all this, that the best way to sort it all out was to go through it with someone who would challenge my assumptions, point out the gaps in my logic and generally play devil's advocate. The problem was, I thought, mentally listing the possible candidates, that Dave was *hors de combat* (and possibly other things, my subconscious put in), Seffi was either in Germany or *en route* back, May didn't really understand this world and Gareth ...

Well, Gareth was the obvious choice, really – he was a *lawyer* for god's sake, had juist chucked in a fairly lucrative job to join us even as we seemed to be heading for the rocks and ... he was a really nice bloke. He was also, of course, a really nice bloke with whom I'd spent a really nice evening in a really nice pub just the night before. How would he take it – what would he think – if I phoned and asked to meet so soon after? Or, perhaps, what was I thinking, really, and what did I actually *want* him to think?
I was in a loop, here, realising perhaps for the first time how much Dave's failure to let me know about his discharge from the hospital had rankled – and how his friendship with Niusha was more of a problem than I'd have wished it to be. Nonetheless, I had to admit that the whole company was basically Dave's idea – his baby, in a way – and he probably ought to be involved in developing whatever fight back we could manage.

So, I thought, fuck it – he'd given me keys to his flat, I'd go and see him. Kill two birds with one stone, in fact ... sort out some of the professional stuff, such as the future of the company, and maybe get some sort of clue as to what was going on between us. Or what was going on, perhaps, within me.

So I picked up the lap top, grabbed my bag and went off to see Dave. But before I did, I rang Gareth, arranged to meet him the next day in Hertford Square...

#####################

Feedback? That would be nice: extrusionuk@googlemail.com
