Knowledge Is Money

Right. You’re back, and you’ll remember where I left you: alone in a dark office at nine at night, a pencil in my hand, thinking about a green coat. I said I was going to have to go and see her. So this is me going.

But I owe you a confession first, because I let you think that was the first time the thought had beaten me. It wasn’t.

I’d been before. Once.

Maureen caught me leaving.

"Meeting," I said, before she asked, which is the first mistake a liar makes.

She looked up from her desk. Put her pen down, which is how you know you’re in trouble.

"You’ve had your good coat on since half seven," she said. "You don’t wear the good coat for a meeting. You wear the good coat for a funeral, or a bank." She held my eye a second. "Or a woman."

I said nothing, which with Maureen is the same as signing your name to it.

"None of my business." She picked the pen back up. "Take the A13 careful, it’s wet. And whatever it is, don’t go doing anything at forty you were too daft to do at twenty."

"That’s the trouble, Maureen." It was out before I could stop it. "I’m going to do the thing I was too daft to do at twenty. I’m going to leave it alone."

She looked at me over her glasses for a long moment.

"Well," she said. "That’s growth, that is."

And she let me go, and went back to her invoices, and did not know that the road I was driving to is the road I died on. Nobody knows that. Nobody alive but me.

Her name is Karen.

In the life I already used up, the one that ended with my Astra folded into the back of a Tesco lorry, I was married to her for five years.

I met her at a wedding when I was thirty, a green dress, a borrowed suit, and I told her for four minutes exactly what was in my head about a five-a-side keeper because I was too tired to do the thing I always did, which was try.

And she laughed, and she stayed, and it was the one time in my life being exactly myself was enough.

Then I spent five years shoving her back out the door I’d got her through, planning every gesture until it curdled, until the morning she sat me down at the kitchen table and I said nothing useful because I’d spent all my useful at the start and never found more.

I lost the best thing I ever had because I could not leave a good thing alone.

And then I died, and woke up twenty-four.

Which means she is out there right now, twenty years old, in a chemist’s off the Uxbridge Road, a girl who has never been to that wedding and never worn that dress and never heard my name.

She told me once, years from now, in a kitchen that hasn’t been built, that she’d worked there when she was young.

The first June, when I was nobody, forty quid and a polo shirt and a tip from God, I drove up and stood at that glass and watched her paint a stranger’s eyeliner, and I could have walked in and said her name and the church and the song that’ll be playing the night she finally gives in.

And I said cheers, and bought a sandwich I never ate, and drove home, because I had nothing to walk in there and be.

I told myself never again. Not now, Karen. Cat off the counter. I said it through a World Cup and a court case and a hundred Saturdays.

And then I built everything. And the never-again stopped holding, because the only thing that had ever stopped me was having nothing to offer, and now I had it all.

I’ll be honest about the drive, because I was not a sane man for the length of it.

I sat on the North Circular, thunk, thunk went the wipers, doing the sums on my own life. Twenty-four on paper. Forty-one in my head. Sixteen years of knowing what’s coming. A striker’s whole career sat behind my teeth and half a million pounds in a bank in Essex that I conjured out of thin air.

And I was spending every scrap of it, a dead man’s entire impossible hand, to drive across London and sit in a car outside a shop I was not going to walk into.

I got as far as Ealing, tick, tick went the indicator, and thought: go home, you lunatic, you’ve a midfielder to sign and a season in three weeks and this helps nobody.

And then I kept driving, because a man does not get to build everything and then flinch at the one door he built it all to be able to walk through.

I parked across the road at nine.

The rain came down the windscreen in sheets, drumming on the roof, and I wiped the glass with my sleeve and I looked through the front of a little chemist’s between a dry cleaner’s and a place that unlocks phones.

And there she was.

Green smock a size too big. Hair up. Up on her toes reaching a box down off a high shelf, shuffling the ones in front of it, saying something over her shoulder to the older woman on the till that set them both off laughing, until the older one flicked a hand at her, get on, get on.

Twenty years old. Ordinary. Alive.

And I’ll tell you what I had driven a hundred miles expecting, and what I got instead, because they were not the same thing.

I expected to want her. To sit there aching outside a house I used to live in.

What I got was grief.

Because that was not my wife. My wife was a woman of thirty-odd with ten years in her, our ten years, the arguments and the in-jokes and the table.

This was a stranger who had never met me and never met the woman she’d become with me, stood twenty feet and a pane of glass and a whole unlived life away.

You cannot go back for someone who has not been there yet.

I sat a good twenty minutes. Long enough a traffic warden clocked me and thought better of it.

An old boy went in, slow, on a stick, and I watched her through the glass come round the end of the counter to him. Reach the thing down he couldn’t.

Read the label out, and then again, patient, because he’d left his glasses at home. Tip his change into his palm coin by coin so he could count it himself.

And that is what did it. Not a thing you could point at. A girl being kind to an old man in a chemist’s on a wet morning, and me across the road crying in a parked car like a man with something wrong with him.

Because I knew that kindness. I was going to spend years on the end of it. And I was going to wear it out, plan it to death, be the sort of man who thinks so hard about a kind thing it stops being kind.

She had it already. At twenty. Nothing I gave her, nothing I earned. Just what she was, before her life laid a finger on her. Before me.

And sitting there, I finally did the sum I’d driven all that way to do.