Excerpt: The Radii of Remains

Godfrey stopped mid-sentence, his pint hovering beneath a bottom lip bitten in confusion.

I reminded him of who I was, and why we were here, and how we’d met, as arranged, early this morning, at the metro stop of St Peter’s Square.

Spotted him, I had, from about 500 yards away, his arm outstretched, raking that colt carving along the high windowsills of the Midland Hotel; a sequence of small avalanches and sharply drawn back curtains succeeding him along Lower Mosley Street.

He shook his head. It was no good.

Not 6am it had been. Still dark. It’s the same day Godfrey, just a few hours later. I’d shouted you be careful when that tram tooted you from the pavement edge. You hurried along behind it, passed the war memorial and down the wrong side of the station’s safety railings. Missed the incline, you did. And you just stood there all the while, two feet below me on the tram track, shaking the hand I reached down you in assistance, not a thought of climbing back onto the platform. I don’t know what gets into you sometimes.

Is it coming back?

Godfrey reached over for my notebook, asking whether my hieroglyphs - as he called them - might always be counted upon to prove the absurdity of such behavior. Behavior he’d likely live in perpetual embarrassment of - should half of it be true.

I read Godfrey the notes we’d made on the back pew of the cathedral before the remembrance service had begun. About how - after he’d clambered onto the platform - we’d watched the ground floor windows of the Midland, as rudely awoken patrons relinquished hairdryers and half knotted ties, cuffing-out condensation patches to peer in a blur through crown glass windows; images distorted to grotesques; fun house reflections nosing the windows for the inconsiderate window cleaner below.

Listen, I read: ‘We watched them all appear, one by one at the windows, like condemned men peering through portholes on a ship of fools. Or how the rippled panes tailored earth-tone roundels of each inhabitant’s work wear – browns and blacks of shirt and suit surrounding beige face blobs near the centre…’

Godfrey sipped his pint; nodding in approval.

‘…Squinting eyes behind the pane’s pontil mark magnified whites and pupils into the inner concentric rings of a series of sepia rendered archery targets. All busy rat-a-tatting their wrath down to street level, where it was lost among tram toots and taxi horns.’

Godfrey shook his head. He didn’t remember. Nice line that though, about the roundels. Had he thought of it? Peculiar, you see, because he did actually remember those circular RAF insignia as being in sepia. As if the medium through which one came to associate those days - old photographs and postcards and such - had, over time, replaced the colour of memory.

Like if you watch a home video enough times you’d come to recognise the event from the camera’s point of view. Memory strained, as it were, through sun spots, lens flares and the third person, said Godfrey.

He grinned, shaking his head. This business about the hotel windows, though. He supposed it sounded likely. He couldn’t after all respect a late riser - a conviction imbued by a thousand or more dawn calls from the damn Foxdon cockerel, which over time he learned to consider as a warning from God against sloth and the importance of being an early bird, because…

I stopped him. He’d said this earlier. How he too learned to be an early bird, because anything left in the same place for too long during those days was likely to be obliterated, right?

Godfrey exhaled and set his pint down. He peered over the top of his spectacles; the slow roll of his kind brown eyes tracked the sub dial of my watch through sixty seconds; breaking off to meet my gaze through the thick mass of unruly eyebrows that shrugged apology for his memory. A result, he explained, of the many nervous moments out on the airfield, awaiting inbound squadrons that his more flippant self might only joke had aggravated his tennis elbow to the point where he’d been forced to stop wearing a wristwatch.

He sipped his pint. His more flippant self, maybe.

I didn’t have the heart to interrupt Godfrey again as he explained, for the umpteenth time, that the present was a habit he’d been forced to retire from a long time ago, for fear of his health. And that the time spent recalling the moments he’d missed had obscured contemporarily to the point where it took recent events a while to sink in, as if the previous couple of hours were a proving ground on the way to record; an acid test for what he took with him to deep storage.

Godfrey’s exile from the contemporary meant that by VJ Day, he’d all but forgotten how to tell the time. He’d re-learned, he explained, according to the array of grand gateaux balanced on silver cake stands in the Lawn Street bakery window, which were cut, to this day, to give passersby a tempting cross section of their filling. One could still gauge a literal degree of popularity by their missing segment, and tell the time by the radii of their remains: The half past five of an overdone, un-iced Madeira; the five to midnight of the last sliver of delicious lemon drizzle.

Already half five on that succulent banoffee when he’d walked past this morning. See, he was remembering now well enough! Some wise fellow bagged his slice for lunchtime, no doubt. Early risers indeed. Be sold out by 10am that one. Delicious. It was coming back to him now. His trip in on the metro; getting off too early at G-Mex, or whatever it was called these day, and following the tram down the incline passed the Midland.

Under the circumstances of Godfrey’s sporadic memory loss, I agreed to straighten out any inconsistencies or repetitions that might make his story sound disingenuous.

However, I could not grant his request - I explained, laughing - that near to the start of its publication, I could insert a disclaimer asking readers to consider both his and my poor temperance for any shaky temporality therein: A shame, said Godfrey, given the amount of pubs between here and our destination.