Chapter 62: Farrow Street
We went on the Sunday because Sunday is the only day I do not work.
She drove. It is nine miles and it took thirty-five minutes and neither of us said anything for the last twelve of them.
I had not been within a mile of that postcode in twelve years.
I want to be accurate about that.
I never decided not to go.
I had simply never gone.
The body keeps a map and quietly closes roads on it, and you do not notice until somebody drives you down one.
Farrow Street runs east to west and slopes about one in twenty-five towards the bridge.
I did not know that I knew that until my feet were on it.
The launderette is a nail bar now.
Pink lettering, closed on Sundays.
The shop with the shutter sells vapes and the shutter is still the same shutter, green, with a dent at knee height.
The bus stop has moved forty metres east and has a shelter now, with a bench in it, which it did not have then.
And the kerb is new.
“Four years ago,” Priya said. “They resurfaced from the bridge to the crossing. I came down that week and watched them do it.”
“You watched them.”
“I wanted to know when it went.”
So the actual stone is gone.
Somewhere in a yard, or crushed, or under a road in another county.
She stood where she had stood, outside the shutter, and pointed at a place at the kerb with two wheels on the pavement.
“The car was there.”
Then she walked four steps east, towards the bridge end, and stopped and turned round.
“That's where he had me. Four steps.”
And I stood where I had been.
That was the thing I had come for and I had not admitted it to myself in the car.
I had carried a picture for twelve years in which I came off the bridge and saw two people at a distance and crossed fifteen metres of pavement to get to them.
Fifteen metres is a decision. Fifteen metres is four seconds of thinking, and in four seconds a person can shout instead.
I stood on the corner by the bridge and looked at the shutter.
It is eleven metres.
Not fifteen.
And then I walked it, and I understood something that made me stop in the middle of the pavement with my hands at my sides.
The camber.
That pavement tips towards the road. Walking east, your right foot is always lower than your left, and you lean in, and the whole street pulls you towards the kerb.
I had been walking there anyway. Everyone walking east on Farrow Street is walking towards the kerb.
I did not cross a road to reach them. They were on my line.
“What?” Priya said.
“I was already going past.”
“Does that matter?”
“To me.”
Kuzushi is the moment balance leaves.
You do not create it out of nothing. You find it already happening in the other person and you take it.
That is the entire art. It is not about strength. It is about arriving at a thing that is already going.
I had spent twelve years believing I had built something out of nothing on that street.
I had arrived at a thing that was already going.
We walked to the bridge end and back twice, at ordinary walking speed, both of us counting. She did not touch me and I did not touch her.
At one point she put her hand out towards my sleeve and then took it back, and neither of us said anything about that either.
On the way home she went a different way because of roadworks and we came up Sedley Road.
At the top of Sedley Road there is a turning with a low brick wall and a sign for a care home that is not one of ours.
I looked at the sign as we went past it and thought about a corridor.
A trolley outside room fourteen with the top drawer open, and a woman in a blue tunic with her back to it, and me pushing Iris Penhale past at four minutes to two on a Wednesday.
The drawer should not have been open. That is all I thought. It went through my head the way a bus number goes through your head.
Then Priya indicated left at the junction and I looked back at the road.
At the flat I got out and stood on the pavement in the dark and she wound the window down two inches.
“Same time next Sunday?”
“Yes.”
I went up sixty-three stairs to somebody else's building and stood in the middle of my room with my coat still on for eleven minutes.
Then I took out the folder and read the fourth paragraph, and for the first time since I had signed it, my hands were shaking.