to Douglas would have meant putting down something I had carried since I was nineteen, and I did not know who I was without it.
I have said that out loud twice now. It does not get easier and it is true.
Gil made one decision at twenty and lived out its consequences with a wife and a son and a job and a caravan. I made the same decision about four thousand times, every time somebody asked me out, in a house with my mother’s telephone in the hall.
One of us did something with the forty-one years.
Sam.
He is thirty-nine. He fits kitchens. He looks nothing like Gil and exactly like him when he is thinking.
He rings me on Sundays. I did not ask him to and I did not expect it past the first fortnight.
And in the January he asked me something at my
