This must be what you meant

After checking through all my Sent Items, I could see that I’d been sending you e-mails for almost three weeks after the date they said you died. Like me, you weren’t always prompt about your replies, and I was assuming that you had better things to do, possibly with that neighbour of yours who always seemed to be making her way up the stairs to her flat with a fistful of mail and wearing something delightfully flimsy.

Yeah, okay, so she was married, apparently, but it was uncanny how she always managed to be there in something reasonably compromising whenever we were leaving. You told me after the first time that you’d never actually seen her wearing actual clothes, and I can remember her smiling at you a couple of times like she’d just found a fifty pound note on the sidewalk, glancing up briefly at her slightly ajar door to see if anyone was watching..

It wasn’t like you’d ever tried to pass yourself off as a lady’s man, but jeez, not everyone has a goddess in suggestive clothing lolling about on their front stairwells. Honestly, if you’d finally succumbed to her teasing and asked her in for a cup of tea or something, I wouldn’t have been very surprised.

Mind you, I was a little perplexed when I came to see you and suggested that we check out one of your favourite local pubs and you said you didn’t really have one. “I don’t go out much.”

By then, you’d been divorced for ten years. I figured you’d be over all that and checking out the status of the local wildlife. “You aren’t SEEING anyone?”

“I guess I’m not really interested right now.”

“Ten years is a pretty long right now.”

You shrugged. “There’s this girl at work. She keeps suggesting that we go out ‘for a pint and whatever,’ but she’s twenty bloody years younger than I am.”

“So what’s wrong with that?”

“I had enough trouble with my marriage.”

My eyes rolled to the ceiling. “Jesus, you don’t have to MARRY her.”

“Yeah, well.” You took another sip on your can of Guinness and twiddled at the dial on the radio. We did a lot of this while I was there, holed up in your kitchen at your grey melamine table next to your cute, little, European appliances, sitting on wooden chairs, sucking back cans of corner shop beer and listening to snippets from the BBC while tossing out the names of high school and college friends; whatever happened to old so-and-so and what’s old whosit doing these days and did you hear that old whatchmacall’im drove that friggin’ motorbike into a hydro pole?

We had both succumbed slightly to age and gravity, but all things considered, I couldn’t feature you not having SOMETHING going on with SOMEBODY. It was just you in your little flat with your twenty-year-old blind and deaf cat and a burgeoning collection of old clockwork toys neatly displayed on shelves that were squeezed in wherever you had room. You were riding a bike to work, so that ruled out any chance encounters on a crowded bus. Your ex had moved to Germany, most of your relatives were back in Canada, and we never once ran into anyone you knew while we were wandering around the tourist traps of London.

Then came a phone call ten months after my visit. “The doctor told me he died of some kind of lymph cancer, something I can’t even pronounce.”

“He didn’t look sick when I was there.”

“It has a fast onset, apparently. He went in for tests on February 10th and he was dead by the 19th.”

“That sounds pretty crazy.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what they told me.”

So here I am, sitting back at home, just off the phone with your brother and looking at that little black notebook you pressed into my hand when I was leaving for the airport. “Can you do me a favour?” you asked.

“Sure. What’s this?”

“It’s the favour. Take it with you.”

“Why?”

“I need someone to hold onto it.”

You’d sealed the edges with tape. “Do you want me to read it?”

“Not right now. Maybe later.”

“Later when?”

“I’m pretty sure you’ll know.”

I cut through the layers of tape with a box cutter; I assumed this was later. Once I’d cut through two sides, an envelope slid out. “YOU’LL NEED THIS FOR EXPENSES” was scrawled on the front. Inside was an international money order for $20,000 US.

The first page of the notebook said. “If you’ve opened this, I’m probably dead. Find out why.” There was a phone number.

Okay, I thought, this should take care of at least the next month or two.