The A-Z of Us (33 page)

But I can't. He's gone. And Ian is here.

‘So, Thompson, what are you going to do next?'

Ian smiles at this time-honoured question, gazing out over the river. I sense at this moment that we might be back on track. I breathe out, enjoying the sun on my face.

‘Well, I'm completely fucked with the
Daily Times
. The BA press woman called the travel editor, they were worried about me and wanted to notify the paper. Old Martin Foster threw an absolute fit, he didn't care about me almost dying, he was just furious that I'd forged the letter. Not that I give a monkey's…'

‘You can still write for other papers…'

‘You know, I think I've had enough of the travel writing thing for a while. It's not like there's anywhere left to explore. I told you I was born in the wrong century. I should have been born in the 1870s, not the 1970s.'

I nod. I've heard it all before. Secretly, I've always thought that Ian would have made a pretty useless explorer. He isn't ruthless enough. But I've never told him this, and I'm not about to start being brutally honest now. As I imagine Ian as an intrepid traveller, crossing ice floes and sand dunes in a variety of nineteenth-century costumes, I recall Duncan Archer's words about trying to find El Dorado.

‘Maybe we are explorers Ian,' I murmur, softly. ‘We are exploring new territory, new lands…'

‘How's that?'

‘Love, emotions, relationships.' My voice is stronger now. ‘It's like you said about family, everything's changed. There are no maps, no charts. We're like those people who went out to Australia in the 1800s; they had nothing to tell them what was there, they had to draw their own maps, build new roads, new towns, new railways… We're the same… with relationships. Everything's new, the old maps don't work any more. Don't you think?'

He looks at me, eyes narrowed in quizzical questioning.

‘You know what I think?'

I shake my head.

‘I think it's great to be back together, Gemma.'

He steps up to me and puts his arms around me. His grip is loose, as if he's waiting for me to move closer to him, to grant him approbation. I lean in. His torso is more slender than I remember, more fragile. I feel as if I could pick him up. I move my arms around his back and give him a quick squeeze.

‘Yeah,' I say softly. ‘Me too.'

After Gemma goes to meet Raj for lunch, I stand for a while in the middle of Waterloo bridge, enjoying the warm early autumn sunshine on my face and hands. I watch the lunchtime crowds – tourists, office workers, businessmen and women, bike couriers, accountants. Everyone seems in good spirits, appreciating the last vestiges of summer, the last few hours that their British forearms will be exposed to the sun for another six months.

It's funny. Nothing much has happened, but everything seems to have changed. All right, I almost died in Business Class on a 747 to San Francisco. I have been dumped by my best friend's sister. I almost drove away my best friend, who almost divorced her husband. And I'm not sure if I want to continue the career I've been pursuing for just under ten years of my adult life.

Yet none of these things feel momentous. They are just things that have happened, points on a map, junctions on a road. The change that I feel most is impossible to draw. It's in my head. It's difficult to explain. It's just that… what? I see things differently. Like finally getting glasses after years of complaining that everything was a little bit blurred.

The strange thing is that I can't quite categorize what has changed in my head. I feel better. That's all. That's everything. It seems amazing that something invisible, undefined and nebulous can feel so real. So solid.

A middle-aged couple stops on the bridge to my right. They are nondescript, just another slightly overweight man and woman dressed in the same clothes as millions of other British men and women in their forties – he in khaki trousers and a blue shirt, she in jeans and a blouse. Usually, I wouldn't give them a second glance, they don't stand out. They would never warrant a mention in a travel article, unless perhaps one of them had fallen into the river, or taken off all their clothes.

Yet I can't take my eyes off them. As I watch, the woman leans into the man and kisses him, missing his lips and clumsily pecking the side of his mouth. The man laughs, his double chin jiggling with his chuckles, and the woman smiles, placing her hand against the small of the man's chubby back. Two children slouch up to them, evidently embarrassed by their parents' show of affection in the heart of London, the coolest city in England, if not the world. The boy, who looks about twelve, takes out a camera and snaps a shot of a boat going under the bridge. The girl, who is probably a couple of years older, wearing baggy jeans that flare hugely at the ankles and a pink raincoat and a T-shirt that reads ‘Wicked', stands in front of her parents with a sulking expression that expresses all her disgust for her brother's nerdiness, for her parents' Marks and Spencer's clothes, for the fact she is being taken to museums and the London Eye when all she wants to do is head to the shops in Oxford Street and Covent Garden.

As the girl stands and pouts, her mother says something to her, with a frown, which seems to harden the girl's sulk, until the father shifts his feet, steps alongside her and
ruffles the girl's hair. She leaps back, her hand flicking to her head in outrage, but she is smiling. Then the father says something and his daughter grins, and the mother laughs, and soon all three of them are laughing in the middle of the bridge in the heart of London. The son looks round to see what all the fuss is about, and raises his camera hurriedly, snapping a picture of his laughing family, and I feel a surge of affection for them and the photo that I know the parents and daughter and son will look at independently in years to come and cherish as an image of this unplanned instant when they were all momentarily but completely happy.

And a thought strikes me that has been ebbing through my head since the plane, but which chooses this moment to surge forward, fully formed, coherent and simple. My thought is this:

That I have spent almost all my life mapping out, strategizing and planning ahead, in a bid to distance myself from my parents and my childhood, and yet the times that have been most precious to me are the moments that have surprised me, that I didn't plan, that revealed in some way the truth that I've been trying to flee from for so long – that everything is connected but unmappable and that even in times of grim uncertainty there is a benign force that acts on our lives, and that this is the force that many people call love and my father has chosen to call God.

The family walks away, mother and father hand in hand, daughter slouching behind, son striding in front. I watch them until they reach the end of the bridge and disappear down some steps.

I think about Gemma and Raj and hope that they can figure out their differences, and love each other again. I think about Molly and how she was very different from the woman I'd imagined her to be in my head. I hope she will find happiness with Will Masterson, or whoever she ends up with, and that she will continue to love her work and taxis and takeaways.

And I think about my visit to the Old Seamen's Hall on Gutter Lane. The antique market was open, but the old man with the maps was nowhere to be found. A neighbouring stallholder said he'd heard that the old man had passed away. I asked several other stallholders, but no one could confirm whether this was true or not. The following day, I took the map to a friend of a friend at Sotheby's. The auction house's cartography expert valued it at £35,000. The auction takes place at the end of the month. I called my parents and my mother sounded relieved and a little excited.

‘Thank you, Ian,' she said, quietly.

I will see them at the weekend. I hope that even if my father's condition deteriorates, the extra money, and whatever I can help out with, will make things a little easier. I hope my parents can learn to let other people look after them for a change. And I hope that I have the strength to be there for them, to love them whatever happens, for the rest of their lives.

Are such hopes the same as prayers? I don't know. All I know is that they are new and clear and they make me feel better about myself and the world I am in.

I look north and west, I look south and I look east across the city I have somehow become part of, and as
the sun comes out from behind the clouds once more, I realize that for the first time in my life, I know exactly where I am.

I only learned about Gemma's breast cancer scare a couple of years after it had happened. Raj told me one night when I was round at their house watching cricket. I was shocked, then a bit miffed that she hadn't told me about it, and then relieved, of course, that the lump had been benign and she'd been fine after the biopsy. As Raj and I agreed, it helped explain some of what happened during those few weeks at the end of the summer of 2004.

That was four years ago. It might seem a little unbelievable, a little Mills and Boon, but everyone is pretty happy at the moment.

Gemma is pregnant again, the baby due in September. Archi Cook-Singh is two in June, and I've bought him an enormous plastic dumper truck that he can sit on and be pushed around in (I always wanted one when I was little, but such large plastic vehicles were considered excessively lavish by my parents). I'm his sort of godfather, but there wasn't any religious service or anything. Apparently the Punjabi term for it is
papa-ji
, which I like. That's what Archi calls me. Uncle-brother.

Molly is the other quasi-godparent, so we see each other occasionally. It was a bit weird at first, but just recently, we've been able to joke about things. She doesn't get to see Archi as much as I do, since she's now living in New York, working for the Bank of America. Will Masterson
is there too, at one of the big Wall Street broking houses. Gemma thinks they'll have children soon.

And me?

I'm happy. Maybe even more than happy.

I've got a regular travel writing gig for the
Daily Times
– Thompson's Trails, my column is called, in which I write about a different walk each week, in the UK and abroad. I got the commission on the back of a couple of articles I wrote about walks around London – one of them following the nocturnal route I took from Gemma's house to Blackfriars Bridge on the night before my nut attack on the plane. They were published in the
Camden Chronicle
(it was edited by a friend of my wife's at the time, who took pity on me), and subsequently read by Simon Rogers, the new travel editor at the
Daily Times
, who called me in. Simon seemed happy to forgive and forget, and employ an erstwhile enemy of his predecessor. It was he who came up with the idea for the regular walking feature. It pays fairly well, and sometimes my wife comes along too.

Kate is amazing. I know we've only been married a year and a half, but I still think she's the most beautiful, intelligent, talented woman I've ever met.

It's strange the way it happened. I ended up renting a new apartment near Paddington Station. One evening a few weeks later, I found myself in Clerkenwell passing a bar where I used to go with Molly when we were dating. I was going to hurry on by, to consign that painful time to my own personal memory bin, but something made me stop, turn back and go in.

I ordered a beer. The waitress looked at me. She was pretty, brunette. I fancied her immediately. Then I realized
I recognized her. And she seemed to recognize me. It was the waitress from Molly's party. We both laughed, both blushing. She offered me a free cocktail of my choosing. She recommended a mojito, which despite my many travels, I'd never tried before. We chatted, she made me laugh, I talked about myself more than I'm used to. She told me about her freelance book-illustrating and her penchant for Spanish cinema.

I stayed until the bar closed and walked Kate back to her flat near Angel. To my surprise, I found the courage to ask her out to lunch. She said yes. Two weeks later she invited me to Barcelona for a weekend and we kissed for the first time. It was a good kiss.

We were married in a church. A beautiful little chapel in a village outside Chester with green and red stained glass windows and a loud ancient organ. Kate's family come from there. Everyone agreed it was a very picturesque wedding, including my bride, which was a relief to all concerned. The best thing was, my father was still well enough to officiate, although his hands shook badly. He gave a great sermon, the gist of which was that the Lord works in mysterious ways.

Which I suppose, if you believe in that sort of thing, He does.

In the spring of 2005, following a military coup and the election of a new president, the statue of the Virgin Mary was moved from Caracas back to its original home in Choronì. Once more, pilgrims flocked from all over South America to the small fishing village. They came, two to a seat in packed buses, lying on top of each other in beat-up cars, hoping, praying, and believing.

To this day the Virgin has not cried again, but still the pilgrims keep on coming…