29

These few days: why not stand around sipping at the wine and gulping at the beer, as if they were any other?

Now, it's time to go home. And still paper work to get through. Still emails to answer. I have been trudging all day.

Social engagements for tonight and tomorrow cancelled. A Thanksgiving party, starting at 4. A celebration of something in the usual bar. An offer of dinner.

Perhaps on Monday I will just be watching television, or eating a meal, or snoozing on a train, at the cinema, maybe, and 6.57pm that night will drift by unnoticed, like any other.

Just disappearing, just like that. Like what?

Like the breath of a man, unconscious and slightly green, laid out in a hospice bed, his brother, his wife, his son stood uselessly around him, like his breath that slows without deepening, once, twice (while a clock must say five minutes to seven one minute, and four minutes to seven the next, unnoticed) - and then the pause between each breath gets longer, and longer, each breath more and more shallow, fainter, going now - a great pause - a final attempt at breath - and then ending, forever. Just disappearing, like that.

So utterly desolate, I looked around the room that night, anywhere, for anything; at the flowers; my uncle's face; to the clock which told me the time - three minutes before seven at that moment, that evening, on Sunday the 29th of November in nineteen ninety-eight. Heh, this Monday, this weekend, however much I empty it out, it won't be like that.