Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sunday 6th January
I get so lonely I could die…
1:05pm GMT Text Message
'Harry, you're not online, hope you're ok, bit busy myself call you next week.'
1:35pm GMT Text Message.
'You're still not online, call me if you're not ok.'
Harry tossed his phone onto his bed, he knew Sunday would be tricky but he just couldn't face Nikki today. It was stupid really, she would cheer him up and after the first couple of minutes he wouldn't have to act jovial, she genuinely would make him happy, but he just had no right, no reason to be happy so he ignored the messages and tried to go back to sleep.
The sleep plan didn't work, so he put on his running clothes and headed out towards Central Park, some brain and body numbing running should work at excising his demons today, or at least overload his brain sufficiently enough to not think about them.
5:15pm GMT Text Message
'I just realised what the date is Harry, I'm sorry. I'll call you at 6. Text me if you don't want me to.'
He didn't really want her to call, but he knew Nikki and she'd not leave it until she'd spoken to him. He'd got three quarters of an hour to make up some story to get rid of her quickly, it couldn't be that hard. He made up stories all the time, just like he made up the marks on his student's papers to fit with the NYU marking practices. So much for intellectual freedom and honesty. Or his other option was three quarters of an hour to get so blindingly drunk he couldn't hold a conversation with her.
"Hello Nikki," he answered when his phone rang at 1pm exactly.
"Hello Harry,"
"Do you want to talk about it?" she asked. Fully aware that in all the years she had known him his father's death was one of the few topics they rarely talked about. He could talk about it to strangers but not to her.
"So today…" he began taking a deep breath. "I'm running in the park, it's cold, really cold still and the park is full of runners, and people walking with prams or feeding the ducks and I don't know any of them. None of them know me; I don't know any of them."
"Harry?" she wasn't sure where he was going with his train of thought.
"So, if I had gone to the top of that bridge that's on all the films, the one that goes over the lake and dived off the top, no one would have known who I was. Work would complain when I didn't show up on Monday, Ruby might give me a call on Weds or Thurs if I still hadn't come in and maybe Mrs Finkelstein next door would eventually notice it was quiet but no one, no one here would know. And it would be so quiet, just a splash and then the cold and then nothing."
"Harry!"
"Don't you ever think that? Nikki you must think that sometimes!"
"I try not to dwell on how lonely life can be Harry. And anyway what about Jorge? He'd have seen you go out and not come back. He would know. I would know." She added after a pause.
"How would you know?" Harry asked his tone mocking and cruel. "And Jorge doesn't work weekends."
"Because I would know," she said her voice low and steady and uninviting of disagreement. "You were almost gone before remember. I would know."
"Pah!" he replied dismissively.
"He had everything: a good job, a wife, a son, respect from his peers everything, he can't have thought that that was enough, that that was the end. I don't feel old. I don't feel as if I've accomplished half of what he achieved. How can that have been enough? How?"
"Harry," Nikki's voice was soothing this time. She knew exactly who he was talking about.
"I haven't got anything Nikki and I can face living another day. He had it all, he should have been happy. Why couldn't he be happy? Was I that terrible a son? That much of a disappointment to him? Maybe I'm just delaying settling down because I could have it all too and still not be happy, what if it's not enough? What then?"
"Harry," her voice was more business like now. "You have said it before, I've heard you. Your father got sick and died. He battled with his illness for years and eventually it killed him."
"Nikki!" Harry whined. "I say that because it makes people feel better!"
"But it's still true!" she countered.
"Why couldn't it have been enough? He was so young!"
"Harry you have to stop blaming yourself, even your father said it wasn't anybody's fault. Just because you're the same age now as he…"
"How do you know that?" Harry thundered interrupting her.
Nikki paused aware of the awakening of Harry's temper even with the miles that separated them. "You're mum mentioned it once," she said quietly.
Harry scoffed again.
"Do you enjoy it? Psychoanalysing me behind my back, with my mother?"
"Harry, I'm not going to talk to you if you're going to be like this. We do not talk about you behind your back. It was last September, we didn't really know each other and didn't have much in common except you to talk about, your mother asked me why I thought you'd left."
"What did you tell her?"
"I said you wanted new challenges."
"And what did she say?"
"She said you were probably scared of the fuss Leo and I would make of your birthday and that your father died when he was 39. It was only when I heard the news today that I remembered the date."
"Did you know there are more suicides in January than any other month?"
"Yes Harry I did. It doesn't make your father a statistic though. He was ill and he died. You wouldn't really have jumped would you?"
"No," he laughed grimly, "I know far more effective ways than trying to freeze myself to death in four feet of water."
"Good," replied Nikki.
"Good that I didn't jump, or good that I know better ways to top myself?"
"I'm not answering that," she said.
"Oh,"
"I am sorry Harry."
"Me too, sorry for being…for not… sorry," he stuttered, hoping she would know what he was actually trying to say. Her brief silence suggested that she did.
"Oh that reminds me, Jack apologised to me the other week."
"Mad Jack, the cage fighting forensics super geek?"
"I'm sure you wouldn't say that to his face."
"Damn right, I wouldn't but it sounds like I could add that to my list of ways to die," he said seriously.
"Harry!" she laughed.
"So what was the apology for? Dragging you through the sewer system?"
"No, for not believing me about the Ballinger case."
"The mad scientist,"
"The not mad scientist."
"That was good of him, things settling down a bit there then?"
"S'pose," Nikki said glumly.
"Now don't you go and get depressed on me, one at a time is all I can cope with!"
"Alright Harry," she answered. "Call me in the week if you need me."
"Talk to you next Sunday then."
"Yes, Sunday at one." She started to wave and remembered they were on the phone for once and disconnected instead.
Heartbreak Hotel: Eddie J Cooley and John Davenport (Elvis)
