A year later, Nigel was standing at the front window again.
It had become, without his quite noticing, one of the shapes his days now took: kettle, mug, window; window, mug, kettle. The old pattern of unemployment had returned to him with the peculiar ease of a bad habit. It was not identical to the first one. There was less panic in it now, but less innocence too. Before, unemployment had felt like suspension. Now it felt like aftermath.
Outside, the estate was carrying on in its usual small-key way. Bins out. Cars back. Curtains moving. The sort of life that never looked dramatic enough to count as indifference, though that was often what it was.
There had even been, briefly, a sort of turf war with a window cleaner, a man Nigel had never knowingly met, who had nonetheless taken a strong and lasting interest in his activities. A single note had come through the letterbox, written in a hurried hand:
my customers say youre doing there windows. fuck off mate. you dont want this. put the sponge down and do something else
It had arrived after Nigel had already stopped cleaning windows altogether, which gave the whole exchange a faintly comic afterlife, as though the objection had outlived the offence.
Earlier, down the estate, Nigel had seen them on one of his habitual walks — always with a cap on, hood up, hoping not to be recognised. Trevor’s new man had loaded the ladder into the van and was listening while Trevor pointed toward something at the side of the house. Another property, perhaps. Another lawn. Another set of windows. Another week proceeding in the old and comprehensible language of payment.
Nigel had watched the two of them with a species of bitterness too tired to remain pure. He had not envied the man exactly. He had envied, rather, the coherence of him: his overalls, his van, his allotted tasks arriving by device rather than by emotional blackmail; his ability to say Will do, Trev without entering into some moral experiment from which he might later be dismissed by SMS.
Instead, he had spent the better part of a year being looked at oddly by people who had once looked at him with eager relief.
That was the thing he still had not quite digested: how quickly gratitude had curdled into grievance.
For a while after the company had dropped him, the neighbours had gone on as before. They rang the bell. They called to him from drives. They caught him in the street with little hopeful expressions that soured the moment they realised hope would not, this time, be rewarded.
At first he had tried to explain it away — something about his back, about overdoing it.
Then, eventually, he had stopped trying to explain anything at all.
He had not meant to become abrupt. He had not woken one morning and decided to lose half the neighbourhood. But there are only so many ways to answer the same unreasonable question before sharpness starts to feel like accuracy.
Still all right for Friday, Nigel?
You didn’t come last week.
I thought we’d got into a rhythm.
It’s only the windows.
You used to like keeping busy.
That last one had stayed with him.
You used to like keeping busy.
As if his labour had once been a charming personality trait and had now somehow lapsed.
Some of them stopped speaking to him altogether after that. Others kept speaking, but with a reserve that was almost worse, as if he had broken some unspoken agreement by remembering he was a person. Yvonne, who had once eaten two slices of the cake she brought to thank him for his generosity, had told him in the post office queue that she no longer knew how to take him.
That had been her phrase.
How to take him.
As though the difficulty lay in packaging.
Nigel had said nothing. There are moments when silence is not a principle, merely exhaustion.
He lifted the mug and found the tea had gone cold.
He drank it anyway.
Inside the house, on the kitchen table behind him, lay an old notepad he had never got rid of. On the top page was a sentence he had written months earlier and then left there, as though hoping time might improve it.
People can be warm and mercenary at the same time.
He had written it after the cake, after the police, after the first few weeks of being pursued for work he no longer had any reason to do. At the time, he had thought it sharp. Now it looked merely tired. Not false. Just smaller than the thing itself.
What had happened to him, in the end, was not complicated enough to be tragic in a grand way. No scandal, no catastrophe, no single betrayal large enough to point at. Just a long sequence of small recognitions. The company had wanted data, not him. The neighbours had wanted help, not him. Trevor had wanted labour, which at least was honest. And Nigel, for a strange and well-paid interval, had mistaken being wanted for being valued.
That was the part that remained.
Not the money. That had gone.
Not even the routine, though he had missed it.
The knowledge remained.
The knowledge and the slight permanent bend it had left in him.
For a little while he stood there in the half-light, looking at his own faint reflection in the glass: older than before, yes, but that was the least interesting thing about him. After a minute he turned away, took the mug into the kitchen, and put the kettle on again, because there was nothing else to do, and because, for reasons he could no longer have explained to anyone, he still found some comfort in the sound of water being brought to order.