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 Friday night found me at home in the flat I'd shared with Phil, alone and
with nothing very pressing to do for the first time since he'd died just a
few weeks before.  Everywhere there were memories, reminders of good times
and bad times between us, souvenirs and mementos from things we'd done
together, places we'd been ...  Most of his clothes were still in the
bedroom, of course, a tooth brush of his sitting in the bathroom, even his
*smell* lingered round the place, I swear.  I sat on the floor for a while,
not wanting to use the sofa we'd shared  -" well, before he'd ended up in
the wheelchair  -" not really wishing to do anything very much ...  trying
not to remember and remembering all the same.  I'd loved the guy more
deeply than I'd ever imagined loving anyone; he was gone; I had to live
with it.  Or without it, I thought, giving myself a grim little smile.

   I was hungry, I thought  -" or, at least, I knew I *should* be hungry 
-" so I ought to cook.  I also ought to look at some of the mail that had
accumulated while I'd been away  -" I'd been genuinely too tired to do
anything with it earlier in the week  -" and begin to get things sorted so
that I could sell the place.  Instead, I sat on the floor and felt sorry
for myself.  Sorry for Phil, too, sorry for all the things that might have
been ...  but mainly sorry for me.  Not what all those helpful books on
managing the grieving process would recommend, I'm sure, but that was what
I did.  Frankly, I wallowed.  At least for a while.

   Then I pulled myself together a bit  -" I could imagine how a lot of my
friends and colleagues would react to seeing me this way and the thought at
least sufficed to get me up on my feet.  Once vertical, however, I still
couldn't really get myself interested in doing anything even marginally
productive, so I sort of slumped against the wall for a while.  I realised
that I needed to get out of the flat, even thought about finding a hotel
for the night, then concluded that a drink and distraction was probably
sufficient for my purposes ...  except that the sort of distraction I would
inevitably get if I wandered into any of the local bars on my own on a
Friday night was unlikely to be helpful.  So I thought about getting
something organised, running through the very brief list of people I'd be
happy to meet up with in a mood like this  -" of whom Dave was in hospital,
May had already done her bit in looking after me After The Event ...  and
in a way that made me hesitate slightly about setting up anything similar,
this being another distraction I felt I could probably do without ...  and,
well, a few others, mostly people I'd worked with over the years or people
I knew through Phil.  And the latter options would presumably be keener on
talking about either work or the dear departed than I could cope with, so
...  I was a bit stuck.

   In fact, I'd just resolved to risk the Napier  -" the pub on the corner,
where I knew some of the bar staff, could rely on a certain degree of
shielding from predatory males  -" when my mobile rang.  I was distracted
enough to answer the thing without checking who was calling  -" I think I
assumed it would be Dave  -" and it took me a moment or two to recognise
the voice: Gareth, our new lawyer, apparently just escaped from an
impromptu leaving do from his now former employers.  My heart fell, to be
honest  -" I *really* wasn't in the mood to talk about work, let alone with
someone who I might just have caused to screw up a promising career  -" but
I kept my voice cheerful enough while he explained that he was at a a loose
end, too, wondered if I felt like a drink, even promising *not* to talk
about the business, like he was a mind reader or something.

   Without even thinking about it I agreed a venue with him, made a call
for a taxi and within five minutes I had my coat on and was off out the
door.

   * ** *** **** ***** **** *** ** *

   In fact, Gareth turned out to be the answer to a maiden's prayer  -" or,
at least, he would have been if I'd been a maiden and/or in the habit of
praying.  Whatever, the pub he'd suggested, just south of the river but on
a back street and almost quiet for a Friday night, turned out to be both
friendly and comfortable, Gareth's conversation both witty and amusing  -"
and strictly not work related, as he'd promised  -" and, hell, the place
even did reasonably priced food when the hunger pangs finally did catch up
with me.

   Instead of work we talked about ...  stuff ...  his adventures on the
end of a climbing rope and some of the dafter things people did with ice
axes, for instance, my early attempts to master Teutonic philosophy and
both of our various excesses as students and as actual grown adults. 
Inevitably, this brought us on to the subject of relationships but he knew
enough about my recent events that even this was an OK topic.  I expressed
some surprise that he was stolidly single  -" genuine surprise rather than
the polite platitudes I think he might have expected: He was a bright,
intelligent bloke, funny when he wanted to be and, as I put it to him, not
bad looking for a dwarf.  Even that got me no more than a guffaw in return
-" well, a guffaw and something acerbic about my own relatively elevated
height  -" and so the moment passed.  Perhaps significantly, I didn't talk
to him about Dave  -" I assumed he'd picked up on the implicit arrangement
between us either in Cumbria or when he was visiting Hertford Square and to
be frank just at that moment I didn't really want to go into that situation
...  because I wasn't sure that I could explain what was actually going on,
quite what the *implicit arrangement* actually was ...

   So I steered the conversation onto safer ground, things moved on and we
had a very pleasant evening.  Neither of us drank enough to get seriously
intoxicated  -" we really had been talking a lot, I realised  -" but both
of us were surprised when the pub started closing around us.  After which,
he graciously  -" maybe even chivalrously  -" walked me up to a nearby
station to pick up a cab and wandered off into the night.  He shook my hand
on leaving, didn't give me a hug or a kiss or anything, just a smile and a
friendly wave goodbye.  I wasn't sure how I felt about that.

   * ** *** **** ***** **** *** ** *

   Back in the flat, I found the memory of the evening was a reasonable
solace  -" or maybe it was just the alcohol.  In any event, I found myself
doing the routine stuff one does on returning home, without getting hung up
on memories and stuff, successfully making coffee, undressing and getting
myself to bed without renewed bouts of angst.  OK, I chose to sleep in the
spare bedroom  -" having to find an old sleeping bag as I couldn't be arsed
to actually make the bed up  -" but all in all I felt a little better about
life.

   Not that I could sleep, of course ...  there were too many thoughts
whirling away in my subconscious.  I deliberately tried to think about work
 -" the lesser of many evils, in the circumstances  -" and that made me
realise that I'd plain forgotten to phone the Hospital, find out how Dave
was getting on.  Which caused me another brief moment of angst, till I
reasoned to myself that Hospitals were twenty four hour facilities, so it
wouldn't be too much hassle to phone them now, despite its being gone
midnight.  I even had the main switchboard number in my mobile's memory  -"
it was another of Phil's regular haunts, at least in the earlier stage of
his illness  -" so no excuses really ...  and what did I care if they
thought I was a bit odd?

   So I called them, got a particularly dozy switchboard person to put me
through to the ward and finally got to talk to someone there.  Someone
who'd actually never heard of Dave, denied having a patient anything like
him anywhere about the place.  Which I thought was a bit odd, but,
eventually, when I got to talk to the nurse in charge of the shift and when
she'd gone through a bunch of paper notes  -" did these people not have
computers?   -" the problem became clear: He'd been discharged earlier in
the day, they had other people to care for, I could presumably get him at
home.

   Which, of course, I could have done  -" late though it was  -" except
that, as soon as I'd ended the conversation with the nurses, a flood of new
thoughts struck me: Why hadn't he let me know directly?  How, in fact, had
he got home?  I knew there were a bunch of stairs leading up to his flat,
doubted whether he was fully fit to deal with them, thought he'd probably
needed assistance of some sort, knew that the NHS couldn't afford that
degree of helpfulness ...  So who had he called?

   I lay back on the bed and thought about it all ...  and didn't get a lot
of sleep for the rest of the night.

   * ** *** **** ***** **** *** ** *

   I finally bestirred myself about seven the next morning  -" quite late
for me  -" and dragged myself into the shower, mind still clogged with
unresolved difficulties and a whole heap of worries that my subconscious
just wouldn't let go.  Not that the rest of me felt up to dealing with
them, just at that point, so I tried for a burst of focused procrastination
 -" a useful way of getting stuff you don't really want to do done by using
it to avoid doing something even less desirable  -" and began to bag Phil's
stuff.  Or, actually, I sat and drank several litres of coffee and
*mentally* sorted it all  -" things his family might like to have, a very
few things I thought I'd keep and the majority to go to one charity shop or
another.  I did get round to taking all his excess medication back to the
pharmacist, but that was only really an excuse to get me out of the house,
spend some time in one of the local parks.

   After a couple of hours of this sort of dithering I began to feel that
the day was beginning to spin out of control, a little, and more to the
point I was beginning to worry that if this sort of mood took hold I would
never get the stuff I actually *needed* to do sorted in time for our Big
Showdown on Monday ...  or in about forty eights hours time, to put it
another way.  Which thought concentrated my mind a little, so I got it
together to dig out the laptop, began to play with my ideas for the meeting
 -" trying to get the ducks in a row, as Carla might have said, or at least
pin down the inchoate sense of possibility I felt, put it all into some
form that I could usefully present to the world.

   In fact, after a while things *did* begin to make sense, or  -" at
least, a little *more* sense  -" but there were still major gaps, areas
that might or might not represent potential threats ...  or even
opportunities.  Chief amongst these were the position of the Californians,
our initial funders not having even told us even who would be attending on
their behalf, while I'd had no luck in contacting the apparently
recuperating Carla directly.  Then there was the legal stuff  -" Gareth and
I had been through the relevant contracts in great detail, thought we saw
some possibilities in the finer details but then again the whole set up was
so strange that we weren't entirely sure that we hadn't missed something 
-" or maybe couldn't believe that PCW *had*, given that they'd drafted the
things in the first place ...  albeit with Carla's and  -" hah!   -" Dave's
input at the time.

   Similarly, we still had a lot of questions around quite who might carry
the can for outstanding liabilities if the whole thing did finally collapse
...  or who might to stand to gain if Seffi and Naz were right about having
a couple of lucrative contracts 'almost in the bag'  -" and the impacts and
ramifications for a large number of more or less innocent by-standers. 
Obviously, we would all be out of a job  -" though, with the exception of
Gareth we'd all probably agree that it was a fun experience while it lasted
and get on with our lives regardless if it all got taken away  -" but there
were others such as Colin the architect and his practice, Rosie, working
away fixing stuff up in Cumbria, Jane-the-teachers dream of creating an
eco-paradise on 'our' land, a variety of hotels and hostelries who could
have expected business from us ...  hell, even the local development
agency, set to lose their big success story of the year.

   Actually, I briefly wondered about whether the last could prove useful
to the argument  -" Dave had told me that he'd had to *turn down* grants
from them  -" but quickly realised that what I really needed was to sit
down and talk to someone about all this, that the best way to sort it all
out was to go through it with someone who would challenge my assumptions,
point out the gaps in my logic and generally play devil's advocate.  The
problem was, I thought, mentally listing the possible candidates, that Dave
was *hors de combat* (and possibly other things, my subconscious put in),
Seffi was either in Germany or *en route* back, May didn't really
understand this world and Gareth ...

   Well, Gareth was the obvious choice, really  -" he was a *lawyer* for
god's sake, had juist chucked in a fairly lucrative job to join us even as
we seemed to be heading for the rocks and ...  he was a really nice bloke.
He was also, of course, a really nice bloke with whom I'd spent a really
nice evening in a really nice pub just the night before.  How would he take
it  -" what would he think  -" if I phoned and asked to meet so soon after?
Or, perhaps, what was I thinking, really, and what did I actually *want*
him to think?  I was in a loop, here, realising perhaps for the first time
how much Dave's failure to let me know about his discharge from the
hospital had rankled  -" and how his friendship with Niusha was more of a
problem than I'd have wished it to be.  Nonetheless, I had to admit that
the whole company was basically Dave's idea  -" his baby, in a way  -" and
he probably ought to be involved in developing whatever fight back we could
manage.

   So, I thought, fuck it  -" he'd given me keys to his flat, I'd go and
see him.  Kill two birds with one stone, in fact ...  sort out some of the
professional stuff, such as the future of the company, and maybe get some
sort of clue as to what was going on between us.  Or what was going on,
perhaps, within me.

   So I picked up the lap top, grabbed my bag and went off to see Dave. 
But before I did, I rang Gareth, arranged to meet him the next day in
Hertford Square...

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