f i c t i o n a l
I'm making a salad because of the vegetarians - no, I'll start again.
I don't know what happened to everything else. Before, there was a house in New Malden and all the possessions of three people. This man, his wife, their daughter. Beds, books, carpets, the walls and pictures that hung on them. Someone in his position, you don't ask where it all went.
It seems that all Vaughan has kept is the contents of the plastic bag despatched to him afterwards by Nottinghamshire Police. The things from the car, carefully collected and cleaned by civilian staff in the Portakabin at the traffic incident compound in Mansfield.
Vaughan is in the kitchen with us to help prepare dinner. I'm making a salad, there will be vegetarians this evening, but not vegans, so eggs can bulk things out. I give him the box of half a dozen, he is to hold each of them for a while to take off the chill from the fridge. Then they won't crack while boiling. Complicated tasks thwart him and he comes to a halt, simple ones absorb him, I've noticed this.
Much of the time he sits in his room or out in the garden, listening to tapes on his daughter's personal stereo. The headphones seem big and clumsy now, when everyone else is wearing those little earpieces. He always holds the Walkman as it plays, I think he likes to feel between his palms the slight vibration of the turning mechanism inside. He got through a lot of batteries until my brother sorted him some rechargeables.
Saul, Nadja, Vaughan, and me. We're making a terrible noise, mess, and a dinner somehow. Vaughan is calm in all this, methodically taking the eggs into his gentle grasp then replacing them and taking out the next two. By the time I've got it together to boil the water he's been through the tray twice over, but still I feel bad about taking them from him.
We got Vaughan off his medication just like we got Nadja off the paki brown and had Saul set up with the church project and I'm not going to talk about me. None of us are in perfect condition now, but we're all a lot better than we were and this going to be a good dinner because we made it.