Free A World of Other People by Steven Carroll Page A

— and they all knew it — a bit special just for being at the university. And so there was always this feelingthat friendships — lasting, important friendships — could be made. Pip, she knows, will be there when Iris marries (if she ever does), has children, turns fifty and dies — if she ever does.
    It was Pip who found this flat — she’s good like that. Finds the impossible, and usually in the most impossibly casual ways. In this case getting a boot fixed, on the spot, by a shoemaker. An ancient Jewish shoemaker. She’d been tramping about the city all day looking for a place, she told him, for something to say or as a way of explaining her exhausted look, and now she’d gone and worn her boots down. Of course, nobody wears their boots down in a day, no matter how much walking they do, but the old man nodded and smiled faintly. And he must have had some sort of sympathy for her. Or must have judged that, tall tales aside, there was something trustworthy in her. Whatever it was, when he put the boots back on the counter, re-soled, glued and fixed, he told her that he had a place — and that they could walk to it from his shop, if she wanted. If she wanted? He’d owned it for years and for some mysterious reason hadn’t bothered increasing the rent in years as well. Whoever was previously in it was gone; Pip neverasked why. It was hers if she wanted. They never signed a lease. No paper. Just a shake of the hands. A flat, an old brewer’s stable, just off St James’s Park, and for a song. That’s Pip for you.
    And that’s how Iris comes to be here, staring at Pip, her hair piled high, standing over the toaster in the kitchen. But as much as she’s staring at Pip, she’s also thinking of the park the previous day. And far from forgetting the young airman, as she thought she might or vaguely hoped she would, she’s dwelling on him more than she imagined. And she can’t say why, can’t explain it, except for an ill-defined feeling that something has happened. But what? Looked at simply, a young man cried in the park and she asked if he was all right; he said he wasn’t; they talked; she gave him a rose; he clasped her hand … no, there was no way of looking at it simply.
    Pip inspects the toast and pronounces it done. She spreads margarine over it, followed with mustard and slices of cheese. She calls it Welsh rarebit. And as Iris sinks her teeth into the toast she contemplates telling Pip about the park. But she doesn’t. Not this time. They are friends and they tell each other things, but this time she thinks twice. And for no otherreason than that she wants to keep it to herself. For a little longer. And with that impulse concludes that something may well have happened — and may well be going on.
    ‘Well?’
    Pip is looking at her and she is about to reply ‘Well, what?’, when she realises Pip is asking about the toast. What’s her verdict? For an answer she bites into the toast a second time and raises her eyes to the heavens deliriously.
    ‘But where,’ she says, when she has finished munching, ‘did you get this cheese?’
    ‘I know a man who knows a man. Don’t ask.’
    That’s Pip. As they finish the toast, having devoured a second serving, and Pip is licking the mixture of margarine and mustard from her fingers, she raises an eyebrow at Iris and says, ‘Pub?’
    And as they step outside into the tiny laneway, Pip asks if there is word of Frank, for she too knew him at university, and it occurs to Iris that she hasn’t even thought of him. Not today. Not yesterday. Her mind has been elsewhere, and as they stride off in the dusk towards the park and a favoured haunt in Soho, she’s glad she didn’t tell Pip after all. Not for the moment.
    Throughout the next week she does all the things she usually does. She moves between her home and work and back. And she’s noted at some stage that the talk in the corridors isn’t so jittery any more. No end-of-the-world talk followed by a