I am not John Nocent

At the bottom of the passenger steps Weston Grey put his foot onto Spanish soil. It was airport tarmac, but it radiated warmth to welcome him. He watched the others, disgorged from the plane, making that same small step. They forced past him competing for the terminal bus.

He was in no hurry.

At the top of the ringing staircase was the plane, overheated and panting from its labours. The screaming turbines were quiet now, denuded of their power. On the other side the aircraft was attended by a tow tractor, baggage trailers, a pallet loader and a catering vehicle, like medical crew clustered round an accident victim. In two hours it would make its way back to London, and two weeks later these people would follow.

He would not make that journey.

The scented afternoon was cooling now and even here standing on the airport apron he could taste the sea. From the sky he had seen the white lines of surf pushing against the coast. His hands were in the pockets of his blue windcheater. The other passengers struggled with hand-luggage, rucksacks, carrier bags and children.

He carried nothing.

In his inside pocket were his passport, his wallet and a guidebook he bought at the airport.
‘Keep moving please, sir.’ The immaculately made-up and coiffured woman in the yellow suit gestured towards the bus. He turned away from the aircraft and whispered a promise never to look back again.
After passport control he picked up his small suitcase from the conveyor belt and made his way through the arrivals hall to the bus stops. A Rasobus was due to leave for the town in five minutes. At the desk he spoke only that one word, the name of the town: Elascana. He had read that it was the nearest to the village of Cella. The clerk produced a short stream of joined up sounds, with no intonation. The last word sounded like, ‘welter’. Weston nodded. He didn’t want to miss the bus. Seconds later, when a stainless steel pole helped to haul him onto the platform, the doors swung to behind him with a loud exhalation.

He found a place in the empty rows at the back, as far as possible from other people. He stroked against the green bristles of the seat fabric, and looked out over La Macha, the local region summed up by the guidebook as rural Spain meets rugged coastline. After passing through the industrial outlands of the city for the first twenty minutes, with factory chimneys dribbling grey gasses onto the postcard blue sky, the first part of that description was true. From the huge windows he could see undulating farmlands and forested slopes. The coach also crossed several rivers with their unremembered names on brown signs beside the road. He unzipped the suitcase on the seat next to him and pulled out Essential Spanish for beginners, also bought at the airport. It revealed that there was no w in Spanish. The expression was ida y vuelta: he had bought a return. He ripped the ticket in two and stuffed the pieces into the ashtray.

The guidebook listed Hotel de Mar as the best hotel in town and it was visible from the bus stop on the coastal road. It was a six-storey block, making it the highest building by three stories; a concrete box with balconies overlooking the sea. It had a large rectangular swimming pool, as if to confirm that oblong was the only shape authorised by the local authorities. To call it the best hotel was only to point out that Elascana did not have any good hotels. It reminded him of the tower blocks of Wandsworth, where Hotel de Mar would have stood happily in the nineteen sixties brutalist architecture. Here, by the shining sea, it could get away with its plain looks.

After booking a room initially for one night, Weston sat on his balcony. The idle Mediterranean stretched out before him, relaxing in the evening after a day in the sun; he felt both calm and excited as he absorbed the scene, as if he had drunk an overdose of espressos. He had arrived, and it was only six hours since he made the decision.

When exactly had that been?

There must have been a point in time when he decided to go, but the photograph was missing from his great album of memories. He could not see that moment, and yet he knew it was not a slow decision, one that he had been considering for days or weeks, ruminating, formulating plans. Will I, won’t I? Do I dare to run away?

No, it was a sudden decision, one that had to be located in a single frozen instant, when his life stopped and all around him continued their comings and goings; he chose his going.
But perhaps all decisions are like that.

He had been at his desk, staring at the mindless grey of an empty computer screen, then he swivelled ninety degrees so that he looked out onto Curzon Street. He felt a choking, terrifying, exhilarating urge to run down that street away from the office, carrying nothing. But that had not been a decision. It was a discovery. That was when he first saw the crack of light beyond the door. He had only to push it open and spring through to escape from the mess that surrounded him. To be free from the black knot that had been tightening in his stomach. For the last three weeks, he had been in turmoil. Welter, as the Spanish ticket agent put it. At first he fought down the desire, turned back to his desk, shook the mouse, and watched the colours crackle back onto the screen.

By the time he reached Gloucester Road, three stops on the Piccadilly Line later, the decision was made. His footfalls touched down as if he were floating along the platform. It was only then, when he saw it for the last time, to say goodbye, that he noticed it for the first time. He was a somnambulist. But his eyes were open to it all. He gazed up as he emerged under the secret shadow arches. Then he stared down at the criss-cross footplates on the steps. London, where the streets are paved in brass; where people come to find their fortune, as he had done. He moved through the museum lighting of the station. Orbs, some suspended from the ceiling, some protruding from the banisters. It was a journey he had made four hundred times before, but now his senses were heightened to it.
On the walk back to the flat he noticed the things he habitually ignored: the gaggle of foreign students, the man waiting in a minibus marked The Hampshire Schools, the workmen dismantling scaffolding, the intermittent clank each time they dropped a coupler onto the pavement. Regiments of tiny schoolboys dressed all in grey, like him, to match the sky. It was too hot to wear a suit, but there was still the odd drip of rain. The roads were completely sheathed with parked cars, Mercedes and BMWs.
At home, he tore off his jacket and tie in the hall while he pushed buttons on the phone. He booked a taxi to take him to the airport and doing so made him feel more committed to the journey. But he needed to keep momentum, not to think about what he was doing in case his resolve slipped. From the top of the wardrobe he pulled a suitcase. Into it he stuffed an assortment of clothes. Shorts and tee shirts, sunglasses, and the floppy disks he had copied in the office. His hand trembled slightly, so he stopped, breathed, took control. He scrabbled for his passport in the bedside table. His breath faltered when he could not see it amongst all the personal accretions of rubbish there: a scribbled telephone number on a torn envelope, a room card from a hotel, photographs, a spare pair of spectacles, a chess book, gym membership documents. But then he felt its smooth cover where it had slipped inside an old blue exercise book.

He cushioned the glasses and a photograph of Winstanton House with pairs of socks. The exercise book made him stop. It was a memento of his parents. After a moment of hesitation, he slipped it into the case too. He wandered around the flat, to check if there was anything else.

There was nothing; he needed nothing.

Carrying the suitcase into the hall, he swung round to look intently as the front door. He listened for noises on the landing, but there was nothing he could do, he had to stand and wait for the taxi. In the sitting room he stared down from the tall windows to where the daffodils were long dead in the square. He remembered when he first came to London, knowing nobody, in another flat. He had looked across the street, with rows of windows staring back at him. The windows contained people, hundreds and hundreds of people living across the street from him, and thousands and millions more, all around him, crammed into the city. But he was alone.

Now he would recreate that loneliness.

Then he was back, sitting on the balcony, in the presence of the inky evening. The Elascana lights were starting to ward off the twilight across the harbour. The vow made at the airport was broken already. So he promised again. He went back into the hotel room, to find something to distract him.
Rolled up in his jacket pocket there was a newspaper, taken from the arrivals hall. He dialled the number of an agent based in Brighton. It was nine in the evening there.

‘Villas International,’ said a woman in a voice borrowed from wartime England.

‘I’m in Elascana. Do you have any properties near here?’

She mentioned a few possibilities, and then said that, ‘by good fortune,’ her husband, Malcolm Clarke, was in Spain. He could pick him up tomorrow, Saturday, and show him some villas. Malcolm would meet him at nine.

Tired after the taxi, the airports, the plane, the bus, the jumble of emotions, he sat on the bed. He unpacked a few belongings. Between the clothes, he found the blue exercise book. It was the reason he had chosen that place. He feathered through the pages. The thick black pencil marks were smudged almost to illegibility.

It had followed him. It was the only token of them. After they died, he threw everything away: the pictures, his mother’s necklace and her rings, his father’s watch; even the bowl of pebbles collected at Lulworth Cove, the beach on their bedroom windowsill, that he played with as a boy. He did it because his father said, ‘You have to be strong.’ Now he was going back to the village where they stayed, twenty-four years ago.

His memory was an idyllic family holiday. When he was seven he had made a record of it for a school assignment: what I did on my holidays. The book had surprised him years later. It had escaped the purging. Since then he had read and re-read the account of that summer. He had read it so many times that by now he was not sure if he could remember the holiday, or if he just remembered his image of it triggered by the written version. He ran his fingers over the scuffed cover again. His name was on the front. His class 3W was written underneath. He had finished the guidebook on the journey. The language tutorial would take too much energy. The only other options were the hotel bible or the property advertisements. With the pillow propped against the headboard, he opened the school book once more.

In his memory his parents were still young, much younger than when they died. He pictured them splashing each other in the shallows. His mother had long golden hair, the most beautiful woman in the world; she was never worried about anything. In his mind, his mother always laughed, and his father was so strong.

He let the exercise book slip from his hands, sliding into a doze. Was he thinking about the past again? Oh well, at least it wasn’t the recent past. Sleep would stop that.