Having nothing else to do I simply wandered through the wet sodium-lit streets of a city as endless as the night sky, drifting aimlessly through a moving ocean of humanity that went on and on in any direction that I cared to walk. Around each crowded corner, beyond each traffic-locked junction, more shops, more lights, more houses, more people staring through me, hurrying past with a nervous glance in my direction, forever on the move, forever striving to be somewhere else. As my feet grew tired and the slow drizzle began to soak through my clothing I gravitated as always to the kind of pub that catered for the likes of me, the people with nowhere else to go. Bright lights outside, dim lights inside, unobtrusive vaguely sentimental music just loud enough to permit relaxed conversation or to cover up its absence. A seating plan that blurred the distinction between those who were on their own and those who were not. The honey smeared on the human fly-paper that gathered up the rootless.
I ordered a drink and stood with it in my hand, scanning the faces of the people at the tables, making use of that radar by which we who are alone and don't want to be can detect others like ourselves. The highest reading came from a young black woman huddled into the far corner of the room, sitting alone at a table for four, with an almost full glass by her hand. I made my way directly to where she sat.
"May I?"
She smiled and motioned towards a chair. I introduced myself and sat down. Her name, she told me, was Sammi. My opening question was easy and obvious: where was she from? It was almost all that I needed to ask. She launched, hesitantly at first, into a long and detailed account of a life that had begun in an African missionary hospital and taken her eventually to a shared apartment in the student nurses' residence of another grander hospital, thousands of miles away in west London. Between there and here she had known good times and bad, love and loss, pain and joy, children and commitment, family and the leaving of family, the hope of a dazzling future in a far off land, the slow coming to terms with a much less glamorous reality. In essence it was the story of everybody who had ever responded to the lure of the neon fairyland that was permanently just out of reach where the end of the rainbow touched the ground. When it was my turn I told my story too, beginning with my arrival as an innocent and unworldly teenager from rural Ireland, standing transfixed between my two big suitcases on the Liverpool landing stage, too scared to ask the way to the train station. I told her of the jobs that hadn't worked out, the relationships that had floundered, the dreams that had somehow slipped away as the years piled one upon another.
We were both of an age when all such things ought really to have been resolved. Apart from the shallowest of externals, I thought, there was no significant difference between us.
I was certain that neither of us wanted to be alone that night, and that each was waiting for the other to make a move of some kind. It was a situation in which I had always felt particularly clumsy and inept, but bolstering up my confidence with the clichรฉ that I had absolutely nothing to lose I finally managed to gather enough courage to ask if I could walk her back to the nurses' residence block where she lived. We left the pub hand in hand and within a couple of hundred yards I was shielding her from the rain with my right arm and the flap of my jacket around her shoulder. We shared our first kiss in a darkened doorway beneath the awning of a shuttered pawnbroker's shop.
