Neighbour

When you get to a certain stage of suicidal, every ''see you'' becomes a promise that you can't tell if you'll keep.

This time last year I was all pieces and splinters. Ugly. Hideous, really. I spent a bit of time visiting my neighbour down the hall. I don't really know how we ended up sharing those empty hours (or was it minutes?) together in his white-walled room, the window always open just a crack, enough to hear the bus going by. He was a 50-something French guy with hair like rust and stubble like steel wire. The guy was living in Manchester for work, but he'd had a wife back in Paris. They'd recently split up. Not quite divorced, but they were definitely apart. He wasn't that interested in the books I'd always end up talking to him about, and he'd always speak in turn about Beethoven. I knew nothing about him.

Once, he mentioned an essay.

"Lydia Goehr. 'The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works'. Have you read that?"

"No."

"Mm. She's fantastic." A long pause. He took a bite out of his toast. "Do you play Scrabble?"

"I have." I started thinking about Aarseth, about cybertexts and multicursal pathways.

"Think about when all the tiles are placed in their little rows. And you have all your words, right at the end of the game." I always won. It infuriated my brother. He broke the board. "And then the game's over, and you fold the board and let all the tiles slide back into the box. Where are the words then?"

He leant towards the window, placing his lips together and whistling a tune I'd heard through the walls sometimes. He held out some crumbs from his toast, and about three birds came fluttering down, out of the blue, landing on his hand for just moments before flying off again.

He looked back to me with a smile. I was at the door then. I could already hear in that unsounded language how it was time to leave.

"Au revoir."

"Yeah. See you."