Perfect Day

worked, how at midnight it would be the beginning of a new 1,000 years, and Lucy beaming at him, saying, ‘I’m standing on both sides of the world, Daddy.’
    ‘I came on a school trip here,’ he told Nell, happily, as they walked away from the Maritime Museum .
    It would have been a wonderful day, if it hadn’t been for the car getting clamped. It was Nell’s fault for parking it illegally, never dreaming that traffic wardens would be working.
    Alexander’s mood turned so foul as they waited by the immobilized car that eventually she took Lucy off down to the quay, where there were clowns and musicians and children running around with sparkly headbands with 2000 spelt out in glitter.
    Nell remembers the effort it took to keep a happy face for Lucy, when she felt utterly desolate inside, not just because she had ruined the day with her foolishness, but because to be so miserable on the last day of the millennium seemed to bode so badly for the future.

    The sound of her tyres bumping over cat’s eyes at the side of the road makes Nell grip the steering wheel so hard she’s in danger of cutting off the circulation to her fingers.
    Alexander has chosen to meet her at Greenwich because it’s the furthest the tube goes south of the river, Nell reassures herself, not because it has a particular history for them.
    Men don’t understand symbols or invest their faith in omens and signs like women do.

    From the junction with the M25 onwards, the road has more light. Nell relaxes, only aware when she sits back that she has been hunched over the steering wheel all the way up the motorway. She rolls her head from side to side, the conscious relaxation recreating some of the sensation that Chris’s neck massages give her.
    Alexander has no idea about everything that has gone on today, she tells herself.
    What has gone on?
    Nothing.
    Nothing for her to feel guilty about.
    So why does she?
    Because of what Frances said?
    Because it might have been true?
    Has Frances always loved Alexander?
    Nell shakes her head, trying to make the tangle of thoughts in her brain settle. She imagines a mass of connections like the wires inside a telephone junction box that are exposed when the engineers are mending a line. So many strands...
    Red traffic lights.
    She sees them late, brakes hard, only just manages to stop before a major crossroads. Her heartbeat races. There was no danger, she tells herself, no car in front, not even any traffic crossing on green. As she pulls away again, the pumping adrenalin subsides, leaving a simple clarity. The important thing tonight is to get them both home safely for Lucy.
    It is all that matters.
    For now.

Twenty-nine

    If it’s an even number, then everything’s going to be all right.
    Alexander takes the steps up to the Charing Cross footbridge two by two, counting silently behind his quickened breath. Fifty. A scruffy youth on a skateboard swishes to a stop beside him and looks at him oddly. Alexander realizes he’s smiling.
    He looks along the length of the bridge. How wide? It’s more difficult to estimate distance in the darkness. He decides that if the bridge is less than 500 paces across, everything’s going to be all right.
    His strides are determined, but not so stretched that they might be construed as cheating by the unseen judge of such challenges.
    When he was a boy he measured out his existence in unspoken Herculean trials.
    Nineteen, twenty...
    He wonders whether every child interprets life with primitive chaos theory, giving each action a false connection to every other, trying to exert a reductive control on the complexity of the world.
    Sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine...
    Alexander stops counting and leans against the iron barrier. A police launch passes beneath him, trailing an incomprehensible snatch of two-way radio. The tide’s lower than it was yesterday. The wash of the launch sloshes peaceably against the bridge’s supports. The inky water is almost invitingly silky.
    Along the Embankment, a slight mist gives the lights smudgy haloes. The lights of cars going over Waterloo Bridge are visible, but it’s just too far to see if there is anyone looking back towards him at the view.
    The memory of standing there with Kate hovers like an angel.
    Alexander senses someone approaching his back and turns round quickly. It’s a middle-aged woman in a camel overcoat with a patterned silk scarf at her neck. She looks as if she has just been to a concert at the South