Perfect Day

away from the train. Behind him, a couple of emergency workers at either end of a stretcher with a covered body on it walk from the left to the right of the screen and then out of view.
    That could be my body.
    The bartender puts a tiny china cup in front of him. Alexander sips it even though the coffee’s too hot. It’s reassuring to feel it burning his tongue and throat and oesophagus as it trickles towards his stomach. The pain is proof that he exists.
    Alexander thinks about all the minute decisions he made this morning that have put him here sitting at the zinc counter of a bar in Soho watching his alternative fate on the television screen.
    If I had slept for five more minutes, I would be dead.
    If I had kissed Nell goodbye, I would be dead.
    If I had eaten breakfast, I would be dead.
    Alexander tips the last bit of coffee sludge into his mouth and puts the cup back down on its saucer.
    He feels like doing something really rash, like cadging a cigarette and smoking again. Something to mark the passing of a momentous event that didn’t happen to him.
    He’s alive, but he shouldn’t be. He could be a pile of ash.
    It occurs to him that at this moment, no-one knows that he is alive.
    It’s a peculiar feeling. Sort of powerful. He’s a ghost who can view the world without taking part in it, like one of those high-concept Hollywood movies. He imagines the portentous voice of the man who does the voice-overs for feature film trailers.
    ‘Everyone who knows him thinks he’s dead...
    If you could disappear, would you...?’
    Alexander goes to the phone in the corner at the back of the bar and rings home again.
    No answer.
    He drops the phone back into the rest, walks slowly back to the bar, orders another espresso.
    He can no longer taste the coffee, but the double hit of caffeine makes him lightheaded. And somewhere at the very edge of his consciousness, there’s the glimmering of an idea that is so wrong it feels wicked to even think it.

    * * *

    ‘If you could disappear, would you?’ the trailer man asks insistently in Alexander’s head.
    ‘Second Chance...’
    The film even has a title now.
    ‘... coming to a screen near you... ’
    Alexander tries to shake the voice away.
    He asks for a glass of water.
    The cool clear fluid washes icily over the soreness of his tongue and throat.
    Better.
    ‘It only takes one decision to change your life...’
    Alexander sees Bruce Willis sitting at the counter of a diner.
    The backstory is that he’s had a row with his wife this morning. She’s played by Meryl Streep and she’s got that Meryl Streep victim look as she goes about her day, putting on a brave face for their child.
    Back in the bar, Bruce Willis puts up the collar on his camel overcoat, leaves a $5 bill on the counter and slips out of the bar into the dark street.
    Why Bruce Willis? Several people have told Alexander that he looks like that actor with the wet shirt. Not Bruce Willis, for God’s sake.
    ‘Bruce Willis is Alexander... Second Chance ...’
    Alexander rests his elbows on the counter and puts his face in his hands. It’s not exactly a headache, more a whirlwind of images that he can’t control.
    Simply, inexorably, unintentionally, the idea has begun to take form, and the logic of it is undeniable.
    If he had been on the train in his usual carriage, he would now be dead.
    It is entirely likely that he would have been on the train.
    Therefore, he should be dead...
    Enough.
    But it doesn’t stop there.
    Nell would be without her partner, Lucy without a father.
    An image of them standing beside a grave leaps unbidden into Alexander’s mind. Two female figures, one big, one small, holding hands .
    Enough.
    Alexander takes another slug of water.
    Nell would hate it that their last moments together had been so unsatisfactory, but Nell’s too sensible to make a few fraught hours eclipse everything that was good between them. He thinks of the effort she made to dredge memories of lovely times out of him after his mother died. He remembers her sweet face trying to maintain an optimistic smile on all the long walks they took over Hampstead Heath and how she would occasionally give him a sideways glance to check whether there’d been a surprise thaw in his frozen stare. He feels a great welling of fondness for her now, which he could not feel then.
    If he were dead, Nell would cope, just as she’s coped with everything life has thrown at her: with Lucy’s allergies, with Lucy’s asthma,