My ex-wife Astrid is a biographer of Napoleon. She has spent her entire career on him, producing essays, reviewing biographies for journals, conducting research into discrepancies in and conflicts between different accounts of the man’s life, writing trivia for magazines, editing others’ work, etc. — she’s a leading expert. For the last nine years of our marriage, she worked full-time on a six-volume biography, everything but the battles, the first volume of which is to be published by the Oxford University Press next year.

It would be fair to say that Napoleon is the love of my wife’s life. I am six feet tall, yet could never measure up to that tiny Frenchman, whose shadow loomed over my marriage like a Brocken spectre for two decades. If I were to advise a man looking to marry a woman who is in love with some celebrity or another: Try and find a woman who is in love with a living person, rather than a great figure from the past. The living grow old, they become embroiled in scandals, their opinions fester, and they become embittered has-beens. The possibility of any of these happening would have been a comfort to me.

A person from the past, of course, never grows old. If one is in love with Napoleon, one can easily and forever conjure the image of him as he is in François-Frédéric Lemot’s “Napoleon in Triumph”: Ten feet tall, muscular, resplendently dressed, crowned with laurel. Sometimes I wonder: How many times when we made love over the years was she imagining the Emperor of France in his prime, his virility, aching for her as he ached for Europe, with that selfsame force of desire that he had for Josephine? In the later years, my mind went to him almost every time I felt I had lost her presence during our lovemaking. How could it not?

But of the ways I did not measure up to Napoleon in my wife’s eyes, his physical body was the least of my concerns. It was who he was as a man, leaving aside his achievements and his tactical genius. Here was a man who lived, and was unafraid. Here was a man who stood up. That is what drew her, and that is the yardstick by which I was inevitably measured. Yet, my wife’s vast interest in Napoleon contained one of the main reasons that I fell in love with her: Her capacity to witness. To bear witness to the life of a man, in this case, me. What more could one ask for in a marriage than to be truly seen, to be borne witness to by someone who sees you ten times as clearly as anyone else? To be loved in such high resolution?

Eleven months before Helena arrived, Astrid finally left. We had initially said that we would break the news after the children’s graduation, but in the time since we had decided to separate, the charade had become difficult to maintain. So she left, we told the kids, and our marriage of twenty-one years ended like a marathon runner’s body giving out just before the finish line, shitting itself and collapsing.

It wasn’t always this way; the first five years had been bliss, the happiest of my life. When we met she had looked at me with such warmth, such adoration it bordered on awe. But by the end, the look she would give me was — on the occasions she failed to conceal it — withering. It was like a fortress, an unassailable resentment built with the sandstone of time, laid in the mortar of life’s endless little grievances and disappointments. What the look meant was accurately summarised by my wife herself, in anger, in a note that she wrote to me after one of our final arguments:

“Roger,

You had neither an Austerlitz nor a Waterloo. You didn’t even have an exile. Never in either your mediocre professional career or frankly rather sad personal life has anyone ever felt strongly enough about you to take you seriously, let alone oppose you. When I met you, I saw such limitless potential. In you. In us. On our wedding day, I was filled with such joy at having the chance to spend my life with you, to write that story together. Seeing you now, how little you have changed or achieved, how little you have been through, how little you have grown, how weakly you have skipped your pebble into the pond of life, I am filled with resentment for having wasted my capacity to love on a man such as you.

Astrid.”

II

I saw Helena for the first time through the kitchen window as she stepped out of the taxi. She walked to the boot and retrieved her luggage. The driver came out to help but she waved him off and scrutinised the house numbers as she wheeled her heavy suitcase along the pavement. The weeds between the tiles of the brick-paved driveways shone in the early spring morning. She wore black boots, jeans, and a slightly tattered green leather jacket. Her blonde hair was scraped back into a ponytail which jostled against her body with some authority, since she walked with considerable pace. My body released a jolt of adrenaline and for a split second I felt what I can only describe as fear, but after a moment’s hesitation, I took my keys and went out, still in my dressing gown.

“Helena! Hello!” I said, immediately regretting the choice of the “Hello”.

She ran to me, leaving her case on the pavement with all the smaller bags wrapped around the extending handle, and embraced me. The hug came as a shock. The only human contact I had had in the past year was from my children, somewhat pitying, indifferent. I felt their mother in their hugs, heart-wrenching little echoes of how we were, towards the end.

She cried when I saw her last, their mother. She hugged me tightly and kissed me on the cheek. I knew she was not saying goodbye to me. She was saying goodbye to the man she had once believed me to be. The Roger Stillwater of the present she had long since given up on, yet her goodbye was genuine. She was saying goodbye to my past. To her unfinished biography of me. I knew then that all of her remaining love for me, what she was now saying goodbye to, had been a little like her love for Napoleon, in that it was love for a man who no longer existed. But when Helena hugged me there was no history. There was so little between us, our interaction felt totally free, open, and entirely unmediated by the past. 

Unmediated by my past at least, which vanished in that first embrace, and then and there I knew: This was not just a new beginning for her, but for me, too. I took her luggage and led her inside, her eyes slightly damp. My eyes, I assume, were lolling like the eyes of a charging horse, my blood suddenly a cocktail of hormones and adrenaline. We got inside, I parked her luggage in the porch, and we went to the kitchen. I put the kettle on with a shaking hand and excused myself to go and change.

I came back downstairs a few minutes later dressed in a shirt and jeans, no longer so shaken. “Would you like the tour?” I asked, leaning against the kitchen counter. She nodded, and I showed her around my home. I showed her the living room, my castle, in which my wife and I had absorbed every scrap of every Scandinavian crime drama under the sun. I showed her the downstairs bathroom (a recent addition). Upstairs, I showed her the children’s rooms. First Silas’s; clean, austere, slightly dark. Then Siv’s, very much an expression of her personality, bright, eclectic, full of bric-a-bric. I showed her the upstairs bathroom and the study. Finally, the master bedroom, which despite its lived-in appearance had attained the air of a mausoleum, like I was sleeping in the room of a dead grandparent. My eyes darted to Helena as she peered in, but she didn’t seem to have picked up on this dimension.

We went back downstairs to the boiled kettle. I took two mugs out of the cupboard, dropped a teabag into each, and poured the water. Then I sighed unwittingly before catching myself. Helena looked at me, maybe conscious that my mind was somewhere else, and asked if she could smoke.

“Of course,” I said, “I haven’t shown you the garden.”

We went out. Helena sat down wearily on one of the garden chairs on the patio and lit a cigarette. “Let me get you an ashtray,” I said and wandered around the garden looking for something she could use, finding a painted clay bowl that Siv had made, at least ten years ago now. It was being used as a birdbath. I emptied the water onto the grass and took it back. Helena smiled at me and as she did, the dark circles under her eyes seemed to underscore her appreciation. She was beautiful. I had not looked at her so closely before; the only pictures of her that I’d seen were full-body photos, her face only visible in grainy, pixellated detail. It had been clear that she was pretty, but seeing her in person there was so much more; her cheekbones, the way her slender neck met her delicate jaw, the disarming blue of her eyes. Her face had the heightened beauty of a face that has attained the very first signs of wear, here highlighting a certain Slavic perseverance, her background only adding to this effect. What had she been through?

I idled around the garden for a few minutes, gently lifting some of the budding plants and inspecting them as she smoked. Then I went in and poured the milk for the tea. I asked Helena if she took sugar, calling out through the living room from the kitchen doorway. She didn’t seem to hear the question, so I stirred two sugars into both cups and brought them both out. I passed her the mug and she thanked me.

Once she had finished her cigarette she told me that she was tired, and asked if she could nap on the sofa. “No, no, take Silas’s room,” I told her. We went in and I helped her with her luggage, dragging the heavy case up the stairs in a series of thumps as she took the smaller bags behind me. It felt good, lugging the case up that terrain with her following, exhausted, watching. I was taking her up, up to her new life, carrying her burden behind me, leading the way. My wife had remarked once, embracing me after I climbed into bed — me still breathing heavily after having conquered the stairs, her half-joking and half-asleep — that the stairs were like my Alps. She still loved me then, and was still sympathetic to the physical reality of my body. “Well,” I thought now, while concealing the fact that I was winded by regulating my breathing with every ounce of my will, perhaps this situation came a little closer? Perhaps here I had done a little better?

I took the case into Silas’s room, wheeling it into the corner and standing for a second in the darkness, still focusing on controlling my breathing. Helena found the light switch. I looked up at her for a moment as the light came on, then tended to the bag again, pushing down the extending handle. Out of nowhere, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned.

“You are strong,” said Helena, a smile on her face. I panicked, not knowing what to say back. Instead, I pushed past her, emitting a kind of huff, a harrumphing noise of mysterious origin. I could feel my face going red. I half-turned in the doorway.

“Let me know if you need anything,” I said, and then after a pause added, “I’m glad you arrived safely, Helena. It was very nice to meet you.”

“And you,” she said. And I left the room.

Facebook went down for hours today. It took some of the heat off of our technical problems, and it gave everyone a little buzz. It opens up the space of possibility, when Facebook goes down, a space of “What-ifs”. A idiotic tweet in which somebody asserted that Facebook was not just “down” but entirely “gone” made the rounds, receiving hundreds of thousands of likes. I think a lot of people were latently excited for that to be the case somehow, but it was not.

After work I drank 6 beers in the office from the alcohol cupboard and decided that I was going to sleep there. I could not be bothered to go home. I went to the meditation room and pushed the futons together. I realised that they were almost the exact same kind of futon I slept on in my own flat. Quite thin, they would be useless for anyone even a bit taller or heavier than me. But I could sleep on them just fine.

At 2:30am the automated female voices started to play, first at somewhere over the other side of the office, then seconds later a lot closer to me, and then at a middle-distance. Even though I had heard this once — sleeping at the office last week — it still frightened me somewhat. When the office lights turn off it can be eerie, but that combined with a Numbers-Station-esque cacophony of disembodied female voices, gave me an instinctual fear that my heart pound. It took me an hour or so to get back to sleep.

Tuesday

I woke up with my calves cramping horribly for some reason. I was at my desk by 8am and nobody saw me leave the meditation room. At lunchtime the fire alarm went off and we were evacuated from the building, so I went to the pub with some colleagues and had a lime cordial and soda. I realised as I was talking that not one of these people took me even slightly as seriously as they took each other, for some reason.

This is a running theme in my life, actually. People don’t take me seriously. I have no idea why other than maybe something in my mannerisms or the things I talk about, or maybe because I’m physically quite small, but that doesn’t seem to cover it. Even in my last relationship I didn’t feel like I was being taken seriously, either by my partner or her friends. I had excommunicated my last group of friends several years ago also in part because they didn’t take me seriously. Come to think of it, I do wonder why.

After work I realised that I had lost my keys — the churn of the stomach when one realises one has lost one’s keys is worse when one lives alone — and commenced half an hour of frenzied searching. They were gone. I traced my steps to and from the gym, ran to the changing rooms and looked in the last few lockers I remembered using, ran back to reception and asked them to search Lost & Found, nothing. I walked back to my office desk and emptied my bag, cleared my desk, still nothing.

Raymond, the office cleaner, came by. I asked him if he’d picked up a set of keys, maybe from the meditation room, and his eyes sparkled. He had fished them out of there during the day and had handed them to the office manager. He found them for me, I thanked him profusely, and rushed out to go to my Brazilian Ju-Jitsu class.

On the bus on the way to my class I passed a couple of places that had meant something to me once, connected in my mind to my last relationship. Ridley road, Columbia road flower market. I had a mental image of a stuffed sloth I had won for my ex in a claw game. It was night time, though, which made it easier.

After my Brazilian Ju-Jitsu class finished at 9:45pm, I decided to walk home back West down the canal. It was black out, and the canal was lit dimly but prettily by various places, boats on it or the blocks looking over it. Fairy lights, coloured bulbs. As I came to Haggerston Road bridge, I noticed a unconscious man on the floor, one arm folded under him at an unusual angle and the other by his side, legs in similarly awkward positions. He had a friend with him who was freaking out, putting his hands on his head and running around in a little circle.

I called them an ambulance and waited with them. The conscious one told me that his name was Marek and that his unconscious friend was called Andrew. Marek was in his late 20s, Andrew was at least in his 40s and looked as though he had been through it. They were both Polish and spoke bad English. I had Marek turn Andrew onto his side and saw that he was bleeding — he had obviously fallen and smashed his head against something without breaking his fall in any way. There was a circular welt the size and shape of a 50 pence piece in the middle of his forehead, which was bleeding from the edges.

I sat there with Marek. He told me that he had been up for 3 days straight on “Polish Amphetamines”. We sat, listening to the water lapping gently at the boats, listening to the boats and the wooden light-up assembly of crossed sticks on the roof by Haggerston Road bridge all creaking in the night. A few people passed. A couple stopped very briefly to ask if everything was alright. I told them an ambulance was on the way already. A man came by and smoked a cigarette while looking out at the water. He took a very long time smoking, didn’t look at us at all, simply looked out at the water, and then mechanically turned and walked back the way he came from. I noticed my lips were chapped.

As I waited I bummed a cigarette off of Marek. He offered his materials and I rolled a roach and then the cigarette and smoked it, squatting down beside the two friends. After that he asked me if I wanted some weed and I said “Sure.” He rolled an abysmal joint and we sat together smoking it. More people passed us but none said anything; I am sure that we looked foreboding, with the smell of weed and the two of us squatting together over Andrew’s body lit by the soft orange glow of the joint.

After about 30 minutes of waiting I called 999 again and asked them how long the ambulance was going to take. They asked me, as they always ask, whether the patient was breathing. I had the urge to lie about this to get them to hurry up but my conscience got the better of me.

“Yes.” I said.

“Is the patient awake?” the emergency responder asked. In an astounding coincidence, as soon as she asked that, Andrew came to life. He started groaning and, in a pained, hoarse voice, started talking to Marek in Polish.

“Yes.” I said, after an inaudible sigh. They asked me if his condition had worsened since the first time I called, and I told them no.

“We can’t tell you how long it’s going to be, I’m afraid,” said the emergency responder. I thanked her and hung up.

Fifteen minutes went by. Andrew had stayed lying down, and had started complaining about the cold. I told him that I had called an ambulance for him. He was shivering, and Marek tried to shield him from the wind with 2 umbrellas but they blew away almost straight away. I covered his body with my Ju-Jitsu gi, which worked better.

Another 15 minutes passed, and now Andrew needed the toilet. Marek and I helped him to his feet and leaned him against a tree so that he could take a piss. He managed surprisingly well; that is to say he didn’t get any on himself. After he was finished he turned to me somewhat embarassed and said “Thank you, thank you.” I helped him onto a bench.

I went for a piss myself then, but not before I walked through a garden spider’s web, fresh and solid, startling myself.

Another 30 minutes went by and Andrew was starting to get upset about how long the ambulance was taking. Marek was drinking cider out of a 2 litre bottle, as he had been the entire time I had been with them, and appeared to be coming down off of whatever drugs he was on. His face looked dark now. He could still walk but he was becoming less and less helpful. I had been waiting with them for an hour and a half.

Sick of waiting for the ambulance, I called an Uber. I understood and dreaded the problem: We were on the canal, and neither the Uber nor any potential ambulance would be able to get down here. I had known this since I called the ambulance, as I had to call it to the corner of Denne Terrace and Haggerston Road, on the North side of the bridge.

When the Uber was 5 minutes away, and wondering why I was doing this even as I began to do it, I lifted Andrew to his feet up off the bench, my arm around his back and under his right arm, his left arm around my shoulder. I walked him under the bridge, careful not to let him bash his head against the brickwork, then took him up the stairs. His legs were almost completely limp. Marek followed us, talking very little now. Andrew was much livelier and was spiritedly complaining about how long the ambulance was taking, even as his legs beneath him were shot, bumping against the steps. He smelled extremely strongly of stale cigarettes.

At the top of the concrete stairs I tried to get Andrew to sit down, but he had recently developed a taste for standing, and insisted on propping himself up on a lamppost with one arm, gesticulating in an increasingly rowdy fashion with the other.

Marek was now running around in the road, shouting incoherently. It was coming up to midnight. I had work in the morning.

“He’s worse than me, now!” said Andrew. He was right.

The Uber arrived. I had ordered an Exec since UberX (the cheaper option) was taking forever to find a driver. The guy showed up in a severely pimped out Merc E-Class and when I approached to show him who he was taking — the pair of wasted Poles forming an admittedly grim tableau under the streetlight — he said (it was now obvious that this would be the outcome) that he wouldn’t take them, and drove off. Thankfully I hadn’t cancelled the ambulance yet, in case this exact thing happened.

Ten minutes later a couple came by on their bikes and then dismounted as they drew near. They had helmets with torches on. They were looking to get down the stairs, where we had come from, and seemed a little scared, especially by Marek, who had now taken to lying down in the middle of the road, knees in the air, screaming. Andrew looked at them and said nothing, still propped up on his lamppost, the blood on his head and the wound lit up white by their torches.

The woman noticed that I was sober and out of place among the other two.

“Is everything OK? Is there anything I can do?” she asked. Her partner stood close behind her, watching.

“No we’re OK, I called an ambulance already.”

“Is he OK in the middle of the road like that?” said the woman.

“I’ll get him out of there.”

“Are you waiting with them?”

“Yeah.”

“How long have you been waiting?”

“Hour and a half, maybe a bit more. He’s breathing and awake, so they’re not sending it as a priority.”

“Yeah, if it’s not urgent they take forever.” said the boyfriend. I looked at him, deadpan.

“You’re telling me, mate,” I said. “It’s like living in a failed State.”

“Are you sure there’s nothing we can do?” said the woman.

“No, honestly, it’s fine," I said. They left. And then, annoyed, I walked into the road and lifted Marek up by his arm and pulled him to the curb and told him to sit the fuck down and stay there please.

Andrew saw that and started shouting at me. “Call the ambulance!” he shouted. “Call ambulance!”

“I’ve called them four times already,” I said, “What do you think they’re going to say?”

Andrew pushed himself off of his lamppost and raised his fist as if to punch me. “Maybe I punch you then ambulance is coming for you!” he said. Marek then stood up again and went back to running around in the road, screaming.

At this point a woman came out onto her balcony from the high-rise residential block in front of us and threatened to call the police.

“Please do,” I called up to the balcony. I would accept these two becoming wards of the State in any capacity at this point, and was indifferent to whether this was the police or the paramedics.

Marek fell over, badly, by a metal fence on the pavement. Andrew wandered over to the entrance of the high-rise and started buzzing the buzzers at random, calling for help. “Nothing! You can’t do nothing.” he said to me as I dragged him away.

When I took him back to the lamppost, Andrew said “Go! Leave us. Why you are here? Go! You can’t do nothing.”

“Do you think I want to be here?” I said. Then I pondered my own question myself. Then I considered just walking away. I think I was only still with these two because it felt like something was happening, like I’d be able to write about it later. I felt like an idiot.

Finally the ambulance showed up. I saw it slowly coming down Haggerston Road from the North with no sirens but the lights on, covering the surroundings in blue. The paramedics got out and immediately went to check on Marek, who was now passed out by the fence on the pavement. Andrew started crowding them and they sternly told him to step back.

Eventually the paramedics loaded Marek onto the ambulance, as he was by this point by far in the worse state of the two. I stayed with Andrew and took an abject selfie with him. “Thank you,” he told me. “Thank you for… ambulance.” and he patted me on the back. I showed the paramedics his head injury as they loaded Marek in, and they let me shove Andrew into the ambulance as well.

"Can I close the door?” I asked.

“Yeah that’d be a help, thanks,” said the paramedic.

“Alright. Drive safe.” I said, shutting the door. I patted the ambulance firmly and breathed a sigh of relief.

I remember a few years ago when I had taken my mother to London Bridge to see my office for the first time. When we left London Bridge Underground station there was a homeless man passed out with this trousers and pants down to his ankles directly outside. I walked straight past, barely registering his existence, eager to get to the office. My mother stopped without a second thought and tended to him. Crouched down with him, she looked around at the migrating flocks of commuters in disbelief, a total shock and confusion that nobody walking past had stopped to help.

Bear in mind my mother worked for the NHS for over 40 years. When she went to nursing school it was run by nuns, and the country has changed a lot since then. I remember her face often when I see homeless people now — an expression almost like a realisation that the country she thought she lived in had vanished at some point over the years. And there’s so many more rough sleepers nowadays, markedly more than under New Labour. Not one for Blair apologia in general, but the fact is New Labour did a lot to help rough sleepers in London. In the last 10 years things have regressed.

This is all to say that I’m not naturally someone who helps others, and to say that this wasn’t any kind of selfless act, I just feel beleaguered by my conscience at times. I admit I felt a smug sense of self-satisfaction when a group of 4 somewhat attractive young American women passed right by us initially, when Andrew was unconscious, totally wrapped up in their conversation. I do often note that the people who are most left-leaning in their personal politics are the ones who take the least note of the world around them. Or at least the fact that they have an airtight theory of how things should be means that, unbeknownst to them, they lose all interest in claiming accountability for how things are. Though I was assuming that the Americans would self-identify as Left-wing. For all I knew they could have been reactionaries.

I didn’t like Andrew. Marek was fine, he had let me roll a cigarette after all, but I didn’t hold them up in the abstract as my moral superiors. They worked on building sites, scored drugs, passed out, then worked on building sites again. It was a life, their life, nothing more. I didn’t particularly feel a sense of social responsibility to them. I imagined some of the more left-leaning people I’d known over the years, and asked myself whether they would have stopped to help. Ones who would talk about what an equal society looked like. Always an embarrassment when a homeless person would shuffle over and ask us for change. People who held the marginalised up as their moral superiors, ready to prostrate themselves before them and listen intently to their lived experiences. But always, always in the abstract. It wasn’t their fault, at the end of the day, that society isn’t organised the way they’d like, so it wasn’t their responsibility to cough up. That was the state’s job. It was the same line of logic that people who don’t tip used with regard to tipping; that it was up to the restaurant to pay a living wage. In this case though it’s more embarrassing, people who don’t tip are straightforward misers, while with Leftists who don’t give to the homeless, their stinginess undermines their whole worldview.

After getting the two Poles into the van, I walked into my favourite bar, saying hello to Erik the doorman on my way in, and drank until 4am. At one point I tried to tell a couple I’d met while they were ordering a drink about what had happened that same night. I showed them the selfie of me and Andrew. They agreed with each other that it was in poor taste to take the photo — I couldn’t argue with that — and that it was very weird for me to be showing it to people. There must be a part of my brain missing, I thought, that I didn’t think it was weird at all. Or maybe I was just drunk. I looked at the photo again, at Andrew’s big bleeding welt on his forehead. I didn’t think it was weird to talk about it, after all it had just happened.