Thanksgiving by Michael Dibdin Page B

alternative life. It was Leah who’d saved me, I realized now, looking at her picture with new affection. She’d taken me in, and for all the problems that came with her, she’d exorcized the power of Sally to get at me. That had been then, this was now.
    What I hadn’t understood at the time was the obvious fact that every now becomes a then in its turn. Leah too had slipped into past mode, with all the power that gave her to manipulate me even more thoroughly than she had when we’d been together. To rid myself of her, I’d fallen in love with Judy from Fulham. There she was, a sulky and adorable ‘bird’ of a period too recent for her hair and clothes and posture to look anything other than quaintly retro. As of course did I, in my embroidered shirts, bell-bottoms and facial hair just about everywhere you can grow it without a surgical implant. Determined not to smile and to impress the camera, I came across now as callow and insecure.
    Lucy and I had talked about having children early on, and agreed that we were too old. Neither of us wanted to propagate another spoiled orphan whose parents, once it reached puberty, would seem to its peers like exhausted relics from another era. ‘Middle-aged parents are like recent converts,’ she’d said once. ‘Too much, too late.’ But I’d thought a lot about the child we were not going to have, and looking at the pictures of myself when young I seemed to recognize him. I felt paternal towards him, a mixture of patronization and pity. I could have been him, I thought, had things turned out differently.
    I knocked the photographs roughly together, stuffed them into the ‘Motion Sickness’ bag in the flap on the back of the seat in front of me, then shoved them back. I knew I’d forget to retrieve them when we arrived. A year earlier, I’d wanted to have them, so much so that I’d even risked an appeal to Anne. Now they filled me with disgust. They represented the incontrovertible evidence that I’d always sold my soul to the past. The difference was that then I could hope to find another woman to redeem me. After Lucy, I didn’t believe that any more. The only person who could redeem me now was Lucy, and Lucy was dead.
    I fell into a shallow sleep for an indeterminate period, occasionally surfacing for a painful moment to rearrange a limb which had gone numb. These waves came closer together, and finally I wakened altogether and looked out of the window. There was nothing to be seen but the usual congregation of stars overhead, and a lumpy layer of cloud below that needed only a few trailer homes dotted about to look exactly like the desert I had driven across to meet the late Darryl Bob.
    Then the hand appeared.
    It was next to my right elbow, with something clasped between two of its fingers. A woman’s hand, I thought instinctively, and not in her first youth. I glanced at Madame Dupont, but she was still absorbed in the movie. Besides, this hand, I now realized, was coming from the row of seats behind me, and what it was holding was a photograph. It took me another moment to realize that it must be one of the ones I’d dropped earlier.
    ‘Thank you,’ I said.
    There was no answer. I tried to turn to see who was there, but no one was visible in the gap between the seats. I inspected the photo. It showed me in my early twenties, leaning with studied nonchalance against a telephone pole covered in posters for rock concerts and anti-war demos. This time I had allowed myself a slight smile. There was a brick wall behind, no one else visible. I was in my full mutton-chops, no-beard period, but there was no other clue to where or when it had been taken, still less why and by whom.
    I turned it over. On the back, in a rather stylish cursive hand, was written a telephone number and an address. Finally I remembered. The date was 1971 and I’d been in my post-graduate year studying journalism at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore. My best friend Pete, a History major, had