Kade Lennox woke up that Tuesday the way he woke up most Tuesdays,
which is to say: badly, and on his own.
The alarm on his phone had been set, four years ago, to a clip of his
father saying "Come on, son, up," recorded off the back of a voicemail
Kade had not had the courage to delete. He had told himself, at the time,
that it was a sensible practical choice. It was, he had argued silently to no
one, the kind of small clever thing a person did to be kind to themselves.
He was twenty-one. He had recently lost a father. He was, at the time,
doing his best.
He had since learned that there is a particular sort of cruelty in being
woken every morning by a dead man telling you to get up, and that the
person doing it to him was, on balance, himself. He had also learned that
he was not going to change the alarm. He had learned, in fact, a great
many things about himself in the intervening four years, and almost none
of them were the kind of thing one put on a CV.
He lay in the half-dark of his flat — a one-bed on the third floor of a
tenement off Maryhill Road, with a window that did not quite shut and a
radiator that did not quite work — and listened to his father say "Come
on, son, up," three times in a row, because he had not yet got around to
pressing snooze. On the third repetition he found that his face was wet,
and was surprised by it, in the way you are surprised by a thing you have
been doing every Tuesday for four years.
He pressed snooze. The voice stopped. The flat made its small
Tuesday noises: the boiler grumbling; the upstairs neighbour beginning
the long and complicated process of finding her keys; a pigeon on the
windowsill, expressing an opinion.
And, Dear Reader, I have no idea how Kade Lennox made it this long.
I don't. I've been watching him for four years now — the alarm, the tea,
the porridge-coloured jumper, the photograph on the bookcase he keeps
almost looking at — and I cannot, in good conscience, tell you how a man
does it. Wakes up. Puts socks on. Walks to a call centre in the rain.
Repeats. I'm going to ask you, please, to be patient with him for the next
few pages. Nothing very exciting is going to happen in them. By the end of this chapter he's going to be dead, and I would like, very much, for that
to
matter to you. So we're going to walk with him. Yes? Yes.
Kade got up. He put on, in order: yesterday's socks; the trousers that
he had not yet conceded were too tight in the waist; a shirt that had been
white in 2019; and the jumper his mother had sent him for Christmas,
which was the colour of porridge and very nearly as comforting. He went
into the kitchen. He filled the kettle. He put a tea bag in his second-
favourite mug — a chipped one that said WORLD'S OKAYEST SON across
the side, which had been given to him as a joke by Daniel in 2018 and
which he had, after Daniel, found himself unable to throw away — and he
stood at the window while the kettle worked itself up to a boil.
Outside, Glasgow was doing November. The rain had not started yet,
but it was, in the Glasgow way, clearly thinking about it. A bin lorry was
reversing somewhere two streets away, beeping with the moral certainty
of small vehicles. Two crows were sitting on the roof of the tenement
opposite, having what looked, even at this distance, like an argument.
Kade liked the crows. He had named them, in his head, Bernard and
Vera. Vera was, he thought, probably winning.
The kettle clicked off. He poured. He let the bag sit for the full three
minutes, because his father had been a man who let the bag sit for the
full three minutes, and because doing it any other way felt like a small
betrayal he could not, at half past five on a Tuesday, quite afford. He took
the bag out. He added milk. He took a sip.
The tea was, by some quirk of physics local to Kade Lennox, already
lukewarm.
And before you ask, Dear Reader: no, that's not a metaphor. Kade's
tea really did go cold faster than other people's. He tested it once, with a
thermometer, in 2022, and concluded that the universe simply did not
like him very much. He took the conclusion, as he took most things, in
good part.
He took the mug into the living room. He sat down on the edge of the
sofa, because sitting properly on the sofa would have meant admitting he of this chapter he's going to be dead, and I would like, very much, for that
to
matter to you. So we're going to walk with him. Yes? Yes.
Kade got up. He put on, in order: yesterday's socks; the trousers that
he had not yet conceded were too tight in the waist; a shirt that had been
white in 2019; and the jumper his mother had sent him for Christmas,
which was the colour of porridge and very nearly as comforting. He went
into the kitchen. He filled the kettle. He put a tea bag in his second-
favourite mug — a chipped one that said WORLD'S OKAYEST SON across
the side, which had been given to him as a joke by Daniel in 2018 and
which he had, after Daniel, found himself unable to throw away — and he
stood at the window while the kettle worked itself up to a boil.
Outside, Glasgow was doing November. The rain had not started yet,
but it was, in the Glasgow way, clearly thinking about it. A bin lorry was
reversing somewhere two streets away, beeping with the moral certainty
of small vehicles. Two crows were sitting on the roof of the tenement
opposite, having what looked, even at this distance, like an argument.
Kade liked the crows. He had named them, in his head, Bernard and
Vera. Vera was, he thought, probably winning.
The kettle clicked off. He poured. He let the bag sit for the full three
minutes, because his father had been a man who let the bag sit for the
full three minutes, and because doing it any other way felt like a small
betrayal he could not, at half past five on a Tuesday, quite afford. He took
the bag out. He added milk. He took a sip.
The tea was, by some quirk of physics local to Kade Lennox, already
lukewarm.
And before you ask, Dear Reader: no, that's not a metaphor. Kade's
tea really did go cold faster than other people's. He tested it once, with a
thermometer, in 2022, and concluded that the universe simply did not
like him very much. He took the conclusion, as he took most things, in
good part.
He took the mug into the living room. He sat down on the edge of the
sofa, because sitting properly on the sofa would have meant admitting he Kade looked at the photograph for a long time. Then he looked away.
Then he looked back. Then he stood up, because looking at it any longer
was going to make him late for a shift he did not want, on behalf of a
company he did not respect, in service of an income he could not quite
live on; and being late for that shift would, absurdly, still feel like a moral
failing, because his father had raised him to be punctual.
He put on his coat. He picked up his keys. He took his mug, because
his mug was the only thing in the flat that was currently warm, and he
was twenty-five years old and allowed to walk to work with a mug of tea if
he wanted to. He closed the door behind him. The lock made the small
reluctant sound it made on Tuesdays.
He did not, on the way down the stairs, think about anything in
particular. He thought, vaguely, about the cost of bread. He thought,
more vaguely, about whether the upstairs neighbour's keys had ever, in
any documented case, been found. He thought, not at all vaguely, about
Daniel, in the way a person thinks about a thing they have decided, that
morning and every morning, not to think about.
— — —
The walk to work was twenty-two minutes, in normal weather, by the
route Kade preferred. The route Kade preferred was not the shortest
route. The shortest route went past a particular kebab shop on a
particular corner, and Kade had not walked past that kebab shop, on that
corner, since the night of the eleventh of September, five years ago.
He had instead developed, over the intervening years, a small
personal geography of Glasgow that routed carefully around three
streets, a bus stop, a pub, and the front door of a flat in Dennistoun. He
had explained this geography to no one, because he had no one to explain
it to, and because, when said aloud, it sounded like the sort of thing a
person said in a documentary about a person who had been very ill for a
long time.
It had begun to rain. It was the particular Glasgow rain that does not
so much fall as accumulate, the way debt accumulates, or regret — a thing you discover you are already wet from. Kade pulled his collar up.
The wind, with the kindness for which Glasgow winds are renowned,
immediately pulled it down again. He did not bother to put it back up.
He passed the off-licence on the corner where the man behind the
counter had once, in 2022, given him an unsolicited and rather long
opinion on Margaret Thatcher. He passed the bakery that had, for three
months last year, sold a thing it called a "scotch pie fusion croissant," and
the absence of which Kade still occasionally mourned. He passed the bus
stop where a small, extraordinarily dignified Yorkshire terrier was being
held in the arms of a man in a hi-vis jacket, both of them waiting for the
same bus, neither of them speaking.
I want you to keep this, Dear Reader. The dog. The man in the hi-vis
jacket. The ten seconds of eye contact in which two grown men silently
agreed that the small terrier was, of the three of them, handling Tuesday
best. Put it somewhere safe — in the small folder in your head where you
keep things to remember about people. There aren't going to be many
more of these for Kade. I'm sorry. I should have told you sooner.
He drank, as he walked, the last of his lukewarm tea. He thought
about phoning his mother. He thought about phoning his mother every
Tuesday morning, on this stretch of road, between the bakery and the
Boots, and he did not, on principle, phone his mother on Tuesday
mornings, because he had once, when he was twenty-two, made the
mistake of phoning his mother on a Tuesday morning in a state of
considerable distress, and she had, with the cheerful brutality
characteristic of west of Scotland mothers, told him to "wheesht and get
yourself a piece, son," and the memory of this had taught him that some
forms of love are not, in the narrow sense, helpful before eight a.m.
He thought, instead and against his will, about Daniel.
He thought about Daniel in the way one thinks about an injury one is
no longer allowed to mention to one's GP. The night on the pavement
was, in Kade's private archive, indexed under several headings. There
was the official version, the one he told himself in daylight: that there had
been four of them; that they had been older and bigger; that he had been frozen, the way people freeze, and that this was a known and documented
response of the human nervous system, and not a moral failing. There
was the secondary version, the one he told himself at three in the
morning, which was that he had not been frozen, exactly, so much as he
had been thinking, very clearly and very fast, about what would happen
to his own face if he stepped in. And there was the third version, the one
he tried not to tell himself at all, which was that the thinking and the
freezing had been, in some small ugly way, the same thing.
Daniel had not, in fact, been very badly hurt. Two cracked ribs and a
black eye that had healed into a story Daniel had told for months
afterwards, with that small wry gap-toothed grin, as though it were all a
great joke against the universe. He had not blamed Kade. He had said so,
repeatedly, on the way home in the ambulance, with Kade sitting next to
him not crying because he was, at the time, twenty years old and
Scottish.
Daniel had stopped speaking to him eleven days later, by text, in the
middle of a long quiet message that Kade had read three times and then
deleted, and then spent five years wishing he had not deleted. The
message had not been angry. The message had been, in fact, very kind.
That, Kade thought, walking past the Boots in the rain on a Tuesday
morning five years and two months and eleven days later, was the part he
could not, in any version, forgive himself for. He could have forgiven
himself a furious Daniel. A furious Daniel would have been a fair
exchange. A kind Daniel — a Daniel who had taken the trouble, in writing,
to be careful with him — was a debt he had no idea how to pay.
He passed a small girl in a yellow raincoat, holding her father's hand,
and did not particularly notice her, because she was one of perhaps forty
small girls in yellow raincoats he had passed in his life, and there is no
way, in advance, of knowing which one will matter.
He did not pass her again. That is to say: he did not encounter the
same girl twice. I mention this, Dear Reader, only because your mind has,
in the way of minds, already begun to stitch the two girls together, and
I'd rather you didn't. The girl in the yellow raincoat in this paragraph went home and had pasta and was happy. The girl in the yellow raincoat
in the next paragraph but one had not, at this point, left her flat.
Kade reached the lights at the top of Sauchiehall Street. He stood on
the kerb. He pressed the button. He waited.
The clock on the bank across the road said five fifty-three. He was, in
the small and stupid mathematics of the morning, going to be seven
minutes late.
— — —
She was eight, perhaps nine.
Yellow raincoat. Wellies the colour of strawberries. A pink rucksack
with a unicorn on it, and one of the unicorn's ears coming slightly
unstitched at the seam. She was, as far as Kade could see, on her own,
which he registered as wrong before he registered anything else; eight-
year-olds were not usually, in his experience, out on Sauchiehall Street at
five fifty-three on a Tuesday morning in November in the rain. But she
was. She was standing on the far pavement, between two parked cars,
looking down at her own boots, the way small people look at their own
boots when they have discovered that boots, in puddles, make a
particular and satisfactory sound.
The little green man came on. Kade stepped off the kerb.
He was halfway across the first lane when she stepped off her kerb.
He saw her do it. He saw, with the small clarity that comes in moments
like this, that she had not looked. He saw, behind her, between her and
him, three lanes of road and a lorry.
The lorry was a Sainsbury's delivery lorry. I mention this, Dear
Reader, not because it is important but because it was true, and because
I want you to feel the small absurd particularity of the world in this
moment. It was a Sainsbury's delivery lorry. It was painted orange. It was
driven by a man called Brian Connolly, who was forty-three, and who was,
in approximately four seconds, going to spend the rest of his life trying to
convince himself that there was nothing he could have done. Kade saw the geometry of it. Driver. Girl. Three lanes. The angle of
the lorry. The angle of the girl. The angle of himself, in the middle, with a
mug of empty tea in one hand and his keys in the other.
He thought, very quickly, about three things.
He thought, first, about Daniel on the pavement. He thought, second,
about the small private dictionary in his chest, in which the only entry
under his own name was a word he had not, in five years, said out loud.
He thought, third, about absolutely nothing at all.
And then his body moved.
It was not, Dear Reader, anything as grand as courage. Courage felt,
in Kade's imagination, like a thing you had to lift. This was lighter than
that. This was the inside of his chest making a decision without
consulting the rest of him. His mug hit the road. His keys hit the road. His
left boot found the far kerb. His right hand found a fistful of yellow
raincoat.
And then he turned, because for some reason he turned, and not the
other way, which would have been the sensible way; he turned his back to
the lorry, with the girl held against his chest, the small surprised weight
of her, the smell of her shampoo (strawberry, very faintly), the unicorn
rucksack pressed between them, and he took, with his back, what the
lorry had been going to give to her.
There was a sound.
I'm not going to describe it for you.
I've decided, Dear Reader, on your behalf and without consulting you,
that the sound is not the part of this we're going to keep. We're going to
keep, instead, the small particular details on either side of it. The smell of
strawberry shampoo. The give of a pink rucksack with one unicorn ear
coming unstitched. The fact that, in the half-second between the impact
and whatever came after the impact, Kade Lennox — twenty-five years
old, of Glasgow, formerly a coward by his own private classification —
had the time and the presence of mind to think, with great clarity, the
following sentence:
Oh — oh, I did it. I actually did it. Dad, I did it. Kade saw the geometry of it. Driver. Girl. Three lanes. The angle of
the lorry. The angle of the girl. The angle of himself, in the middle, with a
mug of empty tea in one hand and his keys in the other.
He thought, very quickly, about three things.
He thought, first, about Daniel on the pavement. He thought, second,
about the small private dictionary in his chest, in which the only entry
under his own name was a word he had not, in five years, said out loud.
He thought, third, about absolutely nothing at all.
And then his body moved.
It was not, Dear Reader, anything as grand as courage. Courage felt,
in Kade's imagination, like a thing you had to lift. This was lighter than
that. This was the inside of his chest making a decision without
consulting the rest of him. His mug hit the road. His keys hit the road. His
left boot found the far kerb. His right hand found a fistful of yellow
raincoat.
And then he turned, because for some reason he turned, and not the
other way, which would have been the sensible way; he turned his back to
the lorry, with the girl held against his chest, the small surprised weight
of her, the smell of her shampoo (strawberry, very faintly), the unicorn
rucksack pressed between them, and he took, with his back, what the
lorry had been going to give to her.
There was a sound.
I'm not going to describe it for you.
I've decided, Dear Reader, on your behalf and without consulting you,
that the sound is not the part of this we're going to keep. We're going to
keep, instead, the small particular details on either side of it. The smell of
strawberry shampoo. The give of a pink rucksack with one unicorn ear
coming unstitched. The fact that, in the half-second between the impact
and whatever came after the impact, Kade Lennox — twenty-five years
old, of Glasgow, formerly a coward by his own private classification —
had the time and the presence of mind to think, with great clarity, the
following sentence:
Oh — oh, I did it. I actually did it. Dad, I did it. "Mister," Millie said. "Your eyes are funny."
"Aye," said Kade. "It's been that sort of morning."
I'm sorry, Dear Reader. I am. I did warn you. I hope you kept the dog,
and the man in the hi-vis, and the upstairs neighbour's keys, in the folder
I asked you to keep them in — because they're about to matter, all at
once. They're the shape of the life that is, just now, ending. They're what
the universe is taking from itself, in the next twenty seconds, in exchange
for a small girl in a yellow raincoat. I'd like, on Kade's behalf, to say that
it was a fair trade. I'm not sure he'd agree. I'm not sure I do either. But it
was the trade he made.
Kade thought about the photograph on the bookcase. He thought
about his father in the green anorak, laughing on a hill in 2011. He
thought about Daniel's gap-toothed grin. He thought about his mother,
who was, at this moment, almost certainly putting the kettle on in a small
flat in Govan, because his mother put the kettle on at this time every
Tuesday, and he was, with a sudden and terrible clarity, very sorry that
he had not, this morning, phoned her.
He thought about Bernard and Vera, the crows on the roof opposite.
He hoped Vera was still winning.
He thought, with a sort of mild astonishment, that the last thing he
had done with his life had been, by any reasonable measure, a good one.
He thought — and this surprised him most of all — that he was not, in this
moment, frightened. He was tired. He was very tired. He felt, somewhere
under the not-feeling, vaguely embarrassed, because dying on
Sauchiehall Street in front of an eight-year-old in a yellow raincoat was
not, on balance, the dignified Glaswegian death he had loosely imagined
for himself in some far-off future. But he was not frightened.
He thought, very small and very quietly, in a voice that was his own
and his father's and neither:
I'm sorry, Dan. I tried. I did try, at the end.
Millie's hand was warm on his shoulder. The rain was on his face. The
Sainsbury's logo was, for some reason, beginning to go very white at the
edges. Kade opened his mouth. The polite Glasgow part of him, which was
most of him, said:
"Aye, go on then."
The rest of him, which had recently been hit by a lorry, said nothing
at all.
The old man poured. The tea came out brown and steaming and
smelt, impossibly, of Kade's mother's kitchen at four in the afternoon in
October 2003, which was a smell Kade had not allowed himself to
remember in some time.
"Sit," said the old man. There was, suddenly, a chair. Kade sat. He
took the cup. He drank, because he was Scottish, and because no other
course of action presented itself.
"Right," said the old man, after a polite pause for the tea to do its
work. "You'll be wanting to know where you are, and what's happened,
and what comes next. I'm to tell you, in that order, in under ten minutes,
and I'm to make a sales pitch at the end of it. I'd like to apologise in
advance for the sales pitch. It's the worst part of the job."
Kade found his voice. It came out small and Glaswegian, and not, he
felt, especially heroic.
"Am I deid?"
The old man considered this with the seriousness it deserved.
"You are," he said, "dying. Not quite the same thing. You're at the
moment every mind passes through, in the moment of stopping. Most go
through it in something rather less than a heartbeat and never know they
were here. You've been given" — and here he glanced, almost
apologetically, at the table, on which there now sat a small brass pocket-
watch Kade had not previously noticed — "ten minutes. Call it borrowed
time. I'm a Guardian of the Edge. This is the Edge. Behind you is the cliff.
Step over it, and you are gone. Turn away from it, and — if you choose —
you can be sent back."
Kade did not turn around. He had a feeling he did not want to see the
cliff.
"Millie," he said. "The wee girl. Is she — "
"Millie is fine," said the Guardian. "Millie is, in fact, currently sitting
on a kerb in Sauchiehall Street being given a foil blanket by a paramedic.
She will, in due course, be very afraid, and then very brave, and then — in
roughly forty years — a paediatric surgeon. She is not, on balance, going
to forget you."
Kade put the cup down. He found his hand was steady. He resented
his hand for it.
"Oh," he said. "Oh. Good. That's — that's good."
And then he discovered, with mild astonishment, that he was crying.
Not in any large way. Just a small and tidy crying, of the sort that
Glasgow men of his generation were trained to do in private and not, on
the whole, in white rooms in the company of strangers.
The Guardian, gently, looked away while he did it.
And that's him, Dear Reader. That's Kade. The small tidy crying, the
steady hand, the lukewarm-tea-physics, the wee dog in the hi-vis man's
arms, the alarm clock with a dead father in it, the chipped mug Daniel
gave him in 2018. That's the shape of him. Whatever they make of him
next — whatever long second life is being arranged, on the other side of
this teapot, by a man in a coat that will not settle — this is the man it's
being arranged for. I just wanted you to see him properly, once, before
the universe got hold of him again. Thank you for sitting with him.
Eventually Kade ran out of crying. He wiped his face on the cuff of his
coat — the coat he had picked up in his flat an hour ago, the coat that
smelt of his Tuesday, the coat he was about, in some way he did not yet
understand, to take off for the last time — and he looked back at the
Guardian.
"Right," he said. His voice had steadied. "You said a sales pitch."
"I did," said the Guardian. "And I owe you an apology in advance. It's
a terrible one."
"Go on, then."
The Guardian set down his own cup. He folded his hands. The pocket-
watch on the table ticked between them in two distinct beats — a fast one
under a slow one — and Kade did not, yet, have the vocabulary for why.
"You have seen, since you were nine years old," said the Guardian,
"on late-night reruns, with your father in the chair beside you, a man in a
long coat in a blue box. You have heard him say things. Never be cruel.
Never be cowardly. Hate is foolish. Love is wise."
"…Aye," said Kade. Carefully.
"You are being offered," said the Guardian, "in the worst sales pitch
in cosmic history, the chance to be one of them. A new body. A new face.
A new life. You will wake somewhere that is not Glasgow. You will be
processed, badly, by a society that has absolutely no idea what to do with
you. You will, in due course, come into possession of a small machine that
travels in time. You will, in further due course, find yourself in a great
deal of trouble."
He paused. He looked, for a moment, less like Kade's father and more
like himself, whatever himself was.
"It is not your old life back, Kade. It is not a reward. You will not see
your mother again, in any meaningful sense. You will not see your flat
again. You will not, I am very sorry to say, see Daniel."
Kade looked down at his tea.
"Or," said the Guardian, more gently still, "you turn around. You step
over. You rest. There is no shame in it. There is, in fact, peace. You have
earned a peace. The lorry has, technically, earned you one."
He looked Kade in the eyes. With Kade's father's eyes.
"Which would you like, son?"
Kade sat with it. He let himself, for the first time in what felt like a
great many years, sit with a question without trying to be clever about it.
He thought about Millie on the kerb. He thought about a paediatric
surgeon in forty years. He thought about his mother, putting the kettle
on, in a small flat in Govan, on a Tuesday morning, in a world he was not
going to be in this evening either way.
He thought about Daniel.
He thought, with great care, about the small private dictionary in his
chest. He thought about whether the entry under his own name was, in
fact, the right entry. He thought about a half-second of strawberry shampoo and a unicorn rucksack and a yellow raincoat, and whether that
half-second had, in some small ledger he had not previously had access
to, paid down any part of the debt.
He thought it had not. He thought, also, that it had not been supposed
to. He thought, with a strange new clarity, that some debts were not for
paying. They were for carrying, for as long as you were given to carry
them, and you carried them by trying, the next time, to be the person you
had not been the last time.
He did not, you understand, articulate any of this in words. He sat in a
white room and drank tea that tasted of his mother's kitchen in 2003, and
he came to the end of a long unspoken argument with himself, and he set
down the cup.
"Right," he said.
"Right?" said the Guardian, who was, Kade suspected, smiling.
"Aye. I'll — I'll have the second one. The sales pitch. The — " He
waved a hand vaguely at the white nowhere. "The whole thing."
"You are certain."
"No," said Kade, honestly. "But I'm doing it anyway."
The Guardian closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them,
they were, briefly and unbearably, exactly Kade's father's. Then they
were the Guardian's again, and the Guardian's hand was on the teapot,
and the teapot — Kade noticed, with a small lurch of theft — was being
slid, very carefully, across the table toward him.
"Take it," said the Guardian.
"The teapot?"
"You'll want it. They don't do tea, where you're going. Not properly."
Kade took the teapot. It was warm. It smelt of his mother's kitchen,
and of a flat that no longer existed, and of a Tuesday in November that he
was, technically, no longer attending.
He stood. He did not turn around. He did not look at the cliff.
He did, however, ask one question. It was a small one. It surprised
him by being the one he asked.
"Do I get to choose my own coat?"
The Guardian of the Edge — old as certain trees, and patient in the
way of things that have watched a great many people decide — laughed.
It was, of all the voices he had used so far, the first one Kade did not
recognise.
"Oh, Kade," he said. "You're going to love the coat."
The white nowhere folded itself, politely, around him. The pocket-
watch ticked in its two beats. The teapot, warm against his ribs, agreed to
come along. Somewhere — very far away, and also directly underneath
him — a sound began that he did not yet have a word for: a slow,
breathing hum, like a lighthouse trying to learn the cello, like a blue-and-
bronze room he had not yet seen deciding it would like to meet him.
And Kade Lennox — twenty-five years of Glasgow, one borrowed
lorry, one Millie, one mother who would, in due course, be told the
gentlest possible version of a very hard thing, and one small unfinished
apology to a friend in Manchester who was not, as I reminded you, dead
— stepped into his second life.
— — —
— end of Chapter One —