Exactly three weeks later he passed, in a hospice on the other side of the city.
I went four times. I want to put that down because I have been given credit for a great deal in this story and that is the only part of it I actually did.
The first two visits he talked. Not about himself — about a documentary he had watched, and about my sister, and about whether I was going to take the promotion.
The third visit he was tired and we did not say much and I read a bit of the paper out loud.
The fourth one he was not really there.
He did not say anything at the end. He had not been able to for about two days.
There was a nurse called Wilhelmina who told me, in the corridor, that he had been asked twice whether there was anybody else to contact.
And that both times he had said no.
I remember thinking, standing in that corridor: how does a man get to sixty-seven with nobody.
I was not being cruel. I was being exactly as stupid as I had been for two years.
Yesterday there was a thick envelope in my post.
Postmarked the day before he went.
I sat at my kitchen table with my coat still on and unfolded four pages of handwriting, fully expecting a thank-you note that would make me cry in a nice way and then go in a drawer.
And by the end of the first few lines there was no blood in my face at all.
It said:
My dear Thomasin. By the time you read this you will have claimed my ashes, and I will have gone the way I hoped — belonging to somebody kind.
I owe you the truth.
My name is not Ray. And I was never homeless.
I chose that corner two years ago. I chose you the first morning you handed me a coffee and did not look away.
I got halfway down page two before I put it face down on the table and walked round my own kitchen twice.
He had a flat.
Eleven minutes’ walk from that station. One bedroom, ground floor, on Culvert Street. Rented in his own name since 2016 and there is a rent book with every single month paid.
He slept there every night for two years and then came to that corner in the morning the way other people go to an office.
I bought a man a coffee every day for two years and he went home afterwards and had a shower.
I want to be accurate about how that felt, because betrayed is not the word and it took me a full day to work out why.
Nothing he took from me was worth anything.
Four pounds of coffee a week. Four minutes of a morning I was not using for anything else.
What he took was the version of myself I had built out of those four minutes.
For two years I had been quietly pleased about that coffee. I had mentioned it to people. Twice I had told it as a story at a dinner.
It was, if I am honest, one of the nicer things I thought about myself.
And it turned out I had been kind to a man who did not need it — which is not actually a moral problem at all, and which felt for about a day like being robbed.
That is the first thing I had to get past, and it is the smallest, and I am slightly ashamed that it took a whole day.
Because the letter goes on, and it is not about me.
But before it does, there is half a page that is, and it is the part I would take out if I were the sort of person who edits their own life.
He apologises for the coffee.
Not for the cardboard. Not for the register office. For the coffee.
He writes that he tried four times to stop taking it and could not work out how to refuse without ending the four minutes, and that by about the sixth month he had begun leaving it on the step beside him and drinking it after I had gone, because drinking it in front of me had started to feel like something he was stealing.
I went back to that corner and looked at that step.
There is a ledge by the flower stall at about knee height. He used to put the cup on it while we talked and I never once registered that he did not drink it.
Two years. Seven hundred cups.
I thought he liked the coffee. That is what I thought the four minutes were for.
