Nana

When I was eighteen I married a woman called Nana. I must have known her maiden name once; I suppose it’s something I could look up. It would be on our marriage certificate, for one thing. But it would change her for me. Even knowing what Nana was short for: Ionna, Annette, Nanette. I couldn’t have loved any of them. Not like I loved Nana.

She was thirty-one when I met her. She smoked thin roll-ups that I never saw her roll; she kept them in a golden Grether’s Pastilles tin, its outline always visible in the back pocket of her battered jeans. This was 2002, and the jeans were voluminous, their hems dissolving into long cotton threads that lashed through the puddles of Camden and Shoreditch, King’s Cross and Earl’s Court—drinking up rainwater, creating a permanent tideline beneath her knees.