City of Second Chances

by Jane Lacey-Crane

  ‘Shall we find someplace where we can talk?’ asked Daniel. ‘Preferably somewhere you aren’t going to slip and break your neck and I’m not totally freezing my bollocks off?’

  ‘Like where?’ I asked suspiciously.

  ‘There’s a bar around the corner from the Guggenheim, over there.’ He pointed just up ahead, and I saw the familiar curved white walls of the famous museum, lit from below by floodlights. It looked like a spaceship. And it looked a long way to walk, but I wasn’t about to admit to that.

  ‘Okay,’ I said, trying not to hobble like an old lady. Daniel said nothing, just stepped over to the kerb and whistled. Almost instantly, the car we had abandoned outside the museum pulled elegantly up to the kerb. Daniel held the door open for me, barely concealing his smirk.

  ‘Don’t say a word,’ I said, dipping my head down to ease myself into the car.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

  It took the driver only a few minutes to make it to the bar, but the walk would have taken me at least twenty agonising minutes. I was all for making the effort to look nice but why did it have to invariably involve footwear that tore your feet to ribbons?

  ‘I think heels must be the modern equivalent of foot binding, you know, like they used to do in Ancient China. Makes us more subservient and less likely to run away,’ I muttered.

  ‘You always were dramatic.’ Daniel chuckled. ‘Look, we’re here.’

  We pulled up outside Sarabeth’s; the bar looked empty but the neon sign that flashed in the window assured us it was open for business.

  Stepping inside was like stepping back in time; the walls were covered in all types of memorabilia. Pictures of Civil War men in uniform nestled in amongst framed prints of old-time New York. The wall behind the dark oak bar was covered with a long mirror that reflected the various labels on all the bottles of booze lined up in front of it, just waiting to be poured. The smokestack chimney from an ancient black pot bellied stove ran up the wall to the right of the door, across the wooden planked ceiling and out of the wall opposite. It looked like a fire hazard to me but what did I know?

  ‘We can grab a table through there,’ said Daniel, guiding me towards some tables and chairs at the far end of the bar. After the biting cold of outside, the bar was warm, and my coat started to feel as if it were trying to suffocate me. I stopped and took it off, draping it over my arm and following Daniel down the length of the bar. He turned to face me, ready to pull out a chair, but he stopped, his jaw dropping open. Oh, shit, I thought, had I spilled something down my front? Or did I have something on my face?

  ‘What?’ I whispered. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You look beautiful, Evie, that dress, it’s…’

  ‘Exactly the same one I’ve had on all night,’ I said, trying to brush off the compliment. ‘It’s Kate’s, so are the shoes. I didn’t really bring anything fancy with me. I didn’t expect to be going out quite so much.’

  ‘I’m glad you agreed to come out with me,’ he said. ‘You might need to put the coat back on though. If you want me to stick to my promise of just talking.’

  I was flattered but I was also wary; I wasn’t some wide-eyed groupie about to fall at Daniel’s feet just because he said I looked beautiful. At college he’d been a bit of a man whore before we became friends, always surrounded by enthusiastic girlies desperate to get close to him. A sudden memory popped into my head.

  ‘Do you remember Mandy Read?’ I asked, sitting down in the chair he’d pulled out for me. He thought about it for a minute.

  ‘Nope. Remind me.’ He sat opposite, leaning forward and resting his elbows on the table.

  ‘You must remember Mandy Read. She was in our A Level Film Studies class. Tall, dark hair, willowy thin.’ Daniel still looked oblivious. ‘She broke her leg chasing you down the corridor.’ I watched the penny drop.

  ‘She wasn’t chasing me down the corridor,’ he protested. ‘She tripped on that trolley someone had left outside the library.’

  ‘Because she was chasing you down the corridor,’ I repeated. I remembered it even if he didn’t. Mandy had been coming out of the library and she’d seen Daniel walking in the other direction. In a desperate bid to catch him up, she’d barged her way through a group of students, caught her foot on the wheel of the trolley, and gone flying.

  ‘I can still hear her leg crunching underneath her as she went down.’ I shuddered; I still couldn’t joint a chicken without remembering the sound. ‘And you just went on with your day like nothing had happened,’ I said.

  ‘I didn’t even know about it until later!’ he exclaimed. ‘It wasn’t like I stepped over her prone body in the corridor. I’m not that callous.’

  He was right, he wasn’t that callous. In fact, when Mandy returned to college with her leg in plaster and on crutches, it was Daniel who was always on hand to help her get around from class to class. Until he just upped sticks and quit college altogether, obviously. That was probably the last time we’d had an actual conversation, I thought.

  ‘Penny for them,’ said Daniel, signalling for the waitress.

  ‘Just thinking about our last conversation. Right before you left college.’

  ‘What can I get you?’ A short, rather angry looking waitress appeared at our table. I guessed we were keeping her from closing up, although we weren’t the only customers in the bar. There were about half a dozen others all nursing their drinks and looking as if they were in no rush to leave.

  ‘I’ll have a beer, please,’ said Daniel.

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘Two beers, coming right up.’ The waitress didn’t seem to be impressed by the fact she was serving a celebrity.

  ‘I think you’ve lost your touch,’ I said. ‘She seems strangely unaffected by you.’

  ‘Can’t win ’em all. I’m fine with that, by the way. It makes a nice change.’

  ‘It must be hard, being recognised all the time.’

  ‘I’m not going to complain. What kind of ungrateful arsehole would I be if I complained about that? It’s fine, it comes with the job. On the whole, people are nice. Like I said, it’s the press that need reining in most of the time.’

  I remembered the front cover of the magazine I’d seen at the airport the day Rachel and I had left England. God, that seemed like ages ago now, so much had happened.

  ‘I’m a bit ashamed to admit, I read one of those horrible magazines at the airport. Well, when I say read, I mean flicked through in disgust. Made me feel a bit grubby.’

  ‘I’m appalled and deeply wounded.’ He clutched at his chest and I laughed.

  ‘I couldn’t help it. There was a huge picture of you splashed over the cover. You were at LAX, wearing a baseball cap and looking furious.’

  Daniel let out a huge sigh and swigged a mouthful of his beer. ‘They’re still using that one? Jesus. That was taken about six months ago.’

  ‘You didn’t look happy.’

  ‘I wasn’t. I was rushing to catch a flight back home to see my mum. She had a stroke.’

  ‘Oh, God, Dan, I’m so sorry. Is she all right?’

  ‘Yeah, she’s fine. But I didn’t know that at the time. I was trying to get to my gate and this bloody photographer wouldn’t get out of my way. If it’s the shot I’m thinking of, it looks like I’m trying to grab his camera, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes, but no one could blame you for that.’

  Daniel laughed. ‘I know. Except that’s not what I was doing. He was walking backwards, totally focussed on me, and he didn’t see the family behind him. They had a toddler in a buggy, he was going to fall right on top of the poor kid, so I grabbed him before he fell. And that’s the shot they used.’

  ‘Jesus Christ. How do they get away with that kind of crap?’

  ‘Welcome to my world.’

  The waitress came back with our beers, two bottles of Budweiser, and a dish of nuts. ‘Thanks,’ I said, but she didn’t hang about.

  ‘Cheers, then,’ I said,
picking up my beer and tapping it against his. We both took a long drink.

  ‘So, what did you want to talk about, then, Evie?’

  ‘Nothing, everything. Tell me something interesting.’

  He thought about this for a moment and then took another mouthful of beer.

  ‘The universe is infinite,’ he said.

  ‘I knew that already. Tell me something else.’

  ‘I’ve thought about you almost every day since the day I left.’

  I almost choked on a peanut. I coughed loudly and then took a sip of my drink.

  ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. But I promised myself that if I ever saw you again I would tell you.’

  ‘Don’t make fun of me, Dan.’

  ‘I’m not. It’s true. One of the biggest regrets of my life is that I never managed to convince you to come with me when I left.’

  ‘You had your future all planned out, I didn’t. I was just enjoying hanging out at college with my mates and putting off the day when I actually had to go out and get a proper job.’

  I hadn’t shared his focus; he’d always known what he wanted to do. Daniel had been acting ever since he could talk. He’d had a small part in a kids’ TV drama before he came to college. That was part of his appeal to the girls; he was practically famous already; he even had an agent. Daniel never really settled into college. He hated the academic side of the course, the bit that I really enjoyed. I wasn’t eager to get up on stage and perform. I preferred to write, on my own, usually in the library or under the roll out seating in the drama studio. That was how we met. I’d seen him around the campus – I wasn’t blind – but I’d steered clear. I’d told Rachel that I thought he looked like a complete tosser. She’d said that he seemed nice.

  ‘Not full of himself or anything like that, not like you’d expect him to be. I mean, he has been on the telly after all.’ We’d been sitting in the canteen, sharing a plate of chips and cheese, when he’d walked in, followed by his groupies. All their giggling and squealing had really pissed me off; I’d been trying to finish a short story for a magazine competition and I couldn’t concentrate.

  ‘I’m going to find somewhere a bit quieter,’ I’d said to Rachel. ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘Nah. I’m going to see if I can snag a cigarette from Jefferson and then I’m going to sneak off home. I can’t be arsed with lectures this afternoon.’

  ‘You’re going to get chucked out if you don’t start coming to classes.’ Rachel had just shrugged. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow.’

  Packing up my stuff, I’d gone to the drama studio to hide. I knew it would be empty, so I figured it would be the perfect place to finish my story in peace. Looking back now I couldn’t even tell you what the story was about, I know it never won the competition; I’m sure it was something suitably angsty and full of emotional teenage turmoil. I’d been under the roll out seating for about half an hour when I heard someone come in. I tried to see through the gap under one of the rows of chairs, but I couldn’t make out who it was. That was until I heard him speak; it was Daniel. He was rehearsing his lines for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. It was that year’s end-of-term production and Daniel was playing Brick, the tortured young man with his leg in plaster, suffering in the heat of America’s Deep South. I heard him recite the same lines over and over, and I marvelled at how a teenage boy from Dagenham could suddenly sound like a grown man from Mississippi. It was mesmerising. I was so engrossed I didn’t watch where I was stepping, and I tripped on one of the metal supports that held up the seats. I dropped the folder I was carrying, the contents spilling out across the floor. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ I muttered, scrabbling around to pick up the pieces of paper.

  ‘Is someone there?’ I heard Daniel call out. I didn’t reply, hoping he’d just leave the studio without checking under the seats. What an idiot. I heard his footsteps approaching and the next thing I knew, his face appeared at the end of the row. ‘Hey, Evie, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Sorry, I came in here to work, to write actually. I didn’t think anyone would be here.’

  ‘It’s cool. Did you hear me practising?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did you think? I can’t seem to get that last speech right. Did it sound all right to you?’ He was asking for my opinion; I was flabbergasted. I stepped out from under the rows of seats and proceeded to give him notes on his performance. After that, whenever he had to rehearse, he asked me to help him. We became friends and then, for a few short months, we were something more. But I knew, the day I saw him emptying his locker, stuffing books and papers into his backpack, I knew that would be the last time I saw him.

  ‘Hey, where did you go? I lost you there for a minute.’ Daniel’s question brought me back to the present.

  ‘I was thinking about how we met and then suddenly I was back watching you clear out your locker on the day you left.’

  ‘I didn’t know what to say to convince you,’ he said, ‘how to get you to come with me.’

  ‘I was never going to come with you, Dan. We both knew that.’

  ‘Do you ever wonder what would have happened if I’d stayed?’

  ‘No,’ I lied. ‘You?’ I watched him closely as I drank my beer.

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘You would have been miserable, I can tell you that much.’

  ‘You don’t know that.’

  ‘Yes, I bloody well do. I saw you on stage the other night – you came alive. If you couldn’t do that, you’d be miserable.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, and then, ‘Are you all right with this business with Maria? You’re not stressing about it?’

  I was tempted to lie again but then I thought better of it; what was the point?

  ‘I freaked out a little when you told me. I’m still not sure why you did it.’

  Daniel leaned across the table and took both my hands in his. He held them tight and then looked at me; his gaze was so intense I had to look away. He gently cupped my chin and made me look at him.

  ‘After I saw you in the bookstore the other day, I started to remember what it felt like to feel joy again. I walked home that day like a walking cliché. Colours were brighter, sounds were louder; birdsong, laughter, it seemed like it was everywhere. Like waking up from a deep sleep. Suddenly, I could see there might be another option for me.’

  ‘I’m not an option, Dan. I’m not some bright and shiny new thing that you can toy with until you get bored. I’m a real person, with real flaws and real feelings. And I won’t be reduced to a distraction, a departure from the everyday boredom, or worse, a way of shoring up your fragile ego because Maria dumped you for another man.’ I drained my beer after I’d finished my little speech and then slammed my bottle down onto the table. I was satisfied I’d made my point, but Daniel was just grinning.

  ‘Are you laughing at me?’

  ‘Why would I be laughing? No, I’m smiling because although you say you’ve changed, that I don’t know the woman you are now, you’re still the same as you were then. Still stubborn, still passionate and beautiful, ready to show the world that you’re not going to take any shit from anyone.’

  I thought back to all the years I’d spent taking Trish’s shit on a regular basis – how had I let that go on for so long? I wasn’t sure now – that all seemed like a lifetime ago when in fact it had been barely a week. I felt different but in a way that reminded me of who I’d been. I didn’t need to find the ‘new me’; I needed to remember more about the ‘me’ I used to be.

  ‘What happens now, then?’ I asked. ‘With the play and Maria?’

  ‘The play finishes on the twenty-third of December and then I don’t know. For the first time in ages, I’m not rushing on to the next thing.’

  ‘I don’t understand why Maria would let her agent try and spoil your plan to meet me tonight. She left you, didn’t she? Surely she was no happier with your living situation than you were?’

  ‘I think Maria and her team are concerned about what th
e negative press might do to her career, if it comes out that she cheated on me. She’s worried that the media will paint her as the villain.’

  ‘Isn’t she?’

  ‘I’m not completely blameless in all this. I was an utter bastard to live with for a long time after Maria decided that kids weren’t going to feature in our life after all. I was miserable, and I wanted to make her miserable. I pushed her away.’ I could see that the memory of how he’d behaved still troubled him. ‘I’ve told my publicist that he has to leak a story about how it was me that was unfaithful, not the other way around. It’s the least I can do for her.’

  ‘Jesus, is that really necessary? Can’t you just say that you grew apart or something equally non-committal? Why do you have to take all the blame?’

  He picked up my hand and held it gently. ‘It doesn’t matter, not any more.’

  ‘Well, it sounds to me like she’s having her cake and eating it too. That’s not fair,’ I said, pulling my hand back. His touch was doing inexplicable things to my insides.

  ‘See? There’s my passionate defender of the less fortunate. That’s the Evie I remember.’

  It was tempting to buy into this version of me, it was certainly a more interesting version, but I had to be realistic. Although I was rediscovering things about myself that I’d thought I’d lost a long time ago, his image of me wasn’t real and I had to make him see that before we could go any further.

  ‘I didn’t vote in the last general election,’ I said.

  ‘Right,’ he replied, somewhat warily.

  ‘I don’t always recycle because sometimes I just can’t be arsed, and I thoroughly enjoyed reading Fifty Shades of Grey, twice in fact, even though the writing was a bit crap in places and I found the heroine totally maddening. Also, I rely on dry shampoo far too much for a grown woman.’ I let out a long breath and then waited for Daniel’s response. He sat there nodding and sipping his beer.