One Day

by David Nicholls

  Tucked between the ragged foam cushions was a copy of Howards End, a letter tucked into the opening pages. Even though it was intended for someone else, she felt an automatic thrill of anticipation at the red and white trim of the air-mail envelope. She tugged the letter out, read it to the end, then read it again.

  Heidi’s English wasn’t particularly strong, and some words were unfamiliar – ‘discersion’ for example, but she understood enough to recognise this as a letter of some importance, the kind of letter that she would like to receive herself one day. Not quite a love-letter, but near enough. She pictured this ‘Em’ person reading it, then re-reading it, exasperated but a little pleased too, and she imagined her acting upon it, walking out of her terrible flat and the rotten job and changing her life. Heidi imagined Emma Morley, who looked not unlike herself, waiting at the Taj Mahal as a handsome blond man approached. She imagined a kiss and Heidi began to feel a little happier. She decided that, whatever happened, Emma Morley must receive this letter.

  But there was no address on the envelope and no return address for ‘Dexter’ either. She scanned the pages for clues, the name of the restaurant where Emma worked perhaps, but there was nothing of use. She resolved to ask at the reception of the hostel over the road. This was, after all, the best that she could do.

  Heidi Schindler is Heidi Klauss now. Forty-one years old, she lives in a suburb of Frankfurt with a husband and four children, and is reasonably happy, certainly happier than she expected to be at twenty-three. The paperback copy of Howards End is still on the shelf in the spare bedroom, forgotten and unread, with the letter tucked neatly just inside the cover, next to an inscription in small, careful handwriting that reads:

  To dear Dexter. A great novel for your great journey. Travel well and return safely with no tattoos. Be good, or as good as you are able. Bloody hell, I’ll miss you.

  All my love, your good friend Emma Morley, Clapton, London, April 1990

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Opportunities

  MONDAY 15 JULY 1991

  Camden Town and Primrose Hill

  ‘ATTENTION PLEASE! Can I have your attention? Attention everyone? Stop talking, stop talking, stop talking. Please? Please? Thank you. Right I just want to go through today’s menu if I may. First of all the so-called “specials”. We’ve got a sweetcorn chowder and a turkey chimi-changa.’

  ‘Turkey? In July?’ said Ian Whitehead from the bar, where he was cutting lime wedges to jam into the necks of bottles of beer.

  ‘Now it’s Monday today,’ continued Scott. ‘Should be nice and quiet, so I want this place spotless. I’ve checked the rota, and Ian, you’re on toilets.’

  The other staff scoffed. ‘Why is it always me?’ moaned Ian.

  ‘Because you do it so beautifully,’ said his best friend Emma Morley, and Ian took the opportunity to throw an arm around her hunched shoulders, jokily wielding a knife in a light-hearted downwards stabbing motion.

  ‘And when you two have finished, Emma, can you come and see me in my office please?’ said Scott.

  The other staff sniggered insinuatingly, Emma disentangled herself from Ian, and Rashid the bartender pressed play on the greasy tape deck behind the bar, ‘La Cucaracha’, the cockroach, a joke that wasn’t funny anymore, repeated until the end of time.

  ‘So I’ll come straight out with it. Take a seat.’

  Scott lit a cigarette and Emma hoisted herself onto the bar stool opposite his large, untidy desk. A wall of boxes filled with vodka, tequila and cigarettes – the stock deemed most ‘nickable’ – blocked out the July sunlight in a small dark room that smelt of ashtrays and disappointment.

  Scott kicked his feet up onto the desk. ‘The fact is, I’m leaving.’

  ‘You are?’

  ‘Head office have asked me to head up the new branch of Hail Caesar’s in Ealing.’

  ‘What’s Hail Caesar’s?’

  ‘Big new chain of contemporary Italians.’

  ‘Called Hail Caesar’s?’

  ‘That is correct.’

  ‘Why not Mussolini’s?’

  ‘They’re going to do to Italian what they’ve done to Mexican.’

  ‘What, fuck it up?’

  Scott looked hurt. ‘Give me a break, will you, Emma?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Scott, really. Congratulations, well done, really—’ She stopped short, because she realised what was coming next.

  ‘The point is—’ He interlocked his fingers and leant forward on the desk, as this was something that he’d seen businessmen do on television, and felt a little aphrodisiac rush of power. ‘They’ve asked me to appoint my own replacement as manager, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I want someone who isn’t going anywhere. Someone reliable who isn’t going to run off to India without giving proper notice or drop it all for some exciting job. Someone I can rely onto stick around here for a couple of years and really devote themselves to . . . Emma, are you . . . are you crying?’

  Emma shielded her eyes with both hands. ‘Sorry, Scott, it’s just you’ve caught me at a bad time, that’s all.’

  Scott frowned, stalled between compassion and irritation. ‘Here—’ He yanked a roll of coarse blue kitchen paper from a catering pack. ‘Sort yourself out—’ and he tossed the roll across the desk so that it bounced off Emma’s chest. ‘Is it something I said?’

  ‘No, no, no, it’s just a personal, private thing, just boils up every now and then. So embarrassing.’ She pressed two wads of rough blue paper against her eyes. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, you were saying.’

  ‘I’ve lost my place now, you bursting into tears like that.’

  ‘I think you were telling me that my life was going nowhere,’ and she began to laugh and cry at the same time. She grabbed a third piece of kitchen paper and wadded it against her mouth.

  Scott waited until her shoulders had stopped heaving. ‘So are you interested in the job or not?’

  ‘You mean to say—’ She placed her hand on a twenty-litre tub of Thousand Island Dressing ‘—all this could one day be mine?’

  ‘Emma, if you don’t want the job, just say, but I have been doing it for four years now—’

  ‘And you’ve done it really well, Scott—’

  ‘The money’s adequate, you’d never have to clean the toilets again—’

  ‘And I appreciate the offer.’

  ‘So why the waterworks then?’

  ‘Just I’ve been a little . . . depressed that’s all.’

  ‘De-pressed.’ Scott frowned as if hearing the word for the first time.

  ‘You know. Bit blue.’

  ‘Right. I see.’ He contemplated putting a paternal arm around her, but it would mean climbing over a ten-gallon drum of mayonnaise, so instead he leant further across the desk. ‘Is it . . . boy trouble?’

  Emma laughed once. ‘Hardly. Scott, it’s nothing, you just caught me at a low ebb, that’s all.’ She shook her head vigorously. ‘See, all gone, right as rain. Let’s forget it.’

  ‘So what do you think? About being manager?’

  ‘Can I think about it? Tell you tomorrow?’

  Scott smiled benignly and nodded. ‘Go on then! Take a break—’ He stretched an arm towards the door, adding with infinite compassion: ‘Go get yourself some nachos.’

  In the empty staff room, Emma glared at the plate of steaming cheese and corn chips as if it was an enemy that must be defeated.

  Standing suddenly, she crossed to Ian’s locker and plunged her hand into the densely packed denim until she found some cigarettes. She took one, lit it, then lifted her spectacles and inspected her eyes in the cracked mirror, licking her finger to remove the tell-tale smears. Her hair was long these days, styleless in a colour that she thought of as ‘Lank Mouse’. She pulled a strand from the scrunchie that held it in place and ran finger and thumb along its length, knowing that when she washed it she would turn the shampoo grey. City hair. She was pale from too many late shifts, and plump too; for some months now she had
been putting skirts on over her head. She blamed all those refried beans; fried then fried again. ‘Fat girl,’ she thought, ‘stupid fat girl’ this being one of the slogans currently playing in her head, along with ‘A Third of Your Life Gone’ and ‘What’s the Point of Anything?’

  Emma’s mid-twenties had brought a second adolescence even more self-absorbed and doom-laden than the first one. ‘Why don’t you come home, sweetheart?’ her mum had said on the phone last night, using her quavering, concerned voice, as if her daughter had been abducted. ‘Your room’s still here. There’s jobs at Debenhams’ and for the first time she had been tempted.

  Once, she had thought she could conquer London. She had imagined a whirl of literary salons, political engagement, larky parties, bittersweet romances conducted on Thames embankments. She had intended to form a band, make short films, write novels, but two years on the slim volume of verse was no fatter, and nothing really good had happened to her since she’d been baton-charged at the Poll Tax Riots.

  The city had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no-one had noticed her arrival, and no-one would notice if she left.

  It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried. The idea of a career in publishing had floated itself. Her friend Stephanie Shaw had got a job on graduation, and it had transformed her. No more pints of lager and black for Stephanie Shaw. These days she drank white wine, wore neat little suits from Jigsaw and handed out Kettle Chips at dinner parties. On Stephanie’s advice Emma had written letters to publishers, to agents, then to bookshops, but nothing. There was a recession on and people were clinging to their jobs with grim determination. She thought about taking refuge in education, but the government had ended student grants, and there was no way she could afford the fees. There was voluntary work, for Amnesty International perhaps, but rent and travel ate up all her money, Loco Caliente ate up all her time and energy. She had a fanciful notion that she might read novels aloud to blind people, but was this an actual job, or just something that she’d seen in a film? When she had the energy, she would find out. For now she would sit at the table and glare at her lunch.

  The industrial cheese had set solid like plastic, and in sudden disgust Emma pushed it away and reached into her bag, pulling out an expensive new black leather notebook with a stubby fountain pen clipped to the cover. Turning to a fresh new page of creamy white paper, she quickly began to write.

  Nachos

  It was the nachos that did it.

  The steaming variegated mess like the mess of her life Summing up all that was wrong

  With

  Her

  Life.

  ‘Time for change’ comes the voice from the street.

  Outside on the Kentish Town Road

  There is laughter

  But here, in the smoky attic room

  There are only

  The Nachos.

  Cheese, like life, has become

  Hard and

  Cold

  Like Plastic

  And there is no laughter in the high room.

  Emma stopped writing, then looked away and stared at the ceiling, as if giving someone a chance to hide. She looked back at the page in the hope of being surprised by the brilliance of what was there.

  She shuddered and gave a long groan, then laughed, shaking her head as she methodically scratched out each line, crosshatching on top of this until each word was obliterated. Soon there was so much ink that it had soaked through the paper. She turned back a page to where the blots had seeped through and glanced at what was written there.

  Edinburgh morning, 4 a.m.

  We lie in the single bed and talk about the Future, make our guesses and as he speaks I look at him, think ‘Handsome’, stupid word, and think ‘might this be it? The elusive thing?’

  Blackbirds sing outside and the Sunlight warms the curtains . . .

  Once more she shuddered, as if peeking beneath a bandage, and snapped the notebook shut. Good God, ‘the elusive thing’. She had reached a turning point. She no longer believed that a situation could be made better by writing a poem about it.

  Putting the notebook away, she reached for yesterday’s Sunday Mirror instead and began to eat the nachos, the elusive nachos, surprised all over again at how very comforting very bad food can be.

  Ian was in the doorway. ‘That guy’s here again.’

  ‘What guy?’

  ‘Your friend, the handsome one. He’s got some girl with him.’ And immediately Emma knew which guy Ian was talking about.

  She watched them from the kitchen, nose pressed against the greasy glass of the circular window as they slumped insolently in a central booth, sipping gaudy drinks and laughing at the menu. The girl was long and slim with pale skin, black eye make-up and black, black hair, cut short and expensively asymmetrical, her long legs in sheer black leggings and high-ankled boots. Both a little drunk, they were behaving in that self-consciously wild and reckless way that people slip into when they know they’re being watched: pop-video behaviour, and Emma thought how satisfying it would be to stride out onto the restaurant floor and cosh them both with tightly packed burritos-of-the-day.

  Two big hands draped on her shoulders. ‘Schhhhhwing,’ said Ian, resting his chin on her head. ‘Who is she?’

  ‘No idea.’ Emma rubbed at the mark her nose had made on the window. ‘I lose track.’

  ‘She’s a new one then.’

  ‘Dexter has a very short attention span. Like a baby. Or a monkey. You need to dangle something shiny in front of him.’ That’s what this girl is, she thought: something shiny.

  ‘So do you think it’s true what they say? About girls liking bastards.’

  ‘He’s not a bastard. He’s an idiot.’

  ‘Do girls like idiots then?’

  Dexter had stuck his cocktail umbrella behind his ear now, the girl collapsing into enchanted laughter at the genius of it.

  ‘Certainly seems that way,’ said Emma. What was it, she wondered, this need to brandish his shiny new metropolitan life at her? As soon as she’d met him at the arrivals gate on his return from Thailand, lithe and brown and shaven-headed, she knew that there was no chance of a relationship between them. Too much had happened to him, too little had happened to her. Even so this would be the third girlfriend, lover, whatever, that she had met in the last nine months, Dexter presenting them up to her like a dog with a fat pigeon in his mouth. Was it some kind of sick revenge for something? Because she got a better degree than him? Didn’t he know what this was doing to her, sat at table nine with their groins jammed in each other’s faces?

  ‘Can’t you go, Ian? It’s your section.’

  ‘He asked for you.’

  She sighed, wiped her hands on her apron, removed the baseball cap from her head to minimise the shame and pushed the swing door open.

  ‘So – do you want to hear the specials or what?’

  Dexter stood up quickly, untangling himself from the girl’s long limbs, and threw his arms around his old, old friend. ‘Hey there, how are you, Em? Big hug!’ Since starting to work in the TV industry he had developed a mania for hugging, or for Big Hugging. The company of TV presenters had rubbed off on him, and he spoke to her now less like an old friend, more like our next very special guest.

  ‘Emma, this—’ He placed one hand on the girl’s bare, bony shoulder, forming a chain between them. ‘This is Naomi, pronounced Gnome-y.’

  ‘Hello, Gnome-y,’ smiled Emma. Naomi smiled back, the drinking straw nipped tight between white teeth.

  ‘Hey, come and join us for a margarita!’ Boozy and sentimental, he tugged on Emma’s hand.

  ‘Can’t, Dex, I’m working.’

  ‘Come on, five minutes. I want to buy you a drunk. A drink! I mean a drink.’

  Ian joined them now, his notebook poised. ‘So shall I get you guys something to eat?’ he asked convivially.

  The girl wrinkled her nose. ‘I don’t think so!’

  ‘Dexter, you’ve met Ian
, haven’t you?’ said Emma quickly.

  ‘No, no, I haven’t,’ said Dexter. ‘Yes, several times,’ said Ian, and there was a moment of silence as they stood there, the staff and the customers.

  ‘So, Ian, can we get two, no, three of the “Remember the Alamo” margaritas. Two or three? Em, are you joining us?’

  ‘Dexter, I told you. I’m working.’

  ‘Okay, in that case, do you know what? We’ll leave it then. Just the bill, please, um . . .’ Ian left and Dexter beckoned to Emma and in a low voice said, ‘Hey, look, is there any way I can, you know . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Give you the money for the drinks.’

  Emma stared blankly. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘What I mean is, is there any way I can, you know, tip you?’

  ‘Tip me?’

  ‘Exactly. Tip you.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason, Em,’ said Dex. ‘I just really, really want to tip you,’ and Emma felt another small portion of her soul fall away.

  On Primrose Hill, Dexter slept in the evening sun, shirt unbuttoned, hands beneath his head, a half-empty bottle of grocer’s white wine warming by his side as he slipped from the hangover of the afternoon into drunkenness again. The parched yellow grass of the hill was crowded with young professional people, many straight from their offices, talking and laughing as three different stereos competed with each other, and Dexter lay in the centre of it all and dreamt about television.

  The idea of being a professional photographer had been abandoned without much of a fight. He knew that he was a decent amateur, probably always would be, but to become exceptional, a Cartier-Bresson, a Capa or a Brandt, would require toil, rejection and struggle, and he wasn’t sure if struggle suited him. Television, on the other hand, television wanted him right now. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? Growing up there had always been a television in the home, but there was something a little unwholesome about watching the thing. Now, in the last nine months it had suddenly come to dominate his life. He was a convert, and with the passion of the new recruit he found himself getting quite emotional about the medium, as if he had finally found a spiritual home.