by Lisa Jewell
‘Fine,’ she said, ‘OK. Give it to me.’ She held out her hands. The folder felt heavy, as if it contained wet sand. ‘But I am not even going to sniff this stuff unless I really, really have to. You know that, don’t you? I so don’t need this guy or his other kids. I’ve got everything I need. OK?’
She awoke in the night, clammy and unsettled, an unremembered dream pulsing in the corners of her consciousness. She felt lost and disoriented. Her stomach was full of undigested cake and carvery and cheap white wine. She immediately got out of bed feeling there was something she needed to do. She paced her room distractedly, rubbing her angry, distended stomach. Obviously she knew what she was about to do. She’d known it since she’d first felt the folder in her hands, taken ownership of them. She pulled the folder from the bottom of her chest of drawers and she opened it.
NOW
Robyn had her microbiology file tucked under her arm and was wearing her black-framed reading glasses, even though she wasn’t reading. She had on a really cute checked shirt dress from Urban Outfitters with green tights and granny boots. She looked cool and clever. Geek chic. She dressed differently for college from how she dressed at home. At home, in Buckhurst Hill, she was more polished. Out here in the hard-nosed streets of London town she let it go a bit. She didn’t want to look like an Essex girl. Still had on proper underwear, though, and was wearing Mac lipstick and Agent Provocateur Boudoir perfume.
She was on Gower Street, headed from a study session at the main library to a guest talk at the Institute of Neurology. She was alone. The sun was low and London felt strangely quiet, like it was early dawn and the tubes hadn’t started running yet. Where was everyone? she wondered. But she liked it, it gave her a feeling of exclusivity, of owning the place, like when they clear the streets to shoot a scene in a film and all the ordinary people have to take detours or just stand around gawping at the much more important people, who are probably just best boys or gaffers or shutter loaders. Empty streets made Robyn feel like she was the star of her very own movie. She smiled, knowing that nobody could see, and let her walk become a sway. No one was watching but she acted like everyone was. She liked these in-between moments, when she was a medical student but she wasn’t actually in the process of studying medicine. Halfway between lectures she was able momentarily to empty her brain of all the facts and jargon and names and numbers that she seemed to carry around with her perpetually these days and just enjoy the fact of her existence in this rarefied world. The rest of the time she was overwhelmed and petrified by the amount of learning she was being required to do. Books like breeze blocks full of vital information, tests every few days, studying, learning, remembering. It was not what she’d been expecting. She’d thought it would be all sitting in airy auditoria with a notepad at her elbow, listening intently to learned men and women whilst gently chewing the end of a pencil. She’d thought exams would be easy, that tests would be a doddle. It was starting to occur to her month by month, in small, discomfiting bursts of awareness, that maybe she wasn’t as clever as she’d thought she was.
She turned a corner and found herself opposite the Brunswick Centre. She smiled, as the irresistible lure of unknown shops therein called to her. Inside the centre she found a dress shop called, rather aptly, Joy. Her eye was immediately caught by a flame-coloured dress hanging in the window. It was shiny, a kind of orange-red, with a crumb-catcher bodice and a full skirt. It would be perfect for Nush’s nineteenth the following month. With a beaded cardi over and her strappy gold platforms. £89.99, though. Where was she going to get £90 from? Her mum and dad had given her £1,000 for her birthday, but that was intended for something mega, for a year abroad or a car or a deposit on a flat or something, not for chucking away on dresses. And exactly how many prom dresses did one girl actually need anyway? She resisted the temptation to go in and try it on. (It would look great on her, she didn’t need to try it on to know that, but once you’d tried something on you were about sixty percent of the way to the till, really.)
She felt pleased with her resolve as she passed the shop empty-handed. She was growing up. She was changing. She felt in her pocket for a folded piece of paper and rubbed it between her fingertips, for reassurance. It was the letter from her dad, her real dad, that her mother had given her back in August, when they’d got back from the pub after her birthday lunch.
Robyn kept it about her person at all times. She didn’t know why. She didn’t really want to know why. The letter was short, less than a page of A4, and she’d memorised almost the whole thing, word for word, all the little blips in his grammar, the occasional exclamation mark. The letter was innocuous. It had done nothing to dent her fantasy. If anything, it had augmented it, adding layers of texture and detail. She could already picture a full-mouthed, handsome doctor in a white coat and one of those cute patterned hats that paediatricians wore to put children at ease; she saw him smiling beneficently at a wan kid in a hospital bed, his hands in his pockets, possibly, probably, rocking back on to his heels. Now she could add a touch of personality to the vignette; a charming misuse of the English past participle, a tendency to end sentences on a note of amusement, a certain shyness and self-effacement.
The letter, far from rendering him unpalatably human, had merely served to make him even more unattainably fictitious. And that in turn made Robyn feel even more unassailably certain that she would never, ever want to meet him.
But that was on a quiet Tuesday morning in February, halfway between a study session and a lecture and exactly two weeks before she met Jack Hart and fell in love.
It was a Thursday night, late-night shopping on Oxford Street. Robyn was on the till downstairs, in menswear. The shop was closing in half an hour and she was so tired she felt like she’d been down a coalmine. She’d left her house at eight o’clock that morning, done a full day of intensive lectures, a gruelling late-afternoon study group, been for a much-needed drink with a friend and arrived at Zara at 6 p.m. for her late-night shift.
Jack Hart walked in at 8.31. He walked past Robyn without a glance and headed straight for a display of mushroom-coloured knitwear. Something about his silhouette made Robyn stand a little straighter and lick her lips. He wasn’t tall and his build wasn’t overtly masculine, but there was something springy about him, as if he could spontaneously perform a somersault. He wore jeans and trainers, an overcoat and a sweater. His hair was black and cut in a shaggy style. Robyn hadn’t yet seen his face but she was spellbound by his back, the cut of his overcoat, the angle of his shoulders, the way he stood with his bouncy feet set wide apart. There was nothing fey or uncertain about him. He stood as though the floor belonged to him, a king inspecting his subjects. He flicked through the cardigans with an air of disappointment. He was not browsing, he was looking for something specific, something he’d envisaged in his head and that did not, it seemed, exist in real life.
‘Do you need any help?’ she asked, taking the edges off her Essex twang and trying not to smile too hard.
The man turned around and looked at her in surprise, as though he’d imagined himself alone down here.
A smile flickered across his face. Insouciant.
‘Um, yeah, actually,’ he replied, as if the idea that a shop assistant might be able to assist him had never before crossed his mind. ‘Yeah. I’m looking for a sweater, kind of like this one,’ he opened his overcoat to demonstrate the sweater, ‘but in a sort of mid-brown.’
Robyn smiled. ‘That’s a very nice sweater,’ she said. ‘I think we might have just what you’re looking for.’
She let him follow her across the shop floor. She was wearing fitted taupe trousers and a chiffon tank top. She knew what she looked like from behind because she’d already checked out her rear view in a changing room when she got changed for work. Her hair was tied up and the back of her neck was visible and she knew that he would be able to see the tiny tattoo at the top of her spine, an enjoined curlicue of her sisters’ initials: G and R, Gemma and Rachel. She’d had
it done last year. Her parents had given their permission. ‘You can always wear your hair down over it,’ they’d said, ‘if you regret it when you’re older.’ They’d cried when they’d seen it. Said it was beautiful and tasteful, a lovely memorial to their two girls.
‘Hmm,’ said the man, as she unfolded a third creamy-coffee-coloured jumper on a table at the back of the shop, ‘almost, almost …’
‘But not quite?’
‘Yeah, it’s just a bit too gold?’ He pinched his chin and smiled. ‘I’m being a total nightmare, aren’t I?’ he said.
Robyn laughed. ‘No,’ she said, ‘not at all. It’s good to know what you want. Means you make fewer mistakes in life.’
‘Ah,’ he said, ‘am I talking to a fellow perfectionist?’
She smiled. ‘Probably. Yeah. I know what I want and I know what I like and I’m not really prepared to compromise.’
He backed away from her, playfully.
She laughed. ‘Now I sound like a total nightmare.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘not at all. You sound like just my kind of girl, in fact.’
The comment was overtly flirtatious but it didn’t throw Robyn off course. She’d been expecting it. And not just because she was pretty and she was used to men flirting with her, but because everything about this man seemed so familiar. The comment didn’t feel to her as though it had come out of the blue, but more as though it were part of a longer and more intimate conversation.
She glanced up at him. She hadn’t really looked at him before, had been too distracted by knitwear. He was lovely. There was no other word for it. Just lovely. His face was soft, almost feminine, but the right side of androgynous. His skin was clear and smooth and his eyes were a glacial greeny blue. He had a neat straight nose and a full mouth, but more compelling than the perfect loveliness of him was the intelligence and humour that radiated from him.
She passed over his comment and said: ‘What’s it for? The jumper?’
‘Oh, nothing really. Just to stop me wearing this one the whole time.’
Robyn checked his left hand for a wedding ring. He seemed the kind of guy who might be married or settled down. People described the air of a single person as desperation. Robyn didn’t see it that way. To her it was more a feeling of vulnerability. There was something fragile about a person looking for another person. Something breakable and filmy, like the shell of a sparrow’s egg. It didn’t matter how hard the single person tried to cover it up with bluster and bravado, it was still there, beneath the surface, the heart-breaking baby bird. But this man had no inner baby bird. He was solid, all the way through. He was either gay, married or not even remotely interested in meeting anyone.
‘Where did you get that one from?’ she asked, pointing at his jumper, resisting the temptation to press the heel of her hand against it as she did so.
‘Here,’ he smiled. ‘Zara. About three years ago. And now the moths have been at it.’ He pulled the hem round and showed her a small hole at the back.
She winced. ‘I hate moths,’ she said. ‘They’re evil.’
He laughed. ‘Absolutely,’ he agreed. ‘So I thought it might be time for a new Zara jumper. And a perfect opportunity to move on from grey.’
Robyn sold him three jumpers in the end. A brown one, another grey one and a black one. Just because she was attracted to him it did not mean that she couldn’t also spin some extra commission out of him.
The air between them at the till as she de-tagged, folded and bagged the jumpers was clogged up and edgy. She had by-passed his one attempt at taking their jumper conversation any further and he clearly didn’t feel the need to make another one.
‘That’s one hundred and eighteen pounds, please,’ she said.
He raised an eyebrow in a manner that suggested that £118 was a lot of money and passed her a Switch card.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
She tried to read his name from the card in the shred of time during which it was visible to her before she slid it into the reader. She caught a ‘Mr’, two initials and the surname ‘Hart’. Mr something something Hart.
Robyn Hart.
The thought streaked through her mind like a bullet train. She blinked, to make sure it was gone. She had never paired her name with a man’s before. Not even as a schoolgirl. She had no intention of ever changing her surname. It belonged to her, to her mother, her father, her sisters. It was theirs. She would never throw it away, not for anyone. But here it was. Robyn Hart. Dr Robyn Hart. It felt like a concept beyond high-school fantasy. It felt like prophecy.
‘If you could just put in your pin number,’ she intoned, weakly.
She watched him pad in the numbers with a strong forefinger and she licked her lips. His bag sat on the counter, ready for him to lift it away. The card machine chuntered out his receipt and she ripped it off. ‘Would you like the receipt in the bag?’
‘Yeah,’ he nodded, ‘sure.’
Their encounter was fading away. In one moment he would loop his fingers around the handles of his bag, he would smile, and then he would be gone. And that, she suddenly knew, would be a tragedy.
‘Do you work here? Full-time?’
She felt her tension ease. Mr Hart had thrown a life ring at their encounter. She grabbed it and smiled.
‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘No, just Thursday nights. And I do Saturdays and Sundays at my local branch, near where I live.’
‘So, what do you do the rest of the time?’
She smiled again. ‘I’m a student,’ she replied, ‘a medical student.’
His brow registered his surprise. ‘Wow. That’s pretty cool. What are you hoping to go into?’
‘Paediatrics.’
‘Right, now you’ll have to remind me – is that feet or kids?’
‘Kids,’ she laughed. ‘I want to look after sick children. And work towards world peace.’
He laughed. ‘So one day you’ll be a doctor?’
‘Yeah, that’s the idea. Got a long, long way to go first, of course. I’ve only just begun. But yeah, work hard, fingers crossed, one day I might be looking after one of your unborn children.’
He grimaced. She thought at first that maybe he was grimacing at the concept of having children, but then realised what she’d just implied. ‘Oh, God, well, no, I didn’t mean … obviously, if you do have a child, I really hope I’ll never ever have to meet it …’
‘Unless it’s yours.’ He smiled.
Her brain raced as she tried mentally to recalibrate his words into some kind of form that didn’t mean what it sounded like it had meant. ‘What? You mean …’
He looked embarrassed. ‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘just being silly. Ignore me. Anyway,’ he brought the exchange to an abrupt close, ‘thank you for being so patient and informative on the subject of brown jumpers. And, er, good luck.’
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I hope you and your new jumpers are very happy together.’
He smiled tightly. Robyn could see more words straining against his smile. She willed them to fight their way out. They didn’t.
She watched him leave, his countenance neither as mobile nor as light-hearted as it had been twenty-two minutes ago. The store was empty. The time on the till said 8.54. Time to cash up, switch off, dim the lights and leave.
Half an hour later she pulled on her overcoat, swapped her heels for sneakers, slung her bag across her chest and left the store by the front door, the primed burglar alarm wailing deafeningly in the background.
She was about to turn left and head towards Tottenham Court Road tube station with the manager and another girl when a figure appeared at her side.
‘Sorry,’ said Mr something something Hart, ‘I’ve been hanging around outside for half an hour like a freaky stalker. I was just wondering, I know it’s late, but do you have to get home? Or have you got time for a drink?’
Robyn looked at him. Then she looked at her friend. Her friend sent her a warning look. Robyn looked back at the man. She thought:
I trust you. I know you. And then she acquiesced, with a simple nod of her head.
She had only met him an hour ago, but already she had dreamed of being his wife and already he had talked of fathering her children. It could be no other way.
DEAN
‘You’re fucking pathetic, you know that?’
Dean flinched. His forehead was pressed hard against his fists and his nose was pointed towards the ground. He stared at a spot of dirt on the grey carpet. The spot of dirt was hard to identify. It might have been a burn mark. It might have been a trodden-in lump of shit. Hard to say from this angle whether it was convex or concave. A vein on Dean’s temple started to throb in rhythm with Sky’s voice. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that a girl called Sky would have a voice like larks and doves and butterflies? You’d think a girl with a name like Sky would wear flowers in her hair and smell of jasmine and rosewater? But no. This Sky, his Sky, was hard and tough. She was small, tiny even, a premature baby who’d never caught up. But what she lacked in volume she made up for in attitude. She was scary. Scary enough when she’d just been a normal nineteen year old with nothing more pressing to worry about than what she was going to wear on Friday night, but now that she was pregnant … it was like she’d been taken over by a devil, literally. She looked at him like he was dirt. Worse than dirt. Like he was disappointing dirt. Not what she’d been hoping for from dirt. Maybe not quite dirty enough.
‘I’m making a baby in here,’ she harried. ‘An actual baby. I’ve given up booze, I’ve given up fags, I’ve even given up fucking Diet Coke. Yeah? And all I’m asking you to do is stop with the fucking weed, yeah? You can’t afford it and it’s bad for your head. Yeah?’
