‘Okay, but you know what I mean. I would give an organ or something.’ She’d closed her eyes as she said this, as if she were making a wish before blowing out her birthday candles. Her eyelids were glittery bronze, the lashes extended in some mysterious way. Under the table, restless legs crossed and uncrossed constantly. She was, I acknowledged, insanely cute.
‘Well, you’re in the right job if you do choose to buy around here,’ I said.
Eyes open once more, she licked the trifle spoon in front of her face as she studied me. ‘It’s not a question of choice. We’ve got no chance. Even one-bedders are pushing half a million, at least they are in the buildings we would want to live in.’
She and Kit glanced about them once again, not asking what they wanted to know: how much we’d paid for our place. How much it was worth was public knowledge since a similar house on the square was currently on the market for £2.3 million. In Greenwich or Camberwell, it would be a million more; in Kensington, five million more. It was all relative, but I’d lived long enough to know that people compared up, not down – and not only in terms of property.
‘Luckily, we’re ancient enough to have bought when St Mary’s was a no-go area without a direct train into town,’ Clare said, her standard line, though neither of us had in fact been involved in the transaction. The property had been acquired by her parents when they’d lived in London briefly in the eighties and theirs remained the names on the deeds. Clare, an only child, would be the sole beneficiary of their estate when the time came. My decade of contributing to the bills was easily offset by the absence of rent; even if I wanted them to – and I didn’t – no lawyer was going to argue that the house was anything but an Armstrong treasure.
‘Believe it or not, you used to be able to get a mortgage for a place like this on just one person’s salary,’ Clare added, as if imparting word of a juicy scandal. ‘The average price of a house in London in 1986 was fifty-five thousand.’
‘Stop!’ Kit groaned, alcohol lending a camp extravagance to his manner. ‘To be told that if we’d just been born a few years earlier, we could have had what we wanted without lifting a finger.’
‘Well, not quite,’ Clare said, with a note of correction.
‘You’d still have to have had a nose for up-and-coming areas,’ Melia agreed, her professional instincts allowing a more nuanced envy than Kit’s. ‘And work incredibly hard to save for the deposit.’
He scoffed at this. There was an ingredient to his manner I couldn’t quite identify. Something childish, a propensity to sulk, perhaps. ‘Yeah, but compare that with now. We could work 24/7 and still never come close. We couldn’t even buy our rental on Tiding Street.’
Tiding Street was a road of narrow terraces on the other side of the high street from us, not long transformed from near slums to desirable starter flats unaffordable to starter people.
‘Nice street. How long have you lived there?’ I asked.
‘Six months. We were over in Blackheath before, so we’re still getting to know St Mary’s.’
‘What do you think of us so far?’
He smirked. ‘I think you’re great – except for all the mums and babies.’
‘Kit!’ Melia protested. ‘You can’t say that!’
‘What? It’s true. They charge down the high street with their buggies, expecting you to jump out the way. I mean, for fuck’s sake, they’d rather you got hit by a bus than they should have to slow down for two seconds.’
‘I think new parents don’t always notice. They’re in a different mental zone from us,’ Clare said, amused.
‘They’re mental all right.’
There was that moment of collective elation when a group understands it agrees on something fundamental. As child-free fortysomethings, Clare and I were getting rarer by the year, marooned in a neighbourhood that had grown ever more family-friendly now the inner zones were unaffordable for most. Though Kit and Melia were still young and, presumably, fertile and might very well change their minds, they were for now at least in our camp.
‘The only real downside is the commute,’ Kit said. ‘The overland is a nightmare, isn’t it? I’m always late for work and that’s if I can squeeze on in the first place.’
Clare and I exchanged a look.
‘Those rush-hour trains are more than twice over capacity,’ I said. ‘Well over legal limits. I’ve complained repeatedly.’
They listened nonplussed as I detailed the complaints process. They hadn’t taken me for a consumer rights activist.
‘I’m quite claustrophobic,’ I explained, ‘so public transport is the bane of my life.’
‘He had to cut out the Tube completely,’ Clare said in a confirming tone. ‘He doesn’t like tunnels.’
‘I don’t like being stuck in them.’ I didn’t say that I found the overland passenger experience only minimally less panic-inducing. The trains had sealed windows and were supposedly climate-controlled, but in reality were overheated, commuters crushed against one another like lovers. London would soon need those Tokyo-style paddles to wedge people in.
‘He had to have CBT. Cognitive behavioural therapy,’ she spelled out, but she needn’t have: this age group knew its therapies better than ours.
‘What gets me,’ Kit said, ‘is there’s always some twat who’s jumped on the tracks or whatever. There was one the other day hanging off the bridge. Couldn’t make his mind up. I mean, if I wanted to end it all, I’d fuck off and do it privately, I wouldn’t hold up an entire rail network. That smacks of egomania if you ask me, not lack of self-esteem. This person shouldn’t be topping himself, he should be auditioning for Britain’s Got Talent!’
So much for being more mental health literate! ‘Your compassion for society’s most vulnerable is a beautiful thing,’ Clare joked over Kit’s shouts of laughter at his own comments. So he was a controversialist, I thought. A provocateur – in short, a man after my own heart.
‘I’ve been thinking about switching to the river bus when my season ticket runs out,’ I told him. ‘They’ve just extended the route to St Mary’s and it doesn’t take much longer to get into town.’
‘I heard it’s pretty expensive,’ he said.
Melia took out her phone to google. ‘There’s an introductory discount for annual tickets from St Mary’s bought before the end of January. What d’you say, boys?’
‘A year’s quite a commitment,’ Clare said.
Kit took the phone from Melia and peered at the timetable. ‘What time do you start work?’ he asked me.
‘Quarter past eight. Monday to Friday. Not so different from you corporate drones, eh.’
‘The seven twenty looks like the one then. Gets into Waterloo at eight-oh-five. You’re on my way, I could swing by here at ten past.’
I played along. ‘Five past, to be on the safe side.’
‘The safe side! You’re showing your age there, Jamie.’
Clare shrieked with delight. ‘You tell him, Kit – he’s turning into such an old codger!’
Not the most flattering remark – the sweet little protest Melia made didn’t pass me by – but I couldn’t begrudge Clare her high spirits. She was really sparking off this pair. Normally by now she’d be winding down, co-operating fully with guests’ murmurings about calling an Uber, but tonight she begged them to stay, insisting on sharing her love of 1980s power ballads, vintage videos of which were ceremoniously aired.
‘You’ve never heard “Alone” by Heart?’ She pressed her burning cheek to mine as the lyrics began and I felt the muscles in her face working as she sang. I mouthed along gamely, while our guests mocked the band’s haircuts, speaking of the era as if it were Elizabethan. They were both pie-eyed now and elegantly swaying. Costumed differently, they could have been in Warhol’s Factory, adult children wafting into shot behind a dancing Edie Sedgwick.
‘Play us something you like!’ Clare urged them, when her own favourites had run out.
Melia overruled Kit to choose a lullaby by
some R&B star, which finally defeated our second wind and at last, just after two, they stood to leave.
‘So great to finally meet you,’ she told me, at the door, as if she’d known of me for years, not weeks.
‘Likewise. Delighted to have had the opportunity to see your famously elastic skin close-up.’
‘Oh!’ She giggled. ‘Clare said you were funny.’ Amid farewell hugs and kisses on hot cheeks, her mouth caught the corner of mine.
‘They’re great, aren’t they?’ Clare said, upstairs. ‘I didn’t mean it about the old codger.’
‘Oh, I don’t care,’ I said, thinking that I would only care if I was one. Even so, she was kissing me in apology, and I wasn’t going to argue with that. These days, sex was neither frequent nor frantic and to be taken in whatever spirit it was offered.
But midway, a terrible, unforgivable thought ignited before I could stop it and I confess I almost burned my eyeballs on the flame before blowing it out:
Shame it’s you and not her . . .
4
January 2019
The next morning, Clare received a thank-you text from Melia, who requested my number on Kit’s behalf. A few minutes later, a text arrived from him, complete with a screenshot of his river bus season ticket confirmation:
See you on the 7.20 tomorrow?
My first thought was shamefully childish, That was my idea, not yours, though it was by definition impossible to claim ownership of a form of public transport. I was uncommonly fired up, though, and while Clare was in the shower I bought my own annual ticket for £1,500.
‘I’ve done it,’ I told her, when she reappeared.
‘Done what?’
‘Booked the river bus season ticket. So you won’t need to hear my moans about the train anymore.’
‘Oh, really?’ She looked disconcerted, began towelling her wet hair with excessive vigour.
‘What? Is it the money?’ I’d used the joint account, set up a decade ago for household expenses. Separate finances had served us well until my removal from white-collar security the previous summer, and what savings I’d had had rapidly dwindled. Now we’d entered a grey area, discussed only in vague terms: I could use ‘whatever’ joint funds I needed till I was earning ‘properly’ again.
Clare draped the damp towel around her neck and smoothed her hair from her forehead. At the roots, there were little worms of silver. ‘Those one-time offers are nonrefundable, aren’t they?’
‘Is that a problem? I’ll get a refund on the rest of my train ticket,’ I added, an unexpectedly personal note in my voice.
‘No, it’s just I didn’t realize the idea was to stay in that job for another year.’ She stood in front of me, her face bathed in natural light from the huge skylight; without makeup, her skin was heavily patterned with lines, a diagram of life lived, and I thought, with a jolt, How weird that we’re getting older. I understood exactly why she’d declared herself open to newness: time was running out!
‘I’ll still need to travel in, whatever I do next,’ I pointed out. ‘There aren’t any decent jobs around here, as we know.’ When I’d searched locally for a stop-gap position like the one I held now in Central London, it had been a dismal experience; on the two occasions I’d been invited for an interview, I’d been rejected as overqualified, beaten out by candidates half my age.
I could see Clare appreciated my effort to meet her halfway. She nodded, smiling. ‘Well, I think it’s great you’ve made the change. No more train dramas. Kit as well?’
I know it sounds crazy: I’d known him only for a few hours, but just like that he’d proved himself an agent of change in my life. Just like that we’d committed ourselves to seeing each other once, perhaps twice, a day, Monday to Friday, for the rest of the year.
‘Yes, Kit, as well.’
*
The conditions that first morning did not make for the sparkling debut commute we might have imagined. For starters, it was mid-winter and still dark when Kit called at Prospect Square at 7.05; sunrise, when it came, had no more effect than a frosted glass lamp with a failing bulb. And the brackish smell of the river was just a little repellent.
The boat was more familiar to me from the website than real life. Amazing how you can live by a world-famous river for years and not notice a thing about the craft that go up and down it. It was a 150-seater high-speed catamaran called Boleyn (the others in the fleet were also named after abused Tudor queens) and, compared to the train, was palatial. Plenty of space, big leather seats. A bar. TV screens showing the news.
‘First day of the rest of our lives, eh?’ Kit said, in general mockery, but I could tell he was as exhilarated as I was to have changed something fundamental so suddenly. He was immaculate in a costly-looking wool coat with an equally high-end leather messenger bag slung over his shoulder. Next to him, in my jeans and North Face jacket, I felt shabby, a slacker relic from the nineties.
‘Hope it sticks to the schedule,’ he added, as the engines fired and we set sail so smoothly as to be anticlimactic. Lit by the boat’s powerful lights, the river was the exact colour of black Americano. ‘I’ve got a new boss who likes to start the week with an eight-fifteen “motivator”. Marks you on some register if you’re late; you’d think we were still at school.’ As I would learn, work was a necessary evil for Kit. He expressed none of the vaunted ‘passion’ his generation had been taught they were entitled to – and that was required of mine if we were even to begin to compete.
‘It’s an insurance firm, right? You must get great benefits? Car insurance, that kind of thing?’
‘Haven’t got a car, mate,’ Kit said.
‘All right, life insurance, then?’
‘Well, yeah, Melia would get a fortune, but that’s no use to either of us since I plan to stay alive.’
‘Don’t we all. Pension? Let me guess, you don’t plan to get old? Fine, we won’t speak of your package ever again.’
He laughed at that. His laughter was an automatic weapon, firing and firing after you expected it to stop, and as heads turned to look at us I experienced a schoolboy’s satisfaction that I was sitting with the cool kid.
Already, we’d reached Woolwich, where more commuters took their seats. Boarding was fast, the crew slick. It was a well-heeled crowd: I could see I was the only minimum-wage worker on the boat – other than the guy serving coffee – and I said as much to Kit.
‘How long have you worked in . . .’
‘Catering? It’s a recent thing, only four or five months. Before that I was in marketing, internal comms, but the company I worked for was in North London and the commute was a bit of a saga. The Northern Line, you know.’
‘Oh yeah, the claustrophobia. How do you even catch that?’ He made it sound like syphilis or something, the result of promiscuity.
‘Could be a post-traumatic thing, could be inherited. The therapist I saw told me it’s people with a keen need to defend their personal space who are more likely to develop it.’
He rolled his shoulders, gestured to the generous seating and wide aisles. ‘Not sure there’s gonna be any problem with that here.’
We were tourists that first day, Kit and I. Naming the neighbourhoods and buildings we’d only ever seen before from land, willingly disorientated by the curves in the river you forget exist when you’re travelling by road or underground; ticking off the bridges, one by one.
‘Did you ever go on the Millennium Bridge when it was still the Wobbly Bridge?’ I asked him, before remembering he would have been a kid back then. The raw, unsophisticated London I remembered from my twenties meant nothing to a man who’d spent his with on-board Wi-Fi. I’d met them by the truckload in my old line of work, grown-up kids who had no experience of self-sacrifice, of paying your dues, and who, understandably, viewed me as an old fart. ‘God, I sound like I’m your father, droning on about the old days.’
‘You sound nothing like him,’ Kit said, darkly. ‘He’s a deadbeat loser.’
‘Really? I
n what way?’
‘Oh, loads of ways. Like, when my mum died, he sold the house and spent the whole lot at the bookies. We had to move in with my gran.’
‘Wow. I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I have nothing to do with him now. Melia hardly sees her parents either, we always joke we’re orphans.’
Rather a bleak joke, I thought.
‘Yours still alive?’ he asked.
‘My dad is. We get on pretty well. He’s closer with my sister, Debs, they live in the same town and she’s supplied the grandkids, which suits me fine. And Clare’s folks are great. We just saw them over Christmas – we always spend it at their place in Edinburgh.’
‘Lucky for some. Just move back a bit, old man, will you?’ He used his arm to ease me back a fraction. ‘You’re messing with my view of St Paul’s.’
‘You got it, son.’
Was there something paternal there? Even a trace of the vicarious? Or was it straightforward rivalry, right from the get-go?
God knows. Back then, I was just elated to not be battling compressive asphyxia on the commuter train.
*
At my place of work, Kit would have been the old-timer. Though the staff used Waterloo Station daily, not one of them knew what I was talking about when I quoted ‘Waterloo Sunset’. ‘Terry and Julie, Friday night? You don’t know the Kinks? Tell me you’ve heard of the Beatles, at least?’
(They’d heard of the Beatles.)
My manager, Regan, was twenty-four and from the Midlands. She was an exponent of that weird contouring young women do to their faces, like stage makeup, so I can’t say in all honesty what she looked like, other than she was chestnut-haired, brown-eyed, and stocky of build. A resident of the Smoke for not quite eighteen months, she had an obsession – in the mornings, at least, fresh from a browse of the news – with ‘lawless’ London’s murder count: the recent stabbing of a teenage pizza delivery driver had occupied her for days. Thankfully, she considered our stretch of Belvedere Road, SE1, civilized, even cool, what with the proliferation of hipsters among the tourists and commuters, the local students and residents of the sleek new apartment blocks. The café occupied the ground floor of a neglected building of the same vintage as Prospect Square, with a large window at the front made of nine panes (once, overnight, someone sprayed a game of noughts and crosses on the glass. The noughts won). The decorating budget must have been about a fiver, bits of old mirror and objects made of shell that you’d find in skips, and cushions everywhere – that was the comfort element of the zone (in all my months of service, I’d never known them to have been cleaned). People came for our artisanal coffee, but we also served pastries and ‘hand cut’ a limited menu of sandwiches. Regan Instagrammed latte art in her down time.
The Other Passenger Page 3
