Constance

by Rosie Thomas

  She was watching the performance with surprise and delight, as if it was completely new to her. After a moment she took a step closer, then cautiously skirted the blanket to stand directly in front of the robot. She waved her hand in front of his face. The man gave a reasonably convincing impression of being made of metal and Noah remembered how tourists used to make similar attempts to distract the Guardsmen frigidly mounted on horses in front of the sentry boxes in Whitehall.

  The girl was laughing now. She reached out a hand with the index finger extended and gently prodded the robot in his metallic middle.

  The girl was very pretty, Noah noticed. Her head had the poise of a marble sculpture, and her mouth had a chiselled margin to it that made her lips unusually prominent. She really did have an amazing mouth. He considered the rest of her. Her hair was short and spiky, blonde with a greenish tinge that suggested it was dyed. She was quite tall, thin, with long thighs and calves. Her clothes were similar to those worn by all the girls in the passing tide, but at the same time there was something very slightly wrong with them. Her top was flimsy and gathered from a sort of yoke and her jeans were an odd pale colour. Her open-toed shoes were thick-soled and dusty and their heaviness made her protruding toes look small and as fragile as a child’s.

  Noah experienced a moment’s dislocation, as if he were drunk or had just stepped off a theme-park ride that had been whirling too fast for him. His body felt very light and insubstantial, and the plane tree and the metallic man and Tower Bridge seemed to spin around him and the girl. He rocked on his feet, establishing a firmer connection with the ground beneath.

  The girl drew back her hand, still laughing.

  Noah took a breath. The world steadied itself.

  He said to her, ‘You won’t be able to make him move. It’s more than his job’s worth.’

  She gave no sign of having heard him.

  Disbelief flooded through Noah. It wasn’t possible. Maybe it was possible, maybe that’s why he had noticed her in the first place.

  Then she slowly turned her head. It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard, he realised, rather that she hadn’t understood what he was saying.

  ‘Do you speak English?’ he smiled.

  ‘Of course. Why not?’ she shot back. She did have an accent. It sounded Slavic, or Russian.

  ‘I thought you were, you know, perhaps a tourist.’

  ‘No,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Ah. Right.’ She was making Noah feel a bit of a fool. As if she sensed this and regretted it, she jerked her chin at the robot man.

  ‘This is clever. Not moving one muscle.’

  ‘Yeah. Sometimes there’s a Victorian couple, and there’s a gold man who does it as well. Usually you see them at weekends in Covent Garden. It always looks to me like a really hard way of earning money.’

  The girl’s eyes turned to him. She looked disappointed, and at once Noah felt sorry that he had diminished the originality of the spectacle for her. ‘But it is clever, you’re right.’

  ‘I was not trying to tease him, you know? I was thinking he cannot be a real man because he is so still, even though I saw him walk up on his step.’

  ‘He won’t move, though. That’s the point.’ Noah was beginning to feel that it was time to steer this conversation forwards. ‘Um. Are you on your way somewhere? Would you like to have a drink? There’s a bar just here. Bit crowded, but we can sit outside…’

  Suddenly an empty table to one side of the open space looked intensely inviting.

  ‘I have the bicycle with me.’ The girl pointed to a bright yellow mountain bike propped against the river wall.

  ‘Nice bike. We can lock it up…’

  ‘I do not have a lock.’

  ‘Really? You should have one, someone’ll nick a bike like that in five seconds. Look, we’ll just park it beside us so we can keep an eye on it.’

  They were walking towards the table, the girl wheeling her bicycle, when she suddenly stopped.

  ‘We did not give him money.’

  Noah was pleased with the we. He grinned at her. ‘You can, if you want.’

  She didn’t smile back. ‘I don’t have any. Not today.’

  He sighed. ‘All right.’ He made a little detour and dropped a pound coin into the robot’s box. The man’s head gave a sudden jerk and his hands rotated. ‘Thank you,’ a robot’s voice mechanically grated. The girl beamed and clapped, and Noah judged that that was easily worth a pound of anyone’s money. He touched her elbow. ‘Let’s be quick, before someone grabs the table.’

  He left her sitting with the bicycle, fought his way to the bar for two beers, and was pleased and relieved when he got back to find that she was still waiting for him.

  ‘Cheers,’ he said as they drank. ‘My name’s Noah, by the way.’

  ‘I am Roxana.’

  ‘Hello Roxana.’ He put out his hand. I am acting like a total prat, he was thinking, but he couldn’t stop staring at her mouth. He wondered what it would take to make her laugh again, the way she had done when she prodded the robot. Roxana took his fingers, very cautiously, and allowed an infinitesimal squeeze before drawing back again.

  ‘Where are you from? Are you Russian?’

  She looked levelly at him. ‘I am from Uzbekistan.’

  ‘Are you? Uh, I don’t think I even know where that is.’ He sighed inwardly. That’s right, go on, let her know you’re thick as well as a prat.

  ‘It is in Central Asia. We have been independent country since 1991. Our capital is Tashkent. We have borders with Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.’

  Noah raised an eyebrow. ‘Thank you. Now I do know. What brings you to England? Are you a student? Your English is really good.’

  ‘Thank you very much. I’m not a student. I’m working here, I would like to stay. It’s better for me.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  Roxana paused. ‘I am a dancer.’

  Yes, she had the body for it. And that explained the studied poise of her head on the long, pale column of her neck. Noah found that he didn’t want to speculate too hard, not here and now, anyway, on the look of her in – what were those things dancers wore? Leotards.

  ‘Ballet?’ She was a bit too tall for that, though.

  ‘No. Not ballet. Modern.’ She nodded towards the yellow bicycle. ‘I have only just been for, um, a test?’

  ‘Audition?’

  ‘Yes. I have the job, they tell me there and then.’ She did smile now and Noah blinked.

  ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thank you. And I should of course ask now about your job but I have to go soon. It’s not my bicycle, I have only borrowed it to come to the place over there for my audition.’ She nodded across in the approximate direction of St Paul’s. ‘But in London for two weeks I haven’t yet been to see the river Thames, so I came for one hour.’

  She pronounced it with a soft th, to rhyme with James.

  Noah’s stomach did something that he associated with a lift dropping very fast. Jesus, he thought. What’s happening? Can you fall in love with someone after ten minutes, just because she says Thames instead of Tems?

  ‘What is your job?’ she asked softly.

  ‘I work in IT. For a small publishing company.’

  ‘Near to here?’

  ‘In the West End. I’ve just been visiting my mother, in the hospital. She’s had an operation. She’s got cancer.’

  Roxana didn’t react in the usual way. Her face didn’t contract with distress or sympathy and there was no rush of consoling words, although Noah realised a second later that this was what he had been looking for. Instead she just nodded, quite matter-of-fact.

  ‘Will she recover?’

  ‘Oh yes, I think so.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  He might have concluded that she was unusually detached. Most people, in his experience, when you told them your mother had cancer, were concerned for you and her, even though they might never have met he
r. There was a look about Roxana, though, that told him she wasn’t unconcerned. He noted the way her incredible mouth drew in at the corners and her neck bent a little, as if it were made of soft wax. He thought she might have heard a lot of stories that were sadder than the illness of a stranger’s mother.

  Their glasses were empty. ‘I have to go, really,’ she said.

  He said too quickly, ‘No time for one more drink?’

  ‘No. Thank you for this one.’

  They both stood up, awkwardly negotiating the edges of the table. Roxana twisted the handlebars of the yellow bike and prepared to wheel it away.

  ‘Which way are you going?’ Noah asked. He was thinking, Do you have to sound so desperate, you sad bugger?

  ‘Over there. There is a small bridge.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s the Millennium Bridge. Known as the Wobbly Bridge, usually. I’ll walk that far with you.’

  They wove through the crowds together. Noah heard himself giving an overlong and over-animated explanation of why the footbridge had acquired its nickname. She might perhaps have been half-listening, but she was also frowning and biting the corner of her lip. She was anxious to get away, probably to return the borrowed bike to its owner. He wasn’t usually quite this hopeless with women. What was it about this one?

  They were crossing the bridge. Streams of people poured past them, which meant she had to keep dodging and breaking away from him.

  ‘Would you, um, like to meet up again? As you don’t know London, maybe we could, ah, go on a riverboat.’ A big white one was passing directly underneath. Roxana briefly glanced at it. ‘Or do something. See a film? Or I could come and see you dance.’

  ‘No.’ She said that very quickly, and in a firm voice that meant absolutely not.

  At the far end of the bridge she bent her head and pushed the bike up the steps, leaning into the job. She looked tired now, and – what? Forlorn. That was it.

  ‘I do have to go.’ She gestured at the handlebars. ‘There will be trouble.’

  ‘Can I have your phone number?’

  ‘I don’t have any phone. Not at the moment.’

  ‘Roxana, I’d like to see you again. Is that all right? Won’t you tell me where you live?’

  She looked away, in the direction she would be heading as soon as she could get away from him, and Noah knew that she was concealing something.

  ‘I will have a place. In a few days.’

  You’re getting nowhere, mate, Noah decided. Can’t you take a hint? She’s probably got a huge Uzbek boyfriend stashed away somewhere.

  ‘Well. I enjoyed talking to you.’

  Roxana made to get on the bike, then stopped.

  ‘You have a telephone?’

  ‘Sure. Yes, of course.’ He took a work card out of his wallet and scribbled his mobile number on the back. ‘Call me.’

  ‘Okay. Goodbye, Noah.’

  She tucked the card away, slung her plastic handbag over her shoulder, straddled the mountain bike and forged out into the traffic. She was looking the wrong way and he almost called Look out. But she veered away from an oncoming bus and wobbled into the left-hand lane, then pedalled uncertainly away. He watched until she was out of sight.

  He was sure he would never see her again and the thought left him entirely disconsolate.

  His mobile rang and he tore it out of his pocket, allowing a flare of hope.

  ‘Oh, yeah. Hi, Dad. Yeah, I was there for an hour, maybe a bit more. She was very sleepy. Call me later? Yeah, me too. Bye.’

  His father was on his way to the hospital. Noah put his head down and started walking towards the tube.

  As soon as she was safely round the corner Roxana peered up at a street sign, then stopped to search in her bag for the street-map book that the man Dylan had loaned her. She found where she was now, after some flipping back and forth through the small grey pages, and also where she had come from. It didn’t look so far, in terms of map centimetres, but remembering the difficulty she had had in getting to the place Dylan had sent her to for the audition, she suspected the return journey was going to cause problems.

  Still, she’d find it in the end, wouldn’t she?

  She tried to memorise the names and the sequence of the four or five big roads she needed to follow, but before she had even reached the first junction they had jumbled themselves up in her head.

  London was a big place. She couldn’t even imagine how far it spread. All these rooms stacked on top of each other, all these tall buildings and streets and glassy shops. All these people. She felt very small in the thick of it, as if she were no more than a speck of dust, a little glinting mineral fragment that the wind might suck away. She kept on determinedly pedalling, bracing herself against a gust of fear as well as the buffeting of the traffic. Buses and trucks hooted at her as they roared past.

  It would turn out fine, she kept telling herself, why not? She had a job now, at least.

  She had got talking to Dylan on her first morning in London, in the café near King’s Cross Station where she had looked out at the rain and the crowds of people all walking heads down with somewhere to go. She had spent the previous night in a nearby hotel, in a room that was noisy and dirty and had still cost far more than she budgeted. Her savings and the money her mother’s old friend Yakov had loaned her wouldn’t go far at this rate.

  The young man, thin as a bamboo pole, asked her for a light and then slid closer along the red plastic bench. He offered her one of his cigarettes and bought her another cup of coffee. It was nice to talk to someone.

  It turned out that Dylan lived in a house where there were cheap rooms to rent. When he asked if she wanted him to find out if the room next to his was free, she said yes, because she had no other ideas. Once she saw the place she didn’t want to stay there, not even for one night. But she did stay, because she had no alternative. She promised herself that it was just until she found some work.

  The house was a catacomb of rooms, the doors leading off the dim staircase all padlocked and the grey walls daubed with slogans. Apart from Dylan, Roxana didn’t know who else lived there. She rarely met anyone on the stairs, and when she did they hastily drew back into the shadows. It was only at night that they came out. The nights were constantly disturbed by running feet, thunderous crashes and outbursts of wild shouting. A door would be wrenched open to set a jagged burst of music throbbing in the stairwell before the door slammed again. After a few nights she learned to pull her pillow over her ears and not to speculate about who was murdering or being murdered on the other side of her door. She bought her own padlocks, two big heavy ones, and kept the door locked day and night.

  Dylan had tried to get inside the room with her, of course he had, but she told him what he could do with himself. He hadn’t taken it all that badly. He was lonely, too. When he wasn’t at work and didn’t have any money for drugs, they sometimes went for a walk or a bus ride together.

  She told Dylan that she needed a job and that she was a dancer, not necessarily expecting the two statements to connect. It was true that in Bokhara, where she grew up, Roxana had sometimes gone to classes and then for a whole wonderful term Yakov had helped her and she had studied dance in Tashkent. She had clung to this tenuous historical link to her maternal grandmother, who had died before Roxana was born and who as a young woman had been a professional dancer. The wife of Tamerlane the Great himself had also been renowned for her grace and skill as a dancer. Both these women had been called Roxana.

  But it was not easy to live in Uzbekistan. After her brother was killed in the uprising she made up her mind that she would find a way to leave it behind, every broken street and Russian soldier, all the memories, everything her native country stood for and everything that had happened to her there, and live in America, or England. She would become an American girl by sheer force of will.

  Or an English one, that would do.

  It had taken a long time to get the money for a holiday flight from Tashkent to Luton, but s
he had managed it.

  Yakov had wished her good luck, knowing that he would never leave Uzbekistan himself.

  Roxana didn’t plan to be on the return flight.

  In London her intention was to find work looking after children, pink and white cherubs who would be dressed in little coats with velvet collars, that would be nice. Or if not that, maybe she could be a chambermaid in a big hotel. She saw herself in a maid’s uniform, plumping up pillows and setting out white towels and crystal glasses.

  But she had soon found out that without references and papers there was no work with English children. The hotels she walked into had all told her that they weren’t taking on casuals at the moment. It was Dylan who had come to her rescue again.

  ‘Ye said ye can dance.’ His accent was so strange. He told her he came from Ireland. When she first met him in the café she could hardly decipher a word, but by now she could understand him better. ‘There’s a feller ye can go to see.’

  He wrote down a name and an address for her, lent her the map book, told her which bus to catch and what time to be there, and advised her not to be late. To make sure she knew where she was going, Roxana traced the route from the house to the place. And on her way out of the house, on a sudden impulse, she borrowed the yellow bike.

  It had been in the hallway ever since she had come to live there, leaning in the same place among the litter of envelopes that no one picked up. She had not seen anyone touch it, let alone ride it. There was no lock. Maybe someone had just left it at the house and forgotten all about it.

  And she had already worked out that to take it would save her the bus fares. Buses and tube trains in London cost a lot of money.