Work out the exchange rate between British pounds and New Zealand dollars.
Downgrade expectation to one bedroom and/or studio flat.
Look at cost of flights from here to England. Think about going off and having a little cry.
Ring up and ask bank if I could break the term deposit that I had put Tom’s life insurance money into (feeling sick through out the entire conversation). Answer, yes ‘but penalties apply’.
Find out how much ‘penalties’ amount to.
Downgrade expectation to room above pawnshop and/or all-night takeaway.
Go off and have a little cry.
Check inbox one last time to see if anyone has come up with offer better than Adam’s.
Go to bed at half-past eight because knackered.
And then, of course, I woke up again at three a.m. convinced that the move was impossible because I would run out of money, be kicked out of my rental and, friendless and penniless, end up starving on the street or dying of hypothermia or being stabbed by some drug-crazed homeless person, whose makeshift home I’d trespass on in my desperate search for food and shelter.
With all those mental gremlins clamouring for my attention, it took me a while to work out what I was really terrified of. And it was far worse than any fear of starvation or stabbing by a random loon. I was truly, deeply afraid that what Tom and I had was not to be repeated in my lifetime. I was afraid that it was true that there was someone for everyone, and my someone had been Tom and that was that. I was afraid Michelle was right, and that my dream lover did, and would always, exist only in a dream.
I ate my breakfast in the kitchen that Tom and I had painted over a weekend. I’d wanted a brighter green, but Tom had said a softer colour would work better, and he’d been right. I could see out the French doors to the small back garden. It was autumn and I knew that in a couple of months, all the flowers would be gone. But I also knew that in spring they’d all be back again, as they had every year since Tom and I bought this house.
I knew the routine of this life. I knew what I was in for. It would be so much easier to do nothing. I wouldn’t have to worry about money. I wouldn’t have to try to find someone new – and to risk discovering that there was no one. That Tom had been it …
So that was my choice. Leave and take all those risks. Stay and do – what? Slide inevitably towards old age and pilchards?
I checked the details Adam had sent me again. And emailed a woman I didn’t know about a house I really wasn’t sure I could afford.
The plane landed at five-thirty in the morning. Customs wasn’t the aggressive nightmare I’d been led to believe (but this had come from Simon, who, Lord love him, does sport the kind of beard that has customs officers reaching for the snappy gloves whether they suspect him or not), and after a brief scrimmage through the crowds waiting for friends and loved ones who weren’t me, I found myself in the airport proper. It was now twenty-five past six. I’d been told that the Heathrow Express would take fifteen minutes to drop me at Paddington, and from there it would be, at this early hour, no more than twenty minutes by cab to Islington. I had arranged to meet my new landlord – landlady, I suppose, although that conjured up a vision of housecoats, cabbage and disapproval – at nine o’clock. So that left me with, by my jet-lagged calculation, about two hours to kill.
I considered spending it in the airport, but the entire place seemed to be dedicated to funnelling you into the exit chutes as quickly as possible. And there were armed police with machine guns – I’d never seen machine guns in the flesh, so to speak – who made me feel guilty and anxious, even though I knew that all I had in my jolly orange wheelie-case was a sponge bag and as many clothes as I could fit, and in the backpack I took on board a flight pillow shaped like a Polish sausage and about as comfortable, and all four volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which had proved heavy going in more ways than one. I decided to catch the Heathrow Express and see what Paddington station had to offer.
The answer was an ethereally brilliant vaulted glass roof and a few half-decent snack bars, but nowhere I’d feel comfortable sitting for two hours. Stations and airports are the places between. They’re neither where you’ve come from nor where you want to go. I found myself a cab and asked him to take me to any café within walking distance of my new home that would be open by the time we got there.
When we stopped, my heart sank. Two minutes earlier, we’d zipped into a big street lined with shops and restaurants, and busy with vehicles and commuters now that the working day had properly begun. But then we’d hurtled off down a side street, where there was nothing but slightly grubby terrace dwellings and, on one corner, a rather forbidding-looking school. The school down the end of my street back home had low wooden fences, a wide-open entranceway and a big, well-kept grass field. This school had one cracked concrete court and bars on the windows.
At that corner, the taxi had turned left sharply and braked only seconds later. We had pulled into a small cul-de-sac parallel to the main road, a piece of waste ground in front of us, and a row of dingy shops beside us, culminating in what appeared to be a very small café. On the main road were more terraced houses and what looked like a huge council estate. The only vaguely attractive building anywhere was a church a little way up the road, alone on a scrubby island of green, sheltered by a few nice trees. I realised that if the taxi driver had got it right, my new house must be close by. I began to wonder what I’d let myself in for.
‘You’re dahn there,’ said the driver. I had felt the need to make nervous chat on the way, and as a result had told him where I was going to live. He was pointing down a small side street off the main road, lined by a short row of terraced houses on one side and the massed squat blocks of the council estate on the other. The houses looked neat enough. So for that matter did the estate. Which made me feel half a degree better.
‘It used to be bleedin’ rough, that estate,’ said my driver, who was clearly straight out of Central Casting for the role of street-wise Cockney. ‘It’s been cleaned up. Notser bad now.
‘And ’ere’s the caff,’ he added, nodding to our left. ‘Pair of Eye-talians. They do a good brew.’
‘Are you from around here?’ I asked.
He turned. He was in his early fifties, grey hair smoothed back in a thinning Teddy-boy quiff, skin roughened and yellowed by years of dedicated smoking. He hooked his thumb over his shoulder.
‘I might ’ave been one of the reasons they needed to ’ave a clean-up,’ he grinned. ‘But I came right in the end. Want a hand with yer bags?’
I hesitated a fraction, and his grin widened. ‘Like I said, it’s notser bad now. You won’t ’ave any trouble.’
But as the cab rumbled away, I could see he’d stopped grinning and was now laughing. For that reason, I eyed up his choice of ‘caff’ with some mistrust. Its entrance was a flap in a plastic tent-like arrangement attached to the front of the building. The tent’s purpose was obviously to provide shelter for the small number of tables within it. Presumably in summer, it was taken down. Or not – I’d heard that British summers were notoriously crap. It was early May now, and the forecast was for about thirteen degrees. The temperature had a fair way to go before it reached that.
It occurred to me that I was both cold and starving. New Zealand was twelve hours ahead so seven o’clock meant dinnertime. And in three hours it would be bedtime. In truth, after close to thirty hours travelling, I wanted to go to bed right now. But it would be another two hours before I could meet my landlady. I wheeled my jolly orange case into the café and ordered a strong double espresso and big fat ham and cheese croissant.
Of course, when I looked around properly, I saw there were no free tables. There weren’t many tables to start off with, and all of them already held one or two people. At the back, near the door to the bathroom, there was a table for four, with only one man at it, sitting in typical man fashion with the newspaper up in front of his face. I dithered for a mome
nt, but decided I was too frazzled to be unselfish. I strode up to the table, and pulled out a chair. One corner of the newspaper was lowered, and a dark brown eye appeared, its eyebrow raised in enquiry.
‘Can I sit here?’ I said.
‘Sure.’ The voice was gruff and deep, but seemed friendly enough in a neutral, ‘I couldn’t give a monkey’s’ kind of way.
The newspaper went back up. I sat down. My coffee came, delivered with a smile and a ‘Buon giorno’ by what I deduced was one of the ‘Eye-talians’. He was in his late forties, balding in a good way (i.e. not in a sad, wispy, apologetic way), nice looking. I decided I liked him.
I also liked his café. Now that I had time to look around, I could see it was a deli, too, its floor-to-ceiling shelves packed with pasta and olives, canned tomatoes and boxes of panettone, bottles of wine, olive oil and balsamic vinegar. There was a gelato freezer, and a counter full of freshly-made baking, salads and pasta dishes. My heart lifted a degree more. This was quite civilised really. A civilised wee oasis surrounded by crud.
My croissant came. I’d ordered it toasted, and it was golden warm and oozing with cheese. Too ravenous for the niceties of knife and fork, I picked it up and stuffed it in my mouth. It was delicious, and I may have given a little moan of pleasure because there was a rustle and the newspaper was lowered again. I found myself face to face with two brown eyes and eyebrows now knitted in a frown.
I brushed stray buttery crumbs off my cheeks. ‘Sorry,’ I mumbled. ‘Starving.’
But my table companion was staring at my croissant, not at me. He muttered something that I could have sworn was ‘Fucking unfair’.
‘Excuse me?’
He stared at me, still frowning. ‘Bacon?’ he demanded.
I checked. ‘No. Definitely ham.’
‘Mmph.’
He raised the paper again. Clearly that was the end of what could hardly be called a conversation. I glanced around to see if there were any free tables, but there were none, and there was a constant stream of people in and out the door. I got the impression that this timeslot belonged to the pre-work crowd, the lucky ones able to sit for a while, others with longer journeys or earlier clocking-in times stopping only to grab a cup of coffee and a paper bag of something to keep them going. I imagined that around eight-thirty the work crowd would start to thin. And then who would come in? Too early for mothers and babies – they’re more mid-morning if my friends who’ve bred have told me right. Who then?
I finished my croissant and surreptitiously picked up all the crumbs with a dampened fingertip. I checked my watch. Barely seven-thirty! An hour and a bloody half to go! The shops wouldn’t be open, and after my conversation with the cabbie, I didn’t feel safe wheeling my suitcase around the neighbourhood. I guessed I could always smack any mugger across the head with my book-laden backpack – probably the most enjoyment I’d get out of the Dance quartet – but decided I wasn’t keen to put that theory to the test.
It made me think about my last conversation with my parents. It was at their house – after I left home, they’d bought a newer, smaller place. It is very tidy and everything matches, including my parents. There is one spare room, but it will never be for guests. My parents don’t do guests. My mother is the kind of person who has guest soaps that remain intact and unused for decades. My mother dusts her guest soaps.
Anyway, I digress. My parents took my news well. I suppose they had little choice; I am thirty-four after all, not seventeen. But they weren’t thrilled. My mother said, ‘Well, I imagine security is much tighter now, since those last bombings.’ My father said, ‘I do anticipate that the New Zealand dollar will fall still further against the pound. But I expect you have made provision for a suitable financial buffer.’ Then he offered me a dry sherry. As you can probably guess, I accepted. I may even have downed it in one gulp.
I checked my watch again. Seven thirty-three. Sigh. I focused on the newspaper my table companion was holding up. I know it’s rude to read other people’s papers but it wasn’t as if he could see me, having erected The Great Wall of Guardian between us. But the headlines – every one of them – mentioned people I’d never heard of. I found that completely depressing. Not only did I have to start my own life from scratch, I had to get to know a whole different bunch of politicians, media people and minor celebrities. The page was like a code I had to figure out how to break before I had any chance of feeling as if I belonged here. I felt like sinking my forehead onto the table in despair. I would have, too, if there’d been enough room.
Suddenly, the paper was snapped up into brisk folds and slapped down onto the table. My companion was revealed as a broad-shouldered man in his mid-forties, with dark, close-cropped hair and a strong-featured, olive-skinned face. Not handsome as such – not handsome at all really, but attractive in the way that self-confident people are. He was wearing a smart black suit, a white shirt and plain blue-striped tie. He exuded affluence and impatience in equal measure. I could not even begin to guess what he did for a living. To be honest, he looked like the kind of shadowy underworld figure whose life would be turned into a movie starring Robert de Niro or, if budget was an issue, Ian McShane. In either case, there would be a dead pizza delivery boy and at least one ear-slicing scene.
Gangster-man, too, was checking his watch. He blew out a breath, as if it were nowhere near the time he’d hoped it was. Then, to my consternation, he looked right at me.
‘I could go home,’ he said. ‘But then I’d have to come back. Which would be a waste of fucking time.’
He sounded just like the cab driver – straight out of EastEnders. In my mind, Ian McShane just lost the role to Ross Kemp.
‘I see …’
‘I can’t order another coffee because it’s bad for my nerves and I can’t order any food worth eating because it’s bad for my arteries. How’s your cholesterol?’
‘I – have no idea.’
He wagged an admonitory finger at me. ‘You should do. That’s the problem. You think you’re young and invincible and then – whammo. You hit forty and you’re fucked. Always pays to get checked out early. You don’t want any nasty surprises. Death, for example. God’s ultimate I-fucking-told-you-s–’
He stopped short because he’d seen my face. Myself, I had no idea how I looked at moments like these; I was always too busy concentrating on just trying to breathe. But from his reaction, which was identical to that of many, many people before him, I suspected I went very pale very quickly. There may also have been a light sheen of sweat. My palms certainly felt clammy enough.
‘Jesus,’ he said, wide-eyed. ‘What brought that on?’ He leaned forward. ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’
The surprise of it actually made me laugh. And I started to breathe again. ‘No!’
‘My wife’s pregnant. Five months. Her moods are – well, unpredictable doesn’t go halfway there. It’s like being stalked by a ninja assassin; one minute you’re whistling in the sunshine, the next you’re diving for cover into the nearest ditch. She cries at the drop of a hat. I can’t let her read the paper anymore, or watch the news. Someone gave her The Velveteen Rabbit at her baby shower and she started crying just looking at the cover. I hid it. I mean, God help us if she’d got all the way to the end.’
‘Congratulations,’ I managed to say. ‘About the baby, I mean.’
‘Yeah,’ he beamed, and went unexpectedly and rather charmingly pink. ‘Thanks.’ Then he frowned. ‘What did I say to I upset you?’
‘Oh–’ Now it was my turn to go pink. I avoided his eye. ‘No, I’m just jet-lagged–’
But then, of course, I reached for my coffee cup and sent it flying. I’d forgotten to give my hands time to stop shaking. There was hardly any coffee left, but it proved too much for the flimsy paper napkin, which instantly began to disintegrate. Even though it was futile, I kept on dabbing. Silently, my companion extracted a white handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to me.
It didn’t stay white for lo
ng. I glanced at the stained ball of cotton in my hand and bit my lip in apology.
He waved his hand briskly, impatiently. ‘Keep it.’ Then he said, ‘Jet-lag doesn’t usually send you into a funk like that. What’s up?’
Jeepers. I couldn’t decide if I found his directness irksome or a relief. But it was clear he wouldn’t give up until I answered. So I did.
‘My husband died.’
He sat back, surprised. ‘Accident?’
‘Duff heart. No one knew.’
‘How long ago?’
‘Quite a while. But I still get hit by–’ I went pink again. ‘I don’t know what they are really. I call them grief bombs.’
He stared at me. ‘I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. That’s fucking terrible.’
Time for the awkward pause. It always came at this point. When the other person tried to think of a way to shift either the conversation to another topic – or themselves towards the door.
But then he said, ‘If Clare died, I’d go as far away as possible. Probably spend the rest of my life holed up in some cave in Azerbaijan, wallowing in misery and yak’s piss.’
‘Are there caves in Azerbaijan?’
He blinked at me, then grinned. ‘I have no fucking idea.’
He gestured at my empty cup. ‘Want another? Nerves say I shouldn’t but I say fuck ’em.’
I tested my own nerves and found them to have settled. I was, in fact, feeling remarkably chipper. For that, I believe I owed a big thank you to this strange man’s directness. Most people would sooner pluck out their eyeballs than talk about stuff like this. But then, I suspected that the man across the table wasn’t even a little bit like most people.
I smiled at him gratefully. ‘I’d love another. Thank you.’
When he stood up, I realised that he was not only broad but also very tall – at least six foot four, I’d have said. In his black suit, he was quite a formidable presence, but the Italian man at the counter greeted him with relaxed cheer and they chatted away. My companion was obviously a regular – and, I had to concede (with, I confess, some disappointment), no gangster. There’d definitely be more cringing and nodding if he’d been dodgy. Also a pinky ring.
The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid Page 3
