by Anne Calhoun
A quick shake of his head. The guarded look was back in his eyes, in his tight shoulders, and she was heartily sorry she’d done that. “You could come with me,” she said, on impulse, trying to put things on a footing she understood. Pictures and videos and social media, not these face-to-face conversations that so easily went awry.
“Where? To Istanbul?”
“Well, I was thinking at least to Venice, if I took that route,” she said. “The Murano glass facilities—”
“No. Thanks, but no. I’m working. I’m busy. I’m fine where I am.”
“Yes,” she said, regretting that she’d spoken at all. Charlie would no sooner go on a three-week train trip through Europe with her than he would tell everyone they were sleeping together. She’d risked the balance of their friendship enough when she sought out his history with his ex-wife. “The cleats—”
“You leave for weeks at a stretch,” he said, talking over her.
“Charlie,” she said. “I understand. It was just a thought.”
“You don’t usually travel with someone else.”
“I haven’t. That doesn’t mean I won’t,” she said and swung her legs over the side of the bed. “I should get downstairs before the girls get home.”
Charlie tossed her clothes to her, piece by piece. Dressed except for her shoes, which she’d left just inside the door, she paused at the foot of the bed to go up on tiptoe and give him a kiss. “Thanks for the present,” she said. “I love it.”
She’d scuffed into her shoes and picked up her pannier straps before he spoke. “Do you want to see the rest of that lot?” he asked with a nod at her pannier.
Surprised, she paused. “Is it part of a series?”
“In a manner of speaking. It’s done.”
The cautious look was back, the longing in his eyes only banked, not doused, so she kept quiet and took what he was giving her in that moment. “I’d love to,” she said. “When?”
“Is the gallery still closed on Monday?”
She nodded.
“Monday. After breakfast.”
“It’s a date,” she said, and let herself out.
Chapter Five
So much for keeping it together with Milla.
Charlie had taught himself to be careful, patient, controlled, all the things he wasn’t when he and Chelsea were burning up all the oxygen in the United Kingdom. He’d taught himself to take no risks. And yet there he’d been, sprawled out in his washroom, utterly bared to her, hearing nothing but his pulse in his ears and the snick of the scissors, lost in the sweet the weight of her hips on his thighs and her fingers against his face and throat. There was no real risk, he told himself, in a safety razor wielded by a friend.
It was a lie. He knew lies now, knew them well. Chelsea had taught him how to do it, how to deceive himself, how to doubt himself.
Milla wasn’t Chelsea. She was loyal, faithful, true. He felt like an ass for being so harsh to her on Friday night. If anything he was surprised Milla hadn’t used her mad social media skills to research him before they’d started sleeping together. He had overreacted to an invasion of privacy, but both the invasion and privacy were an illusion. Milla meant well, but he felt more than he wanted to feel, which meant they were banging into each other like shins against furniture, hurting each other.
Making amends by offering a little more of themselves. After all, friends did travel together, but all the suggestion did was remind him of how small his world had become, and how much he wanted to be more than Milla’s friend.
Monday morning dawned clear, bright and still, promising yet another glorious summer day. Seated at the tiny table in the girls’ flat, Charlie ate his fry-up in silence while the girls chattered around him, putting together this week’s date poll. With rather more force than necessary, he speared the last pieces of sausage and tomato, then lifted the fork to his mouth.
“Milla bought her Orient Express tickets today,” Elsa said as she dropped the frying pan into the dishwater.
“You chose a route?”
“I’m going through Vienna,” she said. A hint of color stained her cheeks, barely visible through the thick curtain of her hair. She’d left it down today, and it framed her face, emphasizing her eyes, mouth and stubborn chin.
Charlie found he was unreasonably annoyed, both with the process of picking dates for Milla and with her decision to go through Vienna. This week’s poll included yet another banker, an accountant and IT Guy, whom Milla wanted on the list again. “Why do you assign them nicknames based on their jobs?”
All three girls looked at him. Elsa was still in her kimono. Kaitlin was dressed for work in jeans and a T-shirt bearing the logo for a theatre production she’d designed. Milla wore a dress with a wide collar that bared her arms and stopped just at her knees. It was another retro look he could describe as a sheath only because he’d been dragged downstairs more times than he could count to help one of them put together an outfit. Being a man with an eye for color was both a blessing and a curse.
“It’s an easy shorthand,” Kaitlin said.
“They’re more than their jobs. You wouldn’t like it if a man posted the three of you described by your physical appearance. When you call one of them the banker of the week, you make it sound like they’re interchangeable.”
“They tend to describe themselves that way,” Elsa pointed out reasonably as she ran water to wash the breakfast dishes. “Jobs, sport, that sort of thing.”
“It’s a good point,” Milla said. She rubbed her thumb along the edge of her phone, considering him. “I don’t post more information because I want to give them some measure of privacy.”
He appreciated that, knew she’d done it long before she learned how Chelsea had conducted both her affair and her soul-searching on social media. “It’s not really a fair vote for your viewers,” he added. “They’re getting the caption of a snapshot of a human being. They know you, but they don’t know enough about the blokes to make a match with any hope of succeeding.”
As soon as the words were out of his mouth, he wished he could take them back. Not because they weren’t true—they were. Not because he’d said more than he should have—he hadn’t. He wished he could have them back because he’d learned something about himself when he said them, and now he couldn’t hide from it anymore.
He didn’t want Milla to succeed. He didn’t want her to find someone who loved bicycling and travel, punk rock and pub quizzes. If she did, everything would change.
“Another good point,” Milla said cheerfully, not looking at him. “We should make the poll more descriptive.”
She didn’t care. She was twenty-four, having fun, showed no interest in settling down. All relationships fail until one doesn’t, she’d said a couple of weeks earlier. This was as much a social media strategy for Milla as it was an effort to find—
His brain ground to a halt. A boyfriend? A lover? A husband?
He’d never really imagined the long-term consequences of Milla’s playful dating strategy, because until now, it hadn’t been real.
It had just gotten real. Very, very real, blindsiding him as only life could.
“You ready?” Milla asked.
He came back into the room. “Yeah,” he said.
“What are you two up to?”
“Charlie’s offered to show me around the East End,” Milla said. “I’ve been lazy the last few weeks. I need to sand the rust off my travel writer’s brain.”
He blinked. He’d done no such thing, just said he’d show her the rest of the process. The cleat he’d given her was one of a series he’d made as he was working through the darkness between one clear artistic vision and the next. He’d intended to show her the end result.
“Ooh,” Elsa said, peering over her shoulder at them, up to her elbows in fairy liquid bubbles.
“Want to come along?” Milla asked, glancing at Kaitlin to include her.
Wait, what?
“Can’t,” Kaitlin said distr
actedly. “I’ve got a big commission due in a couple of days.”
“I’m due at the bakery in an hour,” Elsa said, regret clear in her voice. “Another time?”
Rocked back on his heels, Charlie cleared his throat and scrubbed his hand across his chin. “Uh, sure,” he said. “Let’s go.”
He held the door open for Milla, then followed her down the steps and into the early morning sunshine. “What was that all about?” he asked when they were a few steps away from the open windows.
“Hidden in plain sight,” Milla said matter-of-factly as she slid her sunglasses onto her nose. “It makes more sense to say what we’re doing and invite them along then try to sneak out separately and meet up, especially when you don’t text. And this way, if Elsa’s on her way to work or Kaitlin runs out for lunch and they see us, they don’t suspect anything.”
His blood ran cold for a second, because it was as calculating as he’d ever seen Milla.
“You don’t want anyone to know, right?”
Another gut punch. Milla was being calculating because he’d asked her to.
“Right,” he managed, squinting into the sunshine. Milla loved the sunny weather, but even if it had been pissing down rain, she’d put on her polka-dotted Wellingtons and find an umbrella and go. He fumbled his own sunglasses from his pocket and put them on. “What’s this about an East End tour?”
“Talking last night reminded me I wanted to add more of a written component to my travelogues.”
“Like what?” he said.
“I don’t know. I take notes, obviously, and I’ve written them up for descriptive posts on the website, but a longer piece, a more thoughtful piece. An essay, maybe. I’ve never done that before.” She held up her phone. “I’ve got the visual angle. It’s time to change things up a bit. Diversify.”
“You want me to show you around the East End.”
“Yes, please,” she said brightly, giving it her best British inflection. He smiled in spite of himself.
He could be working, but truth be told, the work was done. Finished. Ready. Today, he was at loose ends.
“What do you want to see?”
“Show me what you see,” she said simply.
There were times in Charlie’s life when days dragged on like the winter rains. Today was as fluid as molten glass, malleable, responding to his touch. Without an itinerary or a theme, he showed her what he loved about the East End. They walked through the narrow streets and lanes, where the houses sat nearly flush with the street, and he showed her the street art created by Banksy and Stik, Invader and ROA, decorating walls and security shutters, still drawn before the businesses they protected opened their doors. He told her how East End residents were the ones to force authorities to open the Tube tunnels to protect civilians during the Blitz. He showed her the Docklands, formerly a major hub in the country’s heavily traveled river and oceangoing shipping, redeveloped into some of the tallest office buildings in London and upscale housing. They spent a quiet hour touring the Museum of London Docklands, built in renovated sugar warehouses, displaying artifacts dating from the Roman times through the Empire years, two world wars, to the docks’ closing and subsequent renovation.
Then he took her through Whitechapel, where he told her about Jack the Ripper, and Brick Lane, where he told her about the Huguenots and the silk trade and the Jewish population who lived there long before the current wave of immigrants from India and Bangladesh gave the neighborhood an air heavy with spices and bright with color and fabric, a transition he didn’t remember but his parents did. He took her to the sites of the weekly markets, some of which had been running for hundreds of years. All the while she took pictures, videos, thumbed in notes, always waiting until he was out of the shot, handing over her phone so he could take pictures of her.
They walked and walked, stopping for a late lunch away from Canary Wharf, at his favorite kebab house in Brick Lane. She was remarkably quiet for Milla, skimming through the pictures, then adding notes to her phone before shutting it off and turning it facedown on the table. They’d found a table near an outlet so she could recharge.
“How long has your family lived in the East End?”
He tore off a piece of flatbread before he answered. “We can trace back nearly four hundred years through church registries,” he said. “Tanner as a name comes from the leather trade. Making leather is a disgusting, smelly process involving significant quantities of urine. The business owners wanted to avoid complaints and fines, so they situated downwind. We’ve also been dockworkers, match girls, rope makers, pieceworkers, costermongers—”
“What’s a costermonger?”
“Sells fruit and veg out of a cart,” he said, then crammed the warm bread into his mouth. He was ravenous. Weeks of near constant work and irregular meals had caught up with him.
“Got it,” she said.
“My dad was a costermonger, and my mum cuts hair,” he said when he’d finished chewing. “My brothers have all left for uni and semi-d’s—you’d call them dupluxes,” he added when her brow furrowed in confusion, “in the suburbs. I left, too, but now I’m back.”
“I can’t see you living anywhere else,” she said. “It’s quite the family history. I know where my grandparents lived, but not much farther back than that.”
It wasn’t exactly a family history to brag about, but he owned it, through and through, as a point of pride. He had none of the qualities that kept popping up in Milla’s date polls, no school ties, no steady job, but he had the history of a vibrant, diverse, thriving and highly resilient neighborhood in his veins, in the air he breathed. He felt remarkably possessive of the East End, as if it belonged to him as much as he belonged to it.
She laid her cutlery across her plate, folded her arms on the table and leaned toward him. The sunlight picked out the red highlights in her dark brown hair and lay across the curve of her cheek like silk. “Are you sure you want to show me what you’ve been working on?” Her eyes were wide, serious, absolutely sincere.
The question surprised him. She obviously meant it, was giving him a chance to change his mind and protect the most vulnerable part of himself. After Chelsea, the hot shop was the only safe place he had, the place where he disappeared and created beauty out of sand and chemicals. Other than Billy, a cousin he trusted with his life as well as his art, he let no one into his creative process. No one.
“Absolutely,” he said.
Her smile spread slowly, crinkling the corners of her eyes. He pulled out his wallet and left a couple of bills on the table. “Come on, then,” he said.
* * *
He unlocked the side entrance to the hot shop, reached inside to flick on the bank of lights over the vast space, then held the door for Milla.
“Furnace, glory hole, lehr,” he said after the lights powered up, pointing at the three furnaces along the back wall. “The furnace and glory hole are heated to thirteen hundred degrees Celsius—”
“That’s what, twenty four hundred degrees Fahrenheit?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Hot.”
“Hot enough to melt sand,” he said. She was taking pictures, of course, but he found he didn’t mind. “We initially heat the glass in the furnace. The glory hole is for reheating it as we’re working on a piece. A finished piece cools in the lehr before we start the cold work.”
“Would it take long to heat up the furnace?” she asked.
He laughed. “We don’t shut it down, love,” he said. “Won’t take a moment. Want to help?”
“Sure,” she said, and set down the camera.
His tools clustered around his bench, the punties and blowpipes sharing space with his hand tools, the rails waiting for him.
While the furnace heated, he hefted a steel blowpipe, then reached into the crucible and gathered a blob of molten glass on the end of the pipe. Milla gave him a wide berth as he turned to his bench.
“You roll the glass on the marver,” he said, nodding at the tab
le as he transformed the blob into a cylinder. “Open the glory hole door,” he said.
She sprang forward and unlatched the door. Charlie tipped his head toward the boxes where he kept the powders and frits used to add color. “What color do you want?” he said.
“Something like the reddish orange in that bowl,” she said, pointing.
Charlie nodded at the correct container. She shook silver nitrate on the marver. “Come here,” Charlie said, then guided her hands to the pipe. “Roll it back and forth,” he said, coaxing her hands through the unfamiliar motions. “Good. Now it’s back to the glory hole to melt the color into the glass. Do you want a vase? Plate? Bowl?”
“A bowl like that one,” she said, pointing at a row of slumped bowls sitting on the window ledge.
“Right,” he said. “Sit there.”
She did. He tipped the end of the pipe toward her. “Blow,” he said. “Go on, put some wind behind it, that’s good. Hang on, needs a bit of flashing,” he said, returning the piece to the glory hole for a moment.
After a few attempts they had the shape he wanted, soft sides, slumping like an old woven basket. “Now we transfer to the punty,” he said. “It’s a bit tricky. Keep turning the pipe, like this, or we’ll chunk it,” he said, showing her the pace he wanted.
She was grinning like a dog with its head out a window. He collected a blob of glass on the punty, then turned back to his bench. “Stop.”
She did. He attached the punty, waited a moment, then rapped the pipe. It snapped away from the piece, leaving the bowl-shaped glass attached to the punty. “Well done, you,” he said.
“You did that, not me,” she said.
“Now we do the fine work,” Charlie said. He did most of the work while she watched and took pictures, using the tweezers to stretch the sides to a soft, uneven shape. She’d chosen a deep orange, not too much, so the color would stretch through the glass like a sunset across the sky. “There,” he said when he finished. He tugged on his Kevlar gloves and picked up the bowl. “Now we leave it in the lehr until it’s cool enough to handle.”
