by A. T. Grant
As her carriage decelerated bumpily into a station, Laura steadied herself, looked around unsuccessfully for a seat then cast an eye idly over another poster on the platform wall. You survived the end of the world, so now what? Vaguely curious at this seemingly random revelation, her eyes fell first to its picture of a sun-kissed tropical beach and next to the very real young man struggling incongruously with a suitcase beneath it. The latch appeared to be stuck.
Laura could only see his features from the side. His profile looked as foreign as many a London lad, but at the same time was disturbingly, and inexplicably, familiar. He had a strong, straight nose and heavy brows pulled into a frown beneath a tussle of thick black curly hair, creating an overall impression of brooding sensuality. Looking up, he turned in frustration as the doors of the tube rolled together. Laura was sure his rich Latino eyes lingered briefly on hers. The train lurched forwards a few inches then stopped, unaccountably, in a screech of metal on metal. The carriage momentarily re-opened and, as Laura regained her balance, she found those eyes again: deep, inviting pools of possibility that held her transfixed for several seconds. Then he was gone, to be replaced by a shiny black wall as her conveyance returned to its tunnel. Instinctively, she had framed a message for those eyes, which spoke instead only to her own reflection.
Laura had rarely felt so drawn to offer comfort, but was aware how out of proportion this was to such a trivial encounter, however handsomely packaged. She felt a familiar rush of blood as she imagined her fingers running through the unruly waves of his hair. Not prone to romantic notions, she endeavoured, half successfully, to dismiss the moment as a capricious conceit and quirk of the moment. The usual rush hour mix of crush, clatter and body odour helped, but every pair of eyes she met was his.
Chapter Three
Bristol
“You said what?”
“I said: If you react to traffic lights that slowly you should be playing for Bristol.”
“...and he hit you?”
“Yes: he had a Bristol FC Supporters Club sticker in his rear window. They went down after last season.”
“...and you knew this?”
“Yes.” David handed his bloodied shirt to his sometime girlfriend, Phoebe.
“But why, David?”
“I don’t know. I sat there staring at that stupid sticker after the crash. I’d been thinking about something else completely. It just seemed so bloody trivial. It made me angry.”
Phoebe crossed David’s kitchen to the washing machine and turned to study him from a distance. He sat topless at the small pine kitchen table, contemplating the cup of tea that Phoebe had just passed him. David wasn’t a young forty year old. Phoebe had noticed how the dark bags under his eyes were now often patterned with age. He was over-weight and growing ever so slightly pear-shaped and his hunched, shirtless frame looked limp and formless. His head still bore a full crown of brown hair, but it was etched with grey and had lost the healthy sheen that had once attracted her to him. Phoebe was worried about David. He was always tired, never talked about work and his shoulders collapsed at even the most fleeting tribulation. What had he been thinking about that had distracted him enough to have an accident? She was unsure whether she wanted to know.
Phoebe busied herself making the dinner. “I have to go soon: Adam will be back from rugby.”
David shrugged.
“How was work?”
David said nothing, assuming Phoebe was using her son as an excuse to get away. Work had not been good. Then there was the accident. The feelings he discovered there had left a deep sense of guilt. He had been desperate all day to get home to Phoebe, but now anything he might say would only confirm he was letting her down. He needed to be alone. He looked up as she turned back to her cooking and watched as she pulled dishes, cutlery and condiments from various draws and cupboards, as naturally as if the place was her own. Phoebe was in her late thirties; slight and trim, with short-cropped and quite striking strawberry-blonde hair. She was wearing sandals, brown jeans and a cream, autumn-leaf blouse. David dwelt on her petite facial features and striking blue eyes. This made him feel calmer. He was about to speak when Phoebe interjected.
“David.”
“Yes.”
“I want you to promise to do something for me.”
“Yes?”
“If someone rings will you promise to pick up the phone?”
David looked at Phoebe, unsure how to respond. He trawled through his mind for possible explanations for this slight, but unusual request.
“Is it your mother?” He knew that she had been unwell and perhaps things had taken a turn for the worse.
“No, she’s doing OK. I had a long talk with her earlier, though she’s still missing Dad.”
“So are you and Adam,” observed David. “I can’t remember the last time Adam cracked one of his jokes. Do you notice he’s always wearing that Glastonbury T-shirt his Granddad bought him?”
Phoebe reflected on the care she put into ironing that T-shirt. She knew she didn’t have to tell Adam to look after it. It was part of the new, closer bond forged in grief between the two of them. Unfortunately, it had yet to bring her closer to her mother. They always spent time together - her mother took this for granted - but Phoebe could already feel the role of dutiful daughter wearing thin now the love of her life, her dear father, was no longer there at the end of each visit with a cup of tea and a cuddle.
“It’s nothing to do with that, David. Well, at least not directly.” Her voice now carried the same worn-down tone as his.
Recognising this, David rallied. “Of course I’ll answer the phone. Whatever it is, you can count on me.” His words sounded hollow, but a smile flickered briefly in Phoebe’s eyes as she carried their dinner to the table.
Laura arrived home that evening to the usual mix of semi-intoxicated flatmates and uninvited guests. A heated conversation flickered between the sunken sofas in the bay-fronted living room of her Georgian, Bristol flat. Laura listened for a second, realised there was unlikely to be any immediate opportunity to impart her good news, so headed for the kitchen and a cup of tea. She pulled up a stool, slouched against a workbench and half-heartedly explored the contents of the local free newspaper.
“Laura.”
Someone must have actually noticed her.
“Laura?”
“Yes.”
“What do you think?” It was George, her flatmate Katie’s tall, Caribbean boyfriend.
“I think that you should go and get me some fish and chips. I’m starving.”
“There are biscuits in the tin. You should have been here earlier. Katie let me do the cooking.”
Laura glanced to her left to examine the sink. The large pile of tomato-stained dishes and pans suggested he was telling the truth.
“Pity you couldn’t wash up.”
“We knew you’d be home soon.”
Laura sighed, too tired to be provoked. Should she wash up, go to bed or join the conversation? The last two options were a close call. She wandered cup in hand into the living room and sat cross-legged on a rug, her back wedged between a sofa and the burnt umber tones of George’s outstretched legs.
“I want to know if trust in big business died with the Recession.” The typically bald statement came from Simon, George’s friend and Laura’s one-time partner.
“Blimey,” protested Laura, “don’t we leave questions like that at work?” She focused pointedly on her tea then used the cup to tap George on the thigh. He was falling asleep in fits and starts and, as he did so, a deep rumble and an occasional splutter emanated from over Laura’s left shoulder. She turned to Simon, who lay full-length on the opposing sofa, stroking his thinning fair hair with his beer-free hand. “So I take it work today was particularly dull?” she quizzed.
“Of course: you we
ren’t there.” Simon’s lean, slightly pinched face slipped to mock despondency in a well-practised theatrical gesture. “Tell me how to make advertising exciting and I’ll go and get your chips, Laura, and maybe even let you sleep with me again.”
Laura sighed at the thought of sleep and her own bed. Simon had always been too restless a sleeper to make his mock offer even remotely appealing. “I take it that you miss me terribly and still can’t bear to be without me?”
“Ouch!”
“If I were you, I’d quit,” she responded bluntly. She took Simon’s concerted attempt to balance a beer can on his forehead as mute acceptance.
“Anyway, you may be just about to lose your job, but I’ve got a new one. I take it none of you could be bothered to shift your arses to pick up the phone when I tried to call you earlier?”
“Sorry” said Katie, “bit of a heavy week. Tell us all about it then.” Her moon face opened into a wide smile and her heavily painted eyelashes shifted a little closer to her brow.
George leant forward and tussled Laura’s hair. “Well done, girl.” Laura always found his rich base voice soothing and was aware that she was becoming just a tad jealous of Katie.
“Well,” Laura collected her thoughts, “they’re called Tailwind Adventure. They want me to help them start up some new destinations. They’re part of the Carlton Travel Group now, which is apparently working to appeal to a more individualistic and thrill-seeking market, if you’ll forgive the corporate spiel. Thinking about it, perhaps you should have gone to the interview, Simon?” She couldn’t help the sort of gentle dig that had once been so characteristic of their relationship.
Simon smiled, spilling beer from the forgotten can onto the carpet as he rolled towards her. “So thrills and individualism equals you, does it?”
Laura folded her arms. She hadn’t stopped to think about it from this perspective. What, exactly, would she bring to the role? She didn’t actually have a clue what it would entail.
“Well, all I know is that they told me to look out my passport.”
“When do you start - I assume I’m going to be looking for a new flatmate if you’re working abroad?” Katie raised another matter that Laura had yet to consider.
Apologetically, Laura levered herself up using George’s legs, who squealed in mock discomfort. Tottering sleepily, she blew him a goodnight kiss, winked mischievously at Katie, and patted Simon on the shoulder as she shuffled past him towards her bed. What had she got herself into? Hopefully things would seem clearer in the morning. As she finally closed her eyes, she rediscovered those from her close encounter on the Underground. Laura slipped away on a warm, but turbulent ocean of uncertainty.
Chapter Four
In dreams, Bristol
The telephone rang. Its insistent tone drifted from a far corner of the insurance office where David worked. In front of him was a balance sheet he could not balance, spending that he could not justify, the unwelcome results of an ill-considered decision he had long since forgotten. The papers multiplied in front of him and toppled to the floor. The ringing grew louder. People were laughing and shouting at him to pick up the phone. His boss thumped his desk, snatched the shrill instrument, shook it a few inches from David’s face then hurled it against a wall. As it smashed into a thousand pieces, David woke up.
He sat up in bed. The pallid light of morning was just beginning to usurp the sodium orange glow of a streetlight through his bedroom curtains. He studied the telephone on his bedside table, remembered Phoebe’s request, then realised that his sheets were soaked in sweat. He shuffled across to the cold but dry side which she would periodically occupy. For a long time he lay there in limbo.
David rolled over, grabbed a book and turned on his bedside light. It was a popular physics tome: an exploration of space for the curious, but uninitiated. Cosmology took David far from his own world, and that was the appeal. The stars felt like old friends, but today the text provided new directions in which his fears could grow. He shrank into a hidden extra dimension, the walls receding in every direction. The light from his bedroom curtains became a barely perceptible afterglow - background radiation from the time of the Big Bang. Adrenaline swept through his system as he tumbled back to his particular place in space-time. As on several previous occasions, he couldn’t figure out where, or even who, he had been.
The house felt particularly cold and empty as David finally staggered, semi-conscious, down the stairs to the kitchen and a bowl of children’s cereal for breakfast. He stared out towards the damp, shaggy patch of lawn that defined the back garden. Droplets hung from the surrounding overgrown shrubbery, giving the whole ensemble a translucent, semi-liquid feel. David made a cup of tea. On route to a cupboard for sugar, he looked out into the garden again. The scene was just as it had been, but now a cat stared back at him from under the eaves of a dark Leylandi fir. It stood rigid, like some Egyptian deity. It was looking straight at him with quite striking eyes which, had they been any paler, might have dissolved away in the mist. The imperious looking animal appeared to be waiting for something. David felt strongly that if he could think of what this was it would leave, satisfied. Something deep inside him reacted as if he knew, but nothing reached his conscious mind, until he realised he had over-stirred the bag in his cup into a dark and bitter brew. He poured his tea into the sink and deliberately turned his back on the cat. Its spell was broken.
David shuffled into the living room then rooted around the scattered items on the coffee table looking for the photograph album that he had recently spent a lot of time contemplating. He made a neat pile of magazines, leaflets and newspapers in one corner. The album failed to emerge. He sighed and pulled a travel magazine from the pile. Why was there a travel magazine there at all? Sudden curiosity took hold. He flicked through the pages then examined the cover: Mexico and the Caribbean. It was a fairly standard Carlton Travel Group brochure.
Settling back to examine each destination, David absent-mindedly reached out for his non-existent cup of tea. A resume of historic Cuban towns immediately connected. He imagined himself a deeply tanned and dissolute drifter, dissuading a drunken Ernest Hemingway from starting a fight in a dark, smoke-stained waterfront bar, amidst the bustle of downtown Havana. Both characters staggered further into his imagination, driving off in the day’s afterglow in a battered 50’s Mustang saloon. Two shapely senoritas materialised on the backseat, starting a shrill argument which served to remind David that he had a headache.
He picked up the telephone instinctively from where it sat on a lamp table beside him, and drew it to his ear. A mercifully soothing, somewhat tentative female voice was asking him if he had yet decided whether to confirm his provisional booking.
“I’m sorry.” David let the apology hang in the ether. It could be applied to all sorts of things at that moment, but the lady to whom he was speaking ignored this introspection and translated it simply as “no”.
“I wonder,” she resumed, “whether you would be interested in considering something a little more adventurous?”
David had the uneasy feeling that whoever this person was knew far too much about him and could even be reading his mind. He also had not the slightest doubt that she was speaking about the very brochure that now lay in his lap.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, “I don’t know anything about this booking.”
“Don’t worry. Phoebe said she might leave this bit to me.”
“Oh.” David wondered why this unknown presence seemed to be on first-name terms with his girlfriend, so that he was now a topic of mutual concern. He let a sigh out into a world whose only consistency was its failure to make any sense whatsoever then decided to continue the conversation.
“I take it that the provisional booking is for a holiday. Where does Phoebe want to go?” he enquired, secretly hoping that the lady would suggest Cuba.
This time the p
ause was at the other end of the line, as the caller grasped that there was much more explaining to do than she had anticipated. “I think,” she began cautiously, “that your girlfriend intends the holiday to be for you alone. Her provisional booking was for Mexico.”
David sat staring into the coal-effect gas fireplace beyond the coffee table. If he were a computer he would have been displaying a small central window with an error message. Try as he might to respond, his mind remained empty of everything except a very familiar feeling of growing panic.
“Would you like more time to think?” The caller was obviously concerned and this tone gave her voice a familiar quality, but one which David again totally failed to compute.
“We get a lot of solo travellers,” she continued. “In fact, they make up the majority of this side of our business.”
Ernest Hemingway drifted again as a companion through David’s imagination and somehow managed to make the image of a solo traveller quite appealing. He envisioned himself tapping away deliberately in two-finger style at an old-fashioned typewriter on the vine-strewn terrace of some cheap Pensione, a Cuban cigar protruding casually from one corner of his mouth and a glass of red wine beside him, refracting the rays of the sun onto his battered old writing table.
