by Luke Tredget
‘That’s … good,’ she says, taking the wok from the dish rack and putting it over a high heat. Her answer lacks conviction so she repeats that it is good – really good – and realises she will have to tell him her own news from today; for some reason the prospect makes her suddenly tired.
‘I had some news as well,’ she says. ‘At work we pitched for this series to Romont, you know, the watchmakers. For a whole series on powerful women. And they, like, have asked me to lead on it …’
She flicks her eyes at Pete and he nods and says, ‘Yeah? So that means …’
‘It means I’ll have to interview all these big-shot women. Starting with Sahina Bhutto. And the week after that, Gwyneth Paltrow.’
‘Gwyneth Paltrow?’
‘Uh-huh,’ she says, continuing to fuss around the stove, pouring water from the boiling kettle, adding chopped pepper to the wok, not making eye contact with Pete.
‘It’s just … it’s incredible, Anna.’
‘It should be good,’ is all she says, and then begins pushing vegetables around the wok with a wooden spatula; the onions are already beginning to colour at the edges and oil is spitting up at her. She doesn’t look away from the stove, as if the process requires her full attention, since she can tell that Pete’s eyes are searching for hers in emotion. A moment passes, then he clears his throat and asks when ‘all this’ is starting; she says she’ll interview Sahina this coming Friday, and the article will go live a week later.
‘On your birthday?’ he says, and laughs. ‘How about that?’
Anna says nothing. She picks up a packet of noodles and tries to open them, but the plastic slips through her greasy fingers.
‘This is a massive achievement, Anna,’ says Pete. ‘A real milestone.’
‘Not really. I’m pretty sure it was my boss’s boss’s idea to give it to me; I don’t think Stuart would have wanted to.’
‘Well … better to be liked by the big boss than the little boss.’
‘But I think she only likes me because I flirted with her at a party last year.’
Rather than respond, Pete just smiles at her in a knowing, patronising way, as if it is typical that she would downplay something like this, to try and squirm away from receiving any praise. Anna would like to say more – how for some reason she isn’t proud or even pleased – but she doesn’t have the words at hand to explain such a statement, or the energy to find them. Again she tries to open the packet of noodles, this time with her teeth, but the plastic refuses to give. Her fingers smell of mandarin peel.
‘About your birthday: have you sent the invites yet?’
‘Just a save-the-date email.’
‘But it’s next week.’
‘I know when my birthday is.’
The boiling water is turning over furiously in the pan, and the vegetables in the wok are beginning to char. Anna takes up the carving knife and decides to stab at the noodle packet instead.
‘I was thinking about what food to get in. How about something Spanish-themed? Maybe we could start with gazpacho, and then perhaps one of those spinach and ricotta tartlets, before a big paella?’
The knife slices easily into the plastic wrapping, but it becomes stuck on the glued seam of the wrapper and refuses to go further. The water in the pan will soon burn away to nothing. She grips the knife and pushes harder.
‘Or maybe a big seafood thing? A series of platters. Smoked fish. Dressed crabs. Crayfish, langoustine, mussels. Though you’d have to decide soon, so I can speak to the fishmongers. How many are we expecting? Eight? Or else I could get up early and go to Billingsgate on the day, and then—’
‘Oww!’
Anna drops the knife on the work surface and grips her left wrist. The blade cut through the plastic and into thin air, slicing the tip of her left index finger on the way. She holds her hand up and looks at the scarlet bead that has sprouted, which trickles down her finger.
‘Careful!’ says Pete. She goes to the sink and he steps towards her, turning off the hob on the way. ‘Are you okay?’
‘It’s just a nick,’ she says, holding her finger under the cold tap.
‘Let me see,’ he says, laying a palm on her back.
‘It’s fine,’ she says, with edge. ‘Just give me some space.’ His hand flinches from her back. There is a moment of hesitation, then she hears him step out of the kitchen, walk along the hallway and close the living-room door. She looks down at the brushed steel sink, watching the blood turn to rusty streaks before disappearing down the plug hole.
*
Two hours later, Anna and Pete are sitting at their usual ends of the living-room sofa, as another edition of Newsnight – which Anna watches daily, in an attempt to persuade herself that she isn’t missing anything – rounds off to its dreary conclusion. To her right, Pete has been slipping steadily towards a horizontal position and yawning regularly, and he slips yet further as she takes the remote and switches to BBC News 24, but doesn’t rouse and leave the room. To her left, above and behind her shoulder, her phone is charging on the bookshelf, switched off and inert, yet emanating a dense presence. The story comes up about the new Kismet Love Test, and the face of Raymond Chan fills the TV, saying with a smile that the accusations are preposterous, that they haven’t done anything wrong – she switches to Al Jazeera instead. They watch the weather man talk of a mini spring heatwave heading for the UK, then Pete makes a final exclamatory yawn, slaps his hand on the arm of the sofa and announces he is off. Anna says she will be up in a minute, that she wants to watch the headlines. This is not entirely untrue, but as soon as she hears Pete finish up in the bathroom and then scale the ladder to the loft bedroom, she takes her phone and switches it on. She senses that Thomas will have sent a message – and knows that the curiosity will interfere with any attempt to sleep – and indeed when her screen comes to life it makes the distinctive, attenuated buzz of an incoming Kismet message.
Thomas 72: Nice to meet you tonight, shame you leave so soon. I can’t stop thinking about you! It was worth the wait for match number 5! Dinner at weekend? T x
Anna reads the message a few times, and the idea of meeting him again stirs the embers of her earlier excitement. She raises her fingers to her nose and finds they still smell of mandarin peel, even after a shower. And she is also struck by the surprising idea that spending the night with him might be a pragmatic, even prudent thing to do. Perhaps going through the motions of meeting up, getting drunk, going to his, getting naked and then having sex – those routine steps that seem so complex and audacious with a stranger – will flush all the doubts from her system and leave her calm, clear-headed, decisive. Kismet doesn’t have any profile pictures, and she tries to bring forth an image of Thomas in her mind. She see him standing before her at the cafe, and when he helped her connect to the internet, but this just directs her thoughts to the Power Women lists, and Thomas is immediately forgotten: instead she wants to know if Romont have replied to her email, and what they might have said; a chirpy, positive appraisal of her spreadsheet will be a much better way to round off the day, and send her towards a contented, satisfied sleep. She logs out of Kismet and opens her work emails, and at the top of the inbox is a red-flagged message from Stuart, sent at 6.27 p.m. It is a three-sentence note, addressed to the Romont marketing team and with Anna in CC, assuring them there must be a ‘simple explanation’ and promising it ‘won’t happen again’. Anna flicks down to the previous message, from Carl at Romont, sent at 5.33 p.m., thanking Anna for the lists but wondering if she could double-check if Mexico really was in South America.
‘What the …’
Beneath Carl’s message is Anna’s initial email, sent at 4.59 p.m. She opens the attachment and sees the fifteen women split into six continents – North America, South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and Australasia – without any of her final rearrangements. For a moment she feels indignant, as if she has been the victim of some unfair technical malfunction, enacted by a malign authority that delib
erately tripped her up. It is impossible: she remembers making the final changes, Thomas coming over, it failing to send, restarting the computer. But did she save the changes? She must have done, surely. Though maybe not. In fact, since the changes aren’t there, almost definitely not. That is all there is to it: simple human error. Like the time when the plagiarism filter caught her out for foolishly lifting a line from Wikipedia, or when she misidentified a rare species of tropical frogs as toads. Just a simple, human error.
Her heart is beating painfully in her chest, and she wants to make amends immediately. She writes an email to the whole team, apologising for the mix-up, saying she attached the wrong document. But she realises it will look crazy coming so late, and deletes it. Then she begins writing a shorter note to Stuart, with Paula copied in, to say sorry and that she’ll sort it first thing. But even this will look crazy, and will ultimately achieve nothing. So instead she deletes this, and sits there, until the screen on her phone switches itself off and she lets it fall into her lap.
A moment later, Raymond Chan appears on the news again, denying any wrongdoing. She turns him off too and sits in the half-dark, the room’s furniture faintly lit by the orange streetlight filtering through the blinds. The clock on the wall shows it is one minute to midnight. The end of yet another day, she thinks. But it doesn’t feel like it; her heart is thumping and her nerves are frayed and her eyes are wet with tears. Sleep is hours away. It’s not the end of the day: it’s the beginning of the night.
Wednesday
On Wednesday evening Anna runs herself a bath. It is easily the most appealing of the methods for inducing sleep she has read about on NHS Choices, including breathing exercises and drinking warm milk and doing press-ups and having sex. She gets in and gingerly attaches her expensive Swedish headphones – principal gift of her last birthday – to the laptop placed on the tiles, from which Spotify offers up recommended tracks based on her own personal playlists. Spotify has an uncanny knack of anticipating her moods. Most nights – whether she is in the bath or lying on the sofa or merely sitting in the dark – she can close her eyes and imagine she is within a pitch-black chamber of music, the insistent beat and soaring chords of some minimal dance track opening up landscapes of emotion within her, whole rolling storm clouds of feeling. Or else some unexpected classic from ten years ago will pitch her deep into a remembered situation, of playing DJ at one of the countless impromptu after-parties they threw in the flat she shared with Zahra in Hackney. Anna would usually position herself behind the laptop on the kitchen counter, combing playlists for the track so timely and welcome and familiar that it brought hoots of pleasure from the four-person dance floor – the Minuscule of Sound, they used to call these parties – and other slumped bodies, long since unconscious, were suddenly reanimated and leaping around in delight.
But tonight it doesn’t work. Each song that Spotify suggests is either timeworn and overplayed – its magic long since depleted – or unknown and obscure, and she keeps reaching out of the bath and skipping to the next track. Even when she does find a song she likes, it doesn’t transport her anywhere; she remains doggedly lying in hot water, her face flushed and beaded with sweat, and surrounded on all sides by concerns, worries, unpleasant memories. Even her toes poking out of the milky water at the far end of the bath are a provocation. For how many times has she reflected on their chipped blood-red nail polish, half grown out, and decided to repaint them? And how many times has this decision been overtaken by a much more pressing concern, as it is tonight, when the memory of being called into the Quiet Room pops into her mind. Stuart didn’t get mad or raise his voice at her for sending the wrong Power Women list, as she had feared, but in a way it was worse how he described the situation as ‘embarrassing’ – for Stuart being embarrassed seems a form of torture – and had her reaffirm that she was ‘on top’ of the Sahina interview, and really was ‘ready for this’. This meeting left her in an agitated mood that continued until lunch, when she had an ill-tempered WhatsApp exchange with Zahra after she asked her advice about Thomas 72’s invite to dinner. Worst of all was coming home to Pete, who once again had cooked her dinner, and lying to him about a plan to meet up with Caz and Hamza on Saturday night. Getting the words out was hard enough, but even worse was the enthusiastic way he accepted, as if his only concern was for her to be happy. Just remembering the trusting way he smiled is enough to make her guilt gather to an agonising pitch, and she thinks that maybe she can’t go through with it, she just can’t.
To try and shake off this feeling she removes her headphones, yanks the plug, climbs out of the bath, pats herself dry, takes a pill, brushes her teeth. While doing this she tells herself that she has little to feel guilty about anyway: this is just a test, after all, and nothing has even happened. And if she does feel guilty, isn’t that a good thing as well, proof she isn’t serious?
Somewhat calmed, she steps shivering out of the steamed bathroom and climbs the ladder to the loft bedroom. It is not yet 11.30 p.m., but Pete is already heaving in sleep. Anna pulls on her vest and shorts, ties her damp hair in a bun, switches off the side lamp, slips into bed and closes her eyes.
She doesn’t sleep. Or she does, for a moment, only to experience a sudden sensation of falling and then waking again with a jerk. Then she lies there, wide awake and newly energised, as if her few seconds of sleep were a power nap. She turns onto her left side but can’t get comfortable; it feels like her muscles and blood and bones are charged with a sour energy, as if on a deep level her body knows something is awry. To discreetly masturbate would help distract her mind and dissipate some tension, but she knows she won’t make it: she had a glass of wine before her bath, and one drink is enough to stop her coming, though Zahra and Pete both separately insist that this problem is merely in her head. But then, Anna always counters, what isn’t in her head? She turns again onto her back, this time with the duvet and pillow configured in such a way as to give back the sound of her own pulse, and then onto her right side, so she is facing Pete, his silhouette just visible in the navy-blue dark. As if in response to her shifting, his breathing changes: his lips part and his tongue clacks softly with each breath. Anna thinks of what Ingrid told her, that her and Sam’s default sleeping position is to lie with their bodies entwined, her head on his chest and his arm looping around her back. She tries to remember the last time she and Pete slept like that, or if they ever did, and at that moment he snores. It is a singular snore, one long strangled breath that rattles in his mouth, but it is enough to make the number appear unbidden in Anna’s mind – 70 – and she sighs and is up and out of bed and getting into her dressing gown, her hope of sleep abandoned.
In the kitchen she reaches to the back of the cupboard for the bottle of expensive whisky, hailing from the mystical-sounding island of Jura, a Christmas present from Pete’s parents, and pours herself a finger with a clink of ice. She has made good use of the bottle in recent weeks, halving its contents through these solitary midnight nips. She wonders what Pete will think when he sees it, and is always tempted to refill the bottle with a quick blast from the cold tap. But to do so would be to cross an important threshold and admit there is a problem, which there isn’t, and so the untampered bottle goes back into the cupboard.
She picks up her laptop from the bathroom on the way to the living room, bundles herself into a ball on the sofa and spends an hour researching Sahina Bhutto. Most articles contain a cursory overview of Sahina’s background and main projects – the Biscuit Tin and the stadium in China that can be seen from space – and then pick up the same anecdotes that underpin her fearsome reputation: the time she made an aeroplane turn around in mid-air because she wasn’t happy with the flight attendants, and when she dissolved her old firm because they failed to secure a contract. These stories are repeated almost word for word in Time and Newsweek and Vogue, and it feels as if the primary research method was to steal facts from one another. Anna digs deeper, and on the third page of search results finds somethin
g interesting – on the RIBA website there is a research paper called ‘Sahina Bhutto and the Modernist Condition’ by a student from the University of Ohio, which is authoritative, meticulously researched, and dredges up all sorts of information from Sahina’s youth in Pakistan and first jobs in America. Anna is inspired to draft ten new questions, and she decides that whatever she does, and however excruciating the interview, she will not simply churn out a repeat of those other mainstream articles. Hers will be different, fresh, revealing, insightful. Maybe if she manages this she will impress Stuart and Paula, who will forgive her for the spreadsheet mix-up, and see that she is ready after all.
She refines the questions and sends them to her work email. Then, feeling like she has achieved something, she goes to the kitchen for another whisky – two fingers this time – and decides to find something relaxing or interesting to look at online before trying to fall asleep again. Her web browser refreshes to a news digest site, with the suggested stories based on her search history. She hesitates before clicking on a story about celebrities with surprisingly high IQs – mindful of what such a selection might do to her Kismet profile – and instead goes to Facebook. She scrolls down through posts and hits Ingrid’s pictures from her weekend in the countryside. There are over twenty new photos, and Anna studies each one, beginning with shots from the back seat of a car whizzing along a grey motorway. Then the collected group are in scarves and hats, hiking across a muddy field. Then they are dancing in front of an open fire in a timbered, low-ceilinged living room. Then they are swimming at night in the indoor pool – the place must have been really swish – and there is a mid-air portrait of each person as they jump spread-eagled into the turquoise water. The final pictures are of a more wholesome dining-room scene, perhaps a hungover lunch the next day, and the sight of a candlelit cake being carried into the room makes Anna experience something akin to a full-body internal wince.
