by Luke Tredget
The bus starts up again, the Kismet billboard slides from view, and Anna tells herself that it is a good thing if the score is an exaggeration. All she wants is one night of adventure and excitement, a birthday gift to herself, never to be repeated again. And even if the number is accurate, and he really does represent a one-in-ten-million match – she looked this up, too – then surely it is an act of moderation and admirable restraint, to only sleep with him once?
Yes, she thinks, as she puts her phone away and stands up and rings the bell, either way, it is fine – everything is fine. Then the bus stops and she skips down the stairs and onto the street, giving thanks to the driver on the way.
The flat is alive with the sound and smells of cooking. Pete prepares most of their meals, and always makes an effort on his study days, but tonight he has really gone for it. When Anna has changed into lounge pants and taken a pill, she comes downstairs and finds the narrow table in the living room set with a carafe of water and silver cutlery, as if guests are coming. He comes through with two plates, which he introduces as if he is a waiter at some fancy restaurant: pan-fried bream with garlic mash and purple sprouting broccoli. She watches him curiously as he takes a seat, and wonders if he is ramping up ceremonies in advance of her birthday. But when he smiles at her she sees an excited glow in his eyes, and decides this is more likely about last night: it is a gesture of gratitude for the sex, for the end to the bout of celibacy.
‘Did you have fun then, with Zahra?’ he says, taking up his knife and fork. The table is so narrow they always sit at right angles from each other, Anna at the head and Pete on the side. She notices that his facial hair has thickened since the weekend, has crossed the line between stubble and beard. It is funny how it grows uninvited, without purpose or benefit, like the weeds and nettles in David’s garden downstairs. ‘You certainly stayed out late. For a Tuesday.’
‘It was fun,’ she says, and then, before he can ask for details, tries throwing attention back to him: ‘How was your evening?’
‘Uneventful,’ he says. ‘Though it certainly improved when you got back.’ He smiles at her again, and she looks down at the burnt-out eyes of her fish. ‘It must have been our talk the other day. Amazing how it can help just to put things into words.’
‘Yes,’ she says, and then returns to her fish. Her stomach turns as she cuts through its shiny scales and pulls soft wet flesh from its spine. ‘Yes, it must have helped.’ She loads a fork with a wet flake of fish and a dollop of mash and washes it down with a glass of water that she suddenly wishes was wine.
‘And how’s the article coming along?’ he says, evidently trying to keep the mood light, conversation ticking over. She tells him that it’s fine, that it’s coming into shape.
‘Have you shown it to anyone yet?’ he asks, and then frowns when she says that she hasn’t.
‘Don’t worry. I’m on top of it. I’ll give it to Stuart tomorrow afternoon.’
There is sufficient edge in her voice that Pete nods in agreement and returns to his food, which he is eating with just a fork. He likes to cut up his food at the start of a meal using his knife and fork, then pass his fork to his right hand and proceed to eat using just that, while his left arm takes a nap. Zahra does this as well, and it obscurely annoys Anna that these two people who have such a vocal passion for food don’t even adhere to basic table manners.
‘Do you want some wine?’ she says, realising that there is no good reason to deny herself. She gets up and goes to the kitchen, where she finds a third of a bottle of white in the fridge. It must be the bottle that Pete had last night while she drank with Geoff, and this thought is like a squirt of black ink into her mood. She takes it back to the living room with two glasses, but Pete says he doesn’t want any, since he had a few drinks last night. Anna nods and pours herself a glass, pretending not to notice his implication. A few moments pass, then he makes his point directly.
‘You must have drunk a fair amount last night as well?’
‘Sure,’ she says, taking a sip and shrugging. The wine isn’t nice but she enjoys the alcoholic bite at the end of the taste sensation, like a sting in its tail. He is watching her sip, and it occurs to her that he might have found the whisky bottle. ‘But I’ve been working hard, too.’
This comes out wrong, as if she is trying to say that he hasn’t been working hard, has merely been lounging around with his textbooks. But Pete doesn’t respond and they both eat in silence; she senses that he is suppressing the urge to say something, and is inwardly repeating some mantra about how to diffuse the heat from conversations before they flare into arguments. Eventually he speaks again, this time about the birthday dinner party.
‘So who’s confirmed?’ he says. She tells him and he then asks many more questions about the event – what she would like to eat, to drink, for pudding, if she wants to go shopping tomorrow night for the food she likes. Anna gives short answers to each of the questions, lacking the energy to think about any of these things, and reminds herself of what she has to tell him, of the lie she has prepared.
‘About tomorrow,’ she says, her fingers gripping hard around the cool metal of her knife and fork. ‘I’m going to have dinner with my mum in the evening.’
‘Oh yeah?’ he says. Anna’s face feels hot, and her heart makes the little lift that lie detectors must measure for.
‘Yes,’ she says, looking down at the face of her fish, its expression now seeming a fixed scream of pain, and cuts yet more white flesh from the hole in its side. She covers this with mash and says: ‘We were going to have dinner over the weekend but she’s busy so we thought we’d go the night before my birthday instead, just the two of us.’ She puts the fish and potato in her mouth then starts loading her fork again. It is reassuring, in a way, to not enjoy lying; it is further proof that this is a blip, an indulgence.
‘Sounds nice. Send her my love.’
‘Will do,’ she says, pouring another glass of wine. She can feel his eyes on her as she does so and, to justify the speed of her drinking, says: ‘This wine is delicious.’ The sound of her own voice make her feel strangely uncomfortable, and she stares down into the yellow liquid until she realises that she said exactly the same words the night before, to Geoff, only that time she meant it.
*
In the middle of the night, Anna wakes with a gasp. She has been dreaming. Already the details of the dream have disintegrated, but she knows it included her dad in some way, and that she was on a ledge or cliff face and then falling, falling. She lies in bed and waits for the sense of danger and panic to fade from her waking mind, but it doesn’t, it intensifies. It feels as if the darkness all around her is a physical force pressing in from all sides. Her breathing is short and pained, and it seems possible that her airways are closing up and that she will be choked by her own anxiety.
Anna gets out of bed and crosses the room and opens the Velux window. Cold air stings her lungs and makes every hair on her half-naked body stand on end. She takes conscious control of her breathing – in for four seconds, out for five – and the panic begins to retreat. By placing her elbows and chin on the window frame and rising onto tiptoes, she is able to stand almost comfortably, and look out across the neighbourhood. Above the opposite terrace she can see a sliver of central London, and the tops of a few tall buildings – City-Point and the Shard and that ugly skyscraper in Elephant and Castle with the wind turbines at the top – around which light is just beginning to gather. It must be almost morning. She thinks of Sheffield, and the house she shared with Zahra and Hamza in third year that was at the top of a hill; from the dormer window in her room she could see the entire city, and she often sat there blissfully watching it fade from night to morning, from evening to night. The memory is a soothing one, and her mood lifts further at the sight of a plane rising up from the west, the red wing and tail lights flashing. She thinks again of her man, four years ago, standing at the carousel at Heathrow, waiting for his luggage. He would be standing there huddled
among the crowds of families and couples and businessmen, some of whom he’d recognise from the flight, watching the first bags appear on the conveyor and then more bags and wondering if this will be the time that his bag doesn’t. Then he switches on his phone and it starts buzzing with a backlog of messages – from his boss, his boss’s boss, his colleagues, his wife. There has been a coup or an assassination or an uprising or some other major event in X – she hasn’t worked this out yet – and he is needed there, right away. He runs to Departures, learns there is one flight for X in thirty-five minutes. He thinks of his bag on the carousel, feels a sentimental pull towards a couple of garments, and then bids them farewell. He asks for one ticket to X, and without even being told the price he hands the woman behind the counter an American Express …
Anna is shivering now, but she is happy; the feeling of panic was merely the overhang of a bad dream. She treads back to bed, and the feeling of getting between the warm sheets is a physical delight. Pete is on his back, and snoring lightly. She nudges him, and instinctively he turns onto his side, as if even in the depth of his sleep he is sensitive to her needs, and only wants to make her happy. She snuggles closer to him and kisses the downy nape of his neck. Then she closes her eyes and goes to sleep.
Thursday
There are many places on and around Carnaby Street to buy boots, and during her lunch hour Anna moseys around several before settling on a boutique on the top floor of Kingly Court. She selects three pairs to try on, and while sitting and waiting for the shop assistant to come back with size 7s she whips a sock off and admires her newly painted toenails. The boots arrive and she quickly discards one pair that is far too pointy, and takes a long time mulling over the other two. They are almost identical pairs of black leather riding boots, and the main difference – other than subtle variations in the lining and stitching – is the price: one is £110, the other £320. In some ways they look identical, but she prefers the expensive pair, she really does, and eventually reminds herself of her pay rise and repeats a maxim she’s been using in clothes shops since she was a teenager: that expensive items aren’t actually more expensive, since the real cost can only be calculated much later, as a function of how many times you chose to wear the item in question, and how much you enjoyed doing so. The assistant takes away the expensive pair to box up, but then Anna can’t bear to put on her old boots – which now appear ridiculously, comically shabby – and asks to wear the new ones out instead. With her old boots swinging from a giant paper bag she heads towards Soho Square, buying a curry pot on the way. It is a bit cold and blustery, and she has her pick of the benches – on a sentimental impulse she selects the exact spot where she activated Kismet and sat waiting until a 54 drifted into the park. Somehow this was only last week. She thinks about this while poking at her curry pot, but barely eats a mouthful – her insides are full of a swirling nervous energy that leaves no space for food. She manages about half before heading back to work; at the edge of the square she drops the full curry pot in a bin and, after some hesitation, stuffs her old boots in there as well.
‘New shoes!’ says Ingrid, when Anna arrives at her desk.
‘A present to myself,’ she says, turning her feet around; the boots are so dark and lustrous they appear wet. ‘For the last day of my twenties.’
Ingrid bends down to touch the leather and asks where they’re from, and seems to want to keep talking, but Anna puts her boots beneath her desk and makes it apparent that she has no time for chatting. She continues combing through ‘Sahina_FINAL’, correcting typos, deleting unnecessary words, beating the sentences into shape. But she is too excited to hold a thought in her head, and keeps losing her place and gazing absently around the office. One time she looks up, and the sight of a new Kismet story appearing on the big board makes her think of Geoff and the evening ahead of her; nervous energy rushes through her like a gust of wind and it feels possible that she might faint.
Her self-imposed deadline is 5 p.m., and at 5.04 she rounds off the last paragraph so that it at least partially makes sense, and emails the whole thing to Stuart. Then she crosses the clearing towards the Quiet Room, and taps on the glass door.
‘I’ve sent you the copy,’ she says.
Stuart is typing an email about the Longines account, she can see over his shoulder – why is it always watches? – and without looking up he grumbles that she should have sent him a draft yesterday or the day before.
‘But just leave it with me. I’ll come and find you later.’
‘The thing is, I have to leave early today. It’s my birthday tomorrow, and I’m meeting my mum for dinner.’
He types a couple more words, then gives the enter key an almighty thwack, before turning in his seat towards her. The resigned and disappointed look passes over his face, as if he should have expected this kind of niggling complication.
‘Alright then,’ he says, nodding to the empty chair. ‘Let’s go through it now.’
‘The thing is,’ says Anna, wincing, ‘I have to leave now now. Like, this minute.’
His expression hardens into annoyance, and he asks how she still found time for a lunch break. Anna isn’t sure if he really can track her movements or is bluffing, but she just apologises for being a pain and says that the article is all finished, that she’s really pleased with it, and that she can come in early tomorrow to talk through any changes, with plenty of time to make edits before sending to Romont. He holds her in his narrow searching gaze, trying to discern her motive, and when he sighs and shakes his head she knows he is begrudgingly acquiescing to her plan.
‘Make sure you come in early,’ he says.
‘No problem. Thanks.’
‘Really early. Eight a.m. early.’
‘Sure thing. See you then.’
He nods at the door, and she surprises herself by making a girlish cheeky smile before turning on her heel and leaving the room.
*
At 5.15 p.m. Anna shuts down her computer and heads to the stairwell, her clunky laptop weighing down her rucksack and pinching the skin on her shoulder. In the ground-floor lobby toilet she fusses with her make-up and puts her hair down and wafts it around for a while until she decides to put it up again. On Charing Cross Road she catches the 176 to Penge, and takes the front seat on the top deck. She checks her phone to see if he’s messaged to cancel or delay, and since he hasn’t she just ends up looking at his name in her contacts and the number 81. It is a vast, towering number, and she tells herself it’s okay to be nervous. She hasn’t slept with anyone but Pete in over four years, let alone with someone with whom she shares the highest match she has ever heard of, anywhere, ever. Of course, the number is an approximation, and she wonders if it’s been rounded up from something like 80.6284985 or down from 81.4322. Then she wonders about its raw, pre-numerical form, and remembers the image that appeared behind Raymond Chan during his TED talk, an abstract spread of dots and slashes and wingdings that covered the wall behind him like a vast constellation, hundreds of thousands of stars, each one representing a practice, an attitude or a belief, creating a map of our true selves …
Anna feels the dizzying energy swirling within her again, and this time she thinks she might be sick; something rises as far as her throat before retreating, leaving an acidic flavour in its wake. In fact, her nerves have crossed the threshold into discomfort – her palms are clammy and her mouth is dry, and the burbling in her stomach makes her think of the long waits before the firing gun in a cross-country race. To calm herself, she focuses on her Twitter channel and the laptop in her bag, and the prospect of her number of followers being boosted to one thousand or two thousand. What will happen? These people will share and retweet her posts and her number of followers will snowball until a breakthrough occurs – someone who works in BAA that is willing to help, or someone who was in Mozambique at that time, or maybe even the man himself. She imagines making a ceremony of returning the suitcase to him, and the story being picked up by local and even national me
dia. Maybe she could talk to Paula about the story being put on the website? And why not, since it is just as interesting as most of the crap they write about. She can see it on the big board, nestled up there amongst the pieces sponsored by Hyundai and Longines and Samsung and North Face. It could become a little runaway hit, and Paula could take her to the airy boardrooms on the tenth floor and ask what she really sees herself doing in five years’ time. Or maybe she could use the project and the Women at the Top series as a platform to launch herself somewhere else, maybe a job in the field or one of the major news centres – New York, Hong Kong, Dubai, Sydney; or, even better, she could go freelance, and pick up odd bits of work and chisel away at projects from some whitewashed villa in the Mediterranean …
This idea holds her attention until the abrupt silence of the engine shutting down restores her to her present moment and position on the bus. They have stopped moving, but the windows are steamed and she can’t tell where they are: the pavement and buildings and sky appear as featureless grey blocks. The driver then speaks through the intercom, saying that regrettably they will be terminating here. A collective sigh spreads through the top deck, and then the other passengers begin filing down the stairs. Anna follows them down and onto the street, and is surprised and alarmed to be somewhere that looks entirely unfamiliar. They are on a curved and rising embankment, surrounded by squat seventies-style offices, with some taller but equally ugly buildings stacked behind them. She really has no idea where they are, and for a strange second she thinks maybe she slipped into a trance on the bus, lost an hour and followed the bus its entire route. Is this Penge? But, wait: she takes a few steps along the pavement, then the white dome of St Paul’s reveals itself, with a Barbican tower peeking over its shoulder. She walks further along the pavement and tries to gain a more precise sense of where she is. Across the road is another bleak office building, and a trampy-looking guy rolling a suitcase along the pavement. She recognises him, but isn’t sure from where. For a second she thinks it might be an old colleague of Pete’s from the garden centre, but then she realises it is someone else: the tramp that sang to her. Yes, that’s right. It’s the one that looked like her dad, and sang his own unique version of the happy birthday song. He notices her watching him, and stops and returns her stare across the road. Yet she still carries on looking, held fast by the uncanny resemblance to her dad; it is almost like a young version of her father has been sent in disguise to spy on her.
