by Luke Tredget
Anna steps into the roped-off smoking area and puts her face to the misted glass. Her idea was to sit in the same booth where she and Ed sat that night, but the re-enactment isn’t going to work: so many people are dancing in the middle of the bar that she can’t even see through to the leather booths at the back. She supposes that she could go and dance herself, since she was lamenting just earlier how she never does this, but stirring up the memory of being here with Ed has killed off any such desire. That night they’d had the place to themselves, and immediately after sitting down she told him her news: her dad was dead. He’d died two weeks previously, a few days after she returned from California. Ed was shocked, and listened in silence as Anna told him the whole thing. How he’d died on a Tuesday morning, while walking in the South Downs with wife number three. After a steep hill he announced chest pains and the desire to sit down. A minute later he slumped over, closed his eyes, and that was it. He was fifty-seven. On that Tuesday, and during the long days that followed, Anna assumed the role of the clear-headed organiser, while her mother and brother and wife number three all went to pieces. She took charge of the death certificate and calling his friends and family and organising the funeral. She didn’t feel grief or shock, didn’t feel anything really, other than pride at how efficient and decisive she was being, as if this were a performance on his behalf, a final chance to show off to him. It was only after the funeral – during which she didn’t cry – when days began to resume their normal shape that she thought of herself, and called Ed.
Once she’d finished saying all this Ed hugged her for a long time. Then he said some nice things – the same nice, reassuring things that most people seemed to say – and hugged her again. During their second drink she persuaded him that she really was okay, and that they could speak about other things. So they discussed instead her time in San Francisco, the short films he was making, their mutual friends. They laughed a little and she edged around the booth towards him, but her warmth wasn’t reciprocated. He was polite, sure, but he was as stiff and cold as a closed door. During the third drink something twigged, and she asked if he was seeing someone else. He said that he was, that she was called Catherine, that he’d met her on Kismet. The news hit her like a dazing blow to the head, and the rest of their drinks washed by in a trance, until they were saying goodbye on the pavement. Then she was watching his lanky frame proceed away along the street, and she was walking in the other direction, alone, towards Great Portland Street.
Anna steps out of the smoking area and walks back to Great Portland Street. She turns right and walks slowly, her eyes scanning for visual cues. Just before the junction for the next side road she sees the pavement is skirted by a waist-high, mottled white wall – as if it has been pebble-dashed and then painted – above which is a thick, closely-cropped hedge, the kind that would be much too sharp and dense to thrust your hand into. Yes, she thinks, plucking off a small waxy leaf and squeezing a drop of sap out. It was right here that it happened, that the full weight of her dad’s death finally hit her. She could see him clearly in her mind’s eye as a young or youngish man, sitting in the driver’s seat of his first car, grinning. She could see him as an older man in his little study, where he would stare out at the garden for hours on end. She could see him walking up the hill, holding a hand up to his chest. And she could see him cold and lifeless in the box. Dead.
Anna began to cry. It started slowly, but then it grew stronger and stronger, until she was doubled over, weeping and sobbing on the street. She told herself to stop, but it was as much use as telling a wound to stop bleeding. The memories of him kept flowing through her, whirling and chaotic. She cried for the man he was and also the man he never quite managed to be; for the dozens of projects and hobbies and ideas that had seemed, to her at least, such an impressive cluster, but which in the end delivered so little that at his own funeral he was described as a supply teacher. She cried for all this, but she also cried for herself too. For the fact that the bottom had fallen out of her existence and that now she had nothing – no dad, no boyfriend, no job, no money – and that she had been labouring under a delusion for years, the delusion that she was special, that she was destined for great things, that somehow the world wasn’t going to get her in the end. On and on she cried, as strangers walked past, and all she could do to salvage some dignity was to stop herself making a noise. Not a sob or a moan, just tears in full flow, and a face distorted and a body buckling back into the sharp hedge, every time a new image of him appeared in her mind.
Tonight, however, it isn’t like that. Anna looks at the flagstones, the white wall, the hedge, and decides that she feels fine. There is no bottomless feeling in her stomach; there is no feeling at all. In fact, she looks back at that night with something almost like gratitude. It was a wake-up call, in a sense. It was for a purpose. Because it was where she started to realise something she’s forgotten these last weeks – she didn’t want to be like him. In a way he was just a big kid. Always dreaming, always changing his mind, always putting his energy into the latest idea; he simply never struck a deal with the great unforgiving world, never took stock of the people around him and his given talents and tried to make the best of the situation at hand. And, while her life might not be as adventurous or exciting as he seemed to think it would be, at least she has the basis for contentment, which is more than he ever did. And, ultimately, it is contentment that provides a platform for us to take advantage of happy moments, when they arrive, not to constantly chase them. Just like tonight, she decides, feeling her light adventurous mood returning. She gives one last parting swipe to the hedge, and then turns around. She walks back towards Social, thinking that maybe she will go dancing after all.
2
Friday
Anna wakes and finds she is contained within a box. It is a small box, not nearly long enough for her body, and her legs are bent and her neck is cricked. In the distance she can see some pale strips of white light, otherwise all is darkness. She pushes her head up and her feet down, trying to break through the soft walls of the box, but they do not give. Panic begins to gather, until she makes sense of the cushions beneath her, recognises the strips of light as venetian blinds and realises she is on the living-room sofa.
Why is she on the sofa? She doesn’t remember going to sleep here and can’t think of a reason why she’d want to, and it strikes her as unfair and somewhat cruel that she is not comfortably in her bed upstairs. But then she closes her eyes and she is upstairs, pleasantly spread-eagled on the double bed. She rolls around, luxuriating in the space and cool sheets, and when she finally reaches the edge she gets up and pads on bare feet across the bedroom, which is now the size and proportion of a vast, open-plan office, and lifts the hatch and begins descending the ladder. The metal rungs narrow and soften into a climbing rope, and she finds herself swinging in open blue sky. Carefully, her grip strong and true, she lowers herself downwards, hand over hand, all the way down to Bedford High Street, bustling on a Saturday afternoon. She is in town with her dad to buy new school shoes, Doc Martens, but her dad has stopped to chat to a man she doesn’t know. Anna is embarrassed by her bare feet, and isn’t sure how to engage with the adult conversation; should she look back and forth between the speaking faces? Or just stare forwards gormlessly, like a child? In the end she looks up, and her dad starts singing the Happy Birthday song, and the other man claps and then she drags him onwards and they are finally in Clarks. She hurries along the wall of shoes, and her worst fears are realised: the Doc Martens she wants are not on sale. For weeks she has agonised over whether to buy Doc Marten boots, which have been adopted with cultish fervour by the cool girls at school, or to simply replace her dull Clarks slip-ons, and she was delighted to learn of a compromise: a low-cut version of Doc Martens, the shape of a regular shoe, yet with the distinctive yellow thread around the top of the sole. But the assistant confirms they have none in stock, and in fact he hasn’t even heard of them, and now Anna’s dad is hurrying her to dec
ide between the full-on boots and prim shoes, and it feels like a momentous decision – a choice between how she’d prefer to be derided in the playground, as a try-hard or a geek – and at once the aggregate torment and shame of thousands of little slights and digs overwhelms her, and she bursts into tears, right there in the middle of Clarks. But when she opens her eyes the walls of the shop fall down and it is a happier time: Anna is running and skipping through fields in much smaller shoes, with Velcro straps and little ladybirds on the side. Her dad walks behind, and is singing again. Anna’s brother Josh is with them as well, in the form of their first dog, Rufus. The field slopes to a river bank, and Anna skims stones and balances on a branch and wants her dad to see her showing off, but has lost sight of him. Downstream a culvert protrudes from the muddy bank, and instinctively she knows he is in there and goes down and climbs inside. She has to crouch to fit in the tunnel, her neck cricked and knees bent, splashing through puddles towards a murmur that gathers in volume, and eventually there is a pinprick of light that grows until she emerges onto a metal balcony overlooking the sheer flank of a dam. Twenty metres to her left, a huge cylinder of white water, as wide and fast as a train, is roaring out of the dam wall and then arcing down to the reservoir, where it turns to white smoke, a rapidly churning cloud.
‘Anna! Up here!’
She looks up and sees her dad is on a higher balcony, connected to hers by a rusty ladder.
‘Come up! The view is incredible. You’ll love it.’
The ladder is out of reach, so she climbs onto the metal handrail of the balcony. She balances on tiptoes and stretches towards the first rung, her body flattened against the sheer wall of the dam. Then a gust of wind gets between her and the stone and she slaps at the wall but grabs nothing and her foot slips off the handrail and she is falling, falling—
Anna gasps and sits upright. This time she is fully awake, and reality is restored around her. She is on the living-room sofa, wearing her bra, knickers and socks. There is a sharp pain behind her eyes, her guts feel watery and unsettled, and her tongue is almost entirely dried out from sleeping with her mouth open. The venetian blinds look like a stack of glowing white spears, and the floor beneath the window is a guilty arrangement of the half-empty Jura whisky bottle, a packet of Embassy No. 1 and a lighter. Her coat, shirt, jeans and boots are spread across the floor, in a twisted approximation of her body shape, and it is only when she sees her phone lying face down beside the sofa that she remembers: it’s her birthday.
Anna falls onto her back and raises a hand to her aching head. Memories of the previous day chase each other across her mind, and she releases a long animal moan. Running away from Geoff at London Bridge. Talking to her mum on loudspeaker in the restaurant. Drinking cocktails alone. Visiting the spot where she broke down on Great Portland Street. Returning to Bar Social and lurking like a creep at the edge of the dance floor. At that point the memories unspool and dissolve, and she isn’t sure if she ended up dancing, and what time she left, and how she got home, and how long she stayed up with the whisky and cigarettes. It is worrying and confusing, this absence of time, but not more so than having left Geoff at the station without a word. She has a vision of him waiting below the information board, and it seems amazing that she left him there without even a text of apology. Anna reaches for her phone – thinking she should at least respond to whatever messages he has sent – but it is turned off and the screen doesn’t light up when she presses the button. She remembers the battery was about to die, and tosses the phone aside and picks up her watch instead. The time is 11.14 a.m. For a moment she just looks at this, her body entirely still, thinking it can’t be the time, it just can’t be. Then the full weight of the fact gathers within her, slowly, like a rollercoaster that pauses at the crest of its initial climb before gravity takes hold and the carriage descends into free fall.
‘Fuck.’
Anna is up and on her feet, eyes wide, heart pumping, and within two seconds she devises a plan: toilet, shower, clothes, run to the tube, at her desk in forty-five minutes. Even before these thoughts have passed through her mind she has peeled off her socks and knickers and bra and then runs naked along the hall to the bathroom, the liquid contents of her stomach churning nauseously. She steps into the shower without waiting for the water to warm up, and thirty seconds later is out again, bundling together her discarded clothes in the living room. Upstairs she throws on a low-risk combination of clothes: black turtleneck jumper, black jeans, her hair pulled up in a ponytail. Then she grabs her make-up bag and heads down the ladder again, thinking she will have to try and apply it on the tube.
In the hallway she picks up her bag and coat, and then steps into the kitchen for a glass of water. What she finds in there makes her stop still. The room has changed, is filled with unfamiliar shapes and arrangements that her eyes struggle to make sense of. The small table has been brought into the centre of the room, and is bearing a colourful array of items: there is a carton of orange juice, a full cafetiere, a rack of toast, a bowl of fruit salad, a concertina of envelopes, and, in a central position between cutlery and cups, a plate covered by another plate. On the fridge blackboard is a note in Pete’s distinctive, dyslexic handwriting: ‘Happy Birthday Sleepy Head! Enjoy your breakfast!’ She puts her finger to the cafetiere – it is stone cold – and wonders what to do with all this stuff. She doesn’t want any of it, not a drop or a bite, and feels a surge of annoyance for once again being presented with something she didn’t ask for. She supposes she should throw it away, and removes the plate covering the other plate, revealing scrambled eggs and smashed avocado on some fancy toast. A blast of sulphuric gas fills her nose and tugs at her stomach, and this time she raises a hand to her mouth, knowing she will be sick. She runs along the hallway and falls to her knees beside the toilet, opening her mouth as a fountain of hot sludge reverses up and out of her. She takes a few sharp breaths before heaving again, releasing another stream of liquid acid. She spits, gasps for air. The third heave delivers only viscous, stringy goo, the fourth just air, and then it is over. Anna rests her forehead on the toilet seat, her body twitching. Within the yellow-brown grit filming the water are some pomegranate seeds that had cushioned her chicken so pleasingly last night, like a bed of rubies. She ponders these for a second before pulling the flush.
She hurries along Mowbray Road and then Cavendish Street, breaking into a little run when she crosses roads. The sharp ridges and eaves and chimneys of the passing houses are crisply defined against a blank, white sky. Her birthday sky. She thinks of her dormant phone in her pocket, and all the birthday messages that will have arrived from her mum and aunts and maybe even her brother. Amongst all these will be the messages from Geoff last night, most likely of confusion or concern or perhaps even recrimination. It is weird to think that he probably sent the first of these while standing on the train station platform a few minutes after she fled, and since then this message will have been patiently waiting to be read. Where has it been since then? Has it been bouncing between masts and pylons, waiting for her phone to come to life so the radio waves can be reconstituted into digits, letters, words, meaning? This thought accompanies her along the high road, and at the station she strides through the cavernous ticket hall and up to the open-air platform, where she sees the next train is in three minutes. This is exactly what she’d hoped for – not a significant delay, but just enough time to buy a coffee from the kiosk built into the station house. It feels like the first good news of the day.
‘Tall Americano,’ she says to the young black guy tucked behind a bank of muffins and nut bars. ‘With an extra shot.’
‘The Americano has two shots already.’
‘I know. I’d like an extra one.’
The guy eventually does as he’s told, and Anna takes the brimming cup and a fistful of sugar sachets to the platform edge; the train is due in one minute. She steps to the wall of the station house and places the hot paper cup on the sloping ledge of a bricked-up window. Deli
cately, she pinches off the lid and shakes a sugar sachet. The board now says ‘Train approaching’. She bites the sachet but it slides through her teeth. She bites again forcefully; the whole sachet splits and sugar granules fly out over her hands and sleeve and onto the floor.
‘Shit.’
She can hear a gathering thunderous rumble, and a snapping noise like electrical wires being whipped. She looks at her coffee again and the steaming cup seems to throb with a totemic energy. If she manages this, everything else will fall into place. It all depends on whether she can get a second sachet open smoothly, and she does, and then pours it into the coffee as the train crashes in beside the platform, accompanied by a gust of warm wind. Anna stirs with the wooden splint and then replaces the plastic lid, but it doesn’t seem to fit, and she can’t push too hard with the cup balanced on the sloping ledge. Behind her the train has stopped, then there is the pneumatic hiss as the doors are sucked open. Discarding the lid, Anna picks up the paper cup and turns towards the train, but the doors are not where she expects them to be. Rather than directly ahead, the nearest door is at least ten metres to her left. Trying to stay composed, she begins angling across the platform, the steaming coffee held in front of her. But then the train makes its final beep of warning and Anna rushes, jerking the cup. Scalding liquid spills over the lip and runs over her fingers, her wrist. She winces, sucks air through gritted teeth, and lets go of the cup as she makes a lunging step up to the train, just as the doors close behind her.
