by Luke Tredget
Each of the eight faces leans closer over the table; she senses the men on the next table have cocked an ear as well.
‘And then?’
‘I stopped on the first floor and went to Juliette’s room. The door was ajar, and I pushed it open.’
‘I told you this was going to be good,’ says Ben.
‘It was dark, she was asleep. I stepped inside and for a while just stood there. Then she woke with a gasp and was like: “What? Who’s there?” I said it was me, Anna. She turned on a lamp and glared at me; I don’t think she remembered who I was. I explained I’d been staying there and she looked at me blankly and asked if I’d left something in the room. I said no, that I just wanted to speak to her. Fuck, I was pissed. She frowned but then for some reason – perhaps seeing the look on my face – said I should sit down. So I perched on the end of the bed and, you know, told her everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘Everything. Just as I told you. And in the telling I realised how crazy it sounded. I felt so stupid I couldn’t look at her, and as it went on it turned into an apology. Then I felt her hand on my shoulder. She laughed and said it was fine. That it was the weirdest thing in the world, but also great, and that she was flattered. She said we should hang out sometime. I nodded and said okay, and dared to look at her. Her hand was still on my shoulder and her face was, like, right there. Then I did it. I kissed her. Just for a few seconds. The crazy thing is she didn’t pull away. We held it for a moment, both with our eyes open, neither of us blinking …’
Anna stops, realising only now that her story is going to have to fork away from reality at this point, that she isn’t going to be able to tell them what really happened. The truth is that she kicked off the story with a lie: she has never slept with a girl.
‘And then?’
‘And then,’ she says, feeling herself blush as she trespasses into fiction, ‘then it happened.’
‘There and then? Just like that?’
‘Yes, there and then. I don’t think I need to draw you a picture.’
‘Wow. Just that one time?’
‘Yep. A week later my friends Zahra and Caz flew over, and we hired a car and went around Yosemite and down to LA. I never spoke to her again.’
‘Wow,’ says Mike, and Ben says he actually does think she should draw a picture. The whole table is impressed and looks at one another, exchanging fair-enough expressions. Paula apologises for calling Anna the straightest girl in London, and Mike tells her maybe she’s still in with a chance. Anna lifts pint number three, already a third gone, and fills her mouth, swallows, fills her mouth, swallows. Once again the corrupt feeling of being a fake rises within her, made worse by their praise and approval.
‘What is Letraset, anyway?’ says Jessica.
Anna sinks into her chair, while the memory of what really happened flows uninvited through her mind: kissing Juliette. The two of them staring at each other, the moment hanging, stretching. Then she felt everything within her go cold and the familiar bottomless feeling in her stomach, as if she was on a rollercoaster that shot suddenly upwards – it felt too real, too unpredictable. Without a word she stood up from the bed, grabbed her bag and left the room. She flew down the stairs, out the front door and into the street. And never went back to the house, for shame.
‘It’s like Etch-a-sketch, isn’t it?’ says Mike.
‘No,’ says Paula, ‘it’s those stencil things with all the letters and numbers.’
‘Those stencil things are called stencils.’
These words wash over Anna as she wallows in the memory of running away from Juliette. It is curious to remember that bottomless feeling, the same as she felt with Thomas 72, or when she went to meet Geoff last night. She has always assumed it was her dad’s death that made her react to danger that way, that made her cautious and steered her away from shipwreck. But there it was that night with Juliette, months before he died, in the safest situation imaginable. She had precisely nothing to lose, and the girl she had coveted for months, with an intensity she had never known, was in her arms. And still she got up and ran away.
‘Come on, Anna? What is it?’
‘What? Sorry?’
‘What’s Letraset?’
‘It’s … it’s those sheets of plasticky paper, with waxy letters that you transfer by, like, rubbing a coin on it.’
‘Congratulations, you win another pint. Same again?’
Anna says she should probably be getting on, and then looks at her watch, which says 7.04 p.m.
‘Shit,’ she says. ‘I’ve got to go. Like, now.’ The table is shifted out and then Anna is pushing past Ben to stand up. She grabs her bag from beneath the table and while squeezing out of her space bids them all a hurried goodbye, says sorry for telling such a long and weird story and now running off; they all shout overlapping goodbyes, and without being able to acknowledge any of them she is away from the table and pushing out the door. The darkening street is clogged with static vehicles, and she walks all the way to Dean Street before spotting a cab with its light on.
‘Kilburn,’ she says, climbing in. ‘Fast as you can.’
The driver makes a three-point turn and accelerates down a narrow one-way lane, only to get stuck in another queue on Old Compton Street; gangs of boozy pedestrians stream around the cab as if it were a rock in a river.
‘Rush hour,’ says the driver. Anna checks her phone: she already has two missed calls from Pete, and a text to ask if everything is okay. She ignores the questions but says that she’s on her way, and then slumps in her seat and feels the warm breeze of the heaters on her face. Soon the traffic clears and they make progress along Tottenham Court Road, the sodium glow of lampposts swashing through the car like swords of light. But then the driver turns off the main road, and Anna cringes when they pull onto Great Portland Street, directly beside the patch of pavement with the white wall and waxy-leafed hedge. She is embarrassed to recall how she stood there last night, drunk out of her mind, feeling pity for her dad. How ridiculous, to pity someone whose only aim was to live without hypocrisy and in keeping with his true desires, irrespective of what anyone else thought. She hasn’t followed through with anything that she wanted to do. She never set up her projects in time. She didn’t sleep with Thomas 72. She didn’t even dare spend the night with Juliette. She has always lacked the courage to live the life she wants, and accuses people like her dad of being careless and childish because it is easier than accepting that she is essentially gutless. This thought evokes a vivid image of Geoff standing beneath the information board, which blends with her half-remembered dream featuring her dad, and diving into the swimming pool in Somerset House, and breaking the kiss with Juliette, and her man with the suitcase at the carousel. These thoughts must hold her in some kind of trance, for the next thing she knows she is thrown against the door as the cab turns off Kilburn High Road, and a moment later they are idling outside her house.
The two front windows of the flat are dimly lit, like a cave with a fire deep within, and when she opens the door she is surprised by how dark and silent it is. She can barely see the stairs, and the only sounds as she climbs are her clopping boots and her own heartbeat. At the stairhead she turns to face the living-room door; pale light is leaking around the edge of the rectangular frame, like the flares around a solar eclipse. Anna takes one, two, three steps and pushes into the room; it is like opening a door to a storm.
‘Happy birthday!’
Seven people are facing her, all with their arms raised above their heads, clapping, their mouths opening and closing.
‘Thought you’d show up, did you?’
‘What time do you call this?’
‘We thought you’d run away.’
‘The cheek of it!’
Anna’s eyes snap between the cheering faces: there is Zahra in a tight-fitting green dress that makes Anna aware of her humdrum jumper-and-jeans attire; her fiancé Keir is in a pink shirt beside her, his white teeth gleaming; Pet
e’s brother Bean has a new beard and makes a wolf-whistle with his fingers in his mouth; Toby and Cecile are clapping in a restrained, muted way; Ingrid is smiling but looking out of place, clearly a stranger in the room; and finally Hamza is floating above them all, standing on a chair. All these thoughts flick through her mind in the second it takes her eyes to scan across the room from left to right, and then there is a cracking like gun-fire, and green, red and pink ribbons of party poppers arc towards her. The floor shakes as Hamza jumps from the chair, and he comes at her with his brown arms outstretched, his bottom lip overturned in a pantomime expression of sorrow.
‘She’s bewildered!’ he says, gathering her limp body in his arms, and then she is rapidly hugged and kissed in turn by the others, who queue up behind him. Then they are seated along the table and Anna is standing alone, leaning against the arm of the white sofa, looking across the room. It is weird to think this is the same room that she woke up in this morning. The long dining table has been brought into the centre of the room and is covered with a white tablecloth, and the only light is from four chunky candles spaced along its centre, amongst the jagged landscape of glasses and crockery and cutlery. Outside the range of the dim candle glow, the edges of the room are lost to shadow, besides the rectangular glow of Pete’s iPad, which is sending forth some inoffensive acoustic ballad.
‘Where is Pete?’ she says. Everyone at the table smiles, and at that moment Anna senses a presence behind her. She turns and sees him standing in the doorway, although it is a new version of Pete, so unfamiliar that for a fraction of a second she wonders if it really is him. For the first time in years his cheeks and chin are pink and clean-shaven, and his tawny, shaggy hair has been slicked to one side with some kind of product that makes it appear black. His eyes haven’t changed though, and are narrowed slightly as they search for reassurance that she is okay, that everything is alright; she smiles at him and his eyes widen, relaxing.
‘See, guys?’ he says, stepping forwards and taking Anna’s hands in his; his white shirt is rolled up to the elbows, and his forearms are coated in flour. ‘I told you she hadn’t abandoned me.’ He pulls her onto her toes for a kiss, his big lips wet against hers, then puts his arm around her shoulder and turns them both to face those sitting at the table, who now form a gleeful little audience. ‘And I want to start with an announcement. As well as Anna’s birthday, we have something else to celebrate. Get your phones at the ready. Just under an hour ago, Anna’s first article as lead writer, an interview with Sahina Bhutto, was published.’
Pete takes his own phone from his pocket and holds it up for the group; ready on the screen is a tiny image of Sahina’s smirking face, followed by Anna’s byline. Impressed and surprised noises ripple along the table, and people start grabbing at their phones to look themselves. Pete brings Anna in for another quick kiss on the cheek, before letting her go and disappearing into the dark hallway.
‘This is amazing, Anna!’ says Bean, before passing the phone to Cecile.
‘She’s doing Gwyneth Paltrow next!’ says Zahra.
‘Dark horse, you are.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me about this?’
‘As in the Gwyneth Paltrow?’
‘I’ve shared it already.’
‘You’re a proper writer, finally.’
Anna takes her seat at the head of the table, and with each utterance the corrupt dirty feeling intensifies. She wants to say something to excuse herself for the clichés and the ugly short sentences, but it is effort enough just to maintain a smile, and she looks instead at her hands in her lap – the knuckles are white where her fingers are twisted together.
‘This is great,’ says Ingrid, who holds up her phone the longest, giving the article a professional appraisal. ‘It’s a really bold style. Anna!’
‘Stop it, guys, she’s embarrassed.’
‘She’s alright.’
‘Look at her, she’s overwhelmed!’
‘She needs a drink, is all,’ says Hamza, and then he disappears to make her an Old-fashioned. Anna smiles at each person, to prove she’s fine; in the dim candlelight only the front of their faces and torsos are clearly visible. Zahra is sat immediately to her left, and on an instinctive impulse she checks to see where Pete is sat in relation to her, a throwback to the jealousy she used to suffer at social events and double dates; she is relieved to see the empty chair at the other end of the table that must be his. A silence gathers, which Anna decides is hers to fill since she hasn’t spoken a complete sentence since arriving. She lays her hands on the white tablecloth and tries to think of something funny to say. Her first impulse is to be self-deprecating about her appearance, and explain that she didn’t have time to shower and change, but she rejects this idea, since it might cross the border between comic and tragic.
‘Sorry for being late,’ she says, finally. ‘But I had a drink with work people and … what can I say … I like them better than you guys.’
They all smile and good-naturedly dismiss this suggestion, apart from Keir, seated to Zahra’s left, who is glaring at her.
‘Forty minutes we were holding those damn party poppers,’ he says, shaking his head, not trying to hide his annoyance. Zahra puts a hand on Anna’s forearm, as if in apology for her fiancé, and says they had fun chatting amongst themselves.
But Keir persists. ‘How can you be that late to a party in your own house?’ His pink shirt is rolled up to the elbows, and he plants his heavy and strangely hairless forearms on the table. He isn’t a huge man, barely more than six foot, but always spreads himself to appear bigger, sitting sideways on chairs or back from tables, as if he doesn’t fit in the available space. ‘We all thought you’d run away.’
‘Who ran away as a kid?’ says Zahra, sitting forwards to block Anna’s view of Keir. ‘When I was six I ran away with just my cello, who I called Bruno, to go and start a new life in America. We made it to the end of the street.’
People take Zahra up on this challenge, and Anna is pleased to see attention drifting away from her. Toby says that as a teenager he spent the night outside a closed train station in Oxfordshire, and used a bin liner for a sleeping bag. Bean says he once spent the entire night in his tree house as a seven-year-old, and no one in his family – not Pete, not his parents – noticed he was gone. At that moment, as if responding to his name being mentioned, Pete kicks the door open, and he and Hamza carry in two laden trays. A bowl of red soup and a hunk of focaccia are placed before Anna, who also receives a cocktail in a pitcher, garnished with ice, green leaves, a glacé cherry and a slice of orange.
‘The soup is cold,’ says Toby, more in confusion than complaint.
‘It’s gazpacho, you klutz,’ says Cecile, his wife, and Anna thinks of their number, 73. They are the only couple, besides Zahra and Keir, whose score she knows for a fact. ‘You’ll like it. It’s basically a Bloody Mary in a bowl. But without the celery, Worcester sauce, cucumber, parsley.’
‘And vodka,’ says Hamza.
‘Which I’m surprised you can taste,’ says Keir, ‘with all that other crap.’
‘Depends how much you put in,’ says Hamza, and everyone laughs. Pete, standing at the opposite end of the table from Anna, brings them to silence by cracking a spoon against his glass. He really does look strange; his white cotton shirt is buttoned right up to the pink skin on his clean-shaven neck.
‘I’d like to raise a toast to Anna. For staying alive for thirty years, for managing to arrive at her own party, and for becoming a famous journalist. Cheers.’ Everyone clinks glasses, but Pete remains standing, and with a soft downward movement of his hand he brings them to silence. It is surprising how smoothly he can work a room, when he has to; it seems to go against his nature, and she attributes it to his private-school education, thinking it is a skill all of them were given, whether they liked it or not. He smiles down at Anna with a hint of mischief in his eyes. ‘And I also wanted to tell Anna about the schedule for this evening. You see, I thought it would b
e a shame, on a night as special as this, for us to talk about the weather and holidays and jobs and house prices and the usual crap. So, in order to give the night some structure, I asked everyone to come prepared with their favourite story – their favourite Anna story.’
‘Fuck off,’ says Anna, as everyone beams gleefully in her direction. ‘I vote we talk about holidays and the weather. I vote for that.’ No one is listening to her; they are already noisily debating who should go first, as excited as children around a campfire.
‘Zahra, you should.’
‘Mine’s too serious, let’s do a fun one.’
‘What about Pete, since he’s already stood up?’
‘Don’t be a klutz, Pete will go last.’
‘Hamza, yours will be funny.’
‘Yes, Hamza!’
This enthusiasm is repeated from all corners of the table and Hamza, rolling his eyes and displaying a reluctance that Anna thinks is disingenuous, relents.
‘Alright, I’ll do it, as long as we can start eating.’
He looks to Pete, master of ceremonies, who nods and raises two upturned palms, prompting the others to bend over their soup; they dunk their spoons and tear at bread with an eagerness that makes clear how hungry they are, and renews Anna’s guilt for being so late. She looks down at her own bowl and the red mush breathes cold air onto her face; she reaches for her cocktail instead, and is surprised to find it already half-finished. The iPad is now playing a Beach Boys song, and she wonders what the hell playlist this is.
‘I feel bad telling this story in front of Pete,’ says Hamza, between slurps of soup. ‘Since it involves other guys.’
‘Don’t tell it, then,’ suggests Anna.
‘Or another guy, to be precise.’
