Kismet

by Luke Tredget

  ‘Leyton and Walthamstow,’ says Pete, sagely. ‘That’s where people are buying now.’ This is pooh-poohed by Cecile, who says that Walthamstow is cooked already, and that people are going as far as Woolwich or West Ham.

  Maybe she’s being harsh, thinks Anna, pouring herself a new glass of white. They are not cowards. For one thing, Bean is opening his own bar and Hamza is basically a bum. And the rest of them, who are taking the nine-to-five route, aren’t doing so because they are shrinking away from their deep desires; the sensible route for them is their deep desire, the product of common sense. She is the only one who was raised to feel a vague duty to make her life extraordinary, and therefore has to grapple with these questions at every turn. And it is therefore only her, she realises, finishing her wine with a hefty gulp, who is the coward. And what a coward she is! Despite all her talking and thinking, she has taken no more steps towards her ambitions than the people surrounding her. The idea Zahra presented of her in the story – as the quirky idealistic airhead – is the real her; it is her private version of herself that is the fantasy. She never did set up the Community Shed crowdfunding page. She never did open the suitcase when there was still a chance of finding the owner. She never did sleep with Juliette in San Francisco, or with Thomas 72, and she certainly didn’t take the chance to be with an 81. Put simply, she has never dared to be true to herself, and never will be.

  The next thing Anna knows, she is being shaken by the shoulder.

  ‘Anna should do one,’ says Hamza.

  ‘What?’ she says, unsure what he is talking about. Time has slipped forwards since she was last cognisant of the entire group; they are no longer talking house prices, or anything at all, and are instead looking along the table at her expectantly.

  ‘You should tell your favourite Anna story,’ says Hamza, giving her shoulder another shake. His jaw is slightly askew and his pupils are dilated; there is no doubt that he is feeling the drugs, too.

  ‘Um,’ she says, sitting up straight, trying to shuck off the melancholy that shrouded her last train of thought. ‘All right. Just give me a minute.’ She takes a deep breath and lays her hands flat on the tablecloth; just beyond her fingertips is a half-pint glass full of a layered creamy pudding, perhaps panna cotta. She doesn’t know when this arrived, and notices that everyone else has finished theirs.

  ‘Is she asleep?’ asks Ingrid. Everyone laughs at this, but Anna carries on staring down at her hands, trying to direct her thoughts inwards and back in time, her mind working at half speed.

  ‘What about the time the Moroccan man tried to buy you for thirty camels?’

  ‘Or when you missed the flight to Scotland and tried to run through security?’

  ‘Or when you thought you were having a heart attack and called NHS Direct?’

  More tittering; she ignores them all. She sifts through and discards any story that reaffirms their idea of her as clumsy and naïve; she wants to parade her best self – fearless, imaginative, enterprising.

  ‘I know,’ she says, slapping the table. ‘This is my favourite story. Sorry if you’ve heard it before. So: for my mum’s fiftieth birthday we planned to go to Paris for the weekend, as a family. This was during second year, so I got the train from Sheffield to Bedford one Friday, and was going to stay at her house the night before. It was while eating dinner that I realised there was a problem: I’d left my passport in Sheffield.’

  A collective groan throbs around the table.

  ‘But that’s just the start. Listen. So there I was, eating Chinese takeaway with my mum and brother and aunts, while privately having this miniature freakout. What was I going to do? The whole trip had been booked, and our train from St Pancras was at eleven the next morning. I slipped upstairs and called my dad, who lived in Cambridge at the time. I only wanted a sounding board, but he immediately had a plan, and told me what to do.’

  Anna pauses and looks around the room, refastening the attention of all her listeners. She is enjoying the physical act of speaking – the air in her chest fluted into words and sentences – which is making her feel simultaneously more and less sober. The obscuring fug of booze has retreated somewhat, leaving her more sensitive to the heart-pumping, joyous rush of the drugs. But she is concerned to see that Ingrid and Bean and Toby are frowning, perhaps in confusion, and she thinks maybe her speech thus far has been garbled nonsense. Then her eyes land on Pete, who is smiling and nodding in encouragement; she knows that he understands her story and why she is telling it, and is sharing in her excitement.

  ‘A few hours later my mum went to bed,’ she continues. ‘I couldn’t have told her the plan; she wouldn’t have let me do it, would have thought it was too dangerous or not even possible. So I waited thirty minutes and then crept out of the house to the main road, where my dad picked me up. He drove like a maniac, and by one we were on the M1, by two we were past Nottingham, by three thirty we were in Sheffield, pulling up at the house. My passport was in the little shoebox I kept all my personal crap in. Love letters. Birth certificates. Do you remember?’

  She says this to Zahra, who says that of course she remembers it, since Anna woke up the whole house.

  ‘Then we were on the motorway again! We only stopped once, at a service station, where Dad had a coffee and we mucked about on some fruit machines. Otherwise we just kept heading south. I tried to take over the driving, but he said I should sleep. So I did, or pretended to while watching him drive, my eyes half-closed. It was starting to get light, and I remember seeing his silhouette against the brightening sky, and wishing we would never reach Bedford: I would have been happy heading south forever, down to the coast, into Europe, I didn’t care …’

  Anna is casting her eyes beyond the table, beyond the room and even the city, and making a sweeping gesture with her right hand towards some imagined horizon. She can almost feel the blood racing in her veins, and remembers the feeling of being her best self, the same as she felt in Somerset House, at the Minuscule of Sound, or showing off for her dad as a child.

  ‘Of course we did reach Bedford, and he dropped me off. I snuck into the house and tiptoed to my room, where I lay on my bed for twenty minutes, listening to the birds, until my mum knocked on my door and said “wakey wakey”. For the rest of that day on the Eurostar and in Paris everyone kept telling me I looked tired, but I told them I didn’t feel it. And it was true. I felt great. As happy as I ever have. That’s it. The end.’

  Everyone smiles and claps, but there is no laughter or warmth in their reaction.

  ‘A lovely story,’ says Cecile.

  ‘Great,’ says Bean. ‘Really, really great.’

  Ingrid mutters something equally generic, and Zahra says that her dad would be really proud of her. The response is far more sombre than she anticipated, and she realises that people are being polite and sensitive, are treading carefully now that she’s brought her dead father into the room and laid him on the table for all to see. She looks beyond them to Pete, whose reassuring smile has evolved into something heartfelt and tender, with his head cocked to one side. He raises his eyebrows, as if asking her a question, and she senses he is repeating his offer to curtail the dinner party if she likes, so that it can just be them. She decides that he doesn’t understand, after all; his reaction is not to join with her excitement, but to feel sorry for her like the others. Only drunken Keir is willing to release the tension.

  ‘I thought you were going to say you arrived in Sheffield without your house keys,’ he says, laughing at his own joke. ‘Or that you came home with someone else’s passport.’

  Zahra scowls at Keir, as does Pete.

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ he says, and Keir holds his hands up.

  ‘Sorry, Anna. I shouldn’t joke. I know how hard it was for you.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ she says, for the first time this evening feeling some affection for Keir. ‘I don’t mind joking about it. He wouldn’t mind, either.’

  ‘No. It’s poor form. And sorry for
taking the piss out of your career plans – I wasn’t trying to be a dick.’

  ‘No worries. I’m sorry for taking the piss out of your kitchen plans.’

  ‘You were right to! It didn’t take two weeks, it was a month, at least. I had sawdust in my hair, my teeth—’

  ‘Shut up, Keir,’ says Zahra, in a furious whisper. ‘It took much longer than that.’

  ‘No it didn’t. We had it ready for Christmas. Look, I can prove it.’

  He reaches for his phone, and Zahra slaps him on the forearm.

  ‘Just shut up. You’re confused. And drunk.’

  This time Keir stops. He appears to have been reduced through drink to an almost bovine stupidity, and glares at Zahra like a child that doesn’t know why they’re being punished.

  ‘Ready for Christmas?’ says Anna. She looks at Pete, who appears unaffected by Keir’s statement. He is studying his wine glass, as if something of urgent importance is taking place within the empty vessel. She looks at Zahra instead, who appears flushed and fidgety and is pulling at her glasses. Then it happens: Pete and Zahra glance at each other. Their eyes meet for the smallest fraction of a second, but it is nevertheless highly charged. His eyes are slightly wider than usual and seem to communicate alarm, as if some conspiracy is unravelling before them. Then they both turn away again, Pete back to his enchanting wine glass, Zahra with a smile to the whole table.

  ‘So what was everyone’s favourite Anna story?’ says Zahra. ‘The Anna story of the Anna stories?’

  Anna pushes herself to her feet.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says, and staggers away from the table.

  In the bathroom she turns the light on and off again, preferring to sit on the toilet in the dark; the sink and bath appear like icy fossils of themselves. Muffled conversation is seeping through the wall, the voices of Keir and Hamza carrying twice as clearly as the others’. Anna is drunk and feeling the drugs – even sat still she senses a shifting movement, as if she were on a small boat at sea – but she tries to concentrate on what just happened in there. She thinks of what Keir said about the kitchen being done by Christmas, and the little glance that Pete and Zahra shared, and the conclusion is irrefutable, even to her addled mind. They have been in cahoots, and must have agreed to match their stories as part of a plan to … what? To keep themselves apart, because they could no longer control their feelings for one another. Not since that morning after the carnival, when Anna left them alone and hungover together. When something did happen between them.

  These thoughts envelop her in a coldness. She takes her phone from her pocket and it lights up like a torch, the brightness making her eyes throb. In her photo stream there are several pictures of them all from around that time last summer. There is one of Zahra holding her bonsai tree. There are several from the carnival itself, including a selfie of all three of them holding cans of Red Stripe; perhaps Anna is just squinting, but there is a definite tension on her face compared to the other two, who are smiling unreservedly. It is as if that earlier version of herself knew more than she thought, or more than she dared to think. Because in a way it feels like she has known all along, on a level of knowing so deep it is possible to discount or ignore. And there is almost a grim pleasure in finally being proved right, like pulling out a sore tooth that has been nagging for years. Yes, she’s known all along. Zahra and Pete have always just clicked. They have such similar backgrounds and taste, and identical orthodox visions for what they want in the future. Whereas Anna has always been struggling to keep up, straining herself to match with their ideal. And while doing so, she has been drifting away from the life she really wants, and has alienated the people she should be with. She imagines Geoff standing beneath the information board, and before she can stop herself she closes her photo stream and opens Kismet. There are no new messages. Then she opens Twitter, and sees that some of her followers have responded to the last message she sent, agreeing with her decision to shut it down. But she has a new message too, one from an unknown follower called @21_yerffoeg, at 6.44 p.m.

  Don’t give up, there’s tons more evidence. Look at the name tag on the handle, it has the start of a logo. Go forensic, just don’t give up!

  There is a photo attached, and it seems that her new follower is the one to have gone forensic; it is one of the first pictures from her Instagram gallery, showing the snapped plastic name tag with the beginnings of a grey circular logo on it, perhaps a company emblem. Anna experiences a tiny sparkle of excitement and hope, and she decides to send a thank-you message to this follower immediately. Their profile picture is the cartoon shape of a new user, and they are only following one person, her. She looks at the name again – @21_yerffoeg – and as the letters rearrange themselves she feels the bathroom and the building and the world turn around her as well. The graphics on the screen shake within her hand, and are then blurred by a film of tears. Her 81. He hasn’t been in Surrey with his wife, or taking other women to Somerset House; he has been thinking of her all along.

  This thought is abruptly halted by a knocking on the door.

  ‘Anna?’ It is Zahra’s voice. ‘What’s going on? Are you sitting in the dark?’

  ‘Just a minute,’ she says, returning her phone to her pocket. Then she switches the light on, blows her nose, takes conscious control of her breathing and repairs her make-up in the mirror. When she opens the door Zahra doesn’t replace her in the bathroom, but takes hold of her upper arms and asks if she is okay.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sorry about Keir,’ says Zahra. ‘You know how proud he is.’

  Anna squints at her in the dim hallway light. She isn’t sure whether to believe her or not. She retains a masklike expression, and eventually just nods and gives a hum of assent. Zahra appears to accept this, for she takes Anna by the hand and leads her back into the living room, where Pete is stood pouring champagne into a long line of flutes. Anna retakes her seat and her stomach crunches when Toby whispers something to Cecile about a taxi: it is almost time.

  ‘We can only fit in one more Anna story,’ says Pete. ‘And that’s going to be from me.’ He puts down the champagne bottle and begins passing the bubbling flutes; they float around the table from hand to hand, the first one arriving at Anna. She holds it to her nose and sour bubbles leap into her nostrils; she puts it down again, deciding she wants to sober up a bit – she wants her nerves to be sharp.

  ‘Obviously I’ve had longer than anyone to think of a story, and that’s why I have to apologise for this not being a funny story, or a particularly good story. In fact, it might not class as a story at all.’ He smiles genially as he says this, again showing off his innate public speaking skills, and Anna is struck by how unfamiliar he looks with his hairless pink chin and slick black hair. It is only a tiny imaginative effort to pretend that she doesn’t know this man, that it is a stranger talking to them; she thinks of the glance he shared with Zahra, and realises that it might not require any imagination at all.

  ‘At first I was going to speak about the first time we ever met, in a pub in Islington. I approached and lingered awkwardly, and it was Zahra that had to do most of the talking between us. I thought I’d blown it, that she didn’t like me, until Anna went to the toilet and Zahra said that she must like me, because she’d sent her a text while the three of us sat there to ask if her fringe was “behaving itself”.

  ‘Then I thought I was going to speak about the first big date we went on, to Margate, when she spent most of the time talking about how weird it was to be going out with a guy who was younger than her. Then I thought maybe it should be a story from one of the holidays we’ve taken. Morocco, Sri Lanka, Vietnam; my favourite being when Anna navigated our car straight into a forest fire in California. So I had all these ideas, and then just the other day, as I tried to work out which story to tell, the most ordinary weekend came and delivered the very, very best moment of being with Anna.’

  He
stares at her without blinking, and she can see the dazzle of a jewel reflected in his damp eyes. Could it be that he is going to do it here, now, in front of everyone? She glances at the pockets of Pete’s jeans; she thinks she can see a bulge that could be the ring box, but it’s hard to tell in the flickering candlelight.

  ‘It was just last weekend. She came home after the interview with Sahina Bhutto all stressed, and then we went out to dinner in Kentish Town and talked about it. The next day we did lots of things, boring things – went for a run, cleaned the flat, cooked dinner – but for some reason it just felt right, everything came together. And then the next day Anna opened the suitcase. And I stood there, by the door, watching her open it. And even though that project didn’t work out, there was something about her willingness to have a go, to get excited about something so unusual, that slayed me. This is what I’ve always loved about her. She has this edge, this quirky quality I don’t see in anyone else.’

  Anna’s face is burning with the belief that Pete really is going to do it here, now, in front of everyone. There will be no waiting until afterwards and going down on one knee – he will pull the box out in a moment, ask the question, and everyone will hold their breath until she says … what?

  ‘And last Sunday, watching her open the suitcase, I realised again what I’d already realised many times before. But each time it hits me like new knowledge, a revelation. I realised I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you.’

  Anna stares up at him, her body frozen with panic. She isn’t ready. She needs more time, needs to think straight about Pete and Zahra and other things besides. Pete moves his hand downwards towards his pocket, but rather than reach into his jeans his fingers swoop up his champagne flute, which he holds above his head.

  ‘To Anna,’ he says. ‘Happy birthday!’

  The others raise their glasses, echo his happy birthday, and drink. A second later they are all talking amongst themselves, and when Pete sits down Anna knows that normal time has resumed, and she has survived.