Kismet

by Luke Tredget

  She drops the notepad and looks for his phone. His jacket pocket yields nothing but loose change and a scratched Oyster card, but there it is in his backpack, nestled along with his keys and wallet – his big three, he calls them. She takes the phone back to the living room and sits on the sofa. While punching in his passcode – 1987, the year of his birth – she questions whether she really wants to do this. It seems possible that she will find evidence that is so shocking it will blow a hole in her existence: a three-year affair, an abortion, a stream of graphic sex pictures, declarations of love. With her heart everywhere at once, she opens his messages and sees a stack of threads from Bean, his parents, his friend Finn, his other friend Matt, from her. There it is, below that: Zahra. She opens the thread and sees the messages from her birthday, with Pete asking Zahra if she’d heard from Anna, and Zahra confirming that she’d come to hers because she needed some ‘space to think’. A week before that is a spate of messages about hiring a boat for Anna’s birthday. Anna swipes the screen upwards and is amazed to find the next message is about the preparations for Anna’s birthday trip to Dungeness two whole years ago. Between then and last month, there is just an empty white space.

  For a moment Anna is flooded with relief, to think that somehow this has all been a mistake. But then her mind traces back to last summer, in search of a memory of Pete texting Zahra, or vice versa. Without even trying, she can think of a handful of examples. When they were planning a visit to Brighton. When Zahra was giving him running updates on the health of her bonsai plant. During the carnival when they managed to lose Pete, and Anna’s phone was dead so they had to use Zahra’s to track him down. And now all these messages have been wiped away, along with what else?

  She minimises the screen and then drops the phone. For a time she sits in the half-dark. Across the room, the tomato plant stands proud on the window ledge; the light from the nearby streetlamp is projecting the plant’s complex, alien-like shadow onto the far wall, within a box of amber light that is the exact hue, Anna realises for the first time, of urine. Then she stands and goes to the tomato plant. Her first thought is to shred it with her bare hands, to behead the tight green bulbs, snap the prickly stem, scatter the soil across the floor. But having it smash on the ground outside seems like a better idea, and she pushes open the window. As she picks up the pot she is surprised by its weight, and almost drops it on her feet. She has to crouch to catch and keep hold of it, and then staggers backwards to find her balance and ends up sitting on the couch again, with the plant pot on her lap, her face covered in the leaves, her forehead against the stabilising bamboo. She stays in this position for a long time, her nose full of the fertile greenhouse smell, until she feels the first tear spill from her eyelid and trickle down her cheek.

  Saturday

  Geoff is a surprisingly cautious driver. The weekend motorway is wide open, but he remains tucked in behind lorries in the slow lane, holding the steering wheel stiffly with both hands. Anna decides that she likes this – the inconsistency with the rest of his personality adds texture – and studies his face for a time. She admires the shape of his head in profile, thinks he has the kind of powerful brow and jaw that would look good on a coin.

  ‘Stop looking at me,’ he says.

  ‘Has anyone ever said you’d look good on a coin?’

  ‘They haven’t actually. Please elaborate.’

  ‘I can really imagine you as a leader, perhaps during ancient times, with a laurel wreath on your head. Wearing a toga.’

  ‘This is the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me. Tell me something else.’

  ‘You drive like my grandma.’

  ‘Now now: old ladies are the safest drivers, and pay the lowest premiums for it. If your grandmother was here she’d tell you the same thing.’

  Anna says that she would indeed, that they’d probably get on well, before returning her eyes to the front window and lifting her bare feet to the dashboard. Today is the warmest day of the year so far, twenty-four degrees and rising, and Anna is wearing denim shorts and a vest top; the car smells of sunscreen. From the stereo a CD of Egyptian jazz is playing, which Anna wasn’t sure about at first, but now she likes the urgent, insistent rhythm. Geoff taps his finger against the steering wheel in time with the rapid tempo. A blue sign grows at the side of the road and swipes past: Swindon 11, Bristol 66, Exeter 118. These place names remind Anna that she doesn’t know where they are going, and it strikes her as interesting that she doesn’t care. At first she thought he would be taking her to see the pipe – or wherever it was he wanted to take her from London Bridge – and was surprised they drove west out of London, but she soon decided that the physical destination didn’t matter; what was important was the emotional objective, the fact that he would surely at some point ask her to switch off Kismet. This thought directs her attention to her phone in her bag in the footwell, and the fact that she hasn’t responded to Zahra’s message; Zahra said, somewhat cryptically, that she felt ‘weird’ about the other night, and suggested they meet up to ‘talk’. Anna takes her phone and taps out a quick text, repeating the same lie she wrote to Pete on a Post-it note, that she is going to her mum’s for the weekend. The message sends and she imagines it flying as radio waves through the sky, at several thousand miles an hour, before arriving at Zahra’s phone a few seconds later, where it will be magically reformulated into pixels, words, meaning. She feels guilty for putting off speaking to Pete yet again, but she knows that things will have to come to a head anyway – what difference if it is one day or the next? This weekend with Geoff is just a present to herself before the ugly business begins, and means she can face the demolition of her old life knowing that the foundations of her new one are firmly in place.

  ‘What are you looking at now?’ says Geoff, pointedly. He does this when she looks at her phone: he asks what she’s doing with the dismissive and scolding tone of a school teacher, as if challenging her to justify what is so interesting.

  ‘Twitter,’ she says, tilting her screen away from him. ‘Reading my new messages.’

  He asks for an update, and from memory she recounts her most recent interaction. She tells him that the net is closing: her new contact @cloud_nine has put her onto someone who works at UNHAS, who has confirmed that only a handful of aid workers used their service during the 2013 Mozambique floods, and that he can email another colleague and ask to mass-contact the list on her behalf.

  ‘You’re a natural,’ says Geoff. ‘And this is just the start. You could create a whole series like this, using the internet to connect people with things they’d given up as lost.’

  ‘And have a global lost property service? It’s hardly going to win a Pulitzer.’ It is Anna’s instinct to respond modestly and dampen his enthusiasm, but she wills herself to embrace it: from now on she will fearlessly strive for success, and part of this will be to accept praise when it is offered. They pass two green hills to their right, and between them she has a rare view of the distant, sun-kissed horizon, which feels like a sudden glimpse into the future. ‘But, having said that … a journalist did email me. From the Guardian.’

  ‘The Guardian,’ says Geoff, and the car jerks as he takes his eyes off the road to look at her. ‘Who?’ His reaction is surprising, and she wonders if he might be jealous. She says it is someone called Natalie Ward, from the travel desk, and the concern seems to wash from Geoff’s face.

  ‘Don’t know her. But that’s great news. They’ll probably commission you to do a regular slot.’

  ‘Yeah, right. It’ll probably be a coffee and a chat.’

  ‘No, I can feel it. This is going to happen.’

  ‘Well, in that case. If you can feel it.’ She says this, yet still turns towards the passenger window so he can’t see the smile on her face, the same half-embarrassed, half-delighted smile she used to have when her dad told people she would be a star. To change the subject, she twists around and asks if he wants anything from the back seat, where sparkling water, a bag of
sweets and an expensive bottle of smoothie are strewn. Her only request for this trip – other than for it to be somewhere interesting and surprising, like their descent into Somerset House – was that they stop at a service station; not to do so would deprive the road trip of authenticity. She cracks open the bottle of smoothie, and as she brings it to her lips Geoff turns the wheel suddenly, causing a blob of juice to jump from the bottle and onto Anna’s bare thighs and the upholstery between.

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, ‘I was going to overtake the lorry but thought better of it.’

  ‘The seat,’ she says, rubbing the dark blotch between her legs.

  ‘Don’t worry about that. Dmitri doesn’t care, this is just a Volkswagen.’

  She finds a tissue in her bag and scrubs at the stain, before giving up and sinking into the seat. The landscape is changing; the parade of green hills on their right is smoothing out into pale meadows, the beginnings of Salisbury Plain.

  ‘Who is Dimitri, anyway?’

  ‘Dmitri. Not Dim, Dm.’ He makes the sound of a hum with a ‘d’ at the beginning. ‘He’s a computer programmer.’

  ‘He’s Russian?’

  ‘Armenian,’ he says, and she can tell he is about to make one of his speeches; he takes his left hand from the wheel and makes a chopping motion. He says he’s been to a fair few places and that, pound for pound, you won’t find a more intelligent nation than Armenia. ‘It’s a country of chess masters, rocket scientists. Powerful minds.’ Anna asks how he knows Dmitri, and Geoff pauses before answering.

  ‘I’m working with him. On the project.’

  ‘Oh,’ says Anna, feeling like the car has hit a bump. ‘Your project.’ There follows the charged silence that occurs every time his project is mentioned, while Anna fights back the urge to accuse him of being ridiculous and not trusting her. Between them is the pumping afro-beat, over which a singer begins wailing.

  ‘I will tell you,’ he says. ‘But we’re so close to cracking it. I want to show you when it’s complete, not when it’s almost complete. But we’re talking days, not weeks.’

  Anna sighs and looks out the window, and reminds herself that she has secrets too. Not just minor details, great big whopping life facts. Geoff doesn’t know about Pete or the drama surrounding her birthday, and this feels like a good thing; if he did, it would clutter up and interfere with their light-hearted chatter, the good-humoured exchanges that are the essence of this new relationship. All this other stuff – their respective exes and families and individual histories and jobs and friends – feels like a meaningless pact with the outside world, mere background noise. This thought makes her forgive him already, and she considers leaning over and kissing his stubble-darkened cheek. But he probably won’t welcome the distraction, so instead, to prove she’s not sulking, she says she’d like to go to Armenia.

  ‘You would? How come?’

  ‘Nothing in particular. Just because it’s a place. Because it’s somewhere different. It’s like you said: a holiday is a mood, not a specific location. I’d happily go anywhere. Armenia. Hong Kong. New York.’ She switches to reading the road sign that is growing on the outside verge. ‘Andover. Salisbury. Yeovil. Taunton.’

  ‘Yeovil?’

  ‘Anywhere. Happiness is a journey, not a destination. At least that’s what I read on a Hallmark card.’

  ‘Be careful what you wish for,’ he says, indicating left. She thinks he is joking, but then he veers onto the slip road for the A303. Anna laughs, then shrugs.

  ‘I mean it,’ she says. ‘Take me anywhere.’

  *

  For a while she thinks they are going to Yeovil, or that Geoff doesn’t actually have a destination in mind and is making it up as they go along, but soon after passing Stonehenge he pulls a folded piece of paper from his pocket, which he gives to her and asks her to navigate. By 2 p.m. they are winding through the incredibly narrow lanes of a village called Pilton, Geoff driving too close to parked cars and clattering wing mirrors. The directions lead them onto a track between ploughed fields, and they finally crunch to a stop on the shingle drive of a red-brick farmhouse.

  ‘Voilà,’ says Geoff. ‘You said you wanted something like Somerset House. So here is a house in Somerset.’

  He explains that it belongs to a friend of his, while taking the key from beneath a large plant pot. Anna follows him inside and spins around the expansive ground floor, admiring the Aga in the kitchen, the wood burner in the living room, the terrace with a view of Glastonbury Tor, a mediaeval tower atop a hill that looks to her like an inland lighthouse. Many roll mats are stacked against the wall, and on the telephone table are piles of leaflets for Pilates, music therapy, transcendental meditation.

  ‘What is this place?’ she says, raising her voice to carry into the kitchen. She can hear him tinkling about, probably fixing a drink.

  ‘My friend organises yoga retreats. She’s in Thailand at the moment.’

  ‘You really are a hippy, aren’t you, Geoff?’

  He laughs, and says: ‘I’m happy to be, if the label helps. Our ideology is all about labels. The world is simply too chaotic, too raucous for our comprehension, so we label things to help get a handle on it: the stuff we like – the cool, the fashionable, the lucrative – can come to the front, the stuff we dislike – the bums, the depression, the illness – we move to the back.’

  He rambles on in this vein; with him everything comes back to ideology. Anna decides to silently abandon him as he makes this speech, in a homage to when she did this in the real Somerset House, and because it is funny to leave him sermonising to no one – it has become a little thing she likes to do.

  On the upper floors there are single rooms, double rooms, en suites, twin rooms, and a room with no furniture that is perhaps left empty for soothsaying or meditation, or is just being decorated. Anna picks the one that feels like a master bedroom, with large windows looking out across brown fields that stretch as flat as the ocean to the shimmering, hazy horizon. She kicks off her pumps, drops her denim shorts, peels off her T-shirt and bra and knickers, and climbs between the cool sheets, waiting to be found.

  Sex with Geoff is usually a sensual, almost tantric affair, but today – perhaps because of the head of steam he developed during the long drive – it is hurried, almost frenzied. He pins her legs up so that five toes are pressing into each of his shoulders, and fucks her vigorously in this one position. Just before they finish, he jams a finger into her arsehole, while using the other hand to softly press on her windpipe. Then it is all over, and they are lying on their backs, panting at the ceiling.

  After a few minutes, apropos of nothing, he says, ‘You’re a dirty bitch,’ and Anna slaps him in the face. It doesn’t connect as well as she’d like, so she tries again with her other hand, but he catches this, and they begin wrestling.

  ‘You disgusting old man,’ she wheezes, as she tries to pin him down. His arms are long and wiry, but she gets within them and for a time it feels like she’s winning, but then he twists her around with an arm up behind her back, and eventually they both fall slack again in a top-to-toe position, laughing and moaning. Her head is rested on his pale thigh and her eyes are level with his slack penis, now a darker hue than when erect, and thicker-skinned. She suddenly thinks of her idea for a theme park of human consumption, and wonders if it would be possible to represent the totality of someone’s sex life in an installation. A water fountain where the liquid looks like semen, representing the totality of a lifetime’s ejaculate? Or maybe one of those fairground electric chairs, only powered by the energy of five thousand orgasms? She shuffles her head closer to his cock, close enough to smell her own residue, and then takes it in her mouth, with the vague idea of cleaning it. Geoff mirrors this gesture by burying his head between her legs, and gradually she can feel his cock pumping up with blood, one pulse at a time, until it is long and hard and filling her wide-open mouth. They stay in this position for a long time, Anna sucking and slurping with t
he same lazy persistence you’d use on a gobstopper or a stick of rock. Eventually she loses her sense of the context altogether – of what she is doing or who she is with or where they are – and becomes an empty vessel for what feels like disembodied consciousness. She looks at the window and wonders how the glass feels encased within its wooden frame, what the shaggy clouds feel like being blown across the sky, what the walls felt like being splattered and smeared with wet paint. This last thought restores her to the present moment and Geoff’s licking, and she realises she is about to come, again. Anna is embarrassed – an orgasm seems a vulgar interruption to an innocent, childish game – and she would like to abort, but already the tip is too steep. But as the first tremors reverberate through her, Geoff’s cock starts to spasm in her mouth and, amazingly, having floated as separate as planets for twenty or thirty minutes, they come at exactly the same time.

  In the late afternoon Geoff takes the car and disappears for two hours, returning with two bottles of red wine, a bag of vegetables, and a whole rabbit he bought from a hunter. He skins the animal himself, but his ambition exceeds his skill in the kitchen, and Anna does most of the cooking. It is just warm enough to sit on the terrace in jumpers, the sunset making a silhouette of the Tor, and while eating they tell each other stories, one long one each, delving deep into unknown terrain. It begins when Geoff says, without any precursor, ‘I hate the countryside.’ Anna laughs at the sudden remark, and he makes a speech about how the country, while ostensibly providing space and privacy, does precisely the opposite: it is almost entirely demarcated land, covered with fences and ‘No Trespassing’ signs, where governments and corporations can get away with their most audacious schemes and experiments, and where the harsh, scrutinising glare of village life makes it impossible for individuals to be the least bit subversive. ‘I grew up in Gloucestershire,’ he says, as if this explains everything. To capitalise on his effusive mood, Anna asks him questions. She asks if he went to private school, and is glad when he says that he didn’t, though he says that he went to the kind of former grammar that may as well be private. He surprises her by saying he didn’t go to university, as he was a rebel and failed his exams, and that he thought his family would never forgive him. She then asks about his daughter – who he hasn’t mentioned once – which leads on to talk of the young girl’s Argentinian mother. Anna asks if they were married, and he says they weren’t, but that he was engaged to an Indian woman called Bhavna, who he lived with in London; he seems to gulp after saying her name.