Kismet

by Luke Tredget

  ‘We don’t have to talk about this,’ says Anna, her interest creeping into jealousy.

  ‘I don’t mind.’

  ‘Maybe I mind.’

  ‘Well, indulge me. I want to talk about it. And it was twenty years ago.’ He puts his knife and fork down, and says that he lived with Bhavna for a year in Brixton, while he was a trainee reporter with the Evening Standard and she worked as a junior doctor. They wanted to get married and decided to fly to Assam, where they would introduce Geoff to the extended family, gain approval for the marriage, then follow through with the ceremony, all in a two-week swoop.

  ‘The trip started well. The Dhars seemed to accept me. Like me, even. But on the third afternoon things became complicated. The mother took me for a private cup of tea. “I don’t care that you’re English,” she said. “And I don’t care that you’re not Hindu. All I care is that you visit the sage.” And that’s when she told me about Kundali. Have you heard of it?’ Anna shakes her head, her mouth full of rabbit stew, and Geoff explains that it is a form of precision astrology, where a sage will use the birth details of an engaged couple – the location, date and time – to generate a number based on planetary alignment and the resultant levels of various energies: vasya, yoni, tara, bhakoot, vasri.

  ‘This all seemed like nonsense to me, but Bhav’s mother took it very seriously. She told me that when she was growing up, her elder sister wanted to marry a boy in their small town, but the sage said they had a dangerously low level of mangal dosha, and that the marriage would upset the gods so much that one of them would be dead within six months. They married anyway, and four months later the groom was killed in a car crash. She told me all this in one sitting, over a cup of chai, and I had no choice but to agree to see the sage the next day.’

  Geoff looks away from the table and shakes his head.

  ‘The results were not good.’

  ‘They weren’t?’

  ‘Twenty-two out of a possible thirty-six. Apparently Bhav had low levels of mangal dosha. Which wouldn’t be too bad, but I had no mangal dosha at all.’

  ‘What is mangal dosha?’

  ‘God knows. Just some made-up crap. But the sage said I had not one bit of it. He actually gave me a report on this cheap white paper, with the readings printed out. Mangal dosha: zero.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘They wouldn’t approve the marriage, and her mother was afraid for Bhav’s life, threatened to disown her if she went ahead against their wishes. Suddenly I was their daughter’s potential murderer. It was all very dramatic. So we returned to London unmarried, and agreed to do it ourselves, in secret. But, for one reason or another, we didn’t. We carried on living in Brixton, then I was given a chance to report on the war in Bosnia, which I took. For the next year I barely spent longer than a month in London, and Bhav moved to Greenwich to be near her hospital. And then we kind of drifted apart …’

  Geoff is staring wide-eyed into the remains of the sunset. His stew is untouched, while Anna’s plate is now empty, besides a few stony pieces that she thinks might be the shot that killed the rabbit. When she clears her throat Geoff startles, and looks about as if he doesn’t know where he is.

  ‘Sorry, I was miles away.’

  ‘That’s okay.’

  ‘Years away, I should say. I got a bit immersed in the story.’

  ‘I enjoyed it,’ she says, honestly – her jealous feelings were manageable, easy to rationalise.

  ‘Now you do some talking,’ he says, taking his knife and fork. ‘Tell me a story about you.’

  ‘I can’t compete with that.’

  ‘Tell me anything. Just talk while I eat. When did you decide to be a journalist?’

  Anna says it wasn’t until fairly late, about four years ago. She did a twelve-week NUJ course, then got an internship at the website off the back of it. Eventually she was given a paid position as a sub-editor, then an assistant writer.

  ‘I’d done bits and pieces before then. Freelance copy editing. Writing blogs. A six-week stint as a sub-editor at the Hackney Gazette. But mostly in my early twenties I was just bumming around, doing temp work when money ran low, and trying to … you know … do something big.’

  ‘See? This is interesting,’ he says, refilling both their glasses. ‘What kind of things?’

  She reminds him of the Community Shed idea, and he again says it’s excellent, though he isn’t sure about the name.

  ‘You don’t like Community Shed?’

  ‘It’s alright. But I think we could do better.’

  They brainstorm quickly, each making puns on tool, shed, garden, ladder. After a minute some cogs turn in Anna’s head.

  ‘How about Tool Shared?’ she says, and Geoff laughs.

  ‘Perfect. Just perfect.’

  ‘The Tool Shared? Or just Tool Shared.’

  ‘Just Tool Shared. It’s cleaner. What else have you got?’

  Feeling energised, she tells him about the subterranean cycle tunnel in central London, and her idea for a gym where people’s workouts would be turned into real power, to sell to the National Grid. Next she tells him about a combined old people’s home and children’s day care centre, where the elderly help look after kids, and her idea for transforming street phone boxes into charge stations for mobile phones. Geoff says they are charming, utterly charming.

  ‘All the ideas have something societal about them,’ she explains, ‘or at least social. Even the silly small ones. I wanted to produce this sling that would allow two people to sit opposite each other while leaning backwards, the opposing force of each holding the other one up. Even that has a nice social message at its heart.’

  ‘It comes across loud and clear. You’re a romantic. And an idealist. So what happened?’

  ‘Well,’ she says, her mood becoming heavy. ‘A few years ago my dad died. And that kind of changed my outlook.’ She does her own wet-eyed stare towards the Tor, which is barely perceptible now, and Geoff invites her to stop. But this time she insists on continuing, and explains that her dad always encouraged her to be adventurous and take risks, and how he used to send her bits of money – £300 here, £200 there – in support. And then he died, and he transformed from a role model into someone who just seemed like an overgrown kid. He’d never settled down – Anna’s mum was wife number one of three – and for all his boisterous energy he never actually did anything. At his funeral he was described as a teacher – a supply teacher at that – and when executing the will she found out how indebted he was: he owed money to banks, had multiple credit cards, used payday loan companies. She realised that the bits of money he used to send her must have been borrowed, perhaps thinking he was investing in something that might eventually bring a return. ‘That’s when I signed up for the journalism course and got serious. I decided I didn’t want to be like him. Not one little bit.’

  By now the wine is finished and the last hint of daylight has vanished; the table is no longer connected to the terrace and garden and fields and hills beyond, but appears to be floating in black space.

  ‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘That was a bit much.’

  ‘Not at all. I love the way you talk. You’ve got a writer’s mind, and mouth.’

  Anna can feel herself blushing, and makes a conscious effort to resist the urge to say something modest and deprecating, and instead to appropriate the compliment, to wear it like a piece of jewellery. She tells him that she is enjoying writing more. Even at work, she is enjoying writing more, and after her Sahina article she will be interviewing Gwyneth Paltrow, and maybe Meryl Streep.

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ he says. ‘That’s not real writing.’

  ‘Not this again. All writing is real. You still have to write words. And organise words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs.’

  Geoff says it doesn’t matter, that real writing has to be an expression of what the writer believes in, what they feel inside. He taps his fingers against his chest when he says this, pointing to his heart: a classic hippy.<
br />
  ‘I’m doing the Twitter project as well. That was my idea. That came from inside.’

  ‘Precisely. It’s just a shame you don’t really commit to it. That you don’t do it full-time.’ Anna tuts and rolls her eyes, but Geoff pushes onwards. ‘Listen: I know you’re concerned about money. But there are other ways of earning a living. For example, I was thinking about my project. We may well need some help with the writing. And there will definitely be money in that.’

  She doesn’t know what to make of this, and her face tells him as much.

  ‘Surely you’ll write it?’ she asks.

  Geoff appears bashful. He looks at his empty wine glass and says there might be an awful lot to write about, perhaps even enough for a book. ‘We could really do with a female perspective. If you were interested …’

  ‘And then you would be my boss?’

  He shrugs.

  ‘If that’s how you want to put it.’

  ‘I don’t have a way to put it. That’s the way it would be.’

  He shrugs again, and then faces her with a hopeful, anxious expression that she hasn’t seen before. For the first time he is saying something that projects an idea of the two of them together, maybe weeks and months and years in the future. She realises it is less of a job offer than a roundabout way of asking her to be with him, a step towards asking her to switch off.

  ‘How much,’ she says, and then stops – it has become difficult to speak, her lips feel strangely gummed up, immobile. ‘How much work are we talking about, do you think? A few days? A week?’

  ‘Oh, much longer than that,’ he says, smiling at her, more sure of himself now, perhaps sensing she understands. The number 81 flashes above his head. ‘We could string it out for months and months. Even years.’

  ‘I’d have to see the contract,’ she says, coyly, turning away from him.

  ‘Come to my office and we’ll write it.’

  There is a silence now, and she knows the moment is upon them. She looks directly at him and tries to let her face go slack and blank, providing a large, neutral target for him to aim at. He inhales to speak and Anna’s heart lifts further, but the air is exhaled as a sigh through his nose.

  ‘More wine?’ he says, scraping his chair backwards.

  She watches him standing, unfurling his great height in front of her, as the excitement suddenly collapses. The question couldn’t be more different from the one she was braced for, but she finds she can use the same prepared phrase to answer it: ‘I thought you’d never ask.’

  Sunday

  At around 1 p.m. the farmhouse is locked up and the key returned beneath the plant pot, and before leaving Anna and Geoff walk across the fields and then up the hill to the Tor. From close range the mediaeval tower appears less of an inland lighthouse than a steeple that has somehow become separated from the rest of its church. At the top of the hill they look back towards the red-brick farmhouse, about the size of a postage stamp. They stand like this for a time, a fresh breeze in their faces, his long arm around her shoulder. On the wave of an unusual feeling she almost tells him that she has been suffering from depression, that she has been taking pills for the last few months, and now plans to start weaning herself off them. But she keeps this inside and they ride the moment out in silence before heading back down the hill to the car. In Glastonbury town they wander around the lanes, Anna encouraging Geoff to buy the hippy and mystical tat on sale – tarot cards, a map of Camelot, a druid’s hat. They have a roast lunch in a pub with several glasses of wine, Anna practising her questions for Gwyneth Paltrow in an American accent. On the drive home she is at first giddy – dancing with her fingers to Geoff’s Ethiopian jazz and quizzing him on how much money he would pay her to join his project – and then sleepy. Near Salisbury she closes her eyes for a moment, and when she opens them the sky has changed colour and they are whizzing beneath an overhead sign for Heathrow, Slough, the M25.

  ‘What?’ she says, blinking, unsure where she is.

  ‘There you are,’ says Geoff, wearing sunglasses against the late afternoon glare. ‘Since I have to do all the driving, you could at least keep me company.’

  ‘Fuck,’ she says, rubbing her eyes. Her tongue feels swollen, her head leaden, her mind clotted. She tries to rub the sleepiness from her eyes but she feels sedated, as if there is a weight pulling her downwards. ‘I don’t feel so good.’

  Geoff makes another crack about Anna being selfish, but she isn’t listening. As well as physical discomfort she has woken with a sense of unease, equivalent to having set off on a journey knowing you have forgotten something, but not yet knowing what that something is. She takes her phone from her jeans pocket and sees she has two missed calls from Pete and one from Zahra; it must have been vibrating against her leg while she slept. There is also a message from Zahra:

  Pete called me and I told him you knew about the ring. I had to tell him something. You should go home as soon as possible.

  The words burn away her drowsiness in seconds, and she knows the final blowout is about to happen, is already happening, without her. She feels a stab of displeasure that she hasn’t signed off with Geoff yet, but perhaps it is naïve to try and stage-manage events like this; things will inevitably fall into place at their own speed.

  ‘That’s right,’ says Geoff. ‘Don’t bother talking to me, look at your precious phone instead.’

  Anna just stares through the windscreen at the factories and fields flickering by; she suddenly feels that the car is a cage, and that she is horribly late for something.

  ‘My friend,’ she says. ‘She’s in trouble.’

  ‘Sounds interesting.’

  ‘It’s … a personal thing. I need to go and see her. Now.’

  ‘You may have noticed I am driving us back to London.’

  ‘Can you just drop me at the first tube station? I’ll go on from there. This is urgent.’

  Even as Geoff scoffs at this, she is searching on her phone for where this nearest station might be. She barely says another word to him for the twenty minutes it takes to get to Hammersmith, where he slows to a halt in the taxi rank outside the station.

  ‘Just let me drive you home,’ he says, perhaps for the tenth time. Anna doesn’t even respond as she unbuckles her seat belt and looks around to check she has everything. Then she pecks him on the cheek – he seems helpless and confused – and says she will come to his after work tomorrow. Then she is out of the car and hurrying into the station. For the tube journey she wrings her hands and bites her nails, and then in Kilburn she almost runs along the pavement, swerving to overtake the dawdling pedestrians. But then, after rushing all the way home, she hesitates outside her own front door, with the key in her hand. She looks up at the two front windows of the living room, which glow red with the reflected sunset. Suddenly anything is possible. He might have done something terrible to the place, or to himself. She makes a conscious effort to control her breathing, then unlocks the front door. Inside, the hallway is gloomy, having darkened just beyond the threshold at which lights should be switched on.

  ‘Pete?’ she shouts. She strains her ears for a response but only makes out faint music that could be coming from David’s ground-floor flat. As she climbs the stairs she sees that the kitchen and bathroom are empty, and can hear a more distinct version of the pop music playing in the living room.

  ‘Pete?’

  The door is ajar, and after taking three deep breaths she steps up and pushes it open. The room is empty. On the table is the usual arrangement of Pete’s textbooks and notepads. A tinny version of ‘Gypsy’ by Fleetwood Mac is playing on the radio. Anna crosses the room to turn it off, and a small black something on the table beside the textbooks catches her eye. Immediately she knows what it is and her insides lurch like a vase pushed from a table. The small velvet cube fits snugly in her palm, and she pops it open and looks down upon the ring, just as she did that one time before, two months ago, and countless imagined times since. It looks different, some
how. The ring is darker in hue, almost bronze, and thinner than she recalls; likewise the diamond is sharper and less gaudy. It is amazing, how different it seems from the remembered image, despite the intensity of her recollections; perhaps each time she remembered the ring the mental creation must have been a slightly new imagined version, so that by tiny increments the memory diverged from the reality.

  ‘Hello, Anna.’

  She spins on the spot and sees Pete standing in the doorway. He is wearing his casual, stay-at-home jeans and T-shirt, and the lower half of his face is darkened with stubble.

  ‘You scared me,’ she says, with a hand on her chest.

  ‘You did call my name.’ He walks into the room but stops after a few steps and props himself on the arm of the sofa, still a good six feet from where she stands beside the table. ‘Good time at your mum’s?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says, the word sounding barely more substantial than a hiss. There is something sardonic about the way he is smiling at her, as if he knows she hasn’t been to Bedfordshire, and she resolves not to let herself be cornered. She smiles back at him and says: ‘And you? You’ve been revising?’ She looks across at the calendar hanging above the television and sees the three squiggles of biro for each exam, the first of which is next week. But Pete doesn’t answer this question, and instead nods towards her right hand, where she is holding the open ring box.