by Luke Tredget
Incredibly, the nice weather holds for another week; it is as if it has become stuck on this one setting – warm and sunny – and has forgotten how to be anything else. On Wednesday, at around 5 p.m. Anna starts a serious but unhurried process of getting ready, with the Velux window open to the empty blue afternoon sky. She tries on two or three shirts and tops before settling on black jeans and an oversize denim shirt and hoop earrings. The outfit makes her feel young, as does getting ready to go out when it is still broad daylight. In particular it reminds her of those heady first big nights out in Bedford, aged fifteen or sixteen, when whole gangs of them would attack the main club in town, Enigma, split into tactical dribs and drabs, the most youthful boys paired up with the most attractive girls, all armed with fake ID, and always horrendously early, 8 or 8.30 p.m., just after the club had opened, governed by the untested theory that the bouncers were more lenient before a queue had formed. After one such summer night she went with Alex Brisindi to the sculpted gardens of Cemetery Park, where they made a hapless attempt to take each other’s virginity, beset by torch-wielding passers-by, an inside-out condom and finally a vanishing erection; this memory makes Anna smile, and the fact she enjoys it without a sense of doom at the passing of time is a good omen for the evening to come.
At 7 p.m. she hauls the suitcase – which she paid the dry cleaners £20 to fumigate and cleanse – down the stairs and into the street. It doesn’t have rollers, and she has to swap arms every twenty metres or so and takes two long rests before finally reaching the station. At King’s Cross she rides the escalators up to the open paved space between the station and St Pancras, and despite him being one man in a huge crowd she spots Andre immediately. His muscular arms and square jaw and close-cropped blond hair give him the look of an elite soldier, or a film star playing the role of an elite soldier, though he is shorter than she expected and, she sees when she reaches him, shorter than her. They hug and kiss on the cheek in greeting, before taking many selfies: Anna and Andre both standing behind the suitcase, Anna handing the suitcase to Andre, Andre crouching down beside the case. She posts these on Twitter immediately, under the sub-heading of ‘mission accomplished’, and they both watch as the first likes and notes of congratulations roll in.
‘Can we get something to eat now?’ he says. ‘I’m starving to death.’
‘Do you have a preference where?’
‘That McDonald’s is starting to look pretty good.’
She is pleased to be able to suggest the Afghan Kitchen in Angel, a ten-minute walk away. Andre heaves the suitcase up and says that it’s fine with him, as long as the food is better than he had in the real Afghanistan.
‘It’s not nice?’
‘It tastes nice enough on the way in,’ he says, shifting the case to his back so he looks like Atlas bearing the globe. ‘But going in wasn’t the problem, if you know what I mean.’
By the time they reach the top of Pentonville Road the veins in Andre’s neck are like rope beneath his skin and his forehead shines with sweat; he complains that she didn’t say the ten-minute walk was straight uphill. But he dismisses the idea of getting a bus, and in another ten minutes they reach the restaurant, which is scruffier than it looked in Google Images, and doesn’t serve booze.
‘This is … nice,’ says Andre, after they are sat at a rickety table, and a waiter has taken the suitcase to store somewhere out back.
‘You don’t have to be polite,’ she whispers, looking down at the laminated menu. ‘I actually just wanted to come here as part of a new project. Something to follow the suitcase thing.’ She explains the idea of a weekly column where she goes with someone to a different country-themed restaurant in London each time: Afghan, Brazilian, Chinese, Danish, Ethiopian …
‘Where did that idea come from?’
‘From a pun, like most good ideas. The series would be called “Around the World in Eighty Dates”.’
Andre smiles and says that this is a date, then – he is a man who not only fancies his chances but likes to get straight to the point. Anna hastens them onwards, telling him about the meeting she has with the Guardian on Friday, and her need to develop ideas to pitch to them. Andre is still smiling suggestively, so she changes the subject entirely by asking him his favourite country to work in. He limits his answer to culinary matters, and gives high praise to the cooking in South East Asia, apart from the Philippines, whose food is so sweet and salty and bland it is like toddlers have been allowed to dictate the national dishes. While he talks their meals arrive, and Anna is pleased to see her dish is like a hybrid between a curry and kebab, which fits nicely with where she pictures Afghanistan to be on the map.
‘You’re not going to reunite more people with their suitcases?’ he asks.
‘I was planning to. But your connecting flight bombshell has killed my idea. Now it’s less of an interesting story and more of an international lost-and-found process.’
‘If it’s any consolation, losing the suitcase did feel quite dramatic at the time. In a sense it cost me a relationship. Or helped to end one, anyway. Maybe you could use it.’
Anna says that she’s all ears, and he begins telling her about the floods in Mozambique, how it was the weirdest mission for him. For a whole year beforehand he hadn’t been sent anywhere – the world had been unusually peaceful and calm – and during that time he lived in Geneva and worked in the headquarters and dated a girl called Iris.
‘We didn’t meet on Kismet, just naturally at a party, and things became really serious, really quickly. After two weeks we said we loved each other, by a month she was living in my flat, and by three months she started talking about marriage and babies.’ Andre shakes his head at the memory of this time – his eyes focused on the air in front of his face – and says that he has never known an intensity of feeling like it. But when she spoke of marriage he was uncomfortable, and while not openly contradicting her, he didn’t encourage the idea either, and began searching for subtle ways to put the brakes on. Iris noticed his change of tone immediately, and from then on every conversation about the future, especially to do with his going overseas for long periods with work, became a battleground.
‘Finally she gave me an ultimatum: stop acting like a jerk and commit to something, at least tell her that I wanted the same things as her, or we should finish it before going any further.’ He didn’t like being cornered like that – has never liked being cornered – and reasoned that she couldn’t be right for him if she felt it necessary to put him on the spot like that. But at the same time he couldn’t reach a decision, and when the floods in Africa came it was like the decision was being made for him. He was deployed for three months, and Iris couldn’t believe he was going, and was too furious and heartbroken to even say goodbye.
‘After about ten seconds of being in Africa I realised I had made a mistake. And by the next day I knew this was about the worst decision I’d ever made, so dumb it was hard to convince myself that I’d really done it. It was like waking up after a night of drunken craziness, when you can’t quite believe it was you that did those things the night before.
‘Worst of all I had days and weeks without phone or even email access, so there was no way of keeping in contact with her. Do you know that feeling, of wanting to win someone back that you’ve driven away? And then being locked away from them, in the middle of fucked-up Africa without even email? You couldn’t even post a letter! I could sense her thousands of miles away, hearing nothing from me, assuming I didn’t care at all, getting over me one day at a time, eventually starting to go out, meet new people. It’s crazy-making! Like standing at the side of the road and watching a car crash in slow motion. Do you know what I mean?’
Anna clears her throat, and with the solemnity and gravity of someone at the altar, says: ‘I do.’
‘But I decided to get her back, whatever the cost. Since I couldn’t contact her, I decided I’d prepare a big gesture for when I returned to Switzerland. One of my colleagues showed me these a
mazing pearls he’d found – blue pearls they were called, though they were more purple – and he told me about this stretch of beach where I could get them at low tide. Iris loved anything to do with the sea – scuba diving, tropical fish, all that shit – so on my one day off in three months I went to find them. I walked on my own out of the little town we were staying in, which was against our security orders, and when I came to the right patch of beach I saw it wasn’t deserted: there were dogs there, loads of fucking stray dogs.’
It occurs to Anna that she really should be recording this, that she might get something out of it, but thinks a notepad and pen would ruin the moment – she decides to commit it to memory instead. Andre says that his colleague had told him the pearls could be found in the smooth wet sand left by the retreating waves, but that’s exactly where the dogs were skipping about; they seemed to be hunting for little fish. The dogs looked mangy and diseased and were just as aggressive as all the dogs in Africa. But he thought of Iris and went back up the path to the woods and found a fuck-off piece of driftwood, and went down to the water wielding it like a baseball bat.
‘The dogs weren’t shy, they started coming for me. I couldn’t tell for sure if they were rabid, but I had to assume they were, and I swung the wood at them, swung it around and around like a madman. Hit one of them in the leg, probably broke it, but that did the trick; it whimpered off and the others backed away as well, but only for a minute. So I had to dance around in the shallows, looking for these little pearls while the dogs skulked about on the beach, trying to figure out the best time to have another go.’
At dusk he left with a pocket full of sand and three little pearls, which were actually tiny clams with perfectly spherical shells. Six weeks later, in the capital, Maputo, he had them made into jewellery – a pair of earrings and the ring he planned to propose with – before catching his flight home.
‘The idea was to go straight to her place and get down on one knee when she answered the door. But in Geneva the bag didn’t come out. Waiting there at the carousel, as soon as the bags stopped coming and mine wasn’t there, I knew I’d fucked it. It was like my heart hadn’t made the journey home with me. When I saw Iris I didn’t propose, I didn’t really say anything substantial. She said she’d joined Kismet and met someone else, that she’d given up on me. I pretended that I didn’t care, and told her I already had my next posting lined up. This time in Haiti. I suppose I gave up on me too.’ Andre sighs and blinks, as if surprised himself at how things turned out.
Anna says it’s a decent story, that she’d love to write it up, and that it would make a great end to her suitcase project.
‘I think we can make a better ending than that,’ he says, smiling at her again. ‘Let’s pay up. I want to get a drink.’
They head to a large pub on Essex Road, where Andre proves his earlier flirting to be as nothing, just a process of warming up. He becomes chattier, more tactile, more flattering, and on his way back from the bar with their third drinks he slides into Anna’s side of the booth, making it abundantly clear, if it wasn’t already, that something is in train, and that she doesn’t have to make anything happen; the momentum is already gathering, her options are to stop it or let it run. There is something about his confidence and the way he moves his body that makes her think he will be really quite fantastic in bed, like sleeping with a professional. He lets slip that he is flying to Sweden tomorrow, and that he is staying in the St Pancras Hotel tonight; Anna tries to work out if that makes it a better or worse idea to sleep with him.
‘But what about your work meeting?’
‘I made that up. I was heading back to Sweden for a holiday, and just added the London leg on to meet you.’
‘Just to meet me?’
‘Uh-huh. Something made me think it was a good idea.’
‘That’s a lot of effort to go to. On a long shot.’
‘And that’s pretty rich, coming from you.’
He kisses her, and she waits a few seconds before pushing him away.
‘It would be a great end to the story,’ he says. ‘That’s something you could sell to the newspaper.’
He kisses her again; she pushes him back even sooner.
‘What is it?’ he says. ‘You don’t like me?’
‘No, I do.’
‘Then what’s the problem?’ He asks this as if the problem naturally must be on her side, and Anna supposes that it is. She knows that spending the night in his hotel will be fun and sexy and exciting and almost certainly have no lasting consequences, but these considerations are massively outweighed, like a hugely imbalanced set of scales, by a countervailing consideration – it isn’t the usual bottomless feeling of panic in her stomach, but something founded on a solid base. She just doesn’t want to.
‘Let me guess,’ he says. ‘You’ve already got someone.’
Anna just shrugs, as if to say: what can I do?
‘I should have known. Every time I come back to Europe there are fewer single people. It’s the way of the world.’
Like a radio tuned to a different frequency, Andre drops the physicality and compliments, and just becomes plain friendly. They have one more drink, a celebratory cocktail, before Andre says he should go and make use of his hotel room. Anna says sorry for making him spend the night alone in that big room, and he says he has no intention of being alone, that he has several old flames in London; Anna laughs out loud and calls him a slut. Then they are outside on the pavement, and hug on the street; they ask a solitary smoker to take a final picture of them posing with the suitcase. Then he is heaving it onto his back like Atlas again, and she watches him walking away from her like a tortoise or snail, the suitcase growing gradually smaller as it proceeds along the straight road, before finally turning a corner and vanishing altogether.
Thursday
In the early hours of Thursday morning she has a moment of untainted sensual delight that feels like another milestone in her recovery. When she returned to the loft bedroom the previous evening it had heated up like a pressure cooker, as it tends to on warm days, and she discarded her duvet and fell asleep beneath a single sheet, with the window open. At around 5 a.m. she wakes up shivering. She leans off the bed and grabs the duvet, noticing the dawn doing a spectacular light show for those few late or early birds lucky enough to see – a big rippling layered cake of orange and yellow and the departing cadet blue – and then pulls it back onto the bed and herself. The sudden warmth is delicious, as is the weight of it pressing down upon her, and she just has time to feel grateful for seeing such a nice dawn, and for experiencing such pleasure, before her thoughts curdle back into sleep.
She next wakes naturally at around 8.30 a.m., and the room is filled with a pleasing dusty sunflower light. She gets up, but only to make a cup of tea, which she takes back to bed and drinks while gazing out the window at the sky, reflecting on her evening with Andre. It was a success, she thinks. More than that: it was a triumph. It wasn’t meeting him or handing over the suitcase or the gushing responses she’s had from all corners of her social network, but the decisiveness she displayed when he propositioned her. This calm certainty seems to have solidified further during her sleep, so that now it is completely obvious what she wants, and how she should go about getting it. As if to test this new conviction, she gets up and goes downstairs and stands before the calendar with her hands on her hips. Tomorrow has the big X indicating the Guardian interview. Today has the blue squiggle of the engineering exam. The feeling of decisiveness is there again, even stronger, flowing through her like a form of energy.
After breakfast and coffee, Anna digs out her running shoes from the cupboard and slams out of the front door. She jogs east across Finchley Road and then down into Camden, where she zigzags between pedestrians and tourists and sometimes shimmies into the road. Camden Road takes her up the long straight hill to Holloway, and she is surprised to not yet be flagging. She deliberately left her phone at home, so she has no way of tracking distance; but it fee
ls much further than she’d normally run, even though she seems to be getting more energised as she goes along. The pleasant springtime sights are another boost; in Finsbury Park dozens of trees in blossom line the paths like pompoms, and the far-off buildings are faintly obscured by a thin veil of mist, and look like a reflection of themselves in a glassy lake. From the park she picks up Green Lanes, where she slows into a steady bobbing rhythm that takes her back to her adolescent cross-country races, how she’d lose herself in a trance where the complaints from her muscles couldn’t reach her. The long northward road takes her through Haringey and Turnpike Lane and Wood Green, where it finally splits and she is faced with a steep terraced street that ends in Alexandra Palace Park. With acid burning in her calves and her heart thrumming against her ribs, she climbs the hill at barely faster than walking pace, and only when the path flattens and she is beneath the entrance to the gutted, shell-like Palace does she turn and allow herself the view of the whole city spread beneath her.
It is all there, from the tilted arc of Wembley Stadium off to the west to the faux-Eiffel Tower of Crystal Palace way off in the south, and then in the east the river glistening as it widens and curls like a snake, surrounded by endless housing and industrial estates, then finally mud flats and a shimmering nothing. Between these marker points, a horrendous cluster of stuff. So many skyscrapers, landmarks, and whole districts that appear nothing more than a jagged mishmash of buildings. But it seems manageable, the city, because she knows what she wants. She thinks it is true, what Geoff said: it is our desires that make sense of the raucousness, the chaos. Whether she gets it or not is immaterial; the point is that she knows what she wants, and it is this that drowns out the noise of the city, that shrinks it to a manageable size.
When she finally gets home, having had to walk most of the way, she finds two missed calls, one from Zahra and one from an unknown number that also left a message; it is from Linden at Kismet, saying that he’d love to follow up with her about the meeting, and see if they can try again to reach an agreement. Instead of returning these she opens her maps and plugs in the route to Alexandra Palace via Camden, and is amazed to find she ran for thirteen miles. Then she sees it is almost 2 p.m. and she doesn’t have time to attend to the missed calls; instead she has a bite to eat and a shower before getting dressed and leaving the house again.
