I was only told this a week after I ordered the system, and I endeavoured to make my feelings on the matter clear to my supplier during the further week in which they playfully promised to deliver the system first on one day, then another, all such promises evaporating like the morning dew. The two boxes had finally made it to my door the day before, and, by a bizarre coincidence, the cable had today crawled tired and overwrought into the supplier’s warehouse. My contact at Calldriven Direct knew just how firmly one of those cables had my name on it, and had phoned to grudgingly admit they were available. I’d immediately called my courier firm, which I occasionally used to send design roughs to clients. Calldriven had offered to put it in the post, but I somehow sensed that they wouldn’t quite get around to it today, and I’d waited long enough. The bike firm I used specializes in riders who look as if they’ve been chucked out of the Hell’s Angels for being unruly. A large man in leathers turning up in Calldriven’s offices, with instructions not to leave without my cable, was just the sort of incentive I felt they needed—and so I was waiting, drinking endless cups of coffee, for such a person to arrive at the flat brandishing said component above his head in triumph.
When the buzzer finally went I nearly fell off my chair. Without bothering to check who it was I left the flat and pounded down the house stairs to the front door, swinging it open with, I suspect, a look of near-lust upon my face. I get a lot of pleasure out of technology. It’s a bit sad, I realise that—God knows Nancy has told me so often enough—but hell, it’s my life. Each to their own.
An expanse of black leather was standing outside, topped with a shining black helmet. The biker was a lot slighter than their usual type, but quite tall. Tall enough to have done the job, evidently.
‘Bloody marvellous,’ I said. ‘Is that a cable?’
‘Sure is,’ the biker said, indistinctly. A hand raised the visor on the helmet, and I saw with some surprise that there was a woman inside. ‘They didn’t seem too keen to let it go.’
‘I’ll bet’. I laughed and took the package from her. Sure enough, it said ‘AV adapter cable’ on the outside. ‘You’ve made my day,’ I said, a little hysterically, ‘and I’m more than tempted to kiss you.’
‘That seems rather forward,’ the girl said, reaching up to her helmet. ‘Cup of coffee would be nice, though. I’ve been driving since five this morning and my tongue feels like it’s made of brick.’
Taken aback, I hesitated for a moment. I’d never had a motorcycle courier in for coffee before. I’m not sure anyone has. Also, it would mean a delay before I could ravage through the boxes and start connecting things up. But it was still only eleven in the morning, and another fifteen minutes wouldn’t harm. I was also a little pleased at the thought of such an unusual encounter.
‘You would be,’ I said, with a kind of mock-Arthurian courtliness which doubtless sounds horrific but was what the moment required, ‘most welcome.’
‘Thank you, kind sir,’ the courier said, and pulled her helmet off. A great deal of dark brown hair spilled out around her face, and as she swung her head the sun shot threads of chestnut through it. Her face was strong, with a wide mouth and vivid green eyes.
Bloody hell, I thought, the cable for a moment forgotten in my hand.
Then I stood to one side to let her in.
Her name was Alice, and she stood looking at the books on the shelves as I made a couple of cups of coffee.
‘Your girlfriend’s in Personnel,’ she said.
‘How did you guess?’ I said, handing her a cup.
She indicated the raft of books on Human Resource Development, Managing for Success and Stating the Bleeding Obvious in Five Minutes a Day, which take up half our shelves.
‘You don’t look the type. Is this it?’ She pointed her mug at the two boxes on the floor.
I nodded, slightly sheepishly. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘Aren’t you going to open them?’
I glanced up at her, surprised. Her face was turned towards me, a small smile in the corners of her mouth. Her skin was the pale tawny colour which goes with rich hair, I noticed, and flawless. I shrugged, slightly embarrassed.
‘I guess so,’ I said, non-committally. ‘I’ve got some work I ought to do first.’
‘Rubbish,’ she said firmly. ‘Let’s have a look.’
And so I bent down and pulled open the boxes, while she settled down on the sofa to watch. What was odd was that I didn’t mind doing it. Normally when I’m doing something that’s very much to do with me and the things I enjoy, I have to do it alone. Other people seldom understand the things which give you the most pleasure, and I’d rather not have them around to undermine the occasion. But Alice seemed genuinely interested, and ten minutes later I had the system sitting on the desk. In the meantime I’d babbled about voice recognition and video input, the eight gigabyte hard disk and ultra-zippy CD ROM. She’d listened, and even asked questions, questions that followed from what I was saying rather than simply set me up to drivel on some more. It wasn’t that she knew a vast amount about computers. She just understood what was exciting about them.
When the screen threw up the standard message saying all was well we looked at each other.
‘You’re not going to get much work done today, are you,’ she said.
‘Probably not,’ I agreed, and she laughed.
Just then a protracted squawking noise erupted from the sofa, and I jumped. The courier rolled her eyes and reached over to pick up her unit. A voice of stunning brutality informed her that she had to pick something up from the other side of town, urgently, like five minutes ago, and why wasn’t she there already, darlin’?
‘Grr,’ she said, like a little tiger, and reached for her helmet. ‘Duty calls.’
‘But I haven’t told you about the telecommunications stuff yet,’ I said, joking.
‘Some other time,’ she winked.
I saw her out, and we stood for a moment on the doorstep. I was wondering what to say. I didn’t know her, would never see her again, but wanted to thank her for sharing something with me. Then I noticed one of the local cats ambling past the bottom of the steps. I love cats, but Nancy doesn’t, so we don’t have one. Just one of the little compromises you make, I guess. I recognised this particular hairball, and had long since given up hope of appealing to it. I made the sound universally employed for gaining cats’ attention, with no result. It merely glanced wearily up at me and cruised on by.
Then Alice sat down on her heels and made the same noise. The cat stopped in its tracks and looked at her. She made the noise again and the cat turned, glanced down the street for no discernible reason, and then confidently made its way up the steps to weave in and out of her legs.
‘That is truly amazing,’ I said. ‘He is not a friendly cat.’
She took the cat in her arms and stood up. ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said. The cat sat up against her chest, looking around with the air of a monarch inspecting his kingdom and finding all was well. I reached out to rub its nose and felt the warm vibration of a purr.
The two of us made a fuss of him for a few moments, and then Alice put him down. She replaced her helmet, climbed on her bike, and, with a wave, set off.
Back in the flat I tidied away the boxes, anal retentive that I am, before settling down to immerse myself in the new machine. On impulse I called Nancy, to let her know the system had finally arrived. I got one of her assistants, Trish, instead. She didn’t put me on hold, merely cupped the mouthpiece, and I heard Nancy say ‘Tell him I’ll call him back,’ in the background. I said goodbye to Trish with fairly good grace, trying not to mind.
Voice recognition software hadn’t been included, it turned out, nor anything to put in the CD ROM drive. The telecommunications functions wouldn’t work without an expensive add-on, which Calldriven didn’t expect for four to six weeks. Apart from that, it was great.
Nancy cooked that evening. We tended to take it in turns, though she was much better at it than me. Nancy is good at
most things. She’s accomplished.
There’s a lot of in-fighting in the selfless world of Personnel Development, it would appear, and Nancy was in feisty form that evening, having tastily out-maneuvered some co-worker. I drank a glass of red wine and leaned against the counter while she whirled ingredients around. She told me about her day, and I listened and laughed. I didn’t tell her much about mine, only that it had gone okay. Her threshold for hearing about the world of freelance graphic design is pretty low. She’d listen with relatively good grace if I really had to get something out of my system, but she didn’t understand it and didn’t seem to want to. No reason why she should, of course. I didn’t mention the new computer sitting on my desk, and neither did she.
Dinner was very good. It was chicken, but she’d done something intriguing to it with spices. I ate as much as I could, but there was a little left. I tried to get her to finish it, but she wouldn’t. I reassured her that she hadn’t eaten too much, in the way that sometimes seemed to help, but her mood dipped and she didn’t have any desert. I steered her towards the sofa and took the stuff out to wash up and make some coffee.
While I was standing at the sink, scrubbing the plates and thinking vaguely about the mountain of things I had to do the next day, I noticed a dark brown cat sitting on a wall across the street. I hadn’t seen it before. It was crouched watching a twittering bird, with that catty concentration that combines complete attention with the sense that they might at any moment break off and wash their foot instead. The bird eventually fluttered chaotically off and the cat tracked its progress for a moment before sitting upright, as if drawing a line under that particular diversion.
Then the cat’s head turned, and it looked straight at me. It was a good twenty yards away, but I could see its eyes very clearly. It kept looking, and after a while I laughed, slightly taken aback. I even turned away for a moment, but when I looked back it was still there, still looking.
Then the kettle boiled and I turned to tip water into a couple of mugs of Nescafé. When I glanced through the window on the way out of the kitchen, the cat was gone.
Nancy wasn’t in the lounge when I got there, so I settled on the sofa and lit a cigarette. After about five minutes the toilet flushed upstairs, and I sighed.
A couple of days came and went, as they do, with the usual flurry of deadlines and committee re-designs. I went to a social evening at Nancy’s office and spent a few hours being patronised by her power-dressed colleagues, while she sparkled in the centre. I messed up a print job and had to cover the cost of doing it again. Good things happened too, I guess, but it’s the others that stick in your mind.
One afternoon the buzzer went and I wandered absent-mindedly downstairs to get the door. As I opened it there was a flick of brown hair, and saw that it was Alice.
‘Hello there,’ I said, strangely pleased.
‘Hello yourself,’ she smiled. ‘Got a parcel for you.’ I took it and looked at the label. Colour proofs from the repro house. Yawn. She must have been looking at my face, because she laughed. ‘Nothing very exciting then?’
‘Hardly.’ After I’d signed the delivery note, I looked up at her. She was still smiling, I think, though it was difficult to tell. Her face looked as though it always was.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I can either go straight to Peckham to pick up something else really dull, or you can tell me about the telecommunications features.’
I stepped back to let her in.
‘Bastards,’ she said indignantly, when I told her about the things that hadn’t been shipped with the machine. I told her about the telecoms stuff anyway, as we sat on the sofa and drank coffee, but not for very long. Mainly we just chatted, and when she got to the end of the road on her bike she turned and waved before disappearing around the corner.
That night Nancy went to Sainsbury’s on the way home from work. I caught her eye as she unpacked the biscuits and brownies, potato chips and pastries, but she just stared back at me, and I looked away. She was having a hard time at work. Deflecting my gaze to the window, I noticed the dark cat was sitting on the wall opposite. It wasn’t doing much, simply peering vaguely this way and that, watching things I couldn’t see. It seemed to look up at the window for a moment, but then leapt down off the wall and wandered away down the street.
I cooked dinner and Nancy didn’t eat much, but she stayed in the kitchen when I went into the living room to finish off a job. When I made our cups of tea to drink in bed I noticed that the bin had been emptied, and the rubbish bag stood, neatly tied, to one side. I nudged it with my foot and it rustled, full of empty packets. Upstairs the bathroom door was pulled shut, and the key turned in the lock.
I saw Alice a few more times during the following weeks. A couple of major jobs were reaching crisis point at the same time, and there was a semi-constant flurry of bikes coming and going from the house. On three or four of those occasions it was Alice who I saw when I opened the door.
Apart from once, when she had to turn straight around on pain of death, she always came in for a coffee. We’d chat about this and that, and when the voice recognition software finally arrived I showed her how it worked. I had a rip-off copy, from a friend who’d sourced it from the States. You had to do an impersonation of an American accent to get the machine to understand anything you said, and my attempts to do so made Alice laugh a lot. Which is curious, because it made Nancy merely sniff and ask me whether I’d put the new computer on the insurance.
Nancy was preoccupied, those couple of weeks. Her so-called boss was dumping more and more responsibility onto her, while stalwartly refusing to give her more credit or money. Nancy’s world was very real to her, and she relentlessly kept me up to date on it: the doings of her boss were more familiar to me by then than the activities of most of my friends. She did manage to get her company car upgraded, however, which was a nice thing. She screeched up to the house one evening in something small and red and sporty, and hollered up to the window. I scampered down and she took us hurtling around North London, driving with her customary verve and confidence. On impulse we stopped at an Italian restaurant we sometimes went to, and they miraculously had a table. Over coffee we took each other’s hands and said we loved one another, which we hadn’t done for a while.
When we parked outside the house I saw the dark cat sitting under a tree on the other side of the street. I pointed it out to Nancy but she just shrugged. She went in first and as I turned to close the door I saw the cat was still sitting there, a dark shape in the half-light. I wondered who it belonged to, and wished that it was ours.
A couple of days later I was walking down the street in the late afternoon, when I noticed a motorbike parked outside Sad Café. I seemed to have become sensitized to bikes over the previous few weeks: probably because I’d used so many couriers. ‘Sad’ wasn’t the café’s real name, but what Nancy and I used to call it, back in the times when we would stagger hung over down the road on Sunday mornings on a quest for a cooked breakfast. The first time we’d slumped over one of its Formica tables we’d been slowly surrounded by middle-aged men in zip-up jackets and beige bobble hats, a party of mentally-challenged teenagers with broken glasses, and old women on the verge of death. The pathos attack we’d suffered had nearly finished us off, and it had been dubbed the Sad Café ever since. We hadn’t been there in a while: Nancy usually had work in the evenings in those days, even on weekends, and fried breakfasts appeared to be off the map again.
The bike resting outside made me glance through the window, and with a shock of recognition I saw Alice in there, sitting at a table nursing a mug of something or other. I nearly walked on, but then thought what the hell, and poked my head inside. Alice looked startled to see me, but then smiled, and I sat down and ordered a cup of tea.
She’d finished for the day, and was killing time before heading home. I was at a loose end myself: Nancy was out for the evening, entertaining clients. It was odd seeing Alice outside the flat, and this was also the firs
t time we’d met outside working hours. Possibly it was this which made the next thing coalesce in front of us.
Before we knew how the idea had arisen, we were wheeling her bike down the road to prop it up outside the Bengal Lancer, the area’s bravest stab in the direction of a decent restaurant. I loitered awkwardly to one side while she took off her leathers and packed them into the bike’s carrier. She was wearing jeans and a green sweatshirt underneath, a green that matched her eyes. Then she ran her hands through her hair, said ‘Close enough’, and strode towards the door. Momentarily reminded of Nancy’s standard hour-and-a-half preparation for going out, I followed her into the restaurant.
We took our time, and had about four courses, and by the end were absolutely stuffed. We talked of things beyond computers and design, but I can’t remember what they were. We had a couple of bottles of wine, a gallon of coffee, and smoked most of two packets of cigarettes. When we were done I stood outside again, far more relaxed this time, as she climbed back into her work clothes. She waved as she rode off, and I watched her go. Then I turned and walked for home.
It was a nice meal. It was also the big mistake.
The next time I rang for a bike to send a package, I asked for Alice by name. After that, it seemed the natural thing to do. And Alice seemed to end up doing almost all of the deliveries to me, more than you could put down to chance.
If we hadn’t gone for that meal, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened. Nothing was said, and no glances exchanged: I didn’t note the date in my diary.
But we’d started falling in love.
The following night Nancy and I had a row, the first full-blown one in a while. We rarely argued. Nancy was a good manager.
This one was short, and also very odd. It was late and I was sitting in the lounge, trying to summon up the energy to turn on the television. I didn’t have much hope for what I would find on it, but was too tired to read. I’d been listening to a CD that had run its course, and was staring at the stereo, half-mesmerized by the green and red LEDs. Nancy was working at the table in the kitchen, which was dark apart from the lamp which shed yellow light over her papers.
More Tomorrow: And Other Stories Page 41
