by Lia Louis
‘And absolutely not on the hard shoulder on the M4. With emergency cheese sandwiches.’
‘Walking sideways,’ says Sam.
‘With a stranger,’ I add, and as I look over my shoulder again, Sam meets my eyes with his and shrugs.
‘I dunno,’ he says slowly. ‘Are we still strangers?’
Then from behind us, a hard thump and a yelp. Sam swoops round quicker than I do, and I see her. A woman on the icy ground, slumped at a bumper, clutching at her head, a single stream of blood trickling down her face, like on those Instagram Halloween make-up tutorials. Sam sprints over, my koala umbrella still in his hand.
Chapter Six
It lands out of nowhere. A plummet – heart to pit of stomach. And I feel it land, like a rock in my gut, in sync with the bang of a heavy car door closing outside. Sam is two cars ahead, crouched in the open door of the woman’s car, a police officer standing over him. His smiling, pink mouth moves – chatting, but his eyes are focused, as he fixes up the wound. The woman slipped on the ice and bashed her head on the bumper of her own car. The police officer had sprinted over at the same time Sam had. He’s first-aid trained, he’d told the officer, fixes up wounds all the time at work. I’d walked over, feeling like a helpless sack of turnips, and Sam had given me a small smile, his hand at the woman’s head, and passed me the umbrella. He’d come back to the car to get a large rucksack he’d pulled from the boot and I’d told him I’d wait inside. And that’s where I am now. My sad, wet koala collapsed in the footwell of Sam’s rental car, with the crushed but still intact bottles of water I’d dropped like a sitcom fool as Sam had sprinted over. I watch him now, through the windscreen, all wise and tall and handsome and strong and familiar, his lips parted in concentration, snow still falling. And the voice in my head slides in, as if an actor on cue in a play. ‘What are you doing?’ it says, critical and no-nonsense. ‘What are you playing at, running away with the fairies like this? This isn’t a movie, Noelle, this is real life. Your life. And this can’t go anywhere. Not in any way, shape or form. Because Sam will get on a plane back to his life, and you will drive home, back to yours. To Levison Drive, back to Mum, back to your routine and work, and that will be that. Because you are strangers. And you don’t know him, and he doesn’t know you.’ I nod in the darkness of the car, like a scolded child, and pull the heavy blanket to my chin. A man from the crisis group, trussed up like a skier, had handed me two of them, plus a freezer bag full of custard creams and two bottles of orange juice a few minutes ago through the passenger door, then he’d joined the policeman and Sam, offering his own aid of Ziploc snacks.
Sam’s locked phone vibrates in the cubby again – another attempt from the universe to plonk me back into reality perhaps. A text from, I’m sure, leggy, perfect and beachy-haired Jenna again, although I can’t see what it says. And then my own phone vibrates. A reminder from the gas company, asking me to submit my metre readings. A reminder, on both accounts, that normal life is out there waiting for us both to resume, and this weird situation on the motorway, stuck in snow with custard creams, is just a tiny little stop gap. An interval.
Eventually, Sam clicks open the car door and quickly jumps in.
‘Jesus, it is cold.’ He blows into his hands and looks over at me. ‘You OK?’
I nod. ‘Fine. And is she?’
‘Yup. Good as new. Her friend’s gonna drive, so she’s in good hands.’ Sam leans a hand across to the radio, turns it up a little.
‘It’s cool that you know what to do,’ I say. ‘Brave.’
Sam chuckles. ‘Hardly. Although, I admit, I kind of like being prepared for the worst. Which sounds dark as fuck as I say that out loud, but I don’t know – you never know what’s round the corner, right?’ Then he looks at me, an eyebrow slightly cocked. ‘I can hear the cogs in your brain.’
‘What?’
‘Something my mom says – your thinking’s keeping me awake.’
‘Oh.’
‘Are you worried? About fuel, food, and – being stuck? Was it the blood?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Well, yes. Maybe. And I am worried. But mostly trying not to think about it. That’s my tactic most of the time.’
‘We’ll be OK. Noelle Not-Gallagher,’ he says with a smile, and I imagine what it must be like to climb a mountain with him, which is laughable considering the furthest I’ve ever climbed is the steps at Covent Garden station and halfway up, panicked, and told some poor random man with a briefcase that I was having a heart attack and to call for help (and he did not.) But I wouldn’t do that with Sam with me, I bet. He’d be all heroic, all unshakable, all ‘there are several mountain lions out there, but if everyone follows me, I’ll get us out alive. But firstly, I must remove my shirt.’
‘Anyway, the snow’s already slowing,’ he carries on. ‘The cop said it wouldn’t be too much longer.’
‘Oh. Well. Good.’
His brow crinkles beneath his soft, dark hair. ‘You seem disappointed.’
I look at him. ‘Ugh, I can’t.’
‘Can’t what?’
Can’t tell you I never want to leave, Sam, I want to say. Can’t tell you that I hardly know you and yet I do not want to get out of this car, and I can’t even put into clear and concise, sane-sounding words why that is.
‘Nothing,’ I say instead and groan, hiding my face as I feel it heat up, like it’s coated in self-heating volcanic face mask. I hear Sam chuckle from behind my hands.
‘Seriously, what?’
I peer at him through the gaps between my fingers.
‘I’m having a really good time,’ I say, the words muffled through my hands. ‘With you. Here.’
Sam presses his lips together, as if to stop a rogue smile. ‘OK, and that’s, what – bad?’
‘No. No.’ I laugh, my face as hot as sizzling rump steak. ‘It’s just – this whole thing is so weird. And … I mean we’re fucking stranded.’
‘Yeah?’
‘And … we have no food besides these sandwiches and biscuits and I’m peeing in bushes and behind signs for the nearest bloody Burger King and you’re fixing up injuries, and blood, and you’d think that all I’d want is to be at home, where everything is normal and safe and warm but – I don’t want to go home.’ I drop my hands to my lap. ‘There. Said it.’
Sam watches me quietly, then looks out of the windscreen as if considering what I’ve said. Then he looks over at me and says, ‘Does it help if I say same?’
I smile. ‘It does. Well, look, maybe we can just stay.’
‘Build a hut in Quebec,’ adds Sam. ‘Out of sticks. Old banjos.’
‘Deal.’
Sam laughs but says nothing else.
I want to ask then, about Jenna. About a wife or a girlfriend. About what’s waiting for him at home, if he feels what I feel. This pull. This feeling of … something. But I don’t – I can’t. I don’t want anything to ruin it – because it’s perfect, this night. So unexpectedly, strangely perfect.
My eyes drift to the clock on the dash – two a.m. ‘God. I can’t believe I was meant to be at a party tonight,’ I say.
Sam yawns, gives a half-chuckle. ‘A party?’
‘Yeah.’ It isn’t a lie, not really. The reunion was meant to be a party, of sorts – beer and music and food and catching up with old friends. But if I said reunion, if I said time capsule, out loud, to Sam, I know I might feel obligated to have to give up more. And I can so easily give up more about anything else. I’m that cluttered cupboard, opened, words toppling out, filling silences. But Daisy, losing her, and almost losing myself – it’s one of those things I like to keep close to my chest. So close, I sometimes think it’s burrowed a hole in the skin, a dark little hollow it’s hidden in for fifteen years. ‘Yep, I had it all planned out,’ I carry on. ‘I was meant to bump into my ex-boyfriend, show him I was fine, you know, to prove him wrong or something. And there was also a part of me – a stupid part maybe, hoping it might spark something again. That it’s …
I dunno, meant to be, that Ed would be back home, after two years. He’s a doctor. Paediatric rheumatology. He moved for work.’
Sam listens carefully.
‘But he ignored me. Looked right through me when he saw me. And then I ended up here.’
Sam looks through the windscreen – that methodical gathering of words in his head. ‘I did a climb with a bunch of medics last year,’ he says. ‘And they may be smart and noble and stuff, but in my experience – they do stupid shit on mountains. Hurt themselves, leave important stuff behind, almost die trying to get the perfect shot for Instagram. I was ready to push one of them off. Tell the cops he wore bad shoes or something.’
I laugh. A warm, belly-clenching laugh.
‘So maybe it applies to parties too,’ he says, looking over at me. ‘Ignoring you: stupid shit.’
Warmth spreads across my skin like the sun just rose.
‘Seriously. Ed the Ped sounds like a shit head,’ says Sam as if it’s a fact. ‘Not that you’re asking me.’
‘I am,’ I say.
Chapter Seven
I’m shaken awake, a warm hand on my shoulder, and for a moment I forget. It’s still dark outside, but the snow has stopped, and the stark white lights of hundreds of headlights outside makes it feel like someone’s flicked the house lights on. The show: over.
‘Sorry,’ says Sam, croakily. ‘The road’s reopening. Cop just knocked.’
‘God, did I – did I fall asleep? ’
‘For just an hour, I guess.’
‘Did you?’
He looks pale, and his dark hair is ruffled on the top of his head, as if he might have. ‘I napped a little, I think.’
I sit up, push the hair from my face. Sam has already doubled his blanket over in a rectangle on the armrest. I do the same, folding mine into one thick bundle and resting a hand on top, and it’s now that the weirdness of everything hits me again, like a slap in the face. I slept in a stranger’s car. I slept wrapped in another stranger’s blanket. I ate biscuits handed to me by a man in a ski mask on the M4. I left home almost twelve bloody hours ago. If I was to suddenly discover this was all a fever dream, I think I’d believe it. It would make the most sense.
‘What do you think we should do with these? The blankets.’
Sam gives a shrug, runs his hands through his dark, wavy hair. ‘Donate them? Keep them?’
‘I’ll take them with me. You’re not going to want to be lumbered with them at the airport, are you? That’s if you’re going straight to the airport?’
‘I am,’ Sam says simply.
Something sits between us in the car now, and I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s because it’s early and I’ve been asleep, but the car suddenly feels cold, and my skin is prickled with a layer of goosebumps. The warm, snuggled easiness has gone, and everything feels a bit rigid – awkward. Like when the lights come on at the end of a film at the cinema and you feel a pang of vulnerability – the worry of how your sleepy face looks to the strangers streaming by you to the exit, skin cold from too much air-con, the inevitable start of the fun-hangover. And despite myself, I really wish it was last night again. Eight hours. Eight tiny hours is all they were. And already, I miss them. Ridiculous. I am ridiculous.
Sam straightens in his seat, arching his back. He relaxes then looks over at me. The car is deathly silent. No radio. No more drifting outside voices of other drivers, of other in-car stereos. No more calming hum of the heater.
‘I suppose I’d better go then,’ I say.
Sam nods reluctantly, but says nothing, and I start gathering up things to take with me – the blankets, my handbag, my koala umbrella, my scarf …
‘Do you want some help? I can walk you over.’ He gives a small smile at the notion of the last few words. The swelling balloon of tension between us deflates a little, and I breathe a bit easier.
‘If you don’t mind.’
Sam and I get out of the car, our coats zipped and buttoned to the top. It’s bitter cold outside and the ground at our feet glistens like smashed glass with the salt that the crisis group must have put down from those big cardboard tubes they were holding. Sam holds my things as I try to unlock my car.
‘Why won’t it …’ I struggle with the key. ‘God, bloody thing usually locks us in, not out––’
‘Let me try.’
Sam passes me back my stuff and jangles the keys in the lock and I watch him, teeth nibbling his pink lips as he does, his hair dangling over his eyes. I want to tell him to stay in touch. I want to put my arms around him. God, what am I even thinking?
‘There.’ Sam straightens and pulls open the car door. I look up at him, the remnants of our evening piled high in my arms. ‘Thank you.’
He gives a singular deep nod.
‘And thank you for the phone charger. And the company. And … everything.’
Sam smiles – a smile that makes that prod-mark of a dimple appear in his cheek. ‘Ditto,’ he says. Then his lips part, and I think he’s going to say something else, but he doesn’t. Go on, ask for my number. An email address, an Instagram handle. Something. We could be friends. We could keep in touch, keep each other updated. A second chance at that pen pal in Portland. Yes, he lives in Oregon and barely comes over to see the family he alluded to visiting ‘once in a blue moon’, but – we can’t just leave it at this, can we?
‘We better go,’ says Sam as an engine from a car behind us rumbles into life.
‘Y-yeah. OK. Right.’ I smile – fake and awkward, more like a strain, but he buys it, I think, doesn’t sense my disappointment. And he starts to walk away, as I stand there by my open car door, engines chugging around me, blankets and belongings bundled under my arm like it’s 1999 and I’m on my way back from a sleepover. Then he stops and turns, shoes crunching on the ice: ‘Noelle?’
My heart lifts in my chest, as if suddenly suspended.
‘Yes?’
‘Drive safe.’
And that is the last thing Sam says to me.
When I get into my car, when I chuck the bundle of crap on my passenger seat, as I start the engine, when the car starts to smell of singed dust from my ancient heaters, as I turn up the radio, I wait. For him to jump out of the car, to tell me to wind down my window, to pass me a number – something scrawled on that old crossword page. But it doesn’t come. And although I really want to be the one to ask, something inside me tells me not to. And really, what would be the point of staying in touch? All those miles. Another person to miss. He probably meets a lot of people, a lot of strangers, and his friendliness, his easy-to-be-aroundness is probably part of the job. It’s why people recommend him. ‘Oh, you need Sam,’ they probably say, ‘he’s cool and calm and such a nice guy. Also, if you’re in the business for nice strong arms that could wrestle away a mountain lion in nothing but rags, then throw you over his shoulder for no reason whatsoever, then whew, he’s definitely your guy …’
When the traffic begins to move, Sam and I are alongside one another for a while. Me in my car, him in his, the hire car he’ll soon drop at the airport to be parked and lost in a meaningless fleet of others. A few times I look over, study his face through the glass – the straight line of his nose, the dark stubble of his jaw, the smile-lines by his brown eyes. I squirrel it away in my memory.
The roads clear, traffic speeds up, and I watch Sam until his car is a speck in the distance, and like those eight perfect hours, he is gone.
Chapter Eight
Five weeks later
Charlie taps the wooden shop countertop with a hand twice, like an impatient drunk in a bar. ‘Hey, babe!’ she calls out. ‘How are we getting on back there with those tomatoes?’ She turns to me, her eyes dreamy, flicks of neon pink liquid liner at the corners. ‘I swear to God, these tomatoes, Noelle. Had them last week. Felt like my life had changed – literally. Something … opened inside of me. Fruit can do that to you, you know.’
‘Is that right?’
‘And some veg, too. With the r
ight asparagus …’ Charlie winks. ‘Mark my words.’ And I would, of course, if I had a clue what they meant.
She leans across the counter, craning her neck to see out of the back of the shop. ‘Theo?’ she shouts again. ‘Oi.’ Theo doesn’t reply. A customer filling a glass bottle with thick, treacly olive oil from a glass keg looks over at us, eyes unblinking like a disapproving teacher, and I desperately want to laugh.
I love Wednesdays. I know some people find routines stifling or monotonous or boring. You’re a total robot, Elle, Dilly would say. But to me – I don’t know. Routines mean knowing what to expect. Routines mean having something to look forward to. And every Wednesday looks the same. Ian drops by for breakfast with Mum, meaning I can get up and out early, just me, a few dog walkers, the glow of a new sun, the sound of bird song and my own footsteps. I drop by the tiny little supermarket in town that always does their price reductions far too late and has yesterday’s flowers at pennies, and pick up what I can find (today, two bunches of alstroemeria, the colour of strawberry milk). I drop by Adly’s flat – a London banker I clean for once a fortnight, who hardly ever comes back to his clinical square of a studio flat, and then it’s on to clean my friend Charlie and her husband Theo’s two-bed maisonette above Buff, their plastic-free grocer’s and deli. Their flat is the total opposite to Adly’s. All rugs and cushions and weird wooden artefacts that I’m sure, after dusting and considering them every week for two years, are mostly sculptures of genitals. I clean, I organise, I arrange flowers in the windows, and at twelve, Charlie glides in on her lunch break and constructs an organic lunch from Theo’s salad bar that she tells me will ‘momentarily open her third eye’. We stand then, like we are now, on the shiny, wooden shop floor and talk, as Theo scuttles about in the storeroom and serves customers, and most of the time, with Petal, their three-month-old baby on his chest in a sling, her tiny starfish hands clenched. Nothing much really ever happens on Wednesdays. They’re simple really, but they’re dependable – safe little markers, to remind me that I’ve made another week, and how lucky I am that I have. Plus, Theo and Charlie are two of the happiest people I know, and regardless of your move, it rubs on you, like perfume.
