watching her do it.
‘What, me and Emily? Eleven years, all in.’
‘Kids?’
‘There’s Stephen. He’s sixteen. Chloe’s nine. They live with their mum. You?’
‘Me and John? God, no.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘What does what mean?’
‘That tone.’
‘I don’t know. Did I use a tone?’
‘You definitely did. There was definitely a tone in use.’
She snorted, then covered her nose with the back of her hand, embarrassed. Mark was grinning at her.
She said, ‘The thought of it. Me and John with kids.’
‘What’s so mad about that?’
‘We agreed not to. Back when we were kids ourselves.’
‘Really? How long have you known him?’
‘Since the Big Bang.’
It was supposed to sound funny, but it came out sad. She watched the pigeons for a while. Then she said, ‘We met at university.’
‘Same course?’
‘No. I was doing law, obviously. He was postgrad in English.’
She tucked her chin into the warmth of her coat and smiled to think of it, just as she sometimes did when flicking through old photographs.
‘We only met because we were both doing this elective course in comparative religion. I sat next to him in this tiny little lecture theatre. Everybody there already knew each other except me and John. I knew him by reputation.’
‘And what reputation was that?’
‘He’s very tall,’ she said, self-conscious as a schoolgirl. ‘Very strong. Very handsome. And very, very intense.’
She laughed out loud, delighted and liberated to be talking about it. ‘And it was like, all the girls fancied him and he didn’t even notice them, y’know? And the more he didn’t notice them, the more they fancied him. He used to make girls do the stupidest things around him, really clever, brilliant young women who should have known better, behaving like idiots to get his attention. And he never noticed.’
‘Everybody notices.’
‘Swear to God. It wasn’t even arrogance. It was a kind of… myopia.’
‘And you liked that?’
‘I thought it was endearing.’
‘Not, like, a challenge?’
‘God, no.’
This time, they both laughed.
Mark said, ‘So how did you… y’know. Get together?’
She smoked the roll-up to its last quarter-inch, then squeezed it between her fingernails.
‘There wasn’t like a moment,’ she said. ‘We met in that lecture and kind of drifted out for a coffee afterwards. Neither of us asked the other. Or that’s how I remember it. We just sat in the cafe and chatted. I told him everything there was to tell about myself — which at the time wasn’t all that much.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Twenty? So girls’ school, sixth form, gap year, university. It felt like a lot of life experience at the time. So I tell him this, all about myself. Then I ask him about himself and he tells me about books. As if he’s made up of all these books he’s read, or was going to read. And later on, he walks me home. I didn’t question it for a minute. And I’ll tell you one thing about John: if you’re a twenty-year-old girl and you’re not that knowledgeable in the ways of the world and you live in a dodgy area, walking home with him, you never felt so safe. And he stops outside my door and says, This is you, then? And I say, This is me. And I’m thinking, Kiss me you arsehole, kiss me or I’m going to die on the spot.’
‘And did he?’
‘No. He just slouches and gives me this nod — he’s got this shaggy-dog nod he does sometimes. Then he digs his hands in his pockets and walks off.’
‘Well played, that man.’
‘Except it wasn’t,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a tactic. I swear! It was just him. That’s who he was. Is. Whatever.’
And then a melancholy descended on her — as it always did when she thought of that boy and that girl. The thought of John Luther, twenty-two, slouching off without kissing her. And the lightness in her heart that night; how she couldn’t sleep and couldn’t believe herself: serious, level-headed, hard-working Zoe, who’d slept with two men in her entire life, one long-term school boyfriend, as a kind of parting gift, and one slightly older man she met on her gap year.
It wasn’t in her nature to lie in bed wondering what a boy might be doing right now, right this second. But she spent the whole night like that.
And she spent the next few days pretending she wasn’t trying to manufacture ways to bump into him in the corridor, the English department, the refectory.
Sprawled on that park bench, looking at the pigeons, Mark said, ‘Are you okay?’
‘Yeah,’ said Zoe. ‘Sorry. Miles away.’
He stretched his arms. ‘Best be getting back.’
‘I don’t want to go to work,’ she groaned, stretching her neck. ‘I want to take the day off. I’m tired.’
‘We could play hooky,’ said Mark. ‘Go to the pictures or something. I haven’t been to the pictures for ages. Especially not in the afternoon.’
‘Me neither.’
‘We should totally do it,’ he said. ‘Say we’re in a meeting. Go to the pictures. Grab a Chinese afterwards.’
‘I’d love to,’ she said. ‘But no.’
So he slipped his tobacco tin into his pocket and they strolled back to work.
In her memory they were arm in arm, although of course that can’t be right. Not yet. Not then.
That afternoon, she’d been distracted and clumsy. She spilled a cup of coffee over her desk.
Just by sitting there, laughing at the past, she’d felt that her John, that boy, was nothing more than a memory.
He’d catch her sometimes, after one glass of wine too many. She’d be tearful, going through their old photos again.
‘Look at my hair,’ she’d say. Or, ‘Christ, look at those boots. What was I thinking?’
Or she’d say, ‘God, remember that flat? The one on Victoria Road?’
And Luther would oblige her by flicking through the albums, unaware that the man looking at the photos was not the boy they pictured.
Somewhere along the line, that boy had joined the dead and Zoe had spent years waving to him from a far shore, trying to call him back.
And now it’s not even lunchtime on this strange day a year later and she lies naked on a hotel bed with Mark North in the warm afterglow of orgasm.
She nuzzles his neck, kisses him. He turns, kisses her.
She knows she’ll feel guilty. She’ll get up and walk naked to the shower and walk back and dry herself and Mark will watch; of course he will — he’s going to watch her do these everyday things because here and now everything she does is fascinating, vertiginous, magical. Just as everything he does is fascinating and magical to her.
She’ll towel herself in front of this man who has just come inside her, twice. And she’ll dress: underwear and tights and shirt and suit and shoes, and she’ll toy with her hair and reapply her make-up. She’ll make an
