Raven’s tactic had always been to keep out of everyone’s way. It was the easiest way to avoid trouble.
‘I work at Curry’s,’ Dylan continued as if she’d just asked, wide-eyed, about his place of work. ‘Computer section. Sometimes they put me in AV but mostly I do the PCs.’
‘Ah.’ He was obviously very gifted at acronyms as well.
‘Good staff discount.’ He stuck out his leg and unearthed a shirt sleeve from his puffer jacket. ‘Check out my jammy uniform.’
Black. Head to toe.
Jammy indeed.
She did the raised eyebrows thing and caught him doing a little double take. People did that sometimes. When they bothered to look at her eyes. They were this sort of weird mossy amber colour and when she did her eyeliner properly they popped. Sort of … reverse goth. Handy seeing as she’d never have alabaster skin which, from where she was sitting, seemed a total pain. Freckles, endless sunblock, zits unbelievably visible. She was quite happy with toasty cinnamon thank you very much. At least she had another thing she liked about her physical self. Eyes. But that’s where her body self-love peaked. She liked her cerebral self just fine, but it was a bit … isolating. Not lonely exactly as online could be a friendly place to be if you knew where to go, but wishing you were invisible in real life was never really indicative of being in a happy place, was it?
‘So,’ Dylan stroked the stubble on his chin. ‘Let me guess. If it isn’t a bowling alley, you work for … McDonalds? Starbucks? MI5?’
‘I work at a call centre,’ she finally admitted.
‘Cool.’
‘Sometimes.’ She shrugged, tactically keeping the part about it being 111 to herself. 999 was far more aspirational. The calls into 111 were usually so … meh. No one really cared if you took twenty-three calls from mums worried about their baby’s cough. There had been, of course, the day Sue had called in and told Flo her husband was dead. That had got her adrenaline flowing. Even Flo, who didn’t look like she’d bat an eye if tanks rolled into the call centre, was flustered. The call had made everybody think. Especially her. Which was why she had agreed to go to the funeral. She’d wanted to understand what it would be like to simply disappear into death. Not forever, obvs, but … every now and again?
To be honest, she hadn’t come out any the wiser on that front. It had felt like being a voyeur into someone else’s misery. When she’d got there … Fuuuuck. Even her finely tuned levels of detachment were rendered useless. Sue, a woman she’d totally dismissed as ‘nice’ and, at forty-something, ‘old’, had looked utterly shell-shocked. As if a tornado had whipped into town, picked her up and deposited her in an alternate universe. Her family had looked embarrassed for her rather than sympathetic. Going through the motions of there there, it’ll be alright, another cup of sweet tea, love? Packing up the sandwiches before everyone had left so as not to leave any trace that they’d been there at all. As if death by noose was the most humiliating way to go.
If it wouldn’t have been the weirdest thing in the world to do, Raven would’ve happily filled them in on a ream of much more embarrassing ways to go. Falling off a cliff on a Segway when you were the owner of a Segway was one. Taking a selfie on live train tracks as the scheduled train approached was another. Death by Viagra, eyedrops, water and the list went on. (Google was full of it.)
All of which culminated in Raven acknowledging that even the prospect of an eternity at Uncle Ravi’s law firm wouldn’t make her top herself. Which did beg the question, why wasn’t she eagerly swotting up for her law degree like a good little Chakrabarti instead of taking a year out? She knew the answer of course. She didn’t want to be a lawyer. She wanted to go to Newcastle Uni. And she wanted to study Art. Or maybe History. Or … and therein lay the problem.
Chakrabartis don’t follow dreams. They pursue goals.
‘No contact with the general public,’ Dylan said. ‘Sweet.’
Raven was on the brink of pointing out that working at a call centre was entirely about interacting with the general public but Dylan pulled out his phone and began to thumb through what looked like an Instagram account. He abruptly stood up and strode out into the sleet. He made a miserable face and did some weird twisty things with his fingers as he popped out a few selfies on his phone. ‘Gotta keep up with my peeps,’ he said back in the bus shelter. ‘Let the lay-deez know I’m ready for some Valentine’s action tonight.’ The way he said it made Raven smile on the inside. He knew he was being a dozy poser. She wondered if the strangers who saw his post would think he was being ironically chavvy or just think he was another self-obsessed social media twat. If he hadn’t spoken to her last week and again today, she definitely would’ve gone with the latter.
If she ever were to go back on social media she’d want to be an Instagram influencer who hit that perfect note between darkly ironic and wise beyond her years. A Raven.
She squinted at Dylan when he became properly engrossed in his phone again. Even though he’d said they were at college together, she still had yet to properly place him. He definitely looked familiar, but … She flicked her brain into etch a sketch mode and tried to picture him
