Eleven Lines to Somewhere Page 8

  Paul had an interview at Brunel, then met him after work.

  ‘They want me to start in January; well, they want me now, but I can’t leave Seville until Christmas.’

  Ryan was impressed if not surprised. Everyone wanted Paul. He was a very good lecturer and he churned out papers that people wanted to discuss. Right now, no one could mention Fabry disease without using Paul’s name in the same sentence. He had a way of owning genetic disorders. He had an aura. The driest of topics became scintillating simply because he could smile while explaining them. This, it transpired, was a rare skill. The smiling scientist, that was Paul.

  He was staying in a hotel at Heathrow and insisted he meet Ryan at Acton Town the following morning so that he could take a peek at Millie.

  ‘You’re kidding,’ Ryan said.

  ‘No, I’m intrigued. I think we should follow her together.’

  ‘She’s not always on the train, and no, we shouldn’t.’

  ‘I have a feeling,’ Paul said.

  He was already on the platform holding a tray with takeaway flat whites as Ryan alighted, five minutes earlier than usual.

  ‘She wasn’t on that one, then?’ Paul said.

  ‘No,’ Ryan said, ‘but you can move to London and bring me coffee every morning anyway.’

  They stood on the platform, Paul relaxed, Ryan agitated.

  ‘This is fun,’ Paul said.

  ‘No, it isn’t,’ Ryan said.

  The next train pulled in. Ryan could not see her so Paul tugged at his jumper, dragging him back onto the platform.

  ‘We’ll wait,’ he said, sipping his coffee.

  It did not occur to Ryan to lie. He had never lied to Paul and so when he saw her on the next train – tucked into the corner of the front carriage – he simply nodded to his friend. There were no seats for them but they could see her clearly enough, her eyes closed, her hands on her lap, her nearly red hair loose as if in celebration of the change in season.

  Paul was surprised. The woman was slender but not, to him, in an appealing way, and while her hair was distinctive, it did not strike him as particularly interesting, although he could see a sort of prettiness that for someone else might be captivating.

  The train whizzed into South Kensington station and Ryan shuffled off, annoyed as he always was by those who tried to board before those leaving had alighted, speaking to Paul as if he was on his shoulder, but Paul remained in the carriage and gave Ryan the thumbs-up as he stared incredulously back at him through the window.

  Gordon was still running the bridge club so Naomi could not attend it but she could time being nearby when it ended, just in case Cappi was back on board. He wasn’t. But she knew he was back at the university. She had seen him on the stairs. She had seen him on the stairs and yet her heart had not skipped the anticipated beat and in that moment she knew there had been a dilution in her yearning – and the dilution had been down to the man she had met in a fairly drab house not too far from Wembley where a grandpa had snored in an armchair, the baby carrots had been smothered with chopped parsley and she had drunk so much her head span all evening. Inevitably, she thought, that man is out of bounds. I will never lust after someone who is free and lusts after me.

  They sat in a pub defined by its shiny wooden pews and booths, low doorframes and fine ales.

  ‘Tell me you didn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Oh Christ, you did.’

  ‘I did.’

  There was a silence. It was companionable but nervy.

  ‘Oh, just tell me.’

  Paul leaned forward.

  ‘North, south, east, west, emerging for lunch at Paddington,’ he said in the voice of the man who reads the shipping forecast on the radio.

  ‘And you were desperate for a piss by then, I bet,’ Ryan said.

  ‘I went when she went,’ he said, sounding pleased with himself.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Oh, well, and then I lost her. Or maybe she lost me. We won’t know until you’ve dated her a few times and you’ve come clean.’

  ‘What do you think is going on with her?’

  ‘Not a damned clue, mate. She is sort of efficient about it, like she is going somewhere specific but that somewhere keeps changing. She is very calm, very patient when she reaches a platform, sort of assesses it like – I don’t know – like she is deciding if it is clean enough.’

  ‘Do you think she is… off limits?’

  Paul laughed.

  ‘She ought to be but no, weirdly, no she isn’t.’

  Ryan was quiet.

  ‘So?’ Paul said after a minute or so.

  ‘So. Looks like she could eat at any station so I’m relieved I didn’t waste any lunch hours trekking to Waterloo. Might be weeks before she goes there again. I think I need a new strategy. Maybe I should spill a drink on her; pretend I’m reading whatever book she’s reading.’

  ‘If it was me,’ Paul said, ‘I’d give it one more go on the Tube. See it through to the end. I don’t know why, feels it needs to be that way.’

  Ryan gurned into his beer.

  ‘Yeah, maybe.’ And then they settled into talk of Spain, the tapas bars of Seville, the flaws in tiki taka football, Paul’s impending move to London and yet another genetic disorder he had his eye on.

  ‘There is work on genetically engineering mosquitoes out of existence at your place,’ Paul said, ‘so I might ask for a meeting and do some research there. Aww, I might be inches from your lab, mate; we can wave at each other through the glass every day. We could commute in together.’

  And so the conversation ended as it had begun, with tales of the Underground and the girl who never got off it.

  In the end several London universities agreed to share Paul. It was better than not having him at all and each of them believed after half an academic year he would choose just one of them as his base, his home, the place that would bear their name when his next paper was published. He flew back to Spain, with the warm glow of plans well made and of having kept open all the options he liked. He was a hard worker but on this particular late-September evening, had you peered through the window of his spacious second-floor flat on the outskirts of Seville, you would have found him sprawled on the floor with a pink highlighter pen, gazing at an enlarged map of the London Underground.

  Paul retraced the route Millie had taken to Paddington, convinced he would see a pattern or logic that had eluded him. If this was a tale of the supernatural, he thought, the highlighter pen would spell out a message.

  Leave me alone.

  Help me.

  How do I get to Madame Tussauds?

  He chuckled to himself and then stood to look at the bigger picture. Just in case there really was a pattern or a message and he became vaguely aware that his heartbeat had quickened. He so wanted there to be some sense to this but there was none. If you were generous about it then you could claim Millie had travelled in the shape of a spiral, but the truth was that her route was a mess. It was random. It was the journey of a woman killing time until lunch.

  He shook his head and thought if there was a message it was that he must not kill time until he could leave Spain for London. Paul liked very much the fact that whenever he left a university no one at it was relieved to see the back of him. Every single city so far had asked him to stay, to reconsider. Those he had tutored gave him gifts, bought him dinner, those in charge had tried to negotiate without seeming desperate.

  He was told, again and again – in modern, bright rooms, in cloistered ancient ones – he would be welcomed back at any time, but how he adored the anticipation of the next place, the different architecture, the different sounds and echoes, the new people, the altered dynamics, the smells of a new city, the finding of the most aesthetically pleasing route from his new home to the campus. He had known deep down for a while that he would end up in London near Ryan.

  He had not been jealous of his best mate’s relationship with Ellen. In fact, he had lik
ed how easily the three of them could hang out, sometimes with a girl he was dating, sometimes not. He never seemed to stay with one girl for very long. He, like Ryan, had not quite understood the meaning of death. One day Ellen was laughing in the bar, being taught how to play pool, proving rather adept at it – potting three balls in a row and wagging her finger at him and Ryan – and then, a day later, she was in a car, driven by her mother, and was thrown through the windscreen while taking off her jumper because the car was too warm and because her mother was an idiot.

  It was sudden and brutal and surreal. Where there had been two, there had been three, and then there were two again. Paul had dated a junior doctor in Toronto who disconcertingly held her booze better than he did. One evening she’d narrowed her eyes as she settled into her armchair and told him he had been frozen in time the day Ellen died, unable to fall in love, unable to commit because he was aware more sharply than most that relationships can snap in half, that it is better not to become too happy, too settled, too content. She had taken yet another a sip of her single malt, paused, breathed in and told him there was a reason he flitted from city to city, from continent to continent.

  Paul had deliberately remained impassive. He told her that all she had said would make sense if it was Ryan who was the wanderlust professor. It was Ryan’s girlfriend who had been killed, not his. That, she said, made it worse. Paul had been clear-headed enough to see Ryan’s pain, his fragility, for what it was, to know that men can suffer in love so they had better not fall too deep.

  He and the junior doctor split up a week later. She said he was being predicable. He told her it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Still, he thought, as he played with the lid of his marker pen, she had been nice, the doctor, and maybe she had a point all along because he felt no regret at all that they never saw each other again, not even accidentally. He had stopped it before they fell in too deep.

  The Underground map glimmered in the orange-tinged late-afternoon light that suffused his living room. Paul had desecrated it with his pink pseudo-spirals. The map was a design of acute beauty, he thought, and as he stared at the scroll he noticed the river Thames was marked on it and he wondered if it had always been there, on the map, because he was certain he had been in London one day and studied a Tube map without the river there. But he could summon no good reason why the river would be included one day and left off on another.

  Perhaps, he thought, Millie simply loved the Underground, or was a secret traveller – the way there were secret shoppers and secret diners. Perhaps she was being paid to monitor the service, the contentment of passengers. Perhaps she was being paid to look for fare dodgers or graffiti artists or drunks. There had to be a reason.

  There had to be a reason because Ryan had not been much interested in anyone after Ellen and, yes, it was not inconceivable that he had fixated upon Millie because she was mysterious and perhaps unobtainable and therefore safe, but Paul felt things were coming together for his friend. Paul would be with him soon and surely, by Christmas, Ryan would have found a way to buy the woman known as Millie a coffee.

  Chapter 10

  Naomi sat at the end of the long white refectory table, peeling the foil lid from the top of an apricot yoghurt. It made a plopping sound and a small splash of it hit her black shirt as Cappi sat down opposite her. She did not notice him, she was too busy licking her index finger and rubbing at the tiny stain. Which meant when she did look up it was to see the tall Italian staring at the damp patch near her cleavage.

  ‘Excuse,’ he said nervously and she thought his voice was far too reedy for the size of him. ‘I miss you not at the bridge,’ he said and she stared into his eyes. She would have done the refectory washing-up for free for a fortnight to have had him say that a month ago.

  ‘Yeah, well, Gordon was a bit of a creep,’ she said.

  ‘Oh,’ Cappi said. ‘I only went once this time. Ah, we can, ah, go for a walk and a drink and dinner this weekend maybe?’

  He did not appear terribly sure that this was possible, and Naomi could tell it had taken him courage to ask. It sounded as if he had been playing bridge to see her and she had been playing bridge to see him. A wave of crashing sadness engulfed her for a split second. She cursed his timidity and her own lack of courage. Right now, she was not all that keen on a walk with this shy Italian, let alone a drink or dinner.

  ‘That would be really nice,’ she said.

  Cappi beamed but said nothing.

  ‘Saturday?’ she said. ‘The nicest walks start here anyway so I’ll meet you by the main entrance at three? On Saturday?’

  Cappi took her hand, the one that had been rubbing at the splurted yoghurt, and kissed it.

  Naomi inwardly groaned. ‘Mamma fucking mia.’

  She was there on the dot of three, though, wearing her old, comfortable Doc Martens, another dark shirt, a clean one, and her best cashmere jumper casually wrapped around her waist. Cappi took her hand but she pulled it away.

  ‘OK, we are not going to be friends if you kiss my hand again. Kiss my cheek, kiss my ass, but not my hand.’

  She said this with a beaming smile lest he inwardly crumpled. Maybe, she thought, he is not a natural hand kisser, maybe he is just really, really nervous and deep down is a cool guy. There was a moment then when neither of them moved or breathed as he absorbed her words and she waited to find out how he would cope with them.

  He placed his hands in his trouser pockets and took a step back.

  ‘Are you a… lesbian?’ he said.

  Naomi blinked and then took a step back herself as she unleashed a clanging peal of laughter.

  ‘Yes,’ she shouted, ‘yes, please!’ And she turned on her heel and walked towards the park and the Serpentine, where she would buy herself an ice cream and try to not weep tears of self-pity.

  ‘So, you know how Cappi thinks you’re gay,’ she said later as Ryan pottered about the kitchen. ‘Well, he now also thinks I’m gay. I think the guy is an obsessive homophobe.’

  ‘And?’ Ryan said.

  For a few seconds, Naomi wondered if he knew. If he knew she had fallen for Hana’s Ed, that her crush on Cappi had been extinguished by a new love interest. But Ryan’s expression was one of concerned innocence. Poor Naomi.

  ‘And, to be honest, I’d gone off him anyway. Really.’

  Ryan slammed down the pan he had been scouring.

  ‘We are becoming quite ludicrous,’ he said. ‘Let’s do something stupid. Spend money we don’t have. Go to a show or something. Or a casino. Or a club.’

  They ended up at a small cinema that specialized in subtitled erotica, giggling at the self-reverential nudity and lack of plot until, suddenly bored, they walked out before the end of the film and went to eat at a cramped, overpriced restaurant in Soho that was packed with brooding couples and dripping candles.

  ‘Why are we here?’ Naomi asked.

  ‘To be deliberately self-destructive,’ Ryan said. ‘To allow a steak costing £24.50 to take our minds off our romantic issues.’

  ‘But I want the monkfish costing £26,’ she said.

  ‘Then let’s have them both,’ he said.

  ‘And Châteauneuf-du-Pape,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard of that one. It’s posh.’

  Once they had accepted the ridiculous expenditure their spontaneous Saturday night’s entertainment would be costing them, they relaxed.

  ‘Is the Cappi thing dead now?’ Ryan asked.

  ‘Yup. Is the Tube-train-girl thing still alive?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. It’s all a bit fantastical and idiotic.’

  ‘But intriguing. I mean, a lot more fascinating than a parody of an Italian lover who thinks it’s cool to kiss the back of your hand. Have you seen her lately?’

  ‘I saw her yesterday, in fact,’ Ryan said with a smirk that was meant to convey a self-deprecating smugness.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Jesus, there are no more ands. I’ve followed her, Paul’s followed her, and she doesn’t get off th
e damned thing. Except to have lunch. We know she eats. We know she’s had lunch at Paddington and at Waterloo. I’m prepared to go out on a limb here and say I bet she’s had lunch at Euston.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ Naomi said. ‘Euston’s horrible. No one eats there through choice.’

  ‘Ah, but no one sits on the Tube all day through choice, either. So I reckon she does dine at Euston.’

  Naomi chewed through a green bean. A pricy green bean that tasted, she thought, no better than her mother’s green beans.

  ‘But that’s what’s interesting, isn’t it? It’s the choice. We don’t need to know where she gets off, we need to know why she doesn’t. Maybe she has no choice.’

  The waiter looked mildly disgusted when they each paid half the bill. It was the sort of place a man brought a woman to show off or to end a relationship. Either way, it was usually the man who paid while the candles flickered in the faces of delight or sorrow.

  The faces of Ryan and Naomi were slack with booze and too much rich food as Ryan thought he might take a day off soon. Chance his luck. Give it another go. Solve the mystery; and when he did so he would most definitely not kiss the back of Millie’s hand.

  He could not bring himself to book off a day he did not need to have free, so resolved to text Naomi to tell his boss he was sick the next time Millie was on his train. That day was a full three weeks after the expensive Saturday. There was a chill in the air and he had the sense she was there less often. He had not made a chart of his sightings of her but the cooler the days, the less likely he was to sit opposite her. The Tube was full of passengers in parkas and pullovers. There was a rather stunning woman scrutinizing her phone wearing a scarlet woollen coat and matching lipstick and a small gaggle of girls in prep-school uniform wearing blue felt hats with a bold pink stripe. In the corner sat Millie wearing a dark green quilted jacket. She looked up as the girls giggled and asked their teacher if anyone needed her seat. The teacher smiled and shook her head and then Millie caught Ryan’s eye. He smiled too and she looked away, then back down at her book, without a flicker of recognition. He took sidelong glances and saw her caress the cover of her novel after she had reached its denouement.