“It’s you,” he says, crossing the car, and I take a moment to stir myself from my deep reverie.
“Oh!” I say. “Hi.” He stands above me, holding the rail above his head. He’s wearing the same aftershave he always did — intoxicating and popular, I’ve smelled it a hundred times since on passing strangers.
“I must have walked right past you.”
“No change there, then.” I was intending a lighthearted riposte, but the words come out strange and bitter.
“You have,” he says. “Changed, I mean. In a good way: you look great. You really…You look really well. Not that you didn’t look good before.” He has positioned himself so that his feet lightly touch either side of mine.
“What are you up to these days?” I say, eager to take the heat off me.
“Bit of research, bit of advising. The band takes up most of my time.” He nudges my foot with his. “Hey, you should come watch us play. We’re on tonight in Camden — I’ll put you on the guest list. It would be great to have a drink after, catch up.” His tongue gleams, caught between his teeth in a way he might think is playful. “Just you and me.”
“Oh,” I say, “tonight, I can’t. Some other time, I’ll look you guys up.”
“Coffee, then?” he says, smiling his wide, joker smile. “Surely you can spare half an hour for a coffee — for old times’ sake?” His knees now gently press into mine. Such immediate, easy intimacy!
“Sorry,” I say, with Herculean effort, dispelling dizzy scenes of emotional free fall in some glowing, foggy-windowed cafe. “I have plans. This is my stop.”
“It was great to see you,” he says as I stand up. He places a hand lightly on my waist, leaning in so his lips skim my ear. “You seem really happy.”
“I am,” I say. “I’m really happy.” And as I disembark — five stops from where I need to be — I realize that in some deep, lonely way I’d been waiting for this moment for too many years.
Signal
“Wi-Fi’s fucked.” Luke is in boxers: barefoot, bare-chested.
“It comes and it goes,” I say.
He steps hopefully around the room, cradling his laptop like a colicky infant he’s lulling to sleep.
“You’re going to make a great father,” I say, and because he’s opened his mouth to protest, I add, “When the time is right, I know, not yet.”
Dream
I’m carrying a baby in my bag, but not in any careful way: just another thing tossed in there with my phone, my hairbrush, my purse and my keys.
Friday night
I’m at Sarah’s — the same flat I shared with her before Luke and I bought our place, five years ago. She’s had a series of quiet PhD-student flatmates since, but tomorrow Paddy’s moving in, so tonight I’m here to mark her last night of freedom with wine and a dinner of potato chips.
“The TV was a deal-breaker.” Sarah nods at the huge, sleek flat screen sitting in place of the tiny ancient box on which we used to watch Friends. “I was a bit sad to get rid of the little box.”
“No antenna issues with that beast, though, I bet.” We had been obsessed with making tiny adjustments to the antenna to get the picture spot on. “Remember when we’d got it just perfect and then Luke came along and ruined it?” On his second ever visit to the flat, Luke had seized the cable, asking what it was for, and Sarah and I cried out in horror as it fell from his startled fingers.
“Bloody Luke. It was never as good after that,” says Sarah.
“He’s lucky I didn’t end things right there and then. So”—I lean forward to press up some chip crumbs with a fingertip—“how are you feeling about living with Paddy?”
She smiles. “Don’t laugh, but I’m ridiculously excited about all the stupid little things you probably take for granted. Like cooking a big pot of chili together and freezing it in batches.”
I nod energetically, dosing our glasses with wine. “I know exactly what you mean. There’s something so appealing and…primal about that: stirring a bubbling pot with your mate, storing up food for the winter. You know that bit in Little House on the Prairie—or was it the one in the woods? When they smoked and salted the deer meat?” Sarah nods, but I think she’s indulging me. “That was my favorite part. The first summer I read it, I begged my dad for weeks to build me a smokehouse in the garden. He refused.”
“I can’t imagine on what possible grounds.”
“I know. So unreasonable.” I take a sip of my wine and sigh. “Luke and I have tried all that batch-freezing business, but we cannot seem to get it together. We’ll forget to put in a crucial ingredient, or leave it in the freezer so long it becomes completely inedible. We have some fish pie in the bottom drawer that I swear is more than three years old.”
Sarah looks forlorn. “Claire! You’re killing my dream!”
“No. Hey.” I put down my glass and take her face in my hands. “Listen to me. You will be fine. You have a pension. And a car. You and Paddy will do the chili thing: I believe in you, okay?” She nods, and I release her, returning to my glass, which I press to my cheek. “It still amazes me sometimes that I’m allowed to live on my own without proper adult supervision. Isn’t it sort of incredible we can do whatever we want, whenever we want? Have potato chips for dinner.”
“Not go to work.”
“Ouch.”
“Sorry, sorry, that came out wrong. I’m just jealous you get to lie in.”
“Actually, I get up earlier now than I ever did when I had a job.”
“Really?”
I nod. It’s not a total fabrication: maybe two days out of five I’m out of bed by seven thirty if Luke’s had an early start, and as far as I’m concerned, that’s good enough to make the claim. “Figuring out what to do is way harder than my old job. I cannot believe how quickly the days go.”
“Dare I ask…where have you got to with it all?”
“Um, nowhere?” I say, tipping two more bags of chips in the bowl — paprika, and chicken and thyme — shuffling them gently to let the flavors mingle. “I feel as if every decision I’ve made has cut off possibilities rather than broadened them. What if I’d make an amazing potter but will never know because I never tried it?”
“We could take a class? I’d be up for that.”
“But the same goes for everything: photography, gardening. Butchery! I can’t take a class in everything.”
Sarah sloshes her glass toward me, managing somehow not to spill a drop. “I really think you have to believe in yourself. Trust your instincts. None of those things ever appealed before, so why would you want to take them further now?”
I consider this. “But you didn’t always know you wanted to teach. Did you?” I look over. Sarah’s frozen at the coffee table: eyes wide and cheeks bulging, trying to gain control of a huge clutch of chips between fingers and mouth. “Good God,” I say. “If Paddy could see you now.”
She shoves in the remainder, laughing.
“That is why I can’t allow potato chips in the house,” she manages once she’s recovered, dusting off her hands against her jeans. “With teaching…I don’t know. I’ve always loved kids. I enjoyed school, and I suppose I liked the fact I’d been through it myself.”
“You make it sound so simple and logical. Why can’t I make those sorts of connections? Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”
“Of course not.”