“Hey,” he says. “What’s up?”
I tell him about the girl. “What do you think?”
“You left her there on her own?”
I snatch up my keys. “Is that bad?”
“Her parents must be going crazy. Did you call the police?”
I pause on the stairs, one foot dangling midair. “Her parents?” Then I realize. “Hang on, she’s our age.”
“Ohhh. You said girl. I assumed child.” I sink down onto the stairs, rest my head against the banister spindles. “Well then,” he continues, “she’s probably fine. Maybe she had a fight with her boyfriend or something.”
“Mm,” I say, chewing at the skin around my little finger. “Maybe.”
“If you’re going to lose sleep over it, why don’t you go back and ask her?”
“I might get into something too big to handle — I mean, she was really upset,” I say. “Hey, what was so funny?”
“What?”
“You were laughing when you answered the phone.”
“Was I? Oh. Can’t remember. Probably nothing.”
When we hang up, I run back downstairs to see if the girl is still there, but she’s gone.
Unrest
Sleep and wakefulness bicker all night and I think, Why can’t you two just get along?
Bowling
My ex-colleagues invite me to a bowling night to celebrate three birthdays that all fall in the same week. There are drinks at the office beforehand. It’s the first time I’ve been back since I left, and the place is different, though I can’t figure out what’s changed. I go and look at my old desk, which is now immaculately kept by my successor: a young (but balding) gun named Jonathan. His default expression is one of sulky surprise, which I put down to the premature departure of his hair, because he’s certainly not at all curious to meet me.
“I’m Claire. I used to be you,” I say, holding a hand out to him, “or you’re the new me, depending how you look at it.”
“You didn’t do digital, though,” he says, hooking a small plastic bag onto the wrist of my extended hand, before taking my fingers in a limp, damp shake. “Did you?”
“No.” I’d spent much of my last year dodging digital, insisting that it wasn’t in my skill set. “What’s this?”
“You somehow managed to miss all that stuff when you cleared out my desk,” says Jonathan, typing so fast he looks like he’s faking, though I can see on his monitor he’s not. His WPM rate must be insane. I look in the bag, which is weighed down with coppers and small denominations of foreign currency. There are also some bobby pins, a disintegrating London A — Z, a bunch of receipts and some pay stubs with my name on them. I notice a few of the latter have been opened, something I never bothered to do.
“You really didn’t need to keep this, but thanks anyway,” I say. “You could have chucked it.” I have so many similar plastic bags at home, full of not-quite-rubbish I can’t bear to throw away.
“Do what you need to do. Wait.” He reaches over to his corkboard and unpins a sheaf of paper. “Also yours.”
I flick through it and my face burns. They’re all the personal emails sent in error to my work account since I left: weeks and weeks worth of invitations to brunch and dinner parties, and a thread entitled “Tuesday Drinkies,” ten-odd pages of my school friends’ plans to meet up for a drink. A glimpse of the final page reveals the discussion has devolved into farmyard-animal puns.
“Wow,” I say, “don’t you have my new email address? You can just forward this stuff to me.”
“Somewhere,” he says, resuming his virtuosic typing. “I thought it would be easier this way. Do it all in one go, post them on to you with that other stuff. None of them seemed like they were that urgent.”
“Well…delete anything else that comes in, will you?” I say, dropping the emails in his recycling box.
—
At the bowling alley, there’s a company tab. I feel bad availing myself of it and end up buying a round for eight people that makes my heart race when I hand over my card. No one even knows I paid for it — they hardly say thank you when I set down the tray.
I open with a half-strike that turns out to be a fluke: my next five balls go straight in the gutter.
“How’s the job hunt?” my old boss, Geri, asks, frowning at her bowling shoes while we await our turn. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her in flats.
“Slow, but it’s going, just about. I don’t want to rush into anything, end up somewhere I don’t want to be.”
“We must have been paying you too much,” she says, “if you can afford that luxury!”
“I have savings. Anyway, some things are bigger than money.”
“Striiiike!” she says, thrusting her index fingers high as Jonathan’s ball blasts through the pins. He’s turned away already, swigging a beer. “Aw,” she continues, patting my knee, “we do miss you! Jono’s brilliant, an absolute whiz kid, but between you and me, he can’t make coffee for shit.”
—
When I leave, everyone is dancing. The song “9 to 5” has come on the jukebox and I slip away as they all join in with the chorus, feeling like a fraud. On the Tube home, I pull out the pay stubs from my little plastic bag, and see one of Jonathan’s has got in by mistake. I’m pleased until I open it and discover he’s only making a grand less per year than I had been, even though he’s twenty-two and I was in the job for over six years.
Probably nothing
I log in to Luke’s emails to see if we’ve paid the gas bilclass="underline" I have the gas supplier’s reminder letter open on the table as proof. My eye alights on an email dated three weeks ago, from his colleague Fiona: no subject, just a link to some article from a medical journal. She has signed off “xoxo,” which makes me think even less of her.
Buddleia
Colin Mason, MBE, has erected some scaffolding outside our building. It doesn’t look in the least official or sturdy, and seeing him creaking around up there makes me a little nervous. I hurry past, not wanting to be drawn into conversation, but he’s either forgotten who I am or has no further business with me.
The next day, the scaffolding has gone, but the buddleia remains, waving gently in the breeze.
Progress
More than forty years since man walked on the moon, yet still no truly viable alternative to bread.
Déjà vu
As I’m eating lunch with Sarah in a cafe near the school where she works, she talks about Paddy and how happy she is. Her experience of him seems so far removed from the sullen nail-chewer I’ve encountered thus far that I have to confront the possibility my judgment might be wide of the mark this time.
“I’ve never met someone who knows so much about everything. The other day, right, I told him about my hay fever and he said I should eat local honey to counteract the symptoms. Local honey.” She’s shaking her head. “He doesn’t even have hay fever himself.”
“I’ve heard that before,” I say, and then, “Oh my God, so weird: this has happened before. You and me, sitting here talking about this, me telling you I’ve heard about local honey before.”
“No,” says Sarah firmly, leaving absolutely no room for debate. “It definitely hasn’t happened. I’d never heard of it until Paddy told me.”