One night after shutting up the shop I drove around between King’s Cross and the North Circular for two and a half hours, just cruising, looking for the girl. From the back she looked like millions of other girls so I was forever slowing down and rubbernecking. I was lucky not to get picked up by the police. Each time I sighted a black Mini down a side street I’d make a late turn and check it out.
Held up by roadworks on the A10 in between Tottenham and Wood Green I remembered something that made me realise I was probably wasting my time. Years ago in a Crouch End pub I’d sat mesmerised for half an hour by a girl drinking with another girl at a nearby table. When her friend accidentally knocked over the ashtray, the first girl and I had exchanged a look and she had smiled at me. I formulated a dozen chat-up lines but lacked the nerve to use any of them. She had dark brown hair tied back with a faded silk scarf and was wearing old jeans and a tan-coloured T-shirt that was cut pretty low for the time. When they got up to go I was looking at her and she smiled at me again. The smile was so friendly I felt certain she would have listened to me if I’d tried to strike up a last-minute conversation. All it needed was a remark about the pub or the warm weather but I dried and she walked out of my life. I followed her discreetly out of the pub and watched as she and her friend split and walked in separate directions. It was a Saturday lunchtime, the sun was beating down and this girl was right there. I’m not saying I’m a catch, but you know when someone’s given you a look, and all I had to do was catch up with her, apologise for staring in the pub and see where it went from there. Instead I watched her wait at a bus stop, climb on board a W7 and disappear in the direction of Muswell Hill.
I went back every Saturday lunchtime for the next eight weeks but never saw her again.
As the lights changed to green and I slipped through the single lane section of the A10 I wondered if my search for the hybrid girl would end the same way. There were at least six million people crammed into the capital and I was hoping to catch sight of one of them. It doesn’t matter that you can bump into one of your oldest friends on Neal Street when you haven’t seen him for twenty years or that you can recognise the same complete stranger two days running in Tube stations at either end of the underground system — you never come across whoever it is you want to see, especially if you’re out there looking for them.
I took a left and headed back towards home. It was dark now and I tried to concentrate on the road but I kept looking around at everything. I noticed a man who’d paused in the act of drawing his curtains together in a first floor flat above a bookmaker’s. He was gazing at the horizon above the row of shops opposite.
I was growing tired of driving but snapped awake when I saw two great gasholders on my right. I checked the rearview mirror and slowed down. There was a turning into a gravel driveway which ended at a pair of wire-mesh gates. Slowly I swung around, turned in and scrunched to a halt on the gravel. When I switched off the engine I could hear my heart beating. For five minutes I didn’t move from the car but just watched the gasholders for any sign of movement. There was a slight breeze which disturbed the tops of the trees but nothing else. I stepped out of the car and closed the door quietly, then approached the gates. When I’d been here with the girl she had used a key to unlock the padlock which now barred my way. But not for long. I climbed up the gate using the pointy toes of my cowboy boots to gain footholds in the wire mesh. I teetered at the top and dropped down in a crouch on the other side.
Unlike the last time, which had felt like a dream and may, for all I knew, even have been one, now I knew I was trespassing.
I looked around for any reaction to my break-in and once satisfied I was unobserved I moved off at a low run in the direction of the nearest gasholder. I’m not a small man and the noise generated by my progress was deafening: sticks, litter, gravel, puddles. My size elevens came into contact with every obstacle and I considered the wisdom of getting hold of a pair of trainers if this sort of thing was going to become a regular feature. I might still have stashed away somewhere the baseball boots I used for the courier job.
The gasholder blocked out the light. The street lighting, obscured by trees, was poor anyway. There were a couple of big floodlights on the other side of the gasholder but now I was in its shadow. I don’t know what was scaring me more — the idea of getting caught or of finding the girl — but I could have done with a hot bath, a cold Sapporo and a neck rub. I went up to the base of the gasholder and reached out to touch it. My finger withdrew abruptly in a reflex reaction, though the metal wasn’t hot. I had felt something, a slight jarring, maybe the displacement of gas inside. Now I pressed the flat of my palm against the metal wall and felt nothing apart from the ghost of that first reaction.
I laid my other hand on the metal and thought about how I was tapping into a system that ran the length and breadth of the country. Millions of feet of pipes carrying fuel from gasworks to homes and industry, hundreds of gasholders storing and supplying gas according to requirements, themselves literally rising and falling with demand.
Within half an hour I was back in the flat with a beer and a Chinese, watching ice-skating recorded a couple of nights earlier. I’d already started watching it the night before but I’d been so tired I’d fallen asleep. I’d kept waking myself up and managing to watch a minute or two at most and then my eyes had closed again. For some reason, even though it’s a recording and you can watch it any time, you try to watch it all the way through, even when you’re clearly too tired. You know you’d enjoy it more if you waited. But still you persist.
There was an Italian girl skating. Sveva Ricciardi. I remembered the name from the night before. She was putting together a fairly ordinary free programme, which I felt sure I’d seen the night before, when suddenly she jumped a quad. The commentator was as surprised as I was. ‘It’s a quad! Ricciardi jumped a quad!’
I moved to the edge of my seat.
The thing was, she hadn’t done that the night before.
The obvious explanation was I’d slept through it the night before. But a small part of me felt sure I’d been awake throughout her performance. I even remembered her score coming up at the end. A string of 5.8s and a 5.9 from the Austrian judge.
So I could have fallen asleep for a second. A microsleep. That’s all it needed.
But the other thing that happened was that no sooner had she landed than the phone rang. I stretched and picked it up, said hello a couple of times but there was no one there. That was no coincidence. Or I was becoming paranoid, and I didn’t buy that.
The Italian girl jumps a quad. The phone rings and there’s no one there. Again.
I keyed in Annie Risk’s number.
‘Hello?’ she said. I loved the way she said that.
‘Hi. It’s Carl. Listen, was that you? Did you just ring me?’
There was silence for a moment before she answered. ‘What?’ She said it wasn’t her but we talked for a while. I said I hoped she didn’t mind me ringing her this late and she said it was always a pleasure. I smiled at that and asked if I could go up and see her for the weekend, not expecting her to say yes. So I was gobsmacked when she said, ‘Yes, OK. I’m not doing anything this weekend.’
‘I’ll come up on Saturday evening,’ I said, aware I mustn’t seem over-keen.