“Hit me up anytime,” Kieran calls out, as I head off across the car park.
I raise a hand, keep walking.
•••
My route home takes me past the café. As I approach, I see Callie outside locking up, Murphy at her heels.
I’ve dropped in most days since my first visit nearly three weeks ago now. Sometimes it’s Dot who serves me, sometimes it’s Callie. But I always find myself hoping for Callie. Once or twice, I’ve even made an adolescent play for time until I can see she’s become free. Pretended to mislay my wallet, dithered over a sandwich or croissant.
I’m most unlike myself, I’ve found, whenever I’m around her.
This morning I was seated near a customer who unwisely decided to disagree with Dot on the definition of brioche (Dot’s view: it’s not a cake). Mid-debate, Callie caught my eye from another table she was serving. We both struggled not to laugh, until eventually she was forced to seek refuge behind the counter. Meanwhile, I had to put my head in my hands for fear of completely losing it.
When eventually she came to take my order, I pretended to deliberate before loudly requesting brioche. At which point she started laughing all over again.
It’s been a long time since I’ve laughed like that with anyone.
Which is why, now, I’m hesitating. Watching her turn the key, check the handle, take a final scan of the shop front. It’s a moment perfect for approaching her, inviting her out for an after-work drink. But, just in time, I check myself.
An image of Vicky’s pros-and-cons list fires like a flashbulb in my mind. I think of Kate too, before her, in bed with someone else.
My life to date: intermittent stabs at normality (school, uni, girlfriends, work) between pockets of instability (wild-eyed experiments, heavy drinking, solitude).
Honestly, dating? With someone as lovely as Callie, I wouldn’t know where to start.
Forget it. What’s the point? Ridiculous.
Besides, I’ve no actual evidence that she’d even be interested. To her I’m probably just another customer, and a slightly peculiar one at that.
So instead I just watch, like I’m peering through a keyhole into another life. Callie’s wearing a pale denim jacket now, has pulled herdark hair into a topknot. Murmuring something in a low voice to Murphy, she slips on a pair of sunglasses. And then together they start to walk away.
I experience a rare rush of wishing it were me by her side. One arm around her shoulders, high on her laughter as it mingles with mine.
9.
Callie
In early October, a fortnight or so since my evening at the pub with Ben and the others, I take the morning off work to go flat-hunting.
True to form, Ian’s first offering is a damp basement bedsit where I spot mousetraps in a kitchen cupboard. “I don’t want to live with mice, but I don’t want to break their necks either,” I confess.
Ian looks at me as if he’s never met anyone so entitled in all his life. “You’ll be homeless at this rate,” he chides—though he’s smiling like it’s funny, which it’s not.
In the living room of my next appointment—an upper-level flat in a Victorian terrace, where the landlord, Steve, wants to meet prospective tenants himself—I notice a framed picture. It’s of a dog almost identical to Murphy, made up of hundreds of tiny paw prints.
“That’s Hayley’s,” Steve says, following my eye. A personal trainer, he’s head-to-toe in gym wear. “My wife. She’s a real dog person. Actually, that reminds me—I did ask Ian to check, but you’ve not got any pets, have you?”
I cross my fingers and tell him no. It was pointless asking Ian to show me pet-friendly flats, mainly because they don’t exist.
Still, so far, I’m impressed. The street is pleasant and tree-lined—which bodes well for a dawn chorus—and only a couple over from where I live now. The rent’s fifty quid more expensive a month, but then so was the bedsit and this is easily fifty quid nicer. It’s a bit stuffy up here beneaththe rafters, but the communal hallway doesn’t smell of sick or urine, which, on a budget like mine, is depressingly rare.
“There’s outside space,” Steve says, when I ask if there’s a garden, “if that counts.”
We both know it doesn’t—thatoutside spaceis really only code for somewhere to keep the bins—but I force my face to look interested. “Oh?”
He takes me over to the kitchen window, where I stare miserably down onto another concrete nightmare, this one crazy-paved, straight out of the seventies.
I long, so much, for a lawn. Just something green to look at.
