‘I’m just saying,’ Ren is saying. ‘If you’re drawing strangers, you can’t get annoyed at people taking pictures of strangers.’
Clara is holding the now-crumpled can in her hand, arranging it like a sculpture. ‘It’s not the same.’
‘It’s exactly the same! He’s a photographer,’ Ren says. ‘They take photos.’
‘Of women?’ Clara says. ‘Without permission?’
‘Did you get this guy’s permission?’ Ren says. ‘To draw him?’
‘A drawing is different.’ A pause. ‘And I didn’t say it was a guy.’
Neither of them says anything else for a while. They have a habit of talking without speaking. The pair of them live together, arrive at work together, leave together. Elizabeth sometimes wonders if they’re conspiring against her.
‘I’m interested in people,’ Clara says.
And something flickers over her face, as if looking like she cares is a cardinal sin. Elizabeth’s co-founder had once described Clara’s look as one of ‘studied disarray’, a high-minded way of saying he wanted to sleep with her despite her being twenty years his junior. Everyone wants Clara, because she’s beautiful, and because she makes it known that she doesn’t care about anything, including the fact that she’s beautiful. How unprofessional, to turn up to the office every day in scuffed Vans and faded jeans, a slacker hoodie and a jacketwhich, vintage or not, looks like it’s falling apart at the seams. Elizabeth supposes that Clara is trying to be edgy when she dresses like a boy. When Elizabeth had invited her to a glitzy industry do, Clara had turned up in a baggy white shirt and men’s trousers. Elizabeth, in sequined dress and stilettos, had felt like Clara was mocking her.
‘So, what did he say?’ Ren says, without looking up from her screen.
‘Who?’
‘The guy you drew.’
The song has changed. Elizabeth has already stood up, smoothed out her blouse and taken her first steps towards the telling-off she’s about to give Clara. But just then, Clara glances over at her, those bright eyes holding her in place. At the same moment, Elizabeth notices the plane tickets in her in-tray, accompanied by a handwritten note. Clara’s handwriting. Elizabeth falters, sits back in her chair.
‘He asked me what I was going to do with it,’ Clara says.
‘And what did you say?’ Ren asks.
‘Nothing.’
‘And him?’
‘He asked if he could have it.’
‘And?’
‘I said, sure.’
the barista
Growing up, the barista had always assumed that living in London would be like a romantic comedy. She’d sat cross-legged as a child in her mother’s apartment in Prague and watchedFour Weddings and a Funeral; she’d seenNotting Hillas an impressionable teenager at Cinema City. By then, she’d known that love looked like London, and that London was the place to find it. Five years here, and she’s still looking.
‘Two cappuccinos for…’ She frowns at the writing on the cup. ‘Lawrence?’
‘Right here,’ he says.
Lawrence has a long neck with a pronounced Adam’s apple, hair thinning on top. She imagines him in aYou’ve Got Mailscenario with the woman sitting at the end of the counter, adjusting her thick-rimmed glasses as she types on a sturdy laptop. The barista likes to do this, to make up stories about her patrons. She spends her days working in a franchise café on Tottenham Court Road, and she’s thankful for anything that helps pass the time. When she looks at her customers – this portly businessman tapping away on his BlackBerry, that paint-spattered woman with the artist’s satchel, rolling her eyes – shemakes matches, sees love stories waiting to happen. Lawrence leaves the café. The woman with the glasses goes her own way. Sometimes, it just isn’t meant to be.
As the barista cleans the spout of the milk frother and gets to work on her next order, her eyes alight on a man standing on the other side of the window, taking the last drag of a rolled-up cigarette before grinding it into the pavement with the heel of his Converse. Could he be a romantic lead? The only thing he has in common with Hugh Grant is that his hair is floppy, though it is almost jet black, tamed only by a pair of heavy black headphones. She can’t imagine him having much to say. He looks too taciturn for impassioned monologues about affection and yearning and being bewitched, body and soul, in the beating-down rain. The man ducks through the doorway, leading his dog to the counter and knitting his dark eyebrows together as he reads the menu above her head. He’s the kind of tall that makes you stop what you’re doing and look up.
‘Cappuccino for…’ She drags her eyes downwards, to the cup on the counter in front of her. ‘Clara?’
A young woman steps forward. Could she be the one? She’s neither a Minnie Driver nor a Julia Roberts. Her hair is so blond it’s almost white. She reaches out to take the coffee, rings on every finger of her hand. Each of her ears is pierced all over. Her nose is pierced, too, and it twitches like a squirrel’s when she smiles. There’s something skittish about her, like she’s already caffeinated enough. But the smile is disarmingly genuine. It seems at odds with the rings, the studs, the armour.
‘Thank you,’ says Clara.
But the barista is once again looking at the tall man, because the tall man is looking at Clara. His eyebrows have relaxed, and suddenly, his face does indeed look like one that could yearn, one that could find itself bewitched. As if automatically, he pulls off his headphones, leaves them dangling around his neck. Could it be?
