There’s a stage in the corner, an abandoned mic sitting lonely in the middle of it. Seb leans back in his chair, nods towards it.
‘So, what?’ he says. ‘Are we going to sing again?’
Clara follows his gaze. She shakes her head. ‘I meant more like—’ She bites her lip. ‘We could get out of here. You and me.’
Seb swirls the dregs of his drink, then sighs. ‘What’s going on, Clara? We’ve done this all before.’
‘We can do it again.’
‘It doesn’t work like that,’ he says. ‘I’m not spontaneous like you.’
‘Say what you really mean.’
‘I don’t change my mind,’ Seb says. ‘How do I know you won’t change yours again?’
‘You don’t,’ she says. ‘But I won’t.’
Seb doesn’t say anything.
‘You don’t think I’m good for you.’ Her voice has an air of incredulity.
‘I don’t think we’d be good for each other.’
Clara laughs a humourless laugh. ‘The jobless drummer with all the tattoos,’ she says. ‘Don’t tell me you’re not impulsive.’
Seb narrows his eyes. ‘Did you just call me jobless?’
‘You’re a big boy,’ she says. ‘You’ll get over it.’
The air has become charged with a different kind of frustration. Seb is rigid, his arms tensed. Clara is leaning towards him, fingers gripping the edges of her chair. They look as if it’s taking all their effort not to sweep everything off the table, to pounce on one another. The teacher feels a pressure bearing down on him suddenly, so intense that it gives him a start. He looks down, realises that their dog is pressing its damp little chin into his leg. It looks like Hairy Maclary, a tangled black furball out of which eyes dart from the teacher to his chips.
At the next table, the moment has passed.
‘Look,’ Seb says, his voice more measured. ‘I’m grateful foryour help. And I think…’ He taps a green packet of tobacco nervously on the tabletop. ‘Maybe we could be friends.’
‘I don’t want to be friends,’ Clara says.
They lock eyes. Seb looks like he might say something, but the words seem to escape him.
‘What are you afraid of?’ Clara says.
The teacher returns to his students’ papers. He’s got a dollop of ketchup on the page, and no matter how hard he scrubs, it won’t come off. What are you afraid of? He flips his phone over, opens the chat. Two hours and still no response. The dog’s chin is pressing so hard that it’s painful, now, like a wrestler digging in an elbow to force his opponent into submission. The teacher relents and sneaks the dog a couple of mouthfuls.
A chair scrapes back and Clara stands abruptly. Then she leaves without saying a word. Seb watches her go, powerless to keep her, unable to tell her to stay. The teacher catches his eye, looks quickly away, his gaze alighting first on the exam papers, then on the vibrating phone in front of him. An incoming call. He moves so fast to answer it that he sends papers flurrying to the floor.
a statue
Covent Garden in the early evening, as seen through the eyes of a man levitating two feet off the ground. He hangs here in the air, entirely still, hovering with the help of a hidden stool artfully wired to travel up the back of one silver trouser leg and end in the seat of his silver pants. He has spent years mastering his breath, banishing all thoughts of pins and needles, dead legs and twitching nostrils. An art, when your face is spray-painted silver. He has become a piece of stone, breaking the spell only to tweak the nose of a child posing for a photograph, or to bow and tip his silver hat at the sound of loose change landing in the silver bucket at his feet. He never turns his head, so can only stare directly in front of him, and can only see what is dead ahead. One segment of one cobbled street off the square, and the blur of colours that passers-by become when they disappear into his peripheral vision, before they’re lost to the crowds of London.
He sees this: one half of each shopfront opposite. Half of a chocolate shop, half of a clothing retailer. Between the two, a single column of thick white brick with a CCTV camera affixed to the top. Bins, bollards, flowerbox planters and, among itall, people rushing from right to left and left to right, into the station and out of it, out of the square and in, from one eye into the other, then into obscurity. There’s a break in the crowd, and into it emerges a young woman: early twenties, downcast, a jumper for a dress and chunky black boots. She walks purposefully, muttering to herself, tucking her bleached hair over and again behind one ear. She has almost passed out of his field of vision when something else appears. A black dog, gambolling towards the young woman on short, fuzzy legs. And after it, a young man, his much longer legs making purposeful strides, the dog’s lead in one hand, the other hand outstretched. He’s tall, wearing a black T-shirt. When he calls her name, he calls it loudly and clearly. She hasn’t stopped walking yet, and she doesn’t get the time to turn. He’s taking her arm. He’s turning her around. She is surprised, but not for long. As he looks into her eyes, as his hand finds its place on her waist and causes her jumper to rise over her laddered tights, her own fingers rise to his neck. She holds his face, gold rings against dark stubble. She stands on her tiptoes to meet him.
They’re frozen in the moment, kissing as if it was always supposed to happen like this.
her flatmate
Ren is struggling to sleep. It’s a hot night, and the noise of the city is pouring in through the tiny rectangle of a window flung open as far as it will go. People melt together on balconies across the estate, mingle in the packed smoking areas of Brixton and beyond. Here on her bed, Ren tosses and turns in a faded Talking Heads T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts. She has no idea of the time, only that it’s no longer yesterday. She is not Clara, happiest when pulling an all-nighter. Ren values her sleep, does not see mornings as something to suffer through. She likes getting up early, making things and growing things and doing things by herself. There is no greater joy than spending time out on their cramped balcony with her budding collection of potted plants, tending to the closest thing she’s ever had to a garden. She exists out there, more than anywhere else.
A creaking on the stairs. Ren cocks her head, fingertips grazing the rumpled sheet beneath her. The sound of searching hands, an unsteady grasp. A key turning in a lock, a latch sliding in a groove. As the front door opens, someone shushes someone else. Ren knows that one of these someones is Clara,because Ren knows all of Clara’s noises. How couldn’t she, when they’ve lived together in so many flats with paper-thin walls? She can discern the drone of a foreign film playing on Clara’s sticker-strewn laptop, or the scrape of a spoon that signals she is having cereal for dinner, again. Thetap-tap-tapof Clara typing away furiously at a treatment, or the crunch of a drawing she’s not happy with, screwed up and thrown across the room into the overflowing bin beneath her desk. The sound that Clara makes when she’s touching herself and trying to keep it a secret. The sound of Clara smuggling a boy in.
