Seb shrugs. ‘Don’t worry.’
She covers the smile that rises to her mouth. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry.’
And suddenly, the karaoke host is calling Seb’s name, and Seb is turning from her, then turning back, his mouth dropping open a little. He’s looking at Clara, and he’s shaking his head with a face that says he can’t believe she’s done this.
‘It wasn’t me,’ she says, with an exaggerated shrug.
It’s an older song. The woman at the next table recognises itfrom its opening chords, a seductive twang of acoustic guitar. Echo & The Bunnymen. ‘The Killing Moon’.
Seb knows it, too. ‘How did you know I liked this song?’
‘I took a guess,’ she says. ‘I thought it would suit your voice.’
He sounds distant. ‘Good guess.’
She stares back at him. ‘Must be fate.’
The word ripples out from her, washes over him. And it’s as if the air between them is thrumming now, as if the table itself and the drinks upon it are vibrating with the frequency of what is happening here. It’s been a long time since the woman at the next table last fell in love, but she’s sure that it looks something like this: a young woman rising from a table and heading towards a stage, reaching out a hand behind her and beckoning. A young man, rising to meet her, knowing he wouldn’t do this for anyone else.
‘Are you coming?’ Clara says.
As if there was any question. They stand close as they sing, hopelessly out of tune, not caring one bit. They share one mic, their lips almost touching. By the time they’re done, their fingers are interlinked, and they move as one through the busy pub and out into the dark night. The woman at the next table watches them go, watches them linger on the pavement. Under an enormous moon, anything could happen.
her upstairs neighbour
So much of her life spent squeezing past. Squeezing past passers-by on tube platforms and in tube carriages on the way to see her daughter north of the river, most of these strangers taller than her, all of them acting like she isn’t even there. Squeezing past her husband behind the stainless-steel counter of her brother-in-law’s takeaway, customers bellowing orders through the steamy air. Squeezing past her neighbours in these narrow corridors, the ones that form the nervous system of this block on this Stockwell estate where she’s lived for her entire adult life, this narrow corridor leading to a narrow staircase, which leads to the narrow hallway beneath this one, and so on and so on until you’ve zig-zagged your way to the post boxes and the electricity meters and, finally, the door to the outside world. The building in which her children grew up, until time squeezed them out.
Yesterday, traipsing home from a long day in clothes smelling of fryer oil, she had squeezed past the cyclist who lives two floors down, struggled to move for the folding bike that took up all the available space. The day before that, laden with straining plastic bags of bok choi and baijiu, daikon and doubanjiang,she had squeezed past the young solicitor who lives on the top floor, his umbrella dripping rainwater on to the slippers she’d changed into at the front door. And tonight, on her way out to help her husband close down, she finds herself squeezing past the girl who lives on the floor below.
This girl is like the others, but she is not like them. She has a flatmate, yes, but she always seems alone. Always lost in her own head, yet ready with a smile when she finally swims to the surface and sees you. She will say hello, this girl. She will ask you questions, and not just the obvious – how are you, do you need help with that – but real questions, about your day, about your story. The others come and go without a word, with their packed-out flat parties and their parents’ cars filled with flat-packed furniture, moving them in and out, in and out, replacing them with others who also treat her home as nothing more than a passing place.
‘Hello.’ A smile.
‘Hello.’ A nod.
They greet each other politely, she and the girl in the denim shorts and the black tights, her hair mussed and her eyeliner smudged. There’s something different in the girl’s smile tonight. Her cheeks are flushed, her eyes bright. As they pass, the girl seems almost self-conscious, her smile turning inwards. She touches her bottom lip with two fingers. The neighbour turns briefly to watch her go. When the girl sees who is outside her flat, her hand drops.
He’d already been there when the neighbour arrived downstairs, this ginger boy. The kind of boy who rings random buzzers until someone lets him in, who lounges in the corridorlike the entire building belongs to him. He’s got that look about him, of owning everything. It’s there, in the carefully creased shirt and the pale, thin face that tilted upwards only to look down on the neighbour as she passed by. His expression was empty, cold. Then he saw the girl coming, and he made sure to lift it, as if he could do so by pulling a string. His even teeth flashed. His light fingers tousled his floppy hair.
‘Jacob?’ the girl says.
‘Babe.’ His voice, affecting an air of concern. His hands, taking her by the elbows. ‘I came to apologise.’
his bandmate
‘So that’s it?’ Ryan says. ‘It’s over?’
He lets his guitar hang slack from his shoulder. If it wasn’t too on the nose, he’d play a mournful chord. But no one is listening. Seb has the floor, and he’s telling the story of the girl with whom he shared the perfect date – and from whom he never heard again.
‘Never?’ Nimesh says.
‘Never ever,’ Seb says. ‘I texted her. Tried to call. Quite a few times, actually. Nothing.’
Seb sits, as per usual, at the helm of his drum kit, and looks, as per usual, totally fucking miserable. He’s pinching tobacco from a pouch, with a cigarette filter held between his lips. His grim face, his too-small beanie hat and the rain-spattered window through which he’s been staring all call to mind a sailor recounting an ill-fated voyage at sea. He doesn’t usually talk this much.
‘It sounds like you really liked her,’ says Smudge from the sofa, a bowl of Cookie Crisp balanced on his chest.
‘I did,’ Seb says. He flicks open an old army-surplus lighter.
