Our Stop

by Laura Jane Williams

  ‘It’s fun!’ Gaby said. ‘Cute!’ She thought about it some more and then added, ‘Plus, if some rando came up to you on your commute, would you honestly even give him the time of day?’

  Nadia smiled. ‘No. I’d think he was a creep.’

  ‘Me too.’

  ‘Urgh!’ Nadia exhaled. ‘I’m just trying to manage my romantic expectations, you know? I don’t even know if I could stand another first date …’

  Nadia made a noise that was like a gag of repulsion, summing up the many emotions of a serial dater in as succinct a way as any. But, even as she did that, her heart skipped a little beat. When a first date went right, it was the most magical, hopeful feeling in the world. A feeling of the gods smiling on her, of recognizing herself in somebody else. She once heard that love shouldn’t be called ‘falling’, because the best love roots you, and makes you grow upwards, taller and stronger. She’d seen that happen with her mum and step-dad, after her biological father had left. Her old colleague and friend Naomi and Naomi’s husband Callum embodied it. Her direct boss in her first job, Katherine, was the most charismatic, well-adjusted woman Nadia had ever had the honour of being mentored by, and Katherine often said she had got to be where she was at work because of the team she was part of at home. All of them said they knew early on that they’d met the person they wanted to spend their lives with, and committed, together, to making it work. Tim had said that about Deena, too.

  ‘No – you couldn’t stand another bad first date,’ said Gaby. ‘But what if this was the last first date you ever had, because it was so good?’

  Nadia was grateful that Gaby was playing to her more romantic inclinations, because she was enjoying imagining what would happen if she met the love of her life through a newspaper ad. How they’d laugh about it, and be forever united in their appreciation of big gestures and taking chances. But Nadia was suddenly suspicious too: Gaby was usually sceptical and pithy about love, priding herself on dating man after man but not needing any of them. It wasn’t like her to coax anyone into believing fairy tales were real.

  ‘What’s made you such a romantic all of a sudden?’ Nadia asked, eyes narrowed. ‘You’re supposed to be my cynical friend.’

  Gaby shrugged, non-committal. ‘What are you working on today?’ she said, by way of reply.

  ‘Now who’s changing the subject!’

  ‘Don’t get smart with me, Fielding.’

  Nadia made a mental note to follow up with Gaby later on her sudden softening. Something was different about her, now she thought about it. Nadia was a tart for her work, though, and so was seduced by her own vanity into talking about it.

  ‘It’s crunch time on the prototypes for the fulfilment centres soon. That newspaper exposé really damaged the stock price and John wants actual humans out of the role as soon as possible to get the whole thing boxed off as an HR issue. Which sucks for the thousands of people who don’t know they’re going to be unemployed by Christmas …’

  ‘Oh, that’s hard. That’s really hard,’ Gaby said.

  ‘I feel bad, yeah. I’m building robots to replace humans, and … well. It’s so conflicting, you know?’

  The lift pinged back open, and seeing that it was going up, Nadia stepped in.

  ‘To be continued?’ said Gaby.

  ‘To be continued,’ said Nadia. ‘I’d like to maybe brainstorm ideas about making sure everyone gets jobs elsewhere? I’d like to help.’

  ‘Sure!’ Gaby said, adding: ‘Maybe over lunch this week? Wednesday? I’ve got a lunch meeting tomorrow. We’ve not been across to Borough in ages. And we’re not done talking about this missed connection.’

  ‘Stop talking to Emma about my love life!’

  Nadia could hear Gaby giggling even as the lift went up.

  4

  Daniel

  ‘You’ve been infatuated with her for months, mate. Today is a big day!’

  Lorenzo had called him at work, despite being asked not to. But Lorenzo hated his job and got bored easily and liked winding up his flatmate and also feigning busyness at his own desk, at a publishing house north of the river. Plus, he was charming enough to persuade the receptionist, Percy, to connect the call, even though Daniel had given Percy numerous and explicit instructions not to. Lorenzo enjoyed practising his charm and getting his own way. Reaching Daniel at his office was another way for him to show off.

  ‘She’s not bloody seen it, though,’ Daniel hissed down the phone.

  ‘Can you change the adjectives and send it again, for somebody else you’ve spotted? Throw enough shit and something will stick,’ Lorenzo said, and Daniel was about 70 per cent sure he wasn’t joking. Lorenzo said he wanted a relationship, but from what Daniel had seen his requirements for dating were that she had a pulse, and didn’t talk too much. It was very Lorenzo of him to suggest simply trying the same tactic with another woman.

  ‘Go and sell some books,’ Daniel retorted.

  ‘Can’t be arsed, mate. Still on a comedown.’

  Daniel hated that Lorenzo did coke Thursday through Sunday. He never did it at home, Lorenzo promised, but Daniel was still the one made to put up with his mood swings as he scaled the walls and then festered on the sofa for the first half of the week – even if he did watch great telly as he did it. Lorenzo was a good bloke, but didn’t half make some choices that Daniel couldn’t help but think weren’t exactly sound. It was so frustrating to be witness to. They’d ended up living together through a SpareRoom.co.uk advert Lorenzo had put up, and Daniel had his suspicions from the beginning that they were a bit chalk and cheese, but the location of the flat and the rent price were basically perfect, so Daniel had made a decision to largely overlook their differences, not quite becoming friends, but certainly becoming more than just strangers who lived together. They had forged their own, very particular, double act, and until Daniel had a place of his own, it did the job.

  ‘I’m going now,’ Daniel said. ‘I’ve got actual work to do. I’ll see you at home.’

  Lorenzo was still talking as he put the phone down. Not seconds later, Daniel’s mobile flashed with a message. It was Lorenzo.

  Well done on having the balls, mate, it said. That was Lorenzo’s way of saying, I know you hate it when I’m a twat but I can’t help it. Daniel double-tapped it and gave it a thumbs-up.

  Daniel resumed idly scrolling through the emails on his desktop, trying to focus on the day ahead and not on the morning that had been. He couldn’t. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He couldn’t stop thinking about the day they first met.

  Not long after Daniel’s father had died, just after Easter, Daniel had begun to force himself to leave his desk whenever he felt claustrophobic, or uneasy, or like he might cry. In his grief – the word ‘depression’ still sort of stuck in his throat a bit, sounded a bit wet – his therapist had said that being outside, in nature, would always help.

  Christ. He couldn’t believe he had a therapist.

  ‘Keep using your body, make sure you engage with the world, take a stroll around the nearest park, even, just to get the energy moving differently,’ she told him at one of their first sessions together, when he’d said about panic attacks that grabbed him by the throat and made him feel like he couldn’t breathe.

  He’d had to pay sixty-five pounds an hour to go private because the NHS waiting list was too long, his situation too dire to wait because he could barely function, and he wondered, not unkindly, if this was the kind of advice he could expect for two hundred plus quid a month. Anyway. Walk he did, at the very least to feel like he was getting value for money, and she’d been there, Nadia (of course, he didn’t know that was her name then), in the courtyard tucked away off Borough Market. A random Friday. Poof. At his lowest, in a moment of pure emotional desperation, this positive, engaged, clever woman had appeared and her verve – her very essence, her aura – was like sunshine, solar-powering everyone around her. It had knocked Daniel sideways.

  Daniel knew exactly which day he’
d first seen her because it was two weeks after the funeral, and five weeks after he’d started his six-month consulting contract at Converge, a petroleum engineering firm. It was the day his mother had rung when he was in a meeting about the design flaws of a submersive drill, and he’d excused himself in time to pick up in case it was urgent.

  She’d said, ‘He’s here.’

  ‘What do you mean, Mum?’ Daniel had replied. ‘Dad’s … Dad died, remember?’

  He’d held his breath as he waited for her to realize she’d used the wrong word, said the wrong thing. He held up two fingers to the guys on the other side of the glass partition, signalling two minutes. He just needed two minutes. They were impatient, needing his sign-off before lunch, and suspicious of an outsider coming in this late in the project and pissed off that he’d been pushing for a pivot on the next steps. He didn’t care. He wanted to make sure his mum was okay. He wouldn’t be able to handle it if she had dementia or memory loss or something. He’d just lost his dad – he couldn’t lose her too.

  ‘Daniel,’ she’d replied, level-headed. ‘I know he’s bloody dead. It’s his ashes. They’ve just been dropped off.’

  Daniel exhaled loudly in relief. She wasn’t crazy. Well. Any crazier.

  ‘But it’s a bloody bin bag’s worth! He’s so bloody heavy I can’t shift him anywhere. So he’s just here. In the kitchen with me, by the back door. All his ashes in a heavy-duty bag that I don’t know what to do with.’

  Daniel closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, stunned. His dad’s ashes. Because his dad was dead.

  ‘I’m having a coffee and telling him – your dad – about Janet Peterson’s new Vauxhall Mokka – they had it in gold, can you bear it! Gold! And you know, I say new but obviously it’s good second-hand. Cars lose money as soon as you drive them off the forecourt – but anyway, it’s a bit creepy. Your dad. Can you come by after work and help me?’

  Daniel could almost have laughed. In fact, he did laugh, and told his mum he’d be across to Ealing Broadway at about seven, and in the meantime to go hang out in the living room to watch Loose Women instead. She’d been so strong since the funeral that it made him feel ashamed to be the “weak” one. He was about to go back into the meeting – literally had his hand on the door knob to push back through – when his throat closed up and his shirt collar felt tight and he had a vague notion that he might be sick, because his body was remembering, all over again, that his dad was gone. His best mate. His loudest champion. Dead from a ruptured brain aneurysm.

  They’d been drinking pints in the pub together before Sunday lunch, his dad telling Daniel he could help him with a flat deposit and not to worry about it, it wasn’t a loan it was a gift, he wanted to see him sorted and London property prices were so crazy now he’d never be able to do it alone. It was weird for a thirty-year-old to have a flatmate, his dad said – he’d had a kid and a wife by that age. Daniel had said he’d think about it, that he was a bit proud to accept a handout, that it was normal to be thirty and have a flatmate in London, it was an expensive place, he liked the company, and living in Kentish Town, and that afternoon, before he could accept and say, ‘Dad, I love you, cheers for looking out for me’, over the spicy bazargan at home his sixty-two-year-old dad had keeled over and had never woken up. In a single hour, everything was different and nothing was the same and Daniel had lost the man who’d made him.

  Daniel made a break for it, after that phone call, turning on his heel with his head dipped down to cover his face, a face that was ashen and streaked with tears. He took the back stairs, all twenty-three flights of them, down to the ground floor, and pushed out of an emergency exit onto the street. He stood with his back against the wall, panting. He didn’t realize he’d started walking until he flopped down on a circular bench in the sun, drenched in sweat, somewhere off the market. He sat, closed his eyes, breathed deeply, let the tears and sweat dry, and thought about his dad, thought about how lonely he was, thought about how badly he’d been sleeping and how the insomnia might be the thing to drive him truly mad.

  On the bench he’d had his back to her, at first. He’d been staring at nothing in particular, just sort of letting the sun be on his face and closing his eyes to do a bit of deep breathing, reminding himself that he would be okay. He didn’t call it a ‘mantra’ as such, but when he missed his dad in his bones he’d say in his head, ‘Be alive, and remember to live. Be alive, and remember to live. Be alive, and remember to live …’

  He became vaguely aware of a voice just over his left shoulder getting louder and louder, and he tuned his ear into it like a radio dial finding a signal on a country road, until he could hear a woman’s voice clearly saying:

  ‘… Because it’s going to be built anyway, right? So it needs to be built by people who come from lower-class or lower-income families …’

  That was what had made Daniel pay particular attention. He was the first in his family to go to university. His family was very modest. His dad had missed only three days of work as a postman in his forty-year tenure, putting Daniel through a degree with hardly any debt. It had been important to him that his child had the opportunities he hadn’t. The woman’s voice continued: ‘The only way artificial intelligence will ever look after poorer people is if people from these underprivileged communities are the ones programming it.’

  As an engineer, Daniel had a small amount of knowledge of artificial intelligence, but not much. ‘The next industrial revolution,’ one of his undergrad professors had declared, but Daniel had preferred the known entities of maths and equations and building things for the now, not the future. Daniel craned over his shoulder a little to see who was talking. There was a guy – suit trousers with no belt, obviously fitted by a tailor to the exact drop of his hip, narrow pinstripe instead of plain black, shoes so shiny you could see your reflection in them – giving the girl a sort of wry look. A smirk.

  ‘I’m not sure about that …’ the wry-smile guy said.

  Daniel didn’t like him at all. He looked like he was from the gang at university for whom everything had come easy. The good-looking guys with the athletic frames who didn’t play football or rugby but played tennis or lacrosse. They got pretty average grades but were the first ones to get above average jobs, because their families all knew other families who could put in a good word. Daniel had friends at university – good ones, who he still knew now – but they’d all grafted, all been the working-class kids whose accents got mysteriously broader in the company of the posh boys, as if to hold up their class difference as a shield instead of bowing to the pressure to act like they were from somewhere they weren’t. A small ‘fuck you’ to privilege.

  Most posh boys were amused by it, and a couple even tried to befriend Daniel, but he always felt like it was a game to them. That them being ‘unable to see class’ meant they could acquire a friend from a working-class family who spoke with different vowels and it be a testament to their own character. But anyone who comes from very little money knows never to trust a bloke who says money doesn’t buy happiness. Money buys food and electricity and pays for a school jumper without holes in it so you don’t get picked on, and you can’t be happy without that.

  The woman talking was smooth. She wasn’t losing her temper as she explained her theory to this loaded rich guy, but she was passionate. Cared.

  ‘We need kids from underprivileged communities being recruited directly so that they take this technology in the right direction. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of rich people making rich-people decisions that continue to screw over millions of people for not being rich – like literally, the gap between the haves and have-nots will get to the point where there will be a minimum net worth a person has to have to even be alive. It’s sickening. Sickening! But we can absolutely do something about it.’

  Daniel loved what he was hearing. He loved this woman, with her unbrushed hair and crazy arms and rice burrito and big ideas about social responsibility. He thought, My dad would like h
er. He positioned himself at a bit more of an angle so he could see her.

  The rich man held up his hands. ‘Okay, okay. Jesus, Nadia, you can have the fund. We’ll do something. I hear you.’ He shook his head, laughing. ‘I’ll talk to the board. Give me a month or so.’

  Nadia – so that was her name – laughed too.

  Daniel had stood up at that point, his Apple Watch buzzing on his wrist to remind him that he had a conference call with the Cape Town office in ten minutes. The geologists had analysed the surface structures of the new site and he needed their input to know what to do about the drilling problem. He knew he couldn’t miss it if they were to come in under budget – and Daniel’s USP was that he always under-promised and over-delivered. That’s why he could charge the day rate he did. He felt much better now anyway. Now that he knew this woman existed.

  He made eye contact with her before he left. It felt like the bravest thing he’d done in months. She was beautiful and untamed. He stumbled a little, backing away from the pair, unsteady on his feet. She half watched him, looked at him for what could only have been half a second but felt like a full minute to Daniel, and then she turned back to Rich Man. Daniel felt like he’d been slapped by the Love Gods, and it wasn’t his dad he thought about as he walked through the doors of his office, but the woman.

  ‘She just had this … spirit,’ he said to Lorenzo, later on. ‘And no ring on her finger either. I checked.’

  Lorenzo had laughed. ‘This is the first time you’ve seemed even vaguely excited by something since your dad, mate. I’m pleased for you.’ And then, in a lower, more serious voice: ‘You’ll never see her again, though, of course. Don’t get too carried away.’

  5

  Daniel

  When Nadia got on Daniel’s train before work two days after he’d overheard her speak at the market, first he gave a word of thanks to the universe, or maybe his dad, or whoever was up there doing him this very solid favour, and then sent a swift gloating text to Lorenzo.