by Minnie Darke
When the music stopped, Evie watched the cellist lean in to kiss the flautist: a hold-nothing-back kiss that caused a woman reading a magazine to look up with a supervisory air, and cough. Evie could see that although the musicians pulled away from each other, they remained connected, the invisible traces of the music still moving between and around them.
That, she thought. I want that.
She walked back to the bus stop with the carton of milk under her arm, aware of the width of the chasm that lay between the kind of love she’d just witnessed and the sad, decaffeinated thing that passed for love in her life with Dave. Her bus arrived, and even before it had delivered her to Leith, Evie had decided. It was time. Not just to go, but – this time – to go home.
It took just over a month for Evie to cast off all her ties. She felt a small amount of regret when she gave her notice at the Thorn and Thistle, but none at all when she quit her job at Starbucks.
For all the time Evie had been travelling, she’d had an amount of money in her bank account which she chose to regard as equivalent to zero. The sum – which was enough to get her home and allow her to live for a couple of months without an income – had sat there in case of an emergency. However, the fact that she’d regarded it for all these years as a kind of calcified deposit didn’t, in the end, make it difficult to spend.
By way of a series of easy swipes and clicks, she booked herself an off-peak train ticket to London and a night in a cheap hotel near Heathrow. The February airfares to the east coast of Australia were blessedly low, but the same could not be said of Melbourne’s summertime accommodation prices.
She was going to need a couple of weeks in ‘Tram Town’: time enough to retrieve and sort through the belongings she’d left in storage there, and also to work out which part of the country to head for next.
When Evie had left Australia, she’d not been able to bring herself to sell her 1960 pastel blue Volkswagen Beetle, so she’d treated it like an oversized suitcase and crammed it with as much as would fit, before driving it into a rickety garage in the backyard of an old friend of her brother-in-law’s. And there it remained, out of registration and most likely undriveable by now. For all she knew, mice might have made their homes in the seats, and silverfish might have eaten the clothes and books she’d been unable to discard. She hardly remembered what else she’d stacked away on that long-ago day when she’d been about to set off to see the world.
In her last week in Edinburgh, Evie made sure to visit all of her favourite haunts – the Library Bar in Teviot Row House, the Writers’ Museum, Calton Hill and, of course, the poetry library. She returned her borrowed books, used up the last of her shampoo and conditioner, and took several shopping bags full of winter clothes to a charity shop. At last, all that remained was to say goodbye to Dave.
She left it as late as possible. On the morning of the day she was to take the train to London, she moved slowly through the small, gloomy rooms of Dave’s house, collecting up the last of her things. Everything she did felt significant because she knew she was doing it for the last time. This would be the last time she walked up these stairs, the last time she opened this bedroom door, the last time she had to look at that awful wallpaper.
Her notebooks went first into the deep belly of her backpack, and her few remaining items of clothing filled the spaces around the edges of them. Evie hefted the pack onto her back, secured its clasps and went downstairs, keys in her hand. Dave was in the kitchen, not long back from the off-licence. There was a bottle on the table, still in its paper bag, and his coat gave off the street’s familiar scent of mossy coldness. He looked at Evie, and then looked more closely, his expression of surprise amplified by his halo of unkempt hair.
‘I’m tempted to say you look like you’re going somewhere,’ he remarked.
‘Yes, well. I’m going home,’ Evie said.
‘Home? What do you mean, home?’
‘I mean, home home.’ She set the house keys on the table.
‘As in, Australia?’
‘Yes.’
‘What? Now?’
‘More or less,’ Evie said.
‘Wow, I . . . uh. I kind of didn’t see this coming. Should we talk?’
Evie, her shoulders feeling the strain of the heavy pack, smiled sadly. ‘What would we say, Dave?’
‘What about your jobs . . . the café? The pub?’
‘I quit.’
‘Just like that?’
‘They won’t miss me. At least, not for more than five minutes.’
As these words landed on Dave, Evie saw they’d struck him as personal.
‘And, what, you think that’s the same for me?’
‘Isn’t it?’ Evie replied, gently.
‘Pissed at me, are you?’
Evie shook her head, and quite truthfully said, ‘No.’
There was no use being pissed at Dave. He was what he was, after all. He was a boy wonder who’d grown up loved and lauded. Then he’d grown up some more and things hadn’t gone according to plan. Instead of changing the plan, though, he’d only kept looking in the bottom of a bottle for the plan that he originally had, the one that everyone promised.
‘It’s time I went home, Dave. Got myself a life,’ she said. ‘That’s all.’
‘Shit, Greensleeves,’ he said, and he reached out for her hands. His were cold, and she wrapped her fingers over the top of his to impart some of her warmth. ‘Shit, shit, shit,’ he repeated.
‘Yeah,’ she agreed.
‘I’m kind of blown away here. Australia? Fuck.’ Genuinely bewildered, he asked, ‘Was it something I did? Is this about New Year’s Eve? About that thing I said, about your poetry? Look, I was an arsehole, I admit it. I’m sorry. But you shouldn’t take anything I say too—’
Evie leaned towards Dave and kissed his cheek.
‘Dave? Do you know what’s going to happen to me next in my life? I’ll tell you. I’m going to meet somebody. Somebody nice. Somebody really nice. And they’re going to want me. Really, properly want me, not just kind-of. And it’s going to be as simple as that.’
Dave looked at his feet. ‘I’m sorry it wasn’t better than it was.’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said.
He opened the front door for her, and she stepped out into the street, feeling ungainly under the weight of her backpack.
‘Maybe I’ll come visit you one day,’ Dave said.
But Evie knew he didn’t mean this; it was just the kind of thing you said at a time like this, when there was really nothing else left to say.
ALONE IN THE offices of Sonder Digital on a Saturday afternoon, Arie was deep in the inner workings of the website for an artisan brewery called Humulus.
‘I want something special,’ the brewery owner had said, and Richard and Arie had nodded, knowing how often clients wanted ‘something special’, but not the price-tag that went along with it. Richard had diplomatically explained this.
‘No, no – I really want something special,’ the owner said. ‘And I expect to have to pay for it.’
Back at the beginning of their partnership, Arie would have built the back end of a site like this one, and Richard would have tackled the design interaction and front-end experience. Arie’s meticulousness and Richard’s flair had got them a long way. But Arie was no slouch in the creative department either, and these days Richard was so tied up in client liaison and managing the staff that it was rare for him to have time for the dreaming and experimentation needed for a job like this one. Arie, therefore, had decided to take on Humulus as a pet project of his own.
Although Sonder had grown, it was still small-scale compared to most of its competitors. The workspace was not superbly renovated, and despite the diffuser sticks that several of the staff kept on their desks – creating a weird mélange of lime, basil, grapefruit and gardenia – there was no hiding the smells of engine oil and ink that were an ongoing legacy of the building’s printing press days.
Almost a year ago,
a couple of the staff had hit upon the idea of putting Sonder’s main room into dark mode by replacing the plain light globes with purple LEDs. It gave the place the nocturnal feel of a bar or a nightclub. Dark mode wasn’t a decor decision Arie would have made himself but he had to admit his staff were right – the purple globes made the dodgy plaster walls and fraying carpets less obvious, and none of the clients who came to Sonder headquarters for meetings ever failed to comment on the lighting.
Not everyone liked it, however, and Richard was among its detractors. Arie, though, had taken the concept and run with it, installing a huge light box on an otherwise empty wall and allowing the staff to use it for random words or inspirational messages. Right now, owing to an ongoing joke between two of the junior developers, the words on the light box were: FEAR ME, FOR I AM THE SPAGHETTI CODER OF THE APOCALYPSE.
Once, Arie wouldn’t have been alone at the office on a Saturday afternoon, but the arrival of little Marek in Richard’s life had changed his view on overtime. In fact, Richard had become evangelical about the staff knocking off promptly at the end of a day. At 5 pm on the dot, he’d stand up at his desk, announce the hour and start shepherding everyone out the door. Arie wasn’t exempt from Richard’s nagging, but his position as a partner in the business enabled him, mostly, to ignore it.
Over the past two years, the staff had settled into a particular way of behaving around Arie. He sometimes felt as if there was a forcefield extending a couple of metres around him and that when his colleagues stepped inside its radius, they felt the need to tread more softly, move more slowly, talk more quietly.
He dropped out of the table-tennis roster when he realised that everyone was letting him win, and that the game’s usual soundtrack of laughter and cheerful abuse never reached its normal volume when he was in the room. He also knew he got away with swearing in a way that nobody else did. One of the designers, Lee, was a zealot when it came to the swear jar, charging fifty cents per ‘shit’, a dollar per ‘fuck’, and two dollars per instance of blasphemy, regardless of the deity. Although she had the ears of a bat, she never seemed to hear a bad word come from Arie’s lips.
The desk closest to Arie’s belonged to Jenavive, a junior developer cursed by her parents to spend her life spelling out her name. She was a pale young woman who sat – in the months of autumn, winter and spring – with a granny-square rug over her knees to keep out the cold, and her niche of the office was decorated in a style that Arie imagined she had cribbed from a craft magazine, involving a good many succulent plants popping out of unexpected objects including a hot pink stiletto and an old rotary dial telephone. She was talented and hard-working, but she had the slightly irritating habit of making Arie cups of undrinkable tea. She never let the teabags steep for long enough, but at least dark mode made it possible for him to surreptitiously tip cold tea into the soil of a forgiving umbrella plant.
Weekends were Arie’s favourite time to be at work. On Saturdays and Sundays there was no nagging from Richard, no cat-piss cups of tea from Jenavive, and nobody speaking to him in careful don’t-upset-the-grieving-man tones. He could just work in solitude, for as long and late as he wanted, disappearing as deep as he liked into the alternative dimension of code, sinking hour after hour into the unique websites that made Sonder Digital’s services pricey, but sought after.
Arie had no sense of what time it was when he heard the turning latch of the door in the foyer adjacent to the main room where he was working. It was Richard, no doubt. Looking up from his screen, Arie blinked and stretched. From the ache down the left side of his body, he knew that he’d been slouching at his standing desk again, and from the insistent throb of 1980s throwback electronica in his ears, he knew that the junior developers had once again been much too instrumental in the composition of this week’s Spotify playlist.
He was surprised to see that it wasn’t Richard who’d arrived, but Lenka. She was looking decidedly weekend-ish, in a casual skirt and T-shirt, her light brown hair pulled back into a ponytail. She had a basket with her, and an air of purpose.
‘Hey,’ Arie said.
She set her basket down on Richard’s desk.
‘Thought I might find you here.’ Lenka glanced up at the purple light globes. ‘I don’t know how you can work in here. When was the last time you saw sunlight?’
‘I haven’t been here that long,’ Arie lied. ‘I had an idea for this site, the Humulus thing. Thought I’d catch it before it disappeared on me.’
Aware that he was justifying himself to Lenka, and that actually he didn’t have to, he waited for her to explain what she, herself, was doing here. She wasn’t exactly a stranger to the place; she often called by to take Richard out for a lunch date, and sometimes she brought Marek in to say hello to Daddy. But for her to call in on a Saturday, without Richard?
She came over to sit at Jenavive’s desk, right near Arie’s.
‘The reason I’m here,’ she said, ‘is to find out why you are here.’
‘I told you, I—’
‘No, Arie. Why are you here? Outside, the sun is shining. It is a beautiful day.’
She was speaking to him, Arie realised, the way she spoke to Marek. Slowly, deliberately, her slight middle-European accent more pronounced than usual.
‘Did Richard tell you to come here and send me home?’
‘Richard is worried about you, yes. But I made my own choice to come. I made a promise, you remember.’
He did remember. Many times, Lenka had invoked the promise she made to Diana on the night before she went away. I’ll feed him and water him. Make sure he occasionally gets fresh air and sunlight, she had said. I promise.
‘Lenka, I’m fine. I—’
‘You are not. This is bullshit.’
He looked at his friend, and in her hazel eyes he saw a certain steeliness. He’d glimpsed this part of her in her interactions with Richard, but he’d never before been on the receiving end of it.
‘You cannot stare at screens forever. You will make yourself sick.’
Again that slow, enunciated speech, like he was eighteen months old.
‘I really do have work—’
‘This is crap. You work too much. And you know it. Why are you here?’
‘I don’t . . . like being at home on the weekends,’ he admitted.
‘And why is that?’
‘The place is so quiet.’
‘Then you have to make noise,’ she said, simply.
‘It’s not just that. It’s—’
‘No, I know. But you didn’t call me yet,’ she said.
‘No, I’m not—’
‘Arie, it is now February.’
What she meant by this, and Arie knew it, was that a month had passed since the second anniversary of Diana’s death. On that day, Lenka and Richard, and Marek too, had accompanied him on his journey to the cemetery. For the last stretch of the drive, Belinda had been with them as well – she and Arie squeezed into the back seat of Lenka’s small European car on either side of Marek’s car seat. It had smelled of curdled milk, baby wipes, and the huge bunch of Asiatic lilies that Lenka held on her lap while Richard drove. That day, Lenka had offered to help Arie deal with Diana’s things – the wardrobe, her jewellery, the things in the bathroom. Lenka would come, she told him, with boxes and bags, and together they could go through it all and she would take away whatever he wanted taken away, so that he never had to think about it again. All he had to do, she’d told him, was call her and name the day.
‘I love you, Arie, but I think I am no longer keeping my promise if all I do is say there, there. It is true – she was remarkable, and you loved her. It is also true that she is gone. It is sad and unfair, and it is shit, Arie. Total shit. But you have wallowed long enough, now. It’s time.’
‘For what, exactly? To start dating?’
‘I don’t care if you date or drive yourself to Timbuktu. I’m not going to tell you what to do, except for this one thing.’ She leaned towards him and took h
is face in one hand, a thumb and a forefinger on each of his cheeks, the way his mother might have taken hold of him when he was little. She looked at him, almost fiercely. ‘Live now.’
She stood up and walked away from him, as if she had surprised even herself with the level of her intensity. Onto Richard’s desk she unloaded the contents of her basket, making a stack of boxes. They contained, Arie realised, light globes.
‘One more thing, actually,’ Lenka said. ‘Get rid of the fucking purple bulbs. This place needs some light.’
That afternoon, Arie went home earlier than he would normally have done. In the comparatively calm streets, he paused for other drivers to reverse in a leisurely Saturday fashion into parking spots on streets lined with cafés and clothing shops. Lenka had been right; it was a beautiful day.
When he turned into Tavistock Row, he noticed a woman walking down the street, dwarfed by the enormous pack that she carried on her back. She walked the way that travellers so often did, glancing down at the piece of paper in her hands, then looking up at the houses, searching for a number or a sign.
Her hair was almost black and cut into a bob that swung into points at either side of her jaw, its colour contrasting sharply with her winter-white skin. She wore a corduroy skirt and what appeared to be woollen tights, and her long sleeves were pushed up to the elbow. The boots she wore were for hiking, large and heavy-looking, but her legs were long and thin, so that there was a hint of Olive Oyl to her silhouette.
When Arie stepped out of his parked car, she was standing on the street, looking confused. He would have been willing to place a bet on why.
‘You after the Airbnb?’ he asked her.
‘Yes,’ she said. She looked tired and hot; there was a hint of dampness at her hairline. ‘Apparently I’m looking for 12, which is that one. But this message from the host says it’s the place with the courtyard in the front, which is this one. But this is 12A?’