Charlotte Street

by Danny Wallace

  And it would have been a nice end, of friendship, and curry, and maybe even a glimmer of the hope I’d always told myself to avoid. That maybe – actually – I just thought I didn’t deserve.

  So yeah. It might well have been the end.

  If it hadn’t been for one last thing.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Or ‘Sometimes a Mind Changes’

  Sarah Jennifer Bennett became Sarah Jennifer Temple on Saturday the 26th November at 2 p.m. precisely, and I suppose the bump in her tummy changed surnames at around the same time.

  She looked radiant.

  Yeah, I know. An obvious word to pick and certainly overused, but look, you weren’t there; it’s the most accurate, and it’s a word I’m glad to say I can use with the generosity and comfort of a now completely non-jealous ex.

  She’d allowed me a guest, and so obviously I’d asked Dev. Who better to ask to a wedding than a socially awkward man with a broken leg you can then spend all day looking after?

  But someone else had also helped with the arrangements today too, and gained a free pass.

  ‘They’re ready!’ said Abbey, and I noticed Matt was here, too, standing just behind her, sheepishly. Her hand reached for his and he stared at the ground. Wow. He was officially a plus one.

  ‘Hello, mate,’ I said, and I half-thought he was going to say ‘hello sir’ back.

  They looked good together.

  I took Abbey’s cue.

  The DJ was belting out Chumbawamba, which Gary’s rugby friends were enjoying a little too much, and I gave him the nod to fade.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen!’ I shouted into the mic, and people span round, a few of them drunkenly shouting hello back. ‘Um … my name is Jason Priestley …’

  A woman laughed at this.

  ‘… and I am Sarah’s ex-boyfriend!’

  A few mock boos and gasps.

  ‘You’re too late!’ shouted the priest, who was getting gently sozzled in the corner, and everyone laughed.

  ‘Stupid Man’d face!’ shouted someone else with great jollity, and the response was more muted. I tried to make out who it was, in case I could reply with something witty. It was Michael Fish, the weatherman.

  I moved quickly on.

  ‘So I hope you’re enjoying the rather odd buffet tonight … a unique Italian-Indian dining experience laid on at very short notice by our friends at Abrizzi’s – for that magical slice of pizza heaven – and Brick Lane’s own Talk of India.’

  I hadn’t meant to, but I’d inadvertently stared straight at Anna when I said this. She avoided my eye, embarrassed.

  ‘It’s all perfect!’ yelled Sarah, starting the applause. Dev raised his hands to try and take some of it, but as he was sitting in his wheelchair no one could see him so he stopped again. One of his waiters pointed at him and laughed.

  ‘And as a last special gift … well, we were supposed to be enjoying the strains of Gary’s favourite band, Abba-solutely—’

  I could see Gary’s bawdy rugby mates pushing his arm and laughing at him, like he was a little Abba-loving lady.

  ‘—but sadly they’re on a seven-night P&O cruise to Lisbon this week. So instead, all the way from Brighton—’

  I looked at Abbey. She smiled. But tonight, it wouldn’t be her that’d be performing. Because from behind her, they started to walk on stage. A young girl near the front gasped.

  ‘—gearing up to release their first album—’

  Someone got close and took a picture, then looked round their camera to make sure it was really them.

  ‘You may have seen them on Wake Up Call this morning when Estonia Marsh proposed to them.’

  Mikey gave me a little hug. I looked cool.

  ‘Sarah and Gary, the happy couple, present to you … The Kicks!’

  And the crowd went wild.

  Even the people who had literally no idea who these young men were – and I’ll be honest, despite my impressive build-up, that was most of them – well, they went wild too.

  And moments later, on the dancefloor, as ‘Uh-oh’ filled the room, Abbey was there, and she dragged Matt out … and I turned around, and Pamela was here, spinning Dev round in his chair and laughing.

  And I reached for the camera one last time, and looked at it. One shot left.

  Was this the one? The moment to capture?

  The Girl’s camera roll had begun at a wedding. I guess it was fitting that mine might end at one.

  ‘Dance, Jase!’ shouted Abbey. ‘Life is good!’

  Click.

  ‘A nice thing you did, my friend,’ said Dev, on the terrace outside. He was having trouble lighting a cigar but pretending he wasn’t. ‘A nice thing indeed. Seems like you’re heading for Level Two.’

  ‘Level Two?’

  ‘The next level. The future. Moving into your new flat in a couple of weeks, that’s Level Two. And Level One’s the present. The way I see it, whenever you’ve got stuff to deal with – unfinished business like Sarah and Gary, or like The Girl – you’re stuck on Level One. It’s rare to be on Level Two because there’s always stuff going on, always overlaps, always some evil end-of-level boss to stop you … but you, my friend … you might just level up!’

  I smiled.

  ‘Nicely put.’

  He stared out into the darkness. ‘Like, in a videogame—’ he said.

  ‘I understand that you’re comparing life to a video game, yes.’

  ‘No, hang on, because you might have to replay a level to make sure you’ve done everything you need to do. Or in Call of Duty, when you move to Prestige Level, there’s always—’

  ‘I don’t think you should stretch the videogames metaphor any more than you have. I think you should quit and save. But I take your point. Level up. I guess that’s the terrific beauty of losing your flat and your job and your girlfriend.’

  ‘That’s exactly it,’ said Dev, oblivious. ‘Exactly.’

  ‘So they’ve asked me to speak at a local teacher’s conference,’ I said, shyly.

  ‘Who have?’

  ‘The teaching Gods. This inspector heard my assembly and called it “inspirational”.’

  ‘That’s great news, mate! Well done!’

  ‘And I’ve started to send some stuff off to the mags. Ideas for features, and stuff, you know? And a column.’

  ‘A column? A column needs a good name.’

  ‘I have a good name: And Another Thing!’

  ‘That’s a good name, though I’m worried you’ll put an exclamation mark on the end.’

  ‘Point is, I didn’t feel brave enough before. It’s taken me ‘til now to start to feel like myself again. But I just thought: take the bull by the horns. That’s how stuff happens, isn’t it? That’s how you got Pamela, isn’t it?’

  Dev made a slightly awkward face.

  ‘What? What’s that face?’

  ‘Yeah, me and Pamela. I’m not sure it’s going to work out with me and Pamela.’

  ‘What? Why?! You put in all that legwork!’

  Actually, looking at him, sitting there, he’d probably put in a bit too much legwork. Dev dropped his voice to a half-whisper.

  ‘She’s absolutely lovely, right, but when you get properly talking to her, it turns out she is actually a very boring woman.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Pawel was right.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Plus she’s got a boyfriend.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘But they were on a break.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘But I’ve suggested she doesn’t stay on a break very much longer. It’s a long and complicated story. But I think we’re better off as just friends.’

  Wow. Friends. That was mature. Maybe Dev had found a little of Level Two as well.

  Well, I thought. That’s that, then. We got away with it. The wedding had gone well. And Dev was right. It was time to move on.

  But then: ‘One other thing. There is one other thing, isn’t there?’

&n
bsp; ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ he said, and then he broached it. ‘Is there anything else at all to sort out on Level One before you move forward?’

  ‘Jason’s totally given up on that thing he was doing,’ said Dev to Pamela, and she sat down, intrigued.

  ‘Why have you given up?’ she said.

  ‘It was to do with hope,’ I said, trying not to sound pompous but failing. ‘And I realised that actually, the best way to live your life isn’t just to hope. It’s like Sarah says: you look at what’s practical and do that instead.’

  ‘Make the best of things?’ said Matt, tapping out a Silk Cut.

  ‘Yes! Exactly. Make the best of things.’

  ‘Not “make it happen”, then?”

  Caught out.

  ‘Well, you can make it happen by making the best of things.’

  ‘Dev told me about the camera girl,’ said Pamela. ‘This is the same thing?’

  ‘It is, Pamela,’ I said, hoping to move things on now.

  ‘And this is camera?’ she said, picking up the disposable from the table.

  ‘Nah,’ said Dev, ‘I got him that one. To record his little journey. What’s on there, do you reckon? When are you gonna develop them?’

  ‘I’m not sure I will,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure there’s any point.’

  ‘What?’ he said. ‘The memories! You and me and a pizza in an Italian restaurant, taken by a man who’d had an affair with her! That was lovely! And there was you standing looking all awkward in Whitby.’

  ‘There was those blokes running off after I smashed up that phonebox,’ said Matt, and Abbey scrunched her nose at him, confused.

  ‘The cinema,’ said Abbey. ‘That was a nice day.’

  ‘That posh restaurant,’ said Dev, ‘with those scallops. I think they’re still in my system, to be honest.’

  ‘Didn’t you take one in a cemetery, as well?’ asked Abbey, and everyone laughed, but I wasn’t listening any more, because a strange and unusual thought had struck me.

  ‘The cemetery is the weird one,’ said Dev. ‘Otherwise, it’s nice pubs, nice restaurants, a nice little film night—’

  A strange thought.

  But one that caught me like a slap in the face or a stamp on the foot and a thought that now wouldn’t let me go.

  I ran through it again in my head.

  ‘What was the name of that cinema again?’ he asked.

  Jesus.

  Jesus, hang about …

  ‘You always said the photos were themed,’ I said to Dev, trying not to let the urgency in my voice show. ‘What did you mean by that?’

  ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘It’s … it’s like all the photos in a disposable belong together, because they’re all locked up inside. They’re a group. They need each other.’

  ‘You’re drunk!’ said Pamela, playfully.

  ‘No, I mean it,’ he said. ‘They mean more in a group. They’re a collection. Why?’

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to say. Not yet.

  Because now, suddenly and without warning, there were images flashing at me like the flashes of the disposable.

  Trips we’d taken, things we’d seen, things we’d said.

  Some made sense, some didn’t, but everything was coming at me at once.

  The scallops in the restaurant, they came at me.

  Damien, in a park, all cashmere scarf and: ‘Said I’d show her the world. We talked about that a lot.’

  Shona. Population: two.

  The car outside the big white building, the seal fur factory by the pub …

  Dev in his Nissan Cherry, XFM on the stereo, me looking round: ‘All the world’s on Charlotte Street …’

  It all hit me and hit me fast.

  God.

  I’d been looking for clues in the photos. But the clues were the photos.

  Dev had been right.

  I was suddenly, inescapably excited. For the first time in for ever, there was that feeling in the pit of the stomach, the hope I’d been so used to fighting, the feeling that something might be starting rather than just another thing ending.

  But how to go about it? How to use these images, these moments, these flashes?

  And then I wanted to laugh. Because I knew how. We’d discussed it, me and Sarah, just a few nights before.

  In fact, it was Sarah that had shown me how.

  If you were to type failure, regret, selfishness and arrogance into Google, you’d find a picture of me, my ex-girlfriend had told me, angrily, not long before she married. ‘Those are the keywords to your life.’

  I guess we all have keywords. I guess we all have a unique set of characteristics: the DNA we wear on the outside and put on show to the world.

  I couldn’t disagree with Sarah’s assessment of me, based as it was on the me she thought she knew. The mildly grumpy ex, down on his luck, beaten up by life, now not even living in a room above a shop next to a place everyone thought was a brothel but wasn’t.

  But I also knew that maybe my keywords had changed.

  Changed thanks to Matt, thanks to Abbey, thanks to Dev. Maybe I’d needed Sarah to meet Gary, too, and for all that to happen the way it did. To make the past a thing of the past. Somewhere you can’t ever revisit, somewhere you can only move on from, like taking a bad picture on an old camera and just winding the film on.

  I’d always been suspicious of hope. But now I could see that hopelessness wasn’t the way forward either. It’s nice to be surprised by good things, of course. An out-of-the-blue phonecall. An unexpected win in life. But how nice it is also to try and make good things happen.

  And that’s what I was now hoping to do.

  So, yes, we all have keywords. But your keywords can change.

  Things change. People change. And I promise I will never say that again.

  But it’s only if we’re lucky. And it’s usually thanks to other people. There’s no self-help better than the self-help that comes from someone else. The small group around me had proved that much. They’re proved we can go from frustration and rage, the bottled-up, pent-up, seemingly unventable fury that soon becomes focus when channelled the right way.

  The scared can become brave. The hopeless hopeful.

  I’d Googled Shona before, of course I had, and you’re silly for asking.

  I’d googled Shona London.

  Shona London girl.

  Shona London I have lost my camera I probably ride an old bike with a basket on girl.

  But nothing, obviously, other than the heartsinking sight of 2.4 million results in 0.06 seconds.

  Shona, as it turns out, is not the rarest name in a city of seven million.

  But now … now I had some of her DNA. I had some of her story. Some of her life. The clues were focused and useful, now no longer just pictures.

  Now, they were words.

  This had all been staring me in the face for so long. The connection I hadn’t been able to make until thinking about the reasons for my own photographs: my own story.

  So, at home, that night, the wedding done and dusted and an old life now finally behind me, I headed for Google and started to type.

  The first three words came easy.

  ALASKA.

  As in the building.

  RIO.

  As in the cinema.

  OSLO. As in the restaurant.

  I thought of the walkway in Highgate Cemetery – the Egyptian walkway – so …

  EGYPT.

  I thought of the pub Damien had mentioned he’d taken her to, the moment captured perfectly in my favourite photo, her hair whipped by the wind, her cheeks flushed and warmed, the photo I wished I’d been in …

  ADELAIDE.

  And then, as my head began to spin at the link, as the diamonds began to sparkle in the ground as I found my inner fish, and just as I was about to press search, a thought struck me – and I laughed, and I shook my head, and I remembered the sausage and the sweet tea and the streak of a yellow taxi light a
gainst the black of a back window and the surprise of finding that I had been there too.

  ROMA.

  As in the café.

  And finally, to fill the box, to complete the journey …

  SHONA.

  And click.

  ‘A new thing does not come to she who sits, but to she who travels.’

  Traditional Shona Tribe proverb, Zimbabwe

  Hello.

  My name is Shona McAllister.

  I am twenty-nine-years-old.

  I grew up in the village of Kilspindie, in Perth and Kinross.

  My favourite colour is yellow.

  My favourite thing is my bike.

  And my something-embarrassing is my guilty pleasure. The complete back catalogue of Hall & Oates. Can’t help it. I was born that way, though I realise I am on my own on this one. (‘London, Luck & Love’ is where it all began … Thank you, Dad. x)

  And with that dreadful confession made, here’s another, but on a more positive note: I have decided.

  I’m going to do it.

  I’m starting to feel like myself again.

  Shona

  x

  TWENTY-SIX

  Or ‘Make You Stay’

  He’d promised to show her the world.

  That’s what I remembered Damien saying.

  And so the story of the camera – playing out shot by shot in a 35mm disposable – had been the story of their short relationship. A trip from Alaska to Rio and back again. A story documented in short bursts on the newly bookmarked MyLifeInProverbs blog. A whirlwind, world tour of London.

  Damien was an ideas man, of course. I wonder if he treated the whole thing like a PR strategy. Each date themed around a different place, each photo adding to the story. The perfect set of dates captured as a collection in the same disposable they’d picked up when they first met. The story of a meeting and a split in twelve frames or less.

  The more I’d read of her blog, the more bruised she’d seemed to be. There was no mention of what she did for a living (just ‘work’, though I still liked the idea of something with books, maybe, or a university), nor did she make mention of anyone new in her life, aside from a bloke on a bus she was scared she’d catch a rash from.