by Alyson Rudd
‘Really, Ryan,’ his mother said, ‘she could just as well be a man.’
Ryan smiled. His mother had not wanted to hear about girls when he was a teenager, had been mistrustful of them when he was in his twenties and now that he was about to hit thirty-three she was in a form of permanent mild panic that he would remain single forever.
‘Do you watch TV together, then?’ Grace asked, staring about the square living room.
Ryan opened up his arms to indicate the space where a TV might be found if there was one.
‘Oh,’ his mother said, deflated, and he laughed.
‘We’ll have a beer and a chat and her mates are fun so it’s all fine, Mam, it’s all fine.’
Grace had travelled home in a cheery mood. Naomi had friends and not all of them would be so tall and self-contained. One of them would be smitten with Ryan. It was just a matter of time. This was something upon which she and Naomi were agreed. Her shorter friends all liked him but, so far, he had been either slow to recognize the signals or deliberately overly avuncular. It seemed to Naomi that Ryan behaved like a man who was already in love, the only flaw to her theory being there was no woman in his life. Not even online. Not even secretly. Not even the hint of an affair. But who was she to speculate, she who had joined the university bridge club just to be in the same room as Cappi, a towering, serious introvert from Milan with a stupidly happy-go-lucky name?
This, then, was the sum total, almost, of what could be construed as romance within Number 4 Cotton Lane, a modest and slender house built in 1976, just a five-minute walk from North Ealing Underground station, which was eight stops from South Kensington, where both Ryan and Naomi would alight to go to the university. Just eight stops. Ryan was tempted to make it nine, to make it twenty, to have longer in which to look at her, the almost-always-there girl with wavy, nearly red hair.
He found himself looking for her one Sunday in June. The chances of her being on the way home at noon on a non-commute day were so slim that he vowed he would speak to her if he did spot her. It would be rude not to, he smiled weakly to himself.
London was quiet. It was bathed in a claustrophobic heat. It was hot enough for the city to smell differently, to emit the stench of Naples or Lisbon. He changed from the Piccadilly line at Rayners Lane onto the Metropolitan. It was hot enough for him to reject out of hand walking to his mother’s house from Wembley Park and so he changed lines again and trundled the two stops to Dollis Hill on the Jubilee line.
He had a key but always knocked. He knocked. Hana opened the door, squeaked as if it was a surprise to find him there, and gave him a quick squeeze of a hug.
‘Happy birthday, little bro’,’ she said and wondered, just as she had the previous June, if she would always feel protective of Ryan. Would she call him little bro’ when he was fifty-three? Seventy-three? They were warm, sweet and deeply sad affairs, these meals at his mother’s house. Only on Ryan’s birthday would his mother refer to Tom’s age.
‘He’d have been thirty-seven this year. My word, thirty-seven. To think of having a thirty-seven-year-old,’ she said.
‘Mam, I’m thirty-nine,’ Hana said, half hurt, half amused.
Her mother grasped her hand and sniffed stoically.
‘But you don’t look anywhere near it,’ she said. ‘Does she, Ryan?’
‘Hmm,’ said Ryan, which delighted his mother and caused Hana to growl comically and point to the sideboard where, on an intricate cake stand, stood the birthday cake she had helped bake for her brother. All three of them knew that once the cake had been cut into, Grandpa would open his eyes, accept a plate of it, then, still propped up in his spongy leather armchair, nod off again. At around three o’clock he would weep in his sleep. It was a routine that had begun several years earlier. Grandpa would eat only biscuits or tarts or cakes for lunch and weep in the afternoons.
As she stood to clear the table, Ryan’s mother tapped her nose and his heart sank a little for the gesture signified she was about to hand him his gift. He unwrapped it gently, aware she was scrutinizing his face.
‘Oh, that’s very nice,’ he said brightly as he gazed upon a white porcelain gravy boat. His mother had taken to giving him love-nest crockery ever since he had moved to Cotton Lane. He felt she was buying all the items, one by one, from an imaginary wedding list at John Lewis. ‘I don’t believe in marriage,’ Ellen had said. He held the gravy boat as if it was a cruel joke of a prop.
‘You must cook your own Sunday roasts sometimes,’ Grace said, uncertainly.
‘Yes, indeed we do,’ he lied, and his sister glanced at him with something approaching sympathy.
As Grandpa’s tears trickled down his cheeks, Ryan stood and stretched.
‘I’m meeting a few mates for birthday drinks,’ he said, checking his phone.
Pub with garden being found. Come home first
read the message from Naomi. He smiled because even now it was strange to be in the house where he grew up and for another building to be referred to as his home. Was home necessarily one place only? he wondered. Could he not be a home bigamist? Grace and Hana hugged him tightly as they always did on special occasions and each time he felt the obligation to live and keep on living if only for their sakes. He loved them very much, these women who were both simultaneously fragile and possessed the strength of ten men.
Grandpa was still asleep, a golden crumb of birthday cake lodged in the creases around the corner of his mouth, and Ryan shook his head fondly.
‘Tell him I said goodbye,’ he said, trying to stifle the fear he felt of late that each time he saw his grandfather might be the last time; that the old man’s tears were a presentiment of his imminent demise. He was, still, a comforting presence for Ryan, someone he had always known, someone who had never left, who had never mentioned the word ‘love’ and yet was, in his gruff way, consistently loving.
As he climbed aboard the Piccadilly line train, he scanned the carriage just in case. It was full of men in flip-flops and women in sundresses, none of which had nearly red waves, although he was struck by the white hair of a tall, slender, ethereal lad whose fingers curled and uncurled with a startling rapidity.
Across the city, the boy, Isak, was agitated by the humid weather. Andrew and his mother had said, given the weather, they should all swim in the rooftop pool of the club Andrew rarely used these days. Isak could think of little worse than swapping his basement pool for one high in the sky exposed to satellites, to cameras, to nearby windows. It would be busy, his mother had admitted as much, and although he liked very much the thought of the three of them together in swimwear, he would prefer it to be in a quieter, darker place. ‘I’ll need some new trunks,’ he had said, and Andrew had not blinked. His mother had not sighed. Of course, he would like swimwear that suited the weather, they said, and so he had travelled into town to buy some, vaguely aware that his new shorts should be brightly coloured and most definitely not brown or navy or black. He was meeting them at the club. His name would be at the door but it was daunting, all this jolly behaviour prompted by the weather, and so he was taking a circuitous route on the Underground to delay his arrival, to delay the moment he walked out onto a sun-drenched terrace exposed for all the world to see.
Ryan could see Beth and Tamsin as soon as he turned the corner into Cotton Lane. They were sat on green striped deck chairs on his tiny square of delicately mowed front garden, each holding a glass of rosé and sporting Hollywood sunglasses. Beth was wearing a polka-dot halter-neck sundress and Tamsin was in shorts and a glinting, metallic bikini top.
‘Happy birthday, Ryan,’ they said in unison.
He reached for his phone and took their photograph. It was such a dazzling, lurid scene that it was oddly beautiful. It was a scene that told him there was no trip to the pub, that Naomi had gathered his and her friends together at Number 4 to celebrate his birthday. The only route to the garden, if you discounted the narrow, ivy-strewn back alleyway, was via the sliding doors from Naomi’s bedroo
m, and Ryan knew this would have meant she had had to tidy her room and accept that it would become one giant depository for bags and jackets and empty cans.
As he walked past her bed, he could smell sausages just before he found Theo standing over a barbecue he had wheeled around the back. The two men shook hands as if they were old buddies with amnesia. They knew nothing about each other whatsoever.
‘I wouldn’t have, but this weather demanded it,’ Naomi said with the air of someone having an out-of-body experience. ‘And Theo has that posh barbecue thing he was going to fire up anyway. So.’
‘And where is the paddling pool?’ he laughed.
Naomi glanced towards the fence where the Mizwa family lived.
‘The children were splashing earlier and saw the balloons and wanted to know whose birthday it was, so… They are popping round too. Before it gets too rowdy.’
Ryan shrugged. The heat had made everyone slightly barmy so he glugged down a cold lager as Stu’s latest girlfriend applied thick sun cream to Ryan’s nose.
Stu, a carefree, sometimes there, sometimes not, friend, sidled up to him.
‘There is no better way to get to know a gang of people you’ve never clapped eyes on before than to slap Factor 50 on their faces,’ Stu said. ‘I thought she would cling to me but she’s more popular than Florence Nightingale.’
Chapter 2
And now Ryan was thirty-three and it was hot in his small, narrow garden and Stu had a new girlfriend and Ryan found himself making small talk to a seven-year-old who wanted to know when the other children were arriving.
‘Will there be a magician?’ he asked.
‘Not that I am aware of but have another sausage,’ Ryan said as he moved to the safety of Naomi, who was sat on one of the canvas chairs lent by Theo and fiddling with the knot at the back of her halter-neck dress. Her bare shoulders, he thought, made her look Amazonian, although he had a hunch she was attempting to look more softly feminine.
‘I know it’s your birthday but I invited Cappi, but he won’t come and, actually, he seemed a bit confused that I thought he might even think of coming. And you know why that is, don’t you?’
She paused and gently punched Ryan’s arm.
‘No?’ he said.
‘Because I don’t know him. I speak to him in my head most of the time. I was practically a stranger giving him, another stranger, instructions on where I live and how much I’d like him to be here.’
Ryan smiled at the thought that Naomi could be someone who might go unnoticed.
‘He was probably delighted to be asked and is just shy or something,’ he said. ‘But hey, you took the plunge. It’s good that you invited him. If nothing else you can now ask him if he got lost or hates parties or only mixes with Italians.’
The sun left the garden and Theo started to pack up his barbecue accessories while the two Mizwa children bounced up and down on Naomi’s bed, causing the empty beer cans to clank and clink in a merry birthday tune.
‘I’m not sure their parents actually came round,’ she said. ‘But they seem to be having fun.’
The heatwave stretched into Monday and Ryan involuntarily pictured his woman from the Underground in a white summer dress as if stepping straight out of Picnic at Hanging Rock – a film defined entirely by heat and pretty, unworldly girls in white dresses. But she was not there today. He let two trains pass and then gave up and sat in a reflective mood, his nose a healthy, steady colour thanks to Stu’s girlfriend, while all around him were bright pink noses and sunburnt forearms, the faint odour of summer hangovers, perspiration and an overwhelming sensation of mass dehydration.
He felt sorry for his students. They had practical exams to take in his laboratory and would have had to prepare for them in the stifling heat while their friends had fried in the sun. Only once had a student complained about the exam conditions of his lab, that there had been a contamination of his aqueous solutions that spoiled his extraction of glycolic acid. The complaint was not proven but it had made Ryan extra meticulous on exam days and the rows of equipment gleamed with uniform brightness in the light that filtered through the long, drawn blinds. After it was over and the invigilator had collected in all the notes, the students filed out and just one shook Ryan’s hand.
‘Thank you,’ he said and Ryan noted that the young man had the air of one under pressure to succeed in a realm that might be beyond him. That the standard of chemistry students was on the decline was a common refrain in the staff rooms.
He wondered if the young man was even studying what he wanted to study. There were always students who caved in to parental pressure to study science when they felt empathy with the arts. Ryan’s own childhood had been one of watchful freedom but he had never lost the sense of duty to his family and a sense of gratitude that the loss of Tom, his older brother, had not left a sediment of resentment or discomfort. The photographs that lined the narrow hall of his mother’s house revealed a curly-haired Tom who looked just like Ryan. He was a reminder then, and still, of what she had lost but if that hurt her she hid it well. Ryan was well aware that he could easily have grown up in a home lacking smiles and sunshine, that every stick-man painting he brought home from school, every cardboard rocket, every spelling-test score, could have been greeted with sad, regretful eyes, but instead either Grace or Hana would utter warm words of encouragement and heap praise upon all his little achievements.
As he walked home the sky darkened and there was a low grumbling of distant thunder just as he bumped into Theo, who, fully aware of the cliché he was uttering, said: ‘That’s our summer over, then.’
Number 4 was quiet. No Naomi. He hoped she was having dinner with her Italian but doubted it. All the same, the thought of it meant he suddenly craved a pizza, which he ate with one of the beers still in the fridge from the party, and then felt bored. He was too old for this kind of existence. The student who had the decency to shake his hand was more grown up than he was. Maybe he did not own a porcelain gravy boat but he possessed a seriousness that implied a willpower stronger than the impact word association had on Ryan’s diet. Ryan patted his stomach. He was not tall enough to carry any blubber. He had always been on the wiry side but there were signs of some flab these days. He threw the last slice of his American Hot in the bin, resisted a second beer and pulled the ironing board away from the wall. He could be proactive instead of beery. ‘I’ll never iron a shirt for you,’ Ellen had said, and he had smiled because he had known, just like 10cc had lied while crooning ‘I’m Not in Love’, she had meant she probably would. One day.
The next morning, he wore a freshly ironed shirt to go with his close shave. Naomi pretended not to notice.
‘Ready? I’m off now if you are,’ she said.
Ryan did not want company on the Tube so he said he had to find some paperwork. She shrugged and left.
Five minutes later he took the same route as his lodger. He peered inside the usual carriage and there she was, sat right next to the driver’s door, a book on her lap, her bag at her feet. There was just one seat available and it was directly opposite her. No one else had noticed it because it was obscured by an obese man who had an old-fashioned briefcase perched on his knees. Ryan had spotted it though, he had become rather adept at finding a seat near… her. He wondered what her name was and then realized he had been thinking of her as Millie because it rhymed with Piccadilly. He didn’t particularly like the name Millie, but it was stuck now in his head.
She did not look up; she did not catch his eye. He coughed. Still she did not look at him. He imagined her standing just as the train braked sharply, causing her to fall into him. She would have to look at him then. But she never, bar the one-off seamless movement at Barons Court, stood up before he did. He always left first and he had no idea where she alighted. If he fell into her lap she would curse him as an oaf. He was stuck. Unless. He looked at his watch. He had time, just, to stay on until Knightsbridge, to find out if that was her stop. It was, after all, why, he no
w realized, he had ironed a shirt. He was having a proactive sort of day. He remained seated and looked for a sign that she was readying to leave but instead she turned the page of her novel.
Ryan sighed and left the train but noted the name of her book. East Lynne. It meant nothing to him so he repeated the words as he dashed along the Brompton Road for a longer than usual walk to the university while Millie continued reading as far as Green Park, although she was tempted, really tempted, to keep trundling on and on, reading, glancing up maybe from time to time, and reading some more all the way to Cockfosters. It was preferable to recalling that day. The day when everything changed.
Three months earlier…
Sylvie had put the phone down with a shiver. She had never been called into Jane Jessop’s office before. As far as she could recall such a message was rarely a good thing to happen to an employee of the consultancy.
‘Ah, Sylvie, please take a seat,’ she said.
Sylvie could feel inverted goosebumps jabbing at her internal organs. She smiled weakly.
‘Never the most pleasant side of my role here,’ Jane Jessop said, ‘but I am afraid we have to let you go and, in line with our policy, that will be with immediate effect.’ She paused and smiled. It was a sickly, half-hearted smile and Jessop’s eyes remained cloudy.
‘However, the severance terms are exceptionally generous. You will receive a full year’s salary upon signature… right here.’
Sylvie had expected something unpleasant but not quite this. She was good at her job. It made no sense to axe her.
Jane Jessop, who hoped that behind her back she was known as JJ, shuffled some papers and cleared her throat.
‘Look, I can see you are surprised but this is business, purely business, and while you might want to, er, challenge the decision you would not get a better deal than a year’s full pay anyway. I do not represent you, I represent the company, but I’ll level with you: it would be counter-productive in every way not to sign. You’ve been with us two years, that’s all. This is extremely generous and it comes with a top-notch reference explaining that we restructured and would have preferred to have kept you. Which we can’t.’