The last time the building would have been on alert and a possible attack was made public was when a helicopter had crashed in the residential tower, called The Tower. A tower that was being under construction next to Carolina’s building, remaining Carolina’s building in between The Tower and the MI6. Weeks after that incident, the Vauxhall Bridge access road leading to central London was partially shut off by the police to place huge cranes on the road and make it to the top with giant parabolic to the MI6 building, so they could increasing vigilance and prevent with more efficacy future attacks.
Carolina likes where she lives, her building unlike the majority of the buildings in London was recent with huge windows with green glass. It looks almost the continuation of the MI6 building, but with shops and restaurants on the ground floor and green spaces overlooking the river, it was a perfect area only 10 minutes away from central London. Her apartment was a penthouse on the top floor with 3 en-suites, with stunning views over the city of London. She was able to see Big Ben tower and the London Eye, but the view was even more admirable at night with all the city lights. Carolina went out of her building while putting the headphones in her ears to listen her favourite music previously selected in the application from her iphone, beginning her walk along the Thames River, going through the tunnel that leads to the rear of the MI6 building in direction Westminster.
As she walked along the river she remembers that she always saw the river with the same brownish colour, it was so different from the blue sea that she was used to see at Estoril, in Portugal. Sometimes she missed the blue sea and its smell, especially the bright and sunny days where the sea had that special smell around but couldn’t confess to anyone, because she really liked living in London. The Thames River had calm waters but was always very busy with boats up and down the river. The most frequent boats were the ones with tourists and they are big with two floors. Downstairs the boat is protected from the cold and rain with glasses all around for tourists to appreciate the view even in less nicer days. The top floor was in outdoors and with sunny days everyone wants to go in the best place to enjoy the landscape of buildings that exist on both bank sides.
London is also famous for its magnificent bridges, and tourists enjoyed everything with great admiration as they passed by them. The most bizarre boat that Carolina had ever seen navigate those waters, were hybrids, also carrying tourists and were known as "London Duck Tours" they are much smaller, painted in yellow and shaped like a duck. These boats came by Vauxhall Bridge from central London as a normal vehicle, and entered the river on the side of the MI6 building becoming a boat, heading the river passing through Westminster into London Bridge direction. The tugs were also part of the maritime traffic of the river and carried behind 2 or 4 containers each time with unknown destination.
The police was a constant in the river waters, always around in a preventive mission.
But there is a boat that is always in the same place, while she is doing her walk as she passes along the boat every time, it’s a riverside bar and restaurant boat, it's big, old, in need of being restored or at least painted. When the water of the river is in low tide, it is clear to see the fragility of the wooden brackets that supports the boat along its banks. But who's up there drinking a beer looks unfazed as this, they are more interested in drinking alcohol than worry about that, they don’t even care if the boat starts browsing at any time aimlessly.
Another few minutes walking along the river, Carolina passed wooden benches with backrest and armrests in wrought iron, they are arranged along the embankment with a cement base with two steps for people to sit on it and enjoy the magnificent view. Following the long hike Carolina is opposite Big Ben’s tower, the most famous clock in the world with a bell weighing over 13 tons, it is installed in the northern part of the Palace of Westminster which is also known as the Houses of Parliament. Carolina likes to enjoy looking at it while she is passing by, it’s so majestic and imposing respect anyone who sees it. The clock must be photographed thousands of times daily by the amount of tourists who walked by daily.
Since Carolina arrived in London, she noticed that the Houses of Parliament were in constant restoration works in some part of that huge and magnificent building, it is no wonder that needs to be repaired constantly since it is dated from the sixteenth century, having since then the aspect that it has today. It is known that prior to this date there was already construction in place of the Houses of Parliament that served the royalty house and was expanded gradually and in several phases, in which led to the palace we can see today. The Palace of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament have currently 1000 rooms, 100 staircases and 5km corridors.
While Carolina’s continues, crossing another tunnel under the road just to avoiding the frenetic traffic on the top, continuing her walk, passing by the London Aquarium best known for "Sea Life London Aquarium". The aquarium was one of the first places she visited with her children when they settled in London getting completely amazed by the huge variety of fishes and the inside is just wonderful with its 2 million litres of water. One of the famous attractions are the 40 sharks that can be seen in the "shark walk", that is, you walk over a glass floor with the sharks swimming underneath, it is terrifying and yet magnificent at the same time.
A few meters ahead on the left side already in the River Thames, is the London Eye, the famous wheel is an attraction for those who want to have a panoramic view of London, and the wheel is about 135 meters high. Likewise as the aquarium entrance, here is no exception and there are on daily basis long queues to enter. During the weekends it’s even worse and tourists need to have a holy patience to spend hours in the queue to enter the amenities. Tourists were very patients and spent their time queuing up buying food in the smalls kiosks nearby while they wait.
Carolina passed by them ending up in the street where street artists perform there but they are not always the same. Today was Mr. Bean’s double ganger to turn up, he is a famous character in England but also worldwide, this street performer played Mr. Bean almost to perfection and tourists took pictures with him usually giving him money as a thank you. There is a reserved area for street artists to do their usual show, after Mr. Bean turns up the human statue, it was an old lady covered with gold ink and immediately after, there was an African group with a prolonged show of dance and contortion to attract more tourists. Carolina goes her way on the street, avoiding uncoordinated tourists who remember stopping along the way to admire the place where they were, seeing curiously the artists, the London Eye, the river and taking pictures.
She goes direction to the pedestrian bridge over the River to cross over to the other side. On the bridge are more artists, these are different and they are Romanians and they are there to fool tourists, encouraging them to bet where is the hiding ball. They Romanians use a ball and three cups, they put the ball under a cup and then mix the cups very quickly, and tourists eager to earn some money, they bet to see where the ball is, if they win they receive double of what they have bet, but what tourists don’t know is that there are fake tourists among them pretending to play as well to encourage true tourists to join the game. At this point Carolina is already walking for about 30 minutes without stopping beginning to feel her legs tired. She wants to stop only in Trafalgar square, only another 5 minutes and she could rest for a while. Arriving at the square, she admired the three staircases giving access to the National Gallery and sits in the grand staircase in the middle to rest for a little bit. Enjoying the view, she admires the tourists who go there and try to climb the lion’s bronze statues, taking all kinds of photos, making Carolina laughing. She paid attention to the children and adults fumbling in the water fountains and others taking pictures to the column of the famous Nelson statue.
Behind Carolina is the National Gallery a building built in 1830, which today has one of the widest exhibition of paintings dated from 500 years ago to the more recent painters, she liked to go there once in a while and contemplate the paintings where each o
ne told a story.
Carolina gives a look at her phone to see if she has any messages from her boys or if someone had called her, but there was nothing, which was a good sign. The boys were in the habit of sending messages instead of calling, only if it was really some emergency they would call her mum, but most of the times kids emergencies were not real emergencies, they were only in their heads, like needing mother’s approval for sleepovers and things like that. However more and more it wouldn’t apply to her sons, as they were old enough just to inform their mum instead asking for permission. She decides to rest a little bit more as she was feeling her muscles in her legs still contracting, so she chose to distract herself with a new iphone application that her boys settled for her to enjoy, saying she should get a boyfriend for yesterday instead of worrying so much about them. Although Carolina thinks that kind of applications was only good for young people, she doubted it would have any use for her.
Apprehensive Carolina devotes a few minutes to see how the application worked and what kind of men are in the application or if there were men of the same age as her. Surprisingly she discovered that there were many men of her age and even older, from all aspects and ethnic groups wanting to meet women for various purposes. Carolina was impressed, everyone today of all ages seems have joined the digital world to get the other half. Once she had figured out how to work with the application, she found out it was really easy, actually just needed to slide her finger to the left meant she wasn’t interested, sliding with the finger to the right would mean she was interested in the man, and all based on a decision of a couple of pictures.
Easy enough – She thought.
The decision was anonymous and those who were rejected would never know, which meant that Carolina didn’t need to have a bad conscience when deciding in case of rejecting someone. She saw a few pictures of men that seem interesting but it was not quite what she thought right for her, but still decided to slide her finger to the right side, thinking if they send a few messages couldn’t hurt anyone and never knew if she couldn’t be surprised by a man. As she saw the pictures of available men in her area, she saw a faced picture that draws her attention.
He is not gorgeous - she thought - but he is not ugly either.
But he had something she couldn’t identify what it was. The photo showed only the face of a man about same Carolina’s age, he had intense blue eyes that drew her attention, his eyes were really very intense and somehow they had almost hypnotic power, his expression was hard and authoritative, almost touching arrogance, but not quite. She slides her finger to the left, opting for no. Tired of swiping left or option no, she decides to put the phone in her pocket and put herself on the way home.
This time, she took another way and went along the street where she could see the guards of the Queen mounted on fine horses with red coats gaudy uniforms, white pants with black boots to the knee, golden helmets and wielded a sword resting on their shoulders. They were at the entrance of the royal guard Queen museum so that tourists could take pictures with them. Tourists concentrated once again here by the dozen.
Now Carolina passed the entrance of the official residence of Prime Minister, here the thing was serious and the guards were armed with machine guns making Carolina realize how tight the security was. And the security needed to be tight to keep order and the prime minister safe, because people often showed their dissatisfaction with the government expressing their discontent with demonstrations in front of the prime minister’s main gate. Sometimes manifestations were large enough to cut partially the road for security reasons. Carolina returned home physically tired but at the same time psychologically much lighter, with her ideas much more aired. It made her very good this long walks along the river and she needed to be distracted mentally, because lately she hadn’t major distractions in her life. She hadn’t dated for a while and particularly that area of her life she felt alone and had doubts if one day someone would turn up to be the man that she finally falls in love with. She knew her age was no longer on her side anymore and every day that passed by she feels she is in countdown. She knew that the men with same age or slightly older liked much younger girls, there was no way to compete.
However this didn’t prevent Carolina often dreaming with the man of her life. Sometimes when she fell asleep and entered in the world of dreams, she dreamed of him. She dreamed that she was with him sitting by the water, on the sand at the beach facing each other as he passed his hand gently stroking her face constantly staring at her with his passionate blue eyes.
It was a great feeling.
She didn’t know where the beach was, she only saw the light yellow sand, and the surrounding beach had some rocks, there were no houses to be seen just a bluff of rocks and then an immensity of beach. In her dream there was a black Range Rover jeep on the beach, with the front wheels over the rocks on the slope where the beach began, next to a wooden path already eaten up by the sun. She knew the jeep was his. Carolina was never able to see with clarity his face because of the brightness of the dream, she thought clarity could be from the sun, but she wasn’t sure. She could glance sometimes his blue eyes for a few seconds in the dream, other times she could see he had a three-day brownish beard. His figure against the sun revealed a tall and defined body figure. In the dream there was never more than that, she could never go beyond that, sometimes she tried harder to see better in the dream struggling to see him in a much clear way, but the clarity against him wouldn’t let her. Trying to him better and most of the time she struggles to see him, but as much she tried as more clarity the dream had, always preventing her to see him. She was sure that in the dream there was a mutual feeling, she felt that they liked each other very much by the way they were looking at each other in the dream.
In real life Carolina had only a few friends and they were always very busy with family and Carolina didn’t feel right to bother them and challenging to go out with her for dinner or see a movie. And the other reason was that, she had a very different taste then her friends, they didn’t really appreciate museums, arts or watch a play as Carolina’s really liked.
The few times she used to go out were when she received e-mails with invitations for events in the city or events related to her work. She made always a huge effort to go, trying to live a bit and meet new people. She laughed at herself because every time she was going to one of these events she ended up meeting someone, but it was usually a woman. She met a few men as well, but they were so uninteresting that she never kept contact with them. One time she met a woman who was manager of a company that bought companies facing bankruptcy. On another occasion she met a matchmaker, very fashionable nowadays for those who don’t have time to search or can’t find the perfect match. This extraordinary well succeed matchmaker ended up offering Carolina an assessment of her profile and one perfect date for free. Another time Carolina met a British woman, a journalist working for the Aljazeera television. Today she was tired because of the walk, grateful for the boys staying overnight at a friend's house, she takes a shower, eats a sandwich, lies down on her cosy bed with an enviable view over the city and falls asleep right away.
She dreams the same dream every time.
A decision
In London, Carolina rarely cares for driving. She drives only at weekends if she needs to go shopping or when she wants to leave London for some reason, so she has a black Jaguar XF that is parked in the garage, without being used most of the time. When she goes to work she never uses the car, public transports are great and she didn’t have to deal with the parking problem in the city centre, which was always chaotic. So as usual the next day Carolina makes to the bus ride to work, as normally happens she arrives earlier. She loved arriving early, drinking an espresso calmly, tasting it while she turn the lights of her office, sitting comfortably in her chair and connecting the computer. As there were still 15 minutes to 9 a.m., she had plenty of time to send messages to her boys to make sure that they are well and are getting ready or already on thei
r way to the university. Once she knows they are good, she decides to open the meetings application on her Iphone and there was again the picture from this arrogant man with the hypnotic blue eyes from the previous day.
From what she had read on the application when she opts for no, that person should no longer appear, but how it was that he was there again, she couldn’t understand. It’s almost saying "I will continue to appear until you say yes." Carolina felt the urge to meet him, it still was a no, but in his expression, in his eyes, she chose to slide her finger to the right, giving the final yes. At this point Carolina was already too curious to know more about him and she waited for his feedback.
In his introduction she knew he was same age as she was and had a little daughter.
It’s a good start – She thought – As I have already kids, he could understand the parenthood and priorities when they arise.
After the divorce, Carolina learned that the best men to go out with were often those who were already parents and they were in a much better place to understand that she was also a divorced and was a mother. She knew they understood better when certain sacrifices needed to be made on behalf of children than often due to themselves, she knew such men were more sensitive to understand the responsibility of being a parent. Once she slide her finger giving indication of yes, moments later emerged the picture of Carolina and JP (with their initials) to match and showing the word “match”.
From now on they could exchange messages if they wished. Carolina had to admit that the photos taken to JP should have been taken by a professional. He had quality photos and yet didn’t look like a model, it was a bit confusing, because he showed in the photos he wasn’t comfortable enough to be a model, but the physical aspect of him, yes definitely he could be a model or an actor. She already had some confirmations and a few messages to start introductions from the previous day, but she didn’t have the patience or any interest talking with them, maybe later.
THE DEAL: Novel Page 3