About the Author
Jessica Thompson is a multimedia journalist working for a series of newspapers in London. Jessica lives in North London and this is her first novel.
THIS IS A LOVE STORY
Jessica Thompson
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Coronet
An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Jessica Thompson 2012
The right of Jessica Thompson to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
eBook ISBN 9781444734225
ISBN 9781444734218
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.hodder.co.uk
For mum, dad and Louise
One
He looks like he could save your life.
Sienna
There are two people sitting opposite me on the train this morning.
A guy and a girl.
They must be in their mid-twenties.
The guy has thick blond hair, green eyes and sexy freckles dotted all over his nose like stars in a clear night sky.
He’s really handsome but not my type. I feel about him the way I feel about Monet. I appreciate what I see. It’s nice. But not really to my taste.
I’m guessing his name is Tom, or something like that, and he works in PR. I am drawing this assumption because he’s wearing what looks like a designer grey suit with a salmon-pink tie.
I like to play this little imagination game sometimes. I’m sure I’m probably wrong most of the time, but it passes a train journey.
She could be a Claire, with long brown hair that’s kind of stringy and ragged, but still seems like it’s all part of a carefully planned look. She has made an effort to seem like she doesn’t give a shit. I’m a girl, I see straight through it. She wants everyone to think she just rolled out of bed like this.
She’s got perfectly painted grey nail varnish on, and a pair of tight black jeans with expensive-looking nude ballet pumps.
Claire looks a bit more creative than her public relations man; it’s the jewellery that gives it away – big chunky bracelets and an eccentric beaded necklace. I reckon she works in the art world, perhaps. Possibly not holding a paintbrush, but maybe in a gallery, having to explain to people what the artist meant by the scrambled splats on the walls.
She’s probably well educated, with a family who live in Kent but holiday in the Cayman Islands three times a year.
I bet Tom loves her. It looks like he does. He has the aura of a man who won’t be easily distracted. It’s lovely.
One of her legs is up on his lap. She’s reading the paper and he kisses her on the cheek every now and then, looking like these are the moments that make his world go round. On the way to work with the love of his life.
I let out a deep sigh as I realise I am staring. Plus, I’m being overly romantic. I’m sure they have the same problems as everyone else – you know, rows about snoring, map-reading and household duties.
But still . . . It dawns on me that I don’t have a love like that at home. I have love, but it’s different . . .
I’m thinking that maybe mornings are easier when you are Tom the PR man and Claire the gallery girl, and not me. Sienna Walker.
You might be woken by gentle kisses, and that special feeling of skin on skin that you soon take for granted.
Warm breath against your face and knowing that you’re safe.
But not me.
My mornings are more like being dunked into a vat of cold water.
I flinch as the train pulls away from the station and I recall the start of my day, which I’m sure would’ve been much easier if I had woken up next to the man of my dreams like Claire, or whatever her name is, did.
The alarm went off at 6.30 a.m., a shrill, piercing scream that made my ears want to burrow inside my head and nestle in the padded, warm folds of my brain. I just wanted to sleep. I wanted to sink back under the covers, which are soft on my skin and smell like fresh daisies, and hide from the world. I contemplated calling in sick, but I haven’t been in the job for long enough to be doing things like that.
Mornings and I do not go well together, a bit like cheese and jam, or hummus and chocolate. It’s a bad combo.
I dragged my heavy limbs out of bed and pushed my feet onto the smooth wooden flooring, my fringe sticking up into the air like a mobile phone mast.
The soft cocoon I had been lying in was replaced by a cool draft and an urgent need to pee. Like a zombie I plodded into the bathroom and tried to make sense of the half-light.
After a few minutes of ‘getting ready’, which included stabbing at my mouth with a worn-out toothbrush and attempting to run a comb through my tangled hair, I felt ready for a shower.
I was wrong.
The water came out cold.
It was a little like someone had stored a night’s quota of icy rainfall in a rusty bucket and tipped it all over me.
My eyes opened wide for the first time since waking, my pupils shrinking to the size of pinpricks as I attempted to deal with the shock. I jumped around to dodge the relentless bullets while I waited for the water to heat up but they were unavoidable.
Then there was the challenge of negotiating the leafy streets of my west London suburb and getting the train to work. In spite of the shock of the shower, I was still bleary-eyed, and so the pavement seemed to spread out in front of me like a chessboard.
Walking around London in the rush hour is like a platform game. The scoring system goes a little like this:
5 points for not stepping into the giant puddle that always collects at the bottom of Edgley Road.
15 points for successfully overtaking the elderly couple who are blocking the way, without walking into a lamp post.
10 points for avoiding the charity touts who lunge towards me outside the station and give me incommunicable guilt for scuttling away.
15 points for buying the last carton of orange juice at the local shop.
20 points for picking up a Metro before they have all been greedily swiped by the grab it for yourself, then throw it away ten minutes later commuter population.
The next challenge was finding a seat on the train. Play it right and you are in for a relatively comfy ride. Play it wrong and you will spend twenty minutes with your face rammed against the toughened glass window and a walking stick wedged into your coccyx.
The train arrived one minute after I got onto the platform, so I weaved through the people, left, right, left, right, and I made it.
But as I sit across from a picture of love that is making me feel acutely depressed about my situation at home, I realise that today, I am not in the best of moods.
Oh no . . . As Tom pulls a strand of Claire’s hair away from her right ear and kisses it gently I have to look away before I go insane. So I glance to my left in a bid to escape this doe-eyed display. But in doing so, my eyes meet directly with those of a man sitting next to me, who just happens to be staring at that moment.
He must be in his fifties
, a skinny type with beady eyes and a pair of glasses with lenses so thick they remind me of the bottom of milk bottles.
He smiles awkwardly as he realises he has been caught staring. Because I like to think I’m a relatively nice person, I smile back as if to say, ‘you know what? It’s ok. Let’s just forget about this and move on’.
I turn away and gaze towards the ceiling; it is obviously a safer option today. But I feel a presence again, my peripheral vision is telling me this. So I turn my head back and the man is staring again, almost boring his eyes into my cheek. This is no accidental gaze. He jumps as if he has been caught pilfering grapes from the supermarket.
‘Oh err, ever so sorry about that, it’s just you’re very beau . . .’
‘Just stop will you. Please?’, I ask, turning red.
‘Yes, of course. Sorry’, he says in his well-spoken accent, somewhat crestfallen.
Welcome to train life. It is a circus and a zoo all at the same time.
I wonder why invasive behaviour of this nature irritates me so much. Blatant letching goes hand in hand with over-enthusiastic public displays of affection, offensive-smelling takeaways and unrestricted trumping.
It’s only my third week at the new job and this daily ritual is all a bit of a shock.
The squash of the rush hour can do such strange things to normal people. Individuals who are usually quite calm find themselves gritting their teeth, muttering under their breath and trying desperately hard not to decapitate someone with an umbrella.
A woman to my right makes a phone call, and a loud one at that.
Man sitting next to woman grimaces.
This woman is so wrapped up in her conversation that she fails to notice we are approaching a tunnel and then, oh dear.
What a shame. The whole carriage breathes a sigh of relief apart from Tom and Claire who are so wrapped up in their bubble of love, ducklings and popping candy that they had no idea about it all in the first place.
For a moment we seem to achieve some kind of peace. An idle-looking young man who appears to have been rudely awoken halfway through a six-month hibernation shuffles back into the corner of his seat. His scruffiness makes me feel better – he has the look I was sporting within my first hour of waking.
Tense legs start to relax, and daydreamers turn their heads back to the windows, hoping for some kind of escape from this cattle cart from hell.
I balance my tea between my knees, pick up my copy of Metro and try to think of the things I have planned for the day ahead, but I am quickly distracted by a picture story of a squirrel on custom-built waterskis.
God, I love this paper.
Being a journalist myself, much as I dream of one day uncovering an earth-shattering revelation of the same magnitude as the expenses scandal, I’d be just as happy writing about small, cuddly animals engaged in bizarre activities like this one.
I look around at other Metro readers. Is anyone else looking at the squirrel? I wonder.
A lady in the row behind the star-crossed lovers is reading, but no, she looks quite sad.
No one is smiling, let alone laughing, and that can’t be right because this is one bloody funny animal.
I keep scanning and my eyes rest on a desperately handsome man in a green T-shirt, sitting across from me, a couple of spaces to the right. He is smirking; in fact, he is so tickled by something that he has to clear his throat.
Wow. How did I not notice him before?
Maybe he got on the train just a few minutes ago when I was lost in my angry, bitter thought processes.
He looks like he would be tall standing up. Under the T-shirt I can make out a perfectly proportioned torso supporting broad, handsome shoulders, and atop it all is a face I can’t bear to look away from. My heart catches in my throat and I swallow hard.
He has pure olive skin, dotted across his chin with sexy stubble that creeps up his chiselled jawline like vines on a beautiful house. His features are strong and bold.
He doesn’t look like a coward. He looks like he could save your life.
These hard, artistic features contrast with a pair of dangerous brown eyes that almost glitter in the artificial strip lighting.
Don’t. Fall. Into. Them.
His lips are perfect, and startlingly like those of my favourite pin-up, Jake Gyllenhaal.
He has whirls of thick brown hair almost caramel in tone, waxed in different directions.
He looks like trouble.
I can already imagine what it might be like to kiss him . . .
I peer over the top of the page and he must sense me because he looks too.
Our eyes meet, and for a few moments all that stands between us are forty-five thin sheets of sooty recycled paper, two metres of stifling carriage air and a fat man who is nodding off on my left shoulder.
This is one of those Hollywood moments you see in the cinema, except I am supposed to be blonde and a size zero.
He is quite possibly one of the most striking men I have ever seen in my life.
As a Londoner, you come to realise that while this city is bursting at the seams with people of all shapes and sizes, it’s very rare that someone stops you in your tracks.
Most people on trains try to lose themselves in the depths of a book, hide away behind a paper or enter the realms of a musical world. They just pass each other by. To actually make a connection, and a friendly one at that, is nothing short of a miracle.
So here goes.
I am either going to make a massive fool of myself, or one day we will tell the guests at our wedding how we bonded over a rodent with a love of water sports. That will beat the usual stories of blind dates and meeting at the gym.
Deep breath . . .
Squirrel?
I mouth it at him, my lips slowly forming the shape of this very silly word. My eyebrows are arched in an inquisitive manner.
Time seems to blur like a slowed-down film clip; I can hear my heart beating in my ears. Shit, shit, shit . . .
Suddenly one thumb is up and the most gorgeous man in this city, in fact possibly the world, has turned his copy of Metro to face me and is pointing towards our fluffy matchmaker.
He bites his bottom lip to stop himself laughing out loud, a row of perfect white teeth just about visible. This is sexy.
I flash him a flirtatious grin and draw my eyes away from his, my heart racing in my chest.
Play. It. Cool.
I keep pretending to read my paper, turning away from the picture story as otherwise I would soon be laughing so hard I’d be squirting tea through my nostrils, and that would kind of ruin the look I was going for.
Aware that I have pushed my own boundaries by initiating this whole thing, I keep reading and reading as if I don’t care, and try to work out what to do next.
The train stops once but I am pretty sure I can still see the lush green hue of his top from the corner of my eye. I must try not to look at him.
God bless peripheral vision.
Soon five minutes have passed and I’m satisfied that it is safe to proceed with eye contact number two.
I look up, but to my horror my handsome stranger has been replaced by an elderly man in a pea-green jacket. The couple has gone too. I quickly whip my head around the carriage, back and forth, and then once more just in case. He has disappeared.
The pensioner sitting in his seat looks happy and surprised at my attention. Not you, pal . . .
Great, I think, looking down at my feet. There goes the man of my dreams. Quickly I realise the naivety of my little fantasy and I feel embarrassed. It was a silly idea anyway. I shudder at how I went from nought to sixty on the love scale within a few minutes – not like me at all.
Besides, he was probably a raving lunatic. Laughing at squirrels? Whatever next, I console myself.
I am a desperate romantic. I love the idea of random collisions of the heart. I crave quirky meetings rather than the conventional way women get chatted up at bars and dragged home for a night of drunken fumb
ling with a man they barely know. ‘We got talking through mutual friends at dinner’ is dire. If you’re feeling particularly dull, you could whip out the ‘We met at work’ tale.
Yawn.
There is a little Juliet inside me, hoping I will lock eyes with my Romeo on the other side of a fish tank or through the gap in a library bookcase. Hell, even if it’s behind the condiments section in a supermarket I don’t really mind.
I’m only twenty but I lament the day that good old-fashioned romance died. I’m not sure when it was. Some say we lost it when we fought for feminism, which is probably a relatively small price to pay for what we’ve gained.
But did we really mean to take it this far?
So far, in fact, that if a man sends you flowers at work your female colleagues will cackle and pretend to vomit, yet when they get home they will still berate their husbands for never buying them flowers?
My stop interrupts me from what was becoming a deep, downward spiral of thought.
Being the fickle young thing that I am, I have pretty much forgotten about my handsome stranger by the time I get to the bottom of my large tea and chuck the crumpled cup into a heaving bin on the platform.
It was a fleeting moment, a bit of sugar on my cereal. I have bigger fish to fry, a career to focus upon. No time for distractions, I tell myself. Plus, there is too much mess at home. Too much to cope with. I really shouldn’t be looking out for other men.
My heart starts to flutter as I negotiate the pavements of Balham. The streets are cluttered with people, mothers and prams, lads in baggy jeans, the last dribs and drabs of City workers dashing towards the train station to head into central London. There are newsagents, estate agents and pound shops, the usual suspects with the occasional petite coffee shop sandwiched between them.
I love it here.
Cigarette smoke wafts in the soft spring air, mingling with the steam emanating from fresh bacon rolls on the plates in front of a couple sharing breakfast at a table I pass.
I’m really pleased with my new job. It has taken two years of hard work and painful rejections to get this entry-level role at The Cube publishing house. Climbing the career ladder has been difficult for me, so I’ve had to be pretty creative to catch the eye of prospective employers. I wasn’t able to go to university, so I’ve had to ensure I’ve taught myself about things like web journalism, video and trying to keep my finger on the pulse in terms of social media. OK, it isn’t the Guardian or The Times, but it’s a good start and so far I have thoroughly enjoyed every second.
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