They’d won the princely sum of ninety-eight pounds and seventy-six pence, some of which they immediately spent on more alcohol and cheesy chips. Nina liked to think they were good winners, calm and composed, unlike The Battering RAMs.
Big Trevor stormed over to demand a recount, then he pored over their quiz sheet to query each answer and finally demanded that Clive disqualify them for bringing in a ringer.
Clive was having none of it. ‘The quizmaster’s decision is final and abiding,’ he insisted and Nina could take it no more.
‘Hey! Big Trev! Nobody likes a sore loser!’ she called out. ‘Now, stop bellyaching and show a bit of dignity.’
It wasn’t often that Nina got to lecture people on their lack of dignity. Usually it was the other way round, she thought as Trevor slunk back to his corner.
‘My God, I thought it was a pub quiz but it seems to have turned into some kind of blood vengeance,’ Noah said. ‘Is it always like this?’
‘No, because The Battering RAMs always win.’ Tom shuddered. ‘We’ll have to leave together in case they’re waiting outside to jump us.’
‘Talking of leaving, it is very late for a school night.’ Posy looked flinty-eyed at her younger brother. ‘And just how many shandies have you had?’
‘This is my second,’ Sam replied with a slightly hurt intonation to his voice, like he couldn’t believe that his sister was implying that he’d broken her ‘two shandies on a school night and any other night, come to that’ rule. It might even have been convincing if Nina didn’t know for a fact that it was actually Sam’s fourth shandy, which was why he’d been getting increasingly giggly. ‘I’m not even a little bit drunk. Anyway, it’s only nine. It’s still early. Let’s stay for a bit.’
It seemed a pity to break up the party but Nina had an elsewhere to be. ‘Actually, I have to bail,’ she said with genuine regret because it was very comfy on the banquette, even though she was still thigh to thigh with Noah, and she could easily go another bowl of cheesy chips. ‘Got a hot date with that guitarist I met the other night.’
There were blank looks.
‘Come on! I told you all about him. His name’s Rob, he plays guitar in some whiny rock band and he broods beautifully,’ Nina told her colleagues again.
Tom shook his head. ‘No, doesn’t ring any bells. But there have been a lot of brooding guitarists in your life.’
‘Well, I’m sure he’s lovely,’ Posy said supportively and Nina pulled a face. She didn’t want lovely. Lovely brought to mind the kind of men who gave you teddy bears with ‘to the world’s best girlfriend’ printed on their stomachs and wanted you to meet their parents before you’d even had sex with them.
‘I don’t want lovely,’ she insisted, as she got to her feet and began to gather her belongings together. ‘But I do want my very own Heathcliff and, like I said, Rob is very good at brooding.’
To her slight horror, Noah was on his feet too. ‘I’ll walk you out if that’s all right. Time I was going home anyway.’
Nina shrugged like she wasn’t bothered one way or another and tried to ignore Tom’s pointed look, which implied that he was very disappointed at her failure to flirt with Noah.
Noah held the door open for her and adjusted his quick stride to a slower pace to accommodate Nina who could only hobble over the cobbles of Rochester Street if she was wearing anything with a heel.
‘Which way you heading?’ he asked.
‘Camden, so just to the nearest bus stop,’ Nina said and as they turned the corner into Theobalds Road, the bus stop was in sight.
‘I’ll wait with you,’ Noah said even though it wasn’t even nine thirty and it was perfectly safe. ‘See you on the bus.’
Noah was as lovely as Posy wished Nina’s suitors to be. Even Nina’s mother would love him and she was a tough crowd. But not my type, Nina reassured herself, as they lapsed into an awkward silence. Still, she’d been on enough dates to know what to do with an awkward silence and it wouldn’t hurt to indulge in a little light flirtation. If nothing else, it would limber her up for her date.
‘So, you really do have some amazing pub-quiz skills,’ Nina said, because everyone liked getting compliments. ‘When you’re short of cash do you hunt around for a pub with a general-knowledge quiz machine so you can win a few quid?’
‘It never crossed my mind but now that you mention it, it could be a lucrative side gig.’ Noah smiled. ‘Although there are whole areas that I’m patchy on.’
‘Like, what?’ Nina challenged. ‘Seemed to me like you knew everything.’
‘Hardly everything. I’m not good on all sorts of things. Insects. I always get my Greek and Roman gods mixed up. And ice-skating. I know nothing about ice-skating.’
Damn it! Nina was smiling. At Noah. Again. ‘I don’t believe you. I bet you have tons of facts about ice-skating stored away up there.’ She almost but not quite touched his forehead.
‘I don’t. I really don’t,’ Noah assured her.
‘I’ve seen you in action now. You know everything. You know it all.’
Know it all. Noah. Know it all.
Oh God, that was it! Of course she knew him! How could she ever have forgotten? He was Know It All Noah!
Nina had the look of a cartoon character a split second before something heavy fell on them from a great height. Her eyes bugged out, mouth hung open as she continued to stare at Noah in utter disbelief, so it was no wonder that the smile gradually faded from his face.
He took a step back from Nina, his expression slightly bewildered.
‘I can’t believe … Ow!’ Nina had to bite down hard on her tongue to stop herself blurting out her unexpected revelation because now she also remembered why being called Know It All Noah wouldn’t hold many happy memories for him.
‘Sorry, I was, um, you know, er, first-date nerves.’ Nina grimaced – as excuses for acting like a total loon went, it was a pretty weak one. She tried out a sheepish smile that Noah did not return. ‘Normally I don’t get nervous before a date, but this guitarist, he’s a feisty one! Grrrr!’ And yes, she had just fashioned her hands into claws and growled. What was wrong with her?
‘I see,’ Noah said, his eyes fixed at a point somewhere beyond Nina’s shoulder. ‘Look! There’s your bus. Wouldn’t want to miss it and be late for your hot date.’ Nina turned to see the 168 trundling towards her.
She turned back to Noah to say goodbye, maybe apologise again, crack some lame joke, but he was gone. Striding away from her as if he couldn’t wait to put as much distance between them as possible.
‘I hate him for himself, but despise him for the memories he revives.’
Know It All Noah. Although in all the years that Noah had attended Orange Hill Secondary School, people had just called him Know It All.
Not because he was always getting in people’s faces with his huge intellect, far from it. Now that Nina had finally answered that nagging voice asking her where she knew him from, she found that she could picture adolescent Noah quite clearly.
Back then his hair had been really orange; the kind of orange hair that glowed so brightly it was as if it had its very own power source. He wore a pair of glasses with thick lenses that magnified the size of his green eyes to manga-like proportions. More often than not, those glasses were held together by Sellotape because they were frequently knocked to the ground.
He’d been gangly too, all elbows and knees, and walked with an odd loping gait like a newborn giraffe only recently upright, so he always looked as if he was waiting to grow into his school blazer, even when he’d been in sixth form. Probably because, by that point, Noah had skipped several years ahead. He’d been a couple of years older than Nina, the same age as her brother, Paul. But he’d been moved up a year for maths and all the science subjects. Then another year. Then yet another year. Had even been in the local paper for doing his GCSEs and A-levels early, which had earned him nothing but derision from his classmates.
Paul and his friends, but mostly P
aul, a fact which made Nina go hot and cold thinking about it, had made Noah’s life a misery for daring to be better than them. Then the older kids had made Noah’s life a misery too for daring to be better than them.
Whichever way you looked at it, Noah’s adolescence had been a misery. Lots of shoving him in corridors and shouts of ‘F*** off, Know It All!’ whenever he appeared. Nina didn’t even want to think about what horrors might have happened in the boys’ cloakroom as they changed into their football kit.
It was bad enough that nobody ever called Noah by his real name unless they were singing an infantile version of ‘Who Built The Ark?’ when he scuttled past. ‘Who did the fart? Noah! Noah! Who did the fart? Know It All Noah did the fart!’
Nina couldn’t remember if she’d ever joined in with the singing. She hoped not. Really hoped not. But she’d been one of the sheep back then. Had looked like all the other girls. Walked like them. Talked like them. Hadn’t wanted to stand out …
‘What’s the matter, Nina? Goose walk over your grave?’ Verity asked and Nina shivered again, returned, blinking, to the present – Friday morning in the tiny kitchen off the back office where she was meant to be making tea.
‘Just thinking about stuff,’ she mumbled, her face flushing.
Verity stared at her keenly because mumbling and blushing weren’t usually Nina’s thing. Usually they were more Verity’s thing.
‘Thinking about your date last night? How did it go?’ Verity asked. ‘Do you think he might be a long-haul type of guy?’
After recognising Noah, Nina had been off her game for her date with brooding guitarist Rob. Also, she’d quickly realised that he wasn’t so much brooding as a bit thick. Boring, even. Had no decent chat in him, just kept wittering on about effects pedals. ‘Definitely not my Heathcliff. Not even a third-date kind of guy, Very,’ Nina confessed sadly. ‘Though I will say that when you have to decide if you really want to have sexy fun times with the person you’ve already been on two dates with, the third-date rule really does sort the men from the boys.’
‘Though you don’t have to have sex with someone on the third date,’ Verity reminded Nina.
‘You don’t have to, but if you want to then the third date is the green light,’ Nina said firmly. Before Verity and Posy had gone and settled down, they’d treated Nina as the oracle on all things relating to men, dating and sex. Some of it, well, actually, quite a bit of it, she just made up on the spot, but she still missed being her friends’ go-to girl on relationship advice.
‘And if you really wanted to, like, if you’d fallen head over heels in love with someone, then maybe even the first date,’ Verity mused. ‘Un coup de foudre. Love like a thunderbolt, the French call it.’
‘Sex on a first date,’ Nina echoed in her most outraged voice. ‘And you a vicar’s daughter too, Very.’ Verity pretended to huff at the same time that the kettle came to the boil. ‘Tea, then? Shall I make for Posy? Tom’s not in today. Noah?’
Her voice actually cracked on the two syllables that were his name though Verity didn’t seem to notice. ‘Noah’s not in today either. Sent an email late last night saying that he was going to work off-site for the foreseeable future.’
‘Oh?’
‘Not sure he’s going to be able to report back on everything we say and do if he’s not on-site to observe,’ Verity said tartly as if she wasn’t quite on board with the scheme to make Happy Ever After work smarter if not harder, which was news to Nina.
‘Oh?’ Nina said yet again.
‘I love Posy. We all love Posy but she doesn’t need a Noah.’ Verity rolled her eyes. ‘She just needs to find the flipchart that has all the ideas from the brainstorm we had before the relaunch.’
‘That’s so true. My idea for a book group was pure genius and yet we still have no book group. We don’t even have a proper social media presence.’ Nina thought mournfully about the locked Instagram account – damn Sam! ‘Although maybe Noah might come up with some good ideas that we’d never think of,’ Nina said, because she was never ever going to have another uncharitable thought about Noah ever again. He’d had enough uncharitable thoughts aimed his way at Orange Hill to last a lifetime. ‘Fresh pair of eyes and all that.’
‘Noah’s very nice, I’m not saying he isn’t,’ Verity insisted, because thinking uncharitable thoughts was probably covered in the Ten Commandments. ‘I’m just saying that Noah isn’t the answer to all our problems.’
‘When you say problems, it makes me worried. Is the shop really doing that badly?’ Nina asked.
‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Verity said but she said it in a pretty anxious way. ‘And you don’t need to worry about Noah either. Though I would worry that I heard the shop bell three minutes ago and we’ve probably got customers waiting.’
Nina wished that she could take Verity’s advice and not worry about Noah, but Noah was all that she could think about for a lot of Friday, most of Saturday and especially Sunday when instead of spending it sleeping off the excesses of the week, she was going home for Sunday lunch.
Or rather she was going to her parents’ house in Worcester Park, Surrey. Nina hadn’t lived there for years but instead had shared flats as near to the centre of town as she could afford. The last one had been in Southfields, which Posy had always described as ‘being as far out of London as you could get while still being in London.’
It was just as well that Posy had never been to Worcester Park, Nina thought glumly. The tube didn’t go this far south-west so Nina had to get the tube to Waterloo, then change onto a proper train to travel deep into the suburbs of Surrey and street after street of identical nineteen-thirties semis, broken up by the odd parade of shops, a pub, a park.
The train chugged through Earlsfield, Wimbledon, Raynes Park, Motspur Park and finally Worcester Park. By now a gloom had settled on Nina’s shoulders like a fine coating of dandruff. As she exited the station a gang of teenage boys were doing wheelies on their bikes in the almost-deserted car park but they stopped to gawp at Nina as she strode past them, eyes forward, trying not to thrust her chest out.
‘Freak,’ one of them shouted at her.
‘But nice tits!’
Oh, she wasn’t in Kansas any more. Certainly she wasn’t in Bloomsbury where no one batted an eye at Nina, unless it was another woman giving her an approving glance or someone looking at her in a way that suggested they found her very attractive.
Nina had even toned it down today. She was wearing a little black dress, a vintage nineteen-forties number in rayon, fishnets, black suede shoes with a block heel and her leopard faux fur. Even her make-up was a little less today. She’d decided against the false eyelashes, her eyeliner was a discreet flick, and she’d gone for a tasteful rosy-pink lip when usually she applied several coats of her trusty MAC Ruby Woo.
Though she returned to her ancestral homelands on the second Sunday of every month, every single time Nina forgot that even her most subtle daytime look was still too much for the mean streets of Worcester Park.
She pulled her coat tighter around her and resisted the urge to say, ‘I know your mother, young man,’ to the one who’d shouted out ‘Nice tits.’ She was pretty sure that she’d been to school with his mum, he had the same pugnacious look as Tanya Hampton who’d been in the year above her, but it was such a Nana-ish thing to say and what if Tanya Hampton turned up on her parents’ doorstep to have it out with Nina? It was the kind of thing Tanya Hampton used to do.
No, it was best to ignore the boys who were losing interest anyway and cycling off to do wheelies through a large puddle. Nina was going to go home, see her family, eat Sunday lunch, not rise to the bait of her mother’s most passive-aggressive barbs and be back on the train in three hours tops. That was the plan and Nina was sticking to it.
‘Your presence is a moral poison that would contaminate the most virtuous.’
It was a ten-minute walk from the station through identical streets of identical houses until Nina was
turning into the cul-de-sac where her parents had lived for the last thirty-three years.
Number nineteen looked the same as it ever did. Front garden completely paved over to make room for her dad’s black cab and her mother’s nippy Mazda convertible. As Nina stood on the doorstep and fished for her keys in her handbag, she could see her reflection in the gleaming gold doorplate.
She nearly jumped out of her skin at the rapping on the window next to her. She turned to see her two nieces, Rosie and Ellie, jumping up and down and waving at her.
Nina waved back, grabbed her keys as she heard shouts of ‘Auntie Nina has pink hair now!’ and got the door open wide enough that Rosie and Ellie could hurl themselves at her so hard, she rocked back on her heels.
‘Hello! Hello! Hello!’ They both shouted at an ear-perforating volume, hugging Nina so enthusiastically, she was amazed that she didn’t snap a rib.
‘Steady on, ladies!’ Nina panted. ‘Let me put down my bags.’ Rosie and Ellie loosened their grip by a fraction so Nina could drop her bags on the floor then held out her arms. ‘OK. Now you can give me some loving.’
Nina had forgotten that there were some good things about her contractually obligated once-a-month trip home and she had her arms full of them. Two curly blonde heads nestled against her chest, fists clutched around the material of her dress in a way that would definitely leave wrinkles, but Nina didn’t care.
‘I have to breathe now,’ Nina said softly and her nieces relinquished their Vulcan-like hold on her so they could gaze up at her.
‘Your hair makes you look like a mermaid,’ eight-year-old Rosie said gravely.
‘Or a princess,’ her five-year-old sister Ellie added.
‘Mermaid princess was the look I was going for,’ Nina agreed. ‘Where is everyone?’
It was no surprise that ‘Nana and Mum’ were in the kitchen cooking lunch and that Nina’s father and her brother Paul were performing some acts of DIY upstairs. It was all about the traditional divisions of labour in KT10, Nina thought, her lip curling.
Crazy in Love at the Lonely Hearts Bookshop Page 8