by Luke Allnutt
“Would you like to go out sometime?” I said.
“Yes,” she said almost instantly, and her reply was so quick I didn’t think she had understood.
“I mean that...”
“Sorry,” she said, “maybe I’m confused. I thought you were asking me out.”
“I did. I was,” I said, leaning a little closer so I could hear her above the music.
“Very well,” she said, smiling again, and she smelled of soap and newly washed hair.
“Sorry, it’s loud in here,” I said. “So can I have your phone number or email or something?”
Anna took a small step back, and I realized I was leaning into her. “Yes, although on one condition.”
“Okay,” I said, still thinking about her “that Rob” comment. “What is it?”
“You give me my phone back.”
I looked down and realized I was still holding her Nokia. “Oh, shit, sorry.”
She smiled and put her phone in her bag. “Okay,” she said. “It’s Anna Mitchell-Rose at yahoo.co.uk. All one word. Two l’s in Mitchell, no full stops or hyphenation.”
* * *
A week later, the cinema. Watching the trailers, I could feel the warmth of her body and I wanted to reach out and touch her, to put my hand on her bare leg. I glanced at her a few times and hoped she might turn toward me and our eyes would meet, but she just stared at the screen, her back straight as if she was sitting in church, her thick-framed glasses perched on her nose. The only movement she made was to silently take sweets from her bag of pick ’n’ mix. I had watched her count them out when she bought them: five from the top row, five from the bottom.
I fidgeted through the movie, about an insufferable drifter who hitchhiked around North America and then died in Alaska. I couldn’t wait for it to end. Anna, however, seemed to be enjoying it—judging by how still she sat, how her eyes never left the screen.
When the movie ended, I thought that she might be one of those people who sit in a reverential silence until the last of the credits rolled, but the moment the screen turned black, she stood up and picked up her coat.
“So what did you think?” I said, as we hurried down the stairs toward the cinema bar.
“I hated it,” Anna said. “Every single minute of it.”
“Really?”
“Yes. It was absolutely awful.”
In the little lobby bar, we sat down at a table next to an antique piano. “It’s funny,” I said, “I thought you were enjoying it.”
“No, I hated it. I found him to be very unpleasant. Traveling all over the place, not letting his family know. He didn’t give two hoots about anyone but himself.”
Two hoots. I imagined for a moment introducing her to my friends back home.
“You didn’t think it was cool when he renounced all his possessions and burned his money?” I said, enjoying egging her on. Anna took her glasses off, wiped the lenses with a small cloth, then put them in an ancient-looking case.
“What on earth was ‘cool’ about that?” she said, her cheeks flushing. Then she squinted a little, as if she needed to put her reading glasses back on. “Oh, you’re joking,” she said, smiling. “I see. But really, though. His family worked hard for what he had and he gave it all up, because of...because of what, some tedious teenage philosophy. He was utterly, utterly self-indulgent.” She suddenly seemed a little self-conscious and stopped speaking as the waitress brought over our drinks.
“Did you like it then, the movie?” she said, when we were alone again.
“No,” I said. “I absolutely hated it.”
Anna beamed. “Good. I’m so glad.”
“What was it he was always telling people? ‘Make each day a new horizon.’”
“God, yes,” Anna said. “Preachy New Age rubbish.”
“And you know what was funny?” I said.
“What?”
“The one thing—the only thing really—that he wanted to do, which was live in the wild, well, he wasn’t very good at it, was he? He failed.”
“Exactly,” Anna said, laughing, her blue eyes flashing in the dim orange light of the bar. “God, you’re right, he was even rubbish at that. The thing is, if he had actually listened to advice from those who knew better, people who had experience living in the wilderness—wilderness experts, for example—then he might still be alive.”
“Wilderness experts?”
“Yes, wilderness experts,” she said, looking at me sternly. “I believe that’s the official name for them.”
I looked at Anna as she took a sip of her drink. She really was beautiful, her mouth always on the cusp of a smile, her eyes sparkling like a promise. She was too good for me. She would go to London and end up with the type of guy who was invited to her high-school dances.
“And what about you, where do your parents live?” Anna said, and I realized I was staring at her.
“My dad still lives in Romford.”
Anna hesitated, took a sip of her drink. “Are your parents divorced?”
“My mom died. When I was fifteen.”
“Oh,” Anna said. “I’m very sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said, “it’s not your fault.” It took her a moment to get my little joke, and I grinned and she smiled back, a little more at ease.
I didn’t like talking about that morning, when Dad was waiting for me outside the school gate. For some reason, he was wearing his best suit. He didn’t say much. He didn’t have to. Mom had collapsed at work, he said, a massive stroke. They had always joked that he would be the one to go first.
“So where’s home?” I asked Anna.
“Oh, the main house is in Suffolk, but we’ve not really been there enough for it to feel like home.”
“Ah, the hard life, so many houses...” I didn’t know why I said it. It was meant to be flippant, a quip, but it just sounded petty and unkind.
Anna scowled at me and took a hurried sip of her drink as if she had to leave. “Actually, Rob, if you must know, I was on scholarship at Roedean, and my parents don’t have two pennies to rub together.”
“Sorry, I didn’t mean...” I stammered. She was frowning, and I could see she found it hard to disguise her annoyance.
“And before you try to out-poor me, Rob, my parents were missionaries and I spent most of my childhood living in Kenyan slums that would make your public housing complex look like Cheam.”
She angled her body away from me, and we both silently sipped our drinks.
“Sorry again. I didn’t mean it like that, I really didn’t,” I said.
Anna sighed and nervously fiddled with the menu. Then she smiled and looked at me again. “Sorry, I probably overreacted a little. Evidently you’re not the only one to have a chip on your shoulder.”
That night we kissed as soon as we closed the bedroom door. After a few breathless minutes, Anna stopped and I thought she was having second thoughts. But then she started to undress, as if she was alone in her own room, and I watched her and I didn’t think she minded me watching her: the angular bones of her hips, her neat little breasts, her pale delicate arms. When she was naked, she folded her clothes and left them in a tidy pile on my desk.
Since I had been a teenager, sex had always been an exercise in caution. A gradual testing of the waters, a constant expectation that my probing hands would be quickly brushed away. Anna was nothing like that. She was hungry and uninhibited, so unlike the prim and proper way she carried herself. Her desire was single-minded—a quality then, not really knowing women, I found curiously masculine. We stayed awake until the early hours, shuttered behind hastily drawn curtains, our bodies wet with each other, until finally we slept.
* * *
I waited for her out on the court, feeling a little uncomfortable in my West Ham United football shirt and Umbro shorts. The court smelled of
rubber and fresh sweat. I wanted to impress on her that I was sporty, that I didn’t just spend my time in front of my computer. So we agreed to a game of squash, which Anna said she had played once or twice at school.
Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, she came out onto the court. In her flappy men’s shorts and regular blouse, she looked like a 1920s tennis star.
“What?” she said.
“What, what?” I said, stifling a laugh.
“Well, your clothes aren’t exactly regulation either. With your football jersey.”
“I didn’t say anything,” I protested, smirking and looking away from her.
“Right. Shall we play then?” she said, awkwardly holding her racket with two hands.
We started warming up, slowly hitting the ball back and forth. Except Anna wasn’t really hitting the ball, but flailing, struggling to connect even when she was serving.
“I’m not so good without my glasses,” Anna said, as she scooped the ball up toward the ceiling.
We carried on like that for a while, not having anything that would resemble a game.
“Okay, I admit it. I lied,” Anna said, after she missed the ball yet again while attempting to serve.
“You lied?”
“I’ve actually never played squash.”
“Oh,” I said, once again stifling a laugh.
“I asked Lola and she said it was easy. She said that anyone could do it. Apparently not.”
I wished then I could have taken a picture of her on that squash court. She looked so beautiful, her dark flannel shorts accentuating her pale legs, her dimpled cheeks flushed with exercise.
“Have you really only played a few times?” Anna asked.
“I don’t know, four or five. At school.”
Anna was quiet, bit her lip. “Well, the truth is, I hate sports.”
“I thought you wanted to play?” I said, putting my arm around her cold shoulders.
“Not really. I thought you wanted to,” she said, gently tapping her racket against her leg. “I only did it because, well, I didn’t want you to think that I was sedentary.”
I smiled when she said that. Sedentary. It was a very Anna word. After another five minutes of pretending, we gave up and went outside.
It was sweltering in the sun. We sat on a small wall that overlooked an enclosed field hockey turf. Children, mostly infants and a few older teenagers, were running around at some kind of sports camp.
We had both decided that we would stay the summer in Cambridge, living off the rest of our student loans. Anna said she wanted to do all the touristy Cambridge things she had never done because she had been working so hard to get her first-class honors. So we went punting and walked around some of the colleges and spent an afternoon in the Fitzwilliam Museum and a morning in the botanical gardens. Much of the time we just spent in bed.
As the summer went on, our friends gradually left. They went off traveling: backpacking in Australia, a camper van across South America. While I felt a pang of regret when they left, a sense that I was missing out on something, Anna and I were both agreed that traveling wasn’t for us. We hadn’t gone to Cambridge just to piss it all away “finding ourselves” somewhere in the Andes. Besides, I had my maps to think about, the software I was writing, the company I wanted to start.
The real reason, though, was that we didn’t want to be apart. We were inseparable, like love-struck teens whose parents and friends can see are headed for a fall. Whenever we tried to spend just one night alone in our own rooms, we were miserable and antsy. We broke, usually within an hour. There was a line in an old Blur song that we both liked: collapsed in love. And that was what had happened. We collapsed in love.
People thought Anna was closed, a cold fish, but she wasn’t like that with me. One evening, without probing, she told me about her life in Kenya and her missionary parents. In these careful, considered sentences, she talked about her father, his affairs, his estrangement from the church. She talked about her mother: how she would not accept her father’s wrongdoing; how she channeled her love into her good works.
It was like a flood, an epiphany, to find out that this person that I thought was so guarded actually lay entirely open, exposed, and the one she wanted to let in was not her father, or Lola, or one of her housemates, but me.
The sun was getting hotter, and we sat on the wall drinking some water that Anna had brought in a thermos.
“Do you want to go and play squash again?”
“No,” Anna said. “I think I’ve humiliated myself enough today.”
“I enjoyed it.”
“Yes,” she said, “I’m sure you did.”
“You do look very cute in your shorts.”
She smiled and dug me gently in the ribs. “God, it’s hot, isn’t it,” Anna said, wiping her brow.
The momentary respite of breeze had gone and it felt like it was 100 degrees. “We could go in the shade over there?” I said, pointing to an awning on the other side of the field.
Anna looked up. “We could, but we’d have to cross the field,” she said. “And look.”
We hadn’t noticed before, but a group of animals—adults in furry suits—had joined the children on the field. A lion, a tiger, a panda, they looked like the grubby leftovers from a Disney parade. There was some kind of awards ceremony, and the children were waiting in line for their prizes.
“What are they doing?” Anna asked.
“Getting medals, I think.”
“Right, I get that, but why the animals?”
I shrugged and Anna squinted, trying to get a better view.
“I don’t like the look of them,” Anna said.
“The animals or the children?”
“The animals.”
I looked over at them. In a certain light, they did look quite sinister, their furry mouths locked into perma-smiles.
“There’s a lot of them,” I said.
“Indeed,” Anna said warily.
“Shall we risk it then?” I said, getting up off the wall.
“No,” Anna said indignantly. “We can’t just run across the field, Rob. It’s some kind of school function.”
“We’re not going to get arrested.”
“We might,” she said.
“Well, I’m going,” I said, looking back, expecting her to follow. “It’s better than sitting here and dying in the sun.” I started running across the pitch, but Anna stayed on the touchline, looking sheepish, as if she was gathering the courage to jump into a swimming pool.
Now safely in the shade on the other side, I waved at her to come across and she cautiously started to move. In an attempt to appear less conspicuous, she decided to walk, but there was something about her nervousness that made her stand out. The master of ceremonies on the microphone stopped talking, and the heads of the children, the parents and the animals all turned to stare at Anna.
She smiled politely, aware that all eyes were on her, and then broke into a hurried little trot. In her gym shorts and blouse, she could have passed for a teenager, which was probably why a large orange tiger intercepted her in the center circle, linked arms and then dragged her into the line of children. I started to laugh, thinking she would make a break for it, but Anna—polite, diligent Anna—stayed in line, waiting for her prize.
After receiving her medal, Anna had to walk down a greeting line of animals. Even from here, I could see the flicker of fear on her face. With her medal round her neck, she moved down the line, being embraced by each animal one by one. Despite the animals’ advances, Anna didn’t hug back. She even pulled away when a bear tried to rest its head on her neck.
When it was all over, when the children had gone to greet their proud parents, Anna walked sheepishly back to where I was standing in the shade, her cheeks bright red, little bits of animal fur stuck to her blouse.<
br />
“Oh my God,” I said, still laughing. “What were you doing?”
Anna started to giggle and wiped the sweat off her brow. “I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. The tiger cornered me.”
“Why didn’t you just leave?” I said, handing her the thermos of water.
“I don’t know. I was in the line and then...it was too late... Stop laughing,” she said, frowning at me. “It’s not funny.”
“It is.”
“Well, maybe a bit. And anyway, it’s your fault.”
“How?”
“For making me cross that pitch. You’re an absolute idiot,” she said, sipping the water. “It’s literally my worst nightmare. Being hugged in public.”
“And by animals.”
“Well, quite.”
We sat for a moment, cooling off in the shade, and I knew then that I couldn’t possibly love her any more.
* * *
We were sitting by the River Cam, with a bottle of wine and some sandwiches. It was another sweltering day. Heat haze hugged the banks of the river like a dogged morning mist, and tinkles of jazz piano floated across the water from a café on the shore.
“Are you ever going to put that away?” Anna said.
I had spent the rest of my student loan on a digital camera and some extra lenses. “Yeah, yeah,” I said, fiddling with the settings, trying to work out how to change the shutter speed.
“Seriously, stop pointing it at me. I feel like a model or something.”
“You look like a model,” I said, and took a photo of her. She stuck out her tongue and turned toward the water, stretching her legs out on the riverbank.
“So any progress?” Anna said casually.
“On what?”
“The job hunt, I mean.”
“Oh, that,” I said. “I sent off a few CVs but I haven’t heard anything back yet. Do you want more wine?”
Anna put her hand over her plastic cup and shook her head, and I poured myself some more.
“You seem pretty relaxed about it all.”
I shrugged. “I’m not going to worry.”
Anna puckered her lips, something she did when she didn’t agree. “Well, you’ve only sent off a few CVs. I sent off about fifteen applications and only got five job offers.”