*
In those early weeks, Kit rarely mentioned Melia. Every evening, while I texted Clare my ETA and negotiated the shopping and cooking chores ahead, he made no contact with his girlfriend; I’d even seen him decline her calls, flashing Steve or me the sitcom grimace of the long-suffering male evading his shrew. Meanwhile, Clare would pass on complaints from the other direction, though in such a way that it was impossible to tell if the criticism was Melia’s or her own. ‘You saw how stunning she is, but he pays her no attention. What an idiot.’
‘He’s one of those men who prioritizes the charming of new people,’ I said. ‘Maybe it’s the drama training. Every situation is an audition, a bid for approval. I’m amazed she even wants his attention. They’ve been together almost as long as we have.’
If this implied that I had no desire for her attention, Clare took it in good part, cheerfully arranging a date for the four of us to get together again. Kit and I got off the boat at Woolwich to meet Melia and her in a new food hall that had sprung up in a disused factory to dispatch pho, roti, ramen, fennel blanched in ostrich urine (not really, just testing) and cocktails with sprigs of Thai basil served in enamel camping mugs with striped paper straws. In spite of – or because of – high prices and taxing acoustics, the place was heaving, the simple accomplishment of securing a table enough to bring about a release of endorphins.
We sat, as we had on first meeting, in facing couples, Clare opposite Kit and me Melia. ‘I’ll tell my clients about this place,’ Melia said, sucking her drink. ‘If they take a flat on the peninsula, they can hop on the boat and come here for dinner. Make a little trip of it.’
Clare nodded approvingly. ‘Maybe we’ll be like Brixton Village soon.’
‘Hope so, it’ll be a lot easier to get coke,’ Kit said and Melia gave him one of her playful slaps.
‘Look how she abuses me,’ he appealed to me with a twisting smile.
‘There are men who would pay good money for a slap from your missus,’ I said, which was no more than the truth, for Melia was looking good enough to draw the gaze of most, if not all, passing males. The legs were not on display this time, but other assets were: her inky hair was pinned up to reveal a pale nape; she removed her work blazer to reveal a top with a neckline wide enough to slip off one shoulder, exposing a lacy black bra strap.
I’d dressed a little more smartly myself for the occasion, had even had a haircut in my lunch break and spritzed myself with some of the posh French cologne Clare had given me on my last birthday.
I realized Kit was responding to my last remark, repeating a question: ‘How much, d’you reckon? Enough to sort out the student loan?’
‘Oh, definitely.’ I wasn’t sure how much the average student loan was, to be honest. Already, I’d learned not to refer to the financial injustices of our age gap: to say, for instance, that I’d been to university when it was still free – I’d even received a grant – would be to provoke a bitter rant.
Less familiar with the danger, Clare began talking to him of her undergraduate budgeting, leaving me to devote myself to Melia and her lovely golden gaze.
‘So how are you, Jamie?’ An emphasis on you. She leaned a fraction closer. ‘I was thinking on my way here that I hardly know anything about you. I feel like Kit hogs you. I can just imagine him snuggled up to you on that boat.’
I grinned. ‘I can assure you there’s no snuggling.’
‘He says you know things. About the river, the buildings. All the old pubs.’
I smiled. ‘Well, I’ve made a life’s study of those.’ I watched as the end of the paper straw began disintegrating on her lower lip, causing her to pick off soggy fragments with matt-black fingernails. ‘How are you getting on at Hayter Armstrong?’
‘Oh, great. I love seeing all the amazing flats, especially the riverside ones. Those terraces where you can just stand and look out at the water.’
‘You’re lucky to be working at the higher end of the rental market.’
‘Not as lucky as if I got to live in one of them,’ she said, with a girlish flounce of self-pity.
I raised an eyebrow. ‘Some of them are unoccupied, right? You could always go back after hours and hang out. Pick your favourite and meet Kit there. Lie on someone else’s sofa and enjoy their view free of charge. Stay the night.’
I remembered making a similar comment when I first met Clare and she’d insisted that the scurrilous practices for which estate agents had once been known were long since outlawed.
‘What a brilliant idea!’ A smile broke over Melia’s face, light cracking the cloud. ‘When I’m caught in the act, I’ll tell Clare it was all your fault.’
‘I’ll deny it,’ I said and we grinned at each other over our sprigs of basil. ‘What’s your family background, Melia? You have such an unusual eye colour.’
‘Half jaguar, half lion,’ she said, deadpan, and our laughter interrupted our partners’ conversation. There was faint relief in Clare’s expression, I saw, and I knew to expect the complaint that arrived later over a glass of wine in the kitchen before bed.
‘Kit’s easily whipped up about money, have you noticed?’ ‘I certainly have,’ I said. ‘He’s very aspirational.’
Clare sighed. ‘All the youngsters at work are. They want more, more, more and then feel persecuted if they don’t get it. Richard says that generation were raised to expect it all to be handed to them on a plate and take it personally when it isn’t.’ She paused to glance around her elegant elder-and-limestone kitchen, relocated from basement to ground floor before my time to capitalize on the high windows and gracious proportions. The dining chairs were wittily mismatched, including the Shaker antique draped with sheepskin that she always chose.
I thought, a little disloyally, Wasn’t all this handed to you on a plate?
‘Kit’s the worst I’ve met, though,’ she went on. ‘You should’ve heard him tonight, talking like he thinks there’s some Anti-Roper League meeting every week to dream up new ways to thwart his ambitions.’
‘You have to admit life is tougher for them than it was for us,’ I said, with as much – or little – delicacy as my four cocktails and large glass of red would allow. ‘Because of people like you driving up property prices.’
She smirked. ‘That’s right, blame estate agents for all the world’s ills. We only propose what the punters are prepared to pay.’
‘Is that Hayter Armstrong’s new slogan?’
‘Ha! But seriously, how do they afford their lifestyle, Kit and Melia? They plead poverty and obviously have these debts and yet they dress so well and they go out constantly. Kit hinted at a coke habit, didn’t he? That can’t be cheap.’
‘I think the way it works is they spend their salaries the moment they’re paid and then put the rest of the month on credit cards,’ I said. ‘They live the way they think they have a right to live, not the way they can afford to.’
Clare’s eyes flared. ‘That’s not the way I would want to run my finances.’
There was a hint of superiority in her dismissal that riled me. ‘To be fair, they haven’t been supplied with a home by their parents.’
She said nothing, though she’d be forgiven for objecting to my sudden piety, given the unquestioning ease with which I’d benefited from her parents’ generosity all these years. All of a sudden it seemed impossible that we’d rubbed along for so long with this fundamental imbalance. If I didn’t reinvent myself adequately in the timeframe she deemed appropriate, would I be out on my ear?
‘Would you swap? Would you go back to being young, even with all the hardships?’ All at once, she was very earnest. She was a magical realist, Clare; she took hypotheticals as seriously as true dilemmas.
‘God, no,’ I said. ‘Would you?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
Which meant yes. ‘Really?’
‘Maybe if I were a man I’d feel like you do.’
‘What’s the difference?’ I asked.
‘Duh. People still find yo
u attractive – I’ve seen them looking at you. But women our age are invisible.’
It was natural that I should think of Melia earlier that evening, the pleasurable glow of her gaze. I wondered if she’d have paid me so much attention if she knew of my lack of assets. ‘Men our age without money can be just as invisible, believe me,’ I told Clare.
*
Well, perhaps the feted Vicky Jenkinson would be in a position to offer a solution to ageing in an unfriendly marketplace.
It wasn’t until I sat face to face with my career coach in a pair of mid-century chairs upholstered in Delft blue that I understood why I had needed Clare to step in and schedule my consultations for me: I didn’t want to look for a new job. I was quite content with the one I had.
That wasn’t to say I didn’t like Vicky or her very cool live-work unit in a former spice warehouse in Shad Thames that I passed twice a day on the boat.
She invited me to choose from a collection of herbal teas, individually packaged and with names like Rejuvenate and Reinvent. I scanned for one without a ‘re’, but there was none and so I chose Reawaken.
She spoke in brisk certainties. ‘You’re demoralized from applying for jobs and not being invited for an interview. We hear a lot about unemployment figures, but not very much about the million-plus people who want to work but don’t get fairly considered for the roles they apply for.’
‘Try not even having the application acknowledged,’ I said, though the truth was that since starting at the Comfort Zone I had not applied for a single job in my old sector.
‘The thing to bear in mind is that hiring someone is a risk-weighted investment decision. You need to lean on your gifts.’
I felt myself wince, and, noticing, she dialled down the jargon. ‘Jamie, I can help you return to marketing by expanding your network and refining the way you sell yourself, or, alternatively, identify a new career, one that has a healthy supply of roles. Do you have a sense of which it will be?’
‘Neither,’ I said, slurping the hot green Reawaken potion. ‘The thing is, I kind of like the job I’ve got. I’m happy there for now.’
She was not discouraged. ‘Is your current salary acceptable?’
‘It matches the unskilled work, I suppose. Clare says it’s pin money, but it’s not pin money to the millions of people who earn it. It’s how they put a roof over their heads and feed their kids.’
‘While studying for qualifications in some cases, I imagine,’ Vicky said. ‘Qualifications that you already have, Jamie.’ She talked about earning power, self-esteem and peer status, which made me remember Steve’s casual disregard and, to an extent, Kit’s.
‘The issue is, Vicky, I have a public-transport phobia, so how I get to work is more important to me than the kind of work I do when I get there or what my friends might think of it. So any new job will have to be within walking distance of London Bridge – or commutable by river bus.’
‘River bus?’ This sparked a connection and she opened a nearby storage box. ‘I have an exercise I do to discover how someone feels about their current position when they can’t identify it easily in words. Let’s try it.’
I thought I’d identified my position perfectly well in words, but I looked anyway at the picture cards she laid on the low table between us. They all involved a man and a boat of some sort, including one of an athletic type in a canoe heading towards a tsunami, another of a drudge on a ferry looking blankly out of a rain-spattered window, and a third of a rakish sort steering a yacht, with friends in the background drinking champagne. I had to say which one was me.
‘One client said she was none of these,’ Vicky commented. ‘She said she was in the water, drowning. Now she’s a vice president at a nonprofit organization. Her dream job.’
‘This is easy for me,’ I said, pointing. ‘I’m the one on the ferry.’
‘Are you heading to work or back home?’
‘I’m heading home.’ I paused, starting to enjoy this. ‘But my season ticket’s run out. I’m a fare dodger.’
‘Interesting,’ Vicky said.
‘Were the teas a test, too?’ I asked, sipping.
‘The teas? No.’ There was a pause. ‘Let’s take a look at your A to Z of skills, shall we?’
*
One evening on the boat, we got talking to a red-haired woman who boarded at Blackfriars with Kit and Steve and beat them to the bar for her G&T before removing all outer garments and settling into a seat near ours as if in her own home. When she called out hello in a celebratory tone, I realized she’d already had a few.
‘What we need on this thing is a bit of decent music, don’t we? Not this soporific crap.’
Weary after a shift at the café so manic I hadn’t been able to take my breaks, I smiled only thinly at the prospect of a floating dancefloor.
‘There’s always the option of a silent disco,’ Kit said, laughing. ‘Plenty of space to dance.’
Our new friend was called Gretchen, a digital project manager whose ambition was to be an artisan gin distiller. I put her at thirty-five but knew better than to do so publicly in case she was in fact twenty-three (later, I found out she was thirty-six). We offered our elevator pitches: Kit the insurance drone, Steve the marketing maverick, I the dropout who frothed milk and mashed avocados for a living.
‘Good on you, Jamie,’ she said, as if I’d said I volunteered in a hospital for terminally ill babies. ‘I would never have put you in insurance,’ she told Kit. ‘How do you even stay awake in that world?’
‘I have my ways.’ Kit winked at her.
When he and Steve disappeared for a cigarette, it was no surprise that she should interrogate me about him. ‘Is he married?’
‘No, but he lives with his girlfriend.’
‘What’s she like?’
‘Really nice.’
‘Really nice as in not at all pretty and you’re being kind to her or really nice as in unbelievably pretty but you’re being kind to me?’
I gave her a look of exaggerated horror. ‘Is this really how women think?’
‘Just put me out of my misery, Jamie.’
‘I’m afraid she’s gorgeous.’ I smiled, ruefully. ‘He’s a lucky man.’
‘Damn. You got some sort of love-triangle thing going on?’
‘Not at all. Kit’s very happy with Melia. I’m very happy with Clare.’
As I made these statements, my voice smooth and convincing, I was aware of a twitch of uncertainty inside my chest.
Anyway, Gretchen joined the gang with or without any prospect of bagging Kit. Now, the fourth seat was saved for her. Now, on the evening boat, a round was four beers, which at £4.50 a go was almost twenty quid, over two hours’ worth of my working day (what with the drinks at the Hope & Anchor on top, I’d soon be working at a loss).
I realize I’m making it sound like we were Ocean’s Eleven, assembling our crew, one by one, for the heist of the century, but we stopped at four.
And the idea of crime of any description never entered my head. Though I suppose I can only speak for myself.
7
27 December 2019
Two young female tourists swish by in biker boots and bobble hats, glancing appreciatively at DC Merchison, and I’m thinking he’s actually a bit of a dude. He’s got a certain poise, an unshockable way about him that reminds me just a little of Kit. If I wasn’t already confident of my own innocence on Monday night, I could easily be lulled into a false sense of security by someone like this – or, rather, a false confession.
Because this isn’t one of those stories of murder dispensed in drunken blackouts or PTSD fugues. I am one hundred per cent confident I did nothing wrong at Monday night’s drinks, other than knock back a bit more than planned, and if we’re going to call that a crime then this city’s going to need a couple of million more police cells.
‘Did Mr Roper confide in you about any worries he might have at the moment?’ Merchison asks.
This is easy. Everyone knows w
hat Kit worries about most. ‘Yes, he’s got money troubles.’
The detective gestures for me to elaborate.
‘Debts. Student loans, and more recent loans as well. Even though he’s on a good salary, he spends every penny he earns and complains he’ll never be able to get on the property ladder.’
‘He’s shared details of his salary?’
‘Well, no, but it’s sure to be decent. He works for a big insurance firm and the benefits package alone is supposed to be fantastic. You’ve spoken to them, presumably? He’s meant to be in work today, I think.’
‘We will be in touch with his employer shortly,’ Merchison says, as if to dispel my fears, but in fact merely confirming that I am not only a priority over Kit’s other commuter mates, but also ahead of his colleagues. I make a painful attempt to gulp, but my saliva glands seem to have failed. God knows where Parry’s gone to get the coffee. Has he left town? I should have sent him to the Comfort Zone for the Indonesian guest bean that’s been so popular this month. I imagine Regan serving him, ignorant of the connection.
Then it strikes me that he might be taking his time because he’s making a phone call about me – or receiving one. Maybe he’s sent someone to hammer on the door of Mariners and take a look at the late-night footage from Monday. Good. But, wait, what if there’s a problem viewing the material? What if the camera wasn’t working that night for some reason and there’s literally no evidence that I walked home alone?
Aware of the expanding silence, I refocus. ‘Anyway, recently, he’s become fixated on me. He can’t bear that I get to live in a great house and he doesn’t, even though mine is actually my partner Clare’s and in reality I’ve got as little as he has. But he doesn’t see it that way, he thinks I’ve got it made. He resents Clare, as well. He was very rude to her the last time we all went out.’ I give a hollow chuckle. ‘I mean, if you can’t handle the idea of inherited wealth, then London’s really not the place for you, is it?’
DC Merchison observes me with increased attention. ‘You’re sure the resentment towards you is in relation to your perceived differences in financial assets?’
The Other Passenger Page 5