by Limmy
The next place he saw her was down at Dumbarton Road, which wasn’t far from Great Western Road, so he thought she must stay up the west end. But then he saw her up the toon, at the Merchant City. He saw her for just a second as she turned down one of the streets there.
Wherever he saw her, she was always on her bike. He wanted to stop her and ask her name, but he couldn’t, because of her bike. And he didn’t have one himself.
He partly wished that she didn’t have a bike, but her bike was part of what made her beautiful. It was to do with how she looked when she was on it, when she was cycling. She didn’t wear a helmet, which was a dangerous thing to do, and he liked that. It showed she was carefree. Everybody wore helmets these days, and she didn’t. Which showed she was different. And not having a helmet also let the wind in her hair. She had long hair. Her hair was full, as they said in the adverts. Full and thick, and a bit wavy. Like Shakira’s.
But what was her name? Who was she? John wanted to know.
He shouted on her once when she was going by, but he saw that she was wearing earphones, which was another dangerous thing he liked. He wondered what she was listening to.
He just wanted to maybe ask her out. He at least wanted to be in the same place as her and just say a few words, to just say hello. He wanted to find out where she lived.
If he knew where she lived, then he could stand himself around the corner, and walk her way, then bump into her and get talking.
Or he could wait in some of the places that she probably went to that were near her house, like a shop or a cafe or the nearest park. There wasn’t any guarantee that she’d go to a cafe near her house, seeing as she had a bike. She could go anywhere on that, and he himself didn’t like going to the local cafes that were near where he lived, he preferred the ones up the west end. But she would surely jump over to her local corner shop now and then. And she wouldn’t take her bike for that. She’d just walk over, and he’d be able to talk to her then.
But he didn’t know where she lived, and he couldn’t find out, because he just couldn’t get talking to her while she was on that bike. He also couldn’t just chase after her, or jump in a taxi and say ‘Follow that lassie!’ like they did in films. That would put her off.
Or maybe it wouldn’t.
Maybe she’d appreciate the effort. He didn’t know. He’d seen programmes where lassies liked being ‘courted’, if that was the word. But he didn’t want to do all that chasing about. He wanted her to just stop for a while, for a chat.
Then his opportunity came.
He was walking down a street near Byres Road, kind of halfway between Dumbarton Road and Great Western Road. It was a wide street, but pretty quiet at that time of day. And he was thinking about her. He was actually thinking about her just before this happened. Then he saw somebody cycling his way, and he wondered if it was her.
And it actually was her.
It was the perfect chance, but there was little he could do. She was at the other side of the street, not on his side where he would have been in her line of sight and he could smile at her and make her stop.
There was no point in shouting over to her, because she had her earphones in again. And he didn’t want to wave his arms about, because she’d maybe think he was trying to alert her to there being something wrong with her bike, like a wobbly wheel, and when she stopped and saw that nothing was wrong, she might feel like he’d wasted her time or got speaking to her under false pretences. He didn’t want that. He didn’t want that to be her first impression of him.
He didn’t know what to do. He walked backwards, looking at her, and stumbled into a bag full of rubbish. He nearly fell.
He regained his balance and looked across the road at her quickly to see if he’d made himself look clumsy. It would maybe be a good thing to look like that ‒ he’d seen in some films that some women liked guys who were clumsy, the type of guys that trip over their feet or fall over things. But she didn’t see him.
He looked at the bag of rubbish again. It was part of a larger pile of rubbish, a pile of things that people had dumped outside their flats for the binmen to pick up. Unwanted odds and ends. There was an old-style telly, there were some ornaments and lamps, and there was one of those Vileda Supermops, with the mop head all dirty and used.
As he looked at it all, he got the idea that it might be good to chuck something at her.
He didn’t want to hurt her, or even hit her, he just wanted whatever he chucked to land in front of her, to get her attention.
He was thinking of chucking one of the ornaments, and he’d time it just right so that she didn’t see him throw it. Then she’d turn around to see who threw it, and he’d look behind him like somebody else threw it, and then she’d come over and they’d both get chatting about it, and he’d maybe ask her what her name was and where she lived.
But he picked up the mop instead.
He threw it towards her like a javelin. He didn’t want to hit her, so he aimed a short distance ahead. There was no point in aiming behind her, she wouldn’t see it if it landed behind. He aimed ahead, and hoped that he didn’t hit her.
But what if he did?
What if he hit her, what would she think of that? Would she get the police? Or would she think it was romantic in a way? Wouldn’t it be romantic to go to that effort, to actually pick something up and throw it at her, in a caveman sort of way? The mop was like a spear. Or an arrow.
Like Cupid’s arrow.
Wouldn’t that be a story to tell?
Imagine she was telling their children the story of how they met, and she told them that. Or on a game show, where the host sometimes asks couples how they met. She’d tell the audience that she was hit by Cupid’s arrow, in a manner of speaking. Then she’d say it was actually a mop.
The mop flew through the air, and landed between the spokes of her front wheel. The pole of the mop jammed against the fork, causing the front wheel to come to an immediate halt. She flew over the handlebars, and for a moment she looked like Supergirl.
It reminded him of a time when he was a boy. He had asked the people in the video shop if he could have the Supergirl poster on the wall, but they didn’t give him it.
The lassie bashed her head against the back of a parked car, and didn’t get up.
John ran over to her, looking around as he ran, to see who saw what happened, but nobody was around.
He tried speaking to her. He asked her what her name was, but she was out for the count. The contents of her bag were spilled everywhere, and he saw her purse. He opened it up and pulled out one of her bank cards, and saw her name. He’d preferred to have seen an envelope lying about with her name and address, so he could find out where she lived, but her name was enough for now.
He phoned an ambulance and took the mop back to where it was, and then he ran away.
The next day, he phoned around the hospitals to see where she was. He told them her name, now that he knew it, and told them that she was his girlfriend.
It was a lie, but it felt nice. He was glad he did it. He almost wasn’t going to. Before making the phone calls, he was worried that if he said that she was his girlfriend, it would show in his voice that he was lying and they’d trace the call. But they believed him. And there was something in that.
He paid her a visit. She was still unconscious, thankfully. He was thankful, because he wasn’t yet up for telling her about the mop.
About Cupid’s arrow.
What a story that would be to tell everybody.
First he’d have to tell her, though.
But not yet. Something in his gut was telling him: not yet.
The Dog
Ben sat in his boardroom with Julie and the clients, looking at her presentation on the 50-inch screen on the wall.
Looking at it.
He couldn’t say that he was watching it.
He was looking at it, looking in that direction. If any of the people there in the room were to have glanced at him, and he
was sure that they had, it would have looked like he was watching it, and taking an interest. At least, he hoped it looked that way. He reminded himself that there was no reason for them to think otherwise, there was no reason for anybody to think that he wasn’t focused and in the room 110 per cent. The clients would assume he was, because it was his company, after all. And Julie would assume that he was enthusiastic about this potentially huge cash cow. There had been a few ups and downs, but things were picking up, and they’d pick up even more with this job in the door.
‘It’s a big one,’ Julie had said last Wednesday, after the client made their first phone call. ‘They’re looking for a new website, new identity, branding …’ She began counting out the individual pieces of work on her fingers. ‘They’re asking if we can do the copywriting for their social media, they’ll be looking at print, you know, posters, advertising, and so on.’
And so on. Another big job in the door.
When Julie had told him about the call, he’d said ‘Yessss!’ and thudded his fist in mid-air. But did he care? Did he really care that much? Of course he didn’t. But did anybody? He wasn’t sure if anybody really cared that much. It was just for show, wasn’t it? Julie seemed to care, though, but she hadn’t been doing this for as long as him.
That was maybe all it was. Maybe he’d just been doing this for a long time. Ask anybody who’d been doing the same job for 20 years if they still had the same get up and go as when they first started. It couldn’t be many.
Ben nodded at Julie as she continued with her presentation. Julie pointed to some stats on the screen and said something about unique visitors. She looked to Ben and said a number. Ben nodded, then looked at the clients and nodded at them as well. He made sure he had nodded throughout the presentation, but not continuously. He would nod for a while, then slowly stop nodding, then later begin nodding again. He paced it so that the nodding drifted in and out like the tide.
‘And so,’ said Julie, ‘that concludes our presentation. We’ll be happy to answer any questions.’
Julie looked to Ben, to gauge how well the pitch went. He smiled and nodded, opening his eyes wide for a brief moment, to send a message along the lines of ‘Wow!’ It didn’t match how he felt, but that wasn’t a reflection on Julie, he was sure she did very well. But whatever the reason for how he was feeling, Julie didn’t deserve to bear the brunt of that, so he gave her the smile and flashed her the eyes. She smiled back.
The clients began asking their questions, and Ben was thankful that most of them were questions that Julie was better equipped to answer. Project-manager questions. Questions regarding timescales, how soon this or that could be started, if there were enough staff to carry out the jobs simultaneously or if they have to be done one after the other. But he backed her up with a nod here and there.
Was he maybe coming across as too quiet?
He picked a moment to say something. He didn’t want Julie thinking that he was a bit quiet. He didn’t want her telling other people later. That could lead to people asking if he was all right, and he didn’t want any of that.
He was all right. He was. Anyway, even if he wasn’t, how do you put something like that into words?
Things were going very, very well. And they’ll be going even better when they got this job in the door.
‘We really have a great team here,’ he said, as he looked through the glass wall that separated the boardroom from the rest of the office. The office was looking great. They’d just had another paint job, it was much better than the one before. More modern. Fresher, cleaner, more crisp. Ben nodded slowly as he surveyed the 30 or so staff who were busy on their computers, then looked back to Julie and said, ‘Great bunch of guys.’
They left the boardroom and walked over to Sarah at reception, to order a taxi for the clients. This is where the small talk usually happened, during the minute or two before the taxi arrived. He wasn’t sure if he could do it. Sometimes it took ten minutes. Sometimes it took longer because there was a mistake resulting in the taxi company not sending a taxi and they had to be phoned again.
He really wasn’t sure if he could do it. Not today. If he could have come up with a good enough excuse to get away, he would have, something about being too busy to talk. A thousand apologies, but he was simply too busy. Then he would rush off to his room or out the door. But nothing came to mind. Nothing that Julie wouldn’t see through. Nothing that wouldn’t make her wonder.
‘So,’ he said.
Julie and the clients looked at him.
He looked away, towards the office, and then out the window to the city below.
‘So,’ he said again.
His eyes followed a bird in the distance, as it flew far, far away.
‘Are you guys heading back to the airport?’ he asked.
He turned back towards them all, his eyebrows raised, his lips pursed. He reckoned it was just the right expression for a question like that. A small-talk question. He didn’t want to look overly interested to know the answer. If he looked too interested to hear the answer to a question so unimportant, it wouldn’t look right. It would look too smiley. He’d always thought that people like that were hiding something.
‘The airport?’ said one of the clients, the woman. ‘Not right away.’ She looked at her phone quickly to check the time. Ben couldn’t remember her name, or the name of her male colleague. One of them had a Gaelic-sounding name, but he couldn’t remember if it was her or him. He hoped he wasn’t put in a position where he was shown up for not knowing.
‘We’ve got another couple of hours,’ said the man. ‘We had another meeting booked in, but it fell through.’ He smiled and looked out the window. He seemed happy to have the spare time. Ben looked at him, and had a vague memory of that feeling. A vague memory of having that spare time, and knowing what to do with it.
The female client wasn’t so happy, and asked Ben and Julie if they had heard of the agency they were due to meet. Oh, Julie knew them very well, and assured the clients that they had dodged a bullet. Julie shared her stories, speaking quietly to avoid letting the rest of the staff hear her throw mud at one of their rivals.
Ben kept quiet. It wasn’t that he found bad-mouthing to be unprofessional. Five or ten years ago, he would have capitalised on the spare couple of hours to take the clients back into the boardroom, fetch them a coffee, and proceed to trash every other agency in the UK.
But now, he preferred to look out the window, nodding, and repeating the occasional word that Julie said.
‘… and the way they then tried to brush it under the carpet was awful,’ said Julie, looking at Ben.
‘Awful,’ said Ben, shaking his head. ‘Just awful.’
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ said Sarah at the reception desk, putting down her phone. She looked at the clients. ‘That’s your taxi here.’
‘Good,’ said Ben, hoping that it didn’t sound like he was saying it was good that the chitchat had come to an end, even though it was. He thought about making a joke about how it sounded like he was glad to see them go, but decided not to.
Ben and Julie walked them to the door.
‘Just that button there,’ said Ben, pointing to the button on the wall that let them out.
‘Thank you,’ said the female client, pressing the button and pushing the door open.
‘We’ll get you down,’ said Ben, hoping they would say no.
‘No, it’s all right.’
‘Okay, if you’re sure,’ said Ben. ‘Look forward to hearing from you. Safe journey.’
Julie showed them out the door to the lift while Ben stayed in the office, next to the reception desk. He was happy with that final goodbye. If there was any doubt in Julie’s mind that he was a bit quiet, that would help her forget all that. That was a friendly goodbye. It was talkative.
Julie returned through the door. She looked over her shoulder to make sure the door had shut. When she saw that it had, she gave Ben a grin and two thumbs up.
‘I thin
k it went really well,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think it went really well,’ he said. Then, realising he had just repeated what she had said, he added a bit more. ‘I think they’ll go for it.’
‘Oh, I hope so.’ Julie turned towards Sarah, who had her phone in her hand. ‘Sarah, sorry. Could you send a meeting invite out?’
Another meeting.
‘Sure,’ said Sarah, putting down the phone and turning towards her computer. She put her hands on the keyboard and looked to Julie for the details.
‘Ummm, in half an hour?’ said Julie, looking at Ben. ‘I think we’ll get everyone in? Luke and Ahmed, Lynn, Isla. Shane as well. Uhhh, who else?’ She thought for a moment, then waved her hands. ‘Oh, that’ll be enough. If we need anybody else, we’ll let them know.’
Ben heard her say ‘Are you all right, Ben?’
He looked up from the floor quickly. Why did she ask that?
He felt his face tingle. ‘What?’
‘I said is that all right?’
‘Oh, yeah, that’s fine. Sorry, I was too busy thinking about …’
Think of something.
‘… if the meeting also needs …’
Needs what?
‘… Nathan.’
Nathan was in the back-end team, doing the server side scripting. There would be a lot of that needed if they were to land the job, so it was a good call. Providing that Nathan still worked there. Ben really hoped that Nathan still worked there.
‘Nathan?’ said Julie. ‘Oh yeah, Nathan as well.’ She looked at Sarah, who gave her keyboard a rattle to add Nathan’s email address to the invite. ‘And that’s it.’
‘Okay,’ said Sarah. ‘That’s it sent. Meeting at 11 a.m.’
Ben turned to Julie. ‘See you then,’ he said. Then he turned and walked away.
It was important that he walked away first. If he didn’t, Julie would have walked away, and he would have been left standing twiddling his thumbs in front of Sarah. And Sarah would have seen it. It might have looked like he simply had nothing to do at that moment, but there was a chance she’d sense that the aimlessness was something else.