by Albert Alla
The day I wrote about leaving Oxford, these visions had gone past Jeffrey’s red bag, all the way to Eric’s black button-up shirt. And unlike the hazy memories I had when I wrote, they were vivid – I was in them like I’d been in the classroom eight years ago.
After a week of writing, my life changed. Now, four months on, everything that happened to the man who called himself Nate, and to the one who calls himself Nathan, seems like a sad joke. A dash in a history book – the sort that a good eraser can remove with a quick rub. Bye, bye, Nathaniel Dillingham.
Five
Almost four months ago, the day after I finished my account, I left my parents’ North Oxford home and rode down the Banbury Road to meet a man my mother had called. After months of meandering letters, my mother had welcomed me home with a folder six inches thick, topped with a three-page handwritten summary. It took me a week of paper shuffling and jargon decoding to reach the same conclusion she’d laid out for me at the start – a condensed course the university’s Department for Continuing Education offered over the summer, which would gain me a year in three months’ work. There was one problem: I didn’t match their requirements. ‘Criteria are more flexible than you’d think,’ she told me. And so, on a morning announcing summer, under white and wispy clouds, I locked my bike to a wrought iron fence, and I went to meet my mother’s colleague to ask him whether I had a future beyond raking sand. A tall, thin man with a crane of a neck, he kept on crossing and uncrossing his legs.
‘You look like Liz,’ he said, and when I told him I hadn’t even finished school, he held a single finger in the space between my eyes and his glasses.
‘With what you’ve told me of your education,’ he cleared his throat, ‘and more importantly, with your life experience, it’s my opinion that you should be able to put together a successful application.’
He opened a drawer and found just the folder he was looking for. While I perused through the structure of the course, three evenings a week, he told me what I needed to do to put together a strong application.
‘It started this week, but don’t worry, you can catch up.’
And with that, I realised that what I’d anticipated, the possibilities my country, my town, could give me, might just come true. As I came out of the meeting, I stopped on the sunny concrete steps and gathered my thoughts between two clouds. They were coming from all directions – a sense that I hadn’t earned this opportunity, glee at its possibility, a fear of success. Rather than rush, I decided to clear my mind, and spend the afternoon in town.
***
To all intents and purposes, Oxford had stood still. These were the streets I’d walked as a child and roamed as a teenager. There was the first pub I’d been served at, when I was fifteen. And there, a bit further down Broad Street, was Blackwell’s, the bookshop my mother used to usher me into whenever she needed more time in town. But I felt out of place. Peckish, I walked into a café outside of Balliol. The counters were full of cheesy paninis and meaty pies. There was a queue of eighteen-year-olds waiting for their turn, all eyeing the white white bread, the white white cheese, and the pale tomatoes as if they were a treat. I walked out.
A limousine pulled up outside Balliol and three black-clad bodyguards spilled onto the street, spreading out according to some mysterious design. Like them, I waited for an important man. Two minutes later, I decided that they were more patient than me, and I locked my bike outside the Trinity gates. A slick-haired man broadcasting to all and sundry: ‘Go inside the colleges and see where they filmed Harry Potter.’ Making my way down Turl Street, I walked around three separate groups of American teenagers, all marching up the street four abreast, all sporting the same hoodie. My steps retraced those I’d taken as a boy, and I found myself in the Covered Market. Some of the shops I remembered had closed and been replaced by others just like them. And there, down one of the middle aisles, was Georgina’s, the café in the market’s eaves I used to take Anna to. Its door stood red and wonky, a wrapped gate.
Because it scared me, I climbed up the steep steps and peered through the wooden beams. New posters lined every inch of wall space. Amélie smiled her devilish smile between two James Deans. I waited at the counter behind two twenty-year-olds in pink trousers and tailored shirts, hesitating between the bean and Greek salads. When my turn came, a blonde girl with a kind face asked me what I wanted. I reached into my wallet and fumbled. She spread my coins over her flat palm and studied them. I’d given her euros.
‘Have you been living in Europe?’
I looked at her. She was standing on the tip of her toes, a green bandana holding her hair back.
‘In France,’ I said, handing her the right amount in sterling.
I took my quiche and salad to my table, pushed two used mugs to the side, and sat so I could face the rest of the room. A couple was sitting at the table Anna and I used to sit at. He was picking food out of her plate. Their scene should have brought up a crowd of memories, but I found myself calm.
The folder I’d been given had a picture on its cover: three women, two black and one white, and an Asian man, laughing with their heads tilted back. I rested the point of my pen on the empty space to the right of the picture, and a swirl became a woman’s face. Her hair flowed and rested at her feet, her chin drooped, and her mouth hung open.
Between mouthfuls of feta and olives, broccoli and stilton, I skimmed through the folder, annotating its pages with my sketches.
‘Can I take these away?’
I looked up and saw the blonde girl by my table pointing at the used mugs. For the first time, I studied her properly: the curve of the hip hidden behind her apron, her t-shirt wrinkling as it clung to her skin, and her lips, puckered together and ever so slightly open. I had her face down to two master lines: one completing an oval before scribbling her hair into a ponytail, another following her mouth, closed with its edges blossoming into a grin.
‘Of course,’ I mumbled.
As she bent forward, I tried not to look at the line between her throat and the swell of her breasts. She noticed the folder:
‘Are you an artist?’
I made sure she was serious.
‘No, I just draw a little.’
‘You’re very good.’
I grimaced, a little embarrassed. Both mugs in her right hand, she traced the lip of the blue one with the fingers of the left.
‘Do you draw?’ I asked.
‘A little but I’m not very good at it. I can’t draw like that.’ She pointed at my doodles.
The compliment seemed genuine, and I was all the more embarrassed for it.
‘What are you good at?’ I asked.
As if she were considering all of the question’s implications, she cocked her head to the side, her eyes on the ceiling. While she thought, the tip of her tongue pushed out of the corner of her mouth, and a strand of her hair buckled slowly over her head until it landed on her right shoulder.
‘I write poetry,’ she finally said.
‘Oh.’
She righted her head, smiled, and her seriousness was gone, making way for a merry warmth. She even laughed a little before she glanced back at the counter and saw someone waiting. As I finished my lunch, I spent more time observing her, and once or twice, our gazes crossed. I tried to draw without making it too obvious that she was my subject. Half of the times I stole a peek at her, she was laughing. The other half, as she reached for the salads with a large spoon, or as she walked back from the kitchen, a cup of hot chocolate in hand, her face was a picture of concentration.
She took her apron off just as I was gathering my things. If I slowed down enough, we’d leave the café together. Seeing her edge past the counter, I stuffed my folder in my bag and hurried towards the stairs. I looked over my shoulder: she was talking to a colleague, exchanging goodbyes, it seemed, but I couldn’t be sure. Two customers were staring at me – yes, I was blocking the entrance and I had no reason to be there. Putting on a purposeful air, I made my way do
wn the stairs. Outside, on the paved aisle, I felt a pang of regret and reached inside my bag as if I’d forgotten something, convincing myself that I really was searching for something, even though I didn’t know what. Everyone walking past seemed to have their eyes on me.
The two pink trousers came down the steps to the sound of their light banter. I moved to let their questioning looks pass. Just as they reached Ben’s Cookies, I heard the girl run down the steps, a duck of an umbrella in hand. Her face opened up for an instant when she smiled at me, and then she was looking right, looking left, calling out, hurrying towards them. Hurrying away from me. The pimply pink trousers clutched at his leg, as if to make sure it really was his umbrella. After she gave it to him, she turned around and walked back towards the café. My initial relief gave way to a touch of nerves.
‘Hey,’ I said, my hand still in my bag. ‘Here it is.’ I pulled out a pen.
She stopped next to me, studying my brandished pen.
‘Are you finished for the day?’ I asked.
‘No, I’m going to buy vegetables. We ran out of tomatoes.’
She spoke with such enthusiasm that, for a second, a basket full of plump vine tomatoes sprung up in my mind. Then I realised that she was standing close, that her feet were facing me, and I once again felt that I couldn’t speak properly.
‘When do you finish work… normally?’ I asked.
‘Half past five, that’s when the whole market closes.’
‘And what do you do after that?’ I rushed to ask before I could stumble.
‘Well, it depends on the day. Sometimes I go for walks. There’s a park I like to go to near my home. With a reservoir and some swans.’
Water glittered around a flock of swans, and dread weighed down my chest. Taking a quiet breath, fearing the step, I plunged in:
‘What are you doing tonight?’
Once again, she cocked her head and looked up, puckering her lips together.
‘Well… I was thinking—’
‘Do you want to go for a drink?’ I interrupted her.
She smiled instantly and I felt relieved. The rest of the conversation seemed so smooth compared to that start. We flowed from names to a time and a place.
‘Nathan,’ she said. She repeated it with more emphasis on the first syllable. ‘Nathan.’ She seemed to like it better that way. ‘I’m Leona.’
‘Leona,’ I said, my tongue slipping slowly from my palate to the floor of my mouth. The name sounded both familiar and exotic.
As she searched her bag for her phone, a notebook popped up precariously. I grabbed it before it fell out, and looked at the eerie postcard she’d pinned to the brown leather. It was a reproduction of an otherworldly painting: in washed colours, a red poppy field by a grey sea, distant waves foaming against the sand, and a blonde girl in a white dress curled up on herself, sitting over the frame of a young man, dead and naked. I looked closer: he was a hairless giant lying limp over winter-green hills, enclosed in a coffin-shaped frame. A withering poppy in each hand, her eyes closed, she faced the ground with a look of ecstatic mourning.
‘Nice, isn’t it?’ she said.
I looked at Leona’s broad smile.
‘So what’s your number?’ she asked.
She typed my number into her phone with the uttermost focus, her head not cocked as far as earlier, her tongue still sticking out. From the warmth of a smile to the focus of her cocked head – it had only taken an instant. In her, two contrasting emotions could coexist, I thought. And for some reason, that left me awed.
***
I remember the rest of the day in bursts. I know that I waited in town, strolling along the Isis, settling down over a cup of coffee in Blackwell’s. From 6 p.m. onwards, Cornmarket was full of chubby white kids in Adidas trousers and England football shirts walking around with pimply faces and KFC paper bags. At the start, I felt rather proud of my upcoming date, but as the image I had of Leona faded, I started doubting whether I was in fact attracted to her.
I was anxious when I saw her loping down the High Street to meet me, a dress of reds and blacks shimmering in the dusk. She leaned towards me, her head going for a space by my shoulder. Unsure of what she was doing, I reverted to my French habits and kissed her cheek. She froze for an instant, and in that moment I realised she’d gone for a hug, but before I had time to apologise, she’d offered me the other cheek and leaned back as if that were what she’d intended to do all along.
I looked at her relaxed smile and, with a pang of nerves, I realised how lucky I was. Strolling over Magdalen Bridge, I noticed the way she moved and the pang tightened. Such flow: in her upright posture, in the suppleness of her limbs, like a cat patrolling its fief from the top of a wall. In the way she climbed on her toes as she walked, the easy swing of her arms – I wanted to stop one of those arms and put my hand in hers right there, while we were looking down at the Cherwell and talking about May Day, but I didn’t dare.
The flow spread to the way she talked, to her bucolic descriptions of France. Yes, I found the words interesting, but now that I’m writing them down, I realise they didn’t fascinate me of themselves. Rather, it was the way she seemed to put her whole self into every word, whether it be a passing joke or a key memory.
‘—They had a house near Rouen. My grandfather used to mow the lawn, and we could ride his tractor. I loved sitting on his lap. He let me steer the wheel—’ she said, and I was with her, smelling cut grass, imagining a creek and an old stone table covered with moss. With a girl as easy-going as that, I could share the strangest of my ideas.
When we entered the bar, she stopped talking, marched three paces in, and swivelled slowly, her gaze taking in the whole of her surroundings. Oblivious to anyone around her, she pivoted around her left foot, and for one instant, I had all her grace to myself. She was with the room and I was with her. Suddenly, I doubted that a girl floating happily through life could like the sort of man who’d been a ski bum in the mornings, a black market entrepreneur in the afternoons, a drunk in the evenings; a man who had trouble sleeping now that he’d gone clean.
Later, as we were finishing our first drink, I found out that she was nineteen, that she was studying French at Brookes, and that she had over four months of holidays before her second year started.
‘I’m saving up for my third year. Paris is expensive. What about you?’
‘Me? My age? What I’m doing? Holidays?’ I lined up the questions, hoping for more time. At nineteen, she was already going into her second year of university, while I was seven years older and I hadn’t even finished school.
‘Let’s start with the one question…’ She played with her lower lip as she considered the questions. ‘Alright: what are you doing?’
‘Now? In life?’
‘In life,’ she said and looked at me, expecting an answer.
‘Well, it’s complicated. Things happened when I was at school. I was a good student and all, but sometimes you just need to leave. So I worked on ships for a while, and then I moved to France.’ I saw her perk up on the mention of France. ‘And now I’m going to start a bridging course so I can go to university,’ I said. From the way she reacted, I thought I’d done well.
When I went to the bar to get us a second round, the barman and I looked at Leona. She was studying a wooden beam on the ceiling. For my part, I looked at the line that muscles and bones drew around her bare collar-bone.
‘First date?’ he asked.
‘Yeah.’ I turned towards him. ‘She’s a nice girl.’
‘Is it going well?’
‘I don’t know.’ I pinched the bridge of my nose. From the way he raised his eyebrows, I knew he understood my plight.
‘You can have a bottle of wine for the price of two large glasses, if you want. If you need.’
Leona was delighted.
‘Nathan and the barman,’ she said. ‘That could be the title of a poem.’
‘How would it go?’
‘Nathan and the barm
an, let me think.’ She hummed as she thought. She took a sip of wine and started: ‘Red as Jacob’s creek, The finger pointed, And the bar whispered, Here’s a bottle don’t be meek.’
I laughed. ‘It rhymes,’ I said.
‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘Do you like it?’
I studied her face. ‘I like it,’ I said.
She smiled. Her hands were gripping the edge of the cushion by her thighs. When she shrugged, her whole body seemed to fold together, and I wanted to kiss the tip of her nose.
‘Can you draw me something?’ she asked, her smile growing playful.
‘Draw?’
‘I made up a poem. It’s only fair.’
‘Alright.’
I tore a page out of my notebook and squinted.
‘Look over there,’ I said.
She followed my direction. ‘Are you drawing me?’ She tried to look serious.
I hushed her and donned an engrossed expression. Without doubling back, I let my pen find the lines I’d identified earlier that day. I added what they missed, the small tilt at the end of her nose, the wide eyes and the marked eyebrows, the sharp arch of throat and jaw.
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘You see, I told you, you are very good. You’re an artist. You were just being modest.’
I’d had enough wine to laugh, and I liked the look she gave me as she spoke.
‘Do you paint?’ she asked.
‘A little.’
‘Can you paint me?’
I laughed and let my hand drift next to hers, skin touching skin. Her hand didn’t move one way or the other, and I started to hope – it was a gentle bond, that contact, steady and comfortable. Our hands stayed touching until she mentioned the Ashes and, with a sudden surge of excitement, I needed both my hands to tell her that my batting efforts were worthy of the English team’s.