I needed a little help myself. “If I say the wrong thing, it might be dangerous.”
“Please,” she said. “I’ve tried everything else. I know you’ve been through a lot, and I thought that maybe if you just talked to him about how you’d gotten through it then he’d be able to get through it too. That’s all I want—for him to make it out the other side.”
“But I’m not out the other side,” is what I should have said, but instead I capitulated to her air of desperation. That and the offer of a free lunch, in return for attempted counseling, were I to meet Caleb the next day in the Holland Park Café.
After she hung up, my cell phone beeped—a noise I hadn’t heard in weeks—and I discovered a text from my old school friend Alana, inviting me for after-work drinks in three hours’ time. I had been trying to see her since I first arrived in London, but she had been away on holiday, then busy at work, and it was only now just happening. In a matter of moments, my week had gone from fatally empty to socially overwhelming.
I set out almost immediately in sneakers and jeans with the idea that I’d walk to Old Street tube station, where Alana and I were to meet, no matter how far away it was. But after an arduous hour of motorway avoidance and sprinting across arterial routes, I limped onto Camden High Street, cashed the last traveler’s check, and splurged on an off-peak bus pass. If only I’d bought one at the outset . . .
By the time I got to Old Street to meet Alana, I was a disheveled wreck but bang on time. In the station foyer, I eagerly scanned the thousands of surging commuters for a wistful schoolgirl in gray skirt, blazer, and pumps, her long hair swept artfully to one side. I was still scanning when a sharp-suited woman with a blunt, practical bob approached me and said, “Suki, is that you?”
I couldn’t believe this woman was Alana. She looked old, her worn face making it seem like more than a decade since we had last seen each other. “Wow,” I said. “You look so grown up.”
“And you still look like a student.” She looked me up and down. “I’m so jealous.”
She couldn’t be. Looking scruffy at almost thirty was nothing to be envious of.
An awkward hug ensued, during which Alana’s briefcase swung round and thumped me on the back. “Well, I can tell you haven’t been living in London for long,” she said, stepping back to examine me. “You still have a tan, and you seem sort of athletic, like someone who goes to the gym.”
“I can’t think why,” I said, keeping mum about the tramps across London to save tube fares and that I’d subsisted for weeks on a diet of chickpeas and rice. “Do I really still have a tan?”
“Maybe more of a healthy glow,” she said. “There’s a girl at work from New Zealand who has the same thing. Australians have it too.”
“Oh that,” I said. “That’s from having no ozone layer. You get so fried in the summer that your skin basically never recovers.”
On the way to a bar in Hoxton, Alana filled me in on her post-school life, and I listened, enchanted by her private school accent, still as high and fluty as mine must once have been. After A levels, she’d studied economics at Bristol, and gone back to do a postgrad diploma in number crunching when a research job didn’t come her way. Since then she’d worked for a multinational accounting firm, but not as an accountant, and although she explained it well, and I tried hard to understand, I failed to grasp exactly what it was she did. She was single, she added, but had her eye on some bloke from work. When she asked if I had a boyfriend, I told her I was happily unattached. We were making excellent small talk, I thought, until halfway down a cobbled side street she exclaimed, “What happened to you after you left? You just sort of disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“I went to live in New Zealand. And I ended up staying.”
“I know where you went,
“Please,” she said. “I’ve tried everything else. I know you’ve been through a lot, and I thought that maybe if you just talked to him about how you’d gotten through it then he’d be able to get through it too. That’s all I want—for him to make it out the other side.”
“But I’m not out the other side,” is what I should have said, but instead I capitulated to her air of desperation. That and the offer of a free lunch, in return for attempted counseling, were I to meet Caleb the next day in the Holland Park Café.
After she hung up, my cell phone beeped—a noise I hadn’t heard in weeks—and I discovered a text from my old school friend Alana, inviting me for after-work drinks in three hours’ time. I had been trying to see her since I first arrived in London, but she had been away on holiday, then busy at work, and it was only now just happening. In a matter of moments, my week had gone from fatally empty to socially overwhelming.
I set out almost immediately in sneakers and jeans with the idea that I’d walk to Old Street tube station, where Alana and I were to meet, no matter how far away it was. But after an arduous hour of motorway avoidance and sprinting across arterial routes, I limped onto Camden High Street, cashed the last traveler’s check, and splurged on an off-peak bus pass. If only I’d bought one at the outset . . .
By the time I got to Old Street to meet Alana, I was a disheveled wreck but bang on time. In the station foyer, I eagerly scanned the thousands of surging commuters for a wistful schoolgirl in gray skirt, blazer, and pumps, her long hair swept artfully to one side. I was still scanning when a sharp-suited woman with a blunt, practical bob approached me and said, “Suki, is that you?”
I couldn’t believe this woman was Alana. She looked old, her worn face making it seem like more than a decade since we had last seen each other. “Wow,” I said. “You look so grown up.”
“And you still look like a student.” She looked me up and down. “I’m so jealous.”
She couldn’t be. Looking scruffy at almost thirty was nothing to be envious of.
An awkward hug ensued, during which Alana’s briefcase swung round and thumped me on the back. “Well, I can tell you haven’t been living in London for long,” she said, stepping back to examine me. “You still have a tan, and you seem sort of athletic, like someone who goes to the gym.”
“I can’t think why,” I said, keeping mum about the tramps across London to save tube fares and that I’d subsisted for weeks on a diet of chickpeas and rice. “Do I really still have a tan?”
“Maybe more of a healthy glow,” she said. “There’s a girl at work from New Zealand who has the same thing. Australians have it too.”
“Oh that,” I said. “That’s from having no ozone layer. You get so fried in the summer that your skin basically never recovers.”
On the way to a bar in Hoxton, Alana filled me in on her post-school life, and I listened, enchanted by her private school accent, still as high and fluty as mine must once have been. After A levels, she’d studied economics at Bristol, and gone back to do a postgrad diploma in number crunching when a research job didn’t come her way. Since then she’d worked for a multinational accounting firm, but not as an accountant, and although she explained it well, and I tried hard to understand, I failed to grasp exactly what it was she did. She was single, she added, but had her eye on some bloke from work. When she asked if I had a boyfriend, I told her I was happily unattached. We were making excellent small talk, I thought, until halfway down a cobbled side street she exclaimed, “What happened to you after you left? You just sort of disappeared off the face of the earth.”
“I went to live in New Zealand. And I ended up staying.”
“I know where you went,
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