One Day (7 page)

… and then he stretched and scratched at his scalp, drained the last of his beer and picked the letter up, tapped the edges together and laid the stack solemnly in front of him. He shook the cramp from his hand; eleven pages written at great speed, the most he had written since his finals. Stretching his arms above his head in satisfaction he thought: this isn’t a letter, it’s a gift.

He slid his feet back into his sandals, stood a little unsteadily and steeled himself for the communal showers. He was deeply tanned now, his great project of the last two years, the colour penetrating deep into his skin like a creosoted fence. With his head shaved very close to the skull by a street barber, he had also lost some weight but secretly liked the new look: heroically gaunt, as if he’d just been rescued from the jungle. To complete the image he had acquired a cautious tattoo on his ankle, a non-committal yin-and-yang that he would probably
regret back in London. But that was fine. In London he would wear socks.

Sobered by the cold shower, he returned to the tiny room and dug deep in his rucksack to find something to wear for the Dutch medical students, smelling each item of clothing until they lay in a damp, ripe pile on the worn raffia rug. He settled on the least offensive item, a vintage American short-sleeved shirt, and pulled on some jeans, cut off at the calves and worn with no underwear, so that he felt bold and daredevil. An adventurer, a pioneer.

And then he saw the letter. Six blue sheets densely written on both sides. He stared at it as if an intruder had left it behind, and with his new sobriety came the first twinge of doubt. Picking it up gingerly, he glanced at a page at random and immediately looked away, his mouth puckered tight. All those capitals and exclamation marks and awful jokes. He had called her ‘sexy’, he had used the word ‘discersion’ which wasn’t even a proper word. He sounded like some poetry-reading sixth-former, not a pioneer, an adventurer with a shaved head and a tattoo and no underpants beneath his jeans.
I will find you, I’ve been thinking about you, Dex and Em, Em and Dex –
what was he thinking? What had seemed urgent and touching an hour ago now seemed mawkish and gauche and sometimes frankly deceitful; there had been no praying mantis on the wall, he hadn’t been listening to her compilation tape as he wrote, had lost his cassette player in Goa. Clearly the letter would change everything, and weren’t things fine just as they were? Did he really want Emma with him in India, laughing at his tattoo, making smart remarks? Would he have to kiss her at the airport? Would they have to share a bed? Did he really want to see her that much?

Yes, he decided, he did. Because for all its obvious idiocy, there was a sincere affection, more than affection, in what he had written and he would definitely post it that night. If she over-reacted, he could always say he was drunk. That much at least was true.

Without further hesitation he packed the letter into an air-mail envelope and slipped it into his copy of
Howards End
, next to Emma’s handwritten dedication. Then he headed off to the bar to meet his new Dutch friends.

Shortly after nine that night, Dexter left the bar with Renee van Houten, a trainee pharmacist from Rotterdam with fading henna on her hands, a jar of temazepam in her pocket and a poorly executed tattoo of Woody Woodpecker at the base of her spine. He could see the bird leering at him lewdly as he stumbled through the door.

In their eagerness to leave, Dexter and his new friend accidentally jostled Heidi Schindler, twenty-three years old, a chemical engineering student from Cologne. Heidi swore at Dexter, but in German, and quietly enough for them not to hear. Pushing through the crowded bar, she shrugged off her immense backpack and searched the room for somewhere to collapse. Heidi’s features were red and round, like a series of overlapping circles, an effect exaggerated by her round spectacles, now steamy in the hot humid bar. Bad-tempered, bloated on Diocalm, angry with the friends who kept running off without her, she collapsed backwards on a decrepit rattan sofa and absorbed the full scale of her misery. She removed her steamy spectacles, wiped them on the corner of her t-shirt, settled on the sofa and felt something hard jab into her hip. Quietly, she swore again.

Tucked between the ragged foam cushions was a copy of
Howards End
, a letter tucked into the opening pages. Even though it was intended for someone else, she felt an automatic thrill of anticipation at the red and white trim of the air-mail envelope. She tugged the letter out, read it to the end, then read it again.

Heidi’s English wasn’t particularly strong, and some words were unfamiliar – ‘discersion’ for example, but she understood enough to recognise this as a letter of some importance, the kind of letter that she would like to receive herself one day. Not
quite a love-letter, but near enough. She pictured this ‘Em’ person reading it, then re-reading it, exasperated but a little pleased too, and she imagined her acting upon it, walking out of her terrible flat and the rotten job and changing her life. Heidi imagined Emma Morley, who looked not unlike herself, waiting at the Taj Mahal as a handsome blond man approached. She imagined a kiss and Heidi began to feel a little happier. She decided that, whatever happened, Emma Morley must receive this letter.

But there was no address on the envelope and no return address for ‘Dexter’ either. She scanned the pages for clues, the name of the restaurant where Emma worked perhaps, but there was nothing of use. She resolved to ask at the reception of the hostel over the road. This was, after all, the best that she could do.

Heidi Schindler is Heidi Klauss now. Forty-one years old, she lives in a suburb of Frankfurt with a husband and four children, and is reasonably happy, certainly happier than she expected to be at twenty-three. The paperback copy of
Howards End
is still on the shelf in the spare bedroom, forgotten and unread, with the letter tucked neatly just inside the cover, next to an inscription in small, careful handwriting that reads:

Camden Town and Primrose Hill

‘ATTENTION PLEASE! Can I have your attention? Attention everyone? Stop talking, stop talking, stop talking. Please? Please? Thank you. Right I just want to go through today’s menu if I may. First of all the so-called “specials”. We’ve got a sweetcorn chowder and a turkey chimi-changa.’

‘Turkey? In July?’ said Ian Whitehead from the bar, where he was cutting lime wedges to jam into the necks of bottles of beer.

‘Now it’s Monday today,’ continued Scott. ‘Should be nice and quiet, so I want this place spotless. I’ve checked the rota, and Ian, you’re on toilets.’

The other staff scoffed. ‘Why is it always me?’ moaned Ian.

‘Because you do it so
beautifully,’
said his best friend Emma Morley, and Ian took the opportunity to throw an arm around her hunched shoulders, jokily wielding a knife in a light-hearted downwards stabbing motion.

‘And when you two have finished, Emma, can you come and see me in my office please?’ said Scott.

The other staff sniggered insinuatingly, Emma disentangled herself from Ian, and Rashid the bartender pressed play on the greasy tape deck behind the bar, ‘La Cucaracha’, the cockroach, a joke that wasn’t funny anymore, repeated until the end of time.

‘So I’ll come straight out with it. Take a seat.’

Scott lit a cigarette and Emma hoisted herself onto the bar
stool opposite his large, untidy desk. A wall of boxes filled with vodka, tequila and cigarettes – the stock deemed most ‘nickable’ – blocked out the July sunlight in a small dark room that smelt of ashtrays and disappointment.

Scott kicked his feet up onto the desk. ‘The fact is, I’m leaving.’

‘You are?’

‘Head office have asked me to head up the new branch of Hail Caesar’s in Ealing.’

‘What’s Hail Caesar’s?’

‘Big new chain of contemporary Italians.’

‘Called Hail Caesar’s?’

‘That is correct.’

‘Why not Mussolini’s?’

‘They’re going to do to Italian what they’ve done to Mexican.’

‘What, fuck it up?’

Scott looked hurt. ‘Give me a break, will you, Emma?’

‘I’m sorry, Scott, really. Congratulations, well done, really—’ She stopped short, because she realised what was coming next.

‘The point is—’ He interlocked his fingers and leant forward on the desk, as this was something that he’d seen businessmen do on television, and felt a little aphrodisiac rush of power. ‘They’ve asked me to appoint my own replacement as manager, and that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I want someone who isn’t going anywhere. Someone reliable who isn’t going to run off to India without giving proper notice or drop it all for some exciting job. Someone I can rely onto stick around here for a couple of years and really devote themselves to … Emma, are you … are you
crying?’

Emma shielded her eyes with both hands. ‘Sorry, Scott, it’s just you’ve caught me at a bad time, that’s all.’

Scott frowned, stalled between compassion and irritation. ‘Here—’ He yanked a roll of coarse blue kitchen paper from a catering pack. ‘Sort yourself out—’ and he tossed the roll across
the desk so that it bounced off Emma’s chest. ‘Is it something I said?’

‘No, no, no, it’s just a personal, private thing, just boils up every now and then. So embarrassing.’ She pressed two wads of rough blue paper against her eyes. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry, you were saying.’

‘I’ve lost my place now, you bursting into tears like that.’

‘I think you were telling me that my life was going nowhere,’ and she began to laugh and cry at the same time. She grabbed a third piece of kitchen paper and wadded it against her mouth.

Scott waited until her shoulders had stopped heaving. ‘So are you interested in the job or not?’

‘You mean to say—’ She placed her hand on a twenty-litre tub of Thousand Island Dressing ‘—all this could one day be mine?’

‘Emma, if you don’t want the job, just say, but I have been doing it for four years now—’

‘And you’ve done it really well, Scott—’

‘The money’s adequate, you’d never have to clean the toilets again—’

‘And I appreciate the offer.’

‘So why the waterworks then?’

‘Just I’ve been a little … depressed that’s all.’

‘De-pressed.’ Scott frowned as if hearing the word for the first time.

‘You know. Bit blue.’

‘Right. I see.’ He contemplated putting a paternal arm around her, but it would mean climbing over a ten-gallon drum of mayonnaise, so instead he leant further across the desk. ‘Is it … boy trouble?’

Emma laughed once. ‘Hardly. Scott, it’s nothing, you just caught me at a low ebb, that’s all.’ She shook her head vigorously. ‘See, all gone, right as rain. Let’s forget it.’

‘So what do you think? About being manager?’

‘Can I think about it? Tell you tomorrow?’

Scott smiled benignly and nodded. ‘Go on then! Take a break—’ He stretched an arm towards the door, adding with infinite compassion: ‘Go get yourself some nachos.’

In the empty staff room, Emma glared at the plate of steaming cheese and corn chips as if it was an enemy that must be defeated.

Standing suddenly, she crossed to Ian’s locker and plunged her hand into the densely packed denim until she found some cigarettes. She took one, lit it, then lifted her spectacles and inspected her eyes in the cracked mirror, licking her finger to remove the tell-tale smears. Her hair was long these days, style-less in a colour that she thought of as ‘Lank Mouse’. She pulled a strand from the scrunchie that held it in place and ran finger and thumb along its length, knowing that when she washed it she would turn the shampoo grey. City hair. She was pale from too many late shifts, and plump too; for some months now she had been putting skirts on over her head. She blamed all those refried beans; fried then fried again. ‘Fat girl,’ she thought, ‘stupid fat girl’ this being one of the slogans currently playing in her head, along with ‘A Third of Your Life Gone’ and ‘What’s the Point of Anything?’

Emma’s mid-twenties had brought a second adolescence even more self-absorbed and doom-laden than the first one. ‘Why don’t you come home, sweetheart?’ her mum had said on the phone last night, using her quavering, concerned voice, as if her daughter had been abducted. ‘Your room’s still here. There’s jobs at Debenhams’ and for the first time she had been tempted.

Once, she had thought she could conquer London. She had imagined a whirl of literary salons, political engagement, larky parties, bittersweet romances conducted on Thames embankments. She had intended to form a band, make short films, write novels, but two years on the slim volume of verse was no fatter, and nothing really good had happened to her since she’d been baton-charged at the Poll Tax Riots.

The city had defeated her, just like they said it would. Like some overcrowded party, no-one had noticed her arrival, and no-one would notice if she left.

It wasn’t that she hadn’t tried. The idea of a career in publishing had floated itself. Her friend Stephanie Shaw had got a job on graduation, and it had transformed her. No more pints of lager and black for Stephanie Shaw. These days she drank white wine, wore neat little suits from Jigsaw and handed out Kettle Chips at dinner parties. On Stephanie’s advice Emma had written letters to publishers, to agents, then to bookshops, but nothing. There was a recession on and people were clinging to their jobs with grim determination. She thought about taking refuge in education, but the government had ended student grants, and there was no way she could afford the fees. There was voluntary work, for Amnesty International perhaps, but rent and travel ate up all her money, Loco Caliente ate up all her time and energy. She had a fanciful notion that she might read novels aloud to blind people, but was this an actual job, or just something that she’d seen in a film? When she had the energy, she would find out. For now she would sit at the table and glare at her lunch.