Before We Met(14)

The reading finished downstairs and a new influx of people flooded the café, taking the last few spare seats. The woman who’d been reading stood nearby, besieged by men with tattoos and ironic T-shirts vying to impress her with earnest, reverential questions.

‘You know, when we first opened our New York office and I was living here full-time, not just flying back and forth,’ Mark said, ‘I used to come in here a lot. I enjoyed sitting and having a bite to eat and a glass of wine – it was much better than staying at home alone in my apartment.’

‘We probably shared a table,’ she said, though she knew she would have remembered if they had. ‘I used to do exactly the same. I still do sometimes, if I’m at a loose end unexpectedly. Like tonight.’

‘Me, too. Like tonight.’

‘Sorry.’ She grimaced.

He rolled his eyes. ‘Please.’ He tipped his head in the direction of the writer and her tattooed acolytes. ‘What do you reckon? Any of them in with a chance?’

He was such easy company, the conversation as natural and unforced as it had been on the beach in the dark. Again, he focused almost entirely on her, asking about her job, her family. They finished their wine and Hannah bought another round. Nearing the bottom of the glass again, she began to feel pleasantly buzzed and she realised that she was enjoying herself more than she had with anyone who wasn’t a friend or her brother in the past seven years. She diverted her thoughts away quickly from the time before that.

‘Do you fancy getting a bite to eat?’ Mark had said as the street outside filled with the peculiar hyper-real Manhattan twilight that made everything seem sharper and brighter. ‘I didn’t have much lunch and if I have another one of these on an empty stomach, I’m going to start talking complete bollocks.’

Outside, he waited while she undid the chain on her bike – he was impressed, he said, that she cycled in Manhattan – and they walked round the corner to Mulberry Street, the bike ticking an accompaniment alongside. They went to a diner-style Italian place which he’d mentioned had got a great review in New York magazine, took the two stools on the short side of the counter near the front and ordered chicken-parm sandwiches approximately twice the size of any sandwich Hannah had ever seen. ‘Which,’ she told him, ‘these days, is saying something.’ They discussed the campaign she was working on for a new manufacturer of healthy snacks, and she asked him about how and when he’d set up his company. After that, she couldn’t really remember what they talked about beyond a general sense that they’d talked like people who’d known each other for twenty years without ever having heard the other’s best stories. The tension came back into her stomach but it wasn’t anxiety or embarrassment now but a reaction to being near him, sitting so close on the pedestal stools, their knees almost touching. She’d watched his hands as they held the sandwich or flipped the cap of his beer on the Formica counter-top, and she’d yearned – it was an actual, physical sensation – to reach out and touch him.

The clock behind the bar read half-midnight by the time he turned to her and fixed her with a serious look. ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘that stuff about the late meeting was a line, wasn’t it, to give me the brush-off?’

She’d bitten the inside of her cheek, trying not to laugh, and looked him directly in the eye. ‘Yes,’ she said.

He shook his head. ‘No remorse, even. That bit about the dental abscess was a nice touch, by the way.’

Hannah burst out laughing. ‘Perhaps I can make it up to you,’ she said, reaching for her glass, ‘by inviting you to a gig in Williamsburg tomorrow night? I hear the band is excellent.’





Chapter Four

The wind had torn the polythene bag into a hundred tattered pieces, making it look like a leftover Hallowe’en ghoul trapped among the branches of the cherry tree. Hannah was on the top rung of the stepladder cutting it out with the kitchen scissors when she heard her mobile ring on the table inside. She considered leaving it but then thought that it might be Mark again and climbed quickly down to get it.

When she picked up, however, it wasn’t Mark but Neesha. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How are you? Sorry it’s taken me so long to ring back – I’ve only just checked my phone. We took Pierre swimming this morning and then came straight on to Steven’s parents. You must have called while we were at the pool.’

‘God, don’t worry about it. I’m sorry to have called you at all, especially at the weekend. I was just trying to track Mark down but it’s okay, I’ve heard from him now. He called me from New York about an hour ago.’