It was perhaps indicative of their respective conditions that each left it to the other to affirm their essential roadworthiness.
“Goodbye, then.”
The lights were in her favour, so she was able to cross immediately. On the other side she didn’t look back, but knew that if she did she’d see him watching her, the colour of his eyes unknowable at this distance, but still that shade of stormy blue they became in his darker moments.
“You look like you could use company.”
Louisa didn’t reply.
Undeterred, the man slid onto the stool next to her. A glance in the mirror told her he was passable—maybe mid-thirties and wearing it well; wearing, too, a made-to-measure charcoal suit, with an intricately patterned tie, blues and golds, loosened enough to indicate the free spirit blooming within. His spectacles had a thin black frame, and Louisa would have bet her next vodka and lime their lenses would be plain glass. Nerd-chic. But she didn’t bother turning to check this out.
“Only you’ve been here thirty-seven minutes now, and you haven’t once checked the door.”
He paused, the better for her to appreciate the cuteness of that specific amount of time, the sharpness of his observation. Sitting here thirty-seven minutes, and not expecting anyone. He’d doubtless counted her drinks, and knew she was on her third.
And now a chuckle.
“So you’re the quiet type. Don’t get many of them round here.”
Round here being south of the river, though not far enough south to be free of made-to-measure suits and classy ties. It was a bus-ride from her studio flat, which, since the weather had turned and the streets become heavy with smells of tar and fried dust, felt smaller than ever, as if shrinking in the heat. Everything in it seemed to pulse. Arriving there was a constant reminder she’d rather be anywhere else.
“But you know what? Beautiful woman, all mysterious and quiet, that’s an invitation to a guy like me. Gives me a chance to shine. So tell you what, any time you want to chip in, feel free. Or smile and nod, whatever. I’m happy just admiring the view.”
So she’d showered and changed, and now wore a denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and skinny black jeans over gold sandals. The blonde streaks in her hair were recent, as was the blood-red toenail polish. He wasn’t entirely wrong. She was sure she wasn’t a beautiful woman. But she was certain she looked like one.
Besides, a hot August evening, and chilled drinks on the bar. Anyone could look beautiful when the context allowed.
She raised her glass and its ice whispered musical promises.
“So I work in solutions? Clients mostly import-export, and a real bastard landed on my desk this morning, two-and-a-half mill of high-spec tablets chugging out of Manila and the paperwork’s only been bollocksed . . . ”
He chuntered on. He hadn’t offered her a drink—he’d time it so he’d finish his own a beat ahead of her then raise a finger for the girl behind the bar,
This, or something like it, was how it always went.
Louisa placed a finger on the rim of her glass and traced round it before tucking a lock of hair behind her ear. The man was still talking, and she knew, without looking round, that his companions were at a table by the door, alert for signs of success or failure, and prepared to have a laugh either way. Probably they worked in ‘solutions’ too. It seemed a job title that could stretch pretty far in any direction, provided you weren’t fussy about the range of problems it encompassed.
Her own problems—the day she’d had, like every other working day of the past two months—involved comparing two sets of census figures, 2001 and 2011. Her target city was Leeds, her age-group 18–24, and what she was looking for were people who had dropped out of sight or appeared from nowhere.
“Any particular language group?” she remembered asking.
“Ethnic profiling is morally obscene,” Lamb had admonished. “I thought everyone knew that. But yeah, it’s the sand-jockeys you want to focus on.”
People who’d vanished and others who’d materialised. There were hundreds of them, of course, and rock-solid reasons for most, and potentially rock-solid reasons for most of the rest, though tracking those reasons down was a pain in the neck. She couldn’t approach the targets themselves, so had to come in at a tangent: social security, vehicle licensing, utilities, NHS records, internet use: anything that left a paper trail, or indicated a footprint. And blah blah blah—it wasn’t so much looking for a needle in a haystack as rearranging the haystack, stalk by stalk; grading each by length and width, and making them point the same way . . . She wished she worked in solutions. The current project seemed mostly a matter of contriving unnecessary problems.
