The Restoration Game (8 page)

I stopped at a crossing and glanced back up the way I had come. No one was walking anywhere close. I crossed, walked on. The sound resumed. I stopped to cross again at the next junction, and looked back again. A couple strolled past, then a knot of lads in white shirts and polished shoes. An old man walked by, a thin pink-striped plastic bag, weighted with a solitary tin, swinging from a crooked finger.

I was back on the left side of the street now. I walked past the Belgian beer pub on the corner and fished my keys from my bag in front of the main doorway. Traffic hummed behind me. The keys jangled, the tip squeaked on the face of the Yale. I got the door open and stepped inside. Just as I turned to close the door behind me I heard the squishy sound of worn heels on wet pavement. A car went past. On the opposite side of the road a young man in a frayed coat and grubby rain-hat hurried by, not looking to left or right.

I made sure the door was locked and ran up the two flights to the flat.

My flatmates, Julie and Gail, had been and gone, presumably to the party. I knew they'd been by the two wet empty shot glasses on the kitchen table and the acetone smell of nailpolish in the bathroom. I knew they'd gone by the silence that hadn't quite settled, like there were echoes still on the air. An empty tin, smelling horribly fresh, told me they'd remembered to feed the cat.

The cat came in and rubbed his head on my ankle and demanded food and attention as if he hadn't eaten for a week and was shortly to feature on an RSPCA poster of a shamefully neglected pet.

“Don't try that with me, Hiro,” I said, scratching behind his ears.

I sat down at the kitchen table in my damp leggings and jacket and reached for the vodka bottle. I knocked back a shot out of one of the used glasses and felt warmer, and a little cheerier. For a moment I contemplated another shot, while looking with some distaste at the lipstick print on the glass and realising I'd probably know at some point just which of my flatmates had used it. Somehow that made it all slightly more disgusting and me slightly more sluttish. What I most wanted right now was a hot bath and an evening slothing about in a dressing gown and slippers, cat on my lap, a thick book in one hand and a tall G&T in the other.

But I had a party to go to. It wasn't far—just over Tolcross, up Home Street, and off to the left—it was starting at 8:30, and it was Suze's flatwarming party. She and her fiancé had just moved in together. I was to be one of her bridesmaids in August. She'd be really miffed if I didn't turn up tonight. I'd bought her a card and a present.

I looked at my watch. 8:20. Shower, hair, face, frock. Agh. I texted Suze to tell her I'd be late.

I made it by 9:15, with time to buy a bottle of chilled Pinot Grigio and a half-bottle of gin on the way.

Party party party…Suze's new flat's bigger than ours and has thicker carpets. Also it's a floor higher, and not above a pub, in fact above a quieter street altogether. I met Suze when I worked three months at Starbucks a couple of years ago. Unlike me, Suze had left the barrista life for a better-paying job, because (again unlike me) she had actually gone to university instead of just thinking about it and already had a very good law degree to show for it. I'd met Julie and Gail at the same time. They too now had better-paid jobs than I did. They didn't understand when I insisted that I couldn't think of a better job than the one I had.

(I should explain at this point that the reason I was able to work in the UK without too many hassles other than filing an IRS return every year was that Amanda had craftily provided me with a British passport when I was a tiny tot, basing her claim in part on Great-Grandma Eugenie's continued British citizenship. So I have a US and a UK passport, as well as some hybrid ID card from the Krassnian Autonomous Region which grants me some of the rights of Soviet citizenship, scarily enough.)

Anyway—me, Julie, Gail, and Suze have all managed to stay together since our Starbucks days, and the three of them have been at the centre of one of my circles of friends, the one I privately call my “normal” friends, just as the lads have been at the core of my circle of not-so-normal friends.

“You look fantastic!” Suze said to me as she added my coat to an over-loaded hatstand and accepted the prezzie and card. “Ooh, nice dress!”

This was kind of her as on the way over I'd been smitten with self-doubt and had arrived a little self-conscious about the dress, it being a hasty Rusty Zip bargain rack purchase, a pale pink vintage prom frock of the kind that Lily Allen has unaccountably failed to make fashionable among my normal friends.

“Thank you,” I said, giving the big skirt a shake to recover its shape from the compression of the coat. “You're looking absolutely wonderful, Suze.”

She was: neat black hairstyle, little black dress. She's always had that elegance that looks effortless and that takes a lot more effort than I've ever been willing to give and that makes me get up strategically earlier in the morning than Julie and Gail despite having a shorter commute (ten-minute brisk walk) and later start.

Suze opened the card (Paperchase welcome to your new home with photo of two Emperor penguins in a blizzard) and the present (John Lewis voucher) and gave me a better smile and thank you than my unimaginative offerings deserved and before I knew quite how it had happened I was holding a wine-glass and standing in the middle of the living room floor and sort of vaguely bopping to Katy Perry on the sound system and nodding to people I knew and smiling hopefully to people I didn't.

There were about thirty people at the party, all in their twenties and most of them women. Lots of LBDs, a few blue jeans and blouse or top combinations that would have been a better bet for me if I'd thought to think like an adult and not like, say, a six-year-old, but too late now. After catching up with Julie and Gail—our paths hadn't crossed for, like, almost a day now—and saying hello to Suze's fiancé, John, I wandered through to the kitchen to top up on the New World Generic White, the Pinot Grigio having gone the path of the just.

“So I'm leaving next week to teach Unix in Saudi Arabia,” a tall guy with black-rimmed glasses was explaining to someone, while Gail looked on slightly bemused. “Six months, ex-pat compound, you know how it is.”

“Enjoy your drinks while you can.”

Laughter. I backed out. Gail followed, fresh G&T fizzing in her hand, and disappeared into the living room while I was still negotiating the hallway and trying to find a conversation.

“So, anyway, at this point the whole thing becomes moot…”

“…brought it right in off the post? That's the sort of play that'll…”

“Nah, they're still well on the way to relegation.”

“Yah, everything's more or less sorted except the table decorations—oh, hello again Lucy, you've
got
to talk to that tall guy over by the window. Friend of John's, Kiwi biologist, total nerd, you're probably the only person here he can have a conversation with.”

“Ah, thanks Suze.” I put on a brave smile at this backhanded compliment and looked across to where this other tall guy (with his back to us, so he might or might not have had a beard) was leaning out the open window smoking a pipe. Since the room was already as full of cigarette smoke as pubs used to be, this at least showed the guy was considerate.

“What's his name?” I asked.

“Alec something. Now, yes, as I was saying, Jenny, my mum's
still
hankering for a castle and we've had the hotel venue booked for
months
and it's
beautiful.
…”

I wandered on into the living room.

“Never heard anything so outrageous in my
life
,” Gail was saying, dominating a knot of conversation in the far corner. In the middle of the floor were about five people, two of whom worked at Holyrood.

“It's been just complete gloom and doom since last May, I mean they still don't have a clue what an opposition's supposed to—”

“Yeah, and it all filters down to us, it's like they want to kick the fucking cat.”

On the way across I got snagged by one person in that conversation: Elaine, a young woman I half remembered from a night out with Julie and Gail, and who now wanted me to know exactly what was wrong about the occupation of Iraq and with the US political system.

“I blame the British,” I said when I could get a word in. “Specifically, I blame the Labour Party.”

“What?”

“Simple. No Blair, no Coalition, it'd have been us and Micronesia or whatever. That'd have been a much harder sell for Bush, agreed?”

“Oh, sure,” Elaine said. “But Blair isn't the
Labour Party.”

“You have this vote of no confidence thing here? Plus you had the war vote. The MPs could have pulled the rug from under him right there.”

“Well, yes, but the MPs aren't the
Labour Party
either.”

She had this way of kind of dropping her voice while emphasising the words when she said “Labour Party” that made it sound like the name of a fucking church, or possibly the Spanish Inquisition.

“So who is?” I demanded. “The members? I've never met anyone who says they're actually in it. Is it a secret society, or what?”

“We-ell,” said Elaine, looking abashed and defiant at the same time, “as it happens, actually,
I'm
a member.”

I was about to give her a backhanded compliment for admitting this disgraceful proclivity when she ruined the effect by adding, in a defensive tone: “But I don't go to
meetings.”

At this I just about sank my teeth in her leg.

“I guess now you'll tell me the
meetings
aren't the
Labour Party?”

While Elaine was taking her defence strategy to the next level, I was keeping half an eye on this Alec somebody. He'd finished his smoke. He drew himself all the way back into the room like some kind of folding ladder and then stood up to his full height of about six and a half feet. His shock of springy black hair made him look even taller. He didn't have a beard exactly, just a black stubble that looked long enough to be soft to brush your hand on. His face looked like he'd been out in the sun a lot. He slid the pipe into his shirt pocket alongside a row of pens and looked around. His eyes were a bright blue and his gaze didn't stop at me. He reached for a wineglass he'd left on a high bookshelf and sipped from it, then took a couple of steps forward and loomed at the edge of the next conversation over from where I was.

By the time Elaine and I had come to a tentative agreement that what we
actually
needed in the US and the UK was a bloody revolution with heads on spikes, Alec had backed away to the corner by the window again and was scanning the bookshelves. I sidled around the side of the room and stepped towards him. On the soundtrack the Zutons were singing “Valerie” which I like (in that version, not Amy Winehouse's, thank you) because it's the only love song I know that's addressed to a girl with ginger hair. It was a bit hard to catch Alec's eye because he was looking down at and carefully turning the pages of one of the shelf-full of wedding magazines that Suze had, to my certain knowledge, begun accumulating about an hour after John had slipped the rock on her finger.

Alec noticed me hovering just outside his space, and looked up. His eyes widened, he smiled and then mouthed along to the very line in the song that always makes me feel appreciated. Then he said: “Why don't you come on over…” and it was like he was waiting to add my own name to the end of that line.

My mouth went dry all of a sudden.

“Uh, hello,” I said. “I'm Lucy. Uh, Suze said…”

“Hi, Lucy,” he said. “I'm Alec. Alec Hamilton.”

I couldn't place his accent. Australian?

“As in Alexander Hamilton,” I said. Forgetting that everyone who has a name that can be quipped about has heard the quip, often.

“The Founding Father,” he said. “Yup.”

He glanced down again at a two-page fashion spread in the magazine, shook his head a little, closed the magazine and laid it back on the shelf, and retrieved his glass from the shelf above. He just stood there looking at me, as if he were pleased to see me. He didn't say anything.

“Why were you looking at
Brides?”
I asked, and then wished I hadn't, because it sounded like I thought he needed to justify his strange behaviour.

Alec didn't seem at all embarrassed.

“I was checking to see if all wedding dresses are the same.” He grinned. “They are.”

“Oh no, they're not,” I said. “There are
hundreds
of different styles.”

Most of which I'd seen while schlepping around bridal shops with Suze, so I spoke with some authority.

“Most of which look exactly alike,” Alec said.

“Well, maybe they do to
you
, but not to—and anyway, why would you even be interested?”

He slugged back some red wine. “When I was about five,” he said, “my parents took me to a wedding. Being a boy, and a brat, I found it all really boring but I do remember being impressed by the bride. I thought she looked…like a queen in a fairy tale, you know? Romantic, I suppose, though I didn't know that word then. She was in one of those big elaborate dresses they had in the eighties.”

I gave my shoulders and hips a tiny wiggle, to remind him or myself that I was in an arguably big and romantic dress too. He gave no sign of noticing.

“These,” he went on, nodding sideways at the shelf, “don't look so spectacular. Very plain.”

I recalled Suze at her fitting. She'd looked like a queen all right.

“You should see one on a bride in real life,” I said. “They look totally different when they move.”

I gave my skirt another little shake, like:
see?

“I'll take your word for it,” he said.

It seemed a bit of a conversation-stopper.

“Well,” I said, laughing it off, “having established that you're not that interested in wedding dresses…what
are
you interested in?”

“I'm interested in lots of things,” he said. He moved his neck and shoulders as if to ease some tension. “Animals, history, weapons, costumes, words, books, tools, card games, rocks, fossils…”