Kismet Page 10

  ‘I thought at the time … that maybe you fancied someone else.’

  ‘Really? Why?’

  She could add that it was Zahra whom she suspected. But she picks a generic version instead.

  ‘I had this idea in my head of some girl … You know. Someone sophisticated, smart, successful. Someone like your ex.’

  His hand searches for hers, which it squeezes.

  ‘Those girls! They’re like … automatons compared to you. I grew up surrounded by them. You’re different. You’re real. Honestly, there was no reason. Just like with you. There is no reason, right?’

  ‘Well,’ she says, gingerly edging further into the unspoken void between them, ‘I have been stressed recently. With work. And, you know …’

  ‘Have you been thinking about your dad?’

  ‘No. Not really. I think that maybe … I think winter gets me down.’

  He turns onto his side and kisses her cheek, until she turns her face to meet his and they kiss properly. His lips are fuller than hers, and her mouth tends to become wet. They hold the closed-mouth kiss for a long time, then follow it with a flutter of short kisses and then rest their foreheads against each other and she looks down into the strange flesh canyon formed by the opposing flanks of their bodies. She should really follow through on what she has started, and tell him about the pills she has been taking since January, and how a loss of libido is the second most common side effect, after batshit crazy dreams. But Pete will overreact, will become upset and concerned, will start treading even more softly around her, as if she is at risk of killing herself. No, she won’t tell him, she doesn’t want to disrupt the moment. But she will tell him. Soon.

  ‘You’re a good guy, you know.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And sex isn’t everything.’

  ‘Of course not. Let’s do something else instead. What do you want to do?’

  ‘Tell me a story.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Tell me a story from one of our holidays. I know: tell me about Margate, what you did on the train.’

  ‘Margate wasn’t a holiday.’

  ‘We stayed the night.’

  ‘Only because we missed the last train. You can’t go on holiday by mistake.’

  ‘Well. It felt like a holiday. We were in a holiday mood.’

  Pete grumbles that a holiday is a thing, not a mood, but then there is a pause and she can tell he is gathering his thoughts. He tells her about their first date outside of London – their fifth date proper – and how they met at London Bridge and caught the train to Margate, where they planned to walk on the beach, visit the art gallery and eat fish and chips. On the train journey Pete opened his backpack, and Anna noticed a book inside.

  ‘The Alchemist, by that Brazilian guy, Paul something. You asked if I was reading it. I said I was about to start, that a friend at the office had given it to me. I asked if you’d read it, and you said you didn’t rate it, that it was trite. I nodded and looked down at the book, turned it in my hands a few times. Then I stood up, opened the carriage window and threw it out.’

  Anna laughs. She always laughs at this story, no matter how many times she hears it; she can still see the book rushing backwards from the window, its pages flapping like the wings of a desperate bird.

  ‘The woman sitting opposite us told me off. She said it was dangerous and wasteful. I tried to explain to her that it was trite, which made you laugh out loud.’

  Anna remembers the woman’s face, and continues smiling long after Pete calls her a weirdo, gets out of bed and announces he is going to use the leftover duck to make hoi sin wraps for supper. He climbs down the ladder and a moment later she can hear him moving things around in the kitchen. She continues staring at the window in a drowsy trance, until she is startled by a sudden buzz from the far corner of the room. She sits upright and looks across to where her phone is charging on the little footstool beneath the window. In the evening gloom it appears excessively dark and dense, almost like an absence of light or negative matter, its presence intensified for having not being checked for five or six hours. It occurs to her that the message will be from Geoff, and she experiences this possibility as a physical feeling, a tingling that spreads across her whole body.

  She rolls off the bed and creeps half-naked across the room. She takes up the phone, types in her passcode and swipes through to the last page, where the Kismet app hides. She has one new message.

  Thomas 72: Salut! How is your weekend? Shame to not see you. Like to meet up this week? xxx

  Anna logs out of Kismet and lets her phone hang at her side. Then she just stands in the centre of the room; the excited feeling dissipates like the slow trailing off of sound after an explosion. From her upright position the angled window gives a very different view: instead of clear sky there is a tangled view of roofs, terraces and TV aerials. There is no denying that she feels shunned and slighted, and she tells herself she shouldn’t, that there is no way he was an 81, no way. He is probably a 65 at most, and is currently pretending to be a family man in deep Surrey, playing with his kids and lying through his teeth to his poor wife. She continues rationalising his lack of contact until the fact that she’s even bothering to rationalise gives rise to a corrupt and unclean feeling, which sharpens into guilt when the smell of frying duck seeps through the open hatch.

  ‘Stop fucking about,’ she says.

  She logs back into Kismet and deletes the message from Thomas. Then she opens contacts, selects Thomas 72, presses delete, confirms the deletion. Without hesitating she does the same with Geoff 81. She considers deleting Kismet altogether, but knows this is a faff: to cancel without having found a partner requires a series of confirmations and double-confirmations and password entries and secret-question answering. She decides to do it at work tomorrow, and instead opens her emails, gets into bed and begins tapping out an invite to her birthday dinner party, this Friday at 7.30 p.m. She addresses it to Caz, Hamza, Zahra and Keir, Ingrid, Bean, Toby and Cecile, copies in Pete, and presses send.

  Anna drops the phone and with a sigh falls down on her back. It is done. She feels no great sense of relief or anxiety or deliverance, feels nothing really, and just lies there looking at the window that displays the same unbroken segment of sky, only darker now. From downstairs she can hear something sizzling and the regular clatter of the wooden spatula against the pan, until this suddenly stops. It sounds like something has distracted Pete from his cooking, and she pictures him down there, perhaps checking his phone after an email notification. He will read the message she has sent, and she imagines the warmth and relief spreading through his entire being as he realises, in a way beyond his conscious awareness, that she has chosen far more than the dinner party, that she has chosen him.

  Monday

  After five days of clear blue skies, the new week begins grey and overcast. But Anna doesn’t mind; she wakes early and in the same energised spirits that have carried her through the weekend. She catches the bus on Kilburn High Road when it is not even 8 a.m., and the upper deck is filled with a colourful array of cleaners and construction workers, rather than the usual monochrome professional types; she thinks this time she will beat Ingrid into work, surely. As the bus rumbles and coughs and splurts its way into central London, and the buildings grow tall and grey to match the sky, she contemplates what to tell Stuart about the interview; she decides to say it was a ‘bumpy ride’, but that she got there in the end.

  In the office she strides through the empty atrium and rides the lift to the third floor, where she finds Ingrid sitting with her headphones in and one foot tucked beneath her, her fingers scuttling against the keyboard.

  ‘Fucking hell,’ says Anna, dropping her bag heavily onto her chair.

  Ingrid pulls her headphones out and greets her with a beaming smile.

  ‘Do you live here, or what?’

  Ingrid says that in Canada this wouldn’t be considered early, and that rather than spending the weekend in the office sh
e has been ‘crazy busy’, covering the tube map with activities in honour of Sam’s final days in the UK. While Anna takes her coat off and gets settled Ingrid tells her about the meal they had at the top of a skyscraper near Liverpool Street; Anna has her usual premonition of seeing the photo gallery, but this time doesn’t have to wait, since Ingrid grabs her phone and brings up the pictures. Anna can’t help feel envious of the view of the city from that height, with Ingrid and Sam surrounded by the other smiling couples, in front of ornate dishes of Asian food, half a mile in the sky.

  ‘But what about you? How was your weekend?’

  ‘It was great. Really great.’

  ‘I bet it was. The last weekend of your twenties! Did you go wild?’

  Anna inhales to speak, then pauses. The last weekend of her twenties; she hadn’t thought of it like that. She realises that Ingrid will be surprised to hear that she spent it working on the article, cleaning the flat, opening the suitcase, and hanging around with Pete; the wildest thing she did was go for a run.

  ‘Not wild, no. Do you ever have a nice weekend, even though nothing much happens?’

  Ingrid nods and says ‘sure’ with a little too much emphasis, and Anna doesn’t believe her. She would like to explain her discovery of what a weekend is for, and the inspiration this gave her, but she doesn’t know how to begin. With dismay it occurs to her that the conviction she felt yesterday – as well as the blissful contentment – has already faded, is now slipping into the past, dissolving into a mere memory. She imagines watching Pete cooking the duck, and this time the image conjures no profound emotion; instead the number 70 flashes above his head.

  ‘But next weekend is the big one, right?’ says Ingrid. ‘I can’t wait. We’re going to have so much fun.’

  ‘Yeah. It will be good.’ Anna senses that Ingrid will ask more questions about her dinner party; the prospect of answering them makes her feel tired, and she swipes the seldom-used cafetiere and walks off before she has a chance to ask. The kitchenette is empty and it is a relief not to have to make small talk with anyone, but the pleasure is soon replaced by a concern that she is inherently antisocial, or is becoming that way. With a litre of black coffee she leaves the kitchen and heads back between the HR and sports departments, which are both filling with people yawning and sipping themselves to a state of wakefulness. When she comes in line with her desk she sees that Stuart is perched beside her computer talking to Ingrid. He is telling her about his weekend, and going for a drive with his young family; only when Anna places the full cafetiere on the desk does he notice her.

  ‘There she is! Our girl in the field. Have a good weekend?’

  He is trying to be friendly and casual, but there is something awkward about it – his backside is just a few inches from her keyboard and mouse, leaving her nowhere to sit down. There is always something forced and itchy about his little trips from the Quiet Room to chat to them. His talk of his wife and twin babies brings to mind the alarming fact that Stuart is married, that Stuart has sex. There was one time, during a free bagel morning, when he came over and ate a bagel amongst them, and a dollop of cream cheese fell from his mouth onto Anna’s keyboard.

  ‘We missed you on Friday,’ he says. ‘Thought maybe you’d run away.’

  ‘Sorry, it was cheeky of me. But the interview lasted over an hour, and then I went to a cafe to write up my notes, and by the time I finished it was almost 5 p.m. and I thought there was little point coming back to the office.’

  Stuart watches her say this. He is about the only person in the office to dress smartly, and his hands are deep within the pockets of his suit trousers, where they turn coins and keys around noisily. Anna isn’t sure what to do with her arms all of a sudden; she loops them around her back, the fingers and thumb of her right hand linking around her left wrist, as if one arm is putting the other under arrest.

  ‘So it went well, then?’ he says, sounding more sure-footed talking about work, his voice in a lower register. ‘She must have had a lot to say for herself, if it overran.’

  ‘It was a bit of a bumpy ride,’ says Anna, regaining her composure. ‘But we got there in the end.’

  ‘Bumpy ride? What do you mean, bumpy ride?’

  ‘You know …’ says Anna, her mind scrambling for the right way to put it. Stuart’s eyes are narrowed, as if trying to peer through to what she is really thinking. She always senses this with Stuart, even when trying to correct for her natural pessimism, and it makes it impossible to think under the heat of his gaze. But before she has a chance to say anything, she hears the rapid tick-tock of footsteps on the tiles, and turns to see little Paula approaching.

  ‘Is this guy giving you a hard time?’ she says, grabbing Anna by the forearm. She nods towards Stuart, who raises both palms in a gesture of innocence.

  ‘Anna was just telling us about her interview with Sahina on Friday.’

  ‘Oh wow!’ says Paula, her eyes wide. ‘How’d it go?’

  ‘Great!’ says Anna.

  ‘Of course it did!’ says Paula, shaking the flesh on Anna’s forearm. ‘Every time I see an interview with her, there’s always a zinger of a quote. Something bold, brassy, surprising.’ She looks to Stuart and then to Ingrid as she says this, and they all agree, the four of them making a loose circle of nodding people. What kind of a situation is this?

  ‘Did you get many zingers?’ she says, smiling at Anna again.

  ‘Oh … sure. There were zingers.’

  ‘Anna was telling us’, says Stuart, his dark eyes gleaming, ‘that they were speaking for an hour.’

  ‘Well …’ says Anna, wishing she hadn’t said that.

  ‘Amazing. I knew you’d nail it. Tell you what: why don’t we expand the article, make it long form. Would be a shame to waste it, if you got such good stuff.’ Paula looks at Stuart, who nods with his mouth downturned, seeming to agree while still digesting the idea.

  ‘We could get new stills as well,’ adds Paula. ‘Send a photographer this week.’

  ‘New stills?’ says Anna.

  ‘Why not? Let’s push this into four-wheel drive. Really launch the series with a bang.’

  ‘Um,’ says Anna, feeling the same tightness in her chest as during the interview. ‘It might be, like, hard for her to find the time. She’s pretty busy …’

  ‘Oh, it would be an extra ten minutes, max,’ says Stuart. ‘Not much to ask after an hour-long interview, is it?’ He is still smiling, but she detects something else in his eyes, something slick and knowing, not dissimilar from the way Sahina looked at her – the feeling of being led into a trap shivers through her. She tries to think of a tactful way of backtracking, of bringing up the fact that Sahina’s answers went against the Romont values, but her mind feels jammed by the way they are all staring at her. After a while she just nods, says great.

  ‘Wonderful,’ says Paula, and with a final squeeze of Anna’s arm she says she is late to see Clem, the website’s CEO, and is then rushing away across the clearing. Stuart finally stands upright from her desk, and Anna is able to fall down into her chair. He hovers for a moment longer though, rattling off a list of particulars to Anna: two thousand words, copy to him by midday Thursday, run a draft by him on Tuesday or Wednesday, he’ll have Jessica call Sahina’s people to arrange the photos. These details wash by her in a blur, then she is watching him walking across the clearing towards his desk, and it is Ingrid’s voice that is struggling to get through to her. She looks at her keyboard and the patch of desk where Stuart’s arse has been resting.

  ‘I’m really pleased for you, Anna.’

  ‘What? Yeah. Great. Hey, coffee!’ She plunges the cafetiere and pours a cup, which she sips at and then grimaces, her lips curling in response to the bitterness.

  ‘Urgh. What is it with the coffee in this place? You need milk and three sugars just to take the edge off. Never drink the coffee they give us in the building. That’s the golden rule. Why did you let me forget the golden rule?’

  She stands
up, puts her coat back on and asks Ingrid if she wants anything from the ‘outside world’. Then she crosses the clearing, imagining the curious eyes of Ingrid and Stuart like a physical pressure on her back, pushing her out the door.

  *

  By 3 p.m., after seven or eight hours of chewing her pen and scribbling in her notebook, Anna has a revised plan in front of her, and persuades herself that she can still do this. She will inflate the usable quotes, and stretch the whole thing to two thousand words. She’ll include more back-story, go deep into her childhood and initial projects, before snapping back to a vaguely contradictory statement that Sahina made, such as that young people shouldn’t be ambitious at all, but should walk across deserts to escape the polluting influence of corporations. She can make the article work, she tells herself, even if it takes every hour of every day. She can, because she must.

  In reward for reaching this relatively calm plateau, she goes for a walk and has a late lunch in Pret a Manger. Then she comes back to her desk and rewatches Sahina’s TED talk from a few years ago, the fourth most-watched presentation on the TED website. For some reason the video won’t stream properly; the red line indicating the position in the timeline keeps catching up with the grey line that measures how much has been streamed, and in the subsequent moment of buffering Sahina is frozen in some inglorious pose, with her eyes closed and mouth open. Anna asks Ingrid, who is deep within a work trance of her own, if the internet is having an off day, and she confirms that it is. But when Anna flicks across to the most-watched TED talk ever, by Raymond Chan, the video streams fine. The talk was given six months after Kismet was launched, and Anna has already watched it several times. His hair has changed but his face and glasses look exactly the same. He begins by revealing the scientific findings which prove that Kismet couples are over ten times more likely to make a serious commitment (cohabitation, children or marriage) than couples that meet traditionally, with the odds growing exponentially in correlation with the Kismet score.