Kismet Read online

  ‘I’m not sure,’ says Zahra, finally.

  ‘About the boat?’

  ‘About the whole thing. I think it’s time you stopped … playing games.’

  ‘Games? You were the one that said I should get perspective.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d take it this far. I didn’t think you’d actually … meet people.’

  ‘Jesus. Look out, everyone: she’s going to meet people.’

  ‘Alright then. Date people.’

  ‘They’re not real dates. It’s just a test.’

  ‘A test for what? What do you even want?’

  Anna could answer this question, for she has posed it to herself recently. She has managed to bring into focus a vague ambition which she has carried within her for many years. She can see herself in her thirties, living in a villa in Greece or Italy or the south of France, picking up freelance writing and copy-editing work online, chipping away at some project or other, maybe doing part-time waitressing at a local bar or restaurant. She would take advantage of the occasional cheap flight back to the UK to see friends and family, but otherwise just exist simply, cheaply, creatively, within sunshine and light, and not have to grit her teeth each October when the clocks change and all is plunged into darkness. But how does Pete fit into this idyll? Good question. And where are her babies? Thrown way off to her late thirties, to her last years of fertility, for when she is Ready.

  ‘I don’t know,’ is all she says, deciding not to attempt another dreamscape after the cross-country analogy. ‘But I just have doubts. He’s only a 70, remember.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re bringing the number into this.’

  ‘That’s easy for you to say. You’ve got a 76.’

  ‘And I never think about it.’

  ‘Exactly. You can afford to take it for granted. With me, it’s like the number flashes above his head every time he snores or, you know, gets all excited about some new greengrocer. And then I’m left stewing for hours afterwards, wondering if I switched off too quick, if I should have held out and made more matches. Do you remember the state I was in when we met? My dad had been dead for three months. Three months! And what if that whole thing threw me off course? And since then I’ve just been drifting?’

  There is a pause – the same concerned, thoughtful pause Zahra always leaves when Anna mentions her dad, or when conversation otherwise brushes up against the idea of fathers. When she does speak again it is quietly, with her professional lawyer’s pragmatic tone, saying that Anna shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Pete is funny and handsome and smart and thoughtful, and that millions of girls would kill for what she has. These words come a little too easily, Anna thinks, and she is tempted to respond by saying that several hundred thousand of them are probably better suited for him than her – Zahra included. But she doesn’t want the conversation to go any further; they are merely repeating the same arguments as they did over their phones yesterday and in the pub last week.

  ‘Look,’ she says, now with a businesslike, summarising tone herself. ‘I’m not ungrateful. I understand he’s a great guy and whatever. I probably will decide to go through with it. But I’m looking for something. And you’ve got to help me. Just text him about the boat. Please. And I won’t ask anything else of you.’

  Zahra turns her head one way and then the other, before sighing in resignation – Anna smiles to see she is relenting, grudgingly.

  ‘I can’t believe you read his messages,’ says Zahra, standing up and unfolding her prim little tweed blazer.

  ‘I’m a terrible person,’ says Anna, standing as well; she feels her backside in search of a damp patch, and finds one. ‘And I’m going to be late. I haven’t got time for coffee.’

  ‘Come on, just a quick one. You can get it to take away.’

  Anna wavers between competing impulses for a moment, then decides she will definitely stay late tonight to finish the Sahina questions, for as long as it takes. Plus she needs the caffeine to power her through the afternoon.

  ‘You’re a bad influence,’ she says as they head off. ‘For all your supposed virtue.’

  At the gates of the park they struggle to fit their ramen pots in the overflowing bins and have to leave them on the ground instead, complaining how hard it is to be good citizens. They wander down Greek Street and into a cafe, and Anna goes to the counter while Zahra takes a stool at the bench along the glass shopfront.

  ‘Look at this footfall,’ says Zahra, nodding out the window, when Anna returns with the coffee. The stream of people hurrying to work for 2 p.m. is three or four thick, and blocks their view of the shops facing them from across the narrow street. ‘You must be getting hits.’

  ‘You’d think, wouldn’t you? But it’s a desert out there. See for yourself.’ She takes her phone from her bag, opens Kismet and hands it to Zahra, who almost snatches it and holds it to her nose. Anna is reminded of when Zahra was using it – back when they lived in east London, not long after it was launched, during her month-long search for Keir – and Anna would often grab the phone from her; nothing is more fascinating than someone else’s phone when they are using Kismet.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ says Zahra. ‘There’s nothing!’

  ‘I told you. They’re all in bloody relationships. Kismet needs to extend the circle. Make it a hundred metres.’

  ‘As if,’ says Zahra, pinching at the screen and flicking it around. ‘I heard Raymond Chan say they were going to make it smaller, to stop people fishing. Apparently in Tokyo people stand all day at busy junctions waiting for hits.’

  ‘Hmm. Do you think it’s weird that he only seems to do interviews and press conferences? Raymond Chan, I mean.’

  ‘When you get senior enough work is just interviews and press conferences. Hey: no wonder you’re not getting hits. It will know you’ve got a boyfriend! It’s only going to match you with freaks, or other cheating scumbags.’

  ‘I did worry about that. But the French guy wasn’t a freak. He was nice. We had things in common. He was funny, and sexy.’ Zahra asks how so, dubiously, and Anna describes how he looked like a pirate and does an impression of him talking about the sound of a mandarin being peeled, which succeeds in making Zahra laugh. ‘I’m telling you. He was a good one. Kismet understands me. The real me.’

  ‘You still shouldn’t see him again.’

  ‘I think maybe I should have sex with him just once.’

  ‘A wonderful idea,’ says Zahra, still with the phone up to her nose. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’

  ‘Just one harmless night of being fucked by a pirate.’

  ‘More likely, you’ll have the kind of awkward sex that reminds you of what you’ve got.’

  ‘Even better,’ says Anna, with a shrug. ‘I’m serious, though. Pete really has changed. He’s only twenty-eight, and it’s like his main ambition in life is to sit down. If you ever came round you’d see for yourself. Why don’t you come round this weekend?’

  The question appears to make Zahra stiffen and her eyes become unfocused, as if her thoughts have been sent elsewhere. After a moment she springs back to life.

  ‘It’s two already; now I’m going to be late,’ she says, putting Anna’s phone on the counter. She gulps the rest of her espresso, kisses Anna on the cheek and says she’s the one that’s changed, not Pete.

  ‘He has! He’s training to be a teacher, for God’s sake. At least when he worked at the garden centre it was a stop-gap.’

  ‘The country needs teachers,’ says Zahra, grabbing her bag. ‘Maybe we could go out for brunch instead this weekend?’

  ‘It also needs traffic wardens. Traffic lights. Yes, brunch. Of course.’

  Zahra kisses her on the cheek again, says good luck for the interview tomorrow and is gone. Anna picks up her phone from the counter and sees that she does have a match, a blue dot on Old Compton Street. She presses it and the number 51 appears. She almost laughs, it is such a low number – two points lower and it wouldn’t register at all. Sh
e wonders what he must be like, to be deemed so perfectly incompatible. Perhaps it would be one of those guys that she has found herself sitting next to at dinner parties or at work that she has nothing to say to. The kind that has no interest in music, has no creative hobbies whatsoever, has a preoccupation with making and hoarding money that is almost primal, and that likes nothing better than to talk about house prices and mortgages and pension plans. Anna tries to visualise such a man, and this time she does actually laugh, to realise she has mentally sketched a perfect likeness of Keir. She watches the blue dot crawl like a bug across her screen, and thinks, yes, that is what the 51 would be like. But then would Kismet know her well enough to score so accurately? Of course it would. It knows every song, every website, every liked post, every shared photo, the playlists she makes and the food she orders for delivery; in short, everything, measured down to the nanosecond and micro-pixel. When is she more honest than when browsing around the internet? It knows her as well as her best friends. Even more so. Maybe it knows her better than she knows herself, she concludes, while considering walking down to Old Compton Street and meeting the 51, just to see if in their extreme incompatibility she might learn something about herself. But the time is 2.09 p.m. and she has to go back to work on her questions. Though maybe, she suddenly considers, it would be better to walk up to the RIBA library on Great Portland Street and do some research there. She can’t decide what to do, and these competing ideas hold her in stasis, sitting by the window and watching the clock on her phone, which seems to hang on 2.09 p.m. for an incredibly long time before finally, mercifully, becoming 2.10 p.m.

  Friday

  Anna is surprised to find that Sahina Bhutto’s new firm is in Vauxhall, that part of London she has always found the most unsightly and obscurely depressing. She arrives over an hour early, planning to eat something, have a strong coffee, memorise her questions, and to buy some deodorant – her stick ran dry two days ago, and she has repeatedly forgotten to replace it on her hurried journeys from home to office, office to home. She walks in a loop around the station, but the only cafe with any seats is a shabby place almost within the bus station. She takes a seat and looks at the laminate menu, at fried sandwiches and all-day breakfasts, and, wanting something light, since her stomach is alive with nerves, she orders the muesli with granola and yoghurt. This arrives piled up in a tall glass with a long spoon, with red berries on top; she feels the eyes of the men in the room on her, no doubt marvelling at this smart young woman digging into a lunchtime ice cream sundae. She pushes this to one side after a few mouthfuls, then flattens the list of questions on the Formica table top.

  Yesterday afternoon she sent Stuart her final suggested ten questions, as agreed, but it wasn’t until this morning that he called her into the Quiet Room and said they weren’t quite right, weren’t quite right at all. They sat together for an hour and talked through each one, and she watched in silent dismay as with hits of his fat fingers he deleted the product of her late-night research – the mentions of Sahina’s childhood in Pakistan, the references to her early projects in the US, the allusion to her controversial partnership with the Saudi royal family – and replaced them instead with the three Romont brand values, one of which he demanded appear in every question, and, with a final patronising flourish, marked in bold where it did. Gone from his voice was the reassuring tone of a few days ago. Now he spoke of her thirty minutes with Sahina as a fragile, volatile thing, during which no risks whatsoever could be taken.

  She reads each of the ten questions out loud and then turns the page face down and tries doing so again. What is the most sophisticated building that you’ve built? Why are there so few powerful women in architecture? What advice would you give – she flips over the page to check – what advice would you give to ambitious young female architects?

  She repeats this process until she can reel off most of them automatically, helped along by a coffee in a mug the size of a bowl. She has to use both hands to pick it up, and she is pleased to see that after twenty minutes of sipping it still isn’t halfway drunk, that it is really two or three coffees, a day’s worth combined. This provokes a thought in Anna, and she watches the buses roll in and out of the station, wondering how much of her life she spends sitting in cafes, drinking coffee. This gives rise to a vision of every coffee she has ever drunk, gathered together into one brown, frothy pond. How big would it be? Maybe it would even be the size of a lake. She then imagines all the bread she has eaten, and eggs, apples, and wine, and then a new idea hits her, her first invention in months, even years: there could be a theme park of human consumption, made entirely of super-size installations that represent the aggregate consumption of everyday items. A hillock of bread. A river of milk. A pyramid of toilet rolls. It would be at once an entertaining spectacle, a comment on wastefulness, and also a philosophical take on how our bodies are tiny vessels, mere needle eyes through which an endless conveyor of resources is slowly threaded …

  The idea holds her in a trance, and when she snaps out of it she sees it is 2.16 p.m. and she really should be going. She folds up the questions, leaves the cafe and edges across half a dozen pedestrian crossings, her feet pinched by the shiny brogues that have never been comfortable but are at least much smarter than her tatty boots. She makes two futile attempts to find deodorant in off-licences along Kennington Lane, and then turns down the industrial side street, arriving at the sign ‘Lambeth Civic Architecture’ with a fresh coat of sweat in her armpits.

  She hovers at the gate for a moment, catching her breath, looking up at the sign. It is a white rectangle of plastic on the large, wooden gate, with the simple words printed in an artless, sans serif typeface. The banality of the logo is reassuring to Anna. She had expected to be confronted with some architectural marvel, a design of glass and chrome, but instead there is just innocuous normality. It is a reminder that the people inside are just that: people. The kind that breathe air, drink water, say hello, goodbye, thank you. They will show her in, ask if she wants anything, take her to Sahina, and even she will adhere to the basic principles of decency. All Anna has to do is say the questions, and the fierce convention of courtesy will prise Sahina’s lips open, and she will get her story.

  Anna pushes through a small door within the large wooden gate and into an enclosed yard containing two renovated, high-windowed warehouses. She walks to the one on the left, which bears a larger version of the sign on the gate, and presses the buzzer. After a few moments the door clicks and is opened by a short middle-aged woman, her wrinkled brown face flanked with long dark hair.

  ‘You must be Anna,’ says the woman, smiling, extending her hand, and it takes Anna a second to realise she is speaking to Sahina Bhutto herself. ‘You’re lucky. You caught me on my lunch break.’

  ‘Hey. Hi,’ says Anna, finally shaking her hand. ‘Yes. Hello. Nice to meet you.’ Anna steps up into a dark and cluttered hallway that reminds her obscurely but powerfully of where all the coats were kept in her primary school. This gives onto a vast, open-plan workspace the size of an aircraft hangar, with whitewashed cinderblock walls and dozens of tropical plants ballooning from window ledges and between the partitioned pods. Perhaps a hundred or two hundred workers – all of whom seem surprisingly young and fashionable and attractive to Anna – are spread throughout the space, either in chatty clusters around tables or individually behind giant Macs or those big angled drawing boards. Several of these young polished architects pass Sahina as they shuffle along the centre aisle, and each time she says ‘Ciao, darling’ or ‘Hello, sweetie’, followed on occasion by a ‘mwah’ kissing noise. Some of them look up at Anna as she walks along, two steps behind Sahina, and she meets their gaze with that inane pinched half-smile she does when inadvertently making eye contact with someone at work. Her eyes drift away from them to the far wall, where the words ‘Never Stop Exploring’ are painted in foot-high black letters, beneath a vast clock whose hour hand is probably bigger than one of Anna’s arms.

  �
�And how is dear Clem?’ says Sahina, as she leads Anna into a pod in the centre of the open-plan space, beside a desk bearing a half-eaten sandwich. ‘A great friend of mine, though sometimes we don’t see eye to eye. In fact, we never do. But that’s why we like each other; our sparring sessions keep us sharp. You know him well?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know him at all,’ says Anna, sitting opposite Sahina; in the next pod is a baby-faced young man with round glasses and blond hair in curtains, and she is slightly alarmed that he is well within earshot. ‘I got into the same lift with him once, that’s about it.’

  Sahina smiles at this, then bites into her sandwich; she apologises and says that she has to leave at 3 p.m. for a meeting with the Chinese ambassador, so she must eat this now. Anna says that’s fine and starts setting up. By the time she has taken out her Dictaphone and pen and folded the list of questions into the centre of her notebook, Sahina still hasn’t finished her first mouthful. She takes another bite, then another, giving the impression of someone trying to finish in a hurry, and Anna pretends to fidget with things while watching her chew. Sahina doesn’t look so good. Her neck is a smooth expanse of skin stretching from her chin to her collarbone. Her eyes are these huge complex things, the surrounding skin so wrinkled she almost looks like a stone sculpture that has started to crack. She takes a final bite and wipes her hands on a napkin and says through a full mouth that they are the best tramezzini in London, that she has them biked over from Soho, that the cafes in Vauxhall can’t be trusted to fry an egg.

  ‘They haven’t quite mastered cereal either,’ says Anna, before explaining about the cafe by the bus station serving her granola and yoghurt that looked like an ice cream. Surprisingly, Sahina laughs out loud. It is a deep guttural laugh that makes the loose skin on her neck wobble and her eyes close, and appears somehow directly connected with the underworld. Then she clears her throat, says that she likes that, and leans forwards in her chair and says, ‘Now then, sweetie, what are we going to talk about?’