Kismet Page 8

  ‘It’s okay. I’m fine. I have a few minutes. Let’s do something.’

  ‘Excellent. Let’s do something.’ He looks up and down the street, as if searching for inspiration, then at his watch. ‘It’s just gone 3 p.m. I suppose it’s too late for coffee. And too early for tea. And far too early for the pub. It’s that time of day when no one wants anything.’ He makes an unfurling motion with his right hand as he says this, and she notices his accent is layered: there is a semi-posh coating above a regional base, though she isn’t sure from where.

  ‘I was going to walk along the river,’ says Anna.

  ‘That sounds nice.’

  ‘If you want to join me?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Great.’

  They stand for a second longer, as if neither is sure how to go about putting this plan of theirs into action. Then they turn and begin walking slowly along the pavement, side by side. Anna is taller than average but only reaches up to his shoulder – he must be at least six foot four. They walk in silence to the end of the side street and turn right onto Kennington Lane. Anna can hear her smart pinching brogues hitting the pavement, and for some reason they bring the face of Sahina into her mind and she feels a lurching dread, and all of a sudden isn’t in the mood to speak to a stranger. But just as she is about to belatedly take him up on his offer to postpone, he breaks the silence and asks if she works in one of those warehouses.

  ‘Just visiting, thankfully. There’s something about Vauxhall that bums me out. I feel like it’s not designed for humans, or something.’ As if to support her point, they reach the first of the pedestrian crossings which take them across the thundering, four-lane gyratory that threads through the arches beneath the railway tracks. They shuffle across two carriageways, through a dank foot tunnel that smells of urine, then across another two lanes.

  ‘See what I mean?’ she says, when they finally reach the pavement on the other side, beneath the MI5 building. ‘Vauxhall is fine if you’re a car, or a bus. But if you’re a human you’ve had it.’

  Geoff makes a speech immediately, as if he knew she was going to say this, and has prepared a response.

  ‘Vauxhall is a piece of infrastructure, first and foremost,’ he says. ‘And recently I’ve decided that infrastructure is the best monument to a city. Sewage plants. Power stations. Motorway flyovers. These are the most awesome testaments to a city’s combined weight. Not some poncy cathedral or art gallery. Near Bow there is a field of electricity pylons that stretches for miles.’

  This eccentric speech surprises Anna – especially coming from someone who looks like a male model – but she imagines saying it herself in a different context, and realises that it is the kind of thing she would be glad to come out with.

  ‘I suppose there could be something sublime about a field of pylons,’ she says. ‘But Vauxhall? It’s just a few gay bars and a roundabout.’

  Geoff releases a titter of laughter, but says nothing in return. They walk for a few steps in a silence that seals off the previous conversation, and then he starts from scratch by asking who she was visiting in the warehouse. Being reminded of the interview is almost physically unpleasant, and with a reluctant huff she admits that she is a journalist, writing an article on Sahina Bhutto.

  ‘Me too!’ says Geoff, brightly. ‘I’m a journalist, I mean. I haven’t interviewed her. I see her from time to time – my business partner has a unit in the next warehouse. On sunny days she sits on a deck chair out in the yard. She seems peculiar.’

  Anna says she certainly is that, and decides it might be cathartic and productive to relay the whole story: she tells him about her working for the website, being given the Women at the Top series, her boss changing all her questions at the last minute, and Sahina basically refusing to answer any of them. By the time she finishes the pavement has widened onto the tree-lined Embankment, with the lampposts carved into ornate fish where the narrow upper section bulges into the lower trunk.

  ‘But she was saying things?’ says Geoff. ‘She wasn’t sitting in silence.’

  ‘Yes, she was saying things.’

  ‘There you go. Just build it around whatever she said.’

  There is something annoyingly matter-of-fact about the way he says this; Anna had merely wanted to vent, not to invite him to problem-solve.

  ‘But she didn’t say the right things. She barely answered the questions about the brand values.’

  ‘The what?’

  Anna sighs and explains about Romont and the three values. Geoff looks concerned; the dark crease has returned to his brow.

  ‘And what happens if she doesn’t speak these values?’

  ‘They won’t sign it off. They won’t pay for it.’

  ‘So it’s an advertorial, then?’

  ‘No,’ she says, sharply. She tells him that they retain editorial control, and that sponsored content is a major part of pretty much all websites and magazines these days, that three of them work on the desk, and that there is nothing new or unusual about it.

  ‘Perhaps I’m out of touch,’ says Geoff. ‘But this isn’t journalism.’

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘It’s advertising, clearly.’

  ‘Huh,’ says Anna, indignant. ‘So I’m not a journalist?’ Her tone makes clear that he is on the brink of causing serious offence, but he doesn’t flinch or hesitate for a second.

  ‘I didn’t say you weren’t a journalist. Just that this isn’t journalism.’

  ‘But this is all I do.’

  ‘In that case …’ He shrugs and looks forwards along the Embankment. Anna marvels at how calm he seems, as if nothing has happened. It is like he is deliberately trying to piss her off and abort the situation. She is offended, but decides not to take it personally. He is obviously the kind of strong-willed man that never modifies opinions to accommodate someone’s feelings – wouldn’t even think to do so – and that nothing anyone says, no matter how well-reasoned, would make him question his own. In other words, he’s a prick.

  They walk past three of the fish lampposts without talking, and as it becomes clear that Geoff isn’t going to say anything to make amends or restore levity, Anna decides the 81 must be Kismet misfiring. He is an arrogant, middle-aged prick, whose good looks seem intrinsically linked to, or perhaps the cause of, his noxious personality. Maybe Zahra was right: Kismet knows about Pete and is matching her with someone equally deceptive – this guy probably has a wife and children in some great big house in one of those awful-sounding Surrey towns, Esher or Epsom or where have you. She wants to tell him right now that this isn’t working, and simply walk away. But there is nowhere to walk to, besides turning and heading back towards Vauxhall, and the nearest tube station is Westminster, half a mile further along the Embankment. She may as well keep walking until then, and have it out with him in the meantime.

  ‘So you’re a proper journalist, then?’

  ‘Not any more. I used to be, after a fashion.’

  Anna asks what the hell that means, and he says he was a reporter in Ukraine and Chile and Uganda, and that he was also a talking head on an Argentinian current affairs show, where he presented a segment called La Duenda La Britannia. His Spanish accent is so strong and surprising that for a strange second it feels like a third person is walking with them.

  ‘I did write for the Evening Standard, back in the nineties.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now,’ he says, and then pauses, close-lipped, deliberating. ‘Now I’m working on something quite different. An investigation.’

  ‘About what?’

  There is another pause, then Geoff says, ‘I’d rather not say.’ He speaks with such gravity that Anna laughs out loud.

  ‘What, is it some kind of secret?’

  Geoff doesn’t contradict her, or react in any way at all; he continues staring ahead with his fixed, earnest expression.

  ‘No way? It is?’

  ‘It’s sensitive, is a
ll,’ he says, half-defensive. ‘It’s not illegal. I just can’t speak about it.’ It is like he is talking about something from a Cold War-era spy novel, and Anna laughs again and says that her lips are sealed.

  They return to silently walking, but her anger and annoyance have diffused; there is something boyish and ridiculous about his talk of a secret project that makes him harder to dislike. Westminster Bridge and the Houses of Parliament are still crouched in the hazy distance, looking like paper cutouts of themselves, and she decides to make use of the few minutes remaining.

  ‘I was planning an investigation of my own once,’ she says. ‘I wanted to reunite a lost suitcase with its owner, using only the contents as clues, which I’d post on Twitter or a blog.’

  ‘I’m listening,’ he says.

  She tells him that dozens of suitcases are abandoned on the carousel at Heathrow each year, and if they remain unclaimed they go to an auction house; a few years ago she went and bought one.

  ‘Can you imagine doing that? Leaving the airport without your suitcase?’

  ‘I suppose you’d need a good reason.’

  ‘I have an image of someone waiting at the carousel,’ says Anna, ‘and getting a text that makes them turn around and just run.’

  ‘Would have to be some very bad news, I suppose. Perhaps their husband or wife had been in an accident.’

  ‘Or some really good news. Maybe their wife had gone into labour. Either way, there’s a story at the heart of it. And that’s what I wanted to get to.’

  They have stopped walking and are leaning against the stone balustrade beside Westminster Bridge. They are both quiet for a moment, and look across the river to the Houses of Parliament.

  ‘I really like this suitcase idea,’ says Geoff. ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘Well, my life changed a few years ago. Something happened. It made me drop a few things.’ The way she says this demonstrates that it was a major life event, and Anna feels the gravitational pull of the conversation shift, but Geoff’s reply is blunt; it strikes her that he has no tact.

  ‘And you didn’t take it up again later?’

  ‘By then I had a job. I haven’t had time.’

  ‘No time? Really? Couldn’t you make time? You still have the suitcase?’

  ‘Yes, I still have it. But it’s way too late. It’s like, four years ago.’

  ‘Nonsense. The delay just makes it more interesting; it’s a demonstration of the internet’s capacity to cross gulfs in time and space. How the past is still with us, in digital form. How it’s not even past. That’s what makes the idea so modern.’ He says more things like this, and is being arrogant and a little pretentious, but she doesn’t mind so much, because he reiterates, repeatedly, that he thinks it’s the best idea he’s heard in ages. She believes him, and it occurs to her that the Kismet score isn’t a complete misfire. He goes off on a tangent and talks about big data and a supercomputer – owned by some of the largest companies and most powerful governments – that is sluicing the entire data of the internet, transmitted in real time as some horrendously vast torrent of numbers and digits and symbols. He rotates his right hand around as he speaks, and she realises he reminds her of someone; perhaps a minor film actor, or an academic delivering a TED talk.

  ‘They call it the pipe,’ he says.

  ‘They call what the pipe?’

  ‘The supercomputer. That’s their cute nickname for it. Not that they’ve worked out how to use the data it produces – the stream is too fast, too complex, billions of digits a second. At the moment they are employing mathematicians to just look at it, and think about how they might begin to map or filter it all.’

  Anna stands there, her palms flat on the cool mottled stone of the balustrade, looking down at the grey-brown water below, and imagines the physical facts of her current situation translated into digital format – the GPS co-ordinates of her position, the person she is standing with – and then pulsing away from her and joining the run-off from the other people walking along the Embankment, until it becomes a flowing stream of numbers, then a surging river. She continues thinking about this until Geoff pushes up from the balustrade, and she stands and follows him across the road.

  In silence they weave through tourists gathered at the base of the London Eye; on the esplanade there are stilt walkers and jugglers and a jazz band. Geoff and Anna both slip their jackets off – he carries his over his shoulder, suspended from a hooked finger in a manner that is old-fashioned and quaint. Without agreeing to do so, they drift towards the railings in front of the Oxo Tower and come to a stop there. Anna stares at the water flopping about below, the sunlight sparkling on the momentary crests and troughs. There are dozens of squawking seagulls circling and plunging, and young children are playing on the small strip of sand as if it were a beach – a second after thinking that it looks like the seaside, she detects a low-tide smell of the sea.

  ‘I can smell salt. But that’s not right, is it?’

  ‘No, it is. The water here is brackish.’

  ‘Brackish?’

  He explains that the river is tidal until Twickenham, and that brackish water is the resultant mix of fresh and salt water, with the concentration increasing towards the sea. He moves his hand around again and, with a jolt that is neither pleasure nor pain, Anna realises who he reminds her of: her father. It is a curiously neutral revelation, and doesn’t set off the bottomless, vertiginous feeling she normally gets when reminded of him, as if a trapdoor within her has fallen open.

  ‘Not sure I can smell it though,’ he says.

  Geoff closes his eyes and inhales deeply through his nose, but then his mouth goes askew, as if he has smelt something unpleasant. Anna breathes through her nose again and she can smell it too – something warm and meaty – and then clamps her arms to her side, knowing it must be her armpits. She takes a half-step away from him on the railing and can feel the beginning of an awkward silence. But then she thinks about the number 81, and decides that if it were true, an issue as trifling as body odour couldn’t derail things. And if it’s wrong, then none of this matters anyway.

  ‘I think you’re just smelling me,’ she says, pinching a corner of her shirt and bringing it to her nose, breathing in her tangy smell of onion. She tells him about the deodorant stick and how she sweated during the interview; for the first time he looks genuinely concerned, empathetic, a gentle smile curling his lips.

  ‘I’ve been in this situation many times,’ he says. ‘Before big meetings, interviews. Public toilets are surprisingly effective. Just a bean of handwash and a blast of dryer. Works every time.’

  ‘Well, I do need the toilet,’ she says, turning to look at the cafe on the balcony of the Oxo Tower. She hands him her jacket and walks inside and up the stairs. In a cafe toilet she checks her phone and sees it is almost half past four, and that she has drifted way off course; there is little point in going back to Soho now, but she doesn’t feel guilty about taking a couple of hours off – she’ll be working on the article all weekend, she knows she will. She sends a message to Stuart saying she has gone home to write up the transcript, and then switches it off. Then she undoes her shirt and washes her armpits, splashing water up from the little sink. She pats them dry with paper, but obviously not thoroughly, for when she puts her green shirt back on two shapes like ink blots spread from beneath her arms.

  On the riverside she finds that Geoff has vanished; he has taken the opportunity to do a runner. But no, wait, there he is, twenty metres further along, reading a metal sign attached to the railing and holding her jacket in a bundle pressed to his side; seeing him with a possession of hers makes him seem more familiar somehow, as if he is a possession of hers as well.

  ‘How’d it go?’ he says, as she approaches. She lifts an arm and he laughs at the dark stains. Then he leans down and takes a piece of her shirt between his fingers. She doesn’t resist, and she feels a weird disturbance in her stomach as he sniffs at the fabric.

  ‘See?’ he say
s, already walking away. ‘Works every time.’

  They both put their jackets back on and walk quietly through the tunnels beneath Blackfriars and Southwark Bridge. The sun is beginning to dip, and the slanting rays fidget and dazzle against the glass towers of the City.

  ‘Have dinner with me,’ says Geoff, as they approach London Bridge.

  There is a long pause as Anna considers what to say.

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘You have plans?’

  ‘No. I’m not doing anything. The thing is, I just—’

  ‘I understand,’ he says, cutting her off, and saying he has work to do anyhow. She is almost certain that he doesn’t understand, and that he assumes she is just being prudent and well-behaved on a first meeting, but she allows the conversation to lapse into silence. Either way, he doesn’t appear too bothered – maybe he doesn’t take the system so seriously, or is just playing it cool.

  ‘I’m actually just going home,’ she says, in a lament. ‘I have no plans at all. Other than work.’

  ‘Ah, to go home,’ he says. ‘The English equivalent of being marooned.’

  ‘When I was younger, having no plans on a Friday didn’t mean not doing anything. It just meant not knowing what I was going to be doing.’

  ‘When you were younger!’ he says, turning towards the car park by Southwark Cathedral, where a family of tourists are getting out of a taxi. He says he’ll get that cab, and then walks over and speaks to the driver for a moment, before coming back.

  ‘Well then,’ he says, standing squarely in front of her, his hands in the pockets of his chinos. With sudden courtesy he says it was nice to meet her, that he hopes she has a good weekend and that he looks forward to seeing her again, if she’d like. ‘Should we exchange numbers?’