The Happy Hour
Prologue
Prologue
A Tuesday in July
It was the perfect July day and London shone brightly, as if it didn’t have a care in the world. Ash Faulkner stood on the deck of the Thames Clipper as the time inched towards twelve o’clock, his hands pushed deep into the pockets of his jeans. It was quiet on a Tuesday morning, only a few passengers on board as the boat chugged through the water away from the city centre.
At the beginning, this journey had filled him with nothing but dread, and he’d always had the desperate urge to get off the moment he’d boarded – to disembark at any stop before he reached Greenwich. But that had changed.
He had met Jess at the market, and she had turned his Sundays into a complicated mix of the best and worst
part of his week. She had made him look forward to the journey to Greenwich, had become the good that outweighed the bad. She was the reason he had stopped waking up on those mornings feeling like his chest was full of rocks.
The deck got busier as the boat approached Tower Bridge, and Ash stepped to the side, letting a woman herd her three children to the front, behind the rope barrier that kept travellers well away from the edge. They pointed and gasped at the bridge’s blue steelwork, and at the Tower of London, a small boy asking how many people had been locked away in the turret, and Ash thought of how Jess, living and working in the heart of a popular tourist spot, had been nonplussed by the things he’d tried to show her: the Queen’s House, the foot tunnel, the view of the city stretching beyond the green expanse of Greenwich Park. She knew it so well, none of it had made her eyes light up.
But other things had – things that Ash had said or that they’d done together: a story about a pigeon that he hadn’t expected to tell anyone ever again, and yet he’d been compelled to blurt it out the first time they met; standing on the heath watching a kite soar high above them, her back pressed to his front; a silly hat; when he’d slid one of her ridiculous fluffy cushions underneath her, angling her hips up towards him.
Ash closed his eyes. He couldn’t let himself fall too deeply into the memories, even though he was glad to have them, now; to be able to replay them when, for the last few days, his mind had been a fuzzy, impenetrable fog. It wasn’t the right time to remind himself that all those stolen moments, those Sunday mornings, hadn’t just made his eyes light up, but had made his whole existence brighter – his heart most of all.
Today, he wasn’t travelling to Greenwich to have another perfect hour with Jess – he couldn’t. He had to stop being so self-pitying, stop thinking about what he needed, and do what was best for her.
He waited until the famous London landmarks were out of sight, and the children had gone back inside, then he walked to the other side of the deck.
He wanted to absorb every minute of their approach, to see the Cutty Sark’s elaborate masts appear, like a careful ink drawing reaching up into the sky, to watch the busy Thames foreshore come slowly into view, spread out like an open invitation. He wanted to feel the anticipation and the sadness, the fear of what he was about to do, the regret that was already leeching through him like a slow poison.
Mostly, though, he wanted to add this to his catalogue of memories: Greenwich in the sunshine, the place he had found Jess. Because he was fairly certain that this would be the last time he came.