Siobhan
NOW
Owen is quieter than usual. He greets her with a hug, but he won’t quite meet her eye as they take their seats and order a bottle of wine.
It’s a novel feeling, not entirely unpleasant, to know that he’s annoyed with her.
Maybe he’s an entirely different person than what she thought.
Maybe she should have more respect for him; maybe she should put more effort into resisting the temptation to test him, to punish him.
“You seem tired,” she says, once they’ve ordered their food.
Owen’s face is half-hidden by his glass of wine. Their waiter merrily fills up their water, oblivious to the tension. “I was out at Melody Blossom last night,” he says. “For no particular reason.”
“How’s Sylvie?”
Owen maintains eye contact, then places his glass down.
This is a new side to him. Spiky. It makes his movements quicker and voice lower.
Siobhan hadn’t thought he had it in him.
“Siobhan,” he says, and it sounds like a warning.
Her belly feels warm and empty. “You need to tell me what’s going on, what this obsession with Sylvie is all about.
You’re putting me in some pretty uncomfortable positions, and I know you know that. You could get me in serious trouble.”
“I told you to say hello,” Siobhan says. “Nothing nefarious.”
“You know what you’re doing. I just don’t understand why.”
“Don’t you like Sylvie? There’s nothing not to like.”
“Of course I like her,” Owen snaps back, a little too loudly. Siobhan becomes aware of eyes turning their way. “But why do you care?”
“I’m in control,” Siobhan says, and something in her voice makes him pause, look away. He casts a wary eye around the restaurant, as if concerned that they’re being watched, that a hidden cameraman is going to jump out at any second and reveal the stitch-up.
“I like you, Siobhan,” he says. “But you need to stop this now.”
She finishes the dregs of wine in her glass and fills it up. His is empty, too, but she leaves it that way. “Fine. I’ll stop.”
There’s a prickling silence in which Owen looks in every direction but Siobhan’s. It lasts until the starters arrive, and they stare down into bowls of Cullen skink rather than at each other.
“Why is it called Cullen skink?” Siobhan says. “It’s just soup.”
“It’s named after where it’s from,” Owen says, then seems to run out of steam. “Never mind.”
Before the mains arrive, Owen excuses himself to go to the toilet.
He leaves his phone unlocked on the table and while he’s away, it flashes with the arrival of a new message.
Watching the closed door to the toilets, Siobhan edges it towards her so she can read the name of the sender.
When she sees ‘Sylvie’, an electrical current floods her veins.
She opens their message history. Sylvie’s latest message comes as response to one he sent last night, at thirty minutes past midnight.
Hope this isn’t weird, Owen had written, but it was really great to run into you tonight.
Lovely to see you let your hair down. Get home safe!
Here’s a link to my company. As I said, it’s just something to consider.
I definitely wouldn’t mind having you on board.
Maybe we could go for another drink to talk about it?
A ten-minute pause between messages, and then he’d sent, You looked really beautiful tonight, too. Hope you don’t mind me saying.
Siobhan wants to jump up from her chair and smash the phone into tiny pieces.
She wants to pour the wine all over herself and lick it from her skin.
She wants to grab both sides of Owen’s face and bring it close to hers and kiss him or spit at him.
I knew it, she wants to scream, I always knew what you were.
She scrolls down to read Sylvie’s reply.
Hey! No worries. Thanks for the drink, and the link. Would love to meet up and talk about the job opportunity. So excited that you’d consider me. When works for you? Appreciate the compliment, too. Winky face. Kiss.
Siobhan marks the message as unread and replaces the phone just in time for Owen to come back to the table.
She watches him as he picks up the phone and reads the message, studying the blankness of his face, the way it gives absolutely nothing away.
He puts the phone back down and their mains arrive.
He spears his steak with a knife and Siobhan watches the juices ooze.
All she can think is, Yes. I know exactly who you are now.
* * *
The next day, Siobhan arrives at the Showroom at 5 p.m. Sylvie is already sitting at the box office, inspecting one of her manicured nails.
They’ll work together for a couple of hours to cover the busy Saturday night shift – some new blockbuster has been released, something about the end of the world and a president held hostage – and then Siobhan will do the close.
“Hey, Sylvie,” Siobhan says, taking her seat at the kiosk.
Sylvie gives her a polite nod. She’s wearing dangling earrings and a long necklace, a beaded evil eye swinging from a fine gold chain. The blockbuster is halfway through in screen one and the explosions are so loud that they rumble under their feet.
“Good week?” she asks, and Sylvie looks up at her, frowning. Their brusque snippets of exchanged speech rarely extend to a full conversation.
“It was fine.” She doesn’t return the question.
“You know,” Siobhan begins, not quite knowing where she’s going with the words until they’re out of her mouth, “I ran into Owen Jameson the other day.”
Sylvie looks up. “Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah. We just caught up a little bit, you know. He said you were doing brilliantly. That you’re one of his brightest students. He couldn’t say enough good things about you. Just thought I’d let you know.”
If Sylvie is trying to disguise her wide smile, the hint of colour creeping into her cheeks, she’s failing. “That’s very flattering,” she says. Her soft French accent adorns every word, making it faintly musical.
“I remember you saying he seemed like a bit of a creep, but he seemed fine to me.”
Sylvie nods. “Yeah. I had a tutorial with him the other day and he was so generous. He really knows his stuff. I think maybe I got him wrong.”
“Maybe you did.”
“You know, he even offered me a job. I could be out of here before long.”
Siobhan keeps her face straight, implacable. “You don’t say.”
At that moment, a cluster of customers arrive through the main doors, and there’s a steady stream of them until the end of Sylvie’s shift.
Siobhan watches her as she leaves, wondering where she’s going.
She wonders if Sylvie ever sits alone in her flat and drinks until her senses burn.
In the quiet after closing time, Siobhan cashes up the till and powers down the two computers at the box office.
Keith appears, looking harried, though there’s not much left to do.
“Can you clean the popcorn machine once you’ve finished that, Siobhan?”
“Sure.”
“Don’t forget the grease tray.”
Siobhan’s mind begins to wander as she scrubs, inhaling the scent of burnt butter and salty corn.
She thinks about clawed feet and outstretched wings.
She thinks that some people are able to take and take without ever stopping to think about what they’re taking.
She thinks about the kind of hunger that never goes away.
* * *
Edinburgh Waverley is busy and freezing when she arrives the next morning to catch a train to Glasgow. She sends Theo a message. I’m on my way. He doesn’t reply.
On the train she sits at a table, hemmed in on all sides by three young boys.
Two are playing music loudly from their phones, chatting and chewing Starburst, while the other is reading The Catcher in the Rye.
Every few minutes, the talkers throw a sweet wrapper at the reader.
Half of the colourful little balls land in Siobhan’s lap.
The boys don’t seem to realise she’s even there.
The train arrives at Queen Street and the passengers all filter out of the barriers and into the city, into their separate lives.
The last time Siobhan was in Glasgow was when she had tried to see Theo, only to be turned away and driven back to the station by his flatmate.
The fact that she’ll see him this time, and more than that, that he’s asked to see her, makes her feel buoyant as she heads down St Vincent Street.
He was working from home today, he’d said, but was pretty back-to-back with meetings.
It would be easier just to come to his flat, rather than go out for coffee.
Siobhan had been secretly glad – she’s keen to soak up the details of his new life.
She wants to know the kind of teabags he keeps in the cupboard, the brand of deodorant he buys, all the idiosyncrasies that might help her to know him again.
There’s a long wait after Siobhan rings the buzzer. It’s so long that Siobhan thinks he’s changed his mind and isn’t going to let her in at all, but finally, he lets her inside.
He’s wearing headphones and talking rapidly about subscriber numbers and follower counts when he opens the door. I’m on a call, he mouths. Five minutes.
She follows him into the flat. Theo sits down in front of his laptop at a table also covered by empty mugs and an open diary.
He says something like, Sorry, sorry, where was I, and Siobhan feels like life has skipped forward too fast, that one moment Theo was the scrawny teenager who collected comic books and was too shy to speak to strangers, and now he’s this capable, working man, someone who attends conference calls in his living room.
He is an adult now, she thinks, he is a real adult, while I am an overgrown child who can’t seem to find a way to exist in the world.