Chapter 42
Adam
We trudge along the pavement as the sun lowers further in the sky. Eve strides a few paces ahead, her phone held out in front of her, and I walk behind, Old Sausage’s crate banging against my shin with every step.
‘Left here,’ she announces, following the blue line on her screen. ‘And then... first right, I think.’
‘Can you slow down?’ I ask, as the crate makes particularly painful impact with my knee.
She apologises, and hangs back a bit until we’re walking next to each other. The sudden proximity of her makes my heart jump, and I clutch the crate tightly. Whenever I’m around her, my head feels muddled. There’s a reservedness about her that intrigues me, like she’s a puzzle that needs untangling, but every time I feel like I’m cracking the surface, that fierceness returns to her eyes and knocks me sideways.
‘Can we speed up just a tiny bit?’ she asks. ‘I’m conscious of the time...’
‘How far off are we?’
She glances at her phone. ‘Thirteen minutes.’
I check my watch. It’s now nine o’clock. We’ve been walking for more than half an hour.
‘I’m not flaunting my maths genius here or anything,’ I comment, ‘but the timings don’t really add up, do they?’
She frowns. ‘I thought we’d be able to get a taxi...’
When we got to the station, there were no black cabs, and the nearest Uber was ten minutes away. I wish we’d waited for it now.
‘We can’t turn around now,’ she says decisively. ‘We’ll get a taxi back when we’re done.’
We keep walking, only stopping once to check on Old Sausage, who had some water and tuna when we got off the train. He sleeps throughout the journey. I try not to think about what happens when we get to the house; do we just hand him over? The thought of it upsets me, like I’m drawing a line under something I’m not ready to wrap up just yet.
The more we walk, the clumsier I get, the weight of the crate knocking my balance. At one point, my hand brushes hers, and I hear her breathe in sharply.
‘Sorry, you made me jump.’ A flush is creeping up her cheeks. I haven’t seen her flustered before.
My heart pounds. What is it about her? It feels like I know everything about her, but absolutely nothing at the same time. I simultaneously want to walk in silence with her for hours and sit her down to ask her a million questions all at once.
I can feel her mind whirring beside me, like I could on the train. It feels somehow like she always knows something, has always figured something out before I’ve even left the starting blocks.
‘Here,’ she announces, and suddenly, we are standing in front of a house. There’s nothing special about it; it’s just another 1960s semi on another nondescript close. We could be anywhere in the country. The only thing making it stand out from the houses around it is its disrepair: weeds have overtaken the front garden, where there’s an abandoned shopping trolley, and the paint on the front door is peeling. It also doesn’t seem like anybody’s home.
‘All the lights are off,’ I state.
‘Yeah.’
‘Should we maybe have called before we came?’ I don’t know why this is only occurring to me now.
‘I did that,’ she says. Of course she did. ‘Nobody answered.’
We stand, staring at the house, for a minute or two. ‘So, what should we—’ I start, but she’s taken off and is striding up the path to the house next door. I chase after her.
She raps loudly, and an older woman answers the door.
‘Hi, I’m so sorry to bother you at this time of the evening,’ Eve says smoothly, her face warm and open. What did she say she did for a living? Marketing? She’s perfect. ‘My friend and I are trying to return a cat to its owner, and we believe it’s from the house next door. Do you know when they might be home?’
The lady looks startled and shakes her head. ‘I’m sorry, love. Mr Barnes died about six months ago.’
‘Oh.’ Eve looks lost for a second, her face dropping, but she recovers quickly and straightens up. ‘Right. Did he have a cat, do you know?’
‘Oh, yes. Tabitha. Went missing just before he passed, I believe.’ She nods towards a lamppost, where a water-damaged laminate is drooping sadly. I walk over. There’s a picture of Old Sausage, looking decisively less weather-beaten, underneath the word MISSING.
‘Well, thank you so much for your time.’ Eve smiles, and the lady closes the door.
She turns to face me. ‘Well, shit.’
‘Shit indeed.’
She comes to join me on the pavement, the closest she’s been to me yet, and we stare at the poster. ‘That’s really her, isn’t it?’
‘Turns out she was a girl after all,’ I say, nudging her. I can smell her perfume, feel the warmth of her next to me.
‘I know — I asked the vet. I was saving it to hold against you.’ She grins at me.
‘Oh, very mature.’ I laugh. ‘We should’ve bet on it.’
‘That wouldn’t have been very fun.’ She turns to face me now, and in the dimming light her eyes gleam. ‘I knew I was right.’
We stand, looking at each other, and the air feels charged. For a second, neither of us speaks, and I take her in: her small nose and mouth, the big, green eyes.
‘Right.’ She turns away from me, and the moment’s gone. ‘Let’s try and get a taxi. We’ve got twenty minutes.’
Eve checks Uber, but it’s still a ten-minute wait. We’d never make it. I put the crate down and pull out my phone, Googling Windermere taxi companies and calling the first three on the list. None can get to us in time.
‘Shit, shit, shit.’ Eve paces up and down the pavement, the phone pressed to her ear. ‘I know it’s Friday, but come on. It’s hardly the party capital.’
I avoid pointing out that that’s probably the exact reason we’re struggling to get a taxi, and instead go onto the Trainline to double-check the train times. ‘There’s one at ten to eleven!’ I cheer.
She turns to face me, cupping her hand over the receiver to block her voice. ‘Isn’t that the one with a four-hour changeover in Preston?’
I look again. Total journey time: five hours and fifty-eight minutes. ‘Always one step ahead, aren’t you?’
Time ticks on, and the numbers to call dwindle. It becomes clear that no taxi will get us to the station in time for the last train.
‘Can you give me a quote for two people, going to Manchester?’ Eve is saying down the phone now. ‘Piccadilly.’
I grimace. There’s no way.
‘OK, yep, great, we’ll think about it and call you back.’ Eve puts the phone down and turns to me. ‘Two hundred quid.’
‘Shut up.’
She throws her head back and laughs loudly. ‘Oh my god. What the fuck are we going to do?’
‘We could go for a drink and then kip in the station?’ I ask tentatively. ‘Wait until the first train home?’
She shakes her head. ‘Have you ever seen a cat at the pub?’
We look at each other, and there’s a moment — one of those clear ones, the kind you stop having in your early twenties; the kind that people try to replicate by cliff diving and drinking too much and getting high — where everything feels so illicit in the best kind of way. We’re trapped, and it’s wrong, this frisson between us — but why?
Under the glow of the streetlamp, Eve’s face is electric. ‘Christ,’ she says, pressing her lips together. ‘I’ve never been so disorganised in my life.’
A rush of laughter erupts from me. I’m giddy, ridiculously so, because what are we doing here? How am I standing here, on this street, in this town, with this mystifying, incredible woman, with no way to get home?
Eve watches me, and then grins. ‘Stop it.’ She starts laughing too, her eyes crinkled and her mouth wide. ‘No, stop it.’
‘You’re amazing,’ I say, because although this is the least romantic place I’ve ever been, it’s true.
She carries on laughing, but her eyes drift away from mine, and then the moment fades, like taking a filter from a photo. ‘Let’s go to the lake,’ she says.
We walk, chuckling again every so often, sober now, until we arrive back at the cluster of buildings dotted along the edge of Lake Windermere. People weave in and out of pubs, shouting and laughing, and hotels rise proudly, overlooking the invisible blackness of the water beyond.
We stop at a bench and sit down. I turn to her, and it hits me again, that feeling I can’t quite describe. ‘I think we’re going to have to stay over, aren’t we?’