CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE #2
‘You brought the podcaster,’ crowed Seb as he finally reached them, a bottle of vodka in his left paw.
‘Yes,’ Tom said, giving him a hard stare. ‘And her name is Raina.’
He felt Raina squeeze him, a subtle reminder that she knew what to expect from his friends and that she could take care of herself.
‘We’re turning around at Putney and heading east,’ Ottie warned them. ‘But the announcement will be before then. Make sure you post about it, Tom.’
Tom frowned. ‘Why’s that, Ottie?’
She threw him a look of disbelief. ‘That’s what a good friend would do. You have, like, ridiculous numbers of people following you.’
‘Yeah, for work.’
‘This is work,’ Ottie insisted. She pointed to Raina. ‘You’re with her. That’s work.’
Tom felt Raina bristle and his skin heated with anger. ‘It’s not, actually.’
Seb made a face of surprise, a slightly characterized performance. ‘You’re out on a date? The anti-social writer left his work cave for something other than a story?’
‘He took me to a nice seafood shack actually,’ Raina said jauntily, smiling up at Tom.
He smiled back. He loved looking at her. Loved having her pressed up next to him.
He wished they’d gone straight home.
Raina was so fun. She made him laugh, the same way that his family made him laugh.
She teased the serious side of him and forced him to drop his grown-up, London facade.
She had no interest in hearing about the fires of social media; she just wanted to laugh.
It was a contagious attitude that rubbed off on him and sandpapered away his daily grievances.
She was teaching him to acknowledge the dark without staring into it for hours on end.
Another boat was coming from the other side of the Thames, heading east. It was lit up like a Christmas tree and ABBA music was blasting, making it seem like a maritime jukebox.
‘Yes!’ Raina cheered, moving away from Tom and his friends to stand on the port side.
A group of women who were clearly having a fantastic night on the other boat spotted her and seemed to immediately recognize her as one of their own.
Tom watched in complete bemusement as the women belted ‘If It Wasn’t for the Nights’ at Raina, who belted it right back with matching choreography.
The boat seemed to pulse and vibrate as it passed them, and the women screamed in disappointment as it became clear that Raina was going in the opposite direction on the river.
‘How embarrassing. ABBA is so basic,’ Ottie said stonily.
‘Hm,’ Raina said, waving enthusiastically to her new friends as they faded into the London skyline. ‘I think it’s glorious.’
‘Ottie hates singing,’ Tom told Raina conspiratorially.
‘Well, you have a beautiful voice,’ Raina said to him. ‘I heard you singing in the shower. That one time I wasn’t in there with you.’
Ottie inhaled sharply but Tom threw his head back and laughed. ‘I’m a Celt. We’re made of music.’
Ottie rolled her eyes while Seb took a long drink. ‘Whatever,’ she sighed. ‘Tom? Eleven o’clock.’
She turned away, heading to the indoor area of the boat. Seb followed obediently.
Tom moved to stand behind Raina, sliding his arms around her body as she continued to look out over the river. He pressed his face into her neck and she sighed. The boat moved towards West London with steady ease.
‘I love this city from the river,’ Raina said, leaning back against Tom. ‘And from all the bridges.’
He pressed his lips to her throat. ‘The bridges?’
‘I love the bridges here. They’re stunning. You have to stand on one of the less touristy ones, for sure. But they’re the best.’
‘Which one’s your favourite?’
‘Probably the Hammersmith Bridge because it makes all the people in my neighbourhood so angry when it’s being worked on.’
‘It’s right by your place.’
‘Yes, and beautiful at night.’
Tom looked back at the bridges stitching the north and south side of the city together. The hilariously ugly London Bridge. The famous Tower Bridge, now far in the distance. Millennium. Blackfriars. Waterloo.
‘I’ve never thought about them before,’ he said.
‘No bridges back home? Where in Scotland are you from again?’
‘Dalkeith. It’s a town near the Esk.’
‘Is it nice?’
Tom thought of his hometown and tried to picture it through the eyes of a stranger. There was the posh side of town. His mother had often made his father drive by those houses.
‘That’s where we’ll be when you make your millions,’ she would say to Mirren and Tom, both sitting in the back of the old, beaten-up car. ‘I’ll have my sewing room, and your dad can have his garden and piano.’
When Tom had got his scholarship to Fettes, his parents sat him down to tell him that he needed to keep certain things about their family private.
They never said ‘secret’, always ‘private’.
Tom felt wretched now, wishing that they hadn’t worried about any of that.
Their council house was cleaner than some of the fancy six bedrooms his friends invited him over to.
But his parents had been proud. They’d feared for him.
Worried about barriers he was still too young to see.
‘It’s a pretty normal place,’ he finally said. ‘Church, shops, houses.’
‘Sounds like Woodstock.’
Tom smiled and nodded but he knew that wasn’t true.
Somehow, he knew her little side of Oxfordshire wasn’t like his slice of Scotland.
It probably had a few Tudor-style buildings, no brutalist architecture.
Tom felt itchy just talking about home. Wondering if other people on the boat could sense things about him.
Memories of paying for ibuprofen with pennies scraped from the bottom of a drawer.
The day his father won fifty pounds at the football, and his mother had cried.
The summer his father was made redundant but instead of telling the children, Tom and Mirren were sent to stay with their grandparents in Bathgate.
Tom didn’t feel shame about it. Instead, he felt a fearful protectiveness and an anxiety.
Stood with his Cambridge friends and their friends, he was aware that his past had become a closed vault inside of himself.
One that they never asked about. They’d made assumptions, and he’d let them.
When he’d once named his hometown, they’d asked if it was near Gleneagles or Balmoral and then nothing more.
They assumed things about Tom and Tom allowed it.
Like so many privileged people in England, they heard his crisp accent and strong vocabulary and assumed that he had to be rich, because they’d always been led to believe that only the Scots with money could truly master English as well as the Scots language.
‘It’s not the richest part of Scotland.’
But he didn’t want to hide from Raina. Not even a little.
She glanced around at him after he said the words. She took in the subtext but didn’t press him. Instead, she covered his hands with hers and they both looked back out at the water. The boat was nearly at Battersea and the city was brightly lit like a nocturnal feast.
‘London is so full of people who ran away to join the circus,’ Raina finally said, as they looked up at Battersea Power Station. ‘That’s what I like about it.’
‘Excuse me?’
Tom and Raina both turned to see a slightly drunk woman who’d broken away from her pack.
‘I jus’ wanted to say, you two are so fucking good together,’ she slurred, gesturing to the two of them. ‘Like, you look like a picture. I want what you’ve got.’
‘All right, Sharon,’ said a very sober redhead, tugging her tipsy friend back to the group. ‘Let’s get you something to eat.’
‘Drunk girls are the best,’ Raina told Tom, laughing as Sharon waved to them both from the bar. ‘The only thing I like about nightclubs is making friends in the toilets.’
‘Yeah, I’ve heard about this,’ Tom said. ‘What magic goes on in the women’s bathroom?’
‘I couldn’t even begin to explain it to you.’
Tom turned her around and pushed her long hair away from her face. He straightened the lapels of his jacket, which she was still wearing. ‘You look really beautiful tonight.’
Raina watched him and opened her mouth to respond but the soulless music that was playing suddenly cut out, and the sound of cutlery against glass could be heard on deck.
Seb was preparing to make a speech. Ottie was standing near him, quickly gesturing to people in her eyeline with slightly frenzied hand movements, mouthing ‘film this’.
‘She asked you to record it,’ Raina whispered gently to Tom.
He groaned but hauled out his smartphone.
‘As you know,’ Seb boomed, exchanging his usual Harrow drawl for a loud, resounding bark, ‘I have known this beautiful woman for almost ten years.’
‘Eleven years,’ Ottie chipped in, smiling a little awkwardly.
‘Oh, my God,’ Raina breathed, and Tom could hear wonder in her voice. ‘Is he about to . . .?’
‘Yes, I think so,’ Tom responded, grimacing. ‘Nice and public.’
‘Oh, it’s lovely,’ Raina reprimanded softly.
‘It makes the woman feel pressured to say yes.’
‘Not if they’ve discussed it beforehand. It’s okay if she knows it’s coming.’
‘You think she knew?’
‘She asked you to film it.’
Tom blinked and then cursed. He’d caught their entire conversation on camera. He stopped and restarted his filming, capturing Seb as he continued with his speech.
It was, as Raina was hoping, a proposal. Seb didn’t get on bended knee until there was an uncomfortable silence after the ‘will you marry me’. Then he, somewhat unwillingly, got down onto the deck.
Everyone applauded, including Raina as she watched Ottie give a demure ‘yes’.
‘So nice,’ Raina said, clapping loudly.
Tom made sure to end his recording before speaking this time. He stuffed his phone in his pocket before saying, ‘Yes, it’s darling.’
‘Oh, stop it,’ Raina scolded warmly. ‘They’re not exactly my kind of people, but they certainly seem well suited to each other.’
‘Oh, they’re two peas in a pod. I don’t know . . . I just don’t like seeing this kind of thing paraded around as if it’s love.’
He felt Raina freeze. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means . . .’ Tom scrambled for the right words, surprised that he was even voicing this.
‘Seb and Ottie are definitely well suited. They can be narcissistic, they’re shallow and they crave status.
So . . . it makes sense for them to get married.
It’s just creepy to see people clapping and cooing as if it’s romantic.
It’s not love. It’s not like how I feel for—’
He cut himself off, clearing his throat and glancing back towards his celebrating friends.
‘It’s a business deal more than anything,’ he concluded.
Raina was so still beside him and her voice was cold when she finally spoke.
‘I think that’s an awful thing to say.’