Chapter Six London Thursday 20 August 1998
Chapter Six
London
‘Excuse me, my ticket’s not working.’
Olivia Sackville, nineteen years old and fresh from a summer’s day temping at possibly the most boring media agency in London, was standing at the barrier inside South Kensington Tube station, trying to get out.
She’d tried four times but her ticket wouldn’t let her through, and she had been asked to Seek Assistance.
‘Mine’s not, either,’ piped up a male voice beside her. She glanced up at him. He was about her age: twice-unbuttoned denim shirt, brown wavy hair. She held out her ticket and the London Underground staff member gave it a cursory glance.
‘Over here, please,’ he grunted, and she and the man in the denim shirt followed him over to the right, to the wide barrier at the end of the row. ‘Come on through, then, the pair of you,’ he said after wearily tapping at something with a key fob.
‘Oh, no!’ Olivia laughed, hitching the straps of her tiny black backpack further up her shoulders. The guard’s tired smile didn’t quite reach his eyes as she busied through the barrier. ‘We’re not a pair.’
‘Why not? What’s wrong with me?’
She flicked her head around to the young man in the shirt moving through after her. He had unhurried hazel eyes, a slow but arresting smile. Posh voice.
She frowned at him. Her eyes told him, Everything.
‘Have a good evening,’ said the guard dryly.
Olivia stepped away into the crowd. ‘You, too,’ she batted back over her shoulder, ever polite.
‘Yes, have a good evening.’
With one last repelling glance at him, the cocky voice of Denim Shirt Man was swallowed, too, into the rush of commuters, and Olivia rolled her eyes before heading as planned to The Cheshire Arms on Thurloe Place, where she was meeting her friend, David – ‘Fellow Working-Class Stowaway’, as he’d referred to himself at Canterbury University – for a Writer’s Tipple Cocktail Night, inspired by the favourite alcoholic drinks of ten legendary writers.
‘Margarita – Jack Kerouac. Mojito – Ernest Hemingway . . .’ David was reading off one of the special menus littering the bar, while Olivia quickly defluffed his jacket with a mini lint roller from her backpack.
Ever-equipped – that was how her friends described her.
‘. . . Ramos Fizz – Tennessee Williams. Gin Rickey – F Scott Fitzgerald. Mint Julep – William Faulkner. Martini – Dorothy Parker. Boilermaker – Charles Bukowski. I reckon we’re in for a great night!
’ He checked out the lapel of his jacket. ‘Thanks, Livs!’
‘What’s a boilermaker?’ Olivia put the roller back in her pack, inside a sandwich bag, and peered at the menu. ‘Oh, right. It’s whiskey and beer mixed together, which sounds absolutely revolting. I’ll have a mojito, please.’
‘I’m going to have a martini,’ said David, flicking his Jarvis Cocker fringe out of his eyes and exaggerating the flat tones of his Sheffield accent. ‘I’m ripe for channelling my inner Dorothy Parker.’
‘Oh no, you’re way too nice.’
‘I’m pithy, though?’
‘Always pithy.’
David was dry, funny, always up for a night out and the only other person who was still in London for the summer.
Olivia’s uni friends, Stella and Annabel, were on a kibbutz in Israel and everyone else who’d just completed their second year at Canterbury seemed to be living it up in Greece or Italy or Spain.
Not Olivia, who just before the start of the holidays had been offered a summer job working at Harrington Blunt, the media company, for six weeks and, needing the money as well as some media experience, she’d taken it, but she had regrets.
The job was incredibly dull. It involved photocopying things and drinking weak hot chocolate at a desk empty except for an empty in-tray and an empty out-tray, trying to look efficient, and sighing a lot more than she wanted to.
David turned to the bar to order, whispering to her that the barman was ‘hot’.
‘Go for it!’ she whispered back to him. ‘He looks lovely.’
‘Do you think he’ll appreciate my down-to-earth northern charm and proletariat allegiances?’
‘Certain to.’
David leaned forward over the bar, giving his fringe another flick, and Olivia started investigating the ingredients in the Ramos Fizz.
‘I hope you’re not following me.’
Olivia looked up. Cocky Denim Shirt Man from the Tube was standing in front of her, holding a mojito.
‘I hope you’re not following me,’ she said, surprised.
‘Well, I kinda did.’ Denim Shirt Man shrugged theatrically. Slid his mouth into a hammy half-smile.
‘You did? Should I be worried?’
‘Yeah. No.’ He attempted to look sheepish. She took in his hazel eyes, his mouth. He was very handsome, she supposed. ‘We went the same way. I just happened to see you come in here. The girl who didn’t want to be in a “pair” with me. I was curious. Who are you here with?’
‘My friend.’ She gestured to David, who was flirting intensely with the barman, not a drop of cocktail having been poured.
‘Not a date?’
‘No.’
‘Are you looking for one?’
‘No. But you clearly are. You followed a complete stranger to a pub. Are you a stalker?’
He laughed, and it was such a warm and disarming laugh. She noticed his eyes had several different shades radiating from the pupils. That his mouth relaxed into a smile so easily.
‘Not at all,’ he said. ‘I promise. I was supposed to meet a mate tonight but he cried off. And I thought you looked nice, despite the faces you were pulling at me in the Tube. I’m Leo.’
She stared at him. He had long eyelashes. Velvety tanned skin between the unbuttoned ‘v’ of his shirt. ‘I’m Olivia,’ she said reluctantly, and then she thought, Why not? She could chat to this handsome, non-stalker bloke for a couple of minutes, seeing as David was otherwise engaged.
‘I like your shirt.’
She looked down. ‘It’s a work blouse.’ It had tiny figures on it – ironic tiny office workers sitting at tiny desks.
It was kitschy. No one at Harrington Blunt had noticed her enough to notice it.
Maybe they thought she was just a silly temp, with her neat blonde bob and her hot chocolate and her set of matching pens she lined up in front of her empty in-tray.
‘I got it from a shop on the King’s Road. ’
‘Where do you work?’
‘Old Street. For a media company, summer job. How about you?’ She glanced over to David and the cocktails; none were forthcoming.
‘Mirror Group. Permanent job, my first after university. I work on reception.’
‘Right.’ She tried to take him in, all of him, without giving away that she was doing so.
She decided he looked like the kind of boy who might pose with one leg on a fallen tree trunk in a catalogue photoshoot, in a nice jumper, then get off with the photographer’s assistant later at a rave.
‘So, you’re a year older than me,’ she observed.
‘And you’ve just finished the second year? How old are you, twenty?’
‘No, nineteen. I’m a late August baby. How about you?’
‘Twenty-one. And I’m a lovely April fool.’
‘Sounds about right,’ she said, and he grinned. ‘May I have some of that?’ Olivia had been eyeing Leo’s cocktail glass. She took it from him and slugged a big gulp. ‘Sorry. I’m quite thirsty.’
‘Can I get you one of those?’ He looked highly entertained, and she liked that.
‘No, I’ll keep yours,’ she said brightly. ‘You can have mine’ – she glanced over at the bar again. David’s barman was finally performing with a stainless-steel cocktail shaker – ‘when it comes. Shouldn’t be too long.’
‘Cheeky.’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I like cheeky.’
His smile felt just for her; like it had only ever been just for her. Now, she felt shy. She wanted to lower her eyes to the floor and look up at him through her eyelashes.
‘Which university did you go to?’ she asked. ‘I’m at Canterbury Christ Church. Media studies.’
‘Southampton,’ Leo replied. ‘Film and history. So, you’re in London for the summer. Where are you from?’
‘London,’ she replied.
‘Ah. Thought I could detect the accent.’ She was disappointed. ‘Your parents live here, then?’
‘My dad does,’ she said. ‘Pimlico.’ The thing about Pimlico was that it covered all bases. From the working man in the ex-council flat, to the toff in the ginormous house. Perhaps he would think the latter. People at Canterbury sometimes did, and she could pretend to be like everyone else.
‘What about your mum?’
‘No.’
‘Divorced?’
‘Dead.’
‘Oh, I’m so sorry,’ said Leo, and for the first time she saw something different in his face. Empathy. A kind of kindness.
‘Thank you,’ she replied, and she meant it. ‘It was a long time ago. I was three.’ The moment hung in the air, like mist on an autumn morning.
‘I’m sorry,’ Leo said again, like he really meant it. ‘I live in London, too,’ he added. ‘I live with Royal Ben.’ He said it like he said it a lot and he enjoyed saying it. The mist cleared, and she was glad of that.
‘Royal Ben?’
‘My mate, Ben, from Southampton. Well, he thinks he should be royal, and sometimes he pretends he’s a member of the extended Lesotho royal family, to get lucky. It seems to work. Let’s just say there’s a lot of handsome boys traipsing through our flat in the mornings.’
‘He sounds like fun.’
‘He is. He wants to be a literary agent. He reads everything. He’s an intern at Penguin – tea boy, really – but I know he’s going to go far.’
‘Good for Royal Ben,’ she said. ‘And what do you want to do when you grow up?’
He pulled a face like he was embarrassed. ‘I want to be a writer. A bestselling novelist, preferably, one day. A journalist, first. To get some experience, and to be realistic. I can’t just become a novelist, can I?’
‘Maybe you could,’ she suggested. ‘And then Ben can represent you.’
‘Maybe.’ They smiled at each other. There was a nice attraction here, Olivia thought. It was bubbling up like champagne poured into a glass.
‘You won’t believe this, but I want to be a novelist, too,’ she said. ‘I have done since I was a kid.’