The woman at the next table
‘I was surprised,’ he says. ‘When you texted.’
His date is defensive. ‘Why were you surprised?’
‘I thought I’d been too forward,’ he says, eventually. ‘I assumed you’d throw my number away.’
‘I admire your humility.’ His date takes a sip of her gin and tonic. ‘It’s refreshing, in an actor.’
‘I shouldn’t have told you I’m an actor.’
‘You shouldn’t have,’ she says. ‘It might have put me off.’ She observes him for a moment. ‘You don’t exactly seem the type.’
The young man considers this. ‘Why?’
Why? A one-word question which lingers in the thick air of the busy pub on Kingsland Road.
On the other side of the stained glass, proto-hipsters light cigarettes pulled from behind their ears.
In here, the dark wood interior is a welcome relief from an evening which is still stiflingly hot.
The girl had arrived like a thundercloud of anxiety, denim shorts over black tights scribbled with ladders, bleached hair swishing this way and that as she glanced around at each unfamiliar face in turn.
When she’d selected a table, she’d slid a sketchbook from her bag and begun to draw the people at the bar, one by one.
A hobby or a nervous tic? She’d hidden the sketchbook away when her date had arrived, had assembled an aura of calm and composure.
The boy is tall and tanned, curly black hair over eyes like olive pits.
He’s wearing a shirt, and he looks uncomfortable in it.
The sleeves are rolled up over tattooed forearms, a thick tangle of chest hair emerging from the open collar.
He isn’t a boy at all. Young man. Young woman. First date.
‘Seb,’ the young woman had called.
‘Clara,’ the young man had said in response, suppressing a smile.
Now they’re talking over first drinks, his stance guarded, eyes straying every so often to her restive hands and the distance between them and his own.
They’ve already talked about his dog, about how he’s left the dog with his flatmate, about how she’s disappointed because it was the dog she’d really wanted to see. Now they talk about acting.
‘You don’t have the…’
‘Charisma?’
‘Arrogance,’ Clara says, with a smile. ‘I can’t imagine you wanting the attention.’
‘I usually do modelling.’ Seb winces. ‘I definitely shouldn’t have told you that.’
‘You definitely shouldn’t,’ Clara says. ‘And you definitely don’t seem the type.’
‘I don’t look the type?’
She grins. ‘I didn’t say that.’
‘I fell into it,’ he says. ‘Not that I don’t like it. It’s more fun than sitting at a desk.’
They don’t seem like an obvious match, these two.
Seb seems the type to hold back, Clara more inclined to put everything on the table.
If she’s a barrage of waves, he’s a cliff face.
A rock. What does he see in her? Her eyes are the blue of the Arctic Ocean, and they haven’t once left him.
The woman next to them heads to the bar for another drink.
When she returns to her table, Seb has changed the subject.
‘What about you?’ he says.
‘I sit at a desk,’ Clara says. ‘Adverts. Production. It’s not what I want to do.’ She waves a dismissive hand. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she says. ‘I’m kind of in between jobs, anyway.’
‘And you draw strangers,’ Seb says. ‘In public.’
Clara seems aware that she’s being teased. ‘You make me sound like a pervert.’
Seb leans back, more relaxed now he isn’t under the microscope. ‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I thought you might ask me to life model next.’
The joke hangs in the air for a little too long.
Seb looks down, then up again, as if worried he’s overstepped the mark.
The woman at the next table looks away. She’s older than the two of them.
She remembers what it was like to flirt without shame.
Her date will not go like this. Her date may not happen at all.
When she glances back, Clara is trying to hide her expression by finishing her drink.
She places the glass down carefully, licks her lips.
‘Did you just lick your lips?’
‘No!’ Clara says. ‘No.’ She screws up her face. ‘My lips were dry,’ she says. ‘So I licked them.’
‘Sure,’ Seb says. ‘Sure.’
‘Can we stop talking about my lips?’
Seb laughs self-consciously. Then he goes to fetch another round of drinks from the bar. In his absence, Clara catches the eye of the woman at the next table. They share a short, polite smile. But Seb is already back, and this time, he’s talking first.
‘What do you want to do?’
Clara looks a little surprised. ‘Tonight?’
‘You said you’re not doing what you want to do.’ He takes a sip of his Guinness, foam gathering on his top lip. ‘What do you want to do?’
Clara looks even more surprised, as if no one has ever asked her. ‘Funnily enough,’ she says. ‘I want to make films.’
And suddenly, it’s like he’s wound her up and let her go, like she couldn’t stop talking even if she wanted to.
She talks about the kinds of film she loves, the kinds of film she wants to emulate, the worlds she’s one day going to create.
Not an if, but a when. Her voice is not exactly low, but pleasantly throaty, like she spends her nights shouting from rooftops, like she’s paying the price of every conversation featuring a barrage like this.
She’s talking, now, about the next short film she wants to make, and Seb is listening intently, his dark eyes betraying nothing.
He doesn’t interrupt her. Clara closes her own eyes, peels them open to look at him.
It’s like she’s worried she’ll have put him off.
‘You don’t think it’s self-indulgent?’ she says, when it’s clear that she hasn’t.
‘The greatest films of all time are black and white,’ Seb replies.
‘Because they had to be,’ she says. ‘Then they invented colour.’
‘Colour isn’t just colour, though, is it?’ he says, with the confidence of a second pint. ‘You put the colour into it. Whether it’s black and white or not.’
When Seb speaks, his voice is deep and coarse, with an actor’s resonance. And though what he’s said doesn’t strictly make sense, Clara doesn’t seem to mind. It’s clear that he’s not what she’d expected. That she hadn’t expected to feel like this.
‘You could be in it,’ she says, quickly, into her drink. She looks up just as quickly, tries to read his expression.
Seb thinks about this. ‘You deserve better,’ he says. ‘I should have been born in the silent era. I’m best when I’m not talking.’
‘You don’t want to be in it?’
‘I’d be honoured, if you’d have me,’ he says. ‘If not, I’ll just be happy to watch.’
‘You’ll never be famous with that attitude.’
‘That suits me just fine.’ He studies her. ‘You want to be famous?
‘I want to make people happy,’ she says. ‘Or sad. Angry. Elated. The emotion doesn’t matter, really. If you make people anything, you’ve made something that matters.’ A pause. ‘Isn’t that what it’s all about?’ she says. ‘Making something great?’
Seb considers this carefully. ‘I think life is about more than making great things.’
He sits back in his chair, one arm outstretched, his fingers drumming lightly on the table. Clara looks at his hand, at the divide between them.
‘I can’t wait to see what you make,’ Seb says.
He offers to buy another round, but Clara rejects his suggestion in the name of equality.
While she’s gone, Seb clasps his hands together on the tabletop.
Behind him, Clara stands at the bar, staring back in his direction.
The woman at the next table casts her eye over the constellation of stick-and-poke tattoos on his forearms. Then she heads for the toilet, balances her bag on her lap in the stall.
She checks her Plenty of Fish page. She checks that the date they’d decided is, indeed, today.
She considers messaging. She doesn’t message.
Instead, she rakes her hands quickly through her hair, staring at her reflection in the speckled mirror above the sink. She returns to her table.
‘I can’t place your accent,’ Clara is saying.
‘Leicester,’ Seb replies, through his first sip. ‘The Midlands.’
‘I know where Leicester is,’ she says. ‘I mean, I couldn’t point to it on a map.’
‘Of course you couldn’t,’ he replies, smirking into his pint glass. ‘You’re from London.’
‘I’m not from London.’
‘It’s all London.’ A pause. ‘How long have you been here?’
‘A while,’ she says. ‘Uni. Two unis, actually.’ Something flickers over her face, but she banishes it quickly. ‘So I can tell you all the places that are far too tragic to go to for a night out.’
As the night rolls on, as a third round turns into a fourth, their conversation takes on a different timbre.
Disbelief, as if the pair of them can’t believe how easy it is to talk and keep talking.
That they’ve never met before, and that they’re lucky enough to have met now.
The sun is setting outside, and a karaoke host has started setting up in the corner.
A drunken businessman takes the first song and the woman at the next table is grateful for something to watch, something to make her seem like she’s here for a reason.
It’s begun to dawn on her that her date isn’t coming after all, but she won’t bear the indignity of leaving, so she will stay and she will drink and she will close her eyes and she will listen.
Next to her, Clara is becoming even more animated, talking loudly, gesticulating so wildly with her ring-strewn fingers that it’s a wonder she doesn’t knock over their drinks.
And while ‘animated’ is not a word you’d use to describe Seb, a transformation has taken place in him, too: a shift in his posture, an unknotting of those broad shoulders.
Clara talks and talks, saying she quite likes being tragic, actually.
That she chose this pub because she loves the old places in this city.
That she’s prone to wandering around like a tourist, neck craning to peer at every blue plaque, sketchbook filled with the most obvious, everyday things.
Big Ben as seen from the river. Carnaby Street when the Christmas lights are up.
Trafalgar Square on an unbroken blue day.
She talks about the concept of cringe, says if it’s cringe to find awe in the obvious things, then one should wear their cringe like a badge of pride.
That she knows she’s a hypocrite for saying that, when she cares far too much what people think.
She talks about how she probably talks too much.
The woman at the next table is lost in her words, barely aware that she’s nodding along. Seb is, too. He hasn’t taken his eyes off her.
‘Can I tell you something?’ he says.
Clara looks suspicious. ‘You can.’
‘You know those open-top bus tours?’ he says. ‘The ones that take you around to see all the sights?’
‘I do.’
‘Every time I see one, I want to hop on and do it,’ Seb says. ‘On my own.’
A beat. Then Clara starts laughing. Seb grimaces, but only for show. He’s happy to have amused her. He holds up his broad hands, makes a face of surrender.
‘Why on your own?’ she says.
‘Fewer distractions,’ Seb says. ‘Less chitter-chatter.’
‘Did you just say chitter-chatter?’
‘I did.’
She’s shuddering with laughter now, struggling to breathe.
‘What?’ he says. ‘I’m serious.’
She manages to collect herself, then snorts into her drink. She struggles to find the straw with her tongue, affects a comically low voice. ‘You’re very serious.’
He chews his lip. ‘Well, you’re very…’ He looks around the table, as if he might find the right word floating in the foamy residue of a half-empty pint. ‘Silly.’
She shakes her head. ‘Is that the best you can do?’
‘I was struggling to think of the opposite of serious.’
It continues like this. They’re giggling, because they’re young, and the way that they giggle makes them seem even younger than they are.
They look like they’re desperate to touch each other, as if they’re holding back for fear of static shock.
Arms graze arms, fingers brush and pull back.
Legs meet under the table, linger a while.
Clara points to the karaoke singers. She speaks in a conspiratorial voice, her face close to his.
‘You wouldn’t do that,’ she says.
‘You think you know me, don’t you?’
‘I think I’ve got you sussed out.’
It’s an unspoken dare, then, or just the kind of silly thing one does when one is young and giddy and wants an excuse to be close to someone else, to make bad decisions with them.
While Seb returns to the bar for yet more drinks, Clara slips off for a word with the karaoke host. By the time he’s returned, she’s back at the table.
A moment of sobriety. She might have lost her nerve.
‘Look, I should say—’ she begins, stopping suddenly. ‘I have a—’ she says. ‘I had a—’ She can’t find the words. ‘I’m kind of between—’
The woman can sense that she isn’t going to say ‘jobs’, but she seems to be struggling to find the right word for what she does want to say. Instead, she lets the sentence fizzle out, stares hopelessly across at him.
‘Don’t worry,’ Seb says.
His simplicity seems to confound her.
‘Don’t worry?’ Clara repeats.
Seb shrugs. ‘Don’t worry.’
She covers the smile that rises to her mouth. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘Don’t worry.’
And suddenly, the karaoke host is calling Seb’s name, and Seb is turning from her, then turning back, his mouth dropping open a little. He’s looking at Clara, and he’s shaking his head with a face that says he can’t believe she’s done this.
‘It wasn’t me,’ she says, with an exaggerated shrug.
It’s an older song. The woman at the next table recognises it from its opening chords, a seductive twang of acoustic guitar. Echo & The Bunnymen. ‘The Killing Moon’.
Seb knows it, too. ‘How did you know I liked this song?’
‘I took a guess,’ she says. ‘I thought it would suit your voice.’
He sounds distant. ‘Good guess.’
She stares back at him. ‘Must be fate.’
The word ripples out from her, washes over him.
And it’s as if the air between them is thrumming now, as if the table itself and the drinks upon it are vibrating with the frequency of what is happening here.
It’s been a long time since the woman at the next table last fell in love, but she’s sure that it looks something like this: a young woman rising from a table and heading towards a stage, reaching out a hand behind her and beckoning.
A young man, rising to meet her, knowing he wouldn’t do this for anyone else.
‘Are you coming?’ Clara says.
As if there was any question. They stand close as they sing, hopelessly out of tune, not caring one bit.
They share one mic, their lips almost touching.
By the time they’re done, their fingers are interlinked, and they move as one through the busy pub and out into the dark night.
The woman at the next table watches them go, watches them linger on the pavement.
Under an enormous moon, anything could happen.