Chapter Four Tom #2
The woman flung her head up from where she had, Tom could see, sent messages about being LATE and URGENT COVER. Her eyes were a sort of mossy green shade, and as she turned to look at Tom, he felt like she was trying to communicate
with him by a glance alone, but he couldn’t quite read it.
Tom held his hand up, still clutching Orlando. “Can we just . . . all . . . wait . . . separately? Act like the strangers we are?”
“What a dickhead,” Shiny Head muttered.
“Excuse me? What did you say?” Tom leaned forward, genuinely unsure whether he’d heard correctly.
“I said . . .” The man stepped closer. “What. A. Dick. Head.”
Tom felt the woman tense slightly beside him and he was sure, now, that she was frightened. As was he, for that matter. Frightened
by these three strangers, pissed in the middle of the night, who’d chosen to climb onto their bus and ruin their journey. They’d been doing fine for months without these guys. Sitting separately, living their own lives,
never once interacting. Not even a smile or a nod or any acknowledgment whatsoever of “Oh . . . it’s you again.” It was as
though they’d both made a silent agreement that they were aware of each other, but it didn’t need mentioning. Until this moment
Tom hadn’t realized how grateful he was for that. How easy she’d made it for him to keep getting on the bus. To sit there
without judgment, and now these three had turned up and ruined everything, interrupting their carefully orchestrated anonymity.
“Why don’t you all just fuck off, actually?” Tom said, suddenly frustrated by the whole situation. Who were these men? Why were they even talking to him with their outdated eyebrow studs and their beer breath? Before he could process
any of that further, Shiny Head came at him from his right, shoving him and then pulling his fist back, slamming it into the
side of his face.
Jesus fucking Christ that hurt. In all his thirty-two years Tom had never, not once, been punched. Until now. At 4:15 a.m. after getting off a
bus he didn’t even need to be on in the fucking first place. What a shit show. What was he doing with his life? The woman
beside him gasped and, as he spun, reaching up toward his cheek with one hand, she reached for his other, grabbing at Orlando and taking it from him. And then, more aggressively than he had ever expected, she started hitting all three of the men with
his book. She smacked them over the head and around the face so hard that pages started flying out of the paperback and littering
the pavement around them.
“Hey!” The bus driver, finally alerted to the hostilities, came rushing over, but seemed unsure how to follow up on his initial exclamation and uncertain as to who the aggressors were in the situation if he were to try and step in. Surely not this woman and her battered book.
Any escalation of the fistfight seemed to have been halted, largely down to pure confusion from everyone involved. These men
didn’t seem to know how to react to an entirely sober woman aggressively wielding a paperback at four in the morning. They
almost certainly, thank God, weren’t going to hit her, and Tom was glad to see that they drew the line somewhere.
She stood back, panting, and looked around her, scanning the ground as, like the plastic bag in American Beauty, one of the pages of Orlando gently lifted in the breeze and took off down the road.
“Look!” she shouted, pointing into the distance, and the three men and the bus driver all turned. Tom felt a tug on his hand
and the woman was running, his book still in her other hand, fast in the opposite direction. Had he . . . Was he being mugged?
Of his book? Except she was taking him with her while she ran?
“Fucking mentalist,” one of the three men shouted from behind, followed by a loud belch as Tom fell into a jog beside her and they rounded the
corner of Pentonville Road onto Euston Road, where the bus stop could no longer be seen. Or heard.
They slowed to a walk and Tom looked down, panting, to realize he was still holding this stranger’s hand. It didn’t feel like
the hand of a stranger, he thought dazedly. He had no idea what his brain even meant by that, so he shook his head to erase
the thought and let go.
“Sorry,” he said, his eyes landing on the very small but very sparkling diamond ring on her finger.
Made sense. He reached up to touch his cheek as he opened and closed his mouth a few times.
Jeez. Was his jaw broken? He moved his hand down to his chin, opening and closing it again.
Sophie would think this was cool, he decided.
If they were still together and he went home and told her that he’d stood up for a woman who was being harassed at the bus stop and got punched, she’d have run at him, wrapped her arms around his neck and called him a hero.
But if they were still together, he wouldn’t have been on the bus in the first place.
“No, I’m sorry,” she said, slowing on the pavement outside a Ladbrokes and handing Tom back the rest of his book, which was
now considerably more sparse in pages.
“Don’t be,” he said, desperately wanting to take his phone out to inspect his cheek, but also wanting to look like it was
no biggie. Like he was used to the odd fistfight. “I think you just saved me from being beaten up by three men who belong
in the early noughties.”
She broke into a smile that totally transformed her face. Her eyes lit up in the same way they had under the glint of the
streetlamp earlier, a sparkle across them as dimples filled both her cheeks. He tried to smile back, but it hurt.
“Full disclosure, I’ve never been hit before.” There went his plan. It was something about what they’d just been through together
that made him feel he could just be himself.
“Full disclosure, I’ve never hit before,” she said, and they locked eyes and laughed. It was the most intimate exchange Tom had had in months and
it made his stomach hurt, a fresh pang of how much he missed Sophie arriving with such a violent rush that he had to turn
and start walking again. She fell into step beside him.
“Your book though.” She nodded toward it. “I’m really sorry. I know how much it means—”
She stopped talking abruptly and he looked at her, frowning.
“You’ve been reading it on repeat for months and I’m sorry that I know that but I’m just observant. It’s my job. But please
can I get your address or something, so I can get you a new copy? That was all my fault, but wow.” She let out a laugh, stifling
it with her hand. “I can’t believe I just did that. My fiancé wouldn’t believe me for a second if I told him I just . . .”
Her words faded.
Tom laughed back, running a hand through his hair.
“It was pretty awesome. You really got some power behind that right hook. Book. Book hook.” She laughed again, properly, and he started laughing too, the total insanity of the morning not lost on either of them, but the pain in his jaw from the laughter was a solid reminder.
“If I need another, I guess I can just pop in there.” He nodded over to the British Library, which sat on the opposite side of the road, nestled just beyond King’s Cross as they kept walking.
“I’m not too sure you’re allowed to totally deface those ones,” she said. “Well . . . without getting banned after.”
“What a day that would be. Punched in the face by a guy who looked like a baby seal and then kicked out of the British Library
for defacing a book. I’d finally be the rebel I always tried and failed to be.” He wasn’t sure why he was telling her these
things. He’d stop.
“Rebels aren’t cool, you know? They turn into guys like the ones back there.”
“Are you saying they weren’t cool?” He looked over at her and smiled as two drunk teenagers wobbled past them on a Lime bike.
“No, but I think they made me cool, which is a first.”
“And me tough as nails.”
“We should write them a thank-you letter.”
“Buy them another tinny by way of gratitude.”
“Might celebrate by getting an eyebrow piercing,” she said and he laughed, wincing.
“Am I still tough if it hurts to laugh?”
“I don’t know,” she said, turning to him, her face now serious. Steely eyes, staring right at him. “But does it matter if
you’re tough or not?”
He thought about it and the only answer he had was that no, it didn’t matter to him. But a little voice in his head whispered
that maybe it mattered to Sophie.