Chapter Two
It wasn’t meant to be , I told myself as the blasted train sped through another blasted tunnel, creating a greater distance between us. I tried to stop the disappointment in my gut from seeping into my chest. Stuff like this happened all the time. Worse things. Anyone who has seen Before Sunrise knows what it really means to lose the love of one’s life after a chance encounter. This wasn’t a fraction as romantic, or heartbreaking. We knew each other for all of twenty minutes. It wasn’t that deep.
With a sigh, I leant back in my seat and tried to ignore the ache in my throat and the empty seat beside me. It probably still smelt like him and I resisted the urge to press my nose against the old, discoloured fabric, reminding myself that it housed a lot more than just Noah’s scent.
Feeling cold and empty, I took out my earphones. I needed a distraction from all the ‘what might have beens’ racing through my mind. As I did, something caught my eye, discarded on the carriage floor next to a newspaper. I leant forward to take a closer look. It appeared to be a notebook.
Just as I was wondering if I should pick it up and check the contents, despite the potential germ-factor and breach of privacy, I suddenly realised it was Noah’s. He had been holding it when he sat across from me. I remembered him gathering it up with his bag when he changed his seat to be closer to mine.
I reached out and picked up the notebook, cradling it in my fingers like it was made of ancient papyrus and might disintegrate into nothing if I wasn’t careful. The cover was black leather and I traced my fingers across the embossed ‘N. K.’ on the front. I could tell that it was used often from the worn creases in the leather and spine. And I was dying to find out what was inside.
‘You have to open it,’ Lucy, my colleague and friend, declared after I got to the offices of Wiser, Hall, Steadman and Associates and offloaded the story onto her. ‘How else will you find out who he is?’
The open-plan office was still quiet, as most people came in at nine and it was only a quarter to. Lucy and I were two of the firm’s eight paralegals. Three of us sat on the same side of the room and the third was a Desi guy called Arjun, who always sauntered in after nine, slightly dishevelled from his previous night’s antics. Our desks were arranged in a sort of circle, so we were facing each other, which was a blessing and curse. It was useful when we needed help – and like now, when Lucy and I had something really important to chat about – but Arjun was a total distraction. If he wasn’t on the phone, he was gossiping about the partners and other solicitors. The only time I got any proper work done was when he went to make himself a cuppa, because he spent ages chatting to everyone in the office on the way to and from the little kitchenette at the back of the room.
‘It’s hardly going to have his full name, address and phone number on the first page,’ I reasoned. ‘This isn’t the nineties.’
‘There may be hints though,’ Lucy mused. ‘Snippets of information that will help us find him.’
‘Us?’ I laughed. ‘What are we, Sherlock Holmes and Watson?’
‘Is that really the only detective reference point we have? In this day and age? Two middle-aged men?’
‘Nancy Drew?’
‘Better. Or The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency .’
‘Who’s a detective?’ Arjun asked, flinging his bag onto his desk and falling into his seat with a theatrical sigh. I looked over at him and I had to admit that despite his messy hair and dark circles, he still managed to look good in that slightly unkempt, geek-meets-model way, with his tailored suit and Italian leather shoes courtesy of the Bank of Mum and Dad. ‘I’m bloody shattered. When is this week going to be over? I swear it feels like Friday.’
‘It does,’ I agreed. ‘But Sheila already thinks I’m useless after rolling up late twice this week. Let’s pick up this convo after lunch.’
‘Coming after 9 a.m. doesn’t make anyone “late”,’ Arjun argued. ‘It’s not the Victorian times. This isn’t the workhouse.’
‘Feels like one,’ Lucy said darkly. ‘I stayed until after eight every day last week.’
The main door swung open and Sheila, my new manager and one of the three partners, strutted into the office in a power suit and sky-high, red-soled stilettoes. Just looking at her walk in those deathtraps made my ankles ache. I wished I was the sort of woman who looked sexy and powerful, but the best I could do was pretty and cute, with my huge, round eyes and signature dimple on my right cheek. Ma loves telling everyone the story of how when I was born, she and Dad had a big fight immediately after her C-section because he wanted to name me Dimple. It’s not unusual for Bengalis to give their daughters nicknames like Lucky, Baby, Beauty and so on, which everyone in their extended family uses. Their real names were often Arabic ones, but only for official purposes.
Ma, who had been born and raised in the UK and had no interest in honouring quirky Bengali traditions, burst into tears and refused. Still hormonal and in agony after her emergency surgery, she was hysterical and made such a ruckus that the midwife burst into the cubicle she was in and kicked my dad out for upsetting her. My younger brother, Malik, still calls me Dimple to wind me up, which often earns him a whack with a pillow.
‘Shh, they’re coming this way,’ Lucy hissed, staring intently at her computer screen. Arjun did the same and I quickly pulled open one of the case files I was working on.
‘Morning,’ Sheila greeted us stiffly as she clacked past. ‘Maya, do you have everything for the meeting at eleven?’
‘I do,’ I confirmed, smiling warmly at her. ‘The room’s booked from 10.30. I’ll set the tech up then.’
‘Great.’
Once all the partners were safely in their glass offices, the three of us let out a collective sigh.
‘Tea?’ Arjun asked. I nodded and followed him to the kitchenette, where I proceeded to recount the morning’s events as the kettle boiled.
‘You have to read the notebook,’ he said, throwing two extra-strong PG Tips into a big mug with some milk, cardamom and a cinnamon stick before heating it in the microwave. ‘I don’t do “white man’s tea’’,’ was his usual response whenever anyone questioned his method.
‘I feel bad,’ I replied, my resolve getting weaker with every passing moment. ‘What if there are really personal things in there?’
‘Like what?’ he scoffed as we waited for the kettle to boil, as part of the second step of his pseudo-masala chai. Ma made it at home all the time, but she did it over a stove and it took ages. There was no stove in the kitchenette of Wiser, Hall, Steadman and Associates. I watched as he took the teabags out of the now-beige milk, infused with spices and put the bags into individual mugs. Pouring the hot milk into the two mugs, he added boiling water and let it all brew for a while, before reheating both mugs in the microwave. Two heaped teaspoons of sugar completed the process and, honestly, it was so good. I personally couldn’t be bothered to make it like this myself in the office, or even at home. Yorkshire Tea with a dash of cold milk was perfectly adequate. But Arjun’s milky, spicy number was pretty epic for a microwaved job.
‘Personal stuff. You know, family dramas, a broken heart .?.?.?’
‘Maya, this is a grown-arse adult man we’re talking about, not a teenage girl. It’ll probably be meeting notes or something equally banal.’
I hadn’t thought of that. ‘But it’s a proper leather-bound book, embossed with his initials. It looks too important to be work stuff.’
‘If you don’t look inside, you’ll never know.’
For the rest of the day, while I prepared meeting rooms and AV equipment, wrote up minutes and completed mindless admin tasks, my mind kept drifting to the notebook that was slowly burning a hole through my desk.
Arjun was right. It could contain something as ordinary as work notes. I had known Noah for less than half an hour, but I could tell he wasn’t the type to pour his heart out onto a piece of paper.
At 4.56 on the dot, Arjun grabbed his jacket and bag and left the office before anyone could stop him and ask him to do something that would take him over the 5.00 p.m. threshold.
‘What are you doing tonight?’ Lucy asked, like she always did, as if the answer was going to be anything other than, ‘Not much, just going to chill with my family.’
‘Are you seriously not going to peek inside?’ she continued, slipping on her jacket and stuffing her phone and charger into her bag.
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘I really want to.’
Lucy put her bag back down. ‘Er, well you’re not doing it without me. Let’s do it.’
‘What, right here? In front of everyone?’
I looked around the sparse office. It was past five now and only a handful of people remained on the other side of the room, where the family law lot sat. They took their jobs a lot more seriously than those of us in commercial and employment and never left before six.
‘No one will know, it’ll look like we’re working. Let’s do this.’ Lucy sat down and wheeled her chair closer to mine. Inhaling nervously, I pulled the notebook over to us. The leather felt softer than the first time I held it and I waited a moment, because once I did this, there was no undoing it. Then, muttering ‘Bismillah’ – in the name of God – I opened it to the first page.
It was blank.
‘What the hell?’ I looked over at Lucy in a panic. ‘Is that it? Have I been stressing over this bloody thing all day for no reason? Now I’ll never know who he is! He’s gone, forever!’
‘Calm down, turn to another page,’ Lucy said soothingly and I could tell from the tremble in her lip that she was desperately trying to stop herself from laughing. I turned the page and let out a breath.
There, on the top, in scrawling blue ink, was written ‘ 30 BEFORE 30 ’. And below it:
1. APPLY FOR PHYSIO COURSE
· UEL (open day: 24 Nov)
· KCL (open day: 11 Nov)
· SGUL (open day: 1 Dec)
· LSBU (open day: 14 Dec)
Find out application deadline.
Fees?
Lucy and I stared at the information.
‘He wants to be a physiotherapist?’ Lucy murmured, her eyes bright. ‘This is good stuff, Maya! Now you know something personal about him.’
‘Well, he said he was already training to be one, I think,’ I replied, still staring at the page and at the way he formed his letters. The ink didn’t look like a standard biro either, possibly a fountain pen. He was serious about becoming a physiotherapist then, it wasn’t a line he told women on the train. What other information did this book hold? I was itching – no, desperate – to know more.
‘He told you about his future plans between Turnpike Lane and Piccadilly Circus?’
I shrugged. ‘It was a deep convo, Luce. We really connected.’ I omitted the fact that most of it was about the Marvel universe.
‘Let’s see what else is there,’ Lucy said, grabbing the book from me and this time, I complied with no fuss. Ethics were secondary when it came to finding love, after all.
‘There’s one on each page, see!’
I snatched the book off her and sure enough, there were more. But each item on the list was on a new page:
2. READ ULYSSES
Challenging but epic read – glad I got there in the end.
And then .?.?.
3. PARTICIPATE IN A TRIATHLON
Choose between:
· Dorney – Windsor, 21 May
· Dorney Lake – Eton College, 31 July
· All Nations Supersprint – 7 May
‘I wonder what this is,’ I mused out loud as I flicked through the rest of the book, my eyes landing on some of the headers: 10 – Complete the Whole 30 programme; 15 – Go skydiving; 22 – Pay off credit card .
‘Omigod, I think I know,’ Lucy exclaimed. ‘He’s made a list of thirty things he wants to do before he turns thirty years old!’
I turned to Lucy and then back to the book. 12 – Trek Snowdon . Who could be bothered to do stuff like that?
‘A fitness freak who’s also planning to do a triathlon,’ Lucy laughed. ‘If this list is anything to go by, he is not the man for you, Maya.’
‘Why not?’ I snapped. ‘I’m very active, thank you very much, in case that’s what you’re implying.’
‘I’m not “implying” anything, babe. I’m saying it how it is. Your idea of being “active” is hitting Oxford Street once a season.’
She was right. I was the most inactive person I knew.
‘What do I do with all this then?’ I asked, deflated. The last thing I expected was for this notebook to prove to me all the ways that Noah was wrong for me.
‘Forget about it and move on. And if you ever happen to run into him on the Underground, get his number so you can return it.’
‘That’s it?’
‘What other options are there? You’re hardly going to tick off his list for him! Can you imagine going skydiving?’
We both laughed weakly and I shuddered at the thought of jumping out of a plane for fun , not because the tail had caught fire and it was the only way to safety.
With a sigh, I stuffed the book into my bag and put on my coat. ‘Come on, let’s go. Netflix waits for no one.’
‘Actually, the whole point of it is that it waits for everyone .’
‘You’re so bloody pedantic.’
‘Duh. I’m not the best paralegal at this firm for nothing, you know.’