Chapter 2
DOMINIC
I’m struggling to believe my eyes.
Flavia James is sitting on a bench about ten metres away from me in the departure area of Heathrow Terminal Five eating sushi and reading something on her phone.
Given that the raffle in which I won this trip took place at her mum’s house, it would be quite a coincidence if she were here at the exact same time as me and not going to the exact same place.
I wind back to when my mother told me I’d won the prize.
I wasn’t particularly keen to accept it because it was incredibly short notice and I had other plans, both work and personal.
Mum begged me to go because it was a trip that the recently bereaved Sofia James had been planning to go on with her late husband, and she’d donated it for the raffle in the expectation that whoever won it would be delighted.
Mum was very worried that she’d be upset if we told her that I didn’t want to go.
I obviously didn’t want to upset Sofia and I do have some work flexibility, plus the New Year’s Eve party I was planning to go to in London was a big one and I’m sure I won’t be missed, so I called Sofia and thanked her profusely for donating the prize and told her that I was extremely excited to be going.
And I am excited to be visiting South Africa: while my work and holidays have taken me around the world, I’ve never been to Cape Town before.
Flavia, though. I was not expecting to be doing the trip with her.
I’m sure that during our conversation my mother told me that the other person who’d won it was a distant cousin of someone in the village who’d been staying with them over Christmas. And Sofia didn’t mention anything about Flavia when we spoke.
I presume that the original winner couldn’t do it and that Flavia was free and fancied a safari.
Which feels very unfortunate. I have a very strong gut instinct that I don’t want to do this trip with her.
Rationally, though, I really don’t know why. There’s no good reason for me to have such a strong reaction to her presence. I have a lot of exes, and I can perfectly happily be in the same room as them (well, some of them). And she isn’t even an actual ex. We just had a one-night stand once.
To be fair, at the time it didn’t feel like a one-night thing. It felt a lot bigger than that. It felt – to my young and na?ve self – like the beginnings of love. Except I was leaving for a new job in New York very soon afterwards.
I asked Flavia to go for dinner a few days later so that I could explain to her that I was leaving.
We met for dinner in a pub and ended up doing a quiz together (neither of us was keen but the quizmaster wouldn’t take no for an answer).
We came last and won a wooden spoon, which felt like a very apt metaphor for the whole Flavia experience – I felt like I’d fallen in love with her and then been forced to give her up.
I actually contemplated asking her to come with me to New York before realising how very stupid – and indeed inappropriate – that would have been: she’d only just started her first job three months before, and we were both just so young.
I saw her a second time, on my return from New York three years later.
On a trip to Robert Dyas to buy baking utensils (I’d promised to make a birthday cake for my mother), I saw a whole rack of wooden spoons, which reminded me of Flavia.
I’d been thinking of her a lot and wondering whether I should contact her, and took the spoons as a sign (I’d have taken anything as a sign), and immediately texted her to ask if she’d like to meet up.
Long anticipation-dashing story short, it turned out that she was as beautiful, funny, gorgeous, smart, kind, adorable as I remembered (seriously, I had a long list of superlatives for her) but in a ridiculous quirk of fate I found out, straight after I blurted out that I loved her, that she was leaving for a year-long stay in Kazakhstan the next week, on a teaching exchange.
I considered for a mad moment asking her if she’d like to start dating anyway and… came to my senses halfway through asking her.
And that was that. We said a very final goodbye, which involved a long, somewhat desperate, kiss in the middle of a South London park, and then we left in opposite directions. I looked back at Flavia; she didn’t look back once. And we haven’t seen each other since.
Nine years on, I know that it’s a good job we didn’t start dating, for many reasons.
The biggest two from my side being that I now know that I am not relationship material, and that our mothers are very good friends, as are her brother and I, so given those family links we could really only get together if we were literally going to get married.
Which, given my relationship-wrecking abilities, we certainly wouldn’t.
And because of all of that, I don’t like the thought of being on the trip with her.
When I think about it properly, though, rationally, I realise I’m being ridiculous. We had a very vague thing once – that’s all. And we won’t be the only ones on the trip; we won’t have to spend a lot of time talking to each other.
It will be fine.
The question now is whether or not I should go over and say hello.
On balance, I think not. I’m sure neither of us wants another vaguely awkward conversation like the one we had at her mum’s last week. We can wait until we arrive in Cape Town.
As I walk in the opposite direction, I can’t help taking a look over my shoulder. There’s something… very kind of delicate… about the way she eats sushi, which is very… yeah, I’d have to say attractive.
Whatever. Lots of people are attractive.
I turn away from her again and head for a steak restaurant in the opposite direction.
* * *
I’m unsurprised when I catch sight of the top of Flavia’s distinctive head of dark brown curls in the boarding queue ahead of me, and I suppose I should be equally unsurprised when I see her in the seat next to mine when I get to our row, but for some reason I’m quite astonished, and not in a good way.
I just don’t want to sit next to her. Another gut feeling.
‘Flavia,’ I say, reminding myself of the times we’ve met in her parents’ house.
‘Dominic,’ she gasps. ‘What are you doing here? Are you…? Did you win the raffle? Are you going on the safari?’
‘Yep.’
‘Oh.’ She clamps her lips very hard together for a moment and looks as though she’s having to try hard to remember how to breathe normally.
Eventually, after several seconds, during which I almost laugh, because I don’t think Flavia’s a naturally rude person and it is rude to look this unhappy about my on-the-safari-together news, she says, ‘Great,’ in freezing tones.
I nod. ‘Yeah.’
Then she frowns. ‘Are you… sitting next to me?’
‘Yep.’ For the first time, I register the chaos surrounding her. She seems to have emptied a lot of stuff out of her large shoulder bag.
She catches the direction I’m looking in and says, ‘I was hunting for my mints and my Kindle.’
I can’t help thinking that surely a Kindle is quite large and easy to find, but I don’t comment, I just nod, and wait while she begins to refill her bag so there’s space for me to sit down.
I don’t want to look, because it feels a little intrusive paying attention to what someone keeps in their handbag, but it’s difficult not to notice that she has a lot of stuff in there.
I find my lips twitching when I am eventually able to take my seat.
‘Something funny?’ she enquires frostily.
‘Did you forget the kitchen sink?’
‘It’s very important to be well prepared when you go on holiday.’
‘That is true,’ I concede. I really don’t think she’s going to need woolly gloves in South Africa in December, though, or indeed nail varnish on a safari, or a bag of marbles, and certainly not a toy lorry, but none of those things are any of my business, so I just nod again and turn to my emails on my phone.
‘Mint?’ asks Flavia just as I think I’ve worked out how I’m going to reply to an unrealistic request from one of my clients.
‘Erm.’ I look at the box of mints. So unhealthy. Fake sugar plus a million additives. ‘I’m good, thank you.’
She takes a couple of mints herself, then puts them in her bag, then moves the bag contents around again quite a lot (surely unnecessarily?) and then asks, ‘Sooooo, do you like flying?’
I was hoping to get through a lot of emails and then sleep on this flight. I like flights when they’re either productive or relaxing.
‘Depends,’ I say. Mainly on turbulence and who I’m sitting next to. Flavia is showing all the signs of not being a great aeroplane companion.
I would really like to say something that indicates that I’d love to pass this flight in silence so that I can get some work done, and obviously a good night’s sleep, except the nervousness in her (still very beautiful) brown eyes and the way her hands are clutching at her bag cause me – annoyingly – to feel guilty.
I could obviously in reality spare a couple of moments to talk to her, if she needs to be calmed down.
I make a quick note on my phone about how I’m going to reply to the unrealistic email, and then observe, ‘You must have taken a lot of flights over the past few years.’ I know that she continued to travel after her year in Kazakhstan, before then settling in Australia.
How can she be a nervous flyer with all those air miles under her belt?
‘Yes, but fewer than you’d think. I always do trains and boats when I can. I hate flying.’ Her voice is actually slightly trembling.
‘It’s the safest form of travel.’ I do know that there’s absolutely no point in saying it, because the whole point about phobias is that they’re irrational, but, also, it’s true.