Random Shuffle
They fled early, leaving their keys on the bar towel and sneaking away like truants. The Black Dog’s full English sounded sinister so they bought snacks, fruit and juice from the local shop and set off through back-streets to the railway bridge, pausing to watch the London train thundering beneath them.
‘I promise it will be worth your while,’ said Michael.
‘I’m not worried.’ She took the carton of orange juice and rotated her palm on the plastic spout.
‘Did you just wipe the top with your hand?’
She laughed, surprised. ‘I did!’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, I think there’s just something about being with you that makes me feel like I’m on a school trip. Also, I don’t want your lurgy.’
‘“Lurgy”.’
‘It’s science, Michael, look it up.’
‘Oh, so the palm of your hand’s cleaner than my mouth?’
‘It was till I got your lurgy all over it. Do kids still say “lurgy”?’
‘Er, no. You could have just sky-ed it.’
‘What’s sky-ing it?’
‘Pouring it into your mouth without touching. So it doesn’t get lipsed-up.’
‘That’s impossible.’
‘Try it.’
‘All right, I’m going to sky it, so it doesn’t get lipsed-up.’
‘Go on.’
‘Here goes.’ She rolled her shoulders, licked her lips, raised the carton and, for a moment, the sky-ing went well, the juice arcing into her mouth until she began to laugh at her own success, spattering the tarmac, wiping her chin with the back of her hand.
The railway line, then the motorway, six lanes of rush-hour traffic. In the months following the assault, he’d found himself prone to feelings of panic around busy roads, a conviction that something terrible was about to happen. At its worst, absurdly, he’d been unable to ride a bicycle because he no longer believed that the forward momentum would be enough to keep him upright. Why wouldn’t he be slammed into the pavement? These feelings were less frequent now but he felt an echo of it over the motorway, the nausea, the tightening between the shoulders, as if concrete was inadequate. It was that feeling of being too far from shore, the foot searching for the sand, and he pushed the sensation down. He definitely had the blues this morning – Nat’s phrase – and they had a long day ahead of them, but they were soon in the wild again, crossing the moorland with a new set of mountains ahead, improbably distant, the Pennines.
‘What’s that?’ she said.
Lines of white rock were breaking through the scrubby grass, like exposed vertebra. ‘That is limestone pavement! You see, the way it erodes into squares, these lines, like—’
‘Pavement. Yes, I see.’
They looked, and after a while, he said, ‘D’you think maybe I oversold it?’
She laughed and he felt hopeful again. ‘No, it’s very nice. Like a rockery.’
‘Exactly. Nature’s rockery.’ He worried that she regretted staying on. The landscape was, to his eye, lovely but less varied than the Lakes, and seven hours was a long time to talk to anyone, even someone he liked very much.
‘You can listen to a podcast, if you like.’
‘No, I’m good.’
‘Or music. It’s a long way to go, I won’t mind.’
She thought for a moment. ‘I have an idea,’ she said. ‘Do you have headphones, wireless headphones?’ He did. ‘And your phone?’
For a moment he felt nervous (Hopeallswell), then turned his back so that she could retrieve it from his rucksack.
‘Why do you keep it in here?’
‘So it’s out of reach.’
‘But then how do you look at it?’
‘It’s not a problem.’
‘Are you very online, Michael?’
‘What do you think, Marnie?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe you’re big on the dark web. Never mind. Now. What’s the PIN? I’m not going to look at your sexts, I promise.’
‘1981.’
‘The year you were born? Really?’
‘Plus one.’
‘Ingenious. Okay, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to listen to each other’s music, all the songs on shuffle, and I’m going to hold on to your phone and you’re going to have mine, so no skipping, no censoring. Just the real you.’ She held out one of her earbuds, which he took and glanced at briefly. ‘Are you worried about my lurgy?’
‘I’m more worried about mine.’
‘I don’t care, look …’ She made a show of screwing his bud deep into her ear and he wondered if this was a kind of flirting too. ‘There. Now. Let’s start. You first. Pick me a good one. At random.’
He looked at the screen of her phone. Music. Songs. Shuffle. Play. Female voices, talking to all the girls on the block.