13 Little Blue Envelopes (8 page)

Keith found her there a few minutes later. He carried a pint glass full of a very dark liquid that was coughing up tiny brass-colored bubbles. There was a thin layer of cloudy foam on top.

He passed her the glass. It was heavy. She had a brief flash of the thick, warm Ribena and shuddered. For himself, Keith had gotten a Coke. He glanced behind him and placed himself between the dancing guys and Ginny.

“Don’t drink,” he explained, seeing her staring at the soda. “I fulfilled my quota when I was sixteen. The government issued me a special card.” He fixed her again with his unwavering stare.

His eyes were very green, with a kind of gold starburst at the center that was just a little off-putting and intense.

“So, are you going to tell me why you did this strange thing or not?” he asked.

“I . . . just wanted to.”

“You just
wanted
to buy out the show for the week? Because you couldn’t get tickets for the London Eye or something?”

“What’s the London Eye?”

“The bloody great Ferris wheel across from Parliament that all the normal tourists go to,” he said, leaning back and eyeing her curiously. “How long have you been here?”

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“Three days.”

“Have you seen Parliament? The Tower?”

“No . . .”

“But you managed to find my show in the basement of Goldsmiths.”

She sipped her Guinness to buy herself a second before answering, then tried not to wince or spit. Ginny had never tasted tree bark, but this was what she imagined it would be like if you ran it through a juicer.

“I got a little inheritance,” she finally said. “And I wanted to spend some of it on something I thought was really worth it.”

Not totally a lie.

“So, you’re rich?” he said. “Good to know. Me, well, I’m not rich. I’m a hooligan.”

Before he began setting the names of coffee drinks to music, Keith had led a very interesting life. In fact, Ginny soon found out, he spent the ages of thirteen to seventeen being a parent’s worst nightmare. His career began with crawling over the fence to the garden of the local pub and begging for drinks or telling jokes for them. Then he figured out how to lock himself into his local at night (by hiding in an under-used cupboard) and get enough alcohol for himself and his friends. The owners got so sick of being robbed that they gave up and hired him under the table.

There followed a few years of breaking things for no reason and setting the occasional small fire. He fondly recalled razor blading the word
wanker
into the side of his schoolmaster’s car so that the message would show up in a few weeks, after it rained and rusted. He decided to try stealing. At first, he stole little 76

things—candy bars, newspapers. He moved up to small appliances and electronics. It finally ended for him after he broke into a takeout shop and was arrested for grand theft chicken kebab.

After that, he decided to turn his life around. He created a short documentary film called
How I Used to Steal and Do Other
Bad Things
. He sent this away to Goldsmiths, and they thought enough of it to accept him and even give him a grant for

“special artistic merit.” And now he was here, creating plays about coffee.

He stopped talking long enough to notice that she wasn’t drinking her Guinness at all.

“Here,” he said, grabbing the glass and finishing off the remainder in one long gulp.

“I thought you said you don’t drink.”

“That’s not drinking,” he said dismissively. “I meant
drink
.”

“Oh.”

“Listen,” he said, moving closer, “as you’ve effectively paid for the entire show—and cheers for that—I might as well tell you this. I’m taking it to the Fringe Festival, in Edinburgh. You know the Fringe?”

“Not really,” Ginny said.

“It’s pretty much
the
biggest alternative theater festival in the world,” he said. “Lots of celebrities and famous shows have come out of it. Took me forever to get the school to pay to send us up there, but I did it.”

She nodded.

“So,” he said, “I take it you’ll be coming to the show again?”

She nodded again.

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“I’ve got to pack everything up after the show tomorrow and move it out for the night,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to join in.”

“I’m not sure what to do with the rest of the tickets. . . .”

Keith smiled confidently.

“Now that you’ve paid for them, they’ll be easy to unload.

There aren’t a lot of people around since it’s June, but the international office will take anything free. And the foreign students are usually still here, wandering around.”

He looked down at her hands. She was clutching at her empty glass.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you to the tube.”

They left the smoke of the bar and stepped back into the fog.

Keith walked her along a different route, one that she would never have been able to find on her own, to the glowing red circle with the bar cutting through it that read underground.

“So, you’ll be back tomorrow?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

She fed the ticket eater and passed through the clacking gate, descending down into the white-tiled tube station. When she got to the platform, she saw that there was a pineapple sitting on the rails of the tracks. A whole pineapple in perfect condition. Ginny stood on the very edge of the platform and looked down at it.

It was hard to figure out how a pineapple could end up in a situation like that.

She felt the whoosh of wind that she now knew accompanied the approach of the train. Any second now it would come blasting through the tunnel and cross right over this spot.

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“If the pineapple makes it,” she said to herself, “he likes me.”

The white nose of the train appeared. She stepped away from the edge, let the train go, and waited for it to pass away.

She looked down. The pineapple wasn’t broken or whole. It was simply gone.

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The Not-so-Mysterious

Benefactor

Discovery: It was possible to take apart a fake palm tree and fit it in a car. In fact, it was possible to take apart a whole set and get it in a car. A
little
car. A little, white, very dirty Volkswagen.

This is how they were “unloading”
Starbucks: The Musical
.

“You may be asking yourself, ‘Why is Keith taking these?’ ”

Keith said as he shoved the fronds down into the trunk. “ ‘Why, he doesn’t even use these in the show.’ ”

“I kind of wondered,” Ginny said. (She’d wondered a lot as she’d been dragging one of them down the basement hallway, actually. They were heavy.)

“Well, I did for a while,” Keith said, looking at the underside of the car and how it was sinking low to the ground under the weight. “I wrote them out. But I have to make sure no one nicks them since the school paid for them. I mean, fake palm trees.

Come on. These beat orange traffic cones any day of the week.

These things are a prize.”

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He looked down at the pile of costumes that was still on the sidewalk.

“You get in and I’ll pack this stuff around you,” he said.

Ginny was duly stuffed in (on the wrong side), and Keith got in on her right. The car didn’t look so good from the outside, but apparently its insides were in perfect working order. As soon as Keith hit the gas, it sprang to life and rocketed to the corner of the street. It squealed slightly as he took the corner and plunged into the traffic on the main road, barely missing being knocked out of the way by a double-decker bus.

She could tell Keith was one of those guys who loved to drive—he switched through the gears with great intensity and as often as humanly possible and zigzagged his way through the congestion. A black cab was suddenly within inches of them.

Ginny was face-to-face with a rather surprised-looking couple, who pointed at her fearfully.

“Aren’t we a little close?” she said as Keith angled the car even closer to the cab in an attempt to change lanes.

“He’ll move over,” Keith said lightly.

They drove through part of Essex Road that Ginny knew.

“I’m staying around here,” she said.

“In Islington? Who with?”

“A friend of my aunt’s.”

“I’m surprised,” he said. “Thought you were in a big hotel somewhere since you’re an heiress or something.”

Keith turned down an endless sequence of tiny, dark roads full of houses and anonymous apartment blocks, past brightly fluorescent fish-and-chip shops. Posters and ads were glued to every surface, advertising reggae albums and Indian music. Ginny 82

found herself automatically marking the route in her mind, tracing a pattern of signs, posters, pubs, houses. Not that she would ever come here again, of course. It was just habit.

They finally stopped on an unlit street with a long row of gray stone houses. He swerved the car and parked at an angle to the curb. There were a lot of wrappers along the sidewalks and bottles in the little yards. A few of the houses were clearly unoccupied, with boards over the windows and signs pasted on the doors.

Keith came around and opened her door, then pulled out all of the things that wedged her in. He opened the front gate of one of the houses and walked up to a bright red door with a yellow plastic window panel. They unloaded the sloppily packed boxes and bags bit by bit. Once inside, they passed a kitchen and went right to a dark set of stairs, which Keith went up without switching on the light.

At the top of the stairs, there was a strong smell of old cigarette smoke. Many objects were stuffed onto the landing—a crammed bookcase with a skull on top, a hat stand draped with shoes, a pile of clothes. He kicked these aside and opened the door they sat in front of.

“My room,” Keith said with a grin.

Most of the room was red. The carpet was brick red. The saggy sofa was red. The multiple bean bags on the floor were red and black. Flyers for who knew how many student plays covered the walls, along with posters for Japanese animation and comic books. The furniture consisted of plastic packing crates, with the occasional board laid across to make a shelf or table. Books and DVDs were piled everywhere.

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“It
is
her,” a voice said.

She turned to face the guy she had attempted to give a ticket to outside the uni—the one with the dreadlocks and the rimless glasses.

He was smiling knowingly. Behind him was a blond girl, rail thin, who didn’t look very happy. Her arms poked out of the stylishly shredded shoulders of her black T-shirt like two white pencils. Her eyes were round and deeply colored, and she had a pout. Her white-blond hair looked over-processed to the point of being straw-like and visibly fragile. Yet somehow this damage complemented the wild, sophisticated way she piled it on top of her head.

Automatically, Ginny looked down at herself—at her long green khaki cargo shorts, the same sneakers, her T-shirt and tiny hoodie. The tourist clothes were even more painful than usual.

“This is Ginny,” Keith said. “I think you met David. David is my flatmate. And that’s Fiona.”

“Oh,” Fiona said. “Are you
working
on the show?”

It was a reasonable enough question, but Ginny detected an insult buried in it somewhere. She was strangely sure that whatever she said was going to cause Fiona to burst out laughing. Her stomach instantly knotted, and she tried to think of a snappy comeback. After about twenty seconds of thinking about the answer, she finally came up with the knife-sharp, “I don’t know.”

Fiona twisted her lips into a wan smile. She looked Ginny up and down, her eyes settling on the cargo shorts and then on a long, thin cut that ran across Ginny’s knee. (Packing accident.

Late night. Stepladder miscalculation while getting some things out of the top of the closet.)

“We’re going out,” David said. “See you later.”

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“They’ve been fighting,” Keith said when they were gone.

“There’s a shock.”

“How do you know?”

“Because,” he said, dumping out a box of Starbucks cups onto the floor. “That’s what they do. They fight. And fight. And fight and fight and fight.”

“Why?”

“Well, the short version would involve me using a word for her that Americans tend to find very offensive. The long version is that David wants to leave university and go to cooking school.

He’s gotten in, has a grant and everything. That’s his dream. But Fiona wants him to go to Spain with her.”

“Spain?”

“She’s going to work as a rep,” he said. “A tour guide, basically.

She wants him to go, even though he needs to be here. But he’ll go because he does everything she tells him to. We used to be good mates, but not anymore. It’s all about Fiona now.”

He shook his head, and Ginny got the feeling that this wasn’t just talk—he seemed really bothered by it. But she was still caught up on the fact that Fiona was going to work in Spain.

Who just decided they were going to work in Spain? Ginny hadn’t even been allowed to get a job until last summer, and that was only at the SnappyDrug down the street. One entire painful summer of stocking razor refills and asking people if they wanted to sign up for the SnappyCard. And here was Fiona, who couldn’t be much older than she was, running off to sunny Spain. Ginny tried to imagine that conversation.
I’m so sick of the
mall. . . . Think I’ll go get a job at that Gap in Madrid.

Everyone else’s life was more interesting than hers.

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“She’s pretty,” Ginny said.

She had no idea why she said this. It was true, more or less.

Fiona was elegant and striking. (Okay, she looked a little like she had recently been raised from the dead—bony, shock-white hair, shredded clothes—but in a
good way,
of course.)

“She looks like a cotton swab,” Keith said dismissively. “She has no known personality and horrible taste in music. You should hear the utter crap she plays when she’s here. You, however, have taste.”

The switch in topic caught Ginny off guard.

“So,” he said, “what was it about my show that made you want to buy up all the tickets? Was it that you wanted me all to yourself?”