Somewhere Only We Know (13 page)

“Yes, a walk!” Nadia repeated, turning on her heel and stepping carefully across the muddy, flinty bank. “So let’s walk!”

“So, are we actually doing this whole tourist thing?” Alex asked, moving quickly to catch up. “Are we going to look at St Paul’s Cathedral and take pictures of Tower Bridge?”

“Those are both in the other direction, genius,” Nadia pointed out, cocking her thumb behind them where Alex could just about make out the pale curve of the roof of St Paul’s at some distance across the river. “How long did you say you’ve lived in this city again?”

“Well, it’s not like I’ve got a season pass for the Hop On, Hop Off London Bus Tour,” Alex retorted, scathingly.

“I used to work on a tour bus, you know,” Nadia said suddenly. “Got the job due to my ‘language skills’,” she said, complete with sarcastic air quotes.

“Well, no wonder you know all this stuff.”

“It’s only because an ex-boyfriend used to take me down here. He used to look for stuff washed up by the river. Mudlarking, it’s called. You can’t dig or mess about without a license or the Museum of London will come and get you, but if stuff is just lying there at low tide its fair game.”

“Jesus. Sounds like the guy thought he was Indiana Jones,” Alex scorned grumpily.

Nadia laughed. “Hardly. Once he accidentally picked up something that turned out to be a bone and he freaked out and flung it away from him and never went ‘mudlarking’ again.”

Alex stopped walking. “A bone?” he echoed in horror.

“Oh, it was probably just a dog’s. Don’t you start!” Nadia mocked, continuing to steadily pick her way around the subtle curve of the riverbank. “I came back though. I liked it down here. It’s quiet. It almost feels like the city is yours alone, rather than being stuffed in with eight million people, don’t you think?” Alex knew exactly what she meant. There wasn’t a single street in London where you weren’t sharing space with countless others. But down here, as the sun disappeared behind the turn of the water and everything started to turn as grey as the rocks they walked upon, it really did feel as if they were the only two people in the world.

“You’re right, it’s really cool down here. Your ex sounds like a bit a weirdo, though,” Alex said, taking Nadia’s arm to steady her as she stepped up onto an old crumbling cinder block lying on its side in the mud. She was almost the same height as him now, but down at water level it was too shadowed and her freckles were invisible to him. They were like Nadia herself; so ridiculously open most of the time, but then again, sometimes so hard to read. “Speaking of boyfriends, I presume that things between you and that Matt guy are going well?”

Nadia made a non-committal noise, looking out across the Thames and back towards the red ironwork of Blackfriars Bridge. “Yeah, Matt’s okay.”

Alex tilted his head. “So when do you make the big announcement and go In A Relationship with him on Facebook, then?” He dropped his voice conspiratorially. “That’s like the twenty-first-century equivalent of being married.”

Nadia shot him a warning look. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. I don’t want to talk about Matt.”

“Obviously, being as you never do. What’s the deal there?”

“There’s no ‘deal’!”

“Don’t get me wrong, because you know I love adventuring around London with you, or whatever it is that we’re doing, but why aren’t you sharing your special Thames walk with…“

“Alex!” Nadia’s tone succeeded in pulling Alex up short. “I mean it. There’s no ‘deal’. Things are going great with Matt. It’s all cool. Can we please drop the subject?”

As if to emphasise her point Nadia hopped down from her vantage point on the cinder block and kept moving. A sleek Thames Clipper boat – weighed down low in the water with passengers –swept noisily through the middle of the river and it felt as if a spell had been broken.

“Sheesh. Okay,” Alex muttered, wondering what nerve he’d had the misfortune to hit.

“Speaking of exes,” Nadia said, breezily, as Alex caught up with her again. “Out of curiosity, what happened between you and that Alice Rhodes girl?”

Nadia

Nadia had been wondering about Alice all week; she was surprised she'd been able to keep it in as long as she had. Monday had been her day off from the shop and nobody had been around to play. So Nadia had just lain on the sofa and played with Holly’s iPad all day long; she wasn’t even sure why she bothered password-protecting the thing. Holly had had the same PIN for everything since they were fourteen, and Nadia had known it since they were about fourteen and a half.

And somehow aimless web-browsing had turned into a shamefully full-on Facebook stalk. To be brutally honest, there wasn’t all that much of Alex to stalk. Clicking back beyond the photos of him that she’d recently uploaded, Alex’s Facebook identity seemed to mainly consist of his head popping shyly out of occasional group photos. He hadn’t been kidding. He barely did anything, or at least, whatever he was doing, the evidence of it wasn’t turning up online. Back and back Nadia had gone, feeling the customary weirdness that came with looking at pictures of friends from before you ever met them.

And then, suddenly, there was an Alex explosion. He’d looked different – younger for sure – sporting a confident short haircut and a lazy fuzz of matching stubble on his face; but the real difference was everything else. He’d once been photographed running barefoot and bare-chested on a pebble beach; smiling broadly on a ratty sofa with his arms around the shoulders of two friends; photobombing a pair of posing, mini-skirted girls with both hands held aloft, making drunken peace signs. And here, there and everywhere had been a girl tagged Alice Rhodes…

“Alice?” Alex echoed, tone suspicious, as if he thought this was some sort of a trap. “What about Alice?”

“Well, I’m just assuming she’s your ex,” Nadia needled gently. “You’re in like thirty thousand photos with her; even kissing in some! I mean I’m not exactly Sherlock Holmes, but…”

Alex visibly winced; Nadia wondered again where the boy in those old photos had gone.

“Yeah, we went out,” he said, eventually. The pair walked on for a minute in weighted silence.

“Alex and Alice,” Nadia said, after a while. “That must have been annoying.”

“Yup,” Alex answered shortly.

“University girlfriend, then?”

“Yup.”

“Sheesh, I’m drowning in information over here!” Nadia cried out dramatically; Alex rolled his eyes. “Anyway, check you out, you dirty dog. She’s absolutely gorgeous!” And it was true. The first thing Nadia had noticed about Alice was that she was an absolute stunner. Nadia would have killed to look anything like her: exotic and sexy with tanned skin and a riot of ink-black curls, the complete opposite of ‘milk-and-water’ Nadia…

“I suppose.” Well, at least that was an improvement on ‘yup’. Alex flashed Nadia a hard look. “You been all over my Facebook, then?”

Nadia shrugged lightly. “I was bored.”

“You could have always just asked,” Alex pointed out, not looking at her as they continued to walk, moving quickly past the unwelcome bustle of Gabriel’s Wharf. “We’re friends, aren’t we?”

Nadia looked at him curiously. “Of course.”

The great, grey behemoth that was Waterloo Bridge reared up ahead of them like a finish line. Alex slowed.

“Do you remember me telling you that I was due to take a gap year, but the other person pulled out?” he said, quietly. Nadia nodded slowly. “Well, that other person was Alice.” Alex shrugged. “Everything arranged and paid for, down to the airport transfers either side. Four days to go.”

“She… decided she didn’t want to go travelling?” Nadia asked, confused.

“She decided she didn’t want to go anywhere with me,” Alex clarified ruefully. “Ever again. We’d been together for two and a half years. It was pretty harsh.”

“Harsh” sounded like a bit of an understatement to Nadia, but she echoed it nevertheless. “Totally harsh…”

“She’d already cancelled her half of things without telling me,” Alex blurted out. “Like, she didn’t even give me a chance to change her mind, plead my case, you know? It was already too late before I even found out about it.”

Nadia considered her words carefully before responding. “Well, I’m sure you wouldn’t have wanted to patch things up with somebody who could be so… harsh – as you put it – would you? Much less travel around the world with them. Really, it was a blessing in disguise!”

“Oh yeah, I know that now, totally,” Alex assured her, maybe a little too quickly. “But at the time, it felt like the end of the world. Hence I couldn’t even pick myself up and go it alone.”

“Oh, I know.” Nadia rolled her eyes. “The devastation of first love gone awry and all that! When my high-school boyfriend stopped replying to my texts and started sitting at the back of the bus with Eloise Adams I cried for a week straight.”

“It was a bit more than that.” Alex gave a little self-deprecating laugh. “Because. Well, I was only going to ask her to marry me during the trip.”

“Alex! What!”

“I know.” Alex laughed again. “I’d gotten my grandmother’s ring resized and everything. How utterly shite.”

Nadia shook her head in disbelief. “Yes. Harsh. Shite. Absolutely, horrifically awful. All of the above?”

“It knocked me for six alright,” Alex agreed, seemingly weirdly cheerful and relaxed for someone who had just confessed utter heartbreak.

“And nobody really since?”

“Nobody since,” Alex confirmed. “Rory made me sign up for internet dating once, but either my face or my description was massively unappealing as I got zero bites.”

“You?” Nadia was baffled. “You got NO dates?”

“Not one.”

“But you’re totally good-looking!” Nadia blurted out.

Alex grinned at her. “Must have been the wording, then.”

“What the hell did it say? That you hate puppies and babies and chocolate and that you moonlight as a Jack the Ripper copycat serial killer?”

Alex threw his head back and laughed, loose and genuine again. “I think that would probably be quite successful, but I reckon it would attract a very niche type of girl.”

“Ah, Alex, I don’t understand it.” Nadia shook her head. “I wish I could set you up with someone. You don’t happen to fancy Holly by any chance, do you?”

“Nope, sorry. Not to disparage the lady. And now are you going to offer me Caro?”

“Why? Do you like her?” Nadia asked, giving him a hard look.

“No, I was just wondering why Holly was thrust into the fray and not Caro!”

“Caro is seeing someone,” Nadia explained.

“Boy or girl?” Alex asked teasingly, obviously recalling their conversation about Caro’s colourful sexual history.

Nadia laughed. “A guy,” she confirmed, before swiftly changing the subject back. Had Alex ever considered speed dating? It could be a laugh…

Alex

He hadn’t talked about Alice for ages and was pleased to find that it hadn’t felt like it used to, that is: like somebody had gutted him navel to nose and taken a cheese grater to what they found inside. That was definitely progress. Of course, it helped that Nadia was the one he’d been talking to; she was probably the easiest person to talk to that he’d ever met. She put him at ease even in the most awkward of situations – hence he was here, walking the floodbanks of the Thames at dusk, he supposed.

She was relating some of the internet dating horror stories she’d heard and was all haloed in orange by the dying light of the day, making him laugh, putting him so expertly at that usual ease. For a moment he felt as if he should tell her about Lila, about how he felt as though she could be The One, about how a second chance at true love might have missed him by just one guy. Or about how Lila was looking at him recently: uncharacte‌ristically silent, with a bruised little expression in her eyes and how his confusion over it all was keeping him lying awake at night.

But for whatever reasoning, he wasn’t quite ready to make the biggest thing in his life into a Big Thing and he didn’t really want to invite Lila down onto the shadowy beach with them, so instead he simply walked and chatted with Nadia – something that was fast becoming one of his most favourite things.

Chapter 10

Alex

"You know, when we talked about this, I didn't think it was going to be so… immediate," Alex murmured as they moved past the bored-looking attendant who had taken their money in exchange for a sheaf of paper and a numbered name badge and waved them on through to the function room beyond her desk.

"Hey, imminent deportation here," Nadia teased. "No time like the present, and all that."

Alex rolled his eyes. Nadia loved to get her way by playing the 'imminent deportation' card. She'd miss that once the appeal went through.

"And what is this?" he continued, waving the stapled bundle of paper incredulously.

Nadia skim-read the first page of her own. "Oh it's just a standard questionnaire. The agency just want to know stuff about you so they can invite you to the right kind of singles' events and stuff."

"Yeah; age, sex, location I get," Alex insisted. "But why do they need to know whether I prefer staycation UK breaks or going abroad?"

Nadia laughed. "Says a lot about your personality, your priorities? I don't know."

"Well then, what does my favourite sandwich filling say about my priorities?

"Oh, just answer any old thing. It's all just a bit of fun," Nadia advised him. "In fact, I'm going to take this opportunity for a little self-improvement. Tonight I feel like being an inventor of something. What could I have invented?"

"Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters!" Nadia insisted. "Come on. It has to be something well known, but not well known enough that it's obvious I didn't come up with it. And something I understand the basics of, in case they ask questions. How about some sort of app?"

"How about just being yourself?"

Nadia waved her hand dismissively. "'Myself' is boring."

Alex just laughed at her. "Nadia Osipova, 'yourself' is the most interesting person I've ever met."

Alex watched with pleasure as Nadia's cheeks flushed with a pleased pink. "You charmer," she teased, deflecting from her blush, looping her arm with his and pulling him on. "That's the way to impress the girls. Now come on. Let's claim our free class of cheap champagne and fill these suckers out."