Anything You Do Say
Gillian McAllister
To Suzanne, my sister and a doctor. Here’s to all the
texts that begin: What if … and your responses: It’s quite complicated, but …
1
It starts with a selfie. He is a random; we are not even sure of his name. We are always meeting them whenever we go out. Laura says it’s because I look friendly. I think it’s because I am always daydreaming, making up lives for people as I stare at them, and they think I’m inviting them over to chat.
In the frame of his phone screen – camera facing forward, to us – his teeth are white and slightly crooked, his nose hooked.
Laura leans over to press the button on the phone. Her long, slender arm is captured at the edge of the display. It’s covered in bangles and bits of thread and a home-made bracelet. She’s a hippy at heart.
She takes the photo, and now we are frozen on his screen. I wonder if he’ll keep it, that photograph of us that now belongs to him.
‘No filter,’ he says to us.
‘What?’ Laura says.
She doesn’t use Instagram. She feels no need to check into places or share her moments with anybody. She is nowhere on the Internet, and I’m sure her life is better for it.
We break apart from our tableau at the bar but he stays standing next to me. He rocks up and down on the balls of his feet. He’s all in black, except his red trainers.
I turn to Laura. She’s had her hair cut. It’s a pixie, again: messed up, the fringe sitting in her eyes. She looks androgynous, slightly goofy. I could never pull off that haircut. People would mistake me for a child. She never wears any make-up, but doesn’t need to, with straight, white teeth, naturally peach cheeks and dark lashes. Her eyes crinkle at the corners even when she is not smiling. What she wants more than anything is to be an artist – she creates hyperreal paintings that look like photographs – and she doesn’t want to live her life like other people. She’s obsessed with it. She will sometimes say things like, ‘What’s the correlation between wearing a suit and doing a good job?’ or, ‘Why do you need a house in the suburbs and a mortgage like everybody else?’
I would never say such things.
‘Great shoes,’ she says now, dipping her head down underneath the bar.
They’re new. Cream silk, with ribbons that tie at my ankles. Laura favours flats, the sides of her feet dry and hard from never wearing shoes at home. They live on a barge, Laura and Jonty. They moor it wherever they like. I sometimes want to do the same, bored of our tiny basement flat, but Reuben tells me I’d hate it; that I am a fantasist.
‘Thanks,’ I say. I bought them on a credit card, at almost midnight, the other night. I’d forgotten until they had arrived, experiencing a familiar sense of wonderment, and then recognition, as I tore into the parcel.
‘Are they Reuben-approved?’ Laura says.
Reuben is one of the only people she consistently misreads. She converts his shyness into something else. Disapproval, maybe. She might be right. He had raised his eyebrows as I unpacked the shoes, but said nothing.
I shrug now. ‘What’s his is ours,’ I say, though I’m embarrassed by the notion. Reuben works far harder than I do. Everybody does.
Laura’s bony shoulders are out, even though it’s December. Her top is simple, a plain white vest that’s too big for her. It’s the kind of material that doesn’t need pressing. I don’t iron anything. If I ever try to, our iron deposits a brown sticky substance everywhere, and so I have given up. In my head, I call it my Joanna-ness: situations in which I fail where most others succeed.
‘Looks like you’ve got a friend for life,’ she says.
I turn. The man is still standing next to me. I can feel the entire length of his leg against mine as he shifts his weight, trying to get the bartender’s attention.
‘Two more for these ladies?’ he says.
We say yes to the drinks, and maybe we shouldn’t. We are becoming giggly. They arrive, placed on black napkins which dampen with condensation from the glasses. Laura sidles slowly away along the bar.
I follow, but so does he.
‘Your work or mine?’ Laura says, her head bent towards me so that he can’t hear.
This is how our long chats begin. We once joked we should have an agenda, and now we kind of do: work, relationships, family. Then everything else. Whatever comes up.
I let out a sigh, but it does nothing to dispel the knots that have appeared as soon as she mentions work. ‘I did a sudoku puzzle on my lunch break that was more stimulating than my entire day yesterday.’
I started work on the mobile library bus because I loved it so much as a child. I loved choosing a fat, new stack of books to read that week. I loved the nooks and crannies and finding my brother hiding in the thriller section. But, after six years in the job, that isn’t enough any more.
‘Mmm.’ She sucks in her bottom lip, looking thoughtfully across the bar.
We hate our jobs in completely different ways. I have no idea what I would like to do. Laura knows exactly what she wants to do, and can’t do it.
‘You need a Thing. I need not to have a Thing,’ she says.
‘Yep. That’s about it.’ Nobody else could say something like that to me, except maybe Reuben. ‘I’m one-dimensional,’ I say to her.
‘You’re too smart for your own good,’ she says back.
‘No. I’m the thick Murphy.’
My brother, Wilf, went to Cambridge, and now owns a whole host of London properties, and none of us can ever forget it.
‘You’re a very bright Joanna,’ she says. ‘Oliva or Murphy.’ Oliva. Reuben’s surname.
I look down at my drink, stirring it with the black straw whose end I’ve chewed. Reuben says I should just forget it. Stop torturing myself. Nobody truly has a Thing.
‘Er,’ Laura says, looking at a spot just above my head, as though she’s seen a spider on the wall.
I turn, and the man is leaning over me, a protective arm right behind my shoulders. Now I know he’s there, I can feel every molecule of him. His arm lands across my back like a heavy rucksack, and I wince. I try to shrug it off, but he claps it down on me. It’s weighty, unpleasant. My body is against his, unwittingly, and his armpit is warm and sweaty against my shoulder. He smells beery, of that sweet alcoholic scent usually reserved for the morning after the night before. A kick of mint behind that. I see that he’s chewing gum.
‘Haven’t even introduced myself,’ he says, interrupting my thoughts. ‘I’m Sadiq.’ His dark eyes appraise us. He holds a hand out to me, then to Laura.
She ignores it, but I take it, not wanting to offend. He passes me a business card, in his hand, as swiftly and smoothly as a spy. Sadiq Ul-Haq. I don’t know what to do with it, so I tuck it into my purse, barely reading it.
‘Thanks. I don’t have one,’ I say back.
‘Thanks for the selfie, but we’re good now,’ Laura interrupts. ‘Just catching up. Alone.’
Even this does not put him off. ‘Baby, don’t be cold,’ Sadiq says.
I can’t help but look sideways at him. I can’t place his lilting accent.
‘We’re not cold. We want to speak to each other, not you,’ Laura says.