‘Is it?’ Wilf said, laughing self-consciously as he reached to touch it.
Where previously he’d been swarthy – we both always tanned easily, but he had golden-brown hair, too, which lent him the look of somebody who spent all his time outside – his palette now had silver in it, and it made him look completely different, somehow.
‘Yep,’ I said.
He reached to touch my hand, then, even though it was banned. The pleasure of it. Of another warm hand upon mine, so delicately it may as well have been an insect landing on my bare skin in the summer. It was exquisite, that pleasure, but I didn’t tell him so.
‘I Facebooked her.’
‘Oh,’ I said. I could feel myself smiling widely. I had known that prison would be upsetting. That I would be lonely. But I hadn’t anticipated how often I would be bored. It was all the time: relentless boredom, time moving as slowly as honey off a spoon.
‘Is that weird? I haven’t told anyone but you.’
‘Your secret’s safe with me,’ I said wryly, and he laughed. ‘What did you say?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Just that I thought she seemed really nice, and that I wasn’t a stalker, and if she wanted to get a cup of coffee I’d be up for that.’
‘And?’
‘We’re going out tomorrow.’
‘Oh no – I won’t hear until Tuesday,’ I said. That’s what the counsellor and I had been talking about. The losses. These pangs – these small hurts – I had to endure them. For justice.
Wilf sat back, his mouth turned down. He was drumming his hands on the desk just like he had done at the dinner table for my entire childhood. He was a fidgeter. That energy had transformed into something else when he reached adulthood – into climbing Mount Kilimanjaro and dealing with a property portfolio – but, right there in the prison, it was like he was eight again, brought in from the summer evening for dinner against his will.
‘Yeah,’ he said sadly after a few seconds. ‘Something to look forward to, though?’
He was always like that. Perhaps it’s why he got so far ahead. He was always so positive. A born optimist. It’ll be Friday again in a few days, he would say breezily when we were working awful factory summer jobs during our university years.
‘What did she say?’
‘Just that she felt the same. A connection – she said. She felt a connection, too. We’re going to Hawksmoor at Spitalfields.’
‘Serious,’ I said, trying to ignore the hollow sensation in my chest.
The feeling got less and less as my sentence ticked by. It had been eighteen months. But, sometimes, it came back. Would I look forward to a glass of wine in a bar on a Friday night in such an innocent way ever again? Probably not, I thought. I couldn’t imagine life beyond HMP Bronzefield, and I certainly couldn’t imagine going out on a Friday ever again. I nodded to that past Joanna, with her carefree nature and her naivety, just like the counsellor told me to do, and tried to make the best of what I had. It would be Friday soon, as Wilf would say.
On the barge, Wilf fades from my mind as I turn now to Laura.
‘Canary Wharf,’ she says, the gas lit. It smells of bonfires and holidays and my childhood, that extinguished match. The nostalgia of the smell masks my shock.
‘Canary Wharf?’ I say. I cannot imagine a place less like Laura.
‘We have grown up,’ she says, sitting down heavily on the sofa.
The sofa that turns into my bed when I stay. When I stayed. I look sadly around the boat. Soon it’ll be sold.
‘The agency …’ she says.
I remember she finished her graduate scheme and got a job in advertising. Switched from marketing. From the woman who used to read her tarot cards every night.
‘It’s in the City,’ she says. ‘Jonty’s in at The Times. He knows someone …’
‘Right,’ I say faintly.
And suddenly, being in the spring sunshine and visiting my best friend’s boat and being free to grab a cup of coffee on the way and faff about with my Oyster card in the tube station seems to mean absolutely nothing. I don’t have a job. I have a criminal record for serious assault. I don’t know where the plates are kept in my own house, would have to think twice about what my postcode is.
‘I can’t imagine you in Canary Wharf,’ I say, all the while thinking, I have no right to comment at all. I’m like an imposter. I don’t know these people.
I feel a familiar sort of panic rising. I used to feel it late at night in my cell, when I knew nobody would come for me. And now, here, free, surrounded by people I love, I feel it again. The sun outside seems to fade and the freedom feels like an illusion. What if I … what if it happens again? I find myself thinking. What if I reoffend? The statistics are against me. I know it’s irrational – Alan would tell me it’s just the primitive part of my brain, trying to protect me from every eventual outcome – but it feels real, to me.
‘Which agency?’ I say, trying to distract myself.
‘In business development,’ she says, instead of answering me. ‘Suits and boots for us. Canary Wharf flat. Then suburbs. Babies.’ She lifts her phone up and responds to a text.
‘God,’ I say, looking away from her. ‘Are you still …’
‘Painting?’ she says.
Her paintings were always so beautiful. She had such flair. Was a true artist; would go into a painting hole sometimes, for weeks at a time. I left her to it, going for drinks with her when she emerged.
‘Yeah.’
‘Not really,’ she says. ‘It wasn’t … I don’t know. It wasn’t making me happy. I was just trying to get somewhere with it. I read something which says you should give up gracefully things not meant for you, and I thought … I don’t know. With everything that happened to you,’ she says, as the kettle starts whistling, ‘I just thought … I should stop messing around. You know? You had two years taken away and I want to just – get going. With life.’
‘Sure,’ I say easily, while reeling.
She picks up her beeping phone again. Her body language is cagey, which makes me look even more closely. Eventually, I stop and just ask her.
‘Who’s the texter?’ I say.
‘Tab.’
‘Tab?’
‘Tabitha. She’s one of Jonty’s friends. We met on the boat, last summer.’
‘Your boat party,’ I say.
‘Yep. She’s nice. You’d like her. She’s a teacher.’
‘Where does she live?’
‘Kent. Commutes in.’
‘A commuter,’ I say. ‘I guess you don’t do many Friday drinks with her.’
‘We do different stuff.’
‘Like what?’ I ask, telling myself that it’s okay. It’s been two years. Of course she’s found other friends.
‘We sit in her garden,’ she says. ‘It’s massive. Suburbia’s kind of appealing, actually.’
‘You’re moving to Canary Wharf.’
‘Yeah. We probably will move out, one day. It just makes sense, doesn’t it? That’s why everyone does these things. Because they make sense.’
I scrutinize her face. She still has the same squinty eyes, attractive colour in her cheeks requiring no blusher. But inside is different. It must be, for her to say those things. We once sat on the steps on the way down to Gordon’s bar, drinking red wine and looking down into the crammed, candlelit cellar below. ‘London’s oldest bar,’ Laura had said, and we had agreed then never to leave, never to be miserable on the 07.04 to Paddington like everybody else. ‘Why would I move away from all this?’ I had said, gesturing down into the bar and behind us, at the buzz of London on a warm Friday night.
‘Well, I won’t,’ I say now.
Laura shrugs, grabs a storage box and passes it to Jonty, who disappears off the boat. Her phone goes again, and she taps out a response.
‘We should go out. Together,’ I say, gesturing to her phone. ‘I’d love to meet her.’
Laura hesitates, just barely, then continues texting. ‘She doesn’t know you,’ she says after a few seconds, still looking down.