December 31
I CICLES ARE DRIPPING all down the alley, catching the slanted sun. There’s a barstool propping open the door of Le Croc, and inside Holly is hoovering, attired in baggy army trousers, a white T-shirt, and a khaki baseball cap, which doubles as a ponytail scrunchie. A droplet from an icicle above finds the gap between my coat and my neck and sizzles between my shoulder blades. Holly senses me and turns. As the Hoover’s groan dies, I say, “Knock-knock.”
She recognizes me. “We’re not open. Come back in nine hours.”
“You say, ‘Who’s there?’ It’s a knock-knock joke.”
“I refuse even to open the door, Hugo Lamb.”
“But it’s already a bit open. And look,” I hold up the paper bags from the patisserie, “breakfast. Surely Günter has to let you eat?”
“Some of us had breakfast two hours ago, Poshboy.”
“If you go to Richmond Boys College you get ridiculed for the crime of not being posh enough. How about a midmorning snackette, then?”
“Le Croc doesn’t clean itself.”
“Don’t Günter and your colleague ever help?”
“Günter’s the owner, Monique’s hired just as bar staff. They’ll be wrapped up in each other until after lunch. Literally, as it happens: Günter left his third wife a few weeks ago. So the privilege of sloshing out the sty falls to the manager.”
I look around. “Where’s the manager?”
“You’re looking at her, y’eejit. Me.”
“Oh. Then if Poshboy does the men’s lavvy, will you take a twenty-minute break?”
Holly hesitates. A part of her wants to say yes. “See that long thing? It’s called a mop. You hold the pointy end.”
“TOLD YOU IT was a sty.” Like a time traveler operating her machine, Holly pulls the handles and swivels the valves of the chrome coffeemaker. It hisses, belches, and gurgles.
I wash my hands and take a couple of barstools off a table. “That was one of the most disgusting things I’ve ever done. Men are pigs. They wipe their arses, then miss the toilet bowl, and just leave the scrunched-up shitty tissue where it fell. And the splattered puke in the last cubicle—nice. Vomit sets if it’s just left there. Like Polyfilla.”
“Switch your nose off. Breathe with your mouth.” She brings over a cappuccino. “And someone had to clean every toilet you’ve ever used. If your dad had run a pub instead of a bank, like mine did, it might’ve been you. Thought for the Day.”
I take out an almond croissant and slide the other bags to Holly. “Why don’t you do the cleaning the night before?”
Holly unravels the edge of an apricot pastry. “Günter’s regulars don’t piss off till three in the morning, if I’m lucky. You try facing the cleaning at that time after nine hours’ worth of serving drinks.”
I concede the point. “Well, the bar’s looking battle-ready now.”
“Sort of. I’ll clean the taps later, then restock.”
“There was I, thinking bars just ran themselves.”
She lights a cigarette. “I’d be out of a job if they did.”
“Do you see yourself in, uh, hospitality long-term?”
Holly’s frown is a warning. “What’s it to you?”
“I just … Dunno. You seem capable of doing anything.”
Her frown is both wary and weary. She taps ash from her cigarette. “The schools the lower orders go to don’t exactly encourage you to think that way. Hairdressing courses or garage apprenticeships were more the thing.”
“You can’t blame a crap school forever, though.”
She taps her cigarette. “You’re clever, obviously. But there are some areas where you really don’t know shit, Mr. Lamb.”
I nod and sip my coffee. “Your French teacher was brilliant.”
“My French teacher was nonexistent. I picked it up on the job. Survival. Fending off Frenchmen.”
I dig a bit of almond from my teeth. “So where’s the pub?”
“What pub?”
“The one your dad works in.”
“Owns. Co-owns, in fact, with my mam. It’s the Captain Marlow, by the Thames at Gravesend.”
“Sounds picturesque. Is that where you grew up?”
“ ‘Gravesend’ and ‘picturesque’ don’t exactly waltz around arm in arm. It’s a lot of closed-down factories, paper mills, Blue Circle cement works, council estates, pawn shops, and bookies.”
“It can’t all be misery and postindustrial decay.”
She searches the bottom of her cup. “The older streets are nice, I s’pose. The Thames is always the Thames, and the Captain Marlow’s three centuries old—apparently there’s a letter by Charles Dickens that proves he used to drink there. How ’bout that, Poshboy? A literary reference.”
My blood’s zinging with coffee. “Is your mum Irish?”
“What leads you to that deduction, Sherlock?”
“You said ‘with my mam,’ not ‘with my mum.’ ”
Holly exhales a fat loop of smoke. “Yeah, she’s from Cork. Don’t your friends get annoyed when you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Sifting what they say for clues instead of listening.”
“I’m a detail nerd, that’s all. Have you started the clock on my twenty minutes, by the way?”
“You’re down to”—she checks—“sixteen.”
“Then I’d like to spend the remainder playing bar football.”
Holly scrunches her face. “Bad idea.”
I never know if she’s serious. “How come?”
“ ’Cause I’ll scalp your arse, Poshboy.”
? ? ?
THE TOWN SQUARE is patchy with melting snow and busy with shoppers, and a red-cheeked brass band’s playing carols. I buy a fund-raising calendar from some school kids and their teacher at a stall by the statue of St. Agnès, and get a chorus of “Merci, Monsieur!” and “Happy New Year,” because my accent tells them I’m English. Holly Sykes did indeed scalp my arse at bar football; she scored rebound goals off the sides, she can lob, and her left-handed goalie’s a lethal weapon. She didn’t smile but I think she enjoyed her victory. We made no plans, but I said I’d drop by the bar tonight, and instead of answering Eeyore-ishly or sarcastically, she just said I’d know where to find her. Stunning progress, and I almost fail to recognize Olly Quinn in the phone box by the bank. He’s looking agitated. If he’s using a phone box instead of Chetwynd-Pitt’s phone, he doesn’t want to be overheard. Would I be fully human if curiosity didn’t get the better of me occasionally? I hide behind the solid wall of the booth where Olly can’t see me. Thanks to a bad line and his angst, Olly’s voice is loud and every punched-out sentence is pretty clear. “You did, Ness. You did! You said you loved me too! You said—”
Oh dear. Despair is as attractive as cold sores.
“Seven times. The first was in bed. I remember … Maybe it was six, maybe eight, who cares, Ness, I … So what’s that about, Ness? Was it one big lie? … Then was it some—some mind-fucking experiment?”
Too late to slam on the brakes now; we’re over the edge.
“No no no, I’m not getting hysterical, I just … No, I’m not, I don’t get what happened, so … What? What was that last bit? This line’s shit … No, not what you said—I said the phone line’s shit … What’s that? You thought you meant it?”
Olly punches the glass of the phone box, hard. “How can you think you love someone? … No, Ness, no, no—don’t hang up. Look. Just … I want things back to how we were, Ness!… But if you’d explain, if you’d talk, if you’d … I am calm. I’m calm. No, Ness! No no no—”
A phony peace, then an explosive “Fuck it!”
Quinn hammers his fist on the glass a few times. This attracts attention, so I slip back into the stream of shoppers and loop back around the way I came, sideways as I pass, for long enough to see my lovesick classmate folded over, hiding his face in his hands. Crying—in public! The unedifying sight sobers me a tad with regard to Holly. Remember: What Cupid gives, Cupid takes away.