And there is Flora MacKenzie, with her elbows out, waiting to get on the little driverless train that will take her into the absurd spaghetti chaos of Bank station. You can see her: she’s just stepping on. Her hair is a strange color, very, very pale. Not blond, and not red exactly, and kind of possibly strawberry blond, but more faded than that. It’s almost not a color at all. And she is ever so slightly too tall; and her skin is pale as milk and her eyes are a watery color and it’s sometimes quite difficult to tell exactly what color they are. And there she is, her bag and her briefcase tight by her side, wearing a raincoat that she’s not sure is too light or too heavy for the day.
At this moment in time, still pretty early in the morning, Flora MacKenzie isn’t thinking about whether she’s happy or sad, although that is shortly going to become very, very important.
If you could have stopped and asked her how she was feeling right at that moment, she’d probably have just said, “Tired.” Because that’s what people in London are. They’re exhausted or knackered or absolutely frantic all the time because . . . well, nobody’s sure why, it just seems to be the law, along with walking quickly and lining up outside pop-up restaurants and never, ever going to Madame Tussauds.
She’s thinking about whether she will be able to get into a position where she can read her book; about whether the waistband on her skirt has become tighter, while simultaneously and regretfully thinking that if that thought ever occurs to you, it almost certainly has; about whether the weather is going to get hotter, and if so, is she going to go bare-legged (this is problematic for many reasons, not least because Flora’s skin is paler than milk and resists any attempts to rectify this. She tried fake tan, but it looked as if she’d waded into a paddling pool full of gravy. And as soon as she started walking, the backs of her knees got sweaty—she hadn’t even known the backs of your knees could get sweaty—and long dribbling white lines cut through the tan, as her office mate Kai kindly pointed out to her. Kai has the most creamy coffee-colored skin and Flora envies it very much. She also prefers autumn in London, on the whole).
She is thinking about the Tinder date she had the other night, where the guy who had seemed so nice online immediately started making fun of her accent, as everybody does, everywhere, all the time, then, when he saw this wasn’t impressing her, suggested they skip dinner and just go back to his house, and this is making her sigh.
She’s twenty-six, and had a lovely party to prove it, and everyone got drunk and said that she was going to find a boyfriend any day, or, alternately, how it was that in London it was just impossible to meet anyone nice; there weren’t any men and the ones there were were gay or married or evil, and in fact not everyone got drunk because one of her friends was pregnant for the first time and kept making a massive deal out of it while pretending not to and being secretly delighted. Flora was pleased for her, of course she was. She doesn’t want to be pregnant. But even so.
Flora is squashed up against a man in a stylish suit. She glances up, briefly, just in case, which is ridiculous: she’s never seen him get the DLR; he always arrives looking absolutely spotless and uncreased and she knows he lives in town somewhere.
As usual, at her birthday party, Flora’s friends knew better than to ask her about her boss after she’d had a couple of glasses of prosecco. The boss on whom she has the most ridiculous, pointless crush.
If you have ever had an utterly agonizing crush, you will know what this is like. Kai knows exactly how pointless this crush is, because he works for him too, and can see their boss clearly for exactly what he is, which is a terrible bastard. But there is of course no point in telling this to Flora.
Anyway, the man on the train is not him. Flora feels stupid for looking. She feels fourteen whenever she so much as thinks about him, and her pale cheeks don’t hide her blushes at all. She knows it’s ridiculous and stupid and pointless. She still can’t help it.
She starts half reading her book on her Kindle, crammed in the tiny car, trying not to swing into anyone, half looking out of the window, dreaming. Other things bubbling in her mind:
a) She’s getting another new flatmate. People move so often in and out of her big Victorian flatshare, she rarely gets to know any of them. Their old mail piles up in the hallway amid the skeletons of dead bicycles, and she thinks someone should do something about it, but she doesn’t do anything about it.
b) Whether she should move again.
c) Boyfriend. Sigh.
d) Time for Pret A Manger?
e) Maybe a new hair color? Something she could remove? Would that shiny gray suit her, or would she look like she had gray hair?
f) Life, the future, everything.
g) Whether to paint her room the same color as her new hair, or whether that would mean she had to move too.
h) Happiness and stuff.
i) Cuticles.
j) Maybe not silver, maybe blue? Maybe a bit blue? Would that be okay in the office? Could she buy a blue bit and put it in, then take it out?
k) Cat?
And she’s on her way to work, as a paralegal, in the center of London, and she isn’t happy particularly, but she isn’t sad because, Flora thinks, this is just what everyone does, isn’t it? Cram themselves onto a commute. Eat too much cake when it’s someone’s birthday in the office. Vow to go to the gym at lunchtime but don’t make it. Stare at a screen for so long they get a headache. Order too much from ASOS then forget to send it back.
Sometimes she goes from tube to house to office without even noticing what the weather is doing. It’s just a normal, tedious day.
Although in two hours and forty-five minutes, it won’t be.
Chapter Two
Meanwhile, three miles to the west, a blond woman was shouting, loudly.
She was gorgeous. Even annoyed and spitting after a sleepless and exceptionally energetic night, her hair roughed up and tumbling about her shoulders, she was still leggy, clear-skinned, and utterly beautiful.
Outside there was the low hum of traffic, just discernible through the triple-glazed glass of the penthouse apartment. The early-morning clouds were low, settling on the thrusting towers of the City skyline and over the river Thames—it was an incredible view—but the forecast threatened a damp, muggy day, hot and uncomfortable. The blonde was yelling, but Joel was simply staring out of the window, which didn’t help matters. She’d started out nice, suggesting dinner that night, but as soon as Joel had made it clear he wasn’t particularly interested in dinner that night, and that in fact three meetings was probably very much enough possibly for his entire life, she’d turned nasty pretty fast, and now she was shouting because she was not used to people treating her like this.
“You want to know your problem?”
Joel did not.
“You think that you’re all right underneath. That that makes it okay to behave like an absolute bastard all the time. That there’s a soft side to you somewhere and you can turn it on and off at will. And I’m telling you, you can’t.”
Joel wondered how long this was going to take. He had a psychiatrist who generally wasn’t as direct as this. He wanted a cup of coffee. No: he wanted her to leave, then he wanted a cup of coffee. He wondered if looking at his phone would speed matters up. It did.