You were different.
Do you remember, the first time we met? I know you do. You were signing books on your publisher’s stand at the Education Show at the NEC. I go every year. Tutoring is a lonely world and you have to plug yourself into the mains every now and then and get a fix of what everyone else is getting. You can’t be yesterday’s flavour of the month when it comes to these north London mummies. You have to keep on top of things.
But mainly I was there because I knew you were going to be there. I’d made an extra-special effort: I had on a skirt and tights and a lipstick the colour of toffee apples that set fire to my hair and made my blue eyes shine. I was forty-one years old. The autumn of my youth. Christ, virtually the winter. And yes, I was still a virgin.
You sat on a high stool at a high table, a small pile of your books in front of you. There was no one there, no queue, a small sign on the wall behind you that said ‘Author Floyd Dunn Will Be Signing Copies of His Book “Bad at Maths” Today, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m.’ And next to it a photo, that photo of you, the same one from inside your book that I’d stared at for so many hours, memorising the way your hair fell around your ears, the line your mouth made as it attempted a serious smile.
My eye went from the photo to you and back to the photo. You were thinner than I’d imagined. I’d expected a little belly, maybe. I don’t know why.
‘Hello!’ you said at my approach, as though someone had just plugged you in and switched you on. ‘Hello!’ You wouldn’t have known how nervous I was. You wouldn’t have guessed. I played it very, very cool.
‘Hello,’ I replied, my hands tight around my dog-eared copy of your book. ‘I have my own copy. Would you mind signing it for me?’
I passed it across to you and you smiled that smile you have, the one that makes your eyes into fireworks that go bang bang bang in my soul.
‘Well,’ you said, ‘that is a well-loved copy.’
I could have told you I’d read it thirty times. I could have told you that your book made me laugh more in a week than I’d laughed in the year before I read it. I could have told you that I was completely in awe of you. But I wanted you to see me as an equal. So I simply said, ‘It has been a very useful tool. I’m a maths tutor.’
‘Well,’ you said, ‘I am very glad to hear that.’ You took the book from me and held your pen over the title page. ‘Shall I sign it to you?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Please. Noelle.’
‘Noelle,’ you said. ‘That’s a lovely name. Were you a Christmas baby?’
‘Yes. December the twenty-fourth.’
‘Best Christmas present ever, eh?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘apparently not. Apparently I ruined Christmas Day for everyone.’
You laughed then; I hadn’t imagined a laugh for you. In your photo you looked as if you might go so far as a chuckle, if tickled to the point of no return. But no, you had a proper laugh where your mouth opened wide and your head tipped back on your neck and a big thunderclap boom exploded from you. I liked it, very much.
You wrote something after my name, I wanted to see what it was, but I didn’t want to look as though I cared.
‘You’re American,’ I said.
‘To a certain extent,’ you said. ‘And you’re Irish?’
‘Yes. To the fullest possible extent.’
You liked my little joke and you laughed again. It felt like someone massaging the inside of my stomach with velvet-gloved hands.
‘Where are you from?’
‘Near Dublin,’ I replied. ‘County Wicklow. Where all the sheep live.’
You laughed for a third time and I felt emboldened in a way I’d never felt before in my life. I looked behind me to check that a queue hadn’t built as we’d talked. But I still had you all to myself.
‘Are you here again tomorrow?’ I asked.
‘No. No. They’re putting me on a train back to London after this. Which leaves in, oh’ – you looked at your watch – ‘approximately two hours. I should probably be wrapping this up soon.’
‘Have you signed many books?’
‘Oh, yeah, hundreds and hundreds.’ You clicked the lid back on your pen and gave me a sideways smile. ‘Kidding,’ you said. ‘About twenty.’
‘Long way to come, to sign twenty books.’
‘I tend to agree with you.’
You slid the pen into your jacket pocket and turned away from me, looking about for a person to whisk you away, no doubt.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘I’ll let you get away. I hope you have a safe journey back to London. Whereabouts do you live?’
‘North London.’
‘Oh,’ I said, an Oscar-worthy moment of fakery, ‘snap. So do I.’
‘Oh!’ you said. ‘Whereabouts?’
‘Stroud Green.’
‘Well, well. What a coincidence. Me too.’
‘What? You live in Stroud Green?’ This I had not known. This I could never have believed to be possible.
‘Yes! Latymer Road. Do you know it?’
‘Yes,’ I said, joy virtually pouring out of my ears and my eyeballs and my nostrils. ‘Yes, I do know it. I’m just a few roads down from you.’
‘Well, well, well. Maybe our paths will cross again then?’
‘Yes,’ I’d said, as though it would be no more than a fun coincidence if they did, not the culmination of all my hopes and worldly dreams. ‘Maybe they will.’
Two weeks later, they did.
Twenty-eight
To say that I’d been stalking you would be an overstatement. We lived but two hundred feet apart after all. It would be fair, though, to say that I was going out a little more than I usually tended to. Coming upon a nearly empty bottle of milk in the fridge would fill me with delight. Oh dear, I shall have to visit the corner shop again. And if I returned to the realisation that I should also have bought a newspaper while I was out, well, that really wasn’t the end of the world. On with the coat, back to the high street, one eye open for you in one direction, another eye open for you in the other. And anything that gave me cause to pass the end of Latymer Road was a particular bonus.
And then one evening, there you were, in the convenience store, in a blue cagoule and jeans, a bottle of red wine hanging from your fist, studying the breakfast cereals intently. I said, ‘Floyd Dunn.’
You turned and you remembered me immediately. I knew you did. I hadn’t expected that. No one ever remembered me immediately. But you smiled and you said, ‘I know you. You were at the NEC.’
‘Yes, I was indeed. Noelle.’
I gave you my hand and you shook it.
‘Noelle. Of course. The unwanted Christmas present. How are you?’
‘I’m truly grand, thank you. And you?’
‘I am moderately grand, if that’s possible.’
‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘There are many shades of grand.’
There was a small moment then, I recall. It was likely awkward, but I’d be hard pressed to judge as my whole life until this point had been vaguely awkward. But you stepped into the moment and saved it and that was when I knew.