Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Trevor and Margaux Problem
Overheard this week: A man on the Overground, to no one in particular — "I don't know why I keep coming back to this city." He got off at New Cross. I've been thinking about it for four days. I've constructed seven possible explanations. None of them are satisfying. This is a problem.
The couple at table seven have been fighting for eleven minutes.
I know because I've been watching them since I sat down, which sounds worse than it is. I'm not a voyeur. I'm a copy editor. I notice things. It's a professional hazard, and also, frankly, a personality feature that my therapist and I have agreed to describe as "heightened pattern recognition" rather than anything with a longer name that involves more paperwork.
The woman—mid-thirties, silk blouse, the particular tight-jawed composure of someone who decided long ago that she would not cry in public—has ordered a flat white she isn't drinking. The man across from her has the posture of someone who knows he's done something wrong but hasn't quite decided how wrong. His hands keep moving toward the shortbread biscuit on the saucer and retreating. He's said "I know" four times in the last three minutes.
I've been counting.
I count things. Not, like, compulsively — okay, yes, exactly like compulsively, but in a way that has never once caused a problem, except for the time I miscounted the steps to my flat after the council repaved the path and missed the bottom stair and twisted my ankle, but that was the pavement's fault, not the counting's. I count "I know"s, I count the number of times someone stirs their coffee, I count the ceiling tiles in rooms where I'm nervous. It's not a thing. It's just a thing I do.
Five "I know"s. He's said it again.
I've named them Trevor and Margaux. This is also not a thing, except it absolutely is. Every regular at every place I frequent has a name. Every stranger I've spent more than four minutes observing has a name, a backstory, at least one formative childhood experience I've invented for them, and usually a pet. I've given Trevor and Margaux a Labrador named Biscuit — inspired by the shortbread. Biscuit is not part of this argument but is, I feel, peripherally relevant to its resolution.
I know that Margaux grew up somewhere cold — not Scotland cold, somewhere further, Scandinavia possibly, I can tell by the way she holds her coffee mug, two hands wrapped around it, like warmth is something you have to claim deliberately. And Trevor, I think, is the kind of man who makes very good first impressions and slightly worse second ones. The kind of man who buys flowers when he's wrong, which is thoughtful in the moment and reveals something complicated in retrospect.
My own tea goes cold. I let it.
This is Anchor Coffee. I want to be clear about my relationship with this place. Not that I own it — the lease belongs to Dom, who appears every Tuesday to top up the sugar canisters and have a loud argument with someone on his mobile in the back room — but in the sense that I have been coming here every morning for two years, and I have a corner table, and a specific chair, and an understanding with Gus the barista that has transcended the transactional. Gus started making my order when he saw me walking up Lamb's Conduit Street. He has never once got it wrong. This is the most stable relationship in my life and I try not to examine this too closely.
The chair: third from the left wall, facing the door, slight wobble on the front-right leg that I've learned to distribute my weight around. On the two occasions someone else has been sitting in it, I have had to stand in the entrance for a full thirty seconds recalibrating before choosing a backup table and spending the entire morning slightly off, like a compass held too near a magnet.
Dani says this is not normal. I say it's a preference. Dani says preferring a specific chair to the point of a thirty-second entrance-paralysis is the dictionary definition of something. We have agreed to disagree, largely because Dani cannot go to bed with the kitchen tap not fully, completely, verifiably off, and we have found a comfortable détente where neither of us comments on the other's rituals before 8 AM.
Over by the window, Bun Lady is on her third coffee. Bun Lady comes in at 7:45 every morning — I mean every morning, I've tracked it, she hasn't missed a Tuesday in fourteen months — orders an Americano, sits in the same window seat with a view of the street, and reads physical newspapers. Not a phone, not a tablet. Actual paper. She unfolds them with ceremony. Her bun has never, not once in two years, had a single hair out of place, and I find this both admirable and faintly threatening, like a very beautiful building with no visible exits. I don't know her name. I call her Margaret, which feels right.
Two tables to her left, The Wig is settling in for his morning ritual. The Wig — I mean this with absolute tenderness — is a man of perhaps sixty who wears a hairpiece that might have been convincing in 2003 and is now doing its absolute best under difficult circumstances. He thinks no one has noticed. The entire café has noticed. We have all, silently and collectively, decided never to say anything, because he comes in every single day and tips generously and calls Gus "young man" with such genuine warmth that we are all quietly rooting for him. His name, from an overheard contactless payment moment, is Ronald. I think of him as Ronald and also, in my more philosophical moments, as a small daily act of faith — the kind that says I will show up. I will do my best. I will present, and the presenting will become its own kind of true.
I have spent more time thinking about Ronald than about several people I've been on dates with.
The thing is, I've spent the last three days at this particular corner table partly because the light through the Lamb's Conduit Street windows is good in the mornings and mostly because I'm supposed to be writing. The novel. My novel. The one I've been "working on" for two and a half years, which currently exists as 11,000 words, forty-seven abandoned first chapters, and a folder on my desktop labeled "DO NOT OPEN (open immediately)." The folder has sub-folders. The sub-folders are colour-coded. The colour-coding system made perfect sense when I created it at 1 AM in March and now requires a key document I've saved separately, titled "KEY (for the folder, not a metaphor, although)."
Today's attempt: a woman who discovers her upstairs neighbour has been secretly watering her balcony plants while she's at work.
Very original. Very not something I wrote at 2 AM after watching a documentary about houseplants and their emotional significance. Definitely not that.
I'd written the first sentence — She noticed the petunias first — six times. Then I changed it to The petunias, she'd notice later, were the first sign and read it back to myself until the rhythm felt right, which took eleven reads, and by the time I looked up, Trevor was reaching across the table and touching Margaux's hand.
After that I couldn't write anything at all, because I needed to know if she was going to pull away.
She didn't.
She looked down at their joined hands for a long moment, the way you'd look at a maths problem you weren't sure you believed the answer to. Then she turned her palm over.
I exhale. I didn't realise I'd been holding it.
This is the part where most people would look away — give them their privacy, stop watching strangers in coffee shops, behave like a normal twenty-three-year-old woman. My flatmate Dani has pointed this out frequently, with the specific energy of someone who has watched me miss the Peckham Rye stop because I was too invested in a stranger's phone argument. You get too invested, Nell. They're strangers.
Yes. But strangers are just stories you haven't been told yet, and my brain — my specific, slightly overclocked, refuses-to-let-anything-go brain — has never once been able to leave a story unfinished. I've read the last chapter of every book I've started before I was halfway through, not because I lack patience but because the not-knowing creates a low-grade hum behind my eyes that makes it very hard to concentrate on anything else.
This is, my therapist says, both my greatest strength and my most predictable obstacle. She means it kindly. I'm fairly sure she means it kindly.
I pay my bill. Exact change, rounded to a clean tip — I always tip to a whole pound because jagged numbers feel unresolved, and I am a person who has strong feelings about resolution. I pick up my bag. I do not look at Trevor and Margaux again, because I want to keep the image of her hand turning over in his. That's the right ending for these two. They're going to be okay.
I've decided. They should behave accordingly.
Harlow & Pine is three floors above a dry cleaner on Theobalds Road, Holborn — close enough to Bloomsbury that we pretend we're in Bloomsbury. You ring a bell to be let in, which feels like an anachronism and is. The staircase smells of old paper and, on Thursdays, of whatever Preethi has brought in for lunch, which is always something with cumin and always slightly too good for a work Thursday.
We publish literary fiction mostly, and the occasional memoir by someone who has lived a life so extraordinary it would be rude not to document it. My job is to catch the mistakes — misplaced commas, anachronisms, the moments where an author writes disinterested when they mean uninterested, which is a crime I take personally and have once flagged in an editorial note in capital letters. My manager described this as "slightly aggressive." I described it as "proportionate." We moved on, mostly.
My desk is by the east-facing window. Good morning light, bad afternoon glare, fair trade. In the upper left corner, where the wall meets the wooden frame, there is a spider's web.
Day twenty-two.
Gerald — I've named the spider Gerald; I've been waiting for someone to ask, no one has asked, I choose to interpret this as awe — has been building his empire since the second week of April. He's caught three flies and what appears to be an adventurous piece of lint that blew in when someone opened the window on the 14th. I have noted his progress in my phone under a contact named Gerald (Spider, Work) with timestamped entries and, since Day Eighteen, actual measurements. The web is currently 4.3 centimetres across. He expanded 0.8 centimetres this week. I made a small graph. The graph has axis labels.
I know how this sounds.
"You're doing that thing again," says Preethi, dropping a manuscript on the corner of my desk without looking up from her own.
"What thing?"
"The staring-at-nothing thing. You get a look on your face like you're watching a very good film that only you can see."
"I was updating Gerald's measurements."
Preethi looks at the corner. Looks back at me. Very slowly. "The spider."
"Up 0.8 centimetres. That's significant growth for a single week."
"Nell—"
"There's a graph."
She picks up her manuscript and leaves. She does this most days. I find her consistency genuinely soothing.
I open my laptop. I type She noticed the petunias first, read it back twice, change first to earliest, read it three times, change it back to first. Close the laptop.
The couple at Anchor will have walked home by now — I think they walked, Margaux had sensible shoes despite the silk blouse, which tells you everything about who she actually is versus who she dresses to be. They'll have talked properly somewhere along Holborn, or down through the little streets near Lincoln's Inn Fields where it's quiet enough to say hard things. Trevor probably apologised near the second turning. Margaux probably said I know back at him — not as acceptance, but as a door left slightly open.
Biscuit, I decide, will greet them both equally and without judgment. That's what dogs are for.
I open a new document. Type: She turned her palm over.
Stare at it.
Close the laptop. Pick up the manuscript I'm meant to be editing. Remind myself, for the forty-seventh time this year, that I need to start living in my own story instead of everyone else's.
I manage to believe this for almost four minutes.
Personal best.
My phone buzzes — Dani: Coming to Anchor after work?
Obviously, I type back.
Anchor Coffee. My corner table. The place where I've written approximately zero words of my novel and kept running notes on forty-six strangers, sorted by date and a tagging system I've been refining since January, which Dani has seen and described, correctly, as "the sort of thing they find in flats after the person has gone missing."
I don't know, as I put my phone away and turn back to someone else's words on someone else's page, that tomorrow morning a man I've never seen before will sit two tables away from me and say something into his phone that I will spend the next three weeks trying to unhear.
I will count how many times I think about it.
I'll lose count by Tuesday.