Chapter 2
Chapter 2: The Man at Table Five
Overheard this week: A woman at the pharmacy counter on Gray's Inn Road — "I just need something that works." The pharmacist asked, "For what?" Long pause. "Everything, ideally." I think about this at least three times a day now. I've given her a backstory. Her name is June.
He arrives at 8:17 the following morning.
I know the exact time because I was in the middle of a sentence — The petunias, she'd notice later, were the first sign that someone had been — and I'd been in the middle of that sentence for four minutes and thirty-one seconds, which I know because I time myself now, which was a productivity strategy I read about online that works in the narrow sense that I am very aware of how long I spend not writing.
The door opens. The bell above it does its small sound. I do not look up, because I am a professional, and I am writing, and I am not going to be distracted by every person who walks into—
He takes table five.
Table five is two tables to my left, slightly diagonal, in my direct eyeline if I look up from my screen, which I am not doing. I am not doing that. I am looking at my screen, at the sentence I've been in the middle of for now — I check — four minutes and fifty-eight seconds. I am writing. I am a woman in a coffee shop who is writing a novel, and that is the only thing that is happening.
He orders a black coffee. I hear this because the room is not large and his voice carries further than he thinks. I don't watch him order it. I'm writing.
The thing is, and this is purely observational, purely professional, the heightened pattern recognition my therapist has validated as a strength and a liability depending on context — he has a specific kind of stillness. Most people, when they sit down in a coffee shop, arrange themselves. They take off their coat and hang it somewhere, check their phone, look around the room to establish they're visible and not being judged, then look at their phone again as if the first check might have missed something. This man sits down and simply is there, the way a wall is there. Solid. Not performing solidity. Just that.
I look up for exactly three seconds to verify this observation.
He's looking at something on his phone, frowning slightly, in the way of someone who has received information they'd been expecting but not hoping for. His coffee arrives. He wraps one hand around it without looking at it — the way you find things by touch when you know where they are, muscle memory, comfort by habit.
I look back at my screen.
The petunias, she'd notice later, were the first sign that someone had been — I have no idea how to finish this sentence. I have never known how to finish this sentence. I've been on the word been for six minutes and I've come to believe that this sentence is the entire problem with the novel, which is to say: the novel is not actually about plants.
His phone rings.
He answers it. "Yeah." A pause in which the other person speaks. "No, I got it." Another pause, longer. His voice is low — not the exaggerated theatre whisper of someone trying not to be overheard, just quiet in the way of a person who is accustomed to not projecting. He doesn't hold his phone to his ear; he has it slightly away from him, speaker-adjacent but not full speaker, the posture of someone who talks on the phone reluctantly and has found the minimum viable distance.
I am not listening. I am writing. I have now been in the middle of this sentence for six minutes and forty-four seconds, and the sentence is about petunias, and I am completely focused on it.
"She just went ahead and announced it," he says. "I never said I was ready for that."
I look up.
I look back down. I look up again. This is involuntary. I want to be fully transparent: this is entirely involuntary.
He's turned slightly away from the room, one elbow on the table, shoulders carrying something. Not dramatic — just the posture of a person who is carrying something, in the way that load-bearing walls don't advertise what they're holding up. They're just there, doing it, without ceremony.
"Everyone's assuming now," he says, "and I don't know how to walk it back without hurting her."
Oh.
Oh no.
This is, I can tell already, a situation. A situation I am going to have absolutely no trouble not thinking about for the rest of the day and probably the next two days and possibly the better part of a week. I am going to be completely fine about this. I am going to finish this sentence, leave this coffee shop, turn left onto Theobalds Road, go to my office, drink Preethi's terrible instant coffee that she insists is "perfectly adequate," and edit someone else's sentences for eight hours, and not at any point construct an elaborate theory about what this man's life is.
"The announcement was her idea," he says. "Not mine."
The announcement. There has been an announcement of some kind. I am processing this. I am filing it. I am absolutely not —
"I don't even know if I want to be here," he says, and his voice has a quality I recognise — not self-pity, the absence of self-pity, the flat affect of someone who has been sitting with a feeling for so long it has stopped having sharp edges, worn smooth by the carrying of it.
There's a short silence on his end while the other person speaks.
Gus arrives at my table. "Top-up, Nell?"
"Please," I say, without looking away from my screen, and Gus, who has been making my coffee for two years and understands the code, does this without further comment or observation.
"Yeah," the man says. "I know." He says it the way you say something when you don't mean it as agreement, when I know means I know and I am still not able to do anything about it, which is the problem. "I'll figure it out."
He rings off.
I have now been in the middle of my sentence for nine minutes and twelve seconds, and I have heard approximately ninety words of what is clearly the opening chapter of someone else's life, and I have absolutely no intention of — I'm already doing it. I'm already naming the feeling and giving it structure and building toward a conclusion. I cannot help this. I have tried. It's simply how I'm made.
His name is — I'll call him Daniel. He has, I'm now certain, been in a relationship with a woman who moved faster than he was ready for. She made some kind of announcement — an announcement, public, definitive, the kind that creates a weight of expectation that's very difficult to shift without causing pain to someone who meant well. He said her idea, not mine with the particular exhaustion of a person who has been having this argument in his head for some time and has not yet found a version of it that ends differently. He said I don't even know if I want to be here and I heard two meanings in it simultaneously, possibly three.
He is trapped. Gently, quietly, completely trapped, by someone who loves him and has accidentally built a cage out of it.
I give him, also, a golden Labrador named Biscuit. This is not a rational decision. I make it anyway.
I stare at my screen.
The petunias, she'd notice later, were the first sign that someone had been paying attention all along.
Eleven words. I write them in one go. Then the next sentence, and the one after, and I write for twenty-three minutes without stopping, without timing myself, without reading anything back. The upstairs neighbour — Daniel — has turned, in twenty-three minutes, from a vague concept about plants into a person. He's quiet in that specific way. He carries things without showing the effort. He looks slightly to the left when he's thinking, as if the answer lives just off-screen in a room only he can see.
I did not decide this about him. It arrived.
When I look up, table five is empty.
He's gone.
I look at the door, as if I might catch a last view of him through the glass, but the morning crowd on Lamb's Conduit Street has thickened in the time I was writing — a woman with a bicycle navigating the kerb, a man in a suit looking at his watch with the expression of someone for whom the watch is delivering bad news, a child being towed at high speed toward something educational — and the man from table five has dissolved into London the way London takes people: completely and immediately, as if the city absorbed him.
I look back at my screen.
I have written a scene. A real one. The first real scene in two and a half years, by which I mean the first scene that is not a false start or a clever opening that leads nowhere, but a scene with a character who has a specific quality of selfhood, who I can feel as a person and not as a narrative function. My plant-watering neighbour has unexpectedly become someone.
I close my laptop. Drink the last of my tea — stone cold, which I notice and don't mind, which is how I know the session was good. Pull on my coat. Gather my things.
At the door I pause.
I look back at table five.
I need to know how his story ends.
This is, I recognise, not a fully healthy thought. This is exactly the kind of thought I have approximately five times a week about complete strangers in various states of living their lives near me, and it has never once led to anything except a very complete set of notes on people who will never know I exist. The sensible response — the proportionate, ordinary, non-Nell response — is to walk out, turn left, do my job, edit eight hours of someone else's words, go home on the Overground, and let this particular stranger be a stranger.
That is the sensible response.
I'm back at 8:14 the following morning.
Just in case.
I bring my notebook as well as my laptop. The notebook is new — I started it this morning, specifically for this, which is something I am not going to examine closely. On the first page I've written: Daniel. What he's carrying. What he's not saying. The shape of the quiet.
Below it, one line, written at 7:58 AM before I left the flat: Biscuit. Golden. Excellent energy.