Chapter 4
Chapter 4: Four Mornings, No Sign
Overheard this week: Two women at the bus stop on Gray's Inn Road — "She said she wasn't angry, but she put the bins out on the wrong day." "On purpose?" Long pause. "Nobody knows." I've been thinking about this for six days.
He doesn't come back on Wednesday.
I'm fine with this. I wasn't expecting him. I arrived at 8:14, which is three minutes earlier than usual, purely because the 36 bus was running ahead of schedule, which is so statistically anomalous that I made a note of it. The note says: 36 bus, early, 8:11 AM. Unprecedented. I have been taking the 36 for two years and it has never once been early. This is simply a data point worth recording.
I sit in my corner. Gus brings my flat white. I open my laptop.
Table five is occupied by a man in a fleece who is on a video call and gesticulating in a way that seems disproportionate to whatever is being discussed. He is not quiet. He is not still. He is the opposite of the person who sat there yesterday, and I feel about this the way you feel when you've been reading a very good book and you pick it up again and realise someone has moved your bookmark.
I write for forty minutes. Four hundred and twelve words, which is — I check — four hundred and twelve more words than I've written on any morning this week before yesterday. Something has loosened. I don't examine it closely because examining it closely is how I've ruined every good writing stretch I've ever had, by looking directly at it until it goes shy and disappears.
I leave at 8:58 and turn left on Lamb's Conduit Street toward Theobalds Road, and I am absolutely not looking back over my shoulder.
He doesn't come back on Thursday either.
I write six hundred and eight words. Gerald's web is now 4.7 centimetres. Preethi notices that I am in a slightly better mood and says so, and I say "thank you, Preethi," and she narrows her eyes in the way she does when she suspects something but hasn't assembled enough evidence yet.
On the way home I walk past the bookshop on Lambs Conduit Street — Persephone Books, which is the kind of place that makes you feel both very well-read and slightly inadequate — and I stand outside it for three minutes looking at the window, not because I'm considering going in, but because there's a woman inside with the same kind of stillness as the man from table five, and I'm trying to decide if stillness is a personality trait or a choice, and whether it can be learned, and what it says about a person that they carry that particular quality of contained-ness in a city that is almost entirely composed of noise.
I go home on the Overground. I write eight hundred and three more words on my phone, standing up, getting increasingly elbowed near New Cross Gate.
The upstairs neighbour character — Daniel, I've called him, though I keep almost changing it — has acquired a habit. Every Sunday morning he makes coffee with a precision that is slightly unnerving, exact ratios, same cup, same spot on the counter, and he doesn't think of this as a ritual but it is. He draws structures in a small sketchbook he keeps on the kitchen table. Not for work. Just shapes. The undersides of bridges. He has never shown it to anyone.
I write this on my phone between New Cross and Peckham, hanging from the overhead rail, and when I read it back at the flat I think: where did that come from?
I save the file. Make tea. Don't think about it.
Friday morning. I'm at Anchor at 8:09. Earlier than Wednesday, which was already earlier than usual, and if I examined this progression I would have to acknowledge what it suggests, so I don't examine it. The bus was early again. This is simply a recurring statistical anomaly.
I have been writing, in the five days since I overheard the phone call, three thousand and forty-one words of my novel. Three thousand and forty-one words. The previous five-day record was four hundred and seventeen, in January, and I'd been so pleased about those four hundred and seventeen that I'd told Dani, who said "is that a lot?" and I said "for me, yes, massively," and she said "okay but that's like a long email" and I said "Dani, for the love of—" and then I didn't write anything for two weeks because the four hundred and seventeen words started looking small every time I opened the document.
I will not look too closely at the three thousand and forty-one. I will simply let them exist.
Table five is empty.
I sit. Gus brings my flat white. I open my laptop.
I've been writing the neighbour's perspective — Daniel — in third person, which is how I always write, but I've been inside his head in a way I normally can't access from third person, and I think it's because I have a clear sensory starting point. The way he wraps his hand around the coffee mug without looking at it. The way he looks slightly left when he's thinking. The careful way he says things, as if words are structural elements he's checking before committing.
I write four paragraphs. Read them back. Change two words. Read them back. Change one of the two back.
The door opens at 8:22.
I do not look up. I know this sounds unconvincing. It's also true. I am writing, and the door opens fairly regularly because this is a coffee shop, and I have no particular reason to —
He sits down at table five.
Same seat, same economy of movement, same quality of just being there without ceremony. He takes off his jacket and drapes it on the back of the chair rather than over it, which is something Daniel does in Chapter Four, which I have just this morning written.
I look at my screen.
She noticed the petunias first.
I have been on this sentence, on and off, for two and a half years. I look at it. I look at the man at table five, who has ordered black coffee and is now reading something on his phone with the particular stillness of someone reading something that requires patience.
I look at my screen.
She noticed the petunias first. He was watering them with the careful attention he gave most things — not out of love, or not only out of love, but because something left untended became a question he couldn't leave alone.
I read this back.
Something about this sentence is true in a way that makes me go very still.
I save the document. Open a new one. At the top I type: Notes — Daniel.
I start writing everything I know about him. Not description, not physical detail. The things underneath. The load-bearing things. The way he was shaped by a brilliant, distracted father into someone who learned early that needing nothing from anyone was a kindness — and a kind of armour — and that the armour had become so practised he'd stopped being able to tell the difference between not needing and not knowing how to ask.
I write four pages of notes about a man I have never spoken to, whose name I do not know, who is sitting two tables away from me drinking a black coffee on a Friday morning.
When I finally look up, the café has filled around me. It's 9:47. I am forty-seven minutes late for work.
I close my laptop, gather my things, pull on my coat. On the way out I pass table five. He glances up.
"Sorry," I say, "do you have the time?"
He looks at his phone. "Quarter to ten."
"Thank you." I'm already at the door.
"You're going to be late," he says. Not unkindly, just as an observation, the way you'd note a structural fact.
I look back at him. "I know."
I am out on Lamb's Conduit Street in the October morning, the grey London light sitting low over the rooftops, the smell of diesel and coffee and someone's bacon sandwich from the café round the corner, and I am walking very fast toward Theobalds Road, and I am thinking: his voice is exactly right.
I don't let myself examine what I mean by this.
I am forty-six minutes late. Preethi looks at me. I sit down, open my laptop, open the manuscript I'm supposed to be editing.
Gerald has expanded to 5.1 centimetres. This is an increase of 0.4 centimetres since Wednesday.
I update the graph.