AI The rain had been working the windows of the Raven's Nest since noon, and by nine it had driven everyone home but the regulars and the desperate. Rory sat at the bar with a plate of chips going cold, her delivery bag slumped on the stool beside her like a second, tireder version of herself. Silas stood at the far end, working the crossword with a pencil he kept behind his ear, and every so often the paper rustled like something being interrogated .
"Seven letters," he said. "Beggar. Starts with M."
"Mendicant."
"Mm." He wrote it in without conceding that she might be wrong. That was the whole of their arrangement, really — he let her pull the odd pint against her rent, she did his crossword, and neither of them said more about it than the arrangement required.
The door opened with its wet-weather groan, and a woman came in unwinding a scarf, and Rory knew her before she knew her. Knew the shape of the gesture, the impatient flip of the wrist at the end, the way she shook the rain off like a dog that had decided not to mind it. Then the woman looked up, and Rory's stomach dropped through the floor of the bar and into the cellars, into the Underground, into the grey water under the pier at Cardiff Bay where they used to stand and shout at the wind.
"Rory?"
The voice hadn't changed. That was the cruel part. Faces changed and bodies changed and voices stayed, so that dead people could live in them, and so could the living, which was somehow worse.
"Eva."
Eva crossed the room slowly , as if the floor might not hold her, and Rory stood to meet her and got a good look at her under the green-tinged lamplight. Eva had been the loudest person in any room in Cardiff, a girl who filled doorways and dared them to be narrower, dark hair in a wild mass that laughed at hairbrushes. The woman in front of her had that hair pinned flat to her skull. She was thin in the particular way that means meals skipped, not diets kept. She wore a good coat, a careful coat, and she took the stool with her back to the wall and her eyes on the door, and Rory knew that trick . She had done it herself for a year, sitting where she could see the entrance of every pub and restaurant in London, until Silas had looked at her one night and said, "You'll wear yourself out before anything comes through the door," and she had cried in the loos for reasons she still hadn't fully sorted.
"You look well," Eva said, and it came out sounding like grief.
"You look—" Rory began, and Eva smiled a small, tidy smile that closed the sentence for her.
"Manchester's got good trams," Eva said. "That's something."
"How long's it been?"
"Three and a half years." She said it instantly, precisely . People who are lonely count. Rory had counted too, once, in a flat in Cardiff with the curtains drawn.
Silas drifted down the bar without appearing to move, and set a gin and tonic in front of Eva, lime pushed down into it with a spoon, the way she'd always mangled them herself at eighteen. He didn't ask what she wanted. He tapped his silver signet ring once against the wood, a small sound like a full stop, and limped back to his crossword.
"You didn't order that," Rory said.
"I didn't have to. He's got a face like a man who knows things." Eva looked at the glass like it was a photograph of somebody. Then she picked it up and drank, and made a face — a lime-sour, eighteen-year-old face — and for one second the old Eva stood inside the new one like a woman framed in a doorway.
They talked the way old friends talk when they're being careful, which is to say they talked about mothers. Jennifer Carter was still teaching Year Six and still sending Rory clippings about pupillage she would never do. Eva's mum was still in Pontcanna, still asking after "that lovely Silas" she'd never met, on the strength of Rory's descriptions alone. Rory told her about the Golden Empress, about Yu-Fei's dumplings and the bicycle she'd bought second-hand and named Brendan, after her father, because it was stubborn and it had cost her money she'd never get back.
Eva laughed. It cracked her open an inch. "You were going to be a barrister."
"I was going to be miserable. I got out of that one."
The laugh died and Eva turned her glass a quarter turn, and a quarter turn back, and Rory saw the ring on her finger — plain gold, turning and turning like a thing being wound.
"You married him, then," Rory said. "The Manchester one. Daniel."
"It didn't take," Eva said. "Separated." And then, in the bright, rehearsed voice that Rory knew better than her own: "It's fine, it's all fine, it was one of those things, you know how it —"
"Ev."
The word sat on the bar between them like the ring Eva had stopped turning. Somewhere behind them the crossword pencil scratched. Rain kept up its long argument with the window.
Eva reached across the bar and took Rory's left wrist, turned it over, and put her thumb just below the small crescent scar there, not touching it, hovering, like a bird over water. "Still tell people it was a dog?"
"You know it was the gate at Nan Ellis's. You were there. You dared me."
"I did not." A pause. "I absolutely did."
They looked at each other over Rory's wrist, over the moon-shaped evidence of a summer they'd both survived, and Rory watched the careful coat and the pinned hair and the thin wrists and the seat facing the door, and she understood that she was reading a letter written in a language she'd been fluent in once, and she said, quietly, so that only Eva and possibly Silas and definitely Silas would hear:
"Where are you staying?"
"There's a Travelodge by Euston."
"Since when?"
"Tuesday."
"Which Tuesday."
Eva looked at the door. A man came through it, shaking out an umbrella, and she watched him the whole way to the far end of the bar before she answered. "This one," she said.
Three days. Rory did the arithmetic of it — three days of a Travelodge, of a coat kept on indoors, of counting — and felt the years drop away like a lift cable cut. "You should have called me. You'd have had the sofa. You'd have had — Ev, you'd have had anything, you know that."
"I know what you'd have done." Eva's voice went low and flat and steady, a voice reporting facts. "That's why I couldn't. You'd have driven up there. You'd have knocked on the door." She turned the ring again . "You were the one who needed getting out, Rory. You were the one I drove the van for. I lied to your da with a straight face, God help me. I was good at it. I couldn't be the one on the other end of it. I couldn't be the one who needed it."
"That's not how it works."
"That's exactly how it works."
"I kept meaning to call," Rory said, and heard how thin it was even as she said it. "I kept thinking you were fine. You sounded fine on the birthday texts. You sounded —"
"Fine," Eva agreed. "Yes."
Neither of them drank. The rain filled in the silence where the apology should have gone, and Rory let it, because she was twenty-five and had learned at least one thing, which was that some sentences do more damage coming out than staying in. Instead she reached over and worked the gold ring off Eva's finger herself, gently , the way you'd take a splinter out, and set it on the bar next to the glass, where it lay like something surrendered.
Silas appeared again — Rory never saw him decide to move, only that he had — and put down two fresh glasses and the bottle and a plate of chips, hot ones, and said to Eva, "Kitchen's open till midnight, and the room upstairs is quiet." That was all. He went back to his crossword with his limp and his authority and left them to it, and Eva looked after him and then at Rory with her eyebrows up, and Rory shook her head, because some explanations were a whole other evening.
"There's a key on the hook by my door," Rory said. "The sofa's got your name on it. It always did — you wrote it there in biro, remember, and I never got it off."
"I remember," Eva said.
The walls of the Nest were hung with old maps, coastlines that didn't exist anymore, borders redrawn so many times the paper had gone soft at the folds, and photographs of people frozen mid-laugh in black and white, all of them strangers, all of them somebody's Eva once. Rory looked at them while Eva ate a chip, then two, then the way she used to eat, quickly , like the plate might be reclaimed, and she thought: time does what it does. It had made a stranger of her friend in all the small ways and hadn't laid a finger on the one thing that mattered, the thing underneath, the gate and the dare and the van.
"Three and a half years," Rory said.
"I know." Eva looked at the ring on the bar, and then at the door, and then — for the first time all night — she turned her stool so her back was to it. "Tell me about the bicycle," she said. "Tell me about Brendan."The rain had been working the windows of the Raven's Nest since noon, and by nine it had driven everyone home but the regulars and the desperate. Rory sat at the bar with a plate of chips going cold, her delivery bag slumped on the stool beside her like a second, tireder version of herself. Silas stood at the far end, working the crossword with a pencil he kept behind his ear, and every so often the paper rustled like something being interrogated .
"Seven letters," he said. "Beggar. Starts with M."
"Mendicant."
"Mm." He wrote it in without conceding that she might be wrong. That was the whole of their arrangement, really — he let her pull the odd pint against her rent, she did his crossword, and neither of them said more about it than the arrangement required.
The door opened with its wet-weather groan, and a woman came in unwinding a scarf, and Rory knew her before she knew her. Knew the shape of the gesture, the impatient flip of the wrist at the end, the way she shook the rain off like a dog that had decided not to mind it. Then the woman looked up, and Rory's stomach dropped through the floor of the bar and into the cellars, into the Underground, into the grey water under the pier at Cardiff Bay where they used to stand and shout at the wind.
"Rory?"
The voice hadn't changed. That was the cruel part. Faces changed and bodies changed and voices stayed, so that dead people could live in them, and so could the living, which was somehow worse.
"Eva."
Eva crossed the room slowly , as if the floor might not hold her, and Rory stood to meet her and got a good look at her under the green-tinged lamplight. Eva had been the loudest person in any room in Cardiff, a girl who filled doorways and dared them to be narrower, dark hair in a wild mass that laughed at hairbrushes. The woman in front of her had that hair pinned flat to her skull. She was thin in the particular way that means meals skipped, not diets kept. She wore a good coat, a careful coat, and she took the stool with her back to the wall and her eyes on the door, and Rory knew that trick . She had done it herself for a year, sitting where she could see the entrance of every pub and restaurant in London, until Silas had looked at her one night and said, "You'll wear yourself out before anything comes through the door," and she had cried in the loos for reasons she still hadn't fully sorted.
"You look well," Eva said, and it came out sounding like grief.
"You look—" Rory began, and Eva smiled a small, tidy smile that closed the sentence for her.
"Manchester's got good trams," Eva said. "That's something."
"How long's it been?"
"Three and a half years." She said it instantly, precisely . People who are lonely count. Rory had counted too, once, in a flat in Cardiff with the curtains drawn.
Silas drifted down the bar without appearing to move, and set a gin and tonic in front of Eva, lime pushed down into it with a spoon, the way she'd always mangled them herself at eighteen. He didn't ask what she wanted. He tapped his silver signet ring once against the wood, a small sound like a full stop, and limped back to his crossword.
"You didn't order that," Rory said.
"I didn't have to. He's got a face like a man who knows things." Eva looked at the glass like it was a photograph of somebody. Then she picked it up and drank, and made a face — a lime-sour, eighteen-year-old face — and for one second the old Eva stood inside the new one like a woman framed in a doorway.
They talked the way old friends talk when they're being careful, which is to say they talked about mothers. Jennifer Carter was still teaching Year Six and still sending Rory clippings about pupillage she would never do. Eva's mum was still in Pontcanna, still asking after "that lovely Silas" she'd never met, on the strength of Rory's descriptions alone. Rory told her about the Golden Empress, about Yu-Fei's dumplings and the bicycle she'd bought second-hand and named Brendan, after her father, because it was stubborn and it had cost her money she'd never get back.
Eva laughed. It cracked her open an inch. "You were going to be a barrister."
"I was going to be miserable. I got out of that one."
The laugh died and Eva turned her glass a quarter turn, and a quarter turn back, and Rory saw the ring on her finger — plain gold, turning and turning like a thing being wound.
"You married him, then," Rory said. "The Manchester one. Daniel."
"It didn't take," Eva said. "Separated." And then, in the bright, rehearsed voice that Rory knew better than her own: "It's fine, it's all fine, it was one of those things, you know how it —"
"Ev."
The word sat on the bar between them like the ring Eva had stopped turning. Somewhere behind them the crossword pencil scratched. Rain kept up its long argument with the window.
Eva reached across the bar and took Rory's left wrist, turned it over, and put her thumb just below the small crescent scar there, not touching it, hovering, like a bird over water. "Still tell people it was a dog?"
"You know it was the gate at Nan Ellis's. You were there. You dared me."
"I did not." A pause. "I absolutely did."
They looked at each other over Rory's wrist, over the moon-shaped evidence of a summer they'd both survived, and Rory watched the careful coat and the pinned hair and the thin wrists and the seat facing the door, and she understood that she was reading a letter written in a language she'd been fluent in once, and she said, quietly, so that only Eva and possibly Silas and definitely Silas would hear:
"Where are you staying?"
"There's a Travelodge by Euston."
"Since when?"
"Tuesday."
"Which Tuesday."
Eva looked at the door. A man came through it, shaking out an umbrella, and she watched him the whole way to the far end of the bar before she answered. "This one," she said.
Three days. Rory did the arithmetic of it — three days of a Travelodge, of a coat kept on indoors, of counting — and felt the years drop away like a lift cable cut. "You should have called me. You'd have had the sofa. You'd have had — Ev, you'd have had anything, you know that."
"I know what you'd have done." Eva's voice went low and flat and steady, a voice reporting facts. "That's why I couldn't. You'd have driven up there. You'd have knocked on the door." She turned the ring again . "You were the one who needed getting out, Rory. You were the one I drove the van for. I lied to your da with a straight face, God help me. I was good at it. I couldn't be the one on the other end of it. I couldn't be the one who needed it."
"That's not how it works."
"That's exactly how it works."
"I kept meaning to call," Rory said, and heard how thin it was even as she said it. "I kept thinking you were fine. You sounded fine on the birthday texts. You sounded —"
"Fine," Eva agreed. "Yes."
Neither of them drank. The rain filled in the silence where the apology should have gone, and Rory let it, because she was twenty-five and had learned at least one thing, which was that some sentences do more damage coming out than staying in. Instead she reached over and worked the gold ring off Eva's finger herself, gently , the way you'd take a splinter out, and set it on the bar next to the glass, where it lay like something surrendered.
Silas appeared again — Rory never saw him decide to move, only that he had — and put down two fresh glasses and the bottle and a plate of chips, hot ones, and said to Eva, "Kitchen's open till midnight, and the room upstairs is quiet." That was all. He went back to his crossword with his limp and his authority and left them to it, and Eva looked after him and then at Rory with her eyebrows up, and Rory shook her head, because some explanations were a whole other evening.
"There's a key on the hook by my door," Rory said. "The sofa's got your name on it. It always did — you wrote it there in biro, remember, and I never got it off."
"I remember," Eva said.
The walls of the Nest were hung with old maps, coastlines that didn't exist anymore, borders redrawn so many times the paper had gone soft at the folds, and photographs of people frozen mid-laugh in black and white, all of them strangers, all of them somebody's Eva once. Rory looked at them while Eva ate a chip, then two, then the way she used to eat, quickly , like the plate might be reclaimed, and she thought: time does what it does. It had made a stranger of her friend in all the small ways and hadn't laid a finger on the one thing that mattered, the thing underneath, the gate and the dare and the van.
"Three and a half years," Rory said.
"I know." Eva looked at the ring on the bar, and then at the door, and then — for the first time all night — she turned her stool so her back was to it. "Tell me about the bicycle," she said. "Tell me about Brendan."