As he came off a curb, plastic-covered parking permit in one hand, house keys in the other, the front wheel somehow jerked left and he hadn’t sufficient grip on the handlebars to correct it. He lost control and down he went, hard and sideways onto the pavement—clatter of bike, scrape of limbs, pain, and yet more disbelief. To counter the embarrassment, he had, of course, to jump back on as quickly as possible, though he was well aware that this was in many ways more ridiculous than falling off in the first place. Ladies, gents, I assure you that the accident you have just witnessed was all but planned… As if anyone cared.
They lived in Tufnell Park, North London, and not bad. They had four rooms: big bedroom, big bathroom, a small nameless room (that screamed in certain cartoonish nightmares for a child), and a decent lounge, down one side of which was their kitchen. Given that to live in the city was for the vast majority of Londoners to live in a dark, vole-sized hole, they were lucky. Ridiculously small and silly by any other standard, in London of the twenty-first century, their flat was modestly desirable.
Or rather, used to be, before they (Lina) had decided to get the kitchen “done.” Now, alas, all was dust, rubble, and dereliction. Week six, and everybody involved, including the flat itself, was showing signs of having had enough. In one sense, and as past participles go, having the kitchen “done” described the process well—though maybe not quite robustly enough to Gabriel’s mind. Rather, it seemed to him that under the pretense of “installing” the new kitchen, the fitters were actually serially abusing it: shoving it up against the walls and banging it every which way they knew how—as hard and as often as they could; ripping it apart, pushing it down, forcing it into places it did not want to go; hurting it, flipping it over this way and that for their brutal pleasure; breaking it, smacking it about, calling it all the filthy names they knew; scratching it, breaking off its knobs, dropping its drawers; fucking it forward, backward, side to side, good and proper, once and for all. And when one guy got tired, another took over and went at it again, as hard as he could for five days straight.
All of this, plus all of everything else, as well as the need to stop all of this and stop all of everything else, was on his mind as he came haring up his street, bike clanking unnaturally loudly. Haring up the street to find Lina looking every bit as fresh and pristine as the face on the North of Sweden Tourist Board’s 1992 press campaign (clear lakes, snow-white mountains, nature’s undiminished purity), which job she had in fact held when she was seventeen. Haring up the street to find Lina standing beneath an umbrella, giving instructions in her measured and sensible voice to Frank, who, unbelievably, was taking down notes as she spoke.
His brakes squealed him to a histrionic halt. There was pavement muck on his trousers, blood on the elbow of his jogging top, white skin-scrapes on his hands, and rainwater on his nose. He tried his best to smile. He was staggered by her… her competence. Nobody was angry or crying or about to die. Nobody was talking about Leonard Cohen or the appalling adolescence of the new world leaders or why they were still tearing down the Amazon or anything remotely like that; they were actually talking about the kitchen sink. And in the chaotic and unpredictable way these things happen to men, as she looked up at him, he was struck by desire. He wanted her there and then. He wanted her as he always wanted her—at the least appropriate moments life could conjure. To kiss those lips now. To hold her now. Shut the door against Frank and all his kind. Fall on each other in the hall. Cast off clothes as best they could. Raise her skirt. Go at it like Olympian gods made mortal for half an hour only.
Their relationship had begun with the best taxi ride of his life. He had just flown back from New York. She was standing at the baggage counter. He had always found it easy to talk to women, his unconscious secret being that, unlike so many men, he naturally talked to them as human beings and not as women. Even so, looking back, he realized that it was probably some magical and unrepeatable combination of his tiredness, his mind’s emptiness, his confession of fear, his unfakeably relaxed I’m-not-after-anything manner (which a man gets when he’s had attention from another woman recently), his genuine feeling of camaraderie with her after the turbulent flight, and maybe even his sincere desire to get a cab at half price that made her feel comfortable enough to let him continue asking questions, carry her vodka through customs, share the ride.
They sat quietly side by side as they drove in, watching that gentle miracle of the dawn: steadfast old London emerging from a quiet rain, gray and wet, street by street—prewar terraces of solid brick, modern low-rise offices, the high white stucco of West London’s prosperity, newsagents on corners just opening up, the Victorian railway lines, the Georgian canals, the early-shifters already afoot, making for the nearest tube with umbrellas, headphones, privately preoccupied. The drizzle zigzagged down their windows. The car’s heater hummed intermittently, as though a tiny piece of paper had been caught somewhere. She sat with her shoulder-length dark hair tied to one side at the back in a mini-ponytail that wisped sideways, long legs twisted around each other in her heavy black tights, buried otherwise in her coat; he sat, also looking out but thinking thoughts that mingled the history of his city with a tingling awareness that he was slipping under the encounter’s gathering spell. That somehow there was a fragile affinity between them that may or may not come to anything, something intimately shared beyond the immediate ride—something, he thought, to do with that mysterious old alchemy that happens when a man and a woman find that their journeys coincide for a while.
When they turned from their windows, they met each other’s eyes. And he eased the moment’s silence by asking for her number, saying it would be fun to meet up again and discuss customs regulations. And she gave it to him. And the next day he called her.
In the weeks and months that followed, he probably fell in love. Lina was twenty-six, two years younger than he at that time. She was half Sami, half Swedish. Her limbs were all long and thin, so she had the occasional gawkiness of a slightly taller woman. She had ice-blue eyes, snow-sunned skin, sleek, dark, silky black-brown hair, which she was forever tying up this way or that. Her lips were almost colorless, though shaped and full, as though designed by some high seraphim of kissing. And the soft light of the midnight sun was in her smile.
Indeed, hers was a sorcery of the genes that no other combination on earth could hope to conjure. When he sat down to think about it, which, in those early days, he did more often than sanity might require, he calculated that there could be fewer than a thousand like combinations alive—how many pure Sami people were left in the north of Sweden, and of those, how many had married the southerners, and of those, how many had produced female children who turned out like Lina? She was one in six billion. And yet it was impossible to place her without knowing where she was from, for her eyes had only the faintest rise of the far north, her dark hair and skin suggested the south, while her smile was as wide and white-toothed as the west itself, and her manner was almost oriental.
Her mother—now married to her stepfather (her “plastic dad”) and living in London for the past two decades—looked as though she had just stepped out of a 1970s holiday brochure advertising happiness and free love in Sweden: the cheekbones, the head-to-one-side smile, the true blond hair, the ever-honest self-reliant Scandinavian eyes of steady azure. And it was from her mother that Lina had received the gift of living in her body with ease and openness—not so much the tawdry modern “confidence,” more a deep and unconscious surety in the authority of womanhood—and the gift of competence, a steady practicality and equilibrium that found life for the most part exactly as it should be.