‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Where?’
She told me she’d drive over. There was an all-night café-bar inside the train station. She’d see me there in twenty minutes.
I put the phone down. Half an hour later I walked into the café. Nina had taken a booth at the back, near the toilets and the cigarette machine.
‘Sorry I’m late,’ I said. ‘Have you been here long?’
‘No,’ she said, ‘not long.’
She was wearing a fake-fur jacket and a beret, and no lipstick. All I could think about was kissing her. The waitress came and stood beside our table. I ordered coffee and a pastry.
Nina waited until the waitress had gone. ‘You don’t like pastry.’
‘I’m celebrating,’ I said.
‘What are you celebrating?’
‘We found The Invisible Man. Me and Loots.’
‘Oh. Right.’
‘I talked to him, Nina. I actually shook his hand.’
‘That’s great.’ But she put nothing of herself into the words. They were hollow, empty. Insincere. I felt my good mood being gradually dismantled.
‘What did you want to see me about?’ I asked her.
She touched her beer mat, just the corner of it, with one finger.
‘It must have been important,’ I said, ‘for you to drive all the way over here at this time of night.’
‘It is important.’
My coffee arrived.
‘I don’t love you,’ she said.
‘Who do you love? Greersen?’ I stared at her in disbelief.
She didn’t answer. She lit a cigarette, then started turning her beer mat on the surface of the table.
‘Maybe I loved you in the beginning,’ she said, after a while, ‘but I don’t any more.’
‘Maybe you’d like to say it again,’ I said. ‘Maybe I didn’t hear it the first time.’
She sighed. ‘I’m sorry.’
I stared at my pastry, its flaky crust baked to a perfect gold, its dusting of spotless white sugar. I wished I was blind. We should have met in the daytime, like before. Or some bright place. Somewhere with fierce lights, preferably fluorescent. Then I wouldn’t have been able to see her. Then I wouldn’t have known what I was missing. Then I wouldn’t have been staring at a fucking pastry.
‘Guess what?’ I said. ‘I was on TV.’
‘Were you?’ She was somewhere else, though. She’d hardly heard me.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I said.
‘No, tell me.’
I stood up. ‘I’ll pay on the way out.’
‘I’ve got to go to the bathroom,’ she said. ‘Will you wait for me?’
I sat down again. This hurt more than almost anything else. Will you wait for me? So trivial, so everyday — and yet it meant there was something between us. We were connected, together.
I didn’t watch her walk away. Instead, I looked at the place where she’d been sitting. There was a shallow indentation in the plastic. I reached over, touched the indentation. It was still warm. Then I noticed her bag on the seat. She’d left it behind. Without thinking, I slipped my hand inside it. The usual jumble of lipstick, make-up, money. A notebook, too. Scalloped edges to the pages. Her addresses. I picked up the book and tucked it into my pocket. I wasn’t sure why I’d done it. And by the time I thought about putting it back, it was too late. I heard the door to the toilets open. She was walking towards me.
‘What?’ she said.
‘Nothing.’ I pointed at the seat. ‘You left your bag.’
She was staring down at me. No warmth in the look, no suggestion of any intimacy at all. It was more sort of dissatisfied. Disillusioned even. I obviously wasn’t handling this the way she’d hoped I would.
‘Is there anything you want to ask me?’ she said.
I sat there for a moment longer, trying hard to concentrate. I kept thinking of her address book in my pocket. I still didn’t know why I’d taken it. I shook my head. ‘No.’
She walked ahead of me, up to the cash-register. She reached into her bag.
‘I already told you,’ I said. ‘This is on me.’
She took her hand out of the bag again. She hadn’t noticed that her address book was missing. I paid for two coffees and a pastry.
‘Didn’t you like the pastry?’ the waitress said. She seemed to be taking it personally, the fact that I hadn’t touched it.
‘I lost my appetite,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’
When I walked out of the café, Nina was waiting in the station concourse. There was that whispering again, the sound I’d heard when I first returned to the city. Voices lifted into a great emptiness. Voices appealing to something they didn’t even know was there. She took hold of my arm. ‘There’s a man staring at me.’
‘There’s always men staring at you,’ I said, irritated suddenly. ‘The saxophone-player the other night. He stared at you, too.’
‘How do you know that?’
‘I told you. I can see at night.’
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she said, ‘This is different. I’ve seen him before.’
I looked around. I couldn’t see anyone. ‘Who is he?’
‘I’ve no idea. I’ve seen him before, though.’
I looked up at the roof, moving my feet inside my shoes to warm them up. She was still clinging to my arm.
‘Will you walk me to my car?’ she said.
I said I would.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’
‘No.’
We left the station by the main exit and turned right, into a side street. Our breath speech-bubbled up into the air. It was very cold.
‘So you’re not coming away for Christmas?’ I said.
‘Coming away? Where to?’
I reminded her about the house by the lake.
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ she said, ‘do you?’
I didn’t answer.
‘There’s too much going on. I need some time.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I understand.’
The wind rose. Snow blew sideways across the street, vicious as ground glass. I thought I could hear footsteps on the pavement behind me, but when I glanced over my shoulder there was no one there. I nodded to myself, remembering the clinic corridors at night.
‘He’s still there,’ Nina said. ‘He’s following us.’
‘Where’s your car?’ I said.
We had to cross the street. I tucked my chin into my collar. My feet felt as if they were made of something different to the rest of me.
‘Is that where you live?’ she said. ‘The Kosminsky?’
I nodded.
‘That’s the place you wanted to show me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Will you show me now?’
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea,’ I said, ‘do you?’
She’d parked right outside the hotel. I left her by her car. Just walked away, towards the steps.
‘Martin?’ she called out.
For a moment I couldn’t move. Her voice had that power over me, the power a dream has, to lock muscles, making it impossible to run. I didn’t look round. Instead, I hunted through my pockets for my room-key. It was a charade. I didn’t have the key on me. I’d left it in a pigeon-hole behind reception.
‘Martin?’ she called again, more urgently this time.
But I had reached the doors, and they were beginning to revolve.
I was inside the building when I heard the car door slam. The engine spluttering, the crunch of gears. And then a sound that was like a seagull’s cry: Nina’s tyres spinning as she took the corner. It wasn’t her fault. It was the new road surface they’d put down. It happened to everyone.
Friday came. I was in my room, watching a carol concert on TV, when the phone rang. It was Loots calling from downstairs, in the lobby. I closed my suitcase, put on my coat and left the room. Loots was standing outside the lift when the doors slid open.