‘Well, we’ve done our duty, for what it’s worth,’ said Davy. ‘Let’s go and have coffee and talk about something else.’
Chapter Five
Two days later, when I returned from work, I took my bike down from the hooks and looked it over. It was a sorry sight. The front wheel was buckled and wouldn’t even rotate, the front fork was bent and the chain was draped round the pedals. But that was about all. I quickly removed the damaged fork, popped it into a plastic shopping bag and cycled down to Essex Road where my friend, Gerry, ran his own bike shop. He wanted to sell me a carbon-fibre replacement that cost more than the whole bike.
‘Is the other person paying?’ he said.
‘She said she was going to,’ I said.
‘Well, then,’ he said.
‘I’m going to have a problem collecting the money.’
He looked puzzled, then rather sad when I chose a run-of-the-mill fork off the rack. He cheered up when I bought a new wheel, a chain and a helmet as well. He said he’d put it all together for me, but I don’t trust anyone else near my bike, so I wobbled home with the wheel and fork balanced precariously on Campbell ’s handlebars.
It was still warm and sunny, so I laid the bike down in the back garden along with the new parts and my tools. I unwound the chain from the pedals and detached it from the gears. I was going to enjoy this. Then I heard a voice: ‘Need some help?’
It was Miles. He came out from the kitchen holding a bottle of beer and sat on the slightly rickety bench that Dario had promised to repair. Miles had a not very funny running joke about how impractical he was at anything mechanical or electrical. It wasn’t really modest: because he worked in the City as an analyst, it was part of his pose that he lived on a superior abstract plane while the rest of us did squalid, inferior things like unblocking the lavatory and replacing the fuses.
‘I could help you strip down the gears,’ he said, grinning. ‘They probably need realigning. I could adjust the sprockets. I’m a bit worried about your cranks.’
I looked round at him wearily. ‘Are you going to keep this up all evening?’
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But I like watching you work. You look so…’ He paused, staring at me. ‘So very competent. Do you want a beer?’
‘I was going to have one as a reward when I finished.’
I attached the fork and, with some reluctance, got Miles to hold it while I replaced the handlebars, then the star nut, the compression bolt and the stem cap.
‘How do you remember where everything fits together?’ he asked.
‘Because I’m interested in it,’ I said.
‘I just care about getting from A to B. Preferably in a car.’
‘How long have we got?’ I asked, as I inserted the new wheel.
‘Until when?’
‘Until you throw us out.’
‘I’m not throwing you out.’
‘Well, whatever it is you’re doing to us.’
‘You know,’ said Miles, softly, as if he was speaking to himself, ‘sometimes I find myself thinking of the alternative world I could have been living in.’
For a moment I thought he was talking in a philosophical way, about quantum physics or something. I frowned at him.
He leaned closer towards me so that I could see my own face reflected in his dark brown eyes. I felt myself tense; it took an effort not to draw back from him or look away. ‘Don’t you ever feel that, Astrid?’
‘Feel what?’
‘You know. Haunted by what might have been, could have been.’
‘No.’
‘Should have been.’
‘I need to finish this now.’
‘That’s what I used to imagine when we first moved in. We were all so poor, but it didn’t matter. Do you remember the anti-war march? And we came back all triumphant and had that barbecue and lay on the grass and got stoned.’
‘Apparently we failed to stop the war, though.’
‘And do you remember what it was like when we were first together? We’d known each other for years and then suddenly, there we were, a couple. Astrid and Miles. Miles and Astrid. I’d know you were in the room without even turning. I’d feel you. I still do, you know. They were good times, weren’t they? I still remember them and can’t work out why they had to end. I always believed that one day it would be just the two of us here.’
I put down the screwdriver and stared at him. Several emotions went through my mind at the same time. The first was a kind of familiar bewilderment that we could have such different versions of what had happened. In Miles’s version, we had had a passionate love affair and only my contrariness and misguided, youthful desire to be independent had thwarted it. But in my version, the relationship had been flawed from the start. When we first met, he had been some kind of eco-warrior, the first person I’d ever known who was interested in politics. He represented a new world to me, and at first he had seemed glamorous and mysterious. He fell for me because he thought I was carefree and light-hearted, then spent his time trying to turn me into a different kind of woman altogether, one who was responsible, domesticated and ready to settle down. It was as if he was trying to steer me into a future he had already planned, but I didn’t want to go there. I was happy in my present.
The second emotion was anxiety, because Miles was my friend: he’d been my straightforward friend before we became lovers, and my complicated friend after we were no longer lovers, and I could see now what I had been trying to ignore for months: that I had made him suffer and was still making him suffer. When the affair was finally over, I had offered to move out but he had been adamant that it wouldn’t be a problem if we didn’t let it be and I had allowed myself to be persuaded. My third emotion was simple anger. That was much the easiest to cope with, so I gave way gratefully to it. ‘Is this why you’re throwing us out?’ I said sharply. ‘Because we broke up?’
‘We didn’t break up. You ended it. But sometimes I feel that it’s not over. Not really. There’s too much still there. You must feel it too. I know you do.’
‘Miles, no,’ I said urgently. ‘Please don’t do this.’
‘I thought time would alter everything in the end, the way it’s supposed to, but I haven’t changed. Not deep down.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Just don’t close the door.’
‘The door closed long ago,’ I said, as firmly as I could. ‘And it’s my fault if I didn’t make that clear. Listen.’ I put my hand on his arm for a moment, then hastily removed it. ‘You know I’m not right for you. You could do so much better than me.’
‘I don’t want to do better than you.’
‘You don’t mean it. Look at the two of us. We live in different worlds now. You’ve got a job you love, a fantastic future ahead of you. You’re grown-up, Miles, you know what you want to do with your life. I’m not like that. I don’t know where I’m going with anything. I just cycle round London delivering parcels and waiting to find out who I am.’
‘So it’s just that? Our circumstances?’
‘No, it’s not just that. I don’t understand why you’re suddenly saying all of this now. You’re with Leah, Miles. She’s bright and beautiful and you’re going to live together. You shouldn’t be saying these things to me. It’s not fair.’
‘If you told me that there was a chance, the smallest chance, then I’d tell Leah that -’
‘Hello,’ said Leah, cheerfully, appearing like a gleaming apparition before us in her smart work clothes, a briefcase in one hand and a paper tucked under her arm. ‘Hi, my love.’ She pulled off her jacket and sat next to Miles, leaned over and kissed him lingeringly on the cheek. Then she smiled at me, her teeth white, her skin smooth. She smelled faintly of apples, while Miles smelled of beer. I smelled of sweat and bike oil. ‘That looks terribly clever. I can’t even repair a puncture. I just take it into the shop. I used to feel I ought to learn, and then I worked out that if I priced my time, I was actually losing money by doing repairs myself.’