ON THE TUBE on the way home, Owen feels a plume of pleasure rising through his physiology; he pictures it as pink ink blooming over wet cartridge paper. He is being reconstituted somehow, and all because a nice, slightly overweight lady from Colindale talked to him as though he was a human being for an evening.
He’s a little drunk too, which is adding to his sense of well-being. Deanna, it transpired, was a fast drinker, faster than him, and he’d had to race to keep up with her. The champagne had disappeared in under forty minutes, after which they’d shared a bottle of wine, and when that had gone, before their desserts arrived, they’d each ordered a cocktail. Owen can’t remember now what his was called, but it had tequila in it and tasted like smoke.
He’s drunk enough and happy enough not to feel other people’s eyes upon him on the strip-lit tube carriage. He doesn’t feel jealous of the loved-up couples clutching single red roses swarming the streets. He doesn’t feel angry when people walk across him or fail to let him through. He doesn’t care if they can see him or not, because, for a full three hours this evening, he has been seen.
Owen replays the night over and over in his head: the easy exchanges, the kind look in Deanna’s eye, the way she kept touching her hair, nodding encouragingly at him when he was talking about himself, the slowness at the end of the night, as though she was trying to delay its finale.
As he climbs the hill back to his house the air is icy sharp. A couple passes by, holding hands, the woman clutching a posy of red flowers. They smell of wine. Owen almost says something to them—something like “Happy Valentine’s, fellow lovers!”—but thinks better of it and stops himself with just a second to spare.
Owen stifles a laugh and turns left. He passes a man walking a small white dog. The man says, “Good evening,” making Owen jump slightly.
“Oh,” he manages to toss over his shoulder, just a beat too slow, “evening.” He’s walked past this man and his dog a hundred times over the years, and this is the first time he’s ever said hello. Owen smiles to himself.
Around the next corner he sees a woman. She has hair the color of sand and wears a brown coat that ties up at the waist. She’s looking at her phone. As he gets closer, he can see that she’s pretty, very, very pretty. Probably pretty enough to be a model. Owen’s defenses automatically go up, as they always do when he is confronted with extreme female beauty. He averts his gaze and veers across the pavement, trying to clear her a path, but she is too busy looking at her phone to notice and wanders straight toward him. He tries to make room for her by moving the other way, but she moves too, and suddenly they are standing face-to-face only a foot or so apart, and she looks up from her phone and straight at him and he sees it there, utter, utter fear.
“Oh,” she says.
Owen moves again so she can pass. Yet again she moves in the same direction. He sees her eyes fall to her phone, the edge of her thumb touching the emergency icon on her screen.
He gestures her past with his arms and says, with some indignation, “Maybe you could try not looking at your phone for five minutes. You might find it easier not to walk into people.” He turns and starts to walk away but then:
“Fuck you, creep.”
He stops. “What?”
“I said, Fuck you, creep.”
He rocks slightly.
He closes his eyes and draws in his breath. He pictures himself turning now, turning and running at her and pushing her over. He exhales, counts to three. He carries on walking.
“Bitch,” he calls out over his shoulder as he walks.
He hears her call something out to him, the fading urgent echo of her heels against the paving stones, the ringing in his ears of adrenaline pumping through his system; he feels the wine in his stomach curdle slightly and his legs turn to jelly. He stops for a moment and holds a wall to steady himself. His head spins, and for a moment he thinks he might be about to throw up.
And then he feels his phone vibrate, and he takes it out of his pocket and there is a message from Deanna.
Dear Owen, I really enjoyed myself tonight. Thank you for being such good company and making me feel good about myself for the first time in a very long time. I hope you sleep well and I look forward to seeing you next week. My treat this time! Deanna x.
All the rage and nervous energy leaves his body immediately.
Smiling, he turns the last corner of the block and arrives outside his house. The lights are all off, and the moon shines blue off the lead on the roof. He stops to peer through the hole carved into the wooden gate of the building site next door where he sees two amber dots glowing in the dark. A fox, staring at him.
“Hello, foxy,” he says into the darkness. “Hello, beautiful!”
He glances across the street. There is a light still shining in one of the windows. He sees the suggestion of movement behind it. He hears raised voices coming from somewhere out of sight. Then he sees a person standing outside the house: tall, slender, in a black hoodie, tips of angular elbows protruding from their sides like wings. The person stands for just a moment, watching the light in the window, just as he does. Then the person turns and in profile he can see it is a young girl, her hands stuffed into the pockets of the hoodie, her jaw set hard.
As he watches her, she turns and looks at him.
I know you, he thinks, I know you.