The bike leaning nonchalantly against the shop window was a sleek vintage road Peugeot with an elegant blue frame and thin, worn-down tyres with show-off blue rims. She knew this bike. She used to know this bike intimately. Back then, though, its saddle was white, not stupidly out-of-place mauve.
He would never get a saddle like that, she thought. She took another sip of Turkish coffee, courtesy of Palm 2 in Clapton Pond. It was too sweet, but she superstitiously followed the once received advice that strong coffee should be sweet to enhance its qualities.
She needed something strong to get out of the stupor she had found herself in. Life had been lazy recently, just like this peaceful summer evening by the Pond. Traffic wasn’t too bad and she could hear stray gulls competing for a wavelength with overexcited local kids.
Breaking this almost rural idyll was a lit up Tesco Express sign to her left.
The fancy bike was bringing back unwanted memories anyway. She might as well admit to herself that, yes, it was the Tesco they’d fought hand in hand to prevent from coming into being. Endless sessions at the Hackney Town Hall, half falling asleep while the councillors slowly made their way through endless complaints about some new developer’s blocks of flats around Old Street, just to cheer or boo when they finally reached the last item on the agenda: a proposed new Tesco Express shop in Clapton Pond. All pertinent evidence had been heard, a procession of witnesses had paraded before the judges: the conservationist (it turned out that the Pond was a conservation area), the mother of young children crossing the road every day on their way to school, the Palm 2 employee afraid of losing her job and hence the support for her family. All this obstructed the application process. She smiled with satisfaction allowing sweet liquid to impregnate her tongue as she remembered young ambitious Tesco lawyers losing their professional cool over the line of local residents giving their testimony.
She came late to the first of these meetings and so ended up sitting next to him. He was at first aloof, pretending to be irritated by having to let go of his iPod. At meeting number three they were holding hands under the Town Hall’s desks. He fingered diagrams showing in great detail the proposed loading bay while she dreamt of other fingerings that indeed followed in due course.
A sudden screech of brakes cut into her daydreaming. She moved her eyes from the bike to witness a cyclist performing a neck-breaking manoeuvre to avoid a huge delivery lorry parking in the loading bay. The guy nearly fell off his bike, swore heartily and pedalled away towards Hackney Baths. She sighed and rolled her eyes. No matter how obvious it had been that a loading bay in that spot would disrupt the traffic and make cyclists’ lives even more miserable, for some reason the council accepted all the tortuous explanations delivered by smug boys in snug suits. As if the story had already been written, she thought bitterly.
Back to the bike in front of her. It couldn’t possibly be his. After an outbreak of love between him and Alicia-The-Posh-Hippie, an outbreak of such unexpectedness and intensity paralleled only by a similar event that took place between the two of them just months earlier, when they moved out of E5 to some absurd location. Willesden Green? Holland Park? Within her frame of reference it might as well be Zurich. He surely wouldn’t come round for a Turkish pizza or a chat with a friendly proprietor.
On the other hand, the Electric Blue Velocity rims... They were difficult to get hold of in this country, and quite expensive. Saving money on virtually everything, he splurged on his bicycle. Poser. The very last sip of coffee completed the lengthy process of waking her up just in time to stare, on a caffeine high, at the owner of the bike who had left the shop with bags full of groceries. A tall girl gave her a friendly look, slightly puzzled by the force of her stare. Her eyes were green.