Page 5 of 56 Days
She laughs. “Nope, I win that game.”
“Where were you before?”
“Cork, since I finished college. I went to Swansea.Not-at-all-notable member of the Class of 2017, here.”
His face can’t hide the fact that he’s trying to do the math. She almost offers, “I’mtwenty-five,” but that’s not how this game is played.
She doesn’t know much but she knowsthat.
“What about you?” she asks. “Where did you go?”
“Newcastle,” he says flatly.
Ciara senses that something has changed, that she’s lost him somewhere along the line. What was it that did it? She has no clue, but knows she can look forward to lying awake in the dark and wondering for days to come, forensically analyzing everything she said and then reanalyzing it, trying to find the wrong thing, the mistake, the regret.
“I’m going to be late back.” He says this a fraction of a secondbeforehe shakes his wrist and looks at his watch.
He stands up then and, not knowing quite what to do, she does as well.
“Yeah, I better go, too,” she lies. “Well... thanks for the coffee.”
He chews on his bottom lip as if trying to decide something.
“Look,” he starts, “I was going to go see that new Apollo documentary. On Monday. Night. They’re showing it at this tiny cinema in town. Maybe—if you wanted to—we could, um, we could go see it together?”
She opens her mouth to respond but is so taken aback by this invite that she delays while her brain tries to catch up with this change of course, and into this pause he jumps with an embarrassed, “God, I’m so shit at this.”
This.
She wants to tell him that no, he’s not, and she doesn’t believe for a second that he thinks he is, but mostly she doesn’t want to have to respond to him referring to this as athisbecause what if he didn’t mean what she hopes he did?
“That sounds great.” She flashes her most reassuring smile. “Sure. Yeah.”
He says he will book the tickets. They arrange to meet outside the building where he works at five thirty on Monday evening. He gives her his phone number in case there are anylast-minuteproblems and she sends him a text message so he has hers. They walk back together as far as his office, then wave goodbye. She doesn’t take a deep breath until she’s turned her back to him.
And so it begins.
Today
Technically speaking, it’sFriday-morningrush-hour, but Lee has the roads to herself. She makes it to Kimmage in no time at all and lucks into a parking space right outside the house. The street is still, its residents robbed of all their reasons to get up early, to start their days somewhere farther away than another room of their home. There’ve been no commutes for weeks now, no school runs, no tourists arriving in or heading off. Even the plague of early morning joggers from the start of lockdown seems to have tapered off.
The nation’s collective motivation to make the most of this is waning, that much is obvious. She wonders how many sourdough starters have been, by now, unceremoniously fecked in the bin.
Lee rolls down the driver’s-sidewindow and settles in to drink her coffee. The coffee that she had to watch someone make with gloved hands and theatrical caution as if it wasn’t a cappuccino they were making but a bomb, whose cost included the forced sanitizing of her already dry and chapped hands before andaftercollecting, that only has two sugars instead of her preferred three because now the barista has to put them in for you and she was too embarrassed to ask for that many, the coffee that she’d literally risked life and limb to get.
She refuses to let it go cold after allthat.
With her free hand, Lee pulls down the visor and inspects the wedge of her own face she can see in the little mirror there. She seriously needed her roots donebeforethey shut down the salons; the brunette is practically down to her ears and in this natural light, appears to end in a blunt line. Like every other morning she’s left home in a hurry, hair still wet, and now it’s drying into her trademark helmet of electrified frizz. She thought she had thrown some makeup on but it has evidently managed to clean itself off in the lasthalf hour. The smudge of tan foundation on the collar of her white shirt is the only evidence it was ever there at all.
Shereallyneeds to get her shit together.
There’s a part of her that wishes she had a different job, the kind that’s normally done from a stationary desk in an office and can now be—nowmustbe—done from home. She’s found herself fantasizing about being one of those women who live alone, temporarily free from all exhausting social expectations, finally able to establish a skincare routine and a yogapracticewith that girl on YouTube who everyone raves about; to crack the spine on thehealthy-foodcookbooks her family has been pointedly gifting her for years; to go for long walks along beaches and clifftops and through woodland, the kind of treks that leave youpink-cheekedand aching with smugself-satisfactionand reconnected with nature (although Lee would have to connect with it first); emerging from the other end of this lockdown a shinier, smoother, brighter version of herself, Lee 2.0.
And honestly, she’d settle for painting her living room and losing half a stone.
But there are no beaches or clifftops or woodland within atwo-kilometerradius of her front door, the hardware shops are closed and there is no lockdown for her. She’s still at bloody work.
On the passenger seat, her phone beeps with a new text message.
