shoes were thick-soled and dusty and their heaviness made her protruding toes look small and as fragile as a child’s.
Noah experienced a moment’s dislocation, as if he were drunk or had just stepped off a theme-park ride that had been whirling too fast for him. His body felt very light and insubstantial, and the plane tree and the metallic man and Tower Bridge seemed to spin around him and the girl. He rocked on his feet, establishing a firmer connection with the ground beneath.
The girl drew back her hand, still laughing.
Noah took a breath. The world steadied itself.
He said to her, ‘You won’t be able to make him move. It’s more than his job’s worth.’
She gave no sign of having heard him.
Disbelief flooded through Noah. It wasn’t possible. Maybe it was possible, maybe that’s why he had noticed her in the first place.
Then she slowly turned her head. It wasn’t that she hadn’t heard, he realised, rather that she hadn’t understood what he was saying.
‘Do you speak English?’ he smiled.
‘Of course. Why not?’ she shot back. She did have an accent. It sounded Slavic, or Russian.
‘I thought you were, you know, perhaps a tourist.’
‘No,’ she said flatly.
‘Ah. Right.’ She was making Noah feel a bit of a fool. As if she sensed this and regretted it, she jerked her chin at the robot man.
‘This is clever. Not moving one muscle.’
‘Yeah. Sometimes there’s a Victorian couple, and there’s a gold man who does it as well. Usually you see them at weekends in Covent Garden. It always looks to me like a really hard way of earning money.’
The girl’s eyes turned to him. She looked disappointed, and at once Noah felt sorry that he had diminished the originality of the spectacle for her. ‘But it is clever, you’re right.’
‘I was not trying to tease him, you know? I was thinking he cannot be a real man because he is so still, even though I saw him walk up on his step.’
‘He won’t move, though. That’s the point.’ Noah was beginning to feel that it was time to steer this conversation forwards. ‘Um. Are you on your way somewhere? Would you like to have a drink? There’s a bar just here. Bit crowded, but we can sit outside…’
Suddenly an empty table to one side of the open space looked intensely inviting.
‘I have the bicycle with me.’ The girl pointed to a bright yellow mountain bike propped against the river wall.
‘Nice bike. We can lock it up…’
‘I do not have a lock.’
‘Really? You should have one, someone’ll nick a bike like that in five seconds. Look, we’ll just park it beside us so we can keep an eye on it.’
They were walking towards the table, the girl wheeling her bicycle, when she suddenly stopped.
‘We did not give him money.’
Noah was pleased with the we. He grinned at her. ‘You can, if you want.’
She didn’t smile back. ‘I don’t have any. Not today.’
He sighed. ‘All right.’ He made a little detour and dropped a pound coin into the robot’s box. The man’s head gave a sudden jerk and his hands rotated. ‘Thank you,’ a robot’s voice mechanically grated. The girl beamed and clapped, and Noah judged that that was easily worth a pound of anyone’s money. He touched her elbow. ‘Let’s be quick, before someone grabs the table.’
He left her sitting with the bicycle, fought his way to the bar for two beers, and was pleased and relieved when he got back to find that she was still waiting for him.
‘Cheers,’ he said as they drank. ‘My name’s Noah, by the way.’
‘I am Roxana.’
‘Hello Roxana.’ He put out his hand. I am acting like a total prat, he was thinking, but he couldn’t stop staring at her mouth. He wondered what it would take to make her laugh again, the way she had done when she prodded the robot. Roxana took his fingers, very cautiously, and allowed an infinitesimal squeeze before drawing back again.
‘Where are you from? Are you Russian?’
She looked levelly at him. ‘I am from Uzbekistan.’
‘Are you? Uh, I don’t think I even know where that is.’ He sighed inwardly. That’s right, go on, let her know you’re thick as well as a prat.
‘It is in Central Asia. We have been independent country since 1991. Our capital is Tashkent. We have borders with Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan.’
Noah raised an eyebrow. ‘Thank you. Now I do know. What brings you to England? Are you a student? Your English is really good.’
‘Thank you very much. I’m not a student. I’m working here, I would like to stay. It’s better for me.’
‘What do you do?’
Roxana paused. ‘I am a dancer.’
Yes, she had the body for it. And that explained the studied poise of her head on the long, pale column of her neck. Noah found that he didn’t want to speculate too hard, not here and now, anyway, on the look of her in – what were those things dancers wore? Leotards.
‘Ballet?’ She was a bit too tall for that, though.
‘No. Not ballet. Modern.’ She nodded towards the yellow bicycle. ‘I have only just been for, um, a test?’
‘Audition?’
‘Yes. I have the job, they tell me there and then.’ She did smile now and Noah blinked.
‘Congratulations.’
‘Thank you. And I should of course ask now about your job but I have to go soon. It’s not my bicycle, I have only borrowed it to come to the place over there for my audition.’ She nodded across in the approximate direction of St Paul’s. ‘But in London for two weeks I haven’t yet been to see the river Thames, so I came for one hour.’
She pronounced it with a soft th, to rhyme with James.
Noah’s stomach did something that he associated with a lift dropping very fast. Jesus, he thought. What’s happening? Can you fall in love with someone after ten minutes, just because she says Thames instead of Tems?
‘What is your job?’ she asked softly.
‘I work in IT. For a small publishing company.’
‘Near to here?’
‘In the West End. I’ve just been visiting
