getting food safely into my mouth.
‘No.’ Thankfully, Nick decided to play nice and just answer. ‘He doesn’t give interviews. This is kind of a big deal.’
‘Have you interviewed lots of fashion people?’ I pushed on while I was on a roll. And eating a roll.
‘Not many.’ He shook his head, looking as though he’d eaten something unpleasant, which I knew for a fact he hadn’t. ‘I talk to people with actual stories. There are very few fashion people with real stories.’
‘Surely everyone has a story?’ I asked. ‘Like how they say everyone has a book in them?’
He shook his head and pinched the bridge of his nose before replying.
‘Not everyone does have a book in them. Some people don’t even have a Post-it note.’
‘It’s just something people say,’ I sniffed, wiping greasy fingers on my heavy napkin and feeling guilty about the greasy finger marks. ‘You really don’t think it’s true?’
‘You do?’ Nick asked. ‘Take you, for example. According to you, you don’t have a favourite book, a favourite band, a favourite movie. What story would you write?’
‘For all you know, I am a fantastic writer,’ I said, starting to get a bit angry again. Fuelled by the overconfidence of far too much food, I slapped the table. It hurt. ‘How do you know I’m not writing an amazing novel about a dystopian society where a reanimated Henry VIII falls in love with a squirrel?’
‘Well, look at you and your completely insane imagination.’ He laughed a little and for the first time it didn’t sound patronizing, even if his words were. ‘I should get your back up more often if you’re going to come out with gems like that. And you should write that book. I’d read it.’
‘Whatever.’ I was annoyed. He was a game player and I hated playing games. That was one of the many wonderful things about Charlie. He was easily as handsome as this douche nozzle, if not more handsome, but he didn’t mess people around. He never fell for girl tricks and he never said anything just to provoke a reaction. Not that I was thinking about Charlie.
‘You’re really not going to tell me about the break-up?’ Nick asked, pushing a bowl of vegetables at me. ‘It was that bad? You should try those, they’re good.’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I replied, heaping some carrots on my plate and pretending they were still healthy even if they were dripping with butter. ‘There’s nothing to talk about.’
‘So there was a break-up.’ He flashed his eyebrows up and down and I stared at my plate. Tricksy bastard. ‘How about a deal. I’ll ask you a question and then you can ask me a question. Sound fair?’
‘Not really. You’re a professional question asker,’ I replied tartly, ‘and I’m a photographer.’
‘Well, I can tell you’re not a wordsmith, anyway,’ he rallied. ‘Professional question asker?’
The wordsmith in me winced. One week out of my job and I’d already lost my grasp on the English language.
‘Question: where do you live?’ I asked before I lost my temper.
‘I have a flat in London and an apartment in New York, but I wouldn’t say I live anywhere,’ Nick replied. ‘I do like a girl with an appetite. Nice. My question: what do you value most above anything else?’
‘Oh, I, um …’ I was stumped. And still trying to work out if he’d just called me fat.
‘You don’t get to think, you just have to answer,’ he said, clicking his fingers over and over and over. ‘Come on, Vanessa.’
‘My friends.’ I shook my head. ‘My best friends. Best friend. Amy. My turn: how old are you?’
‘Thirty-six,’ he said. ‘I know, I look great. Question two: what’s your proudest achievement?’
‘I …’
‘No hesitation.’
‘Getting my first job before I graduated.’ I waved my hands in the air, trying to slow myself down. ‘Before I was a photographer. Full-time photographer. Me again: do you have a girlfriend?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I don’t,’ Nick replied. ‘And that’s two questions for me.’
I wasn’t nearly as good at this game as he was. Over the next ten minutes, I answered every one of his abstract, nonsensical questions. I told him what colour I felt like, I told him I would never move back to where I grew up, I told him I preferred birthdays to Christmas and preferred the city to the country, the country to the beach and that I had never, ever cheated on anyone. All I managed to learn about Nick was that he was born in London, he had lived in New York, Paris and Argentina, that he didn’t have a driving licence, was a night owl rather than an early bird, and his favourite colour was blue. He was right – I was not a professional question asker.
‘Is this what you do in difficult interviews?’ I asked, all out of questions. I sat back in my chair and mournfully nursed my food baby as Kekipi and the gang came to clear the table. There was still so much left, it was beyond wasteful. I wanted to parcel it all up and send it back to poor, jobless Amy. She would have decimated the leftovers in seconds. ‘I ask you, you ask me?’
‘This is what I do whenever I have to interview children,’ Nick replied. ‘Difficult children.’
‘Right,’ I nodded. Just when I’d been starting to warm to him. ‘Do a lot of that, do you?’
‘Nope.’
‘No.’ I shook my head. ‘Well, I don’t see what you managed to glean that would be interesting to anyone else by asking me if I consider myself to be a loyal person. Who would say no to that?’
‘This is the thing.’ Nick leaned back in his chair, his features almost vanishing into a silhouette as he pulled away from the candle. ‘I learned a lot more about you from your questions than you learned about me from my answers.’
‘Is that right?’
‘OK, here’s what I know.’ He took a deep drink of wine and then cleared his throat. ‘You grew up in a small village but you were desperate to get out. I know you aren’t close to your family because you value your friends much more highly than your relatives. You are single, which I would know even if you hadn’t mentioned the break-up earlier because you were so quick to tell me how proud you are of your professional achievements. If you were hopelessly in love, that would have come out in your answers, whether you wanted it to or not. Also, the only friend that you mentioned was Amy, which is very Sex and the City of you but it also tells me that you aren’t in love with anyone. Or at least you’re determined not to be. I’ve got to assume you’re unhappily single because so many of your questions to me were about my love life, and since you asked so many questions about my job and where I’d travelled to, I’ve got to assume that even though you use your job as your main source of validation, you haven’t travelled very much even though you’d like to. Which is weird for a photographer.’
Disconcerting
