I’ve just sat on the sofa and put Netflix on that evening, and I’m scrolling through the recently added things, having already watched pretty much the whole catalogue, when the phone rings. I’ve left Nathaniel’s phone on the kitchen unit next to mine, and as I shove my microwave meal onto the coffee table and run to get it, I notice it’s his phone that’s vibrating across the counter towards the sink. I grab it and slide the screen up to answer without even glancing at it.
‘Hi, this is Nathaniel’s phone.’
‘Hi, this is Nathaniel.’ He pauses and my heart jumps into my throat. I pull the phone away from my ear and look at the number onscreen, a mobile number that’s not saved in his contacts. It must be him on another phone. Maybe it’s just as well I didn’t know – he’d have rung off by the time I’d psyched myself up to speak to him.
‘No, wait, it’s Nathan. Only people who hate me call me Nathaniel. Where did you get that name from?’
‘I texted the first name in your directory.’
‘Who was … oh no, don’t tell me. Alan? I take it he gave a suitably charming response?’
‘He, er, didn’t seem to like you very much …’
‘The feeling’s entirely mutual.’ He sighs. ‘What did he say?’
‘Um …’ I don’t feel particularly comfortable repeating the nasty message. ‘You’ll see when you get your phone back.’
‘Don’t worry, “um” is more than descriptive enough.’ He lets out a sad laugh. ‘It’s actually nice of you not to tell me. You are planning on giving it back then?’
‘Of course I am! I have my own phone that I’d like to get away from half the time, I certainly don’t want yours as well. I saw you on the train this morning. I was behind you when we pulled into your stop and you went to put your phone in your pocket but you missed. I picked it up before it got trampled or stolen. I’ve been trying to find a way to contact you all day.’ You know, between writing an article about how pretty your eyes are and examining every inch of your phone.
‘You’re the girl I see sometimes, aren’t you?’ His breath catches in his throat and I get the sense that he’s holding it, waiting for an answer.
At that caught breath, all of my doubts slip away. He does know me. I haven’t imagined some connection between us. He smiles at me too. Whatever Sliding Doors magic Daphne keeps going on about, whatever else Zinnia wants me to write about him. It doesn’t matter. Maybe they’re right. Maybe this isn’t just coincidence.
‘We do see each other sometimes, yeah,’ I say, hesitating a little because I’m not quite sure how to describe it.
He lets out a long breath and warmth floods my insides. He must’ve felt something over the months of our silent flirtation too. Not just that I was a weird public transport starer.
‘What’s your name?’ he asks in a soft Yorkshire accent.
‘Ness. Well, Vanessa, but everyone calls me Ness.’
‘We have something in common then – full names we don’t get called by.’
The way he says it makes me want to smile but I still feel like I need to explain myself. ‘I tried to catch you, you know? But you ran out of there faster than the Road Runner.’
‘Beep beep,’ he says, doing a spot-on impression, and a giggle takes me by surprise because I used to love those cartoons.
‘Yeah, sorry, I had a connection to catch and about three minutes to make it between platforms and that was without the tube being a couple of minutes late. Trains to this part of the country only run once a day. I couldn’t miss it.’
‘What part of the country’s that then?’ I grew up in a little village where my parents still live. I remember the days of one bus an hour and being completely cut off from civilisation. The constant trains and buses were one of my favourite things when I first moved to London, but even that’s got old now. Sometimes I long for the days of one bus an hour and not being crammed into a tube train every morning like a limp flip-flop on a summer’s day.
‘A little village called Pearlholme. I bet you’ve never heard of it because it’s so small that even people who live five miles away from it have never heard of it. It’s on the Yorkshire coast, not far down from Scarborough.’
‘I always hear people saying they love that part of the country.’
‘It’s perfect here. The beach is amazing and the village is so tiny. It’s all cobbled streets and quaint cottages. There’s one combined shop and post office, a pub, and a couple of beach huts on the promenade, and that’s it. It’s the perfect antidote to London. I’ve only been here a few hours and I feel better than I have in months.’ He sounds like he’s smiling as he speaks.
I wasn’t expecting him to sound the way he does. His voice sounds warm and approachable, like a steady reassuring policeman, someone you’d be safe with. It matches the way his smile has always looked.
‘Are you on holiday?’ With your wife? And children?
‘No, I’m working, although I’ve got a nerve to call it work, really. I’m restoring an old carousel by the sea. I’m literally on the sand. The beach is my office. It’s amazing. It couldn’t get any better.’
I find myself smiling at how happy he sounds. ‘That explains all the pictures of wooden horses on your phone.’
‘So you’ve been going through my pictures then, have you?’ He still sounds jokey and not annoyed at all.
‘I wasn’t going through them, I was looking for a way of getting your phone back to you.’ I don’t mention quite how much time Daph, Zinnia, and I spent combing through his phone inch by inch this morning or that I’m already thinking about how smug I can sound tomorrow when I tell them the carousel horses aren’t just a weird fetish.
‘In my photos?’
‘Well, you could’ve taken a picture of your house, couldn’t you?’
‘Hah. It’s a crummy flat in an ugly block in London. The only people who’d take a photograph of it would be filmmakers for a documentary on Britain’s worst housing.’
‘Oh, I know that feeling.’ I glance over at the bucket in the corner, catching a leak of unknown origin. The landlord, on the rare occasion I can get hold of him, promised to get it sorted last year. He hasn’t answered his phone since. Perhaps I should stop the rent direct debit – that’d get him round here pretty fast.
‘And I bet you pay enough rent to purchase a small car every month too, right?’
‘Several small cars, actually.’
‘You should see the cottage I’m staying in here. It’s a holiday let that I’ve rented for six weeks, but I could live here for six months for the price of one month in London, and it’s gorgeous.’
‘Six
