Wide Open. Nicola Barker

gone. They built a link road over it. So I decided to give myself up to the road. To many roads. And now I’m on the motorway. I’m trying to find out what I can get back from it. I’ve been waving from here for three weeks.’

      Ronny was pleased to have had his first question answered at last. By way of recompense he said, ‘I live on the Isle of Sheppey. By the sea. Not the sea, really, the channel.’

      The other Ronny nodded. ‘Yes, Sheppey.’

      ‘You know it?’ Ronny strained to think of reasons why a person would go to Sheppey.

      ‘Did you pass through to catch the ferry?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Are you a keen birdwatcher?’

      ‘No.’

      He paused for a moment. ‘Were you in prison there?’

      The other Ronny smiled and said, ‘I know someone who lives there.’

      Ronny checked his watch. ‘I’d better be off.’

      He proffered the other Ronny his hand to shake. He wanted to seal this interlude, formally. He was pleased with it but he wanted it contained.

      The other Ronny couldn’t shake his hand.

      ‘I can’t shake your hand,’ he said gently, ‘I’m still holding the wasp.’

      ‘So you’re left-handed,’ Ronny said, ‘like me.’

      ‘No. I’m right-handed, it’s just that I do everything with my left hand.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘It’s one of my projects.’

      Ronny was perplexed. He transformed his attempted shake into a little wave. ‘Well, it was nice to meet you.’

      ‘Yes.’

      He headed over towards the embankment. He didn’t turn around again. If he had, he would have seen the other Ronny go and bury his wasp in the soil at the edge of the bridge and then construct, one-handed and with considerable difficulty, a small marker out of a lolly stick and a piece of dried grass. Next he would have seen him walk back to the centre of the bridge and wash his hands in a puddle.

      When he’d completed his tasks, however, instead of returning to his original post, the other Ronny moved to the opposite side of the bridge, the side facing into London, and stood and gazed down the hard shoulder. He saw Ronny climb into his green Volvo, indicate, pull off.

      He felt an impulse to wave but defeated it. Instead he touched the wrist of his right hand with his left hand as if expecting to find something there, but the wrist was bare. He smiled gently, peered over his shoulder towards the cardboard box, cleared his throat and then shoved his cold wet fingers deep into his pockets.

      2

      Laura had imagined herself to be in love with Nathan for the first three years of her five-year tenure in Lost Property. Truly in love. A dizzy, silly, confusing, confounding love. Love like a wave (foam tipped), a wall (straight up and down, solid, well-built), like a wheel (no beginning, no end), like a whale.

      A giant love, in other words. A great big whopper of a love. Love. Secret and hairy and cinnamon-flavoured. A hot, sharp-shooting sherbert love. A mishy-mushy, hishy-hushy, splishy-sploshy kind of love.

      But the love had been unreciprocated and now she couldn’t understand how she had felt it or what it had consisted of, how it had looked or tasted or smelled.

      It had been lost, her love, it had been pushed into a file, into a drawer, under a table, into an old suitcase. It had fallen between the folds of a badly closed umbrella. Her love had become another piece of lost property, floating around the office, no one seeing it or caring about it, no one to claim it.

      They went out for a drink together, twice, after work. Nathan liked her, clearly, but not in that way. Not enough. Then she found out that he was seeing someone else. A social worker called Margery. She thought Margery such an antiquated name. She thought Margery must be sixty years old with blue hair and a beard. But Margery actually looked like Glenda Jackson. Striking, short-haired and with teeth that needed containing, that needed a brace.

      Nathan never mentioned Margery at work. Thank God. And so Laura, rejected Laura, stupid Laura, blonde-haired, green-eyed, snub-nosed little Laura had to force herself to be nice to him. And in the moist dankness of that niceness a worm of hatred unravelled itself. It slid about. It sniffed, blindly, in Nathan’s direction. It was soft and vile and slightly, very slightly, ever so, ever so slightly whiffy.

      The worm turned. The love withered. And left behind in its stead were only suds and offal and litter and a nasty, dirty bath ring which encircled Laura’s heart and made all her deepest, sweetest sensations of yesteryear seem like something empty and ugly and pathetic.

      Her love was a glob of phlegm on life’s high street. It was slippery and slimy and not especially useful. Her love was cancelled. It was all washed out. It was over. Over. Over.

      Laura wanted to scorn Nathan, to reject and rebuff, but she was a sensible woman and she knew that he didn’t even have the first idea about all the things she’d been feeling, so what was the point?

      Instead she made an effort to be nice. A huge effort. If she offered to make her workmates tea she’d ask Nathan first whether he fancied a cup. She always wrote his name at the beginning of the postcards she sent to the office from holidays abroad. She always remembered the date of his birthday. 12 November. Scorpio. She always did a collection. She always saved the hazelnut whirl for him when someone brought chocolates to work. That was his favourite chocolate. In fact, she made all the silly, goofy gestures she’d never made before, when she’d really, truly loved him.

      And Nathan always took the hazelnut whirl with good grace. It was his least favourite chocolate but Laura seemed to get pleasure from giving it to him. So he took it.

      Did he know how she’d loved him? He didn’t think about it. His mind was elsewhere. Sometimes he felt a vague sense of unease when she was near him, when she smiled at him – too brightly – or when she came over especially just to say goodnight.

      On these occasions he felt like she was overcompensating – which she was – and although he didn’t know what she was overcompensating for, he imagined that it was for something secret and sad and untoward.

      He was right. That’s just how it was. Three years of dreams. Three years of watching and waiting, of apprehending and misapprehending. All that time wasted. All that time.

      He was a softie. Sometimes he cried over the forgotten things. The special things that he kept in the special places. The bangles with loving inscriptions, the tufts of hair in golden lockets, the small dinners in plastic bags. Meals for one, and the one had forgotten them.

      Sometimes he came into work early to walk around and feel the forgotten things, to try and remember them. At night he listed forgotten things in his dreams. He lovingly dwelt on the eight hundred and forty-seven black umbrellas, the fifteen hundred and sixty-two single gloves, the books, the pairs of glasses, the knick-knacks, the scarves, the hats. Unclaimed. Everything. All forgotten.

      Laura caught him once, after hours, in the storeroom, huddled in a corner, poring over something. She drew close and then softly spoke his name.

      ‘Nathan?’

      He sprang up, knocking pictures to the floor, a pile of photographs – polaroids mainly, but some others too, black and white photos. She knelt down to help him retrieve them.

      ‘Isn’t it funny,’ she asked gently, ‘the things people leave behind?’

      And in her hands she saw photographs of a little boy with brown eyes and a mop of hair, naked. And there was something wrong with the photos.

      ‘It is strange,’ Nathan muttered, his face reddening. ‘It is strange.’

      And so it was.