Huddleston Road. John Toomey

his senior and the last time he’d seen her was at her parents’ twentieth wedding anniversary. He was five or six and she was a confident teenager, polite and assured. By the time he arrived in London she was married with two kids and living in Hampstead.

      Although they could have passed on the street and not known each other, such was the time that had passed since they’d last met, Orla’s innate geniality made quick work of any uncertainty. Within minutes she had invited him over for dinner. After nearly three months of toasted, cheap-cheese sandwiches, baked beans and beer, he enthusiastically accepted. Orla introduced him to her husband, Geoff, and the two kids. They were awfully bloody hospitable and charming. Had he not been so grateful, he might have been sickened by the greed – why must some people get it all? His super-animated recollection of Orla’s blissful life could be dismissed as the famine induced hallucinations had it not been for the fact that the perfect looks, manners and fortune willfully withstood the weathering of the years; their perfection constantly adorning itself with still more resplendence and zest.

      Their hospitality, in the thick of London’s aloofness, affirmed Vic’s faith in human kind. The ludicrously homely home in fashionable Hampstead became a safe-house for him; a place where his innards could be warmed by roast potatoes, vegetables and rare tastes of premium meat, so that he could return to student- world rejuvenated. In reciprocation, he babysat for them once a year, on their anniversary, when they would go out to dinner and see a show. A gesture of gratitude that over the course of his university years established itself as tradition.

      With first year skippered successfully, and after spending a summer at home wondering whether he’d bother going back, he returned to London for his second year. He remained in halls of residence, as was his wont as an international student, and thus avoided all the pitfalls of renting in the open market with people you don’t really know as well as you thought, and inevitably falling out with them in the kind of mini-dramas where the last dribble of semi-skimmed milk is a deal-breaker. There was more security for him in halls of residence. It afforded him a level of independence and solitude when needed, retreating to his room for days at a time when assignments needed writing, while also providing the opportunity to be with others at the bar, or share half an hour in the communal kitchen.

      Knowing the ropes already, in a building populated mainly by first years, mostly kids fresh out of school, he was confident enough to resist rushing in. He stood back, mixed sparingly, and worked in a way that was more focused than before. By third year he was a seasoned student; an oasis of clarity and focus among the chaos and melodrama; a marvelous, sovereign entity in a vortex of sex and crying and puking. Occasionally, he cut loose and joined in, celebrating the end of each round of assignments.

      The next step was just laziness. He’d enjoyed London and didn’t want to leave. He didn’t have the appetite for a Masters and he was, despite a degree, unqualified for everything. A few people he knew were going into teaching and he decided, in the absence of anything better, that it would do for him too. Accepted into another London university, he began the following September, his fourth in London, and trudged half-interestedly through a PGCE, passing with relative ease, and took up a post at Downwood the following September.

      He met Lali at James’ birthday celebration. At thirty, or soon to be, and with seven years service behind him, James was an old hand at Downwood. Vic, with only one full year in the job behind him, was still fairly fresh-faced and also, at twenty-five, still firmly in his youth. In a London school with an astonishingly high turnover of staff, James was considered an experienced teacher, and embraced the responsibility of such an impish title with appropriate rectitude; dismissing all his students as unthinking baboons, planning lessons on torn-off strips of cereal boxes, and meeting acronyms, initiatives or pilot anythings issued from the local council – ultiultimately dismissed as either ‘unworkable’ or ‘fuckology’ – with immeasurable contempt. James believed in the text, the power of a text itself. His first advice to Vic was, ‘Pick a book you like, talk about why you like it. They’ll learn more from that than a million storyboards, word searches, tableaux, role-plays or diary entries. And when you’re done, pick something you hate. But make it short, an extract, and have a proper fucking rant about that. That’s teaching.’

      Vic came to notice her through a series of evanescent movements. She was something in his peripheral vision, a graceful flicker among the greater body of James’ birthday guests. There was something about her coffee skin and jet black hair that beguiled. She was small and skinny, naturally skinny though, not in that anaemic, chronically delusional Hollywood starlet kind of way.

      ‘She’s an alright, girl. A bit feisty,’ James said. Vic took this summation to be an endorsement, something James would later insist it was never intended as. Endorsement or disclaimer, it didn’t matter. Vic would have taken his chances anyway. He swaggered across the flat, slinked his way onto the balcony, and stood between Lali and another man. ‘Hi, I’m a friend of James’. From Downwood.’

      Lali smiled and laughed a little. Promising, Vic thought. But then, devoid of modesty, she replied, ‘Sorry, friend of James, but I don’t do freckles.’

      The bristling competition all but fell off the balcony laughing, and Lali stared contemptuously at him until he walked away. For weeks afterwards, Vic thought of all the things he should have said, all the lightning responses that might have redeemed him. But in the moment he was dumbstruck by the blatant arrogance of her assumptions.

      For a while after the episode with Lali, he bore the scars of her malice. He was less sure of himself, and in worrying about how he stood or walked or spoke, he inadvertently contrived to make his every move ungainly and overtly self-conscious. In turn, this had the effect of making his conversation with girls in bars slump awkwardly to a standstill every time Lali’s face revisited him, her clinical sneer sliced across it. They’d excuse themselves to the ladies, or anywhere, just to be free of Vic’s unsettling babble, as he degenerated into chronic ineptitude.

      He knew his confidence should be more robust and that Lali’s reduction of him possessed no more sophistication than that of playground politics, but he struggled to dismiss it. And although in the rationality of his own mind he could overcome her and persevere, the memory of her affront retained the ability to undermine him at a glance.

      The self-conscious inadequacy that Lali had unearthed in him was still dimly observable, several months later, when James set him up for dinner with another girl. James assured him that this was a ‘good girl.’ Vic nearly bolted at the sound of those words. But James convinced him that she was nothing like Lali.

      They met in The Commons, in Blackheath, on a busy Friday, and she was sumptuous company. She was very interested in the fact that Vic was an English teacher, and wrongly assumed that he had extensive knowledge of his subject. She questioned him on novels and authors, and it became clear that the vivacious date was more widely read than the ambling English teacher. He bluffed his way through the literary minefield and then suggested they catch a train, or a taxi, into London and get something to eat.

      The taxi set them down on Charing Cross Road. They agreed, since it was their first meal and there were no guarantees of anything, to go easy on Vic’s wallet; the proviso being that were they to make it to a subsequent date, he’d have to push the boat out a little. So The Pizza Parlour it was.

      A few hours later, Vic paid the bill and they walked out into London’s winter evening. Students, groups of workers on nights out, theatre habitués, fell cheerfully in and out of restaurants and pubs. The streetlights twinkled above them, the wind had calmed, and the rain, now only drizzling, trip-trapped on the ground. The promise of warm, musty-smelling pubs lured them through one last doorway.

      When her phone rang, she looked at the screen apprehensively. ‘I’m just going to take this outside. Home.’ On her return she explained that she had to leave, candidly expounding, ‘My father’s sick. I said I’d be home by midnight.’ It was just past one a.m.

      She apologized and Vic asked for her number. She took his phone in her hand and tapped her name and number into his contacts. Pulling on her coat and buttoning up tight and warm, she leaned in and kissed him softly and wetly on the lips. He offered to take her home, but she declined.

      He