Huddleston Road. John Toomey

girl. I knew her little in the early days.’

      When James spoke of the early days what he was recalling were his years as a stray in London. He’d travelled from Swansea with nothing but a paperback novel stuffed into his jacket and worked in various areas of the service industry to get by.

      ‘She was sleeping with a friend of mine, on and off,’ he told Vic.

      On the subject of Lali’s flatmate, who Vic never met and wrongly imagined to be a male friend, James told him he had no idea who she lived with or what her eagerness to have Vic out of the flat might have been about. ‘Who knows, Vic? I’m telling you, leave this notch on the bedpost. The fuck of your life. Now move on.’

      ‘Why do you need to punctuate every sentence with filth?’

      ‘I punctuate my sentences with facts, my Celtic cousin. Look, you fucked her, she fucked you. Who cares? The point is that you need now to forget about her. Anything else is just your ego. She hasn’t asked for anything more, and she has atoned for her very public humiliation of you. Leave it there, I say.’ James stood up from a stack of loose pages on the desk before him as he said this, drawing the conversation to a close. ‘Have I ever told you that I hate teaching? I’ve run out of red pen for all the inadequacies of this lot. A set of papers two inches high, with answers twice as fucking thick!’

      By the middle of the week, he was refusing to engage with Vic at all. Vic had probed, directly and indirectly, and relentlessly, in pursuit of some missing essence of Lali, to the point that James lost patience. He was no longer able to conceal his irritation with Vic’s interest in Lali and declared, ‘I’m done now, Vic. Okay? I’m not talking to you, about anything, until she’s off the table.’

      Vic’s solution to this impasse was to spend a Saturday morning on a self-directed walking tour of Greenwich. It wasn’t long before he spotted Lali through the glass facade of a trendily poky coffee shop. She was behind a counter, taking money at the till.

      He bought a paper from the kiosk on the far side of the street and sat down on the wall. Pretending to read the sports, he watched her as she worked, shuttling between till and tables, and then behind the counter where she was hardly visible for the shine on the window. The name above the shop was in a royal blue, baroque scrawl – Rococo’s. He wondered did she inherit the name with the premises and was unsure whether it mattered.

      Every time he caught a glimpse of her, he remembered and had to look away, unnerved by the voyeuristic composition of his burgeoning obsession. He got lost for minutes at a time, pretending to read his newspaper.

      Just as he began to think it would be a better idea to forget about her, beginning to doubt the veracity of his recollections – time had surely embellished the experience – a pair of plump feet appeared on the path in front of him. Looming over him was a large woman in her late twenties, or early thirties, maybe, with curly brown hair. She handed him a cardboard cup with tea in it.

      ‘On the house, she says.’

      ‘Thanks.’

      ‘She said she owes you a breakfast.’

      The large girl turned, looked right and left, and crossed the street and went back into Rococo’s. When he entered the shop, Lali was busy with a couple of customers at the till. He took a sip of the tea and tried to control the palpitations, the racing adrenaline of embarrassment and trepidation. Then he presented himself to her, wide open and breath held.

      ‘Take a seat,’ she said. ‘I’ll take my break.’

      Vic took a seat at an empty four-seater table by the window and heard her call into the kitchen, ‘Continental breakfast, tea, large coffee, and a muffin, Aldo. Table two.’

      She untied and removed her apron and sat across from him. Her eyes looked tired but intense; inquisitive, street-smart, hazel whirls of impenetrable murk. The shop was warm and the straps of her black bra were visible on her shoulders from beneath her casual, grey vest-top. Her bare arms revealed skin as sleek and toned as he remembered. Swept back off her forehead by a hair-band, her lustrous mane, fixed in a hurry, was slightly less perfect than the rest of her.

      She lit a cigarette but said nothing. Vic looked back at her, posing as if calm and cool but actually clammed-up and unable to speak. Having come so far in pursuit of her and having then found himself paralysed, he was on the verge of standing up and walking out, without explanation, afraid that the frenzied flicker in his eyes had already betrayed him.

      But then she broke the silence with the kind of simple salutation that he had been pathetically incapable of. ‘So, how’ve you been, Vic?’

      He received those simple words with disproportionate gratitude and they continued from there, for several vapid minutes, exchanging equally mundane conversation starters that somehow failed to have the desired effect. Eventually it was James, their only common point of intersection, that succeeded in moving the conversation from this rut.

      ‘Let’s not dwell on things,’ she said, putting her hand on his at the mention of James’ party. The gesture halted any recriminations. It appeased, softened her in his eyes, and also seemed to transform the previously inconsequential encounter to one of intimate significance; it felt like there was some kind of history at work, the way her hand touched his and asked him to look forward now, to forget what couldn’t be helped.

      They were soon interrupted by Aldo, a short and scrawny and heavily bestubbled man about Vic’s age, delivering the breakfasts. Lali took her coffee and lit up another cigarette, looking across at Vic as he ate. With her cocky indifference, she bound him in another silence. Vic was just noting the imbalanced dynamic at work between them, wondering whether it could be considered a pattern at this early stage, when she let him off the hook again.

      ‘There’s a party next week. A friend of mine. Why don’t you come along?’

      The invitation redeemed her, redeemed them both. It allowed them to talk some more, for him to ask questions, to have something to say. The tremors and licks of her beautiful face in motion was given body and realness by her taut voice.

      Then, at a point, it occurred to Vic that he would like to leave, that the breakfast with Lali was a decent start and it was time to withdraw and regroup. He sensed that another uncomfortable silence was on its way, when the plump girl from earlier arrived tableside, telling Lali there was a call.

      Lali stubbed out her cigarette and introduced Vic to Donna. ‘I’ll call you during the week,’ Lali said to him, as she stood up.

      It was just Vic and Donna then; her, a wall of reticence. Before he had a chance to take his leave, Donna lifted his unfinished breakfast from the table and left.

      The following Saturday came but with no haste. The week was pock-marked by Lali’s intrusion into almost every waking thought. Vic considered what it was about her, specifically. His attraction to her was underpinned by what seemed to him a purely salacious motivation. At the same time, his need for her was not the simple stuff of anonymous lust, taking her and leaving her. He wanted more of her than just that, but a long habit of conformity required him to search for some other, deeper motivation. It didn’t necessarily need to be love, he told himself, just something more profound than carnality.

      Lali, though, appeared completely at ease with the shallowness of it. She almost reveled in the debased individualism. The inherent self-indulgence of such promiscuity hung from her delicate shoulders like a chiffon dress, and, somehow, her disregard for etiquette enhanced her irresistibility. It liberated her to do things like just sit and watch him eat, and take unusual pleasure in the rising panic of his eyes. She could do that because what was useful in him wasn’t sacred; it could be found throbbing somewhere in the minds and between the legs of any man. If Vic didn’t fuck her, somebody else would.

      Vic spent much time trying to make a better story than that of her. Something that would ameliorate the arrogance, make sense of her ardent dislocation. But his efforts were wholly unsuccessful and he reached the Saturday of the party more perplexed by her incompleteness than he had been at the beginning of the week. Somehow, peering into the depths of