Sophie Priest was from the Home Counties but when I first met her she was working as a librarian for John Lewis on Oxford Street. I had no idea why a department store would have need of a librarian but no matter.
As I described in my Asian stories, Sophie had a black centre-parted fringe which framed an angelic face dotted with light brown freckles under hazel eyes and I loved her, even though she did not believe it.
Read moreSophie was now living in a flat share near the house on Brookfield Avenue where Elaine and I grew up. I was back with Sophie on a trial basis and I still loved her so I was on my best behaviour. (Sophie had been cut from the Asian stories for reasons of expediency though her description had been retained and attributed to Bertie.)
That day I had to clear out my work place before going back to Sophie’s flat. Evening was already settling in and I was the only one in the office after Duc the Wanker (not to be confused with Duc the Blind Rickshaw Driver) had left.
From the window of our shared office on the second floor, I looked out across the housing estate rooftops with their burnishing remnants of sun, and called Sophie to warn her.
‘I’m going to be later than I thought,’ I told her with some trepidation. ‘Maybe seven o’clock?’ I added.
We were going to have dinner together. I pictured her picking up my call and leaning against the side table in the foyer corridor of her flat. Sophie would be wearing a white top and jeans, not the tight black wool skirt of old. Also her hair was brown now. She’d dyed it, and it was slightly wavy, not straight, and she no longer had her bangs.
I preferred her old hair colour but as stated, I loved her anyway and wanted to make it up to her.
‘That’s fine,’ I heard her say from the the other end of the line. Then I put down the receiver and hurried out of the office to my car.
Traffic was heavy as usual along the M40, right up until the Hangar Lane Gyratory but the most annoying part was the final walk to her house. Sophie lived the same side as our old house but to get to her flat you had to walk up Hangar Lane to the top of the hill, then turn right into the estate, then walk back down again to her flat. There was no cut through from what I could see, and by the time I had parked and begun the walk it was already night.
I walked up the hill past the shops on the corner, along the tree-lined sidewalk and past the chain link fence of an ill-lit car dealership. A man was walking out from the dealership entrance and for a moment I thought he must have found a cut through – unless the other end of the dealership had another chain link fence.
I continued up the hill past an opening where large brown boulders interrupted the tree line. Perhaps there was a cut through there instead? If I climbed over the boulders? But I was already near the top of the hill so I kept moving. For some unknown reason I crossed Hangar Lane at the zebra crossing and when I saw the commuters spill from the tube station I caught up with a woman to ask her about the cut through.
‘Not that I know of,’ she breathlessly responded as she hurried into the station. As I followed her in, I wondered whether I should have entered the estate from the north, instead of walking south up the hill. It would have taken me past my old house, but that was fine.
I already had a tube pass so I pushed past the ticket booth and didn’t even wait for the elevator but took the stairs instead. The walls were still the brown and white tile of the 70s because the station hadn’t been refurbished like the others. And when I got to the platform I was disoriented and unsure whether I was standing on the eastbound line or the westbound. In the other tunnel across from the platform where I stood I heard the rumble of a train as it came to a stop.
Did I want that platform instead of this? I wondered.
‘Ealing Broadway! doors closing,’ I heard the announcer call out.
Damn it, and I hurried across the intersection to the other platform, which was slightly elevated from where I had been standing. Two men were helping to lift a disabled woman in a wheelchair onto the train by smoothing down a black rubber mat in front of the doors.
Would the doors close before I too could get on? Just then the men stepped back and I slid in next to the wheelchair and the doors closed. At the far end of the darkened carriage was a light marked ‘Ealing Broadway,’ and with relief I leant back against the standing rests at the front of the carriage.
I looked down, and in my hurry, I saw that my phone had pushed out a little from my front pocket. It could have dropped to the floor. I pushed it back into my pocket and now it was okay. Now everything was okay.