‘Oh. Right. Yes. But – what about your car? I mean, you’ve already had a couple of beers and …’
‘No – not here. In Turnpike Lane.’
‘What Lane?’
‘Turnpike Lane. It’s where I live. We can drop the car off and I’ll take you to my local. What d’you think?’
‘Oh,’ said Ana, ‘right.’
‘So? Yes or no?’
‘Er,’ Ana looked at her watch for some inexplicable reason, ‘er …’
Flint stopped and turned towards Ana. ‘Look. It’s not a big deal. I’m going home anyway, and I just thought it’dbe nice to have a drink, that’s all. No pressure … no big deal …’
Ana chewed her lip. She’d just assumed that after this meeting with Ed, Flint would be desperate to offload her, to drop her back at Gill’s and get on with his life. His invitation had thrown her entirely. But then, she thought, what else was she going to do this evening? Stay in on her own? Sit on her futon all night staring at the walls?
‘No – no. I mean. Yeah. Sure. Why not? Where is this Turnpike Lane place, anyway?’
‘Oh,’ said Flint, turning away and smiling slightly, ‘it’s a shimmering oasis in the enchanted woods of north London. A verdant, romantic corner of the city peopled by poets and artists and intellectuals …’
‘Really?’ said Ana, her eyes widening at the prospect.
‘Nah,’ said Flint, ‘it’s a total khasi. But it’s my khasi and I love it.’
Ana was amazed by how long the journey to Turnpike Lane took. They’d been driving for ever – how could they possibly still be in London? The scenery changed as they drove and became incrementally and undeniably uglier and uglier the further they drove. Turnpike Lane itself neither turned nor piked and was the complete opposite of any lane that Ana had ever seen, a wide and unattractive road lined with kebab shops, Turkish supermarkets, burger bars and launderettes.
The heatwave was showing no signs of abating. Buffed black girls in silver trainers shouted into mobile phones, smoky-windowed cars drove past full of music, olive-skinned men in thin shirts stood on pavements outsidecab offices, smoking and watching the world pass them by. They parked Flint’s limo in a lock-up garage behind a petrol station and walked towards his road. Flint lived in a small flat in a small house in a small, one-way, dead-end road. There was something very strange, very intimate about going to someone’s home when you’d only known them in one particular context, and particularly when that person had been expecting to come home alone. Flint unlocked the door and ushered Ana inside.
‘Fancy a quick beer before we go out?’ he said, leading her towards his kitchen and stripping off his T-shirt as he talked.
Ana nodded and looked away, feeling suddenly hot and flustered with embarrassment. Flint’s bare chest was tanned to the colour of strong tea, and he was wearing silver dog-tags around his wide neck. He was in extraordinarily good shape for a man of thirty-six. He turned to lead her through the house towards the garden and presented her with a smooth, muscled back. A few stray hairs grew from his shoulder blades and another scar, long, thin and trimmed with pinprick suture marks, ran from his spine to his side. They squeezed through a hallway packed with large objects – a bicycle, a car-jack, a few large cardboard boxes, a hoover and a set of golf-clubs.
‘Do you playgolf, Flint?’ Ana asked in surprise.
‘Uh-huh. One of the many advantages of not having a nine to five. Civilized mid-week tee-times. Piss-weak lager all right?’ he said, crouching down to pull a can of Heineken Cold Filter from the fridge in his small, basic kitchen and offering it to her. She nodded, taking it from him, enjoying the icy cold of the metal in her hot hands. She glancedaround as Flint pulled some more lager from an Unwin’s carrier bag on the floor and popped them into the fridge, can by can.
The kitchen was unfitted and cheap. A large water-heater took up the only wall space in the room, leaving Flint’s groceries displayed endearingly in piles along the work surfaces: chopped tomatoes with herbs, chopped tomatoes with garlic, chopped tomatoes with basil, whole plum tomatoes, fusilli, penne, Spanish onions, tinfoil, Desiree potatoes, carrots, garlic bulbs in a net bag, a dead basil plant on the windowsill. And then she noticed a little pile of teas next to Flint’s kettle – peppermint, rosehip, camomile, mango and apple – and for some reason they made her feel the same way she’d felt when she’d seen him in the arcade in Broadstairs pushing two-pee pieces into the penny cascade. Like she just wanted to hug him to death. Ana had always found something stupidly, wonderfully vulnerable about men’s groceries. She’d been the same about Hugh’s things – she’d go to his flat and go all gooey over his choice of butter, his little cans of spaghetti rings, the shaving foam and soap he chose.
She followed Flint through the flat towards a door at the back. She glanced quickly at a cluttered bookshelf in the hallway as she passed and just had time to spyMidnight in the Garden of Good and Evil,a biography of Hugh Hefner, the screenplay ofPulp Fiction, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodieand theOxford Dictionary of Quotations.Wrong again, thought Ana – she’d have put money on two Andy McNabs, a John Grisham and the Guinness Book of Recordscirca1989. She really must stop jumping to conclusions about him.
On a table by the back door was an ancient PC, a pile of reference books and a shelf loaded with files.
‘Are you studying something?’ said Ana, pointing at the desk.
Flint scratched his head. ‘Yeah. I’m … er … I’m taking a degree course, actually.’ He looked slightly embarrassed.
‘Oh,’ said Ana, trying not to let her surprise show too blatantly in her voice. ‘In what?’
‘Psychology. It’s, er, just a correspondence course, but it fits in with my lifestyle, you know – working nights, free days …’
‘Which year?’
‘Just starting my third year. Yeah …’ He picked up a reference book absent-mindedly and then put it down again. And then he turned away and walked towards the back door.
Outside was a tiny, overgrown garden. A railway track ran behind the fence at the bottom, and the sound of children playing in an abandoned carriage echoed around the whole area. In the garden next door, two smaller children screamed as they climbed up and slid down the same plastic slide over and over again.
‘Fucking school holidays,’ muttered Flint, stretching backwards into a threadbare brown upholstered armchair, kicking off his shoes, and cracking open the lager.