Page 24 of Love Unlocked

‘Uh, Claire …’ she says in a nervous voice.

‘I just want to test something. I want to see if he could have … you see, he’s left-handed …’

She starts prodding Melody in her sides with the spoon, which tickles. Melody starts laughing and squirming.

‘Don’t move.’

Melody giggles and tries to be still.

Claire swaps the arm over and wraps her right arm around her neck, muttering to herself. ‘But what if he did this … he could have used his left hand not to hold her but to …’

‘That’s a bit tight.’

‘Sorry.’ Claire starts to prod her in the other side and Melody giggles again.

Claire, fed up, releases Melody from her grip.

‘Sorry,’ Melody says, feeling more giggles bubble up inside. ‘I feel like I let you down.’

‘No, it’s not you. It’s just not possible …’ She thinks, then shakes her head.

‘Did he do it?’

‘Probably,’ she grumbles, going for her bicycle again. ‘Oh, by the way, I won’t be home tonight.’

‘Again?’ Melody asks, feeling like a child whose mother has told her she’s going out.

‘Yes,’ Claire says, and Melody thinks she sees a hint of a smile on her lips as she wheels the bike through the apartment. ‘Again.’

Melody waits outside Bridgespan offices at eight thirty a.m. She couldn’t sleep and she couldn’t rest. She needed to get out of the apartment and do something about the messages that are flooding into her Instagram account.

The articles she’d read in the tabloids about the love locks being removed from the Grace Plunkett Bridge had all mentioned and quoted a man named Al Collins. There weren’t any available photographs of him in the newspaper but a visit to the company website reveals a ‘Meet the Team’ tab where lo and behold there is Al Collins. Though as he stands in the team photograph next to his colleagues, he looks like Al Collins’s grandson, his handsome broad-shouldered grandson who has the height of a basketball player and the shoulders of a rugby player. Melody had been expecting a grumpy old troll who’d worked with Dublin City Council for centuries, protecting the bridges, from tourists and progressives. She isn’t sure why. Maybe because of his obvious delight in removing the love locks and extinguishing the joy of thousands of couples across the globe.

She’s beginning to think she’s underestimated how hard door-stepping him would be, and considers phoning to make an appointment like a regular person, when he appears head and shoulders above the rest of the cold pedestrians marching to work and breathing out puffs of cold January morning air.

Al didn’t just provide a good photo, he is a walking good photo. Somewhere in his thirties, he wears navy trousers with smart navy trainers and a puffer coat. He wears black Beats headphones. She can hear the music as though it’s playing live, the unmistakeable sound of ‘Every Breath You Take’ by The Police. She’s pretty sure her mum slept with someone from that band in the Eighties. The original stalker song. He wears an intense look on his face, bright blue eyes that are gazing intently at something in his mind. He has a strong, chiselled jaw, Ken’s better-looking, edgy friend. He stands out from the crowd, and she can’t take her eyes off him, feeling suddenly shyer as he gets nearer. He’s too beautiful to approach. She’s standing at the door, feeling like a stalker herself, her scooter beside her. She steps forward to greet him.

He looks right at her and she smiles, broadly, sweetly, rehearsed. You can trust me. Then he looks away and enters the building.

She swears and leans her scooter against the wall hoping that she can beat the odds and it won’t be stolen. Then as she looks back at it, she changes her mind and tries to take it through the auto-revolving door, but it’s an awkward size and it gets trapped between the doorframe and the revolving door, causing the door to stop. She’s stuck inside the revolving door. As is Al Collins, the bridge guy.

An alarm sounds.

Everyone in the reception area stares at her. Her scooter is caught in the door. The brake and back wheel free on the other side.

Al, wearing his headphones, is in one portion of the revolving door, she is in the other. There’s a gap in his door which offers freedom but he’s too large to squeeze through it. He turns around to face her and looks at her in surprise. She’s sure her face is bright red, stuck in a frozen, embarrassed grin. He lowers the headphones from his head to sit around his neck, only then noticing the alarm. His eyes survey her, and she feels goosebumps rise on her skin under his gaze. Finally he sees the problem. She tugs at the scooter.

‘Sorry,’ she says, feeling her cheeks turn pink. Her voice is small in the confined space.

He smiles and shrugs. ‘I didn’t want to go to work anyway.’

For a joke, she dramatically puts her hand to the glass. They are so close yet so far. This is an unusual thing to do to a stranger, granted, but he doesn’t feel that strange. He feels very familiar, very connected, very handsome. And they are both stuck in a small confined area which makes Melody react in strange and needy ways.

He laughs, his voice warm, though sounding like it’s trapped in a tube.

This is a problem in more than one way for Melody because just as she does not like committed relationships and being alone at night, she also equally does not like confined spaces. Despite the glass, which she is grateful she can see through, and the attractive man who is also trapped with her, she is in a very confined space, where even her voice feels too close to her.

A security guard puts his hand up to tell her to stop tugging, he will somehow fix this, but her panic gets the better of her. What if she’s stuck here, all day? Indefinitely. What if she needs to go to the toilet, as she very suddenly needs right now? What if she runs out of air? What if she slowly dies, losing air and deflating like a wrinkled prune, while everyone watches her through the glass? She can’t just stand here and do nothing. She tugs again. She feels the scooter budge slightly and so pulls and twists it.