Page 10 of The Way We Are Now

‘Our next move?’ I looked him up and down suspiciously.

‘The next march! The next protest! Apparently – and I’ve only just been given this information so keep it under wraps…’ Frank tapped his nose confidentially, his eyes gleaming at the chance of imparting exciting news, ‘there’s thinking out there that Thatcher’s planning to invite P. W. Botha on a state visit to the UK next year. Any march, any protest can only illustrate London’s place as a locus of global radicalism.’

‘Right, OK, Frank, mum’s the word. I really need to have an early night. I’ll see you in lectures in the morning.’

‘Yes, but…’ Frank was hurriedly packing his biros into his pencil case. ‘Anna…?’

I gave him a cheery, if apologetic, wave and headed for the bus stop. There was only so much I could take of Frank at any one go.

The wind was blowing an absolute gale, the rain coming down almost horizontally, and for a split second I considered reversing my steps back into the warmth of the library. But I knew I’d have to face Frank, who was probably eager to escort me home at some point and, besides, I was starving hungry. My umbrella, already missing a spoke, blew inside out as I tried to pull it over my head. My hands were numb with cold and, with not a soul standing at my usual stop, I realised I’d just missed a bus. Bugger. No shelter to huddle under either. I reached for the hood on my coat before remembering this particular coat was sans hood. Bugger to the power of ten.

I considered, but only for a second, sticking out my thumb and hitching a lift up to Headingley, but the spectre of the Yorkshire Ripper and his victim Jacqueline Hill, the first-year Leeds University student he’d murdered just two years or so earlier, would be forever stamped on the psyche of every female, young and old, in the Yorkshire area. I was brought back from my thoughts and anger over a female’s denied right to walk the city streets in the dark when a vehicle, driving at speed, sent up a spray of filthy icy water from the puddle at the side of the bus stop.

‘Shit!’ This was all I needed. ‘Wanker,’ I shouted after the speeding vehicle, while attempting to mop myself down with the wet broken umbrella, the only bit of material I had to hand. I stepped back as another car approached, a veritable tsunami of puddle water rolling towards me once more. The car, a Mini like Fliss’s, but this one black and in somewhat better condition than hers, came to a halt, brake lights showing before the vehicle began reversing back towards me.

A window wound down and a disembodied cultured voice spoke. ‘Gosh, so sorry about that.’

Did anyone say Gosh these days? Obviously, they did.

‘You’re soaked. So sorry.’

‘It wasn’t you!’ I sniffed. ‘But it could have been. I’d had a dress rehearsal just a few seconds earlier.’

‘A dress rehearsal…? Oh, I see what you mean.’ The driver laughed. ‘Can I give you a lift?’

‘You don’t know where I’m going,’ I said, water trickling down my neck.

‘But you know where I’m going,’ he insisted.

I peered in at Theo Mandeville. ‘You don’t have any bad habits, do you? You know, like the Ripper had? I promised my mum I would never hitch a lift with a strange man. Or strange woman, come to that. I mean, you can’t be too sure these days, can you?’

He laughed again, leaning over to open the passenger door. ‘Do you always talk so much? For heaven’s sake, get in. You’re soaked. And you’re totally safe with me.’

‘You’re forgetting, the first time I saw you, you jumped out at me with no clothes on.’

‘And you’re forgetting, I jumped out of the bath, and not at you. Look, it’s cold with this door and window open. Do you want a lift or not? Look at your poor hands. They’re white with cold. Do you not have any gloves?’

‘I lose them all the time. I should sew them on to elastic and thread them through my coat like my mum did when I was little.’

Theo smiled at that and then, as I finally sat down in the passenger seat, reached into the glove compartment of the Mini before handing me a pair of black woollen gloves. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘put these on.’

‘Thank you.’ My hands were so numb it took a few seconds to actually pull on the gloves which were very big on me, but nevertheless very welcome. ‘I’m up in Headingley.’

‘I know.’

‘You know?’ I turned in surprise, taking in the floppy blond longish hair, the large brown eyes and the perfect white teeth. Was there anything about Theodore Mandeville that wasn’t a parody of his class and upbringing?

‘Your friend told me. You know, once you’d backed out in horror at my nakedness before disappearing at speed up to the next flat with Henry.’

‘Henry…? Oh, right.’ I was embarrassed at my seeming gaucheness that morning when confronted with a stark-bollock-naked male rising from the water like some sort of Italian Renaissance statue. Why hadn’t I just stood and stared, a critical smile playing on my lips while I held up my dustpan in the manner of a judge on TV’s New Faces while being exhorted to ‘press your buttons now’? Like Fliss would have done, had it been her who’d been in charge of cleaning the bathroom rather than the kitchen.

‘So, what’s your friend called?’

‘Felicity,’ I said. ‘Fliss…’

‘Fabulous hair,’ he said. ‘Amazing colour.’

‘She has. It is.’