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I peeped over his shoulder. A family was already inside, a couple and a young boy, their stuff spread out everywhere, a pile of colourful, plastic toys in disarray on the floor.
‘Excuse me, but this is actually our couchette,’ said Si, showing the man our tickets and dropping his bag territorially onto the floor. ‘See? Couchette 4, Coach H. Perhaps yours is further down?’
The man turned to say something in French to the woman, who was sitting on the top bunk with her legs swinging off the edge. She had one of those sleek, shiny, perfectly symmetrical bobs that stopped just above her chin and I instinctively touched my own curls, which had gone wild and frizzy in the heat. We waited, both of us standing awkwardly to attention. I felt bad about the little boy, who was now hiding shyly behind his dad’s legs, but it wasn’t like they’d be without a cabin altogether, they were just in the wrong one.
After much shuffling of documents and hissed exchanges too fast for me to understand, the man showed Si a piece of paper. The two of us peered at it: their ticket looked identical to ours, the 19:20 Venice to Amsterdam, Coach H, Cabin 4.
‘For God’s sake,’ hissed Si.
There had obviously been a double booking. And they had a kid, so of course they should stay where they were. I had begun to suspect, though, that Si hated to lose at anything. A year together wasn’t that long in the scheme of things and there was still lots to discover about each other, especially now we shared a flat.
‘We’ll find the train manager, then, shall we?’ said Si, standing his ground.
‘As you wish,’ said the Frenchman, shrugging dismissively.
I backed down the corridor. ‘Come on, Si. Let’s leave it.’
Eventually Si gave up and followed me, making a beeline for the first member of staff we saw. He wanted to make an official complaint, he told her. She explained (much to his annoyance) that nothing could be done onboard, that we’d have to go to the ticket office once we arrived in Amsterdam. Despite him having another rant at a steward with a drinks trolley along the way, we ended up in a cramped, rock-hard pair of seats a couple of carriages further up in standard class. Si was fuming but pretending not to be.
‘We’ll be fine out here,’ he said, attempting to ram his bag into the overhead luggage rack and then kicking it under our seats when it finally dawned on him that it wasn’t going to fit. I moved my knees to let him past. I’d given him the window seat because I’d been on a train journey with him once before and remembered that he’d moaned continually about people knocking into his shoulder ‘all the time’. Also, I knew that once he got settled he’d be out like a light; it would be nicer for him to lean up against the glass. The only thing was, I was now stuck on this thing for the next fifteen hours and couldn’t even daydream out of the window, or pass the time by taking fuzzy photos of the view. I slid my fingers up and down the strap of the camera that had been almost permanently slung around my neck for the last few days, wondering whether I’d have time to shoot half a roll in Amsterdam before the wedding.
‘Sorry about this, Han,’ said Si, looking sheepish. ‘What a fuck-up.’ He took my hand, stroking the skin between my thumb and forefinger. ‘This was supposed to be a special treat. You only turn thirty once, don’t you?’
I swivelled my knees to face him, holding his face in my hands. ‘It’s fine, Si. Honestly. I’m having a lovely time.’
‘But I had our schedule all mapped out,’ he went on. ‘Tripadvisor raved about the first-class couchettes, called them cosy and romantic. I’d have booked us a flight, otherwise.’
‘It is romantic,’ I insisted. ‘And going without a bed for the night just adds to the adventure.’
‘Adventure wasn’t exactly what I had in mind,’ he said, propping his elbow on the window ledge and pinching the top of his nose with his thumb and finger. I could tell it was killing him that things hadn’t gone exactly to plan. Welcome to my world, I thought.
‘Try to relax,’ I said to him, fanning myself with my hand, already too hot.
‘There’s no air-conditioning on this thing either, then, I see?’ said Si, wiping his upper lip on the shoulder of his T-shirt.
‘There wouldn’t have been in the couchette either, then, probably,’ I reasoned, getting out my book and deciding it was best to leave him to stew for a bit.
I was half-way through Gone Girl, which my friend Ellie had lent to me because allegedly I was the only person she knew who hadn’t read it. The female protagonist’s psychotic tendencies notwithstanding, I thought there was something very appealing about the idea of dropping out of your current life and reinventing yourself as somebody else altogether. I supposed that, in a much smaller way, I’d changed myself too, when I’d met Si. Had become a more contained, more settled version of myself. The sort of girlfriend I thought he deserved and that I’d always suspected I had the potential to be, when I met the right person. And after what I’d found in Venice, it looked as though it was working. I bit my lip, unable to stop myself smiling as I tried to get comfortable, resting my head on Si’s shoulder.
‘I need the loo,’ he whispered into my ear after a while, stroking my thigh. ‘Sorry, sweetheart.’
I sat up, stifling a yawn. ‘What time is it?’
Si looked at his watch. ‘Ten past ten.’
Just over twelve hours to go, then. A full working day and then another half. My neck ached and I desperately wanted to stretch out my entire body; to fall asleep on my back with my legs flung out like a star fish. When I stood to let him pass, I felt unsteady on my feet.
‘Back in a sec,’ he said setting off down the aisle. I watched him go, marvelling at the fact that even under these circumstances, he managed to look all groomed and neat in his emerald green polo shirt and straight-cut indigo jeans. His hair was the same natural honey-blond at thirty-three as it had been at five, apparently, which annoyingly meant he still looked very young. He’d been asked for ID in M&S recently, for example, something that hadn’t happened to me for over a decade. To make matters worse, the week before we’d come away, I’d been brushing my hair one morning, pinning my choppy fringe to the side, just for a change, and it had been right there: my first grey strand. How could it be, when I was literally only just out of my twenties? I’d immediately started having dark thoughts about my impending death (which seemed closer than ever, now) and about how I hadn’t achieved half the things I wanted to achieve. I couldn’t even blame my genes: Mum was fifty-seven and I’d never seen any grey scattered through her fine, dark-blonde hair. And I had no idea whether my dad had gone grey or not. His hair was dark like mine and he was olive-skinned, too. He was also short and stocky, like I thought I was, so perhaps I’d blame him for the grey. Why not, since he wasn’t around to prove me wrong?
I sat back down, looking for signs of life out of the window, anything that might tell me where we were. As we’d rattled on, I’d lost track of which country we were in, as though the train could be taking me anywhere and I would just let it. Outside, only the occasional light appeared on the horizon, like splashes of yellow paint on a black canvas. I could see the chatty American boys across the aisle reflected in the glass; they were asleep now, slumped on a parent each, their eyes closed, but not completely, so that you could still see a glimmer of white between the lids. I wondered whether that would be Si and me in a few years’ time: the two of us travelling across Europe with a couple of kids in tow. Breaking up fights over sweets and who’d had longer on the Nintendo console.
Si’s phone buzzed. It wasn’t like him to go anywhere without his prized possession, a copper gold iPhone that was pretty much welded to his hand. After feeling around on the floor with my foot, I found it in the gap between our seats. A message preview sat at the top of the screen and I half-glanced at it, assuming it was his sister, who had been messaging him constantly in the run-up to the wedding. I put it on his pull-down table.
When I looked up, Si was standing next to me.
‘Got us some drinks,’ he said.
‘Great,’ I said, smiling up at him. That should liven things up.
