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He edged past my knees, hurling himself into his seat and picking up his phone.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Thought I’d taken this with me.’
He scanned the screen.
‘You got a message,’ I said.
‘Yeah?’
He pressed a key, tutting.
‘Who was it?’
‘Work,’ he said, pushing his phone into his pocket.
‘Not Dave, surely?’ I said, referring to his nightmare new line manager. He’d made Si’s life a misery since he’d started a couple of months before and was always on his case about something. Either that or he was trying to pin the blame on Si for mistakes he’d made himself.
‘No, thank God, and he’s the last person I want to think about tonight,’ said Si, pulling down my table with more force than was strictly necessary. ‘Here. I got you a wine.’
I unscrewed the bottle with zeal, pouring fragrant, ruby-red liquid into a flimsy, plastic cup. Oh, the glamour of train travel. Si did the same with his sparkling water. I was proud of him for sticking to his self-imposed no-alcohol rule, but given the stresses of the day I thought he’d have been much better off with a brandy. It felt strange that he didn’t drink any more and I was relieved to note that it wasn’t just me who thought so – Ellie and her boyfriend, John, had been baffled by it when they’d come round for my birthday dinner last month, expecting the night to descend into the usual drunken revelry.
‘That’s exactly the kind of sound I like to enter a room to,’ Ellie had said, appearing in the doorway at the precise moment I popped the cork on a bottle of Prosecco. She’d edged round the table to pull me in for a hug. ‘Happy birthday, Han.’
I’d hugged her back, squeezing her tightly. ‘Thank you both for coming.’
‘Here, put this in the fridge,’ she’d said with a knowing wink, thrusting a bottle of wine into my hands.
Si and John had followed her into the kitchen, already deep in conversation about football. Apparently, Arsenal were doing well, which seemed to please them both. I’d branded Si a fair-weather football fan as he only showed interest in his team when they were winning. Also, I thought he pretended to like football more than he actually did, depending on who he was with. I supposed I couldn’t blame him for that; didn’t we all do it, show relative enthusiasm for something based on how much we wanted to be one of the gang?
‘Right. Drinks,’ I said, handing them round. ‘Oops, sorry, Si,’ I said, doubling back, grabbing the orange juice from the fridge and pouring him a flute of it. ‘Almost forgot you.’
Ellie looked confused. ‘Not drinking, Si?’
Si scooted past me and I smiled up at him instinctively as he pressed his hands into my hips.
‘I’ve given up, actually,’ he said casually.
‘What, permanently?’ asked John, already necking Prosecco like it was going out of fashion.
‘Think so,’ said Si, putting on his apron. ‘On a bit of a health kick.’
Ellie gave me a look; I shrugged. I hadn’t mentioned it to her because I knew she’d make a fuss and also, I wasn’t quite sure how to explain it myself, because it seemed to have come out of nowhere. When we’d first moved in together, I’d loved how we’d chat about our day over a glass of wine in the evenings, one of us setting the table while the other one cooked. It had been something to look forward to when I’d been chained to my desk at work, struggling to stay focussed in the afternoons. A chance for us to relax together, for me to shake off the frustrations of the day. Now things felt the tiniest bit more distant. He went straight from work to the gym most nights and so by the time he’d come home and we’d had dinner, I’d be knackered and ready for bed. On the bright side, though, I was drinking less, too – it wasn’t as much fun on your own, something that became glaringly obvious in Venice. One balmy late-afternoon we’d been sitting in the most beautiful cobbled square and I’d been trying to enjoy an ice-cold glass of peachy white wine whilst Si spent the entire time tutting over the extortionate price of sparkling water.
After an agonisingly slow-moving hour during which the train seemed to have practically come to a halt, I was desperately bored and not remotely tired. It was careering along nicely again now, rocking us rhythmically from side to side. The wine had helped so much that I’d been to get another.
‘Let’s have some fun,’ I said, trailing my fingers across Si’s knee.
He took one of his earphones out and leaned into me so that the tips of our noses were touching. ‘And how, exactly, do you propose we do that?’
We settled on people-watching, with Si providing a brilliant David Attenborough-style commentary about the imagined life story of whichever passenger we had decided to observe.
‘He’s going to visit a Dutch girl he met on holiday in Bali and although he looks all cocky about it, he’s secretly wracked with nerves that she’s going to reject him, like all his exes before her,’ said Si.
‘You think?’ I asked, dubious about his appraisal of the guy with the swagger and the hipster beard. ‘He looks very sure of himself.’
‘It’s all a front,’ he said convincingly, reaching out to tuck my long hair behind my ears. ‘And she,’ he said, nodding at a nervous-looking woman returning from the buffet car with a mini bottle of white wine and a plastic cup, ‘is going to visit the long-lost half-sister she connected with on Facebook. She’s terrified in case they hate each other. That’s why she’s drinking. She’ll have another before the end of the night, you’ll see.’
I laughed. ‘You’ve got some strange ideas.’
