‘I hate him for himself, but despise him for the memories he revives.’
Know It All Noah. Although in all the years that Noah had attended Orange Hill Secondary School, people had just called him Know It All.
Not because he was always getting in people’s faces with his huge intellect, far from it. Now that Nina had finally answered that nagging voice asking her where she knew him from, she found that she could picture adolescent Noah quite clearly.
Back then his hair had been really orange; the kind of orange hair that glowed so brightly it was as if it had its very own power source. He wore a pair of glasses with thick lenses that magnified the size of his green eyes to manga-like proportions. More often than not, those glasses were held together by Sellotape because they were frequently knocked to the ground.
He’d been gangly too, all elbows and knees, and walked with an odd loping gait like a newborn giraffe only recently upright, so he always looked as if he was waiting to grow into his school blazer, even when he’d been in sixth form. Probably because, by that point, Noah had skipped several years ahead. He’d been a couple of years older than Nina, the same age as her brother, Paul. But he’d been moved up a year for maths and all the science subjects. Then another year. Then yet another year. Had even been in the local paper for doing his GCSEs and A-levels early, which had earned him nothing but derision from his classmates.
Paul and his friends, but mostly Paul, a fact which made Nina go hot and cold thinking about it, had made Noah’s life a misery for daring to be better than them. Then the older kids had made Noah’s life a misery too for daring to be better than them.
Whichever way you looked at it, Noah’s adolescence had been a misery. Lots of shoving him in corridors and shouts of ‘F*** off, Know It All!’ whenever he appeared. Nina didn’t even want to think about what horrors might have happened in the boys’ cloakroom as they changed into their football kit.
It was bad enough that nobody ever called Noah by his real name unless they were singing an infantile version of ‘Who Built The Ark?’ when he scuttled past. ‘Who did the fart? Noah! Noah! Who did the fart? Know It All Noah did the fart!’
Nina couldn’t remember if she’d ever joined in with the singing. She hoped not. Really hoped not. But she’d been one of the sheep back then. Had looked like all the other girls. Walked like them. Talked like them. Hadn’t wanted to stand out …
‘What’s the matter, Nina? Goose walk over your grave?’ Verity asked and Nina shivered again, returned, blinking, to the present – Friday morning in the tiny kitchen off the back office where she was meant to be making tea.
‘Just thinking about stuff,’ she mumbled, her face flushing.
Verity stared at her keenly because mumbling and blushing weren’t usually Nina’s thing. Usually they were more Verity’s thing.
‘Thinking about your date last night? How did it go?’ Verity asked. ‘Do you think he might be a long-haul type of guy?’
After recognising Noah, Nina had been off her game for her date with brooding guitarist Rob. Also, she’d quickly realised that he wasn’t so much brooding as a bit thick. Boring, even. Had no decent chat in him, just kept wittering on about effects pedals. ‘Definitely not my Heathcliff. Not even a third-date kind of guy, Very,’ Nina confessed sadly. ‘Though I will say that when you have to decide if you really want to have sexy fun times with the person you’ve already been on two dates with, the third-date rule really does sort the men from the boys.’
‘Though you don’t have to have sex with someone on the third date,’ Verity reminded Nina.
‘You don’t have to, but if you want to then the third date is the green light,’ Nina said firmly. Before Verity and Posy had gone and settled down, they’d treated Nina as the oracle on all things relating to men, dating and sex. Some of it, well, actually, quite a bit of it, she just made up on the spot, but she still missed being her friends’ go-to girl on relationship advice.
‘And if you really wanted to, like, if you’d fallen head over heels in love with someone, then maybe even the first date,’ Verity mused. ‘Un coup de foudre. Love like a thunderbolt, the French call it.’
‘Sex on a first date,’ Nina echoed in her most outraged voice. ‘And you a vicar’s daughter too, Very.’ Verity pretended to huff at the same time that the kettle came to the boil. ‘Tea, then? Shall I make for Posy? Tom’s not in today. Noah?’
Her voice actually cracked on the two syllables that were his name though Verity didn’t seem to notice. ‘Noah’s not in today either. Sent an email late last night saying that he was going to work off-site for the foreseeable future.’
‘Oh?’
‘Not sure he’s going to be able to report back on everything we say and do if he’s not on-site to observe,’ Verity said tartly as if she wasn’t quite on board with the scheme to make Happy Ever After work smarter if not harder, which was news to Nina.
‘Oh?’ Nina said yet again.
‘I love Posy. We all love Posy but she doesn’t need a Noah.’ Verity rolled her eyes. ‘She just needs to find the flipchart that has all the ideas from the brainstorm we had before the relaunch.’
‘That’s so true. My idea for a book group was pure genius and yet we still have no book group. We don’t even have a proper social media presence.’ Nina thought mournfully about the locked Instagram account – damn Sam! ‘Although maybe Noah might come up with some good ideas that we’d never think of,’ Nina said, because she was never ever going to have another uncharitable thought about Noah ever again. He’d had enough uncharitable thoughts aimed his way at Orange Hill to last a lifetime. ‘Fresh pair of eyes and all that.’
‘Noah’s very nice, I’m not saying he isn’t,’ Verity insisted, because thinking uncharitable thoughts was probably covered in the Ten Commandments. ‘I’m just saying that Noah isn’t the answer to all our problems.’
‘When you say problems, it makes me worried. Is the shop really doing that badly?’ Nina asked.
‘You don’t need to worry about that,’ Verity said but she said it in a pretty anxious way. ‘And you don’t need to worry about Noah either. Though I would worry that I heard the shop bell three minutes ago and we’ve probably got customers waiting.’
Nina wished that she could take Verity’s advice and not worry about Noah, but Noah was all that she could think about for a lot of Friday, most of Saturday and especially Sunday when instead of spending it sleeping off the excesses of the week, she was going home for Sunday lunch.
Or rather she was going to her parents’ house in Worcester Park, Surrey. Nina hadn’t lived there for years but instead had shared flats as near to the centre of town as she could afford. The last one had been in Southfields, which Posy had always described as ‘being as far out of London as you could get while still being in London.’
It was just as well that Posy had never been to Worcester Park, Nina thought glumly. The tube didn’t go this far south-west so Nina had to get the tube to Waterloo, then change onto a proper train to travel deep into the suburbs of Surrey and street after street of identical nineteen-thirties semis, broken up by the odd parade of shops, a pub, a park.
The train chugged through Earlsfield, Wimbledon, Raynes Park, Motspur Park and finally Worcester Park. By now a gloom had settled on Nina’s shoulders like a fine coating of dandruff. As she exited the station a gang of teenage boys were doing wheelies on their bikes in the almost-deserted car park but they stopped to gawp at Nina as she strode past them, eyes forward, trying not to thrust her chest out.
‘Freak,’ one of them shouted at her.
‘But nice tits!’
Oh, she wasn’t in Kansas any more. Certainly she wasn’t in Bloomsbury where no one batted an eye at Nina, unless it was another woman giving her an approving glance or someone looking at her in a way that suggested they found her very attractive.
Nina had even toned it down today. She was wearing a little black dress, a vintage nineteen-forties number in rayon, fishnets, black suede shoes with a block heel and her leopard faux fur. Even her make-up was a little less today. She’d decided against the false eyelashes, her eyeliner was a discreet flick, and she’d gone for a tasteful rosy-pink lip when usually she applied several coats of her trusty MAC Ruby Woo.
Though she returned to her ancestral homelands on the second Sunday of every month, every single time Nina forgot that even her most subtle daytime look was still too much for the mean streets of Worcester Park.
She pulled her coat tighter around her and resisted the urge to say, ‘I know your mother, young man,’ to the one who’d shouted out ‘Nice tits.’ She was pretty sure that she’d been to school with his mum, he had the same pugnacious look as Tanya Hampton who’d been in the year above her, but it was such a Nana-ish thing to say and what if Tanya Hampton turned up on her parents’ doorstep to have it out with Nina? It was the kind of thing Tanya Hampton used to do.
No, it was best to ignore the boys who were losing interest anyway and cycling off to do wheelies through a large puddle. Nina was going to go home, see her family, eat Sunday lunch, not rise to the bait of her mother’s most passive-aggressive barbs and be back on the train in three hours tops. That was the plan and Nina was sticking to it.