Answers

Thursday arrived the way Thursdays do, claiming it was just another day and fooling nobody.

Cal had not spent the week counting. She had spent the week doing entirely ordinary things, working, walking, making tea in various states of completion, reading the lighthouse book at a pace the woman on the mainland would have found familiar, and if she happened to know, at any given moment, precisely how many days remained, that was simply arithmetic, and arithmetic was nobody’s business.

It was raining again when she reached Mare Street. The pink neon buzzed over the door like it was being paid by the flicker.

Inside, the karaoke machine had claimed its first victim of the evening, a large, sincere man doing unspeakable things to Queen. He had reached the operatic section of Bohemian Rhapsody alone, which is a decision in the way that going over a waterfall is a decision.

Jax was in the back booth.

The folded paper was nowhere in sight this week. She noticed that. She noticed herself noticing it. She sat down and stopped, with some effort, noticing things.

The waitress appeared.

“Usual?”

“Please,” said Jax.

Cal kept her face very still, the way you do when a single ordinary word lands like a dropped plate.

Usual.

Of course he had a usual. He was here every Thursday. Some men had a local; Jax had a booth, and a mug, and a waitress who didn’t need to ask.

She put the thought away carefully, in the drawer where she kept things.

The waitress looked at her. “Same?”

“Please.”

“Stronger than mine,” Jax said, mildly, to the waitress, who nodded and left as though this were established science.

Cal looked at him.

“I never told you how I take my tea.”

“No.”

“You noticed.”

“You ordered tea.”

“At a nightclub.”

“You looked disappointed.”

“I was disappointed.”

“I know.”

The teas arrived. Hers was strong enough to stand a spoon in, which was, she was annoyed to discover, exactly right.

Up at the microphone, the large man committed to the Galileos with the courage of the doomed.

Jax stirred his tea. He didn’t take sugar; there was nothing in it to stir. He stirred it anyway, slowly, the way some men pace, and looked briefly at the neon in the window, pink light coming and going across the table.

Then, simply:

“What’s your favourite colour?”

Cal opened her mouth.

Stopped.

It was an easy question. It was a question with an entire section in every getting-to-know-you conversation ever held.

Children answered it without breaking stride.

She had, at various times, known the favourite colours of colleagues, neighbours, one bus driver, and a man who sold her a mirror.

“…I don’t know.”

Jax waited.

Not awkwardly. Not expectantly.

He just waited, the way he did, as though her silence were a perfectly acceptable ingredient of the conversation and he was in no hurry to cook without it.

Finally:

“You’ve never thought about it?”

“I’ve thought about paint.”

“That’s different.”

“…Is it?”

“I think so.”

He didn’t explain the difference.

She spent a moment trying to construct an objection and found the materials weren’t there, because he was right, and paint was for rooms, and rooms were for other people, and she genuinely could not remember the last time anyone had asked her a question whose answer was for nobody’s benefit but hers.

She looked into her tea.

Something in her chest had gone very quiet, the way rooms go quiet before someone admits something.

Jax, being Jax, did not press. He moved sideways instead.

“What’s the oldest thing you own?”

Cal thought of several answers, alphabetised them, locked most of the cabinet, and chose the smallest true one.

“A teaspoon. My grandmother’s. The plating’s gone at the tip.”

“Do you use it?”

“Every day.”

He nodded, as though this were the correct use of grandmothers and teaspoons, and she felt absurdly as though she’d passed something.

“What book do you keep rereading?”

“I don’t reread.” She heard herself say it and then, unbidden, a dry voice in a grey coat turned a page somewhere at the back of her mind. “…Although I’ve been told you never read the same book twice anyway.”

“Who told you that?”

“A friend.”

Jax looked at her for a moment, cover to cover, unhurried, and she watched him take the word friend, and turn it once, like a key with no lock, and put it away without comment.

“Good friend?”

“Insufferable,” said Cal, with feeling. “So yes.”

The corner of his mouth moved.

The Queen assault ended to scattered applause and was replaced, after some negotiation with the machine, by a young woman who intended to sing Somebody to Love and was already, in the opening bars, discovering the size of the mistake.

“When were you happiest?”

The question arrived like the others, same flat delivery, same unhurried curiosity, and Cal’s whole body went still before her mind had processed a word of it.

The café carried on. The rain carried on. Somewhere a young woman was asking, with increasing desperation, whether anybody could find her somebody to love.

Cal looked at her tea and did not see it.

Jax watched her for a moment.

“…Not that one, then,” he said, without weight, and moved on, the way you’d step around something on the pavement without breaking stride, and she understood, through the roaring quiet in her ears, that he had just seen a locked door and declined, on principle, to try the handle.

He was a doorkeeper. Of course he had.

“Why books?” he asked instead.

And here was the thing. She could have deflected. She was extravagantly good at deflecting; she had been doing it all evening, all month, all — for a very long time. The teaspoon had been a deflection wearing a true fact. The friend had been a vault door painted to look like a word.

But the tea was strong and exactly right, and the neon was doing its patient pink arithmetic on the tabletop, and a man across the booth had spent the whole evening asking questions with no angle in them at all, and she was so tired, suddenly, of being the only person she’d ever let all the way in.

So she answered one.

A real one.

“Because they don’t need me.”

The words came out plainly, without decoration, and sat on the table between them.

“Everything else”

She stopped. Recalibrated. Didn’t take it back.

“Most things need something from you. Books don’t. You can put one down for a year and it doesn’t mind. You can get it wrong and it lets you come back. They’re the only things I’ve ever loved that I can’t damage by loving them.”

Silence.

Not awkward.

Full.

Up at the microphone, the young woman found the high note in Somebody to Love against all odds, held it for one astonishing second, and then lost it so completely that the man behind the counter looked up from his phone.

Jax didn’t say good answer. He didn’t say anything at all. He nodded, once, and turned his mug a quarter-turn, and she understood that the answer had been received, and filed, and would be kept, and that this, apparently, was what it felt like, being on the other side of the glass.

Terrifying, she noted, in a distant administrative way.

She drank her tea to the bottom anyway.

They left just before midnight. The rain had thinned to the fine committed drizzle London saves for people without umbrellas.

They stood for a moment under the pink neon, in the temporary country outside a café at closing time, and Cal was assembling something about next Thursday when Jax said:

“Blue.”

Cal frowned.

“What?”

“I’ve decided.”

She waited.

“My favourite colour.”

A beat.

“I hadn’t thought about it before.”

And he turned his collar up and walked off towards Nocturne, unhurried, leaving her standing in the rain with her mouth slightly open because she had never asked him. Not tonight. Not ever. The question had lived in her head one morning three weeks ago, in a flat, alone, over a cooling tea, and had never once made it out loud.

He’d asked her his own question this evening.

And then, somewhere between the tea and the rain, he’d gone and answered it himself, because it had apparently never occurred to him to wonder, in however many years, until knowing her made him the kind of man who did.

Cal walked home through the drizzle.

Somewhere past the canal she said, to nobody:

“Green.”

Ten steps later:

“…No.”

By the bridge she had considered and dismissed green, grey, a shade of amber the streetlights were doing rather well, and one very specific blue that she refused, on principle, to so much as shortlist.

The rain kept falling. The question walked beside her the whole way home, entirely unbothered, like something that had waited years to be asked.