Perfect Day

and if he had, his hesitation has already given him away.
    ‘I’m not married, but
    ‘You’re with someone?’
    ‘Yes, I’m with someone.’
    ‘Oh.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘I hoped that you might be divorced,’ she says. ‘Shit, I didn’t mean it to come out like that.’
    She’s looking at the table. He doesn’t want to feel guilty. He says, ‘ And the father of your child?’
    ‘He’s back home.’
    Her eyes are glassy with tears.
    They stare at each other. Both with other people, both miserable, both unable now to reach out to the other and take away the pain.
    ‘What were you on about going to Heathrow, then?’ she asks, as her brain works through everything he told her.
    ‘I wanted to run away,’ he says.
    ‘But I stopped you?’
    ‘I think I might have gone,’ he says, choosing his words very carefully, ‘if you’d come.’
    ‘And now?’
    Now, he feels as distant from her as from the female students at his school who come to London looking for romance, and always seem to pick him to fall in love with.
    ‘We’re not the same people,’ he says.
    ‘We are the same people,’ she says, with a short laugh. ‘We’re just not the people we thought we were.’
    She pushes the plate away from her.
    Marco is there to collect it so rapidly that Alexander thinks he must have been listening. He hopes that she’s going to ask for the bill, wrap this thing up, but she orders a cappuccino. It comes with a heart swirled on top.
    ‘What’s your man like?’ he asks, trying to push some of the discomfort he’s feeling back onto her.
    Kate thinks for a moment. She doesn’t smile fondly or frown, but she’s clearly searching for a fair description.
    ‘When I was fifteen I fell in love with him because he was eighteen, and he seemed, like, sophisticated. We used to head out to Blackpool on his bike, really fast, and it was like it didn’t matter if we died, because we were really living, we were going places, you know? We’d go on the rollercoaster...’
    She looks up.
    He nods.
    ‘Then I fell pregnant. And we weren’t going anywhere any more. He wanted to get married and have a family. People thought I was really lucky. He didn’t think it mattered if I did my GCSEs or not...’
    ‘But you got them?’
    ‘Yeah!’
    She smiles at him.
    ‘Not that they’ve done me much good.’
    ‘But you didn’t marry him,’ he encourages her to go on.
    ‘No,’ Kate says. ‘We’re meant to be saving for it, but it’s a lot of money to waste on a white dress you’ll never wear again. He’s like part of the family now, anyway. My mum does his tea twice a week... she doesn’t understand what I’m doing.’
    All those lives, all that complexity, when he had thought her unencumbered.
    ‘What are you doing?’ Alexander asks.
    Kate looks down, sighs.
    ‘I worked out that I spend twenty-five minutes a day with Jimmy on average. He’s at school, I’m at work. He likes playing football. He’s good at it too. He’s been seen by Premier League scouts already. They’ve got their eye on him
    She stops, realizing that she’s diverted herself.
    ‘The time we do get together is a duty for him, we do his homework and I’m giving him nothing, you know? Parents are supposed to know about things, aren’t they? I don’t know about anything. I work all day and I come back and I’m lying in bed at night panicking, really sweating, you know?’
    She looks up as if to ask whether he understands. He nods.
    ‘And I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with someone who thinks William Blake’s the leader of the Conservative Party, and D.H. Lawrence is that bloke with the camels,’ she announces, with an autodidact’s seriousness that makes him burst out laughing.
    Now she’s laughing too, not quite sure what she’s said that’s so funny, and for a moment it’s as if they’re back to where they were, enjoying each other. Then she’s serious again and looking at him as if she’s weighing up whether she’ll let him into another secret.
    ‘They said I was suffering from depression,’ she says, quietly, ‘but I wasn’t depressed, I just felt the world was racing on and I couldn’t catch up with it. There’s all sorts of things I want to do, you see, like visit Cuba before Castro dies, and find an island where there’s just white sand and palm trees and no McDonald’s... I want to feel whether the Taj Mahal is rough or smooth to touch. Do you think that means I’m mentally