‘There it is. Oh God.’ Eliza stopped dead halfway along the street, pointing ahead to a shop sign that read All Mapped Out. She bit her lip, all previous bravado gone. ‘Do you think I look like him?’
‘Yes,’ Lara replied, studying the beloved contours of her daughter’s face, the full rosy lips, the skewering grey eyes, the small delicate ears. Admittedly, Ben’s features had faded in her mind over the years but she thought she detected a similarity between the set of their eyes, the fullness of their mouths. ‘I think you do, actually. I can see a resemblance from how he was back then, anyway.’
Eliza gave a nervous laugh. ‘What, so you don’t think I look like the pictures we saw of him as a middle-aged man? Well, that’s a relief.’
It felt like a dream, walking towards the shop. As if at any moment their surroundings were about to break into fragments and disperse, as if Lara would wake up and find herself back home in her own bed. The ground didn’t feel quite steady beneath her feet; the air was clammy in her lungs. Her heart was really pounding now, to a fast rhythm of Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
A bell on the door jingled as they went in – the sort of old-fashioned detail that would normally charm Lara, but on this occasion, her system was so overloaded with adrenalin as she scanned the inside of the shop that it was hard to process any niceties. Two customers were browsing: a red-haired woman slowly turning a postcard carousel, an elderly man looking at a Bridge of Sighs print. Noodling jazz rippled through the air and a bearded man of dual heritage behind the counter bobbed his head to the beat. So where was Ben?
‘Maybe he’s in a back room,’ Lara muttered, noticing a half-open door beyond the main shop area, through which they could just see a large filing cabinet and sash window. At that moment, the bearded man looked up and caught her eye, and she realised how odd they must look, standing there frozen in the doorway.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked.
This was it. Now or never. ‘We’re looking for Ben,’ she said, her voice sounding strangely high-pitched, even to her own ears. ‘Ben McManus?’
‘Ah,’ said the man. ‘You’ve just missed him, I’m afraid. Can I help at all?’
Chapter Twelve
A pint of lager and a corner table in the Salamander; this was a pretty good start to Ben’s Friday evening, he thought to himself, taking the first cold mouthful and feeling as if an elixir was sinking through his veins. And relax. Nick had offered to close up the shop so that he could get away early, and now the weekend had begun, with Kirsten on her way to meet him for a spontaneous date night – and who knew, she might even be so pleased and charmed by Ben for organising this that he’d be able to persuade her into having sex later once they were back home. If she wasn’t too knackered, that was. Shit, she probably would be, he realised, having just finished a week of early shifts. He’d managed to forget about that, so caught up had he been in his flush of doing something impulsive for once.
His phone rang just then and he picked it up from the table, only for it to stop ringing in the next second. A number he didn’t recognise was on the screen – some scammer, he guessed, rolling his eyes. But then, as he was raising his pint glass to his lips once more, he spotted two women approaching – one middle-aged and anxious-looking, one much younger with an unfathomably direct gaze. They were making for his table, he registered – which was odd, and kind of annoying, actually, when there were plenty of other empty seats around. And why was the younger one staring at him like that? Were they peeved customers that Nick had sent his way? Or zealous religious types with an agenda to convert him, maybe?
They’d arrived at his table by now and stood shoulder to shoulder before him. What was this? Some kind of delegation? ‘Ben?’ the older woman said, and he distractedly noticed her taking the younger woman’s hand as if in solidarity. ‘I’m Lara. We met in New York?’
It took his brain a second to catch up – Lara? New York? – but in the meantime her face had already collapsed as if his delayed reaction was enough to crush her. ‘Nineteen years ago,’ she went on, sounding miserable. ‘In a bar, on the Lower East Side. I was—’
‘You were choking on a peanut,’ he blurted out. ‘Yes. I remember.’ His head filled with images suddenly – vibrant with colour as if it had been yesterday. The two of them walking through the city streets at night. Yellow cabs, music drifting up from cellar bars, neon lights. Tenement buildings and iconic green street signs. Dancing in a bar. Going back to her place. How her skin had felt against his. He swallowed, hardly able to believe that this slice of his own past history, perfect and pure in his memory, had collided with the present day, overlapping like an architect’s acetates. A Venn diagram of people and places. ‘Of course I remember,’ he added, gazing at her anew, trying to match the woman before him with the beautiful girl who’d enchanted him that night. ‘Wow. Lara. God. I can’t believe—’
‘And I’m Eliza,’ said the younger woman – girl, really, she couldn’t be more than twenty, he thought, blinking as he turned in her direction. She had long chestnut hair and wide grey eyes fringed with thick mascara, and in the brief pause that followed, she removed her hand from Lara’s in order to fold her arms across her chest, fingers curling into tight knots. There was something very tense about her, he saw; she was still looking at him in that diamond-hard way as she added, ‘Lara’s daughter.’
‘Oh,’ he said politely. ‘Hi.’
‘And yours too, apparently,’ she said in the next breath. Then a nervous laugh jumped from her and she spread her palms wide. ‘Surprise,’ she said.
He stared at her, uncomprehending, his eyes travelling from the girl – Eliza, had she said? – back to middle-aged Lara. Yours too. What – his daughter? ‘But—’ he began, expecting there to be some kind of punchline. Some explanation. None came. The room seemed to be holding its breath, waiting for his reaction. ‘Is this a joke?’ he asked, uncertainly.
Eliza scowled, her eyes hooded. ‘Wow, great response. That really makes me feel special.’
‘No,’ said Lara quietly, because Ben was no longer able to speak – he had a daughter? This was his daughter? ‘It’s not a joke.’
‘But—’ he bleated again before coming to another stop. His mouth dropped open, there was a new band of tightness across his chest. This couldn’t be true, could it? How on earth could it be true? ‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘How . . .’ He broke off once more, eyes flicking desperately from one to the other, hardly able to comprehend what he was hearing. Lara and Eliza. The girl who had bewitched him all those years ago, reappearing in his life as if by magic – that alone was enough of a headfuck. But to then be told that the sulky-looking, scruffy young woman glaring at him from beside her was his daughter, his child . . . He felt as if the world was spinning too fast all of a sudden. As if it had spun him right into a different universe where nothing quite made sense any more. ‘Wait,’ he said, ‘but we used a condom, didn’t we? Sorry,’ he added, as Eliza pulled a face and theatrically put her hands over her ears.