A lot of friends. I struggle to picture them, but maybe he’s the life and soul, over there.
Once in the driver’s seat, he fiddles with the radio.
‘Do you want music on?’
‘Sure,’ I say.
‘You choose,’ he says.
I poke at it until 6 Music blares out.
‘What’s playing? I’m so out of touch these days,’ Fin says, checking the wing mirror as we pull into the flow of traffic.
‘It’s “This Is What She’s Like” by Dexy’s Midnight Runners,’ I say, chuffed that I happen to know by complete chance, because I’m pretty out of touch myself these days. Justin loves Dexy’s. ‘You know, they did “Come On Eileen”.’
‘Yeah, I know that much,’ Fin says, with a smile.
He navigates out of the city and to the motorway with reasonable ease, punctuated by a stentorian male satnav voice, barking instructions.
‘Only to get me to the motorway and I’ll turn it off,’ Fin says, and I say ‘Sure’ again, like a little robot. The car is comfortable and smells of valeted leather. I stretch my legs out in the footwell and feel grateful at least that I’m not writing about getting bendy with Wendy.
I’ve always liked this part of any trip, the sense you’re escaping. Whenever a plane lifts off, I think about what a tiny piece of the planet I inhabit, how limited my horizons are.
I can hear Mark in my head saying: ‘Yet I couldn’t get you to Stoke Newington.’ And his line in our break-up fight: ‘You know what fucks me off the most? You’d move here for Susie and the gang.’
He was probably right.
‘Don’t judge me for the automatic, it’s years since I’ve driven stick, as they say,’ Fin says, as we zoom past the post-war houses that line the ring road.
I smile at the idea that of the things I might judge Finlay Hart for, it would be his not using manual gear change. A bonus – comfortable silences are easier when you don’t have to stare into each other’s faces.
I steal a sly look at Fin at the wheel, grudgingly admire the hard, leading man jaw – clean-shaven once more – the arms with rolled-up shirt sleeves, and classy, rather than showy, leather-strap vintage watch.
No one said evil couldn’t be attractive. It’s how evil gets a lot of its workload done, in fact.
I amuse myself at the idea of him talking into a Dictaphone, like Agent Cooper. It’s an imperfect comparison: Cooper looked like baby-faced Brylcreemed FBI. Finlay Hart looks like the clean-cut assassin who nobody can remember clearly afterwards.
‘Whereabouts do you live in New York?’ I ask.
‘Park Slope. A gentrified but still almost affordable part of Brooklyn, if you don’t know it.’
‘Do you like it there? New York as a whole, I mean?’
‘Yeah … mostly. I’m not sure I want to stay for good. Put it this way, when I get together with friends all we do is moan about how awful it is, which is the point you know you’re a native. How about you? Do you like Nottingham?’
For once, Fin’s determinedly neutral tone sounds like something approximating grace.
‘Hahaha. New York … to Nottingham. Big Apple to … tiny oranges. Big cats to bin raccoons.’
Fin smiles. ‘I like it.’
Of course he does, in that gently patronising way that cool people, who have nothing to prove, feign approval of uncool things.
‘You left it,’ I say, also smiling.
He loosens his collar and peers up at a road sign.
‘Sometimes people leave places they like. Sometimes people leave people they like.’
‘You’re a therapist, aren’t you … are we into therapy now? Can you charge for this?’ I say.
‘No matter how many years I’ve done my job, this being said to me never gets old,’ he says, still smiling, but it’s thinner, and I make a mental note he doesn’t want to discuss his work.
‘Do I like Nottingham. Yes in some ways, no in others,’ I conclude.
‘That’s every adjusted person’s view of anywhere really, isn’t it?’ Fin says. ‘I’d mistrust anyone who said “Yeah where I live, best place ever, it’s perfection.” I would suspect it’s more about their choices having to be the best ones.’
I steal a sidelong look at him. This sort of cynicism, I can work with.
‘You say that, but my dad lives on a sheep farm in Australia and I think you’ll find it’s literal heaven on earth.’
‘Do you mistrust him?’
‘… Yes,’ I say, and in mutual surprise, I laugh and Fin grudgingly smiles. His face looks completely altered in amusement, like he was never the other person all along. It freaks me out a little.
God, it’s come back to me: Susie conceding he was probably a good model because: ‘He looks different in every single photo. Not like a different photo of the same person, or another angle, a different person. Brrrr.’
That now-familiar hard pang that I can never tell her any of this. With the added psychic blockade of the fight I can never have with her, either.
After over an hour of intermittent, low-key small talk, Fin sees a blinking on a mobile he has in a holder and says: ‘Ah. Romilly’s calling me.’
‘Romilly?’
There’s no time for further explanation as he prods ‘Accept Call’.
‘Hi, Rom,’ Fin frowns. ‘You’re on speakerphone, I’m in the car. I have someone with me.’
Crackle: ‘Who?’
‘Eve. She was a friend of my sister’s. She’s helping me find my dad. Remember he absconded?’
‘Oh. Hello, Eve?’ says a crisp, East Coast, Sex and the City voice. A Charlotte one, or actually – Miranda.
‘Hi!’ I say.
‘I wanted to let you know that Ethan’s appointment went fine. They want to see him again in three months but they don’t think there’s any damage to his hearing.’
‘That’s great. Is he happy?’
‘Oh yeah, he’s back to being a little jerk again. I took him to Balthazar to celebrate and he ate half the breakfast menu. The waiter couldn’t believe it.’
‘Good! Tell him I’ll bring him something back from here.’
A pause. Hard to say if it’s a transatlantic connection pause or a loaded pause.
‘Call me when you get to Scotland. On a private line,’ Romilly says, eventually, which I take as a forthright dig at me. Or maybe it’s merely Big Apple directness?
‘Your girlfriend?’ I say, once Fin’s pressed to end call.
‘Ex,’ Fin says.
‘Ah.’
From her frostiness towards me, I intuit that Fin ended it and she’s not over it, but who knows.
‘She has a little boy, from a previous relationship. I like to know how he’s doing,’ Fin says. ‘We stay in touch about him.’
‘Was she at your mum’s funeral? She had red hair?’
Fin looks surprised. ‘Yes. Were you there?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t see you.’
This strikes me as a peculiar thing to say. If he didn’t know me in adulthood, he wouldn’t have known me by sight, so how would he know if he saw me? That event doesn’t strike me as one to pry into further, however.