I Am Heathcliff

  ‘Oh. Yes.’ She rolled her eyes. She must have caught me staring at her colleague. ‘A skinny latte and a porridge please.’

  ‘Plain, cinnamon, or jam?’

  ‘Cinnamon.’

  He never once looked my way.

  As soon as I got to the office, I exploded all over Nell. ‘Oh my God! Have you seen that guy who works at Roaster?’

  She smiled and put down her granola pot. ‘Oh you must mean Dane.’

  ‘Dane?’

  ‘Great Dane. Irish? Blue eyes? Very … brooding?’

  ‘That’s him. Holy fuck, he’s lovely.’

  ‘Yeah, bit of a miserable fucker though.’ She returned to her yoghurt, prodding it with a plastic spoon. I wished she wouldn’t get plastic spoons when we have perfectly reusable, steel ones in the kitchen. ‘Is granola good for you?’

  ‘No,’ I told her flatly, not done talking about Dane. ‘When he looks like that, who cares?’ I sat in my seat and switched my computer on. The familiar, stomach-deep dread at opening my inbox awoke along with the monitor. ‘Although he is only a barista.’ I stopped, knowing it sounded both snobbish and a little unhinged to be mentally planning our future. Why did it even matter what he did?

  ‘Actually he’s not,’ Nelly said.

  ‘Not what?’

  ‘Not just a barista. He’s a pretty well-known photographer too. His brother owns the Roaster chain – he just helps out I think.’

  Well that changed everything. A photographer, an artist. That explained his bad mood. He’d rather be off, I thought, taking pictures of despondent Londoners, not being one. When I was at school I was briefly interested in photography, but my friend Bella told me I was being a hipster try-hard so I soon gave up the hobby. ‘Oh, OK. Interesting. Do you know how old he is? Does he have a girlfriend? Is he straight?’

  Nelly laughed. ‘Oh Jesus. Stalker much? I dunno, babes. Erm, definitely straight. I think. No idea about the rest.’

  There was only one thing for it. I counted down turgid minutes all through a hugely tedious brand meeting with a client before heading back to Roaster for lunch. Nelly reliably informed me they did delicious organic superfood salad boxes.

  As I tried to decide between kale or quinoa, I saw an opportunity and took it. He was clearing the table just next to the chiller cabinet. ‘Which do you think?’ I asked. ‘Kale or quinoa?’

  At first, I thought he was either ignoring me or had simply zoned out. After a terrible silence where I feared he might just walk away, he realised I was waiting for a reply. ‘Oh. Erm … personally I’d get the bacon-and-egg roll.’ He offered a half-smile, a curl in the right edge of his lip.

  I returned the smile. ‘Kale it is.’

  ‘Don’t say you weren’t warned. Rabbit food.’

  I carried the little box of salad to the counter. It was almost two. I guessed the lunchtime rush was over. Sure enough, the waitress was sitting having her lunch, a Tupperware box filled with last night’s chow mein, at the corner table. ‘I’ll have that and a skinny chai latte please,’ I said.

  He put it through the till before going to make my coffee. ‘I’ll bring it over,’ he said.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I replied, keen to start a conversation. ‘You’re Dane right?’

  For the first time, he looked up at me, no doubt questioning whether we’d met before. I wondered, out of nowhere, if he had a lot of one-night stands. Did he think we’d fucked? That, at some point, he’d left my place, unshowered, in last night’s shirt? Did he think he’d slipped his fingers inside me in the corner of a club or bar while we kissed wet, drunken kisses. Just the idea of his prowess turned me on. ‘Yeah,’ was all he said.

  ‘I’m Catherine …’ I said, but it didn’t feel right, and neither did Cathy. ‘Everyone calls me Kitty.’ No, that wasn’t quite cool enough for ‘Dane’ either. Kitty sounds like a little girl, or a woman who actively wants to be infantilised. ‘Well, Kit.’ There, that was better. Kit.

  ‘Have we met?’

  ‘No. I’m just a fan of your photography.’ Wow, that sounded a lot less Misery in my head. It’s true though. I’d spent half an hour in preparation that morning scrolling through the gallery on his website.

  Dane bottles London’s very essence in his work. Gang members trying to look inconspicuous in very conspicuous hoodies; rugby-playing apes in chinos on Clapham High Street; Romanian men changing into their Yoda fancy dress at the crack of dawn on the South Bank; Putney girls collapsing under the weight of too much Prosecco and too many teeth. Dane captures real London, not postcard London.

  ‘Thanks,’ he said, pouring the milk into my latte. I noted earlier he used blue milk instead of red. I didn’t correct his error.

  ‘I mean it. They really feel like London. There’s no big fake smile. There’s nothing polite about them.’

  He looked at me again, and it was magnetic. I felt something tug on my innards. Tug them towards him. ‘London isn’t polite. If you catch its eye, it asks you what the fuck you’re looking at.’

  ‘Well … I love them. You shouldn’t be working in a coffee shop.’

  I wondered if I shouldn’t have said that, but a wry smile crossed his lips. ‘I’m just helping my brother out.’ He handed me the latte. ‘I don’t know why; he’s a real dick. Two seventy-five for a fucking thimble of coffee in what used to be a slum.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I don’t mention that our high-end creative agency used to be a brothel. ‘Gentrification, right?’

  And with that, I sensed our time was up. A yummy mummy behind me waited impatiently for a floppy-haired little Hugo to decide what cake he wanted. ‘Well thanks.’ I smiled, not letting his eyes unlock out of mine. ‘I’ll see you around.’

  He nodded.

  That night, I touched myself in the bath and thought about him. I made lazy circles in the soapy water. A candle burned, the air was treacly with amber and oud.

  I imagined myself going back to the coffee shop just as he’s closing up, stacking the stools on the tables. He sees me, and, saying nothing, walks past me to lock the door. Taking hold of my arms, he pushes my back against the counter, already unbuckling his belt. ‘You want me in you,’ he growls in my ear, already kissing my neck, exposed like prey.

  ‘Yes,’ I whisper.

  His hand ploughs my thighs, pushing the hem of my dress, and sliding my knickers aside. I’m already wet, in a way I get when I pleasure myself but rarely with a man. With his other hand he steers a fat pink cock – and it’s in my head, so of course he has a porn cock – expertly into me. There’s that familiar stab, the urge to reject it, push it out before it becomes all warmth and tingle and I melt into it.

  The bathwater sploshed and bubbled as I thrummed myself faster, harder. Oh God. I wanted him in me. Closer, if possible.

  There was nothing stopping me taking my work laptop to Roaster. Sometimes he wasn’t there, and I’d get my cappuccino to go. If he was, I joined a strange, pathetic Game of Thrones regarding who got to sit at the hallowed tables next to the power sockets.

  I want to stress once more that I wouldn’t normally do this. In fact, if I weren’t me, I’d judge my behaviour most severely.

  I told a little white lie. ‘The air conditioning is broken in the office,’ I told him when he guessed my order without needing to ask. ‘Skylights. It’s like an oven in there.’

  ‘Cool,’ he replied.

  Painting by numbers, I was soon able to form an impression of Dane Kelly:

  He had a lot of friends who looked like him. They all had beards and sailor tattoos. They dressed in skinny jeans and band T-shirts. The ones who were thinning on top wore flat caps.

  He really hated working in a coffee shop. He often muttered ‘cunt’ or ‘wanker’ under his breath as he breezed past. I wondered if he was confiding in me as he did so.

  He frequently crept around the corner into the alleyway to smoke Marlboros and play on his phone.

  I also learned he had a type. I’m sure to him, he believed he was
one of those rare heterosexual men who have as many female friends as male ones, but I knew better. A steady stream of girls, all candy-pastel hair and nose-rings, all panda eyes and torn jeans, came to visit. They had no interest in being mere friends. All squealy and huggy, they threw their arms around his neck to haul him over the counter for a kiss.

  I couldn’t help but resent them. I wondered, again, how many of them he’d fucked, and each time his imagined mastery stirred me up. I believed he’d probably woken up tangled in most of their bedsheets, only to assure them in the vanilla morning light that the events of the night wouldn’t soil their friendship. Each of the girls would smile gratefully, inwardly devastated, before heading off to their jobs at Beyond Retro or Rockit.

  He seemed to favour one girl over the others, a painfully thin model-type with toothpick arms, hollow cheeks, and full lips like some sort of Tim Burton fantasy. Peroxide lobotomy fringe. For her, he came out from behind the counter, joining her when he took his breaks. Interestingly, this girl seemed entirely disinterested in him. They shared a certain weariness, as if simply being alive were a terrible inconvenience.

  I was doing some work one afternoon when I became aware of a shadow over my MacBook. I looked up and saw Dane standing over me. ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘What are you doing tonight?’

  I was stunned. Surely he wasn’t asking me out?

  ‘I have a gallery opening in Hackney tonight. You should come.’

  ‘Oh, I … sure.’ I actually had plans to go to the cinema, but I reckoned I could convince Eleanor to reschedule.

  ‘Cool.’ He handed me a flyer and returned to the counter.

  I immediately fired off a message to Eleanor. The insanely hot coffee-shop guy invited us to a gallery opening tonight. WE HAVE TO GO.

  What the fuck are you supposed to wear to a gallery launch of someone you desperately want to have sex with? I laboured over whether I should even change, or go in the office clothes I’d been wearing that afternoon. In the end, I went to an early spinning class and headed home to shower.

  Having watched the type of girls who flocked to him, I decided that looking like a prefab wife in a short skirt and high heels wasn’t going to impress him. I clawed through my wardrobe, hating everything. Why did I own so many floral dresses? Did I want to resemble walking pot pourri? I had a Guns N’ Roses T-shirt from Topshop, but I don’t look like I own a Guns N’ Roses album (which I do not) so I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. In the end, I chose a simple white shirt with some spray-on skinny jeans. I picked out some heeled boots, but I couldn’t shake the notion that I was more Kate Middleton than I was Kate Moss.

  I met Eleanor outside Hackney Central. ‘This better be worth it,’ she said, puffing on a vape. I don’t get vaping. If you’re going to smoke, just bloody smoke. I don’t know which is worse, cigarette smoke or smelling like a box of Milk Tray.

  ‘I promise we’ll see the film next week. Or at the weekend.’

  ‘I’m going to hold you to that. And you’re getting the popcorn.’

  ‘Deal. I think the gallery’s just down the street …’

  ‘You look nice, by the way. A red lip suits you.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Everyone suits a red lip.

  We didn’t need a map to know the poky little pop-up gallery with people spilling onto the street was Dane’s launch. Dozens of adults dressed as teenagers littered the pavement, cradling glasses of wine. ‘This must be it,’ I said. It was a balmy night, sticky and airless. I soon wished I’d worn a skirt.

  We fought our way through the crowd, and I saw Dane in the middle of it all, wholly different away from the coffee shop. He was laughing at something a friend was saying, head thrown back. White teeth, sharkishly sexy. Quite unconsciously, I pursed my lips, puckering up.

  ‘Do you wanna go up and say hi?’ Eleanor asked.

  ‘No. No, we can’t just go barging up. Let’s wait for a good moment.’

  We busied ourselves looking at his photography. In the small space we could only shuffle from image to image, following the herd. The pictures were quite wonderful, but by far too bleak and stark for my little flatshare. This new collection was mostly taken at the coast … possibly Camber Sands or Margate, I’m not sure. They seemed to be about the juxtaposition of natural and artificial. The black-and-white pictures captured disused power substations, downed power lines, burned-out cars, washed-up shipwrecks.

  One caught my eye in particular. A rare portrait of the girl with the peroxide fringe eating chip-shop-chips out of a paper cone. She was seated awkwardly, staring into her food. She looked upset, her brow furrowed, eyes down. I wondered if she was happy with him taking her picture. I imagined her asking him not to take it. Yet there she was.

  I scanned the room and found her lurking in the corner like a fashion Gollum. I watched as Dane sidled up to her, slipping an arm around her shoulder. She wriggled out from under the embrace like that cat in Pepé Le Pew cartoons. I seethed, wondering if she knew how much I wished he’d wrap his arm around me. I would be so proud to be at his side, supporting this, his big moment.

  Dane leaned in and whispered something in her ear, and she did manage a watered-down smile. At the same time, she – unconsciously or not – pushed him back, creating more personal space between them. My mind filled the gap with all sorts of scenarios. Did she have a boyfriend? A girlfriend? Is she an ex? Is she with his brother? I was almost sure there was a story, a history there. What I didn’t question was that Dane was besotted with her.

  Unless I could somehow get him to see me the way he saw her.

  I waited for my moment. I saw him duck out for a cigarette, and I pounced. I followed him outside. He said farewell to some people who were leaving, and then I swooped in for the kill. ‘Can I bum one of those?’ I asked, hoping people still said ‘bum’.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. ‘You made it.’

  ‘Yeah. Just thought we’d pop in on the way to the cinema.’

  ‘Oh cool. Didn’t realise you smoked.’

  ‘Only with a glass of wine.’ Not strictly true, but I’m not a total dork, I had smoked before. ‘They’re great, you know. Your pictures.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, eyes down. I could tell he wasn’t just being humble.

  ‘No they are. So different in tone from your older stuff.’

  He shrugged. ‘I wanted to try something new. Not sure it works. I wasn’t inspired by London any more, so I left for a while. I just wanted to come back and take pictures of London.’

  ‘Well sometimes,’ I decided to go there, ‘you have to go away to realise that you already had what you wanted the whole time.’

  He laughed a little – a tiny snort really – but I was pleased I’d done it. ‘Yeah. I hear that.’

  I was brave again. ‘That blonde girl?’

  ‘God is it that obvious?’

  I smiled. If I could win him over as a confidante, I was surely halfway there. ‘Maybe a little.’

  ‘I royally fucked that one up. I missed my chance by a mile. Timing is everything, everything is in the timing.’

  Well isn’t that a shame, I thought. ‘Plenty more fish in the sea.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He finished his cigarette. ‘My mam used to say there are as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it. Everyone thinks that’s Shakespeare, but it’s not. We don’t know who first said it.’

  ‘And it isn’t even true. Overfishing. Look at poor cod.’ With hindsight, do I know why I mentioned cod? No. Either way he laughed, more loudly this time. Worth it.

  ‘I better get back in there. What with it being my party and all. I have to do a speech in a sec. You gonna stick around?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Sorry, what’s your name again?’

  ‘Kit.’

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s it.’ He vanished back inside, and I felt as if I were glowing all over.

  Obviously I wasn’t going to copy Miss Peroxide, but I did need to make Dane see me in that way. It started with the hair. I went
to speak to my hairdresser, and said I wanted a radical change, something a bit rock chick, but nothing needy. He bleached just the ends of my hair before adding a bubblegum-pink tinge.

  I went shopping for new clothes. Again, I couldn’t wear the exact same stuff as her because I’m not a size eight, but I bought some simple black T-shirts and dresses from All Saints. I subtly changed my make-up, gradually adding more black kohl to the rim of each eye. It wasn’t so much a makeover as a seasonal shift into autumn. No one in the office even noticed, really.

  The day after my hair turned to candyfloss, I took my laptop down to the coffee shop to show it off. You can only imagine my disappointment when I found Dane wasn’t working, nor did he drop by for free coffee as he sometimes did if he didn’t have a shift.

  And you can continue to imagine the disappointment when he wasn’t there the next day either. As the days turned to weeks, gradual panic rose in my gut as the pink hair faded. In the end, I decided to be bold and ask Gaby, the nice lesbian with the nose-ring who works at Roaster. ‘Hey, where’s Dane these days? Is he on holiday?’

  ‘No,’ Gaby said with relish. ‘Didn’t you hear? He and his brother had a huge fight about something. I don’t know, he wouldn’t say. Anyway, Dane quit and said he hopes Rich chokes on his own dick.’

  ‘Oh wow.’ Graphic.

  Gaby shrugged, gesturing at the coffee shop. ‘Dane didn’t really need this anyway. He’s earning like proper money for his photography now. He’s doing something for ID Magazine.’

  I nodded, but felt winded. I took my chai latte to a corner table and waited for my pulse to stop raving. How … how could he just leave and not say anything? I felt so … so cheated. How can someone just go? If TV has taught us anything, it’s that feelings this strong deserve a rain-soaked farewell, some sort of crescendo.

  He’d just gone. And I thought for a moment that maybe I’d imagined him.

  There was only one thing left to do. I’m as good a social media detective as the next girl. No longer worrying it might look keen, I followed him on Instagram, and his ‘Stories’ told me he was still in East London at various bars and parties. He was looking after someone’s French bulldog, so lots of walks in Victoria Park.