On the Other Side

  ‘It does, yes. I’m twenty-seven and this is my first job. Not ever having to work sounds glorious, but not when you feel like you’re being kept captive in your own house. Having money doesn’t mean anything if you don’t use it in the right way.’

  ‘And what’s the right way?’ Vincent looked intrigued.

  Evie shrugged. ‘Helping people? Animals? The earth? Having adventures? I could think of a hundred better ways to use my family’s money than what it’s being used for now. Which is nothing.’ She looked troubled. Agitated. She’d picked away at the foil wrapping of her burger and created silver confetti on the tablecloth. Vincent decided this wasn’t the time to delve into her family issues and changed the subject.

  ‘So not even so much as a hamster?’

  He shook his head in disbelief, she smiled and his heart swelled just a little.

  ‘No, not even a hamster!’ She smiled again.

  ‘Fair enough.’ He nodded, curling his bottom lip out into a sort of approving pout. Evie couldn’t help but look at his mouth then, but she caught herself before she let her mind wander.

  ‘And you? No fish of your own?’ She was making fun, but he didn’t seem to realise, and Evie quite liked that.

  ‘Just a family mutt called Max, but he died a few years back. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard in my life as the day we lost him. Mum too. Since then she’s not been able to get another dog. Can’t handle losing them.’ Vincent suddenly felt himself being swept away by grief so he shook his head sadly.

  ‘Can I be honest with you?’ Evie smiled at her own cheeky thoughts which made Vincent wonder where she was taking this conversation.

  ‘Of course.’ He opened his own burger, removed the gherkins and passed them across to her.

  ‘These questions are awful,’ she revealed.

  ‘Oh are they now? And why is that?’ Vincent leaned his chin on his hand again, smiling.

  ‘You’re not finding out anything … meaningful. Whether I have siblings or pets doesn’t tell you anything about … well, me.’

  ‘Yes it does! It tells me you have a brother. And that you’re heartless towards fish and most likely amphibians!’

  Evie rolled her eyes. ‘You know what I mean. They’re things I’d expect to be asked in an interview by someone who doesn’t need to know my personality. My … ins and outs.’ She hadn’t intended to sound provocative, but all the same, the slight tilt of Vincent’s head and the sudden raise of his left eyebrow pleased her. ‘Ask me something that will make me think. Something I’ll have to wonder whether I should tell you the answer to or not.’ She leaned forward on her elbows, fascinated to see what he’d come up with.

  Vincent thought hard, looking directly into her eyes. She didn’t shy away from his gaze. She just wanted to know what he was seeing when he looked at her.

  Vincent, however, suddenly felt her stare was too much. Her eyes weren’t full of anything other than happiness, something Vincent had known very little of in his life and he feared they were like the sun; beautiful and necessary but looking at them directly might hurt you. He averted his eyes down to his large, calloused hands and wondered what he was doing. No, in fact, he wondered what she was doing, this brilliant girl who wanted for nothing, whose nimble hands could create brilliant worlds on a page in mere minutes, with an oafish man who bumbled about the underground with a violin barely scraping together enough pennies to buy two burgers, fries and two Cokes. He was a giant who had caught a butterfly and knew he’d only kill it if he kept it but was so reluctant to let it go for its beauty made him something he wouldn’t be without it: happy.

  ‘All right,’ he said eventually. ‘I have a question.’

  ‘Go for it.’

  ‘It’s a doozy.’

  ‘Go on …’

  ‘Seriously. Brace yourself. It’s amazing.’

  ‘Tell me!’ Evie giggled.

  He took a deep breath. ‘OK.’ He paused for dramatic effect just long enough to wind her up a little bit more. She looked at an imaginary watch, unamused. He brought his hand to his mouth as if he was holding a microphone. ‘If you could undo one thing from your past, what would it be?’ He quickly moved the microphone over to Evie so she could answer, and she tapped the top of it to make sure it was on.

  ‘That’s your question?’ she asked, humorously exasperated.

  ‘What?’ He couldn’t help but laugh. ‘It’s a very interesting question. Could reveal a lot about your … ins and outs.’ He smirked. Evie felt her cheeks flush and hoped she hadn’t gone red.

  ‘Well. My answer is … I wouldn’t.’ She sat back, feeling her mother possess her again as she clasped her hands in her lap in a no-nonsense manner which was utterly ridiculous considering how much Evie liked nonsense.

  ‘Wouldn’t what?’ He picked up the remaining half of his burger and halved it again in one bite.

  ‘Undo anything. I believe that everything I’ve done and everything that’s happened in my life has happened for a reason, and if I changed anything, I wouldn’t be the same person I am now.’

  ‘Have you been asked this before?’ He narrowed his eyes at her. ‘That was a very practised answer.’

  ‘I just think about stuff like that a lot. Don’t you?’

  Vincent stuffed the last of his burger into his mouth and shook his head.

  ‘I think about it all the time,’ Evie continued, ‘about what makes everyone who they are, and if we went back in time and changed anything, whether or not it would make a difference. Would it make us better or worse, or would we just stay exactly the same because we were always destined to end up this way no matter what happened throughout our lives?’ Evie was no longer looking at Vincent. Her burger had become far more interesting. She was relaxed, almost spaced out, lost in a world of her own. Vincent took a sip of his drink and although he tried to stop it, he couldn’t; he grinned at her even though she wasn’t looking.

  ‘And what’s your conclusion?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Ugh, I don’t know.’ She took a deep breath and snapped out of her trance, glancing up at Vincent then back down at the mess she’d made of the foil wrapper. She swept the pieces off the table into her hand, then instead of scattering them onto the train station floor, dropped the tiny traces of foil into her coat pocket. ‘If I had an answer to that, I think I’d be far more sought-after than I am.’

  She glanced at Vincent again and noticed the way he was gazing at her. It was the way she’d seen movie stars look at each other. Like nothing else in the world mattered except them existing in that moment. Evie had watched many romantic movies, and enjoyed them, but she never wept with happiness when the couple finally kissed, and she’d never understood the force a look like that could have. She realised now that that was because she’d never been looked at that way before today.

  ‘What about you?’ she asked, trying to stop the mood from becoming too intense. ‘What’s the one thing from your past that you’d change?’

  Vincent scrunched up his face like he’d been hoping she wouldn’t ask the same question in return. ‘Urgh, can I only pick one?’ He laughed nervously.

  ‘They’re your rules, Winters, not mine!’ She ate one final chip and then wiped her hands together, signalling she was done with food. Now she was hungry for more conversation.

  ‘I think I would go back to when I was learning the violin and figure out how to play with my eyes open. That way I would have met you sooner.’ He tried to give her a confident smile but as soon as the words had come out he’d second guessed himself and it showed.

  ‘I quite like the way we met,’ Evie confessed. ‘Even if it did take you forever to finally say hello.’

  ‘OK,’ Vincent said, the awful underground lights reflecting in his eyes. ‘I have one more question.’

  ‘Go on.’ Evie tilted her head.

  ‘And forgive me if I’m being forward.’ He was suddenly bashful, his hair flopping over his eyes again, a tinge of red in his cheeks.

 
‘Go on,’ Evie nudged, feeling a jolt in her stomach.

  ‘No, really, I don’t want to make you uncomfortable …’

  ‘Vincent,’ Evie said, a little more seriously than she’d intended. She dipped her head to meet his eyes. ‘Just ask.’

  He pursed his lips but still managed to smile through them. ‘Is there a … Mr Snow?’

  Evie laughed. ‘Even if I was married he wouldn’t be a Snow. I’d be a … well, whatever he was.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I didn’t quite think that through.’ He brushed his hair out of his eyes, the red hue now covering his whole face again, right to the tips of his ears.

  ‘No.’ She held up her left hand to show him her ring finger. ‘Not married. And not involved, either. I’ve never really been one for romance. Much to my mother’s horror. If anything, I’ve avoided it to spite her.’ She laughed, but then felt mean. ‘I love her, she’s my mum, but we have very different ideas about how I should be living my life.’

  ‘I’m guessing working at The Teller wasn’t her idea?’ Vincent scrunched up the wrapper of his burger along with the paper plate and stuffed it back into the bag it had come in. Evie did the same.

  Even though she hadn’t quite finished her burger, she’d lost her appetite.

  ‘Definitely not.’ She laughed at what an understatement that was. Eleanor Snow couldn’t have been more against this endeavour; in fact Evie was still pinching herself that she’d been able to get this far. ‘And I can only continue living my life how I want to live it as long as I progress as an artist professionally, beyond the pages of The Teller, within the next year.’

  ‘And if you don’t?’ Vincent didn’t look too troubled by her story. Evie supposed it sounded like an empty threat to him – a fairy story about an evil queen keeping her daughter in a tower – but she herself knew only too well just how serious her mother was.

  ‘If I don’t, I get married to whomever she chooses and spend the rest of my days as a wife and mother. Nothing more, nothing less.’

  ‘Wow. We’d better start getting your artwork out there then. It needs to be seen by the right people if you want to animate for motion pictures.’ Vincent took her rubbish from her and stood up.

  ‘We?’ Evie asked, taken aback, looking up at him.

  ‘I don’t want to jump to any conclusions, Evie,’ he said, walking across to the bin, ‘but I think we’re friends now, and friends help each other out.’ He gave her his most adorable smile.

  ‘I suppose we are, Mr Winters.’ She nodded, grinning. She’d been living on her own for just over a month, and this was the first friend she’d made. Preconceptions had been the undoing of any potential friendships at the office (if Grayson called her ‘Princess’ one more time, she vowed she’d buy a tiara, wear it to work every day and be done with it), except maybe with the receptionist but that may have been due to the fact she was also female and fed up of the misogynistic work environment rather than through any real connection to Evie, herself. Then again, Evie hadn’t been very responsive to friendly advances either as she always had her head in her sketchbook, searching for some way to progress further than the newspaper.

  ‘Evie?’ Vincent ventured.

  ‘Another question?’ She stood to take her coat from underneath her. The evening was drawing to a close, and the air was chilly. ‘Better make it a good one. All the others have been a bit of a let-down!’

  He walked back over to her, but kept his distance. His hands suddenly felt like two useless lumps that he didn’t know what to do with, so he shoved them deep into his coat pockets.

  ‘I was just wondering … Seeing as it’s only’ – he checked his watch – ‘eight o’clock, would you like to go for a walk? With me. Somewhere.’

  Evie thought about getting up for work early the next morning, and then had the glorious realisation that tomorrow was Saturday.

  ‘Now that, Vincent, was a brilliant question,’ she said, smiling.

  Vincent, the brilliant violinist, had never met his father but his mother, Violet Winters, had worked hard to bring her two children up on her own. When the time came for his sister, eight years his senior, to go to university, Violet realised that by seeing one of her children all the way through higher education, she was taking the opportunity away from the other. There was no money left to send Vincent any further than college, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to put aside enough by the time he was eighteen, even if she worked three jobs. Instead, she scrimped and saved for a whole year to buy him a violin for his tenth birthday. She’d seen the way he looked at them when they passed the music shop on the way to school, and how his fingers twitched, desperate to try one.

  ‘If you get really good,’ she told him, ‘that violin will pay for whatever you need.’

  At ten years old, he’d believed this to be true, but now, eighteen years later, he wasn’t so sure it was that simple. He’d practised until his fingers were numb, and as the commuters at the station would confirm, he was the best there was. The problem was that he had taught himself from books and from nagging people he knew who also played. In the process, he’d picked up bad habits, and his unusual technique and lack of knowledge of music theory made him unacceptable to every music school in town, especially when he was also looking for a scholarship. He’d filled in application after application, every time having to leave questions about qualifications blank, and he knew it was useless. Even though he could outplay the greats, the best schools were looking for the best musicians, and to be considered one of the best, you had to have had a formal education.

  Through busking and his part-time job at the very music shop where his mother had bought the violin he still played, he made enough money to pay half of the rent on a small flat in a seedy part of town, but that was about all. He shared the flat with a guy he’d gone to college with who called himself a musician too but who was nowhere near as talented as Vincent, although he was a great deal more deluded: he’d even gone as far as giving himself a stage name, though he wouldn’t divulge how many times he’d actually been on a stage, other than trying to crash one. Sonny Shine was a wannabe rock star, and although Vincent loved him like a brother, he thought he was a moron. Sonny was usually late with the rent, but Vincent couldn’t kick him out because he couldn’t afford the place on his own and he knew no one else was stupid enough to live there with him. So, Sonny and Vincent lived together as harmoniously as they could, Vincent on the violin and Sonny on the electric guitar.

  Vincent had managed to put a sweet spin on burgers and chips with his romantic meal for two in the station, but if he planned to see Evie again, he needed some new ideas. He didn’t have a lot of experience with girls. He was bisexual and he’d had as many relationships with men as women which, at the age of twenty-eight, was the grand total of two. Two serious relationships, at least. The first, for six months when he was nineteen, had been with a red-headed, fierce-tempered girl called Tallulah Holly. She was beautiful to look at, like a mermaid from a lagoon, and she was very sweet in small doses, but behind closed doors she was bitter and left a bad taste in your mouth for days. She worked in a café serving coffee and fried breakfasts to construction workers, but she wanted to be an actress, and Vincent had become completely besotted with her when he saw her play Portia in an amateur production of The Merchant of Venice and just had to go to the stage door to speak to her.

  Tallulah was high and mighty right from the off, and she signed Vincent’s programme even when he hadn’t asked her to but Vincent was convinced she could do no wrong. After six months, during which his life revolved around her and she made things as difficult for him as possible, he decided to introduce her to his mother. They dropped by unannounced (because Vincent knew Tallulah would find an excuse not to go if he told her), and even though Violet thought she was far too big for her boots and was aware of Tallulah looking down her nose at the tiny house that smelt slightly damp and the makeshift meal she had rustled up at short notice, she could see how happy she made her son an
d so was as nice as the pie she had served them. It was only when they were back at Tallulah’s flat (because she always refused to go to Vincent’s as she thought Sonny was a moron – though that was a fair opinion because everybody did, and he was) and Tallulah said, ‘She’s a sweet woman but it’s obvious why your father left. She’s not really much to look at, and that cooking! My God!’ that Vincent’s rose-tinted glasses cracked and he saw her as everyone else did: a bitter girl whose life hadn’t turned out the way she’d wanted it to, so she tried to make everyone else’s just as sour as her own. He’d ended it there and then, as gently as he could, mind you, but the actress in Tallulah had to make a scene. She broke most of her own crockery that night.

  Vincent’s second relationship was with a guy called Will Johnson. It too only lasted six months, but it ended as amicably as it had started. Will worked behind the bar at a club Vincent’s college friends liked to go to. They’d dance the night away getting sweaty and terribly drunk, but that wasn’t really Vincent’s thing, so instead he assigned himself as the group’s designated driver. Like a parent at a children’s birthday party, he would watch his friends run off to the dance floor and inevitably embarrass themselves before the evening was out while he’d wait at the bar and drink as few of the tiny bottles of overpriced Coke as he could without getting chucked out. It took Will two weeks of serving Vincent to pluck up the nerve to offer him a drink on the house. It took him another week to ask his name and another for his number. Will worked in a club with loud music because he wasn’t very good at talking to people, and as Vincent was the first person he’d ever wanted to speak to, it made him think he must be special. (Will also worked in a club with bright lights because he was ginger and hoped all the strobes and lasers made it impossible to tell.) As it turned out, he went to the same college as Vincent, taking English literature and art, and was working at the club to make a bit of extra money for art supplies. They spent most of their time together discussing books and making out on Vincent’s sofa to vinyl records. In the end, the relationship simply fizzled out. As Will put it, life happened and a relationship wasn’t what either of them needed or, in all honesty, wanted but a great fondness remained.