Claire Kendal - I Spy

‘Your glasses are steamed up.’ I noticed because I wanted to sneak a glance at his extraordinary eyes. One was violent blue. The other was the real wonder. It was a half circle of cobalt in the top of the iris, and a half circle of brown in the bottom.

He took the glasses off and handed them to me, an intimacy. ‘Is that a yes to dinner?’

‘I think so.’ I fiddled with his glasses. ‘I don’t have anything to clean them with.’

He looked at his jacket pocket. I fumbled my hand inside, meeting those bright eyes of his as I did, and found a square of grey microfibre covered in tiny stethoscopes. I wiped the lenses. When I handed them back, he let his skin touch mine and gave me an electric shock.

‘You’d better watch for Mr Rowntree’s girlfriend. If she turns up during visiting hours while his wife is here, he may arrest again.’ Zac was smart enough to make sure nobody heard him say this – it was the kind of talk that could get even a doctor in trouble. A piece of my hair had slipped out of my ponytail. He slid it between his fingers as he walked off to do his ward rounds.

Milly came over. ‘You’re looking hot.’

‘It’s extra warm in here.’ I tried to tuck my hair into the elastic.

‘Not that kind of hot.’ She eyed Zac, who was disappearing into the doctors’ office. ‘Nothing says, I’m a very important cardiologist doing super-cool interventional things like a scrub top and smart-casual trousers.’

I laughed so hard I almost snorted, which encouraged Milly to keep going.

‘That I’m looking beautiful but heroics were needed so I threw this top on outfit is definitely for you. I wish I could dress for impact.’ Milly frowned at the purple dress the staff nurses had to wear. ‘It’s like The Handmaid’s fucking Tale around here, with all this fucked-up colour coding.’

Milly and I kept an incognito blog. We called it Angel’s and Devil’s Book Reviews . Devil found the novels that everyone loved and gave them one star. Angel found the ones everyone hated and gave them five. We had two thousand followers and the most beautiful review blog in the world, because Milly was an artist, so everything about it was visually arresting. She was the most creative person I’d ever met. There was a photo on our ‘About Us’ page, with both of us wearing superhero eye masks. Mine was white, Milly’s red. She had scarlet horns pinned to her blonde hair. I had a white halo. Milly’s hatchet job reviews got twenty times more Likes than my attempts at justice for the unfairly spurned.

‘Please tell me you’re not doing Atwood,’ I said.

‘I am for sure going to do Atwood.’

‘You will make her cry.’ I clutched my heart in mock sorrow.

‘She doesn’t strike me as the crying type.’

I looked down at myself. ‘She for sure would if she had to wear this.’

‘True. Those white polka dots.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Dr Hunter seems into them, though. He’d be perfect for you, except for the fact that he sleeps with everything that moves.’

‘If that’s true,’ Zac said, ‘then why haven’t I slept with you?’

Milly let out a squeak.

Zac’s face was a tight mask. How did he manage to sneak up on us? Normally the sound of his shoes gave him away. Did he change his gait, to avoid the usual noise of the taps on his soles? Or were Milly and I so absorbed in each other we didn’t notice? There was no doubting the clip-clop of his walk as he went off to continue his rounds.

Milly wasn’t finished, though she was no longer smiling. ‘It’s so fucking predictable, your falling for this powerful doctor. It’s pure fantasy. We’re not living in my mum’s collection of Disney films. Tell me you at least know that.’

‘I do know, yes. But I also know I’m not alone.’ I hummed a few lines of the Gaston song from Beauty and the Beast , because Gaston was my nickname for Milly’s boyfriend.

‘You have got to stop calling him Gaston,’ she said. ‘Why do you?’

‘You know why. Because he’s so in love with himself. Like the character in the Disney film. They’re practically identical.’

‘That’s true.’

‘Remind me of his real name, Milly.’

‘You’ve known it since our first day of school.’ She put her hands on her hips. ‘Tell me the truth about something.’

‘What?’

‘You know that love letter you got when we were in Reception? We thought it was from a boy in our class, but we never figured out who …’

‘We were four. It was twenty years ago, Milly!’

I’d actually written the letter myself. It said, ‘I love you, Holly’, and the words were surrounded by a heart. It was hardly a work of art, though I suppose it was evidence of how much I loved to write and make things up, even at that age. I’d wanted Milly to think I had a secret admirer. I’d experienced a small sense of triumph that I pulled off that bit of fiction and made someone think it was true. Even then, though, I knew that the fact I could fool her didn’t mean I should . I’d felt a twinge of guilt, too, that it had been so easy.

‘Was it Fergus?’ she said. ‘Do you think he wrote the letter?’

‘God. No. I mean, I don’t know, but I’m sure it wasn’t him.’ I still didn’t want to confess to Milly that I’d faked the letter. At the age of four, I was already practising my tradecraft as well as my writing. But my strongest motive for tricking Milly was my wish to impress her. I’d wanted my brand-new friend and neighbour to think that other people saw me as special.

I tried to joke. ‘Gaston probably wasn’t able to write then, so it couldn’t have been him. But you and I were very advanced.’

She laughed. ‘Again true.’

‘I get that you had a crush on him when we were four. I don’t get what you see in him now.’

‘What I see in Fergus is that he’s always been in my life. That kind of loyalty matters.’

‘Not to him. You shouldn’t hold on to someone because they’re a habit.’

‘Why not? I’ve held on to you.’

As a joke a couple of years ago, Milly bought a book that instructed women on all the right things they should do to get a man to fall madly in love with them, and all the wrong things they shouldn’t. She read out bits to me and the two of us hooted in derision.

On my first date with Zac, I did two of the biggest wrong things. The first was that I didn’t make him take me out to dinner. I went to the house he was renting, nestled in farmland and set a few hundred metres from the coastal path.

After weeks of flirting and brushing past each other, his hands were all over me the instant he closed his front door. I said, ‘All those women. Is it true?’

‘Not any more.’ He was unzipping my dress, sliding it off my shoulders, letting it drop to the floor.

The book put the second wrong thing in a different font, for emphasis. Do not sleep with a man on the first date. Never ever. No matter what . Just don’t.

Zac was pulling me towards a rug in the centre of his sitting room, pushing me onto my back, and we were making love almost in the same movement.

When we got up to go to make dinner, he asked how I liked my steak, and I said, ‘Well done, with horseradish sauce.’ He kissed me and sat me at his marble-topped table and told me he would be right back. I heard him climb the stairs, and a minute later, his footsteps drawing near. But instead of returning to the kitchen, there was what I guessed to be the rattle of keys and the creak of the front door opening and closing, then the roar of his car engine.

Half an hour later, I was reading an article that Zac had left the newspaper folded to, which he’d neatly arranged on the corner of the table. The article was about a huge leak of records from a Panama-based law firm, and how the prime minister’s own father was on the list of rich people who put their money in offshore tax havens.