Laura Williams - Our Stop

Lorenzo was still talking as he put the phone down. Not seconds later, Daniel’s mobile flashed with a message. It was Lorenzo.

Well done on having the balls, mate , it said. That was Lorenzo’s way of saying, I know you hate it when I’m a twat but I can’t help it. Daniel double-tapped it and gave it a thumbs-up.

Daniel resumed idly scrolling through the emails on his desktop, trying to focus on the day ahead and not on the morning that had been. He couldn’t. He couldn’t stop thinking about her. He couldn’t stop thinking about the day they first met.

Not long after Daniel’s father had died, just after Easter, Daniel had begun to force himself to leave his desk whenever he felt claustrophobic, or uneasy, or like he might cry. In his grief – the word ‘depression’ still sort of stuck in his throat a bit, sounded a bit wet – his therapist had said that being outside, in nature, would always help.

Christ. He couldn’t believe he had a therapist.

‘Keep using your body, make sure you engage with the world, take a stroll around the nearest park, even, just to get the energy moving differently,’ she told him at one of their first sessions together, when he’d said about panic attacks that grabbed him by the throat and made him feel like he couldn’t breathe.

He’d had to pay sixty-five pounds an hour to go private because the NHS waiting list was too long, his situation too dire to wait because he could barely function, and he wondered, not unkindly, if this was the kind of advice he could expect for two hundred plus quid a month. Anyway. Walk he did, at the very least to feel like he was getting value for money, and she’d been there, Nadia (of course, he didn’t know that was her name then), in the courtyard tucked away off Borough Market. A random Friday. Poof. At his lowest, in a moment of pure emotional desperation, this positive, engaged, clever woman had appeared and her verve – her very essence, her aura – was like sunshine, solar-powering everyone around her. It had knocked Daniel sideways.

Daniel knew exactly which day he’d first seen her because it was two weeks after the funeral, and five weeks after he’d started his six-month consulting contract at Converge, a petroleum engineering firm. It was the day his mother had rung when he was in a meeting about the design flaws of a submersive drill, and he’d excused himself in time to pick up in case it was urgent.

She’d said, ‘He’s here.’

‘What do you mean, Mum?’ Daniel had replied. ‘Dad’s … Dad died, remember?’

He’d held his breath as he waited for her to realize she’d used the wrong word, said the wrong thing. He held up two fingers to the guys on the other side of the glass partition, signalling two minutes. He just needed two minutes. They were impatient, needing his sign-off before lunch, and suspicious of an outsider coming in this late in the project and pissed off that he’d been pushing for a pivot on the next steps. He didn’t care. He wanted to make sure his mum was okay. He wouldn’t be able to handle it if she had dementia or memory loss or something. He’d just lost his dad – he couldn’t lose her too.

‘Daniel,’ she’d replied, level-headed. ‘I know he’s bloody dead. It’s his ashes. They’ve just been dropped off.’

Daniel exhaled loudly in relief. She wasn’t crazy. Well. Any crazier.

‘But it’s a bloody bin bag’s worth! He’s so bloody heavy I can’t shift him anywhere. So he’s just here. In the kitchen with me, by the back door. All his ashes in a heavy-duty bag that I don’t know what to do with.’

Daniel closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose, stunned. His dad’s ashes. Because his dad was dead.

‘I’m having a coffee and telling him – your dad – about Janet Peterson’s new Vauxhall Mokka – they had it in gold, can you bear it! Gold! And you know, I say new but obviously it’s good second-hand. Cars lose money as soon as you drive them off the forecourt – but anyway, it’s a bit creepy. Your dad. Can you come by after work and help me?’

Daniel could almost have laughed. In fact, he did laugh, and told his mum he’d be across to Ealing Broadway at about seven, and in the meantime to go hang out in the living room to watch Loose Women instead. She’d been so strong since the funeral that it made him feel ashamed to be the “weak” one. He was about to go back into the meeting – literally had his hand on the door knob to push back through – when his throat closed up and his shirt collar felt tight and he had a vague notion that he might be sick, because his body was remembering, all over again, that his dad was gone. His best mate. His loudest champion. Dead from a ruptured brain aneurysm.

They’d been drinking pints in the pub together before Sunday lunch, his dad telling Daniel he could help him with a flat deposit and not to worry about it, it wasn’t a loan it was a gift, he wanted to see him sorted and London property prices were so crazy now he’d never be able to do it alone. It was weird for a thirty-year-old to have a flatmate, his dad said – he’d had a kid and a wife by that age. Daniel had said he’d think about it, that he was a bit proud to accept a handout, that it was normal to be thirty and have a flatmate in London, it was an expensive place, he liked the company, and living in Kentish Town, and that afternoon, before he could accept and say, ‘Dad, I love you, cheers for looking out for me’, over the spicy bazargan at home his sixty-two-year-old dad had keeled over and had never woken up. In a single hour, everything was different and nothing was the same and Daniel had lost the man who’d made him.

Daniel made a break for it, after that phone call, turning on his heel with his head dipped down to cover his face, a face that was ashen and streaked with tears. He took the back stairs, all twenty-three flights of them, down to the ground floor, and pushed out of an emergency exit onto the street. He stood with his back against the wall, panting. He didn’t realize he’d started walking until he flopped down on a circular bench in the sun, drenched in sweat, somewhere off the market. He sat, closed his eyes, breathed deeply, let the tears and sweat dry, and thought about his dad, thought about how lonely he was, thought about how badly he’d been sleeping and how the insomnia might be the thing to drive him truly mad.

On the bench he’d had his back to her, at first. He’d been staring at nothing in particular, just sort of letting the sun be on his face and closing his eyes to do a bit of deep breathing, reminding himself that he would be okay. He didn’t call it a ‘mantra’ as such, but when he missed his dad in his bones he’d say in his head, ‘Be alive, and remember to live. Be alive, and remember to live. Be alive, and remember to live …’

He became vaguely aware of a voice just over his left shoulder getting louder and louder, and he tuned his ear into it like a radio dial finding a signal on a country road, until he could hear a woman’s voice clearly saying:

‘… Because it’s going to be built anyway, right? So it needs to be built by people who come from lower-class or lower-income families …’

That was what had made Daniel pay particular attention. He was the first in his family to go to university. His family was very modest. His dad had missed only three days of work as a postman in his forty-year tenure, putting Daniel through a degree with hardly any debt. It had been important to him that his child had the opportunities he hadn’t. The woman’s voice continued: ‘The only way artificial intelligence will ever look after poorer people is if people from these underprivileged communities are the ones programming it.’

As an engineer, Daniel had a small amount of knowledge of artificial intelligence, but not much. ‘The next industrial revolution,’ one of his undergrad professors had declared, but Daniel had preferred the known entities of maths and equations and building things for the now, not the future. Daniel craned over his shoulder a little to see who was talking. There was a guy – suit trousers with no belt, obviously fitted by a tailor to the exact drop of his hip, narrow pinstripe instead of plain black, shoes so shiny you could see your reflection in them – giving the girl a sort of wry look. A smirk.