Jonathan Coe - Number 11

‘I might not be free tonight,’ said Rachel, playing hard to get. ‘What did you have in mind?’

‘A surprise,’ said Nick, taking her in his arms. ‘And a pretty good one, if I do say so myself.’

It turned out that he was not exaggerating. After a few minutes’ chat with their mother, he bundled Rachel into the Porsche and soon they were driving north out of Leeds along the A61, until they reached Harewood House. By then, it was almost six o’clock.

‘What are you doing?’ Rachel asked, as Nick swung the car into the serpentine driveway. ‘This place’ll be closed now, won’t it?’

‘To most people, yes,’ he answered.

How did he manage to arrange these things? Rachel suspected that it was less to do with having money to spend, and more with his network of contacts in the most unexpected places. In any case, he had arranged for them to enjoy a private tour of the Terrace Gallery, followed by champagne on the terrace itself, and then a private dinner for two in the State Rooms.

The Terrace Gallery was especially impressive, with two new pieces by Antony Gormley on display in addition to the permanent collection. Rachel could not help thinking how much Alison would have enjoyed this privileged view. She took a picture of one of the sculptures on her phone and, while she and Nick were waiting for their champagne to be served on the terrace, sent it to Alison via Snapchat.

Soon afterwards a picture of Alison’s bedroom in Yardley popped up.

Hi Rache, did you get my letter?

The words were only on the screen for ten seconds or so, before dissolving into nothingness. By way of reply, Rachel took a quick picture of the parkland laid out in front of them, bathed in evening sunlight, and then wrote with her forefinger on the screen:

Yes, will write back soon.

Alison replied:

That looks good! Where are you?

Rachel took a picture of the house itself, and wrote:

With my brother. We’re doing the nicest thing tonight!

There was a longish pause before Alison’s reply came through. It said simply:

W T F??

Had she misunderstood, somehow? Rachel took another picture, this time with the Terrace Gallery itself in the background, and wrote:

Right up your street I would have thought.

There was no reply from Alison after this, but Rachel didn’t think anything of it. A waiter approached them from the main house to announce that their table for dinner was ready.

The next day, Rachel read Alison’s letter, and was profoundly moved by it. She replied at once. She wrote a heartfelt message of support, saying that Alison was not to feel shy, let alone ashamed, of what she had realized about her own identity. She promised that they would always be friends, whatever happened. She hoped that it would not be long before they saw each other again, and could discuss these things face to face.

She was surprised, at first, not to receive a reply. She put it down to the fact that Alison had just started college and must be busy. Then she, too, had the beginning of her first term at Oxford to think about, but although that distracted her, she was still puzzled to have heard nothing at all. She called Alison on the phone and texted her, posted messages on her Facebook timeline, but never got any response. She began to wonder if there had been something in the letter which had offended her. Had she not sounded supportive enough? Had she made Alison’s announcement sound more like a problem than a cause for celebration? As the weeks went by, and turned into months, her puzzlement dwindled, receded but never quite went away. It mutated, eventually, into a low-level hum of resentment. She had done the right thing, after all. She had responded just as a good friend should. She deserved something better than silence.

*

The Number 11 bus route, which follows the whole of Birmingham’s outer circle, makes a complete circuit of the city in about two and a half hours. Most passengers stay on it for only a fraction of that time. Alison and Selena, new students together and already new friends, were sitting on the lower deck of the 11A, the anti-clockwise version, heading from Bournville in the direction of Hall Green. They were on their way home from college, having dozed through a ninety-minute lecture on ‘Mapping the Historiography of the Para-Architectural Space’, which had failed to catch their imaginations. Well, never mind. They couldn’t expect everything on this course to be brilliant.

It was late September, and a low sun was still washing the city in pale golden light, glinting off the windscreens of cars and the panes of allotment greenhouses. Alison glanced at her phone to see what time it was, as the bus shuddered to a halt at a pedestrian crossing. Almost six thirty. This was proving to be a slow journey.

‘You going straight home now, then?’ Selena asked.

‘No. I’m meeting my mum for a drink. With her new boyfriend. Well, she calls him “new”. He’s her old boyfriend, in fact. But he seems to have popped up on the scene again.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘Whatever makes her happy, I suppose,’ said Alison, without much conviction. Then: ‘Your folks are still together, right?’

‘Yeah.’ Selena laughed, and said: ‘I don’t know why, sometimes, but they’ve stuck it out. For the sake of us kids, I think, as much as anything else. Good on them. I’ve seen most of my friends having to deal with their parents splitting up. I know how tough it is. You an only child?’

Alison nodded.

‘That’s even worse, isn’t it? So it’s just you and your mum at home, and I bet half the time it’s you looking after her, not the other way round.’

‘Yeah, there’s all of that. Plus, you know, it just gets so fucking lonely a lot of the time. Sitting at the kitchen table, having dinner together, just the two of us. If you don’t put the radio on or something you can hear the clock ticking on the wall.’

Selena’s wide, hazel eyes were full of sympathy: ‘Look, any time you want to come round and have a meal at our place … Just say the word. There’s five of us and it gets pretty loud and, you know, we have a good time. It might take you out of things.’

Returning Selena’s gaze, Alison took a long breath and said, in a tone of voice suddenly nervous and confiding: ‘Look, Selena, we only met a couple of weeks ago, but there’s something I want you to know about me. Something you really have to know, actually.’

Selena was startled by the change in her manner. She waited for some passengers to jostle past them on their way to the exit door, then said: ‘OK. What is it?’

Saying nothing, her eyes still locked into Selena’s, Alison took hold of her friend’s hand with a gentle grip. She lifted it, and now, moving it slowly, unobtrusively, so as not to attract the attention of the other passengers, she laid it on her own left thigh, just above the knee. She squeezed Selena’s hand, so that Selena herself was encouraged — even compelled — to respond by giving Alison’s thigh a reciprocal, questioning squeeze.

Selena’s eyes, not leaving Alison’s for a moment, flickered with surprise. There was a long silence between them: a silence charged with confusion and uncertainty. Selena’s hand did not leave her friend’s thigh: in fact it was still being held in place there. Gradually, her lips widened into a smile; the smile became broader, revealing her teeth; and at last, unable to contain her feelings any longer, she burst into laughter.

‘What the fuck !’ she said, and Alison started laughing as well.

‘What the fucking fuck !’ Selena repeated, and neither of them seemed to mind now that some of the passengers were turning to look at them. ‘Have you got a false leg?’