‘You don’t have the apps on your phone.’
‘So you went through my apps but you didn’t go through my browsing history? You’d make a terrible investigator, do you know that?’
He’s smiling as he says it and he doesn’t seem annoyed with me. ‘I didn’t even think of that. I didn’t want to invade your privacy too much.’
‘You didn’t want to open my browser and find I was into unicorn porn or something like that?’
I raise an eyebrow. ‘Is that a thing?’
He laughs. ‘I have no idea. I promise I’m not into anything weird. If you had opened my browser, you’d have found Google News and searches for how to make a Pot Noodle more interesting.’
‘Can you make a Pot Noodle more interesting?’
‘It’s really a case of with or without the sauce packet. Some bloke on YouTube tried putting it in a sandwich, which just looked … ick. And I’m always being careful not to strain something with my adventurous cooking.’
Surely it’s not normal to just sit here and smile at someone? Everything about him makes me smile. I feel comfortable sitting with him, and I’m suddenly so, so glad I came. I know it won’t lead to anything more, and I don’t want it to, but I’m just glad to have met him. He feels like someone special.
I shake myself. I have to stop it. I’m here to further my career, nothing more. ‘So, are you okay? You said on the phone that you felt better than you had for months. Had you been feeling bad?’
He gives me a sideways glance and his dark eyes turn soft. ‘I can’t believe you heard that. Or cared.’ He looks out at the sea again. ‘Yeah, I hate London. My last job was restoring an Edwardian organ in the basement of a London museum. I felt like I hadn’t seen daylight in months. I couldn’t have asked for a better job at a better time than this.’
I glance at the giant tent behind me. There’s not much of the carousel to see. He hasn’t opened the tent from this side, so all that’s on show is the greyish white canvas of the marquee covering and enough space for Nathan to work around it. ‘Do you get many jobs like this?’
‘It’s been a while since I was sent anywhere quite as perfect as this, but yeah, I go out to fix things in situ if I can. Our workshop is on the outskirts of London, so we get stuff brought in there or shipped to us, or we go out to jobs like this one. There’s six of us there and we all have different specialities. My boss is one of the leading antique restorers in the country, so people go to him with whatever they need doing and he decides which of us is best suited to the job. I’m lucky that I mainly fix big old things because I’m more likely to get to go out to jobs. I’m probably sixty per cent away and forty per cent in the workshop. The guys who fix up furniture and small easily moveable things are almost always in the workshop.’
Which explains his absence on the train for weeks at a time. It’s easy to tell how much he likes being outside. It’s something I’d never really thought about until I wandered through Pearlholme, but I don’t get much fresh air either. I’d always thought I got enough on the walk from my flat to the tube station every day and the lunchtime walks to the nearest sandwich shop, but there’s a difference between London fresh air and real fresh air.
I can’t help looking at his hands again as he leans down to draw mindless patterns in the sand at his feet. ‘Do you know they’ve invented these really clever hand coverings for people who do messy jobs … called gloves?’
Instead of being offended like I feared he might, he laughs, a warm sound that shakes the wood we’re sitting on. ‘I need to be able to feel what I’m doing. See this?’ He reaches into his pocket and pulls out the small metal thing he was rubbing earlier. ‘They’re the bearings that allow the carousel to turn, and because it’s so old, they’ve got gunk all around them where it isn’t supposed to be. I’ve got to be able to feel if they’re damaged – if there are any chips or splits it’ll affect the movement – and the best tool I’ve got for clearing these little ridges out is my thumbnail.’
He rubs the metal thing with his thumb and then runs his nail along one of the grooves in it, a tiny noodle of grease appearing in its wake.
He wipes it on the cloth. ‘We’ve got fantastic gloves that are like a second skin, but nowt’s as good as actually feeling something this old with your fingers. I think you can almost feel the years that have passed.’ He rubs the bearing with the cloth and then shoves it quickly back into his pocket, suddenly seeming embarrassed. ‘Sorry, I’m sure you’re not even vaguely interested in my metal bits.’
‘No, I am, it’s fascinating. I love carousels but I’ve never thought about how they work, and I’ve definitely never met anyone who does something so interesting before.’
‘Ah, me and the word “interesting” don’t belong in a sentence together. You just don’t know me well enough yet.’
There’s that ‘yet’ again. The butterflies that haven’t left my stomach since the train the other morning take off in another storm of fluttering.
‘And I am sorry about the mess.’ He holds his hands out in front of him and wiggles his fingers again. ‘Modern grease tends to come off with wet wipes. The old stuff that’s in this is like tar – they don’t make it like this anymore.’
I look behind us at the tent. ‘How old is it then?’
‘Oh, I wish I knew.’ His face lights up, making laughter lines crinkle around his eyes again. ‘Usually they’re emblazoned with the name of the maker and the date, but this one isn’t. I can vaguely date it because the horses are solid wood, anything from the 1930s or Forties would’ve been aluminium, and it changed to fibreglass in the Fifties, but only pre-1930 would’ve been made solely of wood, so it’s definitely at least that old, but from the style, the trappings and just the way it’s carved … I’d say it’s older than that, the late 1800s to the turn of the century. It matches what you would’ve seen at that time, but it’s nothing like a commercial carousel, and it’s definitely never had commercial use— Sorry, I’m rambling. Simple answer: late Victorian era.’
‘Oh, please, ramble away, it’s fascinating.’
‘You have no idea how many times I’ve heard that, but fascinating is code for, “When will the boring bastard shut up? Oh God, is he still going? Kill me now”, usually accompanied by the distorted facial expressions of trying to hide a yawn.’
It makes me laugh even though it probably shouldn’t. He gives me a smile when I meet his eyes, but I get the feeling that it covers something deeper. ‘I used to love going on these when I was little. There was one on the seafront where we went every summer and I always went on the same horse. Mum used to call it “my” horse.’
‘Me too. My nan and granddad used to take my brother and me for days out by the seaside when I was young and the carousel was the only thing my nan was brave enough to go on. Maybe that’s why I was drawn to fixing them … but seriously, everyone in my life knows better than to ask me questions about work because I get overexcited talking about it.’
I tuck a leg under my thigh and turn towards him, trying to figure out why anyone would want him to shut up. ‘Do you know the film Carousel?’
‘The old Rodgers and Hammerstein musical from before The Sound of Music? The one that “You’ll Never Walk Alone” comes from and no one knows that?’
I’m smiling again as I nod. ‘It’s one of my favourite films.’
He screws his face up. ‘It’s about a dead guy who hits his wife and then gets a chance to go back to earth and make amends so he hits his daughter instead.’
‘It’s about a man who died before he could bring himself to tell his wife that he loved her because he thought she deserved better than him, when all she really wanted was for him