‘But I’m … that’s why I’m worried. I don’t think that’s the sort of thing he’d do, at all. I’m worried he might mean it.’
‘He doesn’t mean it,’ said Phillip, handing back the phone.
‘He might mean it. He isn’t the type to … he’s not melodramatic at all.’
Phillip blinked. Again, he didn’t have to say anything. Why are you defending your ex? his face asked. Most people in his position would ask the same, she supposed. Michaela was even wondering it herself, and perhaps that was what James would want. So maybe it was true; maybe it was manipulative of him to be doing this. She wondered fleetingly what James looked like these days; whether he had put all the weight back on by now.
‘Well, do you want to call him?’ asked Phillip.
Michaela moistened her lips with her tongue. Her throat felt dry. Below, there was a gap in the music; then a thudding beat came in, louder than anything before, and there were faint whoops from the dance floor. She could see James in the doorway for a second, as she had left him in the doorway of the old flat, shoulders drooping, and head held between his big hands. Her feeling of guilt and relief as she walked away.
‘It’s fine,’ she said. ‘He’ll be fine, I’m sure.’
STEFFI BERMAN
Now that the underground was running through the night at weekends, Steffi’s commute home from the restaurant was easy. Tonight had been a raucous one, a party of twenty businessmen loudly and repeatedly toasting someone who seemingly went by the nickname Billy Bollocks. One of the diners had called her ‘darling’ too many times, and for a moment Steffi had entertained a bizarre fantasy: of taking the red mullet off his plate, the whole fish, lifting it from its bed of rice, and putting it down the back of his neck. The mental image was so strong that Steffi laughed out loud, as if she’d seen it in a film rather than dreaming it up. The would-be fish victim had taken this for some sort of flirtation, as men of this kind often did when she laughed, smiled, or looked at them. But they had tipped quite heavily, drunkenly – at La Chimère they let you keep individual tips – so she was in good spirits as she walked to the tube.
If anything, in fact, the journey home almost wasn’t going to be long enough, given the entertainment Steffi had lined up. For the past couple of months her spare minutes had been mopped up ruthlessly by a phone app called ‘Sheep Wars’ – created by one of James’s successors in the game-tech business, though she had no idea her flatmate had ever worked in that field. Sheep Wars was so addictive that it was difficult to remember a time when she hadn’t played it at every opportunity. You were a wolf and your mission was to eat as many sheep as you could; if you caught enough of them, you went on to the next level. In the early rounds the game was boringly easy; the sheep were so slow and stupid that a 4-year-old could capture them. Steffi had been annoyed with Emil, the colleague who’d recommended it to her: did he think girls couldn’t play games? Or that she specifically was useless, just because of that one time she slipped on a bit of pulped avocado and smashed all the glasses?
But as the stages of the game went by, your prospective prey became faster, and more cunning. They armed themselves with weapons; they built fortresses. Last night she’d played it until 3 a.m., as usual, and to her amazement the sheep, who normally just shuffled around like real sheep, had escaped from her by jumping into a sports car and driving off laughing. This was level seventy-four and she hadn’t yet worked out how to respond to the sheep’s new cunning. Nobody online seemed to know how many levels there were; you couldn’t find anyone who claimed to have finished it. There was a theory, in fact, that the invisible creator was perpetually adding to the game; was a mad genius who had them all indefinitely enslaved.
Sometimes, on the tube, she glanced across at other passengers hunched over their own phones, and wondered if they were on Sheep Wars, too – unwittingly part of a community, even as they all played the game alone. People always looked so serious, but you never knew what was in someone’s head. Steffi remembered once sitting next to a man who was studying his screen with one of the most intense expressions of concentration she’d ever seen. When she sneaked a look over his shoulder, it turned out he was watching a GIF in which someone had made Beyoncé appear to turn into a pizza. Watching the five-second film over and over and over again, like someone newly arrived on the planet, grasping fruitlessly for context. Quite often she thought that everyone except herself was insane. The thought was half-ironic – but only half.
On the escalator up to the street, Steffi’s gaze was still fixed on the little sheep as they danced around, taunting her. She knew that before too long she would work out how to ambush the car and finish this level. And then two contradictory things would happen. She would feel a little swell of satisfaction, followed almost immediately by disappointment that this was not a real-world achievement, something that anyone else alive would care about. Steffi was not a zombie gamer, an addict, in the truest sense. She was aware that there should be more substance to life than working as a waitress in a restaurant whose online reviews were struggling to match up to its pretensions, and then spending every other moment engaged in the hunting of imaginary animals. It just wasn’t clear how to get out of this loop.
As she came out onto Pentonville Road Steffi glanced at her phone. Slightly surprisingly at this time of night, there were two new notifications. One was from Emil, the line chef, asking the staff’s WhatsApp group if anyone wanted to ‘get a drink somewhere Euston or whervr’. The proposal was backed up by emojis depicting glasses of wine, beer and champagne, as well as a dolphin; Emil was a profligate emoji user and rarely stayed on-topic. The other message was a text, from her flatmate and landlord James. In the instant before she read it, she registered that it was unusually long; she couldn’t remember him ever writing more than a few words before. Even after the bad night, the crying night, he had only messaged to say, ‘I am very sorry about all that’. She hadn’t even replied; too awkward to know how.
She read the text, read twice through the words ‘end my life’. She stopped dead outside a kebab shop, where a huge skewer of meat was rotating in the window and a couple of customers waited at the counter.
‘What the fuck,’ said Steffi out loud, to the nearly empty street, ‘what the actual fuck.’
She touched the screen to call James. It was hard even to remember the last time she’d called someone, actually called them on the phone like in the Seventies or something. With Mum it was always Skype on a Sunday. She was in constant contact with friends, but it was all instant messaging. Even with her best three or four buddies back in Holland, one of them actually phoning would mean something seismic was happening.
But now something was, or at least could be. There was a brief pause as the call tried to connect, and then the same recorded message that Michaela had heard minutes earlier. There was no option to leave a voice message and Steffi experienced a guilty twinge of relief that she wouldn’t have to.
What now, though?
Where are you? she wrote. Unlike Emil, she preferred – even in her second language – to text in proper words and sentences. Your screen looked ugly otherwise.
She stood looking at the screen in case the messaging dots popped up, in case there was an immediate reply. Within thirty seconds she knew in her heart that there wouldn’t be one. Well, she hardly even knew James, really, did she. Other people must know him. Someone else would know what to do.
But no one else was heading home to James. There was no escaping that. If he had done something to himself in the flat, Steffi was going to be the one to find him. The knowledge flipped her guts. Although she was only seven minutes away