Charlotte Street by Danny Wallace

Author:Danny Wallace [Wallace, Danny]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction, C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9780062190567
Publisher: Charnwood
Published: 2012-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

Or ‘Southeast City Window’

I think there’s something nice about not knowing. There’s plenty of stuff I don’t know. And plenty of stuff I do that I’d rather I didn’t. But not knowing – and not knowing you don’t know – is something else. It frees up the mind. It means you can project.

That’s what I’d been doing with The Girl, of course. This projecting. Finding meaning where perhaps there was none, basing it all on so little: a whip-quick half-smile on a dark night on Charlotte Street. But that was better than reality. Because this, right now, sitting in stony silence outside the café down the road with Sarah, her fiddling with a spoon, me waiting for our coffees to arrive: this was reality.

The guys had fallen into silence, too, when Sarah had walked into the shop. They’d exchanged pleasantries, Dev had given her a hug, but they knew this wasn’t a social visit. This was an anti-social visit.

‘So …’ she said, and then Pamela was upon us, splashing the coffees down next to a silver pot in which a thousand packets of sugar were suffocating each other for space.

‘Do you think we could get some extra sugar?’ I said, deadpan, and Sarah smiled.

‘Yes,’ said Pamela. ‘No friend today?’

Dev would be thrilled. The long game was working!

‘No, he’s actually busy with some humanitarian work right now,’ I said.

I made a mental note to tell him he was now a humanitarian. He’d pretended to be harder things in the past. A priest. A commercial airline pilot. An Indian prince. Pamela shrugged and walked off.

‘Dev’s latest crush?’ said Sarah, when Pamela was out of earshot.

‘Pamela.’

‘He likes girls in uniform.’

‘Is a pinny a uniform?’

Inside the café, Pamela’s boss was shouting at her. We paused for a microsecond, then continued nonplussed.

‘Remember the time he was after that other girl?’

‘You’re going to have to be more specific than that,’ I said, raising my eyebrows. ‘Much more specific.’

I guess talking about Dev was easier than talking about us, but then so was talking about anything else, including the rise of national socialism, or swingball.

‘You know the one,’ she said, pointing her spoon at me. ‘The one he said was The One.’

Oh. Well, that was different. There’d only ever been one The One. They’d met at an indie night at the Garage on Highbury Corner, when we could still go to indie nights at the Garage without looking like we were someone’s dad waiting to pick them up. Dev had wooed her, pined for her, missed her when she wasn’t around, picked her dry cleaning up for her, dropped her dry cleaning off for her, learned to cook her favourite dish in case she ever popped round, though she never would, and then after three weeks it turned out she still didn’t even know his surname. He was crushed. I think that’s why he had the business cards printed.

Sarah smiled as she remembered something.

‘I always remember the night after, he said—’

‘Yes. That was amazing. “You can say what you like about love, but you can’t say it’s good”.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.