The Orange Room by Rosie Price

Author:Rosie Price [Price, Rosie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781529926545
Publisher: Penguin Random House UK
Published: 2024-07-04T00:00:00+00:00

21

A work trip, Dominic had said, and this was almost entirely true. Meetings and seminars with contractors, suppliers, lecture theatres with purple lighting and talks on liquid granite and self-heating concrete. Coffee, biscuits wrapped in pairs. Dominic, lately, had been discovering that his body was no longer built for London, not even now, at the very tail end of the summer. He could not stand the stickiness of the heat in his armpits, the density of the air, the conviction, every time he descended an escalator onto the Northern Line, that he would die down here, by either suffocation or obliteration. Squashed or blasted.

There was a time, years ago, when he had loved it here. A time when he used to drive that van with missing plates down Effra Road, when he didn’t ask about where the copper had come from for this job or the next, when he was taught how to roof by an uncle who also knew how to play the spoons and didn’t know how old he was but would tell Dominic, either way, that he was sure he was going to hell when he died. The uncle, he’d kept tobacco in a tin box in his jacket and he’d been the one to pick Dominic up from hospital, the night he’d been punched in the eye. On the bus home he’d told Dominic, and Dominic had not forgotten, that once he had a family, he’d be better off out of the city. That was before he’d met Josephine at the bar at The Queen’s Head. That summer had been hot. She’d put a can of cold Heineken to her forehead and the beer had exploded all over her face; Dominic cried laughing. They took the 345 and he promised that next time it would be a car and not a bus, and she’d told him he’d better keep his promise.

Dominic rolled over. Two nights he’d been here, more sleepless than ever. He was staying in a hotel in Docklands and in the evenings he’d catch a lungful of the polluted air that came up off the surface of the river water, luminescing. He waited until the third day – how times had changed, that three days was all he could stomach in the city – before he made the journey across town. He took the tube with his suitcase. Northern Line, Bank, King’s Cross, coming up for air. He remembered Granary Square, more developed now than it was then, water fountains shooting chlorine jets across the cobbles, children screaming.

It was Rhianne who had taken him to the restaurant opposite. They’d sat and had brunch, her hair shorter back then, speaking twice as fast as Dominic about all the projects she was working on, about her supervisor, Alexander, he’s incredible, she told him, you’d love him, she said, the way his mind works, it’s like – here she held out her hands, wide, like she was holding an enormous brain. She’d lost weight and he’d ordered more courses than they could possibly eat, then had to ask for the leftovers to be boxed up.

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