He’s American, still young, likes to go for a drink with his students, likes to be their friend.
But Neda is a wall.
“No, sir.”
It’s the second term of her second year.
BA Social Anthropology at the LSE.
She’s a straight-A student, mostly.
He plays to the room.
“So it’s just me?”
A ripple of amusement, but from Neda, no.
He returns to the board.
“Maybe a full night’s rest is in order? A little less partying with the boys?”
He reminds her of Dean.
“I don’t party with boys.”
Now the laughter is on her: of the students in her course, she’s the least likely to party with anyone at all.
* * *
—
Yeah, she’d always dreamed of living abroad, of having an apartment of her own, a rich and stimulating inner life, tangled love affairs, true friends to whom she could confess. Something to write home about. A home to write home to in the end.
Not this.
* * *
—
She slips out of the hall, head down, hair over her face, books barricading her chest.
She doesn’t even know why she’s still there.
She imagines, when the time comes, she’ll abandon it.
Just walk out the door the day before her exams and never return.
It’s not like it matters.
It’s not like the money matters.
* * *
—
Each day, at HSBC, she checks her account to see if it’s still there.
It’s always still there. One hundred thousand pounds.
Whatever she does: ?99,878 becomes ?100,000; ?96,300 becomes ?100,000.
Whatever she does, however much she spends, there it is, topped up with remorseless precision.
As if he were taunting her.
She taunted him back once by making a twenty-thousand-pound donation to a homeless charity.
Her balance returned to one hundred thousand pounds the next day.
Now she taunts him by barely spending at all.
* * *
—
She leaves the campus and walks up Southampton Row to the Polish vodka bar behind Holborn. It’s slow at lunch; the suits like to come and get wasted in the evening after work. She takes her usual seat, back against the wall, watching the door. Orders ?led?, a half pint of ?ywiec, a shot of Chopin. Her one indulgence. The same thing every day. She eats in mechanical silence, sips her beer, saves the vodka for the end. She never orders more. To the outsider looking in, it’s an eccentric’s discipline.
* * *
—
Such is this habit, the owner has learned to bring her bill as she’s nursing the vodka. He does it today, hands it over with his unobtrusive, sympathetic smile.
But today she does something unexpected.
Orders another Chopin.
His face betrays mild surprise.
“Celebrating?” he says.
“Yes,” she replies. “It’s an anniversary.”
* * *
—
She arrived in London in April 2004, hurled from the wreckage of her Delhi life, parachuting into this gilded nothingness. The air smelled of nothingness. It would have been comical, if it wasn’t built on death.
* * *
—
She arrived in April 2004, but today is February 24—two years to the day since her life irrevocably changed. In these two years, she has managed, more or less, to hold things together, to maintain the veneer of a respectable, steady life. She has done this through a form of self-abnegation—not merely financial, spiritual too. But today that goes out the window. Today, February 24, is the day for nasha, oblivion through intoxication.
* * *
—
He brings her shot. Without touching it, she looks up.
“I’d like two more.”
The liquor is in her blood.
His hesitation, his curiosity, even his concern, are met by the cool desolation of her gaze.
And he nods. He understands something in this moment.
It is as clear as someone crying in church.
* * *
—
When the shots are brought, she slides them ceremoniously to the empty places at her table, to her left and to her right.
She lifts her glass and says a silent prayer.
Communing with her ghosts.
* * *
—
It’s one thirty in the afternoon. A gloomy day, a day of umbrellas and headlights. Clouds obscure the building tops. Rain swirls like a dancing kite. She leaves a fifty on the table, steps outside. At the ATM she withdraws four hundred more.
* * *
—
It’s a short walk to the Princess Louise. She slips down the side, pulls up a stool in one of the ornate wooden cubicles facing the bar, orders a pint of Alpine, leans her shoulder against the stained glass. No one looks at her. No one talks to her. And if they did, if they asked her what she was reading, she would show them a printout of Dean’s latest article, “Remembering the Forgotten: The Lonely Deaths of Five Pavement Dwellers and the Lives They Left Behind,” and conversation would stop.