Free The Calling by Neil Cross

ourselves.’
    ‘Really? How long have you known him?’
    ‘Since the Big Bang.’
    It was supposed to sound funny, but it came out sad. She watched the pigeons for a while. Then she said, ‘We met at university.’
    ‘Same course?’
    ‘No. I was doing law, obviously. He was postgrad in English.’
    She tucked her chin into the warmth of her coat and smiled to think of it, just as she sometimes did when flicking through old photographs.
    ‘We only met because we were both doing this elective course in comparative religion. I sat next to him in this tiny little lecture theatre. Everybody there already knew each other except me and John. I knew him by reputation.’
    ‘And what reputation was that?’
    ‘He’s very tall,’ she said, self-conscious as a schoolgirl. ‘Very strong. Very handsome. And very, very intense.’
    She laughed out loud, delighted and liberated to be talking about it. ‘And it was like, all the girls fancied him and he didn’t even notice them, y’know? And the more he didn’t notice them, the more they fancied him. He used to make girls do the stupidest things around him, really clever, brilliant young women who should have known better, behaving like idiots to get his attention. And he never noticed.’
    ‘Everybody notices.’
    ‘Swear to God. It wasn’t even arrogance. It was a kind of . . . myopia.’
    ‘And you liked that?’
    ‘I thought it was endearing.’
    ‘Not, like, a challenge?’
    ‘God, no.’
    This time, they both laughed.
    Mark said, ‘So how did you . . . y’know. Get together?’
    She smoked the roll-up to its last quarter-inch, then squeezed it between her fingernails.
    ‘There wasn’t like a moment ,’ she said. ‘We met in that lecture and kind of drifted out for a coffee afterwards. Neither of us asked the other. Or that’s how I remember it. We just sat in the café and chatted. I told him everything there was to tell about myself – which at the time wasn’t all that much.’
    ‘How old were you?’
    ‘Twenty? So girls’ school, sixth form, gap year, university. It felt like a lot of life experience at the time. So I tell him this, all about myself. Then I ask him about himself and he tells me about books. As if he’s made up of all these books he’s read, or was going to read. And later on, he walks me home. I didn’t question it for a minute. And I’ll tell you one thing about John: if you’re a twenty-year-old girl and you’re not that knowledgeable in the ways of the world and you live in a dodgy area, walking home with him, you never felt so safe. And he stops outside my door and says, This is you, then? And I say, This is me . And I’m thinking, Kiss me you arsehole, kiss me or I’m going to die on the spot .’
    ‘And did he?’
    ‘No. He just slouches and gives me this nod – he’s got this shaggy-dog nod he does sometimes. Then he digs his hands in his pockets and walks off.’
    ‘Well played, that man.’
    ‘Except it wasn’t,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t a tactic. I swear! It was just him. That’s who he was. Is. Whatever.’
    And then a melancholy descended on her – as it always did when she thought of that boy and that girl. The thought of John Luther, twenty-two, slouching off without kissing her. And the lightness in her heart that night; how she couldn’t sleep and couldn’t believe herself: serious, level-headed, hard-working Zoe, who’d slept with two men in her entire life, one long-term school boyfriend, as a kind of parting gift, and one slightly older man she met on her gap year.
    It wasn’t in her nature to lie in bed wondering what a boy might be doing right now , right this second. But she spent the whole night like that.
    And she spent the next few days pretending she wasn’t trying to manufacture ways to bump into him in the corridor, the English department, the refectory.
    Sprawled on that park bench, looking at the pigeons, Mark said, ‘Are you okay?’
    ‘Yeah,’ said Zoe. ‘Sorry. Miles