Free Things to Make and Mend by Ruth Thomas Page A

pondered this. She hardly knew Colin, really, apart from the fact that he was nearly twenty-two and worked in advertising. But at London Zoo she imagined them openly holding hands, chatting about their lives, wandering along the paths in the cool greenness. Happily pointing out the gazelles and parakeets and laughing at the stick insects. They could really get to know each other there. He would see that she was funny but also serious: he would comprehend the intricacies of her mind. And London Zoo did seem like a lover-ish place to go; sweetly poignant. It was like the song her parents played on their record player: an old record on their new stereo.
    ‘Something tells me it’s all happening at the zoo – I do believe it, I do believe it’s true …’
    *
    On their way to the station, she noticed a man practising yoga. He was standing on a grass embankment at the side of the road, his long arms outstretched.
    ‘Doesn’t he look funny?’ she said to Colin.
    ‘Probably a student.’
    ‘So? What’s wrong with that? I’m a student.’
    ‘No, you’re not. You’re a schoolgirl.’
    She didn’t reply. Flirting, sophistication, maturity, did not come easily. She worried about every sentence that came out of her mouth, in case it meant he fell out of love with her. Their relationship, twenty-one days old that Friday, was suspended on the finest, surrealist thread. How was it ever going to work? Sally looked at her watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock; she should have been in the school library with Rowena, revising. But there was a big romantic sun in the sky. There were pigeons and drifts of orange leaves at their feet.
    ‘Do you think that yoga man’s discovering his inner self?’ she said, hoping she looked very pretty as she spoke. She pushed her right hand through her long brown hair, inadvertently disturbing several kirby grips.
    Colin smiled and walked ahead of her to the pedestrian crossing. Sally watched him go, this man she was in love with. She regarded his hair and his jacket and the way he walked. She thought of his kisses, metallic-tasting and intoxicating. But why does he love me? Does he think I’m pretty? Does he like my mind? Heart thumping, she watched as Colin began to cross the road. And she lagged behind for a moment. ‘I will give him some space,’ she thought. ‘I will be mysterious.’ It was childish, to go rushing after him all the time. So, loitering on the pavement, she turned to watch the yoga man again; to have her own fascinating thing to observe.
    But the yoga man had stopped. He was standing there frowning .
    ‘This is not a public performance,’ he said. ‘I am not a performing seal.’ He glared at her with peevish blue eyes and she felt, somehow, that he knew her secret.
    *
    By the time they made it to Victoria station she was as nervous as a rabbit. And Colin was in a funny mood. He had that inscrutable air about him, looking around the crowds with his vacant, angelic expression. They walked out of the station into a high wind which blew paper bags around their heads.
    ‘I hate the wind,’ Sally said, her voice raised.
    ‘Why?’ Colin shouted back. ‘It’s exciting! Beautiful. Like you!’
    Did he say that? She thought she heard him say that. He had a clear, high voice, some of his vowel sounds occasionally betraying an exciting Northern origin. Speaking to him Sally used to try taming her own twanging, Southern vowels, but it never lasted. Like Miss Button, Colin had made a few remarks about her accent. He had once said it was a ‘gutbucket’ accent, and she didn’t even know what he meant. Unlike Miss Button, though, she hoped that Colin thought of her accent with tenderness.
    Rowena’s presence, that day in 1979, would have been a comfort, a buffer, like those nets of corks that people sling over the sides of barges to stop them crashing into the riverbank. Unmoored, though, precarious, they spent the morning floating around – Covent Garden, the Strand,