Free Things to Make and Mend by Ruth Thomas Page B

along the Embankment.They crossed trafficky roads. They walked beneath avenues of autumn trees. They sat on a green curlicued bench beside the Thames before walking across to Trafalgar Square to stare up at Nelson’s Column and three pigeons sitting on his three-cornered hat.
    ‘Did Nelson fight the French?’ Sally shouted.
    ‘Yes. Don’t you know anything?’ Colin replied, before abruptly hoisting himself up on to the plinth of one of the lions, placing his left foot at the base of its tail and pulling himself on to its back.
    ‘Colin!’ Sally screeched, feigning delight.
    Colin didn’t reply. He leaned back against the lion, put his hands beneath his head and closed his eyes.
    ‘Does your friend know anything?’ he asked into the wind.
    ‘Who? Rowena? Know anything about what?’
    ‘About life. About history. About the battle of Trafalgar.’
    ‘No more than me.’
    ‘Does she know what Nelson said before he died?’
    ‘Don’t think so.’
    ‘Kiss me, Hardy.’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘Or was it Kismet?’
    ‘Sorry?’
    ‘What’s your school on about, then? What do you all pay your fees for?’
    ‘I don’t know!’
    You are wonderful, she thought, gazing up at him. You are wonderful and funny and you have such long eyelashes.
    Colin lay there for a full five minutes, his eyes closed, while the wind blew down the back of Sally’s neck. She waited, looking around – at the pigeons again, across to Big Ben in the distance, up at the National Gallery and the steps and the tourists taking photographs.
    ‘Shall we go and get a coffee, then?’ Colin asked suddenly from his vantage above her. And he sat up, slid down from the lion, jumped off the plinth and took her hand in his. Sally’s heart sprang like a frog.
    ‘I know a place near here,’ Colin said, and without speaking further they walked across the square, over the road and down the steps into St-Martin-in-the-Fields. They sat in the crypt, drinking coffee. Sally peered around at the headstones mortared into the walls. There was a leaflet on the table informing them of the fact that a band (‘The Cryptics’) would be playing there at 7.30 on Saturday evening.
    ‘Could be cool.’
    ‘Yeah.’
    She was not sure if it was quite normal to drink coffee in a crypt but she approved of anything she did with Colin. And nothing was normal now, in any case. She, Sally Tuttle, who occasionally still sported a plait, was going out with a twenty- one-year -old man! And when he spoke to her, when he kissed her, it was thrilling but not normal.
    *
    When they had finished their coffee they walked up Charing Cross Road and looked at the bookshops. They went into a little shop and bought a paperback on the Metaphysical poets. Then they queued for ages in Foyles to buy another very small book for Colin, on marketing strategies.
    ‘How stupid,’ Sally said, about the queuing system.
    ‘It’s a time-honoured tradition in Foyles,’ Colin retorted. ‘Queuing. You wouldn’t last a second in Russia.’
    ‘Wouldn’t I? Why not?’
    ‘Haven’t you heard of the bread queues? Haven’t you heard about the way they queue?’
    ‘No.’
    And he looked at her. Then he said, ‘Never mind. That’s whyI like you, honey. Sweet and innocent.’
    In the National Portrait Gallery they looked at the paintings for a while – Beatrix Potter, Henry VIII, the Queen, and then got the lift down to the shop. They peered together at the postcards and the cases of coloured slides, Colin’s hand sliding lower and lower down Sally’s back. She didn’t know how to respond to this hand, so she ignored it; she stood, wooden as a figurehead. Last time I came here, she thought, I was with Mum and Dad.
    The women behind the till were discussing lunch.
    ‘That café on the corner does nice rolls,’ one of them was saying, into the echoing vaults. ‘And what are them things? Spinaca-something. Spinacafrittas?’
    ‘Mm-hmm.’
    ‘Maybe when you go for your lunch break you could pop up