Free Shake Off by Mischa Hiller

concealers of microphones or cameras. Every person you meet could either be an agent wanting to get close or a possible recruit to the cause. Every woman that talks to you wants to trap you with the promise of sex. Every postcard has a hidden meaning. Everybody behind you could be following you, and it is your job to shake them off.

Fourteen
    W hen I got back to Tufnell Park I lay down. I must have fallen asleep as I was woken by knocking, and the light in the room had changed. Helen was at the door.
    “Hello.” She waved at me by holding up her hand and wiggling her fingers. “I want to repay you for what you did yesterday.” In my dopey state I thought she wanted to give me money; perhaps some English etiquette I was unsure of. I stood in my bare feet and ran my hand through my tangled hair. She looked different, like she had a little make-up on. Not much, but enough to make a difference. “I’d like to take you out to dinner,” she said. I’d never been asked out to dinner before.
    “You don’t have to pay me back,” I said.
    She shrugged and pushed back her hair.
    “OK then. Let’s just go to dinner. We can go Dutch, if you like.”
    I was trying to remember what going Dutch meant, and for some reason I looked behind me into my room, as if something there could rescue me from making a decision.
    “Do you have a girl in there?” she asked, trying to look past me.
    I smiled and shook my head.
    “Then maybe you have better plans for tonight?”
    My plans consisted of heating up a ready-made meal of meat and vegetables and gravy. I was going to eat it from the plastic container it came in so I’d only have a fork to wash up.
    “I have no plans,” I said. “Give me fifteen minutes to get dressed.”
     
    We went around the corner to a Chinese restaurant on the high street. She was telling me how good it was and asking if I had been before. She looked great, in simple linen trousers and a shirt. They were understated but looked expensive. Her hair was pinned back for a change, and she had little dangly earrings on, like silver peas. She still had the enormous stainless-steel man’s watch on, and for some reason I found it reassuring. I chose a table in the corner and sat down with my back to the wall, where I could see the door. I worried about being on a date initiated by a woman.
    “So tell me how you learned to open doors like that,” she said.
    I’d forgotten to concoct a story to explain the lock-picking, so I smiled stupidly in order to buy time to think. “It’s just something I picked up,” I said.
    “Picked up where? Prison?”
    I told myself that these were innocent questions.
    “Relax,” she said. “You look like a deer caught in headlights.”
    I sat back in my chair and tried to smile. My knee was springing up and down under the table in a rapid displacement of nervous energy. A waiter approached.
    “Perhaps we need a drink,” she said.
    “I don’t drink alcohol,” I told her, wishing I did.
    “Then we’ll drink green tea,” she said. “It has the same effect.” We ordered, and while we waited for our food we sipped our pale tea.
    “I’ve sent him back to his wife,” she said. I kept a blank face, even though I knew who she was referring to. “You know, my pretend boyfriend?”
    “It’s none of my business,” I said, glad at least that the subject had been changed.
    “Well, you have become involved in a way, and I feel I owe you an explanation.”
    She didn’t owe me an explanation but I understand that sometimes women have to talk through their problems—they don’t want a solution necessarily, just someone to listen. She told me that she was a postgraduate anthropology student and that he was her supervisor and that they naturally spent a lot of time together because of her work on her PhD.
    “We attended the same field trip and things got out of hand.” I didn’t want to hear this but I let her carry on. “He told me I made him feel complete,” she said,