The Most Difficult Thing. Charlotte Philby

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       CHAPTER 4

       Anna

      In those early London days, the office was a bus ride from the flat Meg and I shared, a boxy two-bed above a kebab shop on Camden High Street. It was Meg’s cousin’s flat really. Although she had not lived there for months, Lucy’s presence was etched across the living room in cheap, colourful wall-hangings from her travels in Asia; ineffectual attempts to distract from the grubby off-white walls and the draught which rattled in from the road below.

      To the outside world, it was a dive. To me, it was home. Mine and Meg’s.

      It was a Friday night when Meg announced that Lucy had decided to stay on in Sydney with her boyfriend, leaving the flat in Meg’s care. The very same night that Harry landed back in our lives, like a bomb.

      The two events, unconnected on the surface, squeezed me in from either side.

      We were sharing a bottle of wine – my treat, courtesy of my new job – in the pub on Arlington Road, around the corner from Meg’s flat. As was her style, the offer for me to move in was presented not so much as a proposition but as a fait accompli.

      ‘How could you say no?’ She paused halfway through pouring my glass. ‘Even if the prospect of living with me isn’t enough on its own, which it obviously should be, then just think how much you’ll be saving on travel from your aunt’s house, presuming that’s where you were planning on staying … From the sound of it, your dad’s not going to be stationed back in the UK any time soon. I know it’s a tiny flat and it’s a shithole but it’s cheap – and you get to live with me!’

      The pub doors swung open, a bluster of wind edging through the heavy velvet curtain.

      ‘Look, Lucy isn’t charging me full whack. If we split the bills, you’d be doing me a favour, and I want you to live with me … Fuck sake, man, say yes?’

      Meg had this way of making me feel like I was the most important person in the world. I thought of my parents, the nights I had cried myself to sleep after it happened, desperate for one of them to hear my heart tearing above the sound of their own; for them to come to me and tell me it was not my fault. For a split second, my brother’s face flashed in front of me, but the spectre disappeared at the sound of Meg’s voice.

      ‘Shit, are you crying?’ She leaned across the table and took my arm. ‘I’m not that bad!’

      I pressed my sleeve briefly at the corner of my eyes, laughing, and when I looked up again, my skin bristled like a fox catching the first scent of the hounds. Harry: the man who would be the death of me.

      It was the first time I had seen him since that night in the pub in the shadow of Canary Wharf, though my eyes had sought him out at the office the following day, self-consciously pulling at the sleeves of the jumper I had borrowed from Meg – deep red with a slight scratchiness to the wool. I even stayed late, making excuses to move around the office, in the hope that I might spot him; propelled by a naive notion that he might be looking for me, too.

      Rather than giving up, something in me accepted his absence as a challenge. That evening after work, my legs moved more briskly than usual as I made my way back from Guildford station, energised by the thought of him. It was just past eight by the time I closed the front door and already the house was swallowed by darkness, a low light emanating from the living room.

      I walked purposefully across the hall so that they would hear my steps momentarily hovering outside the room, giving my mother the chance to call out, to ask if I had had a good day. But the door remained shut, the only sound the canned laughter clattering out from the television.

      Upstairs, at the end of the corridor I flicked on the lamp beside my bed, the featureless room coming into stark focus. The single bed, neatly made, a single chest of drawers uncluttered by anything other than a small make-up bag and a stick of deodorant, which my mother had pointedly removed from the bathroom and placed on my bed on my first day home, without a word. The spectacle of my return flaunted in our shared spaces was apparently too much for my father to bear.

      By the bed there was the computer I had been given my first week at Sussex, as part of my grant. Pressing the door closed, I turned it on, my fingers trembling as I typed ‘Harry Dwyer’ into the search engine, holding my breath as a photo appeared on the screen. The first image might have been a disappointment if I had not been so desperate for any trace of him.

      It was taken from a news conference: Harry in the crowd amidst a small throng of reporters. The image was poor quality, Harry’s face distracted by a scene just out of shot.

      After a moment, I pressed the arrow on the screen and another, less recent, photo appeared of Harry having just scooped the Young Journalist of the Year prize for a piece on internal wranglings at Number 10. He was twenty-three at the time, which made him nine years older than me. For a moment I thought of my own path: the year spent working at the chain bakery in town after leaving school with an unblemished if unremarkable academic record; fending off awkward advances from Tristan, the general manager, who snorted when he laughed, and stood too close behind me at the counter, making comments about the position of my hairnet by way of exerting his power.

      The three years at university, where my greatest single achievement had been meeting Meg and David and having, for the first time in my life, found both friendship and the space to breathe, space to become the person I was beyond the frameworks by which others interpret and define us. The fact that Sussex had accepted me onto an English and media degree without asking for an interview had not so much given me confidence in my ability as it had confirmed to me that I would get by better in life if people weren’t given too much information. On paper, the surface facts of my life – childhood in Surrey where my father ran a local business; my mother, otherwise a stay-at-home wife, lending a hand – were acceptable: I was acceptable. Delve any further, and … I inhaled hard, not allowing my mind to slip back to Thomas. Look forward, I reminded myself, focusing on Harry’s face, absorbing his successes, allowing myself to live vicariously through them, even if just for a moment.

      Admittedly, it was a long way from the life I was living now. If you were to line up our achievements side by side, and draw lines between them – a habit I found impossible to break – you would notice a distinct distance between where I was now – commuting four hours a day to transcribe other people’s interviews and make endless cups of tea – and where Harry had been at the same age. But a lot could change in a year; I was dependent on that possibility. Though of course back then I couldn’t have known quite how much.

      There was a stirring on the stairs, and instinctively I sat upright, pressing open a new tab on my web browser. Though I need not have bothered; as always I heard the footsteps speed up as they passed my door, despite my father’s attempts to make his feet lighter in the hope that I wouldn’t notice him, urged forward by his terror of being made to look me in the eye.

      Refusing to give my father another thought, I returned to the previous tab. With another click of the mouse, I was met by a brief journalistic profile of Harry and his time as a reporter at the paper, alongside the same byline photo that had first caught my eye on the front page that morning in the smoking room. And then, with another simple click, there it was, on the second page of Google, a brief mention in the media pages of a rival paper:

       Harry Dwyer was unceremoniously sacked today, just hours after his most recent scoop. The paper’s editor, Eddy Monkton, is believed to have seen СКАЧАТЬ