Perfect Day

One

    In the end, this is a love story.

    The first thing Alexander says to Kate is ‘American Hot’.
    The first thing he notices is her fingernails. She’s standing behind him, taking his order, and as he turns his head, his eyes are level with her hands. The nails are small and round. Each is painted with a different sparkly shade. They are the fingernails of a child secretly sampling exotic little pots of paint on a mother’s dressing table.
    ‘Anything to start?’ she asks him.
    Six or seven little plastic butterflies hold dark hair away from her face. Her skin is white in the blue neon light of the sign on the window. There is a slight gleam of sweat on her forehead. She waits for him to say something, and when he doesn’t, she wipes the back of her hand across her face, inadvertently dislodging two of the plastic butterflies which ping ungracefully to the floor.
    ‘Oh bugger.’ She bends to retrieve them.
    Her hair is so close to his face that he can smell that she has washed it this morning in coconut shampoo.
    ‘A green salad?’ He feels he has to offer something in exchange for her trouble.
    Later, he will wonder whether he would always have remembered the fleeting encounter if he had not chanced upon her again. Would his memory have retained those fingernails, or the sun tan-lotion smell of her hair, or would it have discarded the information as rapidly as the details of his colleagues’ choice of pizza and the number of times he refills his glass with the house red attempting to numb out the prickly restlessness that has been bothering him all morning?
    There is an end of term feeling at the school even though it’s only midday Thursday. The students have just finished their exams and a bunch of them are celebrating outside the pub across the road. All the teachers are seated at a large round table in the usual pizzeria. The get-together is in honour of Mel and Joe, a recent couple, who are leaving tonight for jobs on a remote Indonesian island.
    Alexander watches their faces, elated with love, cheap Chianti and the prospect of travel. His hand slips inside his jacket and touches his own brand new passport there. The postman delivered it just as he was leaving home this morning. On the train in, Alexander tore open the envelope, took it out and stared at the pristine pages with a creeping feeling of misery.
    The smart middle-aged woman who always sits opposite him seemed to sense his distress and leaned forward conspiratorially.
    ‘They’re not as nice as the old blue ones, are they? There was something special about travelling with a British passport, wasn’t there?’
    He gave her a wan smile, unwilling to explain that it was not the imperial indigo leather he was missing, but the multicoloured jumble of visas and entry stamps. His old passport was his diary, each stamp conjuring a memory of the smell of a foreign airport or the exhilaration of a new beginning.

    * * *

    He sees that his pizza has arrived without him noticing. He looks round, but whoever brought it has disappeared behind the stainless steel shelving unit with its glass bowls of chopped mushroom, green pepper and onion. Everyone else at the big round table is eating. He picks up a knife and cuts his disc of pizza into eight wedges, then pulls a section away, holding it carefully just above his mouth to catch the elastic drips of mozzarella. The tomato sauce beneath the skin of cheese is hotter than he expects. It scorches the roof of his mouth and a soft blister begins to form. He takes a gulp of wine and a kind of mouldy blackberryness mingles with the taste of his own flesh. The pizza is now just a combination of wetness, crunch and moments of chilli heat.
    Vivienne, the assistant director of studies, scrapes back her chair and proposes a toast to Mel and Joe.
    ’…and we’re all envious, but we wish you a safe journey. Have a fantastic time!’
    ‘Bon voyage!’
    A couple of people clap. Malcolm calls out, in his actor’s voice, ‘Speech!’
    Then there’s a moment of almost-embarrassed silence while everyone makes up their mind what they’re going to do next.
    The teachers who have not been drinking each put a £10 note on the table and go back to the school to sort out their files and write their reports. The drinkers order more wine, and coffee.
    Alexander’s tongue worries at loose skin in the top of his mouth. He spoons soothing white foam from the top of a cappuccino.
    ‘Are you coming?’ Mel says to