Our Stop(4)

The photo was a close-up of that morning’s paper, specifically the Missed Connections section – the bit where Londoners wrote in about their commute crush and left hints about their identity in the hopes of landing a date with a stranger they’d seen on the bus or tube. Nadia and Emma were obsessed with Missed Connections. It was a mix of horror and awe – the same kind of compulsion that drove their love of reality TV.

The mating rituals of the sexes were a constant source of fascination for them both. Before she got the restaurant review column – a superb job for any best friend to have, since Nadia was frequently her plus-one – Emma used to be the dating columnist at one of the weekly women’s mags, but most of her material was crowd-sourced from after-work drinks with Nadia and sometimes Nadia’s work best friend, Gaby.

Romance and lust and sex and relationships were of endless interest for them all, and ever since they’d known each other, bad dates were almost worth it in order to have an outrageous story to share the next day. They’d had four-fingers-in-his-bum guy, and the divorced chap who’d disclosed on their first date that his wife had left him because he ‘couldn’t satisfy her – you know, sexually’. There’d been ‘Actually-I’m-in-an-open-marriage-my-wife-just-doesn’t-know-it’ man, and also the one who picked at the eczema behind his ear and proceeded to eat it in between mouthfuls of his pint.

Emma once accidentally had three dates with a man Gaby had previously dated – Gaby had dumped him because he refused to wear a condom, and Emma found that out only after she’d dumped him for … refusing to wear a condom. For some reason all three of them had dated more than a handful of men called James, who ended up being referred to by number: James One, James Six, James Nine. The most memorable bloke was Period Pete, a friend of a friend who liked performing oral sex on menstruating women, and who the three collectively decided must have an undiagnosed iron deficiency.

Nadia, Gaby and Emma had talked about them all, trying to understand the puzzle of men-kind. Well, except for the one who said he’d be too busy to have a girlfriend ‘for the next five years, at least’, who Nadia had simply never texted back again. He was a riddle not worth trying to solve. She didn’t want a man she had to teach kindness to.

Nadia wondered if it would change if any of them ever got married – if they’d stop telling each other everything about their sex and love lives. She hoped not. She hoped that even in marriage or after fifty years with her hypothetical guy that there would still be romance and mystery and tension that she’d want to gossip over with her girlfriends. She’d heard on an Esther Perel podcast that that was important. For a woman who historically hadn’t been very good at it, Nadia spent a lot of time researching love.

The image Emma had photographed cleared into vision and Nadia saw that it said:

To the devastatingly cute blonde girl on the Northern line with the black designer handbag and coffee stains on her dress – you get on at Angel, on the 7.30, always at the end nearest the escalator, and always in a hurry. I’m the guy who’s standing near the doors of your carriage, hoping today’s a day you haven’t overslept. Drink some time?

Nadia stopped walking, causing a woman behind her to side-step and mutter, ‘Oh, for god’s sake.’

She reread the note.

The devastatingly cute blonde girl on the Northern line with the black designer handbag and coffee stains on her dress. She spun around to look back at the train she’d just disembarked. It had already left. She dropped her hand to run a finger over the brown mark on her dress. She looked at her handbag. She WhatsApped Emma back.

!!!!!!!!! she typed with one hand.

And then, Um … I mean, lol but maybe?!

After a beat she thought better of it: I mean, the chances are slim, right?

She mulled it over some more. She and Emma weren’t even sure that Missed Connections was real. It made her initial reaction seem increasingly off the mark. Nadia and Emma didn’t care one way or the other – if it was real or made up by the weekly intern at the paper as a creative writing exercise – it was the fantasy of a stranger searching for somebody they felt a fleeting connection to that was fun. It was like Savage Garden knowing they loved you before they met you.

It was romantic, in a you’re-a-blank-canvas-I-can-project-my-hopes-and-dreams-on sort of way.

In a fantasies-don’t-have-problems-so-this-is-better-than- real-life way.

An our-love-will-be-different way.

Missed Connections felt full of more romance than messing around on Bumble did. Although, any time either of them doubted that sort of love existed, the other would bring up Tim, Emma’s brother. He’d gone out to Chicago for a couple of weeks for work and used a dating app to meet a local who could show him around, maybe even partake in a fling. Through that app Tim had met Deena, and legend had it that when Deena went to the loo Tim pulled out his phone, deleted the app, and within three months had transferred out there to live with her. They’d got married that spring. Miracles do happen, Tim had said in his speech. I searched the whole world for you, and there you were, waiting for me in downtown Chicago, in a restaurant window seat.

Emma texted: Question: are you sporting a coffee stain this morning, and did you get the 7.30? It’s Monday, so I presume yes.

Nadia replied with a snap of her outfit from above – the splodge of butter-laden coffee clearly visible – very obviously on her way to work.