my mobile number in the condensation. I could have opened the tiny quarter-pane and yelled my name and address or something. I can think of any number of things I could and should have done, yet at the time none of them occurred to me because I simply couldn’t take my eyes off him.
For onlookers, it must have been an Oscar-worthy sixty-second silent movie. From now on, if anyone asks me if I’ve ever fallen in love at first sight, I shall say yes, for one glorious minute on 21 December 2008.
2009
* * *
New Year’s Resolutions
Just two resolutions this year, but two big, shiny, brilliant ones.
1) Find him, my boy from the bus stop.
2) Find my first proper job in magazines.
Damn. I wish I’d written them down in pencil, because I’d rub them out and switch them over. What I’d ideally like is to find the achingly cool magazine position first, and then run into bus boy in a coffee shop while holding something healthy in my hand for lunch, and he’d accidently knock it out of my clutches and then look up and say, ‘Oh. It’s you. Finally.’
And then we’d skip lunch and go for a walk around the park instead, because we’d have lost our appetites but found the love of our lives.
Anyway, that’s it. Wish me luck.
20 March
Laurie
‘Is that him? I definitely got a bus-ish vibe from him just now.’
I follow the direction of Sarah’s nod and sweep my eyes along the length of the busy Friday-night bar. It’s a habit we’ve fallen into every time we go anywhere; scanning faces and crowds for ‘bus boy’ as Sarah christened him when we compared Yuletide notes back in January. Her family festivities up in York sounded a much more raucous affair than my cosy, food-laden one in Birmingham, but we’d both returned to the reality of winter in London with the New Year blues. I threw my ‘love at first sight’ sob story into the pity pot and then immediately wished I hadn’t. It’s not that I don’t trust Sarah with my story; it’s more that from that second forth she has become even more obsessed with finding him again than I am. And I’m quietly going crazy over him.
‘Which one?’ I frown at the sea of people, mostly the backs of unfamiliar heads. She screws her nose up as she pauses to work out how to distinguish her guy for my scrutiny.
‘There, in the middle, next to the woman in the blue dress.’
I spot her more easily; her poker-straight curtain of white-blonde hair catches the light as she throws her head back and laughs up at the guy beside her.
He’s about the right height. His hair looks similar and there is a jolting familiarity to the line of his shoulders in his dark shirt. He could be anyone, but he could be bus boy. The more I look at him, the more sure I am that the search is over.
‘I don’t know,’ I say, holding my breath because he’s as close as we’ve come. I’ve described him so many times, Sarah probably knows what he looks like more than I do. I want to inch closer. In fact I think I have already started inching, but then Sarah’s hand on my arm stills me because he’s just bent his head to kiss the face off the blonde, who instantly becomes my least favourite person on the planet.
Oh God, I think it’s him! No! This isn’t how it’s supposed to happen. I’ve played out variants of this scene every night as I close my eyes and it never, repeat never, ends like this. Sometimes he’s with a crowd of guys in a bar, other times he’s alone in a cafe reading, but the one thing that never happens is he has a girlfriend who he snogs to within an inch of her shimmery blonde life.
‘Shit,’ Sarah mutters, pressing my wine into my hand. We watch as their kiss goes on. And on. Jeez, do these people have no boundaries? He’s copping a thorough feel of her backside now, wildly overstepping the mark for a busy bar. ‘Decency, people,’ Sarah grumbles. ‘He’s not your type after all, Lu.’
I’m crestfallen. So much so that I pour the entire glass of chilled wine down my throat, and then shudder.
‘I think I want to go,’ I say, ridiculously close to tears. And then they stop kissing and she straightens her dress, he murmurs something in her ear, and then turns away and