A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [160]
‘And you must be Alec,’ she says, breaking away from him to shake my hand. ‘I’m Mia. Pleased to meet you.’
She is American.
‘You’re from the States?’ I ask.
She looks irritated.
‘Canada. From Vancouver.’
Just seeing them together casts my mind back to Kate and me meeting for the first time. We were seventeen, what now seems an absurdly young age to be about to embark upon the relationship we had. Barely old enough to express ourselves. It was at a party in the school holidays. I remember a lot of weak beer and girls in mini-skirts. Kate came right up to me, just seemed to know it was the right thing to do. We were standing over a bale of straw, surrounded by people dancing to Dexy’s Midnight Runners, and within minutes were hidden in some dark quarter of a vast garden, kissing. Everything was new back then; all we did was react to things.
For some reason, we started climbing a tree, Kate first, me right behind her, just the rustle and scrape of the two of us against the branches and amongst the leaves. Quite quickly she lost her footing. Flecks of sooty bark puffed into my eyes. I lifted up my hand to catch her in case she was about to fall.
‘You OK?’ I asked, calling up at her.
Even then, within moments of our meeting, I wanted Kate to feel safe. It happened immediately.
‘Yes,’ she said, and there was a certain stubbornness in her voice which I noticed, and liked, right away. ‘I’m OK.’
And she kept on climbing.
Saul is talking Mia through the route to Cornwall. When they’re done, I shake her hand, she wishes me well, and he walks her back to the street.
‘See you at the weekend,’ she calls back to me.
‘Yeah. Looking forward to it.’
And five minutes later we are on our way.
Saul is driving his wideboy Capri, a dark blue V-reg with 70,000 miles on the clock and a bonnet the size of a ping-pong table. Gradually we shunt our way through the pre-weekend traffic which has clogged up the M3 from Sunbury right out to Basingstoke. The Capri feels low and heavy against the road; when I lean right back in the passenger seat, the darkening sky entirely fills the windscreen.
After an hour the traffic starts to free up and we can move at a steady seventy-five. I put on a tape - Radiohead’s The Bends - and watch the flat suburban heartlands flick by.
‘You want to get something to eat?’ Saul asks, as he is overtaking a caravan. ‘I was going to stop at the next place we see.’
‘Sure.’
It is the first time I have felt like eating in twenty-four hours.
‘There’s a McDonald’s at Fleet services,’ he says, winding down his window and letting a half-smoked cigarette firework on to the road. ‘You feel like McDonald’s?’
‘Whatever.’
Two miles later I spot a glowing yellow M hanging low over a slip-road encased in black trees. Saul comes off the motorway. The passenger-side wing mirror is not aligned, so I turn around sharply in my seat and look out through the back windscreen.
Three vehicles follow us up the exit.
In the car park Saul swings into a space alongside a grey BMW. The Capri gives a growling cough as he shuts off the engine. Two of the vehicles behind us went straight on to get petrol. The third, a hatchback Volkswagen, has parked fifty metres away, disgorging young children who run gleefully into the building. An Indian woman wearing a sari is stretching near by, rolling her neck in a slow clockwise loop.
The restaurant is as bright and sterile as the Abnex offices. There are no shadows. People drift about in the white light, fetching straws and napkins. They queue up four deep at the tills, munch Big Macs at clean-wiped tables. Kids are greedy for plastic figurines and pots of ice cream threaded with furls of chocolate sauce. There’s a constant noise of demand.
A middle-aged man