The bus route began – for me, that is – in my neighbourhood, and then wound down past the mosque, through the leafy parts of North London, where the pavements became flat and wide and cafés began to spill their clients onto the streets, and then it came to the house where Tom lived, where he probably lived still, just opposite a magnificent church made of a brick that was almost lilac in colour. After that, the bus would take a sharp left and began to wend its way painstakingly through the traffic to the choked-up heart of the city, where I worked.
She was sitting a few rows ahead of me in the front seat of the bus. She had a strong Nordic name, Yngvild, which I did not know how to pronounce. I had never met her in person. I recognized her only by her very long black hair, and the green coat she always seemed to be wearing in his photographs of her, no matter the season. I had no idea how long she’d been there; I hadn’t noticed her when I had got on, nor had I noticed her boarding after me. The front seat was my usual seat. I’d avoided it this morning because the sun was coming in too brightly. but the situation could have easily been the other way around, with her watching the back of my head and wondering if it was really me.
Yngvild, my living echo, is it you? I brought up Tom’s profile and found a photograph he’d posted of her in a hardware store, wearing the coat, her back half-turned and her palms upturned, upon which lay an assortment of nuts and bolts. From there I tried once again to open her profile, but it was still set to private. I looked at the photo, and looked at the girl at the front of the bus, and I couldn’t tell if her coat was the same shade of green. In the photo it looked less turquoise, but photos have a funny way of distorting colour. It was all I had to go off. There was no way to get a proper look at her face, not unless I sat directly next to her and engaged her in conversation. If it was her, then she was probably on her way to his house. I’d know for certain if she got off at the stop outside the lilac church.
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I had met Tom four years prior. I’d heard that it took on average one year to get to know somebody, but it seemed to me that I knew him just as well on that first day as I did on the last. He had appeared in the pub wearing all the things I loved and those that I would come to hate; his reptilian elegance, his occult calm and the churning thing beneath it that I knew I would never understand. From the beginning, our story had harboured a beating sense of fate. Three weeks before we met, I had been walking with a friend and I had declared to her, sitting in the alpine rock garden with moss under my fingernails, that I was ready to fall in love. Later, I thought that it was apt for me to have cast this spell in the season of death, of brittle leaves and furious winds, the strange light of days that shrunk.
In the winter of that first year, Tom and I went on holiday together to Northern Italy, where the buildings were painted pink and frosted yellow like little cakes. The light cut everything up cleanly into pieces. At the top of the mountain I lost my breath, and later, in a small, over-heated cabin, I lay beside him on the bed and felt nauseous with the strength of my feeling. As a child I had watched Maria fall in love with Captain Von Trapp, and from this – Maria’s flushed and sweaty forehead – I understood that love was supposed to make you unwell. I felt it happening just as I’d longed for all my life, the opening of a hatch, a great, roaring tunnel of wind. I knew that it would change me and I knew too that eventually it would end. Sometimes it seemed as though he were very far away, but in sleep his whole body reached out to mine with an abandonment that startled me. I listened to the blood pulsing under his skin. My love story, my love story, I thought to myself, over and over. Here it is, here it is, my love story!
After it was over, I had felt for a while as though I were living inside a drift of snow. I spent months in this state of frigid tranquility. When I emerged, it was summer, and Tom was on holiday in Italy with a woman named Yngvild. I knew this because I still followed him on Instagram. Each time I browsed his photos I told myself that I was looking for clues, gathering information, piecing together a complete picture of who he was, who he loved and how he loved them, and that these were necessary steps in working out who I was now that he was gone.
Luckily for me, Tom had always documented his life obsessively. When we were together, it had felt good to watch him take photographs and post them: here I was, in the private realm with Tom, and there was the world, looking in from the outside. Now I was a member of the public again, and here was Yngvild, standing in a cobbled street and looking back at Tom over her shoulder, holding a little paper bag of pastries close to her chest. Yngvild lying in a shadowy room with the balcony doors open, reading Chekov. Yngvild again, her hair almost blue in the dusky light, climbing up a mountain path that was strewn with pine needles, wearing a long skirt underneath the green coat. I flicked through the photographs in disbelief. With every month I had spent buried in the snow-drift, he had been slipping further out of my love story and further into hers. She was lolling about on a pebble-beach in the sun, shielding her eyes and laughing. Like all the images he posted, these stayed up for twenty-four hours, and then disappeared.
I knew Yngvild was beautiful, but when I tried to picture her face without a photograph in front of me, I struggled. My impression of her was like a ransom note, patched together strangely from various very specific angles; Yngvild in italics, Yngvild in cursive, Yngvild in a bold sans serif, depending on Tom’s mood. Nonetheless, I was sure I would recognize her if I saw her in person. Who else had hair like that? So long and so dark and so still, like a curtain of stone. Black hair, green coat. Black and green. They were strong colours, natural colours, supernatural ones. They made me think of forests at night, of glow-worms and serpents and UFOs, radioactive waste gleaming at the bottom of a dark pond. It made sense to me that Tom would date somebody like that.
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At the front of the bus, the woman reached into her bag and pulled out a big set of headphones. They looked enormous on her head, like she was an aircraft operator. In reality, Yngvild was an artist. I knew this because I had googled her and found her portfolio online. Her paintings had bits of rubbish stuck to them. I wondered if she was good at drawing. When Tom and I began dating there had been a little pen-sketch of his cat tacked on to the fridge by his ex-girlfriend, who had had the same name as me. A year on, it was still there. I asked him why he hadn’t taken it down, and he’d said he just liked the sketch, but that if I wanted, I could make something for him to put up there instead. I did a small portrait of him one morning while we were drinking our coffee. He sat very still, which had never been difficult for him. His eyes in particular were easy to draw because they were the shape of upturned boats. He looked like a cartoon character and also exactly like himself. Over the subsequent years the picture had begun to curl at the edges, but he never took it down. Was it still there on the fridge? Did Yngvild know I’d made it? If it was still there, did it mean that he liked the picture, or that he still loved me?
It occurred to me, then, that engaging her in conversation wasn’t the worst option available to me. If it turned out to be Yngvild, I could ask her all the questions that had plagued me for the last six months, and so be free of them. If it wasn’t her, I would simply explain that I’d mistaken her for somebody, and then we’d resume our journey in silence. There was an empty seat next to her. We were only just now reaching the mosque, so there was still time. It wouldn’t have to appear as anything other than a coincidence. I took a few deep breaths and peered down at the street through the window. A woman was standing at the crossing, holding her mobile phone in one hand and a baby in the other. She was laughing on the phone to somebody. The baby looked heavy; I could see all the muscles in her arm contracting to hold him upright.
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Like me, Tom wasn’t an artist, but he liked to draw. Sometimes in the evenings we would spread paper and crayons on the floor and turn off most of the lights. In the gloom I’d watch him producing small, furious, tangled sketches which he always presented to me when he was finished. In those moments I was giddy with happiness. We pasted all our sketches up on the walls and cooked elaborate meals at midnight. I still don’t know how to explain what loving him felt like. Like being a four-year-old, but sexy. In three and a half years, we never once talked about the future.
On his birthday, I bought train tickets for the coast, where the sea was pulled back like the lips of a mad horse, and the wind whipped up phantom waves out of the sand. I did not hear from him that morning as I packed my bags, nor later, while I waited at the station, nor later still, long after the train had departed. He arrived at my house finally that evening at a quarter-to-midnight, wearing a woollen jumper I’d bought for him the previous year. He’d shrunk it in the washing machine and it looked ridiculous on him now, like a child’s jumper, its sleeves beginning half-way up his forearm. At the sight of it I was so overcome with tenderness that I burst into tears straightaway. I cried for hours and he comforted me good-naturedly, as though I was crying about some external object that had no relevance to him.
‘You’ve got yourself all worked up’, he said to me, softly. ‘You’re getting your knickers in a knot over nothing’. And then he held out a tissue for me to blow my nose into, and stroked the side of my body very gently, as if I were a precious and breakable object.
‘I can’t live like this’, I said. ‘This isn’t how adult people live’. I explained to him how each time he disappeared I imagined the worst. The things I imagined were too terrible to vocalize, so I had to phrase it exactly like that. They were just the worst, the things I imagined.
‘I was napping, my darling’, he would say.
It made me so sad when he lied to me. But sometimes he told me the truth, and that made me even sadder. On the latter occasions he bought flowers. After he left, I lay in the bath, and looked at my body underwater, and tried to will myself out of love. He believed that no matter what, I would always sink back into his oaken arms. He was right about this, until he wasn’t.
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If I wanted to sit next to Yngvild and make it look like an accident, I would have to go down the bus stairs and come back up again at the next stop so that it would appear as though I’d just boarded. By now I was certain it was her, though I had no reason to be. It made perfect sense for my love story to end this way. Of course I would meet her here, on the bus, as we both sped towards the lilac church. We would share a brief, illuminating conversation that neither of us would ever forget, and before she disembarked, I would turn to her with sparkling Vaseline eyes like the Baroness Schraeder, and wish them both well. I didn’t have time to think it over more thoroughly; I had to act straightaway. I pressed the stop button and made my way quickly to the front of the bus and then down the stairs, resisting the urge to try and get a closer look at her face. If she saw me too soon, my plan would be ruined.
When I had reached the bottom of the stairs, I leant against the baggage hold by the drivers’ capsule, feeling out of breath. The bus lurched forward as the light went green and I fell into the railing, which dug painfully into my belly and brought an acid taste into my mouth. For a moment I thought I might throw up. I felt as though something were unravelling from my core, an umbilical cord I’d forgotten to snip. I didn’t want to talk to Yngvild. I really, really, didn’t want to talk to her. But I needed to, because I didn’t know how to begin to make sense of it all by myself. Who else was going to answer my questions? Certainly not Tom. He had never communicated with me in words.
The bus stopped, the doors opened, and people began filing in. Two or three people had been standing in the wheelchair area, and these people began now making their way up the stairs to the top level. I went up after them. Don’t take my seat, I willed them, but it was too late; an elderly tattooed man with a long grey beard, like a punk wizard, had taken the spot next to Yngvild. Then the woman behind him took the seat a few rows back that I’d been sitting in before. There was only one free seat left now, right at the back of the bus, next to a girl who was several years younger than me and whose cheeks were flushed pink. I took the seat beside the girl. Now I could only just see the shining ebony crown of Yngvild’s head.
My chance was gone. I shivered under the film of sweat that had accumulated on my skin, feeling disappointment and relief bubble up inside of me as the adrenaline faded. My stomach churned and churned. I gripped the seat in front of me and tried to steady myself by staring at the moquette, which was patterned with fat little moons, red and blue, that tenderly buried their noses in one another.
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When I had calmed down, I began to think of what might have happened if the old man hadn’t taken my seat after all. Would I have introduced myself? Surely that wouldn’t have been necessary. I felt confident that Yngvild would have recognized me just as I recognized her. From photographs.
‘I thought it might be you’, she’d say. ‘ I’ve imagined this encounter so many times. There’s so many things I want to ask you’.
‘Me too’
‘You first’, she’d offer.
It was autumn and the road was strewn with yellow and orange leaves that glimmered against the black tarmac. We were nearing the lilac church. Tom had once told me it sat above a secret crypt where modern-day cults sometimes did rituals. He had told me lots of small, inconsequential lies. He had told me he’d loved me, again and again. The spire loomed larger and larger as we sped towards it. She would be getting off at the next stop.
The sunlight was gleaming off the church and came galloping through the front windows of the bus, hitting Yngvild full in the face. From my spot right at the back, I raised myself up slightly in my seat so I could gaze at her over the tops of everybody’s heads. I watched her lift a hand to her eyes to shield herself, just as she had in that photograph on the pebbled beach. As she cowered away from the light, I felt an overwhelming wave of compassion for her. I didn’t want to ask her questions anymore, not even the important ones. I just wanted to hold her and tell that her I understood how much she suffered. I wanted to tell her that I understood why she stayed, even when everyone else around her told her to leave. She would cry into the nook of my shoulder and I would put my palm on the back of her lovely head until she was ready to emerge again. Oh, Yngvild, I understand!
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The bus slowed and finally pulled to a stop outside of the church. The young girl next me stood up and I shifted my knees to let her out. She blocked my view momentarily, but it didn’t matter because when I looked towards the front of the bus again, Yngvild hadn’t moved. A long time seemed to pass. Then I heard the doors close, and she was still there. The bus began to roll forward again.
Well, I thought. Maybe she’s on her way someplace else.
I moved into the window seat so I could look at the church as we passed it. From this angle, backlit against the sun, its stones appeared grey. The bus carried on, and I twisted my head so I could keep watching through the back window as the church receded behind me. Finally we turned left, and began to make its way, slowly, into the bowels of the city. Goodbye, church, I thought. But I’d stared at it too long and the outline of it stayed with me a long time afterwards, a dark grey shadow on my retina when my eyes were open, a gleaming purple spire behind my eyelids when they were closed.
On we trundled through the crowded, narrow streets. I rested my head against the window, and thought about that day in the alpine rock garden. Across that wide expanse of years, I reached out to the girl with moss under her nails, and placed a small premonition in her breast. When I next looked ahead, the woman who might have been Yngvild was gone. I never saw her get off.
The bus was just a bus now, full of strangers on their way to work, with no real way of reaching one another, and nothing to say even if we could. Of course, it had been Captain Von Trapp’s absolute impenetrability that Maria had fallen in love with, his heart like a fossilized egg with a liquid core, the intensity that came off him in waves and never, ever really found its true expression, except maybe in song. The problem with that kind of love – a love steeped in mystery – is that when it failed you, it left you with a silence thick as stone. When Captain Von Trapp failed Maria, she had had her god, a new outlet for her devotion to the unknowable. And what did I have? Only a small portal in my pocket that sometimes showed me the world through his eyes.