his leathers. He hated this kind of town, with its boutique shops for the left-at-home wives, its unspoken snobberies. Even the countryside looked different. More compact somehow, rounded and soft and green. In Sweden, everything looked like it had been smashed into chunks, jagged, proud. He’d forgotten how squashed-up southern England was. It was strange too to speak English in the petrol station, hear the squawking Kent accent and even feel the familiar words in his mouth.
This wasn’t somewhere he’d expected Ali to live. She’d always talked about Paris, New York, Berlin – not mid-Kent, with its commuter towns and overly pretty villages where a house would set you back over half a million. It was the kind of place Mike was always going to end up, and Ali had been dragged with him, pulled along like the tail of a comet. That was . . . disappointing. But not surprising. He told himself it was never going to end any other way.
Apart from all that though, the evening had been good. Callum’s blokey banter was sometimes hard to adjust to, and where he led Mike followed, but it was good to see them all again and remember he’d had a life before Sweden, before Astrid. It was as if he was groping his way along, trying to find the Bill who’d turned up at Oxford aged eighteen, with two pairs of jeans, one pair of trainers, a tin of rolling tobacco and not much else. Bill, the name he’d chosen for himself, shelving the Bilal he’d grown up with on the coach journey down. He’d struggled to explain to his mother that he needed a new name for Oxford. That no one meant to be racist, not exactly; it was more that they’d grown up only seeing non-white faces cleaning their houses or serving in corner shops. Now his mother was dead, no one ever called him by his real name.
He was glad he’d come, yes, but all the same he’d felt the need for some time out after dinner. Smoking was very useful for that, an excuse to wander away when a conversation got too much. After he’d gone to see if Ali needed help – he was surprised at how anxious she’d been to have everything in order, a plate at each place and a bowl to sit on top of it, a tumbler and wine glass and napkin and cutlery; Ali who used to eat pasta and pesto out of a saucepan on the floor of the communal hallway in college – he ambled down the garden. Part of him was kicking himself for the awkward moment in the kitchen. Stupid, to think they could go back to their old friendship, after so long. When he’d touched her arm, he’d seen the alarm in her eyes, and wanted to explain he hadn’t meant – but he didn’t know what he had or hadn’t meant.
Outside on the decking, the night air was cool. The candles Mike had lit were out, and he and Callum sat in darkness, only the sounds of their voices showing anyone was there. Bill was pleased, though he couldn’t have said why, that he liked Ali’s house. It was a little shabby round the edges, the garden overgrown and full of flowers, foxgloves, night-scented stock, hyacinth, but in a way that seemed organic and not planned. He liked the way the trees formed an arch over the garden, and the cries of birds drifted down. Earlier, when showing them round it, all Ali could do was apologise for the pile of garden waste behind the shed, and it made him sad to think she couldn’t enjoy this small paradise she lived in.
He wondered what Astrid was doing. Neither of them were on Facebook, which Astrid hated, but he could see the attraction of it now. Just to know where she was, who she was with. Have some small idea how she was spending her time.
Bill sighed. For years he’d been slightly baffled by the romantic dramas of his friends, while he and Astrid had moved along like swans swimming over a pond, cool and respectful. Now he felt the draw of all kinds of unSwedish behaviour. Hacking into her emails. Begging her to take him back. He knew it was over, they both did, but it was surprisingly hard to let go.
He remembered he’d left his phone in the saddlebag of the bike and he thought maybe he’d text her, or see if