he’s right there in the flesh and standing next to me on the subway. Just small, random, apparently inconsequential things that by themselves seem like coincidences . . . but put together are starting to seem really weird.
Like, for example, I keep getting missed calls from him on my mobile. At first I just ignored them, but when one woke me up at 5 a.m., I finally called him back and demanded what he wanted.
‘Nothing,’ he replied angrily, before swearing blind he hadn’t rung me and it must have been an accident.
‘What? Twelve times?’ I huffed, before telling him he needed to learn how to lock his iPhone and hanging up.
Which by itself isn’t that bizarre. After all, who hasn’t sat on their phone and accidentally dialled someone, or answered a call from a friend only to hear their footsteps walking down the street?
What was bizarre was Nate calling me back the next day complaining that I was calling him! Which is impossible, ‘as my phone was locked’, I told him indignantly. Only later, when I checked my call log, sure enough there were all these calls to his number.
Then there was this funny incident when Magda sent me uptown in a cab to fetch some ‘supplies’ from her friend Dr Rosenbaum, a peculiar-looking man in a white coat who has a pink, shiny face that doesn’t move and huge offices overlooking the park. It was all very cloak and dagger. After punching in a secret code, I was ®t cr-lo Nushered inside, asked to hand over the cash and given a bag of creams and potions. I felt as if we were doing a drug deal. Not that I’ve ever done a drug deal, but anyway, that wasn’t the strange part. The strange part was on the way back.
One minute everything was totally normal. I was trundling along in the cab and the driver was cursing away on his phone in what sounded like Russian, when suddenly the engine spluttered loudly and we broke down. Guess where we broke down? Right outside Nate’s apartment. I mean right outside. As if that wasn’t enough of a coincidence, it was at exactly the same time as Nate was leaving the building! I had duck down on the back seat so he didn’t see me. A few seconds more and it would have been too late. How weird was that?
And it doesn’t stop there. Every time I turn on the TV, he’s on it. Admittedly not him personally, but Big Bucks is always playing. What’s even worse, I’ve now got the jingle in my head and I can’t stop humming it. It’s like there’s no escaping him. It’s the same with the radio. Only this time it’s Bob Marley’s ‘No Woman, No Cry’, which used to be ‘our’ song. Every time I hear it, it reminds me of Nate.
I haven’t heard it for years. Normally it’s Lady Gaga and Fergie and Katy Perry. Now suddenly, these past few days, every time I flick on the radio, it seems to be on every station. It’s totally freaky.
So freaky that it gets me thinking about all the other things that have niggled me recently but which I’ve brushed off. Like Nate’s confession that he had a strange desire to walk into our gallery one day, for no apparent reason, discovering that we’d been going to the same places for years and kept missing each other, both of us finding the pendants again, even though mine had been lost for years.
As one thought trips over another, like a row of dominoes, my mind starts whirring . . . bumping into him in the street after we’d broken up, sitting next to him at the sushi restaurant, the incident at the gym – Manhattan’s small, but not that small – and then the other night at the gallery, seeing all the TV screens tuned to his game show as I was talking to Adam, then Brad suddenly appearing just as Adam was about to ask me out on a date, mentioning Nate’s name and making him disappear . . .
If I was superstitious, I’d almost think there was some higher force trying to stop me from going out with anyone else.
I’m not superstitious, though. I don’t believe in all that rubbish, I tell myself firmly. OK, so I admit, I read my horoscope now and again, and yes, it’s true, I once saw a fortuçce Lig Sforne-teller, but it was years ago at a school fête