Page 21 of Little Miss Fortune

‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t hear you. No, they didn’t.’

The train stops again, and the people push through, taking half a step each time. Their miserable faces are more suitable for prisoners shackled in chains than agents of free will trying to get to their jobs.

‘I think I keep apologising to you.’ He continues after another beep.

I know I was frustrated with him, but seeing how horrible he feels makes me feel better. There is something in the way he talks that makes it seem as if everything is going to be okay. I try to ignore the weird pit in my stomach every time he leans in to say something to me.

‘You are honestly fine. It’s all accidents, innit?’

Innit? Innit? I’ve never used innit before. I’m not Hanako.

Toby’s mouth moves again, and some sound is escaping it, but does that man genuinely not know that I cannot hear him? I respond with silent ‘watermelon, watermelon’ like the extras did on Alien with Sigourney Weaver. To the untrained eye, it would look as if I were talking in earnest.

Toby leans in, trying to hear what I am saying. Closer and closer. His ear is facing me now, revealing his neck with a single bead of sweat running down it. The piercing shrieks of the beast dissipated enough for him to realise that I’m making fun of him by pretending to answer his question. He looks at me for a moment, staring at my lips.

His eyebrows frown and then relax. He figured it out.

‘Cantaloupe, cantaloupe, cantaloupe,’ he mouths back.

I try not to laugh, but a gust of air escapes my lungs in an unwelcome chuckle. The train halts. The man sitting in the priority seating jumps up and pushes out the doors with a quiet, ‘Sorry, mate.’

The force of that one passenger was enough to make Toby fall on me. Luckily, the sardine-like property of this tin can on wheels doesn’t allow anyone to hit the floor. His chest bumps me in the nose, and because more of the thick-bodied rucksacks are pouring in, Toby and I are stuck like this against the plastic of the wall until the next stop.

‘I am so sorry,’ he whispers into my ear.

A shiver runs down my back from his warm breath, which makes sense as I am quite ticklish and watch ASMR reels to fall asleep. If anything, at least I heard him this time. The ride between the previous stop and the next is so long, so excruciatingly long. And a sudden stop drops him even closer into my now nonexistent personal space.

‘Ladies and gentlemen. We are being held due to an emergency on the train in front of us.’

Different flavours of fucks and shits and tuts and sighs simmer through the carriage. That is quite unfortunate. Fuko-Brewer-level unfortunate. Maybe Toby Lewis is on the unlucky side of the spectrum. Would make sense; he keeps running into awkward, random situations, mainly with me. More observations to follow before a proper conclusion.

When we finally arrive at our station, Toby tumbles out, red in the face, sweat all over his forehead.

‘How are you dry?’ he asks on the escalator.

Heh, never heard that before. I high-five my inappropriate mind joke.

‘Asian genes.’ I shrug.

‘Would love to have some of those right about now,’ he says as if he is ordering a brie-and-cranberry-jam sandwich. ‘I think that was a weird thing to say.’

It was.

‘Not at all,’ I lie. ‘How was Japan for you then?’

Japan’s humidity is famously bad. Terrible for someone born in the foggy Albion of the UK clouds.

‘It was horrendous.’ He taps his card on the barrier. Not an Oyster card, like the rest of us peasants. I swear, for a moment, the gates had a royal fanfare as he walked through them. ‘I don’t know why people go there during the summer.’

‘Well, they usually don’t.’

‘And what an excellent choice they make. Why did you go? To visit family?’

‘In a sense.’ People get weird about the dead-mother thing. ‘And I was unemployed and miserable for so long that my family wanted me out of the house.’

‘Wow, how bad were you to send you into those conditions?’

‘They were about to call Ed and Lorraine Warren.’