Page 8 of You Can't Hurt Me

“Of course. Absolutely.” But we both know it’s a compromise, an unpredicted win.

“I’ll get Rhik to email you and confirm the details and address. My niece is staying there at the moment while she’s on a research placement and she’ll be around if I’m delayed here for any reason,” he says and then he’s on the move again. I follow him back along the acres of beige corridor until we reach the elevator, facing each other. “Thank you for coming along today, Anna, for being so game. There’s something about seeing an authentic response to my work that is always such a privilege.”

He gives me a small, secret sort of smile as the doors close.

5

Back out on the street the world seems spikier, as if the volume button is turned to high. Colors are savage, noises shriller. It takes a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the clarity of light pouring into the garden square opposite. The tree branches are paper cutouts spread across a buttermilk sky, the black railings that encircle them sharpened spears. Heading for the square, I register a dull ache behind my eyes along with a strange bitter taste in my mouth. I sit down on the nearest bench, take out my phone and tap away furiously into Notes.

Details swim before me as I replay the experience, how the interview I had taken so long to research and prepare for was ambushed by Nate. How it was me who wound up placed under the spotlight, not him. At least I hadn’t given too much away, except apparently my pain tolerance.

Still, hadn’t I won out with an invite to Algos House? I couldn’t help smiling to myself. Who had been more persuasive in the end?

I get the rest of the facts down as I remember them, and then sketch in my initial impressions of him, how contradictory and clinical he can be. There’s a lot I won’t include, because I’m not sure I have the words quite yet for the intensity of those sensations in the lab, the peculiar intimacy of the whole experience, the way that it all made me feel.

I reach down to touch the back of my calf, still painful, perforated like a pin cushion and bruised. The inside of my arm all the way down to my wrist is blistering. I want to go home, replay and analyze this scene in my head many times over. But I promised to meet Amira for lunch. I drop my phone in my bag and walk briskly to the subway.

At Oxford Circus, I weave my way south toward Lexington Street where a sliver of Georgian Soho still lingers between the bubble tea bars and independent coffee shops. The sludge-green restaurant facade looks like it should sell antiques. The blackboard outside is chalked,Old Spot pork chop and mash. Downstairs in the gloom of the basement, the walls are lined with a print of Hogarth’sGin Laneand oldPunchcovers. While I wait to be seated, a man in a paisley silk waistcoat at a nearby table orders a second bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape. And then I remember why I’ve always loved this place. Barely 1:00 p.m. and it already has the louche air of a lost afternoon on the run from the office.

I see my friend and editor, Amira, at a table in the alcove. She waves.

“Anna.” She stands up to kiss me, her face clouding with concern. “Are you okay? You look...washed out.”

“Honestly, I’m fine,” I say, sitting down and studying the menu. I know Amira well enough but can still never quite work out if her inquisitiveness is born of sympathy or prurience, or most likely a combination of both. “I’m starving.”

I look at the wine list, stalling for time while I work out what I’m going to tell her about the interview. I will need to break the news that I let it slip through my hands today, spin it to manage her expectations.Delayed but not lost. All to play for.

“Come on, tell me what happened.”

I try to catch the waitress’s eye, avoid the beam of Amira’s interest, always shining a spotlight into corners one would prefer to remain in shadow. It’s been something of a relief to me over the years that she’s much better at asking questions than truly listening to the answers.

“He was interesting,” I say, carefully. “The Rosen is such a weird old place. Like a time warp really. Miles of corridors and these dusty old laboratories. Except for Dr. Reid’s, which is like a high-tech lair.” I pause, registering a shade of panic in her eyes.

“So definitely interesting enough for next week’s cover story, do you think?”

“That soon?” It’s my turn to panic now.

“Jess is desperate, our lead interview has just fallen through.”

“I guess I could turn it around but I’d need a few more quotes. I’ve pretty much been a lab rat for the last two hours; it wasn’t exactly the interview I expected.”

“Well, we may have to make it work as it is,” she says as the waitress starts to hover at our table. “Let’s get the drinks in first.”

Amira and I studied at the same journalism course and since then we have slipped in and out of each other’s lives, drifting apart until someone or something snaps us back together, remaining close through it all. She’s Jess’s deputy editor and commissions me to do most of their cover interviews. A year ago, I lived in her loft room while my apartment was being renovated and now I’m returning the favor. Amira recently finished with her boyfriend, so she’s about to move in with me for a month or two.

The second bedroom was originally my older brother Tony’s—we bought the apartment together ten years ago with our parents’ inheritance, not a life-changing amount but enough to cover a decent deposit. He’s a freelance photographer for travel magazines and websites, spending much of his time away. When he’s back in the country, he stays at our apartment. I know how difficult it is freelancing in this business so any rental income we get from the extra room, I tend to give him. It’s a mixed blessing really, owning a property and yet never being able to enjoy the freedoms it should bring.

“Nice bag,” says Amira, as if reading my thoughts, eyeing a fake Celine that Tony bought me from Hong Kong.

“You know how he is.” I wave it off. “Dropping in without warning, always with the gifts he really shouldn’t be able to afford.”

“Such a hardship.” Amira eye rolls. “Balenciaga from Milan, an iPhone and AirPods from New York. He never bought me anything like that, fake or otherwise.”

Amira had a disastrous fling a few years ago with Tony, which ended when he met someone else. She was devastated at first but eventually they became friends. Sometimes I suspect she still finds the idea of him intriguing.

Tony and I have always been close, so I avoided them as a couple as much as I could because I didn’t want her to feel excluded. Amira often made comments about our relationship. She once told me that as an only child, rattling around a sprawling Edwardian house on the edge of Ealing, she had yearned for a younger brother or sister, all that volatility and emotion and bickering and love.

“Headoresyou, Anna,” she would say. “He talks about you all the time.”

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