Page 55 of A Face in the Crowd
Each image is time-stamped in roughly thirty-second intervals. I can see the moment after the bus had stopped and everyone moved around. The woman who was bleating about foreigners appears and, in the next shot, Mr Stinky has his arm down.
There’s a claustrophobia that’s hard to avoid even by looking at the pictures. One after another, there are limbs wrapped around limbs. People packed far too tightly for it to ever be safe.
I keep working through the stack until I reach the one in which I’m moving towards the front, trying to get off. I’m there in one; gone in the next. By that point, the envelope of money was already in my bag.
Unsure of what I’m looking for, I go back to the beginning. It’s like a badly made flickbook of jumping images. People’s heads jerk wildly, limbs flap uncontrollably… and then I see it. A face I recognise belonging to a person standing directly behind me. A face that, surely, shouldn’t be there.
I’m looking at the floor, oblivious to who and what is around me – while, at the same time, there is a person so close I could’ve touched him.
Harry.
Chapter Thirty
Thursday
One of the most common pieces of advice people give, or get, is to ‘sleep on it’. It’s often followed up with something like, ‘It’ll seem different in the morning’, or ‘It’ll feel better in daylight’. None of that makes it clear what to do if sleep proves near impossible because of the situation, or if things seem exactly the same by sunrise.
I sleep in short bursts but constantly jump awake, thinking Harry is standing at the side of the bed. It’s as if his presence edges across me and then I’m alert.
At the time the CCTV still was taken, we had been messaging back and forth on the dating app for a couple of weeks. We had swapped photos but didn’t meet for real until we were in The Garden Café a little more than twenty-four hours later. I can’t quite get my head around the images. Harry is in seven consecutive photos, but I can’t work out if he’s already on the bus and works his way forward through the mass, or if he gets on at one of the stops. There are only two pictures in which it’s clearly him. One with a sideways profile; the other where he’s glancing up towards the camera and it’s a full front-on image. In the other five, he’s either looking down or turning away. There’s an umbrella in his hand, but he’s wearing jeans and jacket, like the other times I’ve seen him. In all of the seven images, I don’t look up once. I’m paying no attention to anyone around me.
When Harry and I first saw one another at The Garden Café, I remember seeing something in his eyes that I thought was a hint of recognition. I didn’t know him, but I considered if he knew me.
I wonder if, perhaps, Harry takes the same bus as me regularly and, for whatever reason, I’ve never noticed him. It could be possible.
I scan through the faces of everyone else in the images and recognise perhaps one person – even though I took the same bus at the same time every day I was at work. That could be it, of course. I had a routine that was easy to follow if somebody wanted.
But why?
What reason would Harry – or anyone else – have for leaving the envelope of money in my bag? Could he be some sort of secret millionaire-type who’s playing a strange game? It does seem like the type of thing Channel 4 would show.
I fold my bed away and check on Billy. He’s awake but lethargic and I hide the next dose of his medicine in his food. He eats it without too much complaint and then I take him outside for a short walk.
Back upstairs and there’s an email waiting for me. Whoever put up the posters replied a little after three in the morning. I’d said I wasn’t going to contact him or her any more if the person didn’t tell me what was misplaced on the bus. I half expected to receive nothing, but the message is straightforward enough:
I lost an envelope. I think you know that. Can we meet?
It’s hard not to wonder now whether this is Harry playing games. If it is, then what is the trick? He is asking to meet. Is he gambling that I won’t show up? Or is this going to be the big reveal that it was a joke, or an experiment, all along? I can’t work out what I think is real, so decide to be assertive.
I can meet today. 11 a.m. at Chappie’s café.
It puts the onus back on the sender – whether or not it’s Harry:Meet me or don’t meet me.It takes less than a minute for the reply to come.
See you at 11.
There’s something unerringly uneasy about the confidence of the reply. I thought the time of day might put the person off – or the public location – but it is seemingly fine. He or she is unfazed by daylight and isn’t at work. I could not turn up, of course, but there’s a big part of me that wants to figure out the mystery. I also realise that, in all our communication, I’ve given this person no way of knowing who I am. I won’t recognise him or her either, and so, unless the café is empty, there’s still some anonymity.
I check Harry’s last text – the one in which he sent a selfie while wearing the bandage. ‘What do you think of my war wound?’ it says underneath. It’s a little flirty. I didn’t reply last night and don’t now.
As has been happening so often, I find myself counting the cash in the envelope. After everything else, plus the vet bill and bribe for the bus company employee, there is a little under £2,400 left. I’ve spent more than £1,200 in less than a week. I pack the cash into the same envelope in which it arrived and slip it into my bag, then I say goodbye to Billy.
Chappie’s is one of the trendy new breed of café-bars that open before I get up for work and close long past my bedtime. The days of greasy spoons and the smell of chip fat in the morning is largely a goner. Now, it is all inoffensive background lift music and lattes made with any kind of milk, as long as it comes from a nut. By the evening it is imported beer from Portugal or Croatia – nowhere too obvious – plus craft ales from up and down the country that are called things like ‘Bloated Emperor Penguin’ or ‘Flighty Orange Fox’.
I order the cheapest coffee on the menu and it still comes to more than two pounds. I sit cradling it on one of the tables towards the back, far away from the windows. It gives me a good view of anyone entering the café.
The reason for choosing this place is that, despite the prices, it is comfortably the most popular café in the area. There are people all around.Witnessesall around. Admittedly, many are either hammering away on their MacBooks or sitting cross-kneed in suits and talking about things like ‘this month’s portfolio’ and how Veena from accounting ‘can’t operate the photocopier, let alone an entire payroll’. It still seems like the worst thing that can happen here is that someone’s poached egg is a little overcooked.
It’s ten minutes to eleven as I sit and wait, listening into other people’s conversations and meticulously watching the door for even a hint of movement. A waitress shuffles by and asks if everything’s all right. It’s hard to get a coffee wrong, so I tell her it’s fine and she moves on.
