1 It starts with a selfie. He is a random; we are not even sure of his name. We are always meeting them whenever we go out. Laura says it's because I look friendly. I think it's because I am always daydreaming, making up lives for people as I stare at them, and they think I'm inviting them over to chat. In the frame of his phone screen-camera facing forward, to us-his teeth are white and slightly crooked, his nose hooked. Laura leans over to press the button on the phone. Her long, slender arm is captured at the edge of the display. It's covered in bangles and bits of thread and a homemade bracelet. She's a hippie at heart. She takes the photo, and now we are frozen on his screen. I wonder if he'll keep it, that photograph of us that now belongs to him. "No filter," he says to us. "What?" Laura says. She doesn't use Instagram. She feels no need to check into places or share her moments with anybody. She is nowhere on the internet, and I'm sure her life is better for it. We break apart from our tableau at the bar but he stays standing next to me. He rocks up and down on the balls of his feet. He's all in black, except his red trainers. I turn to Laura. She's had her hair cut. It's a pixie again: messed up, the fringe sitting in her eyes. She looks androgynous, slightly goofy. I could never pull off that haircut. People would mistake me for a child. She never wears any makeup, but doesn't need to, with straight, white teeth, naturally peach cheeks, and dark lashes. Her eyes crinkle at the corners even when she is not smiling. What she wants more than anything is to be an artist-she creates hyperreal paintings that look like photographs-and she doesn't want to live her life like other people. She's obsessed with it. She will sometimes say things like, "What's the correlation between wearing a suit and doing a good job?" or, "Why do you need a house in the suburbs and a mortgage like everybody else?" I would never say such things. "Great shoes," she says now, dipping her head down underneath the bar. They're new. Cream silk, with ribbons that tie at my ankles. Laura favors flats, the sides of her feet dry and hard from never wearing shoes at home. They live on a barge, Laura and Jonty. They moor it wherever they like. I sometimes want to do the same, bored of our tiny basement flat, but Reuben tells me I'd hate it, that I am a fantasist. "Thanks," I say. I bought them on a credit card, at almost midnight, the other night. I'd forgotten until they had arrived, experiencing a familiar sense of wonderment, and then recognition, as I tore into the parcel. "Are they Reuben approved?" Laura says. Reuben is one of the only people she consistently misreads. She converts his shyness into something else. Disapproval, maybe. She might be right. He had raised his eyebrows as I unpacked the shoes, but said nothing. I shrug now. "What's his is ours," I say, though I'm embarrassed by the notion. Reuben works far harder than I do. Everybody does. Laura's bony shoulders are out, even though it's December. Her top is simple, a plain white vest that's too big for her. It's the kind of material that doesn't need pressing. I don't iron anything. If I ever try to, our iron deposits a brown sticky substance everywhere, and so I have given up. In my head, I call it my Joanna-ness: situations in which I fail where most others succeed. "Looks like you've got a friend for life," she says. I turn. The man is still standing next to me. I can feel the entire length of his leg against mine as he shifts his weight, trying to get the bartender's attention. "Two more for these ladies?" he says. We say yes to the drinks, and maybe we shouldn't. We are becoming giggly. They arrive, placed on black napkins that dampen with condensation from the glasses. Laura sidles slowly away along the bar. I follow, but so does he. "Your work or mine?" Laura says, her head bent toward me so that he can't hear. This is how our long chats begin. We once joked we should have an agenda, and now we kind of do: work, relationships, family. Then everything else. Whatever comes up. I let out a sigh, but it does nothing to dispel the knots that have appeared as soon as she mentions work. "I did a sudoku puzzle on my lunch break that was more stimulating than my entire day yesterday." I started work on the mobile library bus because I loved it so much as a child. I loved choosing a fat new stack of books to read that week. I loved the nooks and crannies and finding my brother hiding in the thriller section. But, after six years in the job, that isn't enough anymore. "Mmm." She sucks in her bottom lip, looking thoughtfully across the bar. We hate our jobs in completely different ways. I have no idea what I would like to do. Laura knows exactly what she wants to do, and can't do it. "You need a Thing. I need not to have a Thing," she says. "Yep. That's about it." Nobody else could say something like that to me, except maybe Reuben. "I'm one-dimensional," I say to her. "You're too smart for your own good," she says back. "No. I'm the thick Murphy." My brother, Wilf, went to Cambridge, and now owns a whole host of London properties, and none of us can ever forget it. "You're a very bright Joanna," she says. "Oliva or Murphy." Oliva. Reuben's surname. I look down at my drink, stirring it with the black straw whose end I've chewed. Reuben says I should just forget it. Stop torturing myself. Nobody truly has a Thing. "Er," Laura says, looking at a spot just above my head, as though she's seen a spider on the wall. I turn, and the man is leaning over me, a protective arm right behind my shoulders. Now that I know he's there, I can feel every molecule of him. His arm lands across my back like a heavy rucksack, and I wince. I try to shrug it off, but he claps it down on me. It's weighty, unpleasant. My body is against his, unwittingly, and his armpit is warm and sweaty against my shoulder. He smells beery, of that sweet alcoholic scent usually reserved for the morning after the night before. A kick of mint behind that. He's chewing gum. "Haven't even introduced myself," he says, interrupting my thoughts. "I'm Sadiq." His dark eyes appraise us. He holds a hand out to me, then to Laura. She ignores it, but I take it, not wanting to offend. He passes me a business card, in his hand, as swiftly and smoothly as a spy. Sadiq Ul-Haq. I don't know what to do with it, so I tuck it into my purse, barely reading it. "Thanks. I don't have one," I say back. "Thanks for the selfie, but we're good now," Laura interrupts. "Just catching up. Alone." Even this does not put him off. "Baby, don't be cold," Sadiq says. I can't help but look sideways at him. I can't place his lilting accent. "We're not cold. We want to speak to each other, not you," Laura says. It's typical of her. All through university, people would underestimate her. She was softly spoken, small-boned, would sit almost huddled, with her arms folded right across her middle, so people thought she was meek. But she wasn't, not at all. She wordlessly picks up her drink and we walk across the makeshift dance floor, squeezing against bodies that jolt unpredictably. The only place available is right next to the speaker, which is pumping out a dance hit I would have loved five years ago. It's thrumming in my ear, the bass reverberating in my sternum. Opposite me, I can see a couple standing close to each other. The woman has an Afro, a slim waist exposed between a black top and trousers. The man's hand is on the wall behind her. He's talking softly in her ear. I wonder what their evenings look like. I bet they listen to indie music on the radio while cooking from scratch. Or maybe they paint together, every Sunday: a weekend ritual. Abstract art. It would get all over their clothes, their walls, but they wouldn't care. She catches me looking, and for the millionth time in my life, I am pleased that nobody can read my mind. She draws a hand up to her hair, embarrassed. I look away, but not before noticing that her nails are painted a jewel-toned plum, glossy and perfectly even. Ah. She is one of those. A Proper Person, I call them in my head. Proper People have well-fitting clothes and neat hair and glowing skin. You can break it all down into its component parts, but the thing is-they just look . . . groomed. They are doing something right. Something intangible. I wonder if they've all been told, like some rite of passage, and I haven't. "What?" Laura says, following my gaze. "Oh, look," I say, as the couple embrace again. "Oh to be young and in love," she says. I look curiously at her. I realize that I no longer see Jonty kiss her. Their relationship seems pally, somehow, more about teamwork than romance. No doubt she thinks the same of Reuben and me. Reuben seems reserved, remote, dismissive. Until the door closes behind us, that is. "He was a weird one," Laura shouts, pointing with her drink over to the bar. "Sadiq." "I know." "Pushy." "Oh, he'll leave us alone now." Laura raises her eyebrows but says nothing. "Jonty is acting strangely," she says after a moment. I look up in surprise. "Really?" "He said he didn't like my latest project. He's never said that. He's never cared." "No?" She rakes her fringe back. It snarls, sticking up slightly before drifting down. She puffs air into her cheeks. Lovely Jonty; he's been sacked from every office job he's ever had because of lateness. He often forgets he's going on holiday and has to be ushered to the airport in surprise. Posh and affable and a bit hopeless: What he wants more than anything is a quiet life, a G and T in his hand. I like to consider what everybody I meet truly wants. I started doing it when I was a teenager, and I haven't been able to stop. "What's going on with him?" I say, frowning. He has been temping, recently, painting perfume bottles with glitter for the Christmas season. He says it's quite meditative. "I have no idea. Do you?" I am often asked for advice about people. Nothing else, of course. Nothing highbrow. I am never asked for my opinion on medicine or law or planning permission or transfer deadline day or the war in Syria. Just people, and the things they do. "What's he saying to you?" "Nothing. Just-talking about the future more, maybe." She shrugs. She doesn't want to discuss it any further, I can see. "How's that master's?" she adds. "What master's?" I ask absentmindedly. "The cultural theory one." I frown. It does ring a bell. "Oh, still pending," I say vaguely. I am forever applying for master's courses and grants and pitching articles to The Guardian and thinking maybe I would like to be a coffee-shop owner. Maybe I will farm cocoa beans in South America? I will WhatsApp Laura. You burn too easily, though, she will send back. Maybe wheat in England instead? And even though it's endless, my career pondering, and must be tedious, she takes each and every whim as seriously as the first. "Good luck," she says with a smile. She looks like she's going to add something else, but then her gaze drifts to just behind me, and she never starts her sentence. Or rather, she starts a different one. "Okay, leaving time," she says. I look behind me, and there's Sadiq. I shrug, irritated, and move away a few feet, but he follows, an arm reaching out. "Leave us alone," Laura says. "You don't want to be talking to me like that," he says. My head turns, and the song stops, leaving a beat before a new one starts, during which time I can hear blood pulsing in my ears. And suddenly, it's not funny anymore. A frisson of fear moves through me. Images pop into my mind. Images of women followed down alleyways, coaxed into passenger seats, dismembered in car boots. I move farther away from him, toward the wall, away from Laura. I think of the couple I saw earlier, and how happy they looked, and I wish Reuben were here. He wouldn't say anything; he wouldn't have to. He has a presence like that. People seem to behave for him, like naughty children. Sadiq follows me, blocking me in. Behind him, Laura's eyes are narrowing so they are almost entirely closed. And now he is squaring up to me, right in front of me. I walk away from him, dodging around him, but he grabs me, pulls me back, and grinds into the back of me, his hands on either side of my hips-either side of my bum-like we are in a sex scene. I stand completely still for a second or two. Shock, is it? Whatever it is, it's two seconds during which I can feel not only his hands, his breath on the back of my neck, but his erection, too. Hard against the back of my thigh. I can't help but imagine how it looks. The thought intrudes in my mind like an unwanted internet pop-up, and I wince. I haven't felt another man's penis in over seven years. Until now. What would Reuben say? He'd call him a fucking dickhead, that's what he'd say. The thought comforts me. I move slowly away from him, smiling awkwardly because I don't know what else to do, the shock of being touched against my will like jumping off a pier and into the sea. I can still feel him. The warmth and hardness of him. My teeth start chattering. I don't say anything. I should, but I don't. I just want to be gone. Laura is taking the drink out of my hand and trying to find a surface to put it on. In the end, she places it on top of the speaker-she can only just reach-and she grabs my coat, and my arm, and we turn to leave. He grabs for me again. A catlike swipe. He catches just my finger, as I'm leaving. I try to pull it away from him, but he's stronger than me. I could shout, but what would I say? A man grabbing a woman's hand in a bar hardly feels like a crime, though maybe it is. Instead, I am complicit, almost holding his hand. Nobody knows it is against my will. Nobody knows what's going on in my head. His hand is momentarily like a manacle around mine. Excerpted from The Choice by Gillian McAllister All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
