I am beginning to suspect that I have in fact already had way too much coffee. I am also beginning to suspect that I’ve made a terrible mistake coming here.
She puts her coffee down on the table, and it sloshes out over the rim of the cup and into the saucer, almost-black against bone white.
‘Shit,’ she says, putting a briefcase on the floor by her feet and sitting. ‘It always does that, doesn’t it? I’ve never yet opened one of those little biscuit wrappers without it being wet. Sorry I’m a bit late. The Tube was a nightmare today, wasn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ I smile. ‘I’m strictly an above-ground kind of person.’
‘Ah. Of course you are,’ she says.
I notice that although she is dressed in a very smart and stylish way, she is still wearing a pair of battered cherry-red Doc Marten boots with tartan laces.
‘Childish rebellion,’ she says, noticing me notice. ‘Whenever I have to tart up for proper meetings with grown-ups, I have to keep something on to remind me who I really am.’
‘Oh,’ I reply, smiling slightly. ‘That makes sense, weirdly. Who were you meeting?’
‘Funders for the documentary actually, hence the suit. When I saw you through the window, you looked like you were considering doing a runner.’
‘I was considering doing a runner,’ I say quietly, staring at her downy hair and big green eyes and pierced nose. She looks so familiar, and oddly, neither of us has introduced ourselves, or confirmed who we are. ‘I still am, to be honest.’
‘Nervous about meeting me, or being in the big bad city?’
‘Maybe both. I tend to worry more than I used to … Olivia, my sister, thinks I am the safest person in the world to be out with. She says there’s no way the law of averages would allow anything bad to happen to me again – I’m inoculated against car accidents, plane crashes, terror attacks, crush incidents in the sales, fire, flood and lightning strikes. She’s suggested I hire myself out as a bodyguard to protect people from forces of nature and acts of God.’
Em laughs, and sips her coffee, then unwraps her little biscuit from its soggy little wrapper.
The more I look at her, the more I start to think that I know her. That I know her from somewhere other than the internet, and the deliberately blurred or blocked photos of her on there.
She meets my eyes, and grins.
‘You’re wondering where you know me from, aren’t you?’
‘I am, yes. Or am I imagining that we’ve met before?’
‘You’re not, no,’ she answers. Her accent is warm and gentle, the softened-off sound of a Scot who has lived away from home for a long time.
‘I’ve changed a bit,’ she continues, ‘since you last saw me. I’ll give you a clue – add in a lot of red hair, a very red face, and a bad attitude. Actually, I’ve still got the bad attitude. I’m just hiding it right now so I make a good impression.’
She stays very still, allowing me to examine her features: the now almost translucently pale skin, the almost-shaved hair. She does a theatrical scowl, demonstrating the bad attitude as well – and that’s when it falls into place. The evil eye gives it away.
I realise who she is, and it does something strange and primeval to my stomach. I feel muscles clench and insides writhe and everything flip-flop. I realise who she is, and my mind tells my body I’ve just plunged down on a roller coaster.
‘You were there,’ I say eventually, amazed at how calm my voice sounds. ‘With your mum and your brother and your … your dad. But your family isn’t Hoyle, and you weren’t Em.’
She nods, and her eyes flicker to the window and back, and I realise perhaps this is weird for her as well. She dunks her teeny-tiny biscuit into her coffee, and predictably enough, it crumbles and falls into the steaming liquid.
‘Bollocks,’ she says, laughing. ‘That always happens too … and you’re right. I changed my name when I was eighteen. One thing I’ve learned over the last few months is that everyone dealt with it in different ways. Some basically made themselves forget about it, pretended it never happened. Some are still in therapy. Some still talk about it every day. Some drink, some do worse, some are managing just fine.
‘But me? Back then I really couldn’t handle it. Because of Dad – because he died, and because of how he died, trying to protect us. At school, on the bus, everywhere, I was Earthquake Girl. I can see, as a professionally nosy person myself, why people were so fascinated – but I couldn’t deal with all that scrutiny. With people thinking they knew me.’
‘So you changed your name?’ I ask, feeling a familiar sense of numbness creep over me. The numbness is my friend, and it’s how I cope when I have to remember this stuff. Self-applied anaesthetic.
‘Yes. I was worried my mum would be upset, feel like I was somehow turning my back on Dad by getting rid of his name … but she understood. The name came from this mad old aunt I had. Well, probably great-great aunt; she was ancient even when I was a kid. She lived on her own in a caravan on a wild hill in wild country, with a nippy border terrier and a shotgun. She died when I was about twelve, but I always remember her – it felt like she’d inspired some major life goals, you know?’
‘Living on your own with a dog and a shotgun?’
‘Well, maybe, one day, when I actually grow up … but what I saw in her was complete independence. She’d never got married, or had kids, or bought a house, or had a flash career, or even a bank account. She wasn’t beholden to anyone, and she didn’t give a flying frog what anybody thought about her. She was tough and strong and very, very funny. My heroine. So when I was eighteen, I moved away for university. I moved from Edinburgh to Brighton, which was probably as far away as I could physically get.
‘I cut all my hair off – I always hated it anyway – and I changed my name from Samantha Frazer to Em Hoyle, and I decided that I wasn’t going to be Earthquake Girl any more. I loved my dad, and I never want to forget him, but I couldn’t carry on living my life in the shadow of what happened that night, you know?’
