Our Stop(37)

Nadia tried the tennis ball under her bum like Emma had it. Nothing. She moved it to the left and tried it there. Nothing there, really, either. A sort of weird digging sensation, maybe, where the surface of the ball dug into her skin, but it didn’t feel like a release.

She moved the ball up a bit so it was in the middle of her back. Nadia moved her feet up so her soles were flat on the floor, knees bent, and used the leverage to move her body up and down on the yoga mat. The ball slipped further up, to near her shoulder blade and behind her heart. There. There Nadia felt a hot, pulsating sort of pain, that if she had to identify out loud she’d only be able to locate as right in the middle of her body. She kept her eyes clamped tightly shut as the ball moved back and forth, back and forth, digging deeper and deeper and deeper. She altered the motion so that instead of up and down she went around and around, the heat rising and rising, and Nadia saw in her mind an amalgamation of every time a man had dented her heart.

She thought about Awful Ben, and her school sweetheart, and the guy in her uni halls who had slept with her and then ignored her. She thought of all the nights – endless nights, it seemed – that she had stayed home alone, her phone by her side, waiting for a text message from a member of the opposite sex to validate her, to validate her existence. She thought about her grandfather’s affair and how he’d left her grandmother for their neighbour, and she thought about how much she wanted to love and be loved in return. That her appetite for it might consume her whole, because for all the pep talks she gave herself there was something, buried very, very deep, that told her that maybe she wasn’t worthy of it.

‘Good,’ said Ivanka now, kneeling down beside Nadia. She felt the woman’s hand on her shoulder. Nadia’s face was wet through with tears. ‘This is fascial release.’

Winding through the tight back lanes that would eventually give out to an A road and then the motorway, the women drove home in companionable silence. Nadia reflected on the lightness she felt after the fascia class – like her shoulders were no longer bunched up in stress around her ears and her breath shallow, like she couldn’t quite steady herself. Her whole body had been tense since Thursday night – maybe longer. Nadia hadn’t realized how she’d carried anxiety in her jaw, tension in her arms. How had a tennis ball relieved her of all that? It was a miracle. She came out knowing that she had to take her life in her own hands, that she had to take charge of her own romantic destiny. Emma absentmindedly sang along to a Spotify playlist she’d made of all her favourite love songs, and Nadia noted that she seemed happier now too.

Nadia typed in the URL for Missed Connections on her phone and stared at the submissions box. She took a breath. Take charge of yourself, she repeated in her mind. She typed:

Train Guy: You, me, coffee on the platform at 7.30 a.m., Thursday? Love, Coffee Spill Girl (though I promise not to spill any on you)

She read it, and reread it, wondering if it was too to-the-point, and if they were supposed to write back to each other a little bit more first. But, surely not. Surely the whole point of Missed Connections was to get a date in the diary and not miss what otherwise wouldn’t have happened. They’d established a rapport and she’d enjoyed that, and maybe before this morning she would have gone back-and-forth a little more. But now she’d decided: she desperately wanted to meet him, because she understood how she was a woman worth meeting.

Yes, Nadia decided. I am going to be a modern, go-getting woman and get this off the page and into real life. I am ready for my future.

And with that, she hit ‘send’.

‘Did you get that feeling too?’ Emma asked her, a little time later. ‘That you were having some big amazing release?’

‘Yeah, it was so strange. Like, she was right! There was something hidden in there, and I got it!’

‘Me too,’ said Emma.

‘Mine was in my heart, if you can believe that,’ said Nadia.

Emma smiled. ‘I can.’

Nadia smiled too. She could as well. ‘Where was yours?’

‘A bit all over, actually,’ said Emma. ‘Mostly around my pelvis though.’

‘Ooooh, how telling!’ said Nadia, about to make a joke about her sex life that was rudely interrupted by the ringing of a phone. It wasn’t Nadia’s ringtone. It was Emma’s. Emma’s hand jutted out, off the wheel to where it sat below the radio, just as Nadia’s did.

‘I’ll get it!’ Nadia trilled, since Emma was driving, and she went to pick it up just as Emma said, ‘No!’

Emma clawed at Nadia’s hand so that Nadia ended up holding one end of the phone and Emma the other. Startled, Nadia looked at her friend, and Emma turned her head away from the road and looked at Nadia, and Nadia didn’t understand. In shock, she dropped the phone, registering the panic on Emma’s face, who suddenly let go too, just as something happened outside of the car, beyond the windscreen.

Nadia followed Emma’s gaze, and it all happened so fast, so quickly, but so slowly at the same time. No reactions were fast enough. There were people in the road – men. A group of men in the road. The car brakes screeched and the car jerkily slowed down.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, Nadia silently prayed. Or did she say it out loud?

Both women screamed as the group in the road turned their heads and registered the car, dividing themselves by either propelling forward or pulling back. The car came in at a halt, stopping inches from where the crowd had just been. There was silence. Shock. Nadia turned to Emma, who still had both hands on the steering wheel, her arms fixed straight in front of her, panting.