13 Little Blue Envelopes(17)

gotten a Coke. He glanced behind him and placed himself

between the dancing guys and Ginny.

“Don’t drink,” he explained, seeing her staring at the soda. “I fulfilled my quota when I was sixteen. The government issued me a special card.” He fixed her again with his unwavering stare.

His eyes were very green, with a kind of gold starburst at the center that was just a little off-putting and intense.

“So, are you going to tell me why you did this strange thing or not?” he asked.

“I . . . just wanted to.”

“You just wanted to buy out the show for the week? Because you couldn’t get tickets for the London Eye or something?”

“What’s the London Eye?”

“The bloody great Ferris wheel across from Parliament that all the normal tourists go to,” he said, leaning back and eyeing her curiously. “How long have you been here?”

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“Three days.”

“Have you seen Parliament? The Tower?”

“No . . .”

“But you managed to find my show in the basement of

Goldsmiths.”

She sipped her Guinness to buy herself a second before

answering, then tried not to wince or spit. Ginny had never tasted tree bark, but this was what she imagined it would be like if you ran it through a juicer.

“I got a little inheritance,” she finally said. “And I wanted to spend some of it on something I thought was really worth it.”

Not totally a lie.

“So, you’re rich?” he said. “Good to know. Me, well, I’m not rich. I’m a hooligan.”

Before he began setting the names of coffee drinks to music, Keith had led a very interesting life. In fact, Ginny soon found out, he spent the ages of thirteen to seventeen being a parent’s worst nightmare. His career began with crawling over the fence to the garden of the local pub and begging for drinks or telling jokes for them. Then he figured out how to lock himself into his local at night (by hiding in an under-used cupboard) and get enough alcohol for himself and his friends. The owners got so sick of being robbed that they gave up and hired him under the table.

There followed a few years of breaking things for no reason and setting the occasional small fire. He fondly recalled razor blading the word wanker into the side of his schoolmaster’s car so that the message would show up in a few weeks, after it rained and rusted. He decided to try stealing. At first, he stole little 76

things—candy bars, newspapers. He moved up to small appliances and electronics. It finally ended for him after he broke into a takeout shop and was arrested for grand theft chicken kebab.

After that, he decided to turn his life around. He created a short documentary film called How I Used to Steal and Do Other Bad Things. He sent this away to Goldsmiths, and they thought enough of it to accept him and even give him a grant for “special artistic merit.” And now he was here, creating plays about coffee.

He stopped talking long enough to notice that she wasn’t

drinking her Guinness at all.

“Here,” he said, grabbing the glass and finishing off the remainder in one long gulp.

“I thought you said you don’t drink.”

“That’s not drinking,” he said dismissively. “I meant drink.”

“Oh.”

“Listen,” he said, moving closer, “as you’ve effectively paid for the entire show—and cheers for that—I might as well tell you this. I’m taking it to the Fringe Festival, in Edinburgh. You know the Fringe?”

“Not really,” Ginny said.

“It’s pretty much the biggest alternative theater festival in the world,” he said. “Lots of celebrities and famous shows have come out of it. Took me forever to get the school to pay to send us up there, but I did it.”

She nodded.

“So,” he said, “I take it you’ll be coming to the show again?”

She nodded again.

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“I’ve got to pack everything up after the show tomorrow and move it out for the night,” he said. “Maybe you’d like to join in.”

“I’m not sure what to do with the rest of the tickets. . . .”

Keith smiled confidently.

“Now that you’ve paid for them, they’ll be easy to unload.

There aren’t a lot of people around since it’s June, but the international office will take anything free. And the foreign students are usually still here, wandering around.”

He looked down at her hands. She was clutching at her

empty glass.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll walk you to the tube.”

They left the smoke of the bar and stepped back into the fog.

Keith walked her along a different route, one that she would never have been able to find on her own, to the glowing red circle with the bar cutting through it that read underground.

“So, you’ll be back tomorrow?” he asked.

“Yeah,” she said. “Tomorrow.”

She fed the ticket eater and passed through the clacking gate, descending down into the white-tiled tube station. When she got to the platform, she saw that there was a pineapple sitting on the rails of the tracks. A whole pineapple in perfect condition. Ginny stood on the very edge of the platform and looked down at it.