The Gates of Balawat, Chapter 3
Ella bumps into Andy again, but he doesn't recognise her. Is this a brush-off, or is there something else going on?
Ella threw some frozen stew in the microwave as soon as she got home and while it reheated she pulled out her laptop and searched for Andy’s webcomic. She came up with nothing. Both Birdgirl.com and Birdgirl.net led to ISP holding pages. She couldn’t find anything that looked remotely like a webcomic about a girl with feathers instead of hair. She chastised herself for not asking his surname because without that, she really didn’t have anything else to search on.
Still, at least she had his phone number. She took out the piece of paper and entered the number into her phone book so that there was no risk she might lose it. She wouldn’t text him immediately — she didn’t want to look needy — but would wait for a socially acceptable period of time to elapse. A few days, perhaps.
But what would she do if she bumped in to him at the museum before she had texted him, or before he replied? Wouldn't that just be awkward? Wouldn't it seem as if she was being impatient? Well, it was Friday. She had stuff to do this weekend and he probably didn’t go in on the weekends anyway, because the museums and galleries were always stuffed to the seams with people. So she’d text him Sunday evening and say she was planning to be there on Monday.
❦
It was 8pm, Sunday. The optimal text sending time, according to Ella’s back-of-a-napkin estimates. She had mulled over the contents of the message all weekend, scribbled out a few versions on paper, and had come to the conclusion that short was sweet.
“Lovely to meet you Friday. Would love to meet up…” No, two ‘loves’, sounds clunky.
“Lovely to meet you Friday. Would be delighted…“ Too formal.
“Great to meet you Fried by…” Damn you, autocorrect!
“Great to meet you Friday. Would love a comics lesson! When would be good for you? I’ll be around same time all week, btw. Ella.”
With heart beating hard and stomach tight with nerves, she typed the message in, being very careful to make sure there were no further embarrassing autocorrections that might turn innocent words into something awful. She checked it over and over again, wondering how it would read to Andy. Too cold? Too eager? She could obsess over it all evening, if she let herself, but instead she took a deep breath and hit ‘send’.
“Message not sent,” her phone said, an alarming little red exclamation mark driving home the point. She tried again. Still not sent. How odd. She pulled out the piece of paper and double-checked the number. It was correct. Except, clearly it wasn’t because the text was resolutely refusing to send. He must have written it down wrong. Damn.
She put the phone down and tried not to think about whether the error was deliberate. It didn’t make sense, given how genuinely enthusiastic he’d been whilst they were chatting. But she would see him tomorrow, maybe, or the day after and check with him then.
❦
Monday morning. Interminable. Cruel in its slowness. Monday lunch, tasteless. Monday afternoon, worse than the morning. Long and slow, without the smallest glimmer of interest to move it along. Then, shift end. Almost rocket-propelled, Ella left the shop and hurried her way to the museum. Taking her usual route, she wound through the exhibits, between gaggles of tourists. Back past Ashurnasirpal II, back to the second of the Assyrian rooms.
It took her a while to realise that it was him, sitting on the bench. His hair was shorter, much shorter. It didn’t really suit him, she thought. Too severe. But maybe it would soften as it grew out. She sat down, not too close to him, not too far away.
“Hi!” she said, pulling out her sketchbook and pencils. He glanced up at her briefly without a glimmer of recognition in his face. “You’ve had your hair cut. Looks, um, nice,” she lied.
“I’m sorry,” he replied. “Do I know you?”
“Ella. We chatted on Friday?” she said, taken aback.
“I’m sorry, you must have me mixed up with someone else.” She felt her face burn red with shame and embarrassment.
“Sorry to have disturbed you.” She thrust her sketch book back in her bag and fled.
❦
Ella spent her precious sketching time over the next month in the park near work, drawing vignettes of office workers eating a late lunch, dog walkers with their whippets or labradors or London battle mutts, tourists having a sit down to rest their blistered feet. She studied architecture, looking up when most people look down, and had ample opportunity to add cars, buses and London taxis to her repertoire.
Rain finally drove her back to the museum, memories of Andy just a faded ‘what if’ lurking at the back of her mind, mostly forgotten, or maybe just ignored. She took her usual route through the Balawat Gates, but she eschewed the Assyrian rooms this time, making her way to Ancient Greece and the works of the Minoans, a great culture that had ended in death by giant tsunami.
There were pottery jars, bronze sculptures and jewellery but, despite walking the room twice, nothing caught her eye. On to the Mycenaean room. More bronze, more pottery, still no inspiration. Ella rambled through the museum, through Athens and Lycia, through Medieval Europe, through Asia. But it was in her most loved and most hated gallery, Ancient Egypt, that she realised what she was looking for. Who she was looking for.
It had been a long month, long enough — with the application of willpower — to forget. But one glimpse of him and she was back in the Great Courtyard, chatting and laughing and smiling and wondering at her good fortune. Yet he had snubbed her, had blanked her. She should just walk away and forget him. But she couldn’t quite bring herself to turn her back.
Instead, she found a convenient nook between cabinets to stand in, pulled her sketch book out and began to draw. The gallery was one of the busiest in the museum, but for once that suited her just fine. She was tucked out of the way and although the tourists obstructed her view of him, they also obstructed his view of her, providing cover and reducing the chances that he would notice that he was being observed. Maybe she could draw him out of her mind, draw him and forget him, properly this time. Soon she was absorbed by her work, so absorbed that she was startled when Andy finished and began to pack up.
Day after day, Ella made her way to the National Museum, finding Andy in a gallery somewhere and finding herself a discrete spot from where to observe. On a couple of occasions, he noticed her, but only smiled and looked away, the next day as oblivious as ever.
❦
“It’s too quiet in here,” Caroline complained as she looked around her empty shop.
“It’s that new Underground station they’re building,” replied Ella looking up from her sketchbook. “It’s cut us off from the main drag.”
“We could do another stock take?”
“Again?”
“Fair point. Do some flyers?”
“Could do.” Caroline plumped herself down behind the counter next to Ella and peered at her sketchbook. “What you got there?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t ‘nothing’ me, girl. You’ve been bolting out of here on the dot for the last month. You’re up to something. Is it him? It is him, isn’t it?” She reached over and snatched away the sketch book before Ella could react. She flipped through the pages as Ella sat there dumbly.
“Oh my god, this is him?” Caroline asked as she looked at page after page, portrait after portrait.
Ella winced. “Yes. It’s him.”
“Name?”
“Andy.”
“I thought he’d vanished from view?”
“It was weird. We had a fabulous chat one Friday, and I thought it might, y’know, go somewhere. He gave me his phone number and said he wanted to meet up again. But the number didn’t work and the next time I saw him, he acted like he’d never even met me before.”
“Jerk.”
“Yup.”
“But you still can’t get him out of your head, huh?”
“Nope.”
“Is there a reason you switched his hair around?”
“What?”
“See, here the parting’s on the left,” she pointed at a rough sketch. “Here it’s on the right, and the hair is a bit longer.”
“Huh.”
“Well, minus ten out of ten for actual observation, then. Though if he’s half as hot in real life as he is in these sketches, you should give it another shot.”
“He pretended he didn’t know me!”
“Maybe he’s face-blind. Some people are — they can’t remember or recognise people.”
“Maybe he’s just a twat.”
“Maybe he’s got amnesia!”
“No, I think he’s just a twat.”
“Oh! He’s a twin! I totally bet that’s it! He and his identical twin brother, they dress the same, they both love art, and they take turns sketching at the museum!”
“I really think he’s just a...”
“That would explain why one is left-handed and one is right-handed! And why he didn’t recognise you!”
“But why...”
“You’ve got to figure this out! Oh, this is so exciting. The Mystery of The Museum Twins. You have to come up with a ruse, to talk to them.”
“A ruse?”
“Yes! A ruse. A ploy. A tactic.”
“Right. Okay,” Ella said, deeply skeptical.
“Hey, it’s nearly time,” Caroline shut the sketchbook and gave it back to Ella. “Why don’t you knock off early?”
❦
“Er, excuse me,” Ella said tentatively, as she twiddled a pencil round in her fingers like a drum major with a particularly small mace. Andy looked up and smiled. At least, he looked like Andy. “Um, I know this is really stupid and I’m so sorry to interrupt, but you wouldn’t happen to have a pencil sharpener on you, would you?” She presented the pencil as supporting evidence, the tip of the lead broken off. “I seem to have lost mine.”
“Sure,” he said, putting his sketchbook down and rummaging in his bag. “There you go.”
“Thanks,” she sharpened her pencil, slowly, carefully. “Do you sketch here every day? I’m sure I’ve seen you before.”
“Most days, yes.”
“Well, thanks for that!” She handed back the sharpener, looking him full in the face for a moment as she did so. Eyes blue, small mole on left temple, faded freckles, clear pale skin, black hair parted on the left, cut floppy.
“You’re welcome!” he said, and there was that smile again. Ella smiled warmly in return and walked away, holding the image of his face in her mind so that she could get it down on paper as soon as she found herself a seat.
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