Nearly Departed

Those Who Run Away

London Fields isn't the best park in London for a run, but Joel liked how he could do laps of it and count them as he went along. Kilometres and heart rate were fine metrics, to be sure, but nice round whole numbers were what made Joel's brain light up.

The perimeter of London Fields was about 1.6 kilometres in total and the satisfying attrition of doing one, then two, then three, then four loops of the park kept Joel's attention as rapt as it needed to be. It did, at times, get a bit like those old Hanna-Barbera cartoons where the same background tree or car would reprint itself in his peripheral vision over and over again, but that relentless consistency was actually one of the pleasures he got from running. Joel had been eight when he'd realised he could tell when an object in the background of a cartoon was about to be used by a character because it was slightly lighter in colour than everything else. He wished every object he was eventually going to have to interact with stood out from the rest of the world like those painted cels.

It would have been handy to be able to tell the difference between the objects destined to remain in the background of his life, and those that were soon going to be making the all-important jump into the foreground. If Joel's life had been styled after an episode of Scooby-Doo then maybe he'd have seen the baseball-sized rock on the path coming from a mile off, and not - as he had done - fallen flat on his face in front of two papoose-wearing women.

Joel brushed himself off and picked grains of gravel off his hands. He wasn't hurt. Not badly, at least. Three people had paused their weekend to try and help him back up and check if 'he was okay, mate,' but Joel had simply nodded and grunted a spartan 'thanks' as he shrugged them off. His face still burning scarlet, he walked towards a Wimbledon-green patch of grass where he could sit and squint at the sun.

London was a different animal in the summer. She was more herself, and everyone inside her was warmer and friendlier, sniffing for any opportunity to break out into a smile or sink a pint. Even the birds sounded happier. Joel's head still throbbed faintly, but a few swigs of lukewarm water from his water bottle would have him feeling right as rain, he thought.

It was then, when he was cocking his head back to let the water slide softly down his throat, that he got the feeling he was being watched. He placed his bottle back into his bag in slow motion, as if a policeman with a megaphone had just squawked at him to 'put your weapon down', and pretended to stretch his neck in a wide circle.

His far left was all clear - just a couple lying on a blanket, enjoying a punnet of red grapes. The best kind. To the right of that couple, positioned at about ten o'clock, was a bulldog on a thick rope leash. Straight in front of Joel was a group of men playing Spikeball. He slid his eyes swiftly to the periphery of that platoon before watching them try to shirtlessly outdo each other gave him second-hand embarrassment. Towards his right hand, positioned at about two o'clock, was a slim, sallow-faced man with tired eyes, reading in a folding camp chair.

It was so far, so good until Joel's head owled as far as it could go and he spied a familiar-shaped smudge. The profile of his nose was blocking his view so he shut his left eye for his right to focus, and the moment he did it, the smudge disappeared. He looked to his left. He looked to his right. He looked up to the sky, hoping for an answer. No dice. Whatever it was - or whoever it was - had gone. But he was left with a disconcerting feeling; a chill ran under his skin and threatened to seep into his bones. He wasn't one of those people who thought they had a sixth sense or anything like that. He simply couldn't ignore the feeling there was a pair of eyes boring into the back of his skull.

He was about to puppeteer his body back up to standing when he was startled by a voice that sounded like it came from directly behind him - perhaps because it did, in fact, come from directly behind him.

'It's Joel, right?'

Joel pivoted around and looked directly upwards, ineffectively blocking the sun with one hand and trying to work out why the silhouette standing above him knew his name.

'Yeah, it is,' he said, 'how did you know that?'

'I'm Nina, from the app,' said Nina, from the app.

'Oh. Wow,' said Joel. He unfolded his legs and got up, standing straight to make himself taller. His eyes widened as he confirmed it really was the same Nina he'd left on read for the last two days.

'Fancy bumping into you here,' he said, inexpertly forcing a casualness into every word he uttered. He already felt as if he knew her. Even though he didn't. Not properly, at least. They'd exchanged lengthy messages covering everything from the discomfort Nina felt in all-white social settings to their respective death row meals. And then he'd gone and fucked it all up.

Joel read Nina all the way from her feet to her head in the least creepy way he could. Her Birkenstocks told him she was functional, yet fashionable. Her burnt orange jumpsuit said she hadn't predicted today to be quite so warm and the tight coils of her dark hair - combined with her smile - made him instantly stressed out about how sweaty and bedraggled he looked in comparison. Joel fidgeted with the sleeves of his T-shirt.

'I'm sorry I didn't reply to your message the other day,' he spluttered. 'Like really sorry. I just-'

'What?'

'You asked me where I'd like to go on holiday and-'

'Did I?'

'Yes, and then I couldn't think of how to tell you that . . . wait, what do you mean "Did I"?'

'I mean, I don't really have any vivid memory of that,' said Nina, whose lips were pursed in amusement. 'I'm actually texting a lot of different men right now and they all blur into this one big homogenous toxic mass.'

'Ah, yeah. Right,' said Joel. He ran his finger over his chin and watched as the dimples in her cheeks deepened. 'You're fucking with me, aren't you?'

'Yes, Joel,' said Nina. 'I'm fucking with you. You don't need to apologise for not responding to a message I sent . . .' she paused as she pulled out her phone to verify its version of events, '. . . forty-three hours ago.'

'God, yeah. No, of course. You probably think I'm a bit of a maniac,' he said, trying his best to sound as sane as possible while acting the exact opposite. 'If you're wondering why my face is so red right now, it's because I've been running. Not because I'm, like, nervous about seeing you in person or anything.'

'Red?' said Nina.

'Red,' nodded Joel.

'I'm not sure about red,' said Nina, 'I'd say it's more of a . . . ghostly white? Kind of like a Victorian child that's suffering from consumption. That's actually why I came over to say hi. I thought I recognised you, and my friend, Aisha' - Nina thumbed out a woman sitting roughly twenty metres away who was eating crisps and staring intently at Joel - 'bet me five quid you would pass out if I came and confronted you.'

'I'm glad I didn't,' he replied, returning Aisha's daggers with his own scimitar of a stare. Nina, who seemed suddenly unsure of what to do with her arms, folded them in front of her chest before changing her mind and allowing them to hang loosely at her side. Joel suspected she was making a conscious effort to try and conceal the effects of some summer afternoon boozing.

'So am I. I'm actually a little surprised I recognised you. I don't mean to sound rude or anything, but you don't exactly come across as the sporty type.'

'That's because I'm not,' said Joel, 'which is also probably why I look like a . . . what was it you said again?'

'Like a Victorian child that's suffering from consumption.'

'Right, yes. That. Or like I'm about to be sick.'

Joel had a bad habit of bringing up sick early on in conversations and, every time he did, he was reminded there was never an easy way out of it. It wasn't exactly a topic that encouraged people to chime in with their own experiences - 'Oh, yeah, I was sick once, too,' - and it was never sexy to imagine someone hunched over a toilet bowl. Nina, however, took Joel's mood-killing commentary like a champ.

'Please don't,' she said, smiling and showing off two sets of tastefully off-white and shockingly straight teeth. You could tell she'd had braces as a teenager and those years of sacrifice had paid off in dividends now she'd entered her twenties.

Joel replied with a laugh - not his uninhibited high-pitched one but a more baritone 'huh-huh' - and glanced at Nina just long enough to get a good look at her eyes. And when he did, he...