Somewhere Only We Know (2 page)

Alex blinked and re-read the opening line of the letter he’d just picked up. He felt his mouth twitch into a smile; it was a fair point. He skimmed through the rest of the wonderfully effusive letter, particularly affectionate sentences jumping out from the long, rambling paragraphs.

“Nadia knows and excels at all the dance moves to Steps’
‘Tragedy’
and
‘5-6-7-8’
. Her
‘Macarena’
isn’t great, though.”

“She ran a half-marathon dressed in a hot pink bra with me to raise money for breast cancer after my aunt died of it.”

“I honestly think that were Prince Harry to meet Nadia, he’d probably want to marry her. How can you deny a potential future princess of this great nation the leave to remain in it?”

“If Nadia is removed from the country, you will be breaking up an epic pub quiz team. We win the Bellevue’s quiz almost every week and would have serious trouble finding a replacement with Nadia’s niche knowledge.”

Alex felt his smile grow wider as he read on; this was mildly insane.

The concluding paragraph was neat and controlled and out of place in the general sprawl of the letter as a whole – as if the writer had belatedly remembered that she was writing a formal letter to the government.

“You will know ‘Nadezhda Osipova’ from all your forms, papers and records. I hope, however, that I have been able to introduce you to ‘Nadia’ – the very best person I will ever know. I hope this slightly irreverent – but heartfelt! – letter has gone some way towards convincing you that she should have the right to remain in the UK on the grounds that she has an established private life due to her long residency here. Losing her would be like losing an arm. Please grant Nadia Osipova Indefinite Leave to Remain.”

Alex lingered on the last sentence, his smile fading, awkwardness returning. Like it was that easy! Especially not for Russian nationals. He flicked back to the personal details form on the front of the application pack and took a more interested look. The twenty-six-year-old Nadezhda Osipova had been resident in the UK since she was eleven, when she’d enrolled in a prestigious boarding school just outside London. After graduating she’d clung on to her residency here by jumping from one temporary visa to another. But that particular cat was now out of lives.

Nadezhda ‘Nadia’ Osipova’s immigration history was an absolute headache. Each year when her school had closed for the summer break she’d been shunted back across to her parents in Russia. She’d gone budget backpacking during her student years, taken typical beach holidays with mates, skied in the spring, returned to her family each Christmas. He wondered what the girl’s immigration lawyer was thinking. There was no way she was going to get Indefinite Leave to Remain with all of these random, elongated absences from the country.

Feeling a little heavy, he read the rest of Nadezhda's supporting letters, which were all focusing on the same theme. He returned to the first and re-read it. It had got to be one of the stupidest letters he'd seen in his long years at the Home Office – and this made it strangely fascinating. He couldn't deny it had hit its mark, though, because he found that he really was seeing
Nadia
, the charity-marathon running, pub quiz-winning, cheesy-dancing friend, rather than Nadezhda, the foreign national, who he knew wasn’t going to make the cut.

And so that’s probably why, despite knowing that his manager would most likely toss the application out, Alex wished Nadezhda Osipova well and passed her up the chain.

Nadia

Ten weeks after her work visa had been taken away from her, Nadia had finished reading every book in the flat and given it two spring-cleans. Ledge had kindly given her access to his Netflix account and she’d racked up hundreds of hours of watching questionable American drama. She wandered up and down the high street, window-shopping for things she couldn’t have afforded even before she lost her salary. She was bored, bored,
bored
.

So the three-days-a-week volunteer position at the local Oxfam shop was a godsend. It didn’t pay her, so it didn’t contravene the conditions of her immigration status, but it kept her busy and out of her own head, where these days she did almost nothing but obsess. Unfortunately, people weren’t really knocking down the door lately – to donate or to buy – and so Nadia spent a large proportion of each day needlessly rearranging the musty stock, or picking a book off the shelf to leaf through as she perched on the wobbly stool behind the ancient till.

On Tuesdays, though, Caro had no classes and usually came into the shop for an hour or two’s chat. It was, she cheerfully admitted, the only time in her life she ever contemplated setting foot in a charity shop.

“This is cute,” she said, holding out a pink, fluffy jumper with a white kitten on the front of it. Nadia glanced up from where she was optimistically filling out Gift Aid labels.

“Then buy it,” she suggested. “It’s what, all of four pounds?”

“Oh, no,” Caro laughed lightly, putting the hanger back on the rail but continuing to leaf through the jumble of items with her manicured fingers. It was hard to be mad at her; Caro’s family probably gave more to charity every year than this tiny little back-street Oxfam made per annum.

Because Caro was rich; double-barrelled surname rich. Her family business was something dreadfully unglamorous, but dreadfully lucrative, which allowed Caro and her brother to officially Do Nothing. The brother had disappeared from Heathrow with a backpack and a credit card as soon as he graduated from his mandatory university degree. Caro was more of a home bird, and so had decided she'd rather remain the eternal student. She was currently halfway through Masters degree number two and starting to give serious consideration to which of her many qualifications she was going to take through to a gratuitous PhD afterwards. Considering that this was probably the biggest concern that Caro had, it was lucky she was genuinely sweet and a wonderful friend, or else Nadia would have long since strangled her with a charitably donated knitted scarf.

“So, I assume you haven’t heard?” Caro asked, finishing with the jumpers and moving on to the rail arm of skirts.

“From the Home Office? No. I’m meant to by the end of the week.”

“Still hopeful?”

“Yeah,” Nadia lied. She wasn’t exactly hopeful. But it was important that she pretended to the others that she was; it made things easier for them, especially for Caro, who was still smarting after having her generosity snubbed. She’d tried to insist on using Daddy’s credit card to hire a proper immigration lawyer for her friend, but Nadia had just as insistently refused, assuring her that she and her family could handle the cost on their own. That was a lie too. The closest Nadia had gotten to a lawyer was a Google search for helpful blog posts on immigration law.

“Good.” Caro smiled. “Me too.” She pulled out a panelled tartan skirt. “I saw a lush skirt just like this in Bottega Veneta last month!” She laughed. “And that one was £845.”

Nadia rolled her eyes. “So buy it!” Caro laughed again, as though Nadia had just made the funniest joke ever, and continued her blasé browsing.

Alex

Lila’s thighs were clammy. Alex knew this because Lila kept mentioning it, as if it was absolutely no big deal to discuss the condition of her naked skin as she squeezed past him over and over again as they both tried to cook simultaneously in the poky kitchen.

Her pasta bake finally assembled and in the oven, Lila sat down on one of the kitchen’s two foldaway chairs and crossed one (apparently clammy) leg over the other.

“It does feel sort of sordid having bare legs in the office and on the Tube,” she confessed as she reached for her glass of water. “But even clear skin-coloured tights are just unbearable in this weather, you know?”

Alex snorted. “Imagine having to wear a suit and tie to the office and on the Tube!” he mocked. “You don’t exactly have my sympathy, Lils.”

Lila waved her hand dismissively. “Suit trousers aren’t skin-tight,” she argued. “It’s not the same. Besides, you could always buy a pair of those city shorts?”

Alex gave her a withering look. “Lils, have you actually ever seen anyone wearing those shorts?” he asked her.

“Yes!”

“I mean, like on the Tube, not in a magazine!”

“Then no,” Lila admitted, laughing.

“That’s because they’re a myth. Because men know that if they wear them, it will appear as if they have simply forgotten the bottom third of their suit.”

“You said men wearing Ugg boots was a myth,” Lila argued. “And then David Beckham wore them.”

“David Beckham is a celebrity, not a ‘man’!” Alex immediately countered, turning his attention briefly to his bubbling saucepan.

“Oh, he’s a man all right,” Lila joked. “And what a man!”

They both turned, distracted by the jingling of keys in the front-door lock. Lila hopped to her feet expectantly and moved out into the hallway to greet Rory as he arrived home, looking rumpled and sweat-stained, his tie already removed and three of his shirt buttons undone.

“S’bloody hot out there,” he informed them, as if they somehow weren’t aware of the fact.

“Was the Tube a nightmare?” Lila asked, sympathetically, going up on her tiptoes for a peck on the lips.

“Yeah. Central Line. Hottest line on the Underground, apparently.”

“I don’t understand how they can manage to give us WiFi underground, but not bloody air-conditioning!” Lila complained.

Alex stood awkwardly, half-in and half-out of the kitchen. Right on cue, that old third-wheel feeling had started up, making him feel like a horrible, pointless person. He’d mentioned it to Lila once, one night, after too many beers, and she’d just laughed, totally not getting it. She never got it.

“Third wheel?” she’d echoed. “Don’t be silly. What if we’re more like a tricycle, you, me and Ror?” But that was just her being sweet, of course, and it didn’t change the fact that Alex was well and truly a sad little unicycle, all on his own.

On the face of it, it should all have been so different. Lila was
his
friend, or she had been, back at university, anyway. Sure, they may have fallen out of touch for a couple of years, but fate had intervened in the end. It was one of those “six degrees of separation” things; she was in a house-share with someone who was casually dating a mate of Rory’s from work. If that mate hadn’t thrown a house party at exactly that point in time, in a city of eight million people, Lila Palmer may just have remained an obscure Facebook Friend. And Rory – Alex's taller, darker, richer and generally more attractive flatmate – would never have met her. But meet they did, and within two weeks she was sitting sheepishly across the breakfast table from Alex wearing Rory’s dressing gown and exchanging awkward small talk about how life had been to them since graduation. And within six weeks, Alex was painfully certain he was in love with her.

Alex remained stupidly paused in the doorframe as Lila followed her boyfriend into his bedroom, chattering away brightly as she’d just been doing in the kitchen with him; the bedroom door was kicked closed, almost like an afterthought. He guessed he wouldn’t be getting to hear what else Lila thought about David Beckham, not that night anyway.

Alex jumped as his saucepan of veg finally boiled dry on the hob, hissing loudly as if it was as pissed off with Alex as he was with himself.

Nadia

Nadia was home from her shift at the shop a little later than usual for a Thursday evening; she’d stopped off at Tesco to buy herself a cheap (but probably not that nutritious) dinner of value-brand instant noodles (supposedly “chicken flavour” but ominously suitable for vegans). Holly was already home when she got there, sitting awkwardly on the very edge of the sofa cushions, knees and ankles together, shoes still on. An impossibly crisp white envelope sat on the coffee table in front of her.

“It came, then?” Nadia asked, in a ridiculously calm voice.

“It came,” Holly confirmed, pressing her palms to her knees, as if she was physically stopping herself ripping open the letter herself.

“Hmmm.” Instead of pouncing on the piece of paper that pronounced her future, Nadia walked into the kitchen and began methodically unpacking her shopping into the cupboards. Holly came to stand in the doorway.

“Well, aren’t you going to open it?” she asked, incredulously.

“In a minute,” Nadia replied.

“How can you wait?”

Nadia turned and rested her hands behind her on the kitchen counter. “I just need a minute, Hol, okay?”

“But…"

“That letter quite possibly tells me that I need to pack up and leave everything I know.” Nadia tried for a light tone but failed miserably. “Let me just have a few more minutes in blissful ignorance, please.”

“Oh, hun.” Holly crossed the kitchen and pulled her friend into a hug. “You haven’t been thinking that, have you? They’re not going to deport you. You’ve lived here since you were a little kid. You’ve paid taxes here. You probably speak better English than me – and definitely better English than Ledge!” Nadia gave a weak little smile. “Everything’s going to be fine,” Holly promised. “Let’s open the letter.”

Nadia could barely open the envelope, her finger clumsily sticking as she used it to try and rip the seal. She shook the contents into her lap. A shiny folded booklet fell out first: a multi-ethnic group of people smiling out at her from under dark turbans and brightly coloured hijabs. It was followed by one piece of A4 paper, just one. Nadia tried to read every word at once; the print just swam before her eyes. She swallowed and cleared her throat, focusing on the familiarity of her name at the head of the letter and slowly fragments started to make sense.

Dear Miss Osipova…  regret to inform you… application has been denied on the grounds that you have spent more than 450 days out of the country during your residency here… vacate the country within three months…

Nadia couldn’t read any further. She let the piece of paper fall to her lap on top of the leaflet and pressed the hands that had been holding it against her temples. Vacate the country. In three months she would be back living with her parents, something she hadn't done since before she was a teenager. She’d have to go and live in a country that she barely knew. She may not have ever been totally accepted as British – her surname and her international school accent and her constant visa issues had never allowed for that – but it was even worse when she was back in Russia.