The Authenticity Project Read online

  “How long have you been in London, Riley?” she asked him.

  “I got off the plane the day before yesterday. I left Perth ten days ago and did a couple of stops on the way. I’m staying with some friends of friends, in Earl’s Court.”

  Riley’s whole demeanor was easygoing and relaxed, such a contrast to the rigidity of most Londoners. He’d slipped his shoes off and was swinging one of his bare, tanned feet back and forth. Monica wondered if there were still grains of sand between his toes. She fought the urge to drop a pencil just so she’d have an excuse to scrabble around under the table and have a look. Stop it, Monica, she chided herself, remembering one of her mother’s favorite sayings: A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. But it was all so bloody contradictory at times. How on earth did that fit in with Don’t leave it too late to have a family, Monica. Nothing brings more joy than family? Even Emmeline Pankhurst had a husband, and children—five of them. Doing life properly wasn’t easy.

  “Have you been to London before?” she asked Riley.

  “No. This is my first time in Europe, actually,” he replied.

  “I’m going to Borough Market tomorrow, for supplies. You want to come? It’s one of my favorite parts of London,” she said, almost before she knew what she was doing. Where had that come from?

  “I’d love that,” he replied with a grin that looked totally genuine. “When are you leaving? I have no plans at all.” How could anyone have no plans? And he hadn’t even asked what, or where, Borough Market was. Monica would never have agreed to an arrangement without the necessary due diligence. But she was very glad he had.

  “Why don’t you meet me here at tenish? After the early-morning rush.”

  * * *

  • • •

  MONICA HAD ADDED a bright-red sweater, low-heeled boots, some large hoop earrings, and a dash of red lipstick to her work outfit of crisp white shirt and black trousers. She kept reminding herself that this was a work trip and not a date. Riley wanted to get to know London better; she needed some help carrying the bags. If it had been a date, she’d have agonized for days about what to wear, planned a few witty anecdotes to be tossed casually into the conversation should it flag, and looked up potential venues for any impromptu change in plans. Preparation is the key to effective spontaneity. Not that any of that had worked so far, thought Monica, remembering Duncan, the bee-loving vegan. She prodded that thought, like checking a sore tooth, to see if it still hurt. Nothing but a dull ache. Well done, Monica.

  Riley had turned up late. She knew she’d said tenish (she’d been trying to sound relaxed and casual), but she’d meant ten, obviously. Not ten thirty-two. But being cross with Riley felt like kicking a puppy. He was so bouncy and enthusiastic about everything, and so different from herself that she found him intriguing, if a little exhausting. He was also drop-dead gorgeous, she thought, then chided herself for being so shallow. Sexual objectification was not OK, under any circumstances.

  “I wish my brothers and sisters could see all this,” Riley said as they wove their way around all the stalls. The various cultures and influences that made up the melting pot of London butted up against one another, assaulting the senses and competing for custom.

  “I wish I had brothers and sisters,” said Monica. “I was a much longed-for only child.”

  “Did you invent an imaginary friend?” asked Riley.

  “No, I didn’t actually. Does that mean I have a terrible lack of imagination? But I did give all my teddy bears names and ticked them off on a register every evening.” Oh God, was she sharing too much? She was definitely sharing too much.

  “I spent all my spare time at Trigg Beach surfing with my older brothers. They took me out when I was so small I couldn’t even carry my own board,” said Riley. They joined the queue for pulled pork rolls. “I just love street food, and eating with my fingers, don’t you? I mean, who invented knives and forks? What a killjoy!”

  “Actually, if I’m honest, street food makes me a bit nervous,” said Monica. “I’m pretty sure they don’t get regular food safety inspections, and none of them are displaying a food hygiene certificate.”

  “I’m sure it’s all perfectly safe,” said Riley. Monica loved his optimism but thought him dangerously, if sweetly, naive.

  “Is it though? Look at the lady serving. She’s not wearing gloves, despite doing the cooking and handling all that money, which is a hot bed of bacteria.” Monica knew that she was probably coming across as a little obsessive. It was likely, actually probable, that Riley had much less interest in food safety than she did. She also found herself flushing at the use of the words hot and bed next to each other. Get a grip, Monica.

  After a bit, though, Monica realized that, despite herself, she was enjoying being the sort of girl who ate with her fingers on the street, with a gorgeous man she barely knew. She was being positively reckless. The world suddenly seemed much bigger and more laden with possibility than it had just a few moments ago. They moved on to a stall selling Mexican churros, still warm, covered in sugar and dipped in molten chocolate.

  Riley took his thumb and dabbed it gently at the corner of her mouth. “You missed a bit of chocolate,” he said. Monica felt a yearning much stronger than the one for sugar. She quickly ran through her mental list of all the reasons why the positively steamy but totally unwelcome visions that had forced their way into her head were never going to be a reality. Riley was just passing through. There really was no point in getting involved. Riley was only just thirty, seven years younger than her. And he seemed even younger, a lost boy in Neverland. He’d never be interested in her anyhow. She knew roughly where she sat in the pecking order of attractiveness. Riley, with his exotic beauty (Australian father, Balinese mother, she’d discovered), was way out of her league.

  “We should be heading back,” she said, aware that if a spell had been woven, she was breaking it.

  “Are your parents foodies, too, Monica? Is that where you get it from?” asked Riley, as they wound their way past a stall groaning with baskets of olives in every shade of green and black.

  “Actually, my mother’s dead,” replied Monica. Why had she said that? You’d think she’d know by now how quickly that could put a downer on a conversation. She carried on, in a gushing stream of words, to avoid a pause that Riley would feel the need to fill. “Our home was filled with convenience foods—instant mashed potato, Findus pancakes, and, for special occasions, M&S Chicken Kievs. Mum was an ardent feminist, you see. She thought that cooking from scratch would be surrendering to the patriarchy. When my school announced that the girls were going to do home economics while the boys did woodwork, she threatened to handcuff herself to the school gate unless I was allowed a free choice. I was so envious of my friends, carrying home beautifully decorated fairy cakes while I slaved over a wonky birdbox.”

  Monica could remember so vividly shouting at her mother: You are not Emmeline Pankhurst! You are just my mother!

  Her mother had replied, in a voice that was pure steel, We are all Emmeline Pankhurst, Monica. Otherwise what was it all for?

  “I bet your mum would be really proud of you now, Monica. Owning your own business,” said Riley.

  It was so precisely the right thing to say that Monica felt a lump forming in her throat. Oh God, please don’t cry. She channeled Madonna again. Madge would never, ever, let herself weep in public.

  “Yes, I think she would. That’s one of the main reasons I started the café, actually,” she said, managing to keep the wobble out of her voice. “Because I knew how much she’d have loved it.”

  “I’m really sorry about your mum,” said Riley, putting his arm around her shoulder, a little awkwardly because he was carrying so much of her shopping.

  “Thanks,” she replied. “It was a long time ago. I just never understood why her. She was such a firebrand, so vivid and alive. You’d think cancer would have p
icked on an easier target. She used to hate it when people talked about ‘fighting’ or ‘battling’ the disease. She’d say, How am I expected to fight something I can’t even see? It’s not a level playing ground, Monica.”

  They walked in step, in a slightly strained silence, then she brought the conversation back round to pricing structures, which made her feel much more comfortable.

  “I’m not sure I could cope with this climate for long. What was I thinking coming to England in November? I’ve never been anywhere so cold,” Riley told her as they walked over London Bridge, back to the north side of the river. “I only had room for light stuff in my rucksack, so I had to buy myself this overcoat before I froze to death.” His Australian accent turned every statement into a question. The wind picked up, whipping Monica’s long, dark hair across her face.

  They stopped for a minute, in the middle of the bridge, so Monica could point out some of the landmarks lining the Thames—St. Paul’s Cathedral, the HMS Belfast, and the Tower of London. As she was talking, something extraordinary happened. Riley, still clutching an armful of boxes and bags, leaned toward her and kissed her. Just like that. Midsentence.

  Surely, you couldn’t do that? In this day and age, it was entirely inappropriate. You had to ask permission. Or, at least, wait for a signal. She’d been saying if the Tower of London ravens fly away, superstition says the Crown and country will fall, and she was pretty damn sure that that sentence couldn’t be seen as a come-on. She waited for her sense of outrage to gather. Instead, she found herself kissing him back.

  Frailty, thy name is woman! she thought, quickly followed by, Oh, sod it. She grasped, desperately, for her mental list of reasons why this was absolutely not a good idea. Then, as he kissed her again she tore it in half, ripped it into shreds, scattered those pieces over the side of the bridge, and watched them float like snowflakes into the river below.

  Riley was never going to be a sensible long-term proposition, obviously; he was too different from her, too young, too transitory, and she’d like to bet he’d never read any Dickens. But maybe she could have a fling? See what happened. Be spontaneous. Maybe she should try on that persona, like she would a fancy dress outfit, just for a while.

  FIFTEEN

  Riley

  Riley had been several hours into his journey to Heathrow, fascinated by the flight tracker on the screen in front of him, which showed a little airplane traveling across the Northern Hemisphere. Until last week, he’d never crossed the equator. Was it true that the water in England swirled in the opposite direction down a plughole? He didn’t suppose he’d be able to find out, since he’d never noticed which way it circled back home. I mean, why would you ever pay attention to that?

  He reached into the backpack by his feet to find the thriller he’d been reading and pulled out a pale-green notebook. It didn’t belong to him, although it reminded him of the book he used back home to jot down customer briefs for his gardening business. For a moment, he wondered if he’d gotten the wrong bag, but everything else in it was his; his passport, wallet, guidebooks, and a chicken sandwich, lovingly packed by Barbara. He turned to the friendly-looking, middle-aged woman in the seat next to him.

  “Does this belong to you?” he asked, thinking that she might have mistaken his bag for her own, but she shook her head.

  Riley flipped the book over to look at the front cover. On it were the words The Authenticity Project. Authenticity. Great word. There was something really British about it. He rolled it over in his mouth, trying it out loud. It tied his tongue into knots and made him sound like he had a speech impediment. Riley turned to the first page. He had eight hours left to go; he might as well see what was in it, since it appeared to have hitched a lift in his luggage.

  Riley read Julian’s story and Monica’s. Julian sounded like a proper character, exactly as he’d imagined the English to be. Monica needed to chill out a bit. She should come and live in Australia! She’d soon relax and have a brood of half-Australian kids running around her feet and driving her crazy. He looked up Fulham in the London A to Z he’d been given as a leaving present from a client. It was just around the corner from Earl’s Court where he was headed. What a coincidence. How strange to think that these were people he’d never met but whose deepest secrets he now knew.

  He turned to the next page, where the handwriting changed from Monica’s neat and rounded script to a more haphazard scrawl, as if an insect had walked through a pool of ink and then died.

  My name is Timothy Hazard Ford, although when you have a middle name like Hazard, no one is going to call you Timothy, so for most of my life I’ve been known as Hazard Ford. Yes, I have heard all the jokes about sounding like a road sign. Hazard was the surname of my maternal grandfather, and using it as one of my names was probably the most unconventional thing my parents ever did. Since then their whole lives have been dominated by the question “What would the neighbors think?”

  Hazard. Riley knew exactly who he was. The ex-banker he’d met on his last stop in Thailand, the one who’d been so interested in Riley’s life and his plans. How had Hazard’s book ended up in his bag? How on earth was he going to return it?

  You’ll have read Julian’s and Monica’s stories. I’ve never met Julian, so I can’t tell you any more about him, but I can fill you in a little about Monica. I live just a few minutes’ walk from her café (which is at 783 Fulham Road, by the way, next to Nomad Bookshop. You will need that information!), so I dropped in there after I read her story.

  You will need that information? Who, Riley wondered, was Hazard talking to? He hoped he’d find out.

  I only went there to give her the book back, but I never did. Instead, I took it with me to Thailand, to a tiny island called Koh Panam.

  I was at a boys’ school that took girls in the sixth form. When the new girls first walked into the dining rooms we would each hold up a scorecard giving them marks out of ten. I’m not kidding. I feel terrible about it now, obviously. Anyhow, had Monica walked into that room I’d have given her an eight. Actually, I was such a raging mass of hormones and unrequited desires that I’d probably have upped it to a nine.

  She’s quite fit, Monica. She’s slim, with neat little features, a turned-up nose, and hair like a show pony. But she has an intensity to her that I find off-putting to the point of terrifying. She makes me feel that I must be doing something wrong (which I probably am, to be honest). She’s the sort of person who arranges all the tins in her cupboards so they’re facing outwards and puts all the books on her shelves in alphabetical order. And she has an air of desperation that I might be exaggerating in my imagination because I’ve read her story, but it makes me want to run for the hills. She also has an annoying habit of obstructing pavements, but that’s another story.

  In short, Monica’s not my type. But I’m hoping that she might be yours, because, as you can see, the girl really needs a good man, and I expect that you are a better man than I am.

  I don’t know if Monica’s plan to help Julian by advertising for an art teacher worked, but I know it wouldn’t have if I’d left it up to her. She’d put one, rather inadequate, poster up in the café window, which there was no way he’d notice. So I gave her a bit of a helping hand. I took the poster down, went to the nearest printing shop, and made about ten copies, which I posted all around Chelsea Studios. I even found the Admiral’s gravestone, the one Julian mentioned, and stuck one on there. I nearly missed my flight, wandering around that bloody cemetery. Looking back, I see that I wasn’t being altruistic. It was displacement activity. Concentrating on Monica’s advertising campaign stopped me heading to the supermarket to buy vodka for the journey. I do hope all that effort paid off.

  I suppose I should answer Julian’s question: What’s the one thing that defines you, that makes everything else about you fall into place? Well, I don’t have to think about that for very long: I AM AN ADDICT.

  For the last ten
years or so, pretty much every decision I’ve made—big or small—has been driven by my addiction. It’s led to my choice of friends, how I spend my spare time, even my career. Trading is, let’s be honest, just a legitimized form of gambling. If you’d met me back home, you’d have assumed I had it all together—the insanely well-paid job, beautiful apartment, and gorgeous women, but the reality was I spent a huge proportion of every day just planning my next high. I would be floored by even the tiniest flicker of anxiety, stress, or boredom and would escape to the toilet with a hip flask of vodka or a wrap of coke to take the edge off.

  Riley wondered for a moment whether he could be reading about a different Hazard. The guy he’d met was a health nut. He didn’t drink, he didn’t party—he was in bed by about nine p.m. most nights and up really early meditating. Riley had assumed he was completely vegan (perhaps because of the hipster-style beard and the way he wore sarongs all the time) until he’d seem him eating fish. But, he reasoned, what was the likelihood of anyone else being called Hazard whose book could have found its way into his bag? Zero.

  Riley frowned. How could he have misjudged Hazard so badly? Was everyone so complicated? He certainly wasn’t. Did he really know anyone at all? He read on, slightly warily.

  I’d long passed the point where it was any fun. The highs weren’t high anymore, they were just what I needed to get through the day. My life got smaller and smaller, stuck on this miserable treadmill.

  Recently I found a photo of me, aged about twenty, and realized that I’d lost myself. Back then, I was kind and optimistic and brave. I used to travel, seek out adventures. I learned how to play the saxophone, to speak Spanish, to dance the salsa, and to paraglide. I don’t know if it’s possible to be that man again, or if it’s just too late.