u/Jkrambi

The plane landed in the kind of grey morning that made the city look like a photograph someone had left out in the rain. Edward had not slept. His neck hurt in a specific and unhelpful place, and the small bottle of water he had been nursing for the last hour was warm. He pressed his forehead against the window and watched the runway slide past and thought, with the dull clarity of the very tired, that he would do almost anything for a shower.

The plane stopped. The seatbelt sign clicked off. Around him, two hundred people stood up at once, and Edward stood with them, because he wanted to be off the plane more than he wanted anything else in the world.

He shuffled forward in the line. A woman ahead of him was already crying quietly into her phone in a language he didn’t speak. A child somewhere behind him was explaining, with great patience, that he was not tired. The flight attendants smiled the same smile at every face that passed them. Edward smiled back — a small, polite, foreign-country smile — and stepped out into the jet bridge, and felt the cold air of the new place hit him for the first time.

The university had arranged a shared house in a street where every door was the same colour. Edward stood on the pavement with his suitcase and double-checked the address on the printout, which had crumpled in his pocket on the train. There was a small front garden the size of a bathmat. A bicycle missing its front wheel was chained to the railing.
He had not yet knocked when the door opened. A boy his own age stood in the gap, barefoot, holding a mug. He had the kind of face that hadn’t yet been disappointed by anything in particular.

“Edward?”

“Yes.”

“Cool. I’m Tomas. Come in, come in. There’s tea. There’s also no milk. I’m sorry about that, it’s an ongoing situation.”

Edward laughed — partly at the line, partly out of relief that the first interaction in his new life had gone, on the whole, fine. He stepped into a hallway that smelled faintly of someone else’s cooking. Tomas was already walking ahead, talking — the names of the other housemates, the trick with the boiler, a warning about a creaky stair — and Edward, who had been awake for what was beginning to feel like several days, followed him with the dazed gratitude of a man who has been told he doesn’t have to make any more decisions for a while.

“Your room’s at the top,” Tomas said. “It’s small. The window’s nice though. There’s a tree.”

“A tree is good.”

“Exactly. That’s what I said when I got mine. Welcome. Seriously, glad you’re here.”

And Tomas, who had perhaps used the line a dozen times before on a dozen new arrivals, said it like he meant it, and Edward — twenty years old and four thousand miles from anyone who had ever known him as a child — felt, for a second, almost foolishly grateful.

The room was small. The window was nice. There was, as promised, a tree.

Edward sat on the edge of the bed for a long time before he started unpacking. He hung three shirts in the wardrobe and put a few books on the shelf — not all of them, only the ones whose spines he liked the look of together. The rest stayed in the suitcase, which he slid under the bed with his foot.

From downstairs came the muffled, layered noise of a house in use: a woman laughing, a kettle, a door, music through someone’s speaker. He didn’t know any of these people yet. In a week he would know all of them. The thought made him tired in a way that had nothing to do with the flight.

He took out his phone and typed a message to his mother. He wrote that he had arrived. That the house was nice. That the housemates seemed friendly. He read it back, and then deleted it, and then wrote it again almost the same. He sent it.

Her reply came within the minute. A heart. Then: Eat something. Then, after a pause: We are proud of you.

He read the line twice. He put the phone face down on the bedside table, and got under the covers in his clothes, and was asleep before he had decided to be.

In the morning the kitchen contained four strangers and a kettle that had, by the sound of it, been mistreated for years.

“Edward,” Tomas said, by way of introduction. “He’s the new one. He arrived last night looking like a ghost.”

“I was tired.”

“He was a ghost,” Tomas said cheerfully. “This is Mira. She studies brains. This is Kaur. He plays the guitar, badly, almost constantly. This is Ines. She sees through people. Be careful around her.”

“I don’t,” Ines said, into her tea.

“She does,” Tomas said. “It’s why none of us have any secrets anymore.”

Mira laughed — a full, easy laugh that filled the small kitchen — and Edward, who had been bracing himself for the awkwardness of strangers, felt something in his shoulders unclench. He took the bowl of cereal that was passed to him. He sat down. Within a few minutes he was laughing too, at something he wouldn’t, later, be able to remember. Tomas had a way of telling stories that made the punchline arrive a half-second before you expected it. Mira interrupted him constantly. Kaur ate three bowls of cereal in the time it took anyone else to finish one. Ines watched all of them with a small, private smile, like someone enjoying a play.

“So what are you studying?” Mira asked him.

“I’m studying Law,” Edward told her.

“Oh god,” she said, with feeling. “You’ll be miserable. We’ll have to be very nice to you.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“He’d appreciate that,” Tomas repeated, delighted. “He’s so polite. Edward, I’m telling you now, this house is going to ruin you.”

Edward grinned. The kettle screamed. Kaur, without looking up from his bowl, reached over and turned it off.

The first weeks of term passed in the way first weeks do — a blur of corridors and name tags and lectures held in rooms too cold for the season. Edward attended everything. He bought a small black notebook because the campus shop was selling them in a stack near the till and he had liked the colour. He took careful notes in it and underlined the things he meant to think about later.

He liked his lecturers, mostly. He liked the long walk home along the canal, where the slow brown water carried whatever the day had given it: a crisp packet, a single shoe, the reflection of a streetlamp coming on. He liked that the bakery on the corner of his street sold bread that was still warm at four in the afternoon, and that the woman behind the counter had begun, by the second week, to nod at him without quite smiling, in the way of people who have agreed to recognise each other without committing to anything further.

He missed his mother. He missed her in small, unspecific ways — the way she set down a cup of tea without asking if you wanted one, the particular sound of her slippers on the kitchen tiles. He called her on Sunday evenings. The calls were short. She asked if he was eating. He said yes. He asked if his father was well. She said yes. They talked about the weather in two cities. After he hung up he usually walked for a while, nowhere in particular, until the feeling went.

He made friends. Tomas, of course, who treated everyone in the house as though they had grown up together. Mira, who turned out to be cleverer than she let on and who could be relied upon, in any group of more than five people, to say the thing nobody else would. Kaur, who was quieter and who one evening, over the wreckage of a shared pizza, told Edward without preamble about the girlfriend he had left behind and then never mentioned her again. Ines, who said little and who became, in a way he could not quite account for, the housemate whose presence he found most restful.

There were others. A boy from his course called Daniyar, who wore the same jumper for what appeared to be all of October and who became, briefly, the friend Edward walked to lectures with. A girl called Aoife who sat next to him in seminars and made him laugh by writing rude observations about the lecturer in the margin of his notebook. The Polish couple who ran the corner shop and who, by the third week, had started saying his name when he came in, and getting it almost right.

It was, by any honest measure, a good autumn. He told his mother so. He believed it himself.

And yet.

On the walks home, late, after good nights — the streets emptying, his breath visible in the cold, the house keys cool against his palm — there was always a small interval, perhaps a hundred metres long, when the warmth of the evening seemed to go on without him, like a song heard from another room. He didn’t dwell on it. He was twenty. He was tired. He let himself in, and went up the creaky stair, and slept.

There was a bar near the university with low ceilings and a sticky floor where the students went on Thursdays because the drinks were cheap and the music was loud. Edward went because the others went.

On the Thursday in question — early November, his second-favourite jumper, a cold he was almost over — they had been there for about an hour when a song came on that everyone seemed to know. A small ripple went through the room. Mira shrieked something Edward didn’t catch and grabbed his sleeve and pulled him into the loose mass of bodies near the speakers, and he laughed and let himself be pulled, because she was already laughing and the song was good and he had had two drinks and this was, very plainly, what he was meant to be doing.

He danced badly. Tomas danced badly, and proudly. Kaur danced not at all, but tapped the rim of his glass against the bar with a small, contented expression. Mira danced as though she had been waiting all week to dance, which Edward suspected was true.

It was a good night. He would remember it, later, as a good night.

And it was only when he stepped out of the press for a moment, sweating, looking for water, that he saw the man at the far end of the bar.

A stranger. Alone. Phone in one hand, beer in the other. He wasn’t talking to anyone. He didn’t, as far as Edward could tell, even seem to be listening to the music — his eyes were on the screen, his face slack with the particular tired blankness of a person scrolling. And yet his head was moving, very slightly, in time with the song.

Edward watched him for perhaps three seconds.

Then Mira shouted his name from somewhere behind him and he turned around and went back into the crowd, and the moment closed over itself, and he did not think about it again that night.

They walked home together at two in the morning, the four of them, arms around each other on the cold streets, Tomas singing something tuneless and triumphant. Edward sang along where he knew the words. Mira tripped on a kerb and Kaur caught her and the three of them laughed for longer than the moment really deserved. By the time they reached the house, Edward was warm through, and very tired, and very happy, in the loose uncomplicated way of someone twenty years old in a foreign country with friends who liked him.

He brushed his teeth. He got into bed. Sleep came up to meet him quickly.

And in the last second before it took him, with no warning at all, he saw the man at the bar again — the slack face, the lowered phone, the small unconscious nod — and felt, for less than a heartbeat, a small precise discomfort, like a hand placed briefly on the back of his neck.

Then he was asleep.

In the morning he had forgotten it. The kitchen was full of laughter. Tomas had made coffee badly and Mira was complaining about it, and Kaur was eating toast standing up, and Ines was reading something on her phone and looked up at Edward as he came in and gave him the small private smile she gave him sometimes, and he felt, at that moment, no discomfort at all — only the warm, ordinary pleasure of being twenty and at home, more or less, in a kitchen that had not, six weeks ago, been his.

He poured himself coffee. He sat down.

“Morning, ghost,” Tomas said.

“Morning.”

And the day began.