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It was only a couple of lines asking him if he fancied spaghetti bolognaise for dinner or if he had other plans. Like he’d have other plans! Seeing Lila was, no exaggeration, the very highlight of his week. Just getting to eat a meal she’d put together, sit with her in companionable silence as they watched a DVD. Being madly in love with someone made the mundane magic.
Then, as usual, his flatmate, Rory, came straight to the front of his mind, putting a bullet in the brain of Alex's enthusiasm. “Hey, Lils,” Alex typed, with a sigh. “Spag bol sounds great! Thank you! What are you and Rory up to this weekend?”
Nadia
Nadia was almost certain the police were coming for her. It made it difficult to relax.
She made herself yet another cup of tea, but that just made her jittery, so most of it went down the sink. She tried to distract herself with a little Facebook stalking, but – for some reason – other people’s lives weren’t as fascinating as they usually seemed. Television was a lost cause since daytime TV made her want to poke her eyes out with a fork, so she ended up just sitting and fretting for hours. By the time Holly got home from work, Nadia was in a right state and had been waiting in the hallway for twenty minutes.
“I’m having second thoughts,” she admitted, without preamble, before Holly had even got fully through the flat door.
Holly arched an eyebrow at her as she kicked off her shoes. “Bit late for that, hun, the stuff’s in the post.”
“I know. I know. But, I was thinking, maybe we can call Royal Mail, or the sorting office, and get them to, sort of, pull it?” she said, hopefully.
Holly’s eyebrow arched higher. “Pull it?”
Nadia waved her hand vaguely. “Yeah. You know, take it out of the system and… return it to sender.”
“’Fraid it doesn’t work like that,” Holly said, moving past her flatmate towards her bedroom. “Don’t worry about it; everything’s going to be fine.”
“But… I’ve lied,” Nadia said, miserably. “On an official document. I could get in some serious trouble over this. Things are bad enough already. I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Calm down,” Holly instructed, as she attempted to tame her heat-frizzed hair with a brush and pull it up and away from her flushed face and neck. She'd had a long, hot journey home on the stuffy Tube. “People lie on these things all the time. Besides, I wouldn’t even say you’ve lied, per se.”
“Oh yeah? Well, what would you call it, then?”
Holly considered her response. “You were just a little bit pre-emptive,” she said finally, scooping up an armful of dirty clothes from the hamper in the corner of her bedroom and moving past Nadia into the hallway again.
“Pre-emptive?” Nadia echoed, as she trailed Holly to the kitchen. “How’s that? And stop it with that! I know very well that you only ever do laundry when you’re putting off doing something else.” Holly shot her a guilty expression as she shoved her load into the washing-machine drum. “Seriously, Hol, I am freaking out here.”
“You don’t need to be!” Holly reasserted, standing straight and slamming the drum door shut. “It’s not like you told them you’d been happily married for ten years and are pregnant with your sixth child. That would have been a lie.”
“And so just saying that I have a boyfriend is… pre-emptive?” Nadia asked, doubtfully.
“Yup. Anticipatory. A little ahead of yourself.” Holly smiled helpfully.
“More like way ahead of myself.”
“Hey, it’s Friday night! If you want a boyfriend so badly, let’s hit the High Street and find you some idiot in a rugby shirt with a popped collar that you can change for the better.”
Nadia sighed. "I've added some stuff to the Netflix list I thought you might like. We could crack on with some of that."
Holly shot her a disparaging look. "I was thinking more along the lines of something where we break up the love affair that is your arse and our couch. Come on. We're going out."
"Ah, Hols, you know I'm broke!" Nadia sighed, flopping dramatically onto said couch. The Home Office had taken away her working visa and her passport nine months ago and she had been existing on a combination of savings, overdrafts and waning parental generosity ever since. “I wouldn’t say no to sharing a bottle of wine from Budgens, though. I think I’ve got a few quid somewhere.”
Holly cocked her head to one side and looked at her friend with exaggerated pity. “Oh, stop it, you’re breaking my heart,” she said, sarcastically. “Go and put some slap on, already. I've been cooped up in that office all week; I'm definitely up to stretching to a few drinks tonight."
Nadia laughed, easily persuaded. “Okay, sounds good. But I will still go and spend my few precious pounds on that bottle; we can drink it while we’re getting ready.”
“Sounds good. But I think I’m on the Mojitos later. I just really fancy a Mojito. Must be the weather.”
“Okay, but please, let’s not wind up in that dive bar again, drinking double-strength Mojitos at four in the morning. You know I had to throw away that top after last time? I loved that top!”
“I make no promises!” Holly laughed. “At four in the morning the liver wants what the liver wants.”
“I guess it wouldn’t do to mess with tradition,” Nadia said thoughtfully; “especially as I am ‘constantly mindful and respectful of historic and cultural traditions’,” she laughed, quoting her recent visa application essay. Holly herself had come up with that particular piece of crap.
“Agreed. A night where we hit Clapham High Street and didn’t over-indulge just wouldn’t be the same. Right! Do you think I'll be way too hot in my skinny jeans?” The cheap Ikea bureau in her bedroom groaned as Holly yanked open one of the drawers.
And Nadia thought it, but didn't say it: this could be one of the last nights that she and Holly ever drank Mojitos together.
Alex
Alex had never had much of a life plan. He had an average grade in a broad subject, which – if anything – opened up too much choice, but the Home Office recruitment booth, decked out in Union Jack bunting, had immediately drawn his attention at that first careers fair. Seduced by aspirations of martinis – shaken, not stirred, naturally – and daydreams of parkouring across Middle Eastern rooftops after bad guys, Alex immediately signed up for their fast-track graduate scheme. Of course, it was just a desk job, the same as any other, and – with the recession double-dipping away – one that turned out to have no career progression, bonuses or benefits. Every year staff were reminded that their relatively low salary should be bolstered by a sense of accomplishment in knowing that they were working for the good of their country, which in the case of Alex’s role seemed to primarily consist of preventing people’s access to it.
Monday morning meant a whole new batch of applications. Almost all of them would be the usual – EU citizens looking for student, or sometimes spousal, visas. All Alex had to do at this point was read through them, making sure the applicant had ticked the right boxes – both literally and figuratively – before sending those who’d got everything right up the management chain.
It was all achingly repetitive – the insincere protestations of patriotism, the stiff Google-translated English, the bored-sounding formal references from companies who’d had the person in for an internship years ago…
“One time, Nadia and I were watching University Challenge; the round was politics and she got every question but one absolutely right. How many natural British citizens do you think know that much about their country?”
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.
