Ullswater Lake

Chapter 1

It doesn't take a genius to work out when another human being is in need of some space. It's an intuitive thing, a touchy-feely aspect born from the depths of evolutionary struggle. Of learning to listen and learning to speak.

This face was most definitely a puzzle to behold. Yep, that ground-down look shouted 'give me some space' and the greying bob signalled times long gone, but the tweed jacket and high cheekbones covered in rosey red flesh evoked a country girl strength that would always find a way through.

The school desk-like street tables were inviting in an over-fashionable Shoreditch manner. They were too small for a gathering and too close for the shy, so I wasn't surprised to find myself struggling not to listen as the woman with the cheeks in the tweed spoke in what she thought was a whisper but as far as I was concerned was a tannoy broadcast. Why do people do that, blurt out their life for all to hear? And when she spoke visions of hay and milking fell away.

"Yeah right," she said with disdain and exasperation. "Please yourself but don't come back – go rob a bank why don't you."

She held the phone to her head for what seemed like far too long although I couldn't hear the other half of what struck me as a particularly unbalanced conversation. Not unbalanced in a crazy way but in a one-way traffic sense. After a couple of minutes of saying nothing while her phone burned a radiation hole in her ear, she almost dropped it on to the table, as she hung up in a most emphatic manner. She didn't have to speak because I just knew she didn't care. She couldn't care less who was listening, not that she said a lot, and from the sound of it she didn't care for the faceless human being on the other end of the phone. Not faceless to her but to me.

She sighed in resignation, remembered I was sat at the table next to her, or maybe she didn't, rose briskly to her feet and headed directly back into the bar. She disappeared, unbelievably quickly, leaving her phone and handbag behind. Now that is unhinged, no one in London leaves their stuff unguarded for a minute, unless inebriated, and certainly not a coveted dumb smartphone that, for some, have become the appendage evolution never gave us. Oh well I'll do the Good Samaritan bit and watch over her stuff for her. What's the bet she's crying in the toilet? Or am I reading this all wrong. Maybe she's at the bar getting a tall long island ice tea to toast a new-found freedom from a man that was a jerk. I presume too much. She's coming back with what looks like coffee or some such beverage.

"Hey, you left your phone and everything behind. Are you OK?"

I really wanted to ask her what her name was and who should go rob a bank.

"Oh my god I wasn't thinking. Thanks for watching them for me – nice to know there's still honest people in the world. Ta."

There was no answer as to whether she was OK but that was kind of a rhetorical question.

"Have you got a light," she asked, presumably surmising that as I was sitting outside I must be a smoker, given the cold. Either that or mad. She downed what must have been an espresso in one after fumbling ineffectually in her bag for cigarettes she knew she didn't have.

"Just think, it'll put minutes on your life."

She didn't take that quip too kindly, evidently preferring the prospect of throat cancer.

"What?" came the caustic reply as she momentarily forgot my earlier good works.

And then, as if by way of an apology, came the gatling gun delivery of openness: "I've had such a nightmare day you wouldn't believe it."

"Try me, I might."

"I hate winter – there's not enough light, there's not enough day. You really don't want to know about my woes. Really, you don't."