Angela

Angela

(Wednesday 25th May 2011, 7.30pm )

I should be on a date right now.  The appointment reminder on my phone just popped up with a single word, ‘Angela’.  That’s who I should be with right now, 7.30pm on Wednesday evening.  I was going to take her down to Heddon Street.  We were going to check out a set of photos by my friend Max which are on display in a bar there.  We would have had a drink or two and then would have talked about moving on for dinner somewhere.  Right now we’d probably be at the point when we’re making conversation in a slightly nervous sort of a way, hoping that it wouldn’t take us too long to get back to that real connection that we both knew we’d made the last time we met.  Maybe we’d already have got there.  Maybe we’d be sharing one of those jokes, you know - the ones that you make with only your eyes; maybe we’d be smiling at that guy at the next table making such sincere efforts to impress the bored-looking girl opposite him.  A nice little way to deflect attention from the thought that that might be exactly what we’re doing too, Angela and me.

I met Angela on Saturday.  It was Brent who introduced us.  Brent is good at doing this – making introductions.  I don’t mean setting people up romantically, although he does that too sometimes.  I mean, helping people be friends with each other.  Friendship means a lot to Brent.  He’s lived in so many different places around the world and travels to so many more for his job that he works hard at friendship, carrying them with him across continents and timezones.  When I haven’t seen him for a while, I’ll often get a text that asks nothing, just lets me know that he’s thinking of me, that I ‘came to mind today’.  I’m pretty sure that he does the same for most of his friends and I’m sure they appreciate it as much as I do.  When I was in New Zealand, Brent flew six hundred miles from Auckland to Christchurch just to spend the evening hanging out with me.  Like I said, that’s what friendship means to Brent.

Whether or not it’s as a result of this, Brent’s friends are a good bunch of people.  In fact, it’s fair to say that I’ve never met one I didn’t like.  But this may be no accident.  Brent thinks a great deal about his friends.  He thinks about who will like each other and how they will connect, and then he introduces them.  On Saturday, he introduced me to Niloo and Angela.

The plan is for us to meet at Niloo’s place for a bite to eat and then the four of us will head down to Clapham to go to a party.  This we do, nibbling pasta off our knees and hoovering up Niloo’s stock of Guinness and sauvignon blanc, chattering about Wales and the Middle East and rugby.  Over the course of the evening, we all learn lots about each other but it’s what I learn about Angela that makes me excited about tonight.  This is some of it, in no particular order:

I learn that Angela wears Converse.  She smiles a lot and her smile is the smile of a warm positive person who enjoys having reasons to smile.  She was born in Canada, in Ontario but has (like Brent) lived in all sorts of places, including Wales and St Albans.  She has a cut on her lip that she is self conscious about.  She has just come back from three months in Pakistan, on a ‘mission’ (and that’s what they call it) for the Red Cross.  She loved it over there and was really enthusiastic about the experience.  She is interesting and obviously very bright.  She has well-considered views on the idea of women having to cover themselves but is also very ready to listen to Brent’s thoughts on the subject.  She was staying less than an hour from where Bin Laden was shot.  She went to Embassy parties and likes running.

Angela enjoys a glass of wine but later is happy to join me drinking cans of Kronenberg from an ice-filled trough.  She likes to be made to laugh and gives as good as she gets.  She likes Dire Straits and is thrilled when Niloo invites her to go to a gig with her on the Sunday at the Albert Hall.  She loves watching rugby and calls the Harlequins ‘the ‘Quins’ like an old hand.  She has just started playing touch Rugby in Clapham Common although would prefer us to wait a couple of weeks before coming to watch her so she can get a little better at it.  It’ll only take a couple of weeks apparently.  She has longish blonde hair.  She loves the photo I took surreptitiously of the Canadian on the tube with three separate Maple leaf flags on his pack and then tells me interesting things about why people wear those flags.  She likes Elbow and is jealous that I’ve been invited to a secret gig of theirs at St Paul’s on Thursday.  She assures me that I’ll like them more in concert when I tell her that I wasn’t convinced about the albums I’ve been listening too.  She laughs when Brent claims to prefer ‘Knee’.  In fact, that teaches me an awful lot about her.

She bought a house in Hertfordshire, preferring to go further out of town to get a bit of space.  She hints that things aren’t great at home then explains that her ex-boyfriend has been squatting in her house since she went away and being really unpleasant and spiteful to her.  She tells us for example that he’s been calling her fat and pointing out double chins.  She isn’t remotely fat and has a lovely chin (and only one of them) but she is hugely appreciative when Brent, and later I, point this out.  She is hopefully going to stay at Brent’s flat while he is away but needs to go back home to see lawyers and the police about getting this guy removed.  She hasn’t managed to get any clothes and is coming to the party in her faded jeans and t-shirt.  They look great on her.

At the party, she thinks it hilarious that all the boys are making such a fuss over a girl in a short dress when its flowery pattern looks odd to her.  She sticks with us as we take over the corner of the garden and talk about our adventures.  She is encouraging when Brent and I somehow find ourselves vowing to climb Aconcagua soon.  She could even come with us.  She is nice to the labrador-like attentions of a gregarious tiler called Chris and prompts him to tell more and more ludicrously exaggerated stories about the misery of his marriage and the burden of his children.

She is someone with a sense of humour about her failings and a certain humility about her achievements.  She’s warm and fun and friendly and approachable and enthusiastic and, as a result, enormously likeable.  She doesn’t love dancing and is funny about her lack of skill, happy that we seem to share that.  She’s chuffed when I tell her how beautiful I think she is and smiles when I point out how she could give the girl in the dress more than a run for her money.  She is happy to stand in the hallway with me, talking about all sorts of things at the foot of the stairs while the party rages all around us.  She is very nice to kiss and later, in the cab and back at Niloo’s, she fits comfortably under my arm and seems quite happy for Brent to give her my number.  Brent tells me afterwards that she subtly texted him when we were all in the cab back to Niloo’s together to say ‘make sure he calls me’.

I don’t need the encouragement.  I like her.  I text her on my way home that night.  She responds the next day, joking about her slow start to the day and agreeing to meet up on Wednesday; today.  Wednesday, I reply, sounds great and suggest we make a plan on the day.  I think about her on Monday and I try to take it a little easy at last night’s awards dinner to make sure I’m on form for today and I find myself telling my colleague Alice and my client Aina about my date and my hopes for it but at five o’clock this morning Brent phones me from Singapore to tell me that Angela has been murdered.

Yes.  Murdered.  Even the word is horrifying.  Angela was found dead in her house early this morning.  I don’t really know exactly what happened and wasn’t close enough to feel right about pestering anyone with questions.  It seems likely that it happened on Sunday.  It seems very likely that it was her ex-boyfriend and I understand that he’s nowhere to be found.  But that isn’t really the point.

What a tragic loss.

They say that a friendship can last a lifetime or a day.  For both those spans to be the same length is awful.  Who knows what would have happened with Angela and me – tonight’s date might have been a disaster but it might also have been really special.  The loss for me is that we never got a chance to find out.

But if in one evening, I felt like I’d learned so much about her and found such an awful lot to like, then I can’t begin to imagine what her friends and family, those who knew her properly, those who had so much more time, a lifetime even, to find things that they loved about her, must feel they’ve lost.  Think of her family and friends.  Think of Angela.  What a horrible inexplicable waste.