The Knock on 4B

Lina had been staring at the wedding invitation for so long that the gold writing had started to look like little ants. It was her ex's wedding. Daniel's wedding. Daniel, who she had dated for three years and who had broken up with her by saying he didn't think she was serious enough about her life, which was a horrible thing to say and also, annoyingly, the sort of thing you can't fully argue with at the time. And now Daniel was marrying someone called Felicity, and he had invited Lina, because Daniel was the kind of person who invited his ex to his wedding to prove he was a good person, and the invitation said Lina plus one. Plus one. Two of the cruellest words in the English language when you do not have a plus one and your whole family is also going to be at this wedding and your mum has already, twice, asked if you're "bringing anybody, love." Lina did not have a plus one. Lina worked at a garden centre and had worked at a garden centre for four years and had not been on a date in eleven months, and the wedding was in three weeks. So she did the thing you do when you have a problem and no solution, which is she went and stood in her kitchen and ate cereal directly out of the box, and that was when she heard her neighbour Marco swearing at his front door. Marco lived in 4B, across the hall. Lina had lived next to him for two years and in that time they had exchanged maybe forty words, most of them about parcels. He was one of those neighbours who is just always slightly annoyed. He frowned at the lift. He frowned at the recycling. Once Lina had held the building door for him with a big smile and he had said "thanks" like the word personally cost him money. He was, right now, jabbing his key at his lock and clearly losing. Lina did not really decide to open her door. She just did. Cereal box still in hand. "The lock on this floor sticks," she said. "You have to lift the handle and turn at the same time. The whole building's held together with knowing things like that." Marco looked at her. Then he looked at the cereal box. Then, with the air of a man who hated being given advice and hated more that the advice worked, he lifted the handle, turned, and the door opened. "...Thanks," he said. The usual way. Like it cost money. And then he didn't go inside. He stood there in his doorway, frowning, and he said, "Can I ask you something weird," and Lina, who had a wedding invitation slowly turning into ants on her kitchen table, said, "Honestly, today, please do, anything." So Marco told her. It turned out grumpy Marco from 4B had a nan. A nan he loved, who was eighty-six, who had been ill in the winter and was better now, and who had got it into her head that Marco was lonely and was going to be alone forever, and it was, he said, the only thing she worried about, every single phone call, are you seeing anyone, Marco, I won't rest until I know you're not on your own — and there was a big family lunch in two weeks, the whole family, and his nan would ask, in front of everyone, and he was so tired of watching her face when he said no. "I just want her to stop worrying," Marco said, and for one second the frown was gone and underneath it he just looked like a person who loved his nan. "She's eighty-six. I want her to have one lunch where she's not worried about me." Lina put the cereal box down on her own little hall table. "Marco," she said. "I'm going to tell you something, and I need you to know that the universe is doing a bit right now." She took a breath. "My ex is getting married in three weeks. He invited me. The invitation says plus one. My whole family will be there and my mum keeps asking if I'm bringing anyone, and I am not bringing anyone, because I have not been on a date since literally last spring." She looked at him. "You need a fake girlfriend for a lunch. I need a fake boyfriend for a wedding. We live four feet apart. We don't even need to commute to lie." Marco stared at her. For a horrible second she thought he was going to do the thanks-that-costs-money voice and shut his door. He was a grumpy man. Grumpy men did not, in Lina's experience, say yes to mad plans proposed by a neighbour holding a cereal box. But then the corner of Marco's mouth did something. Just a tiny something. It was not a smile, Lina would not call it a smile, but it was the raw material that a smile could one day be made from, and it completely changed his whole face, and Lina found that she was suddenly very interested in whether she could get the rest of it to happen. "One lunch," Marco said. "One wedding." "One lunch, one wedding," Lina agreed. "We should probably learn things about each other. Like, before. So we don't get caught out." "Probably." Marco looked at her cereal box. "Do you eat that dry, out of the box, as a meal." "That's the first thing you want to know about your fake girlfriend?" "It feels important," said Marco, and there it was again, the almost-smile, the raw material — and Lina stood in the hallway between 4A and 4B and thought, oh no, with the particular sinking feeling of a woman realising her brilliant plan had a flaw, and the flaw was that she had not, in eleven months, wanted to make anyone smile this much.