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He takes another swig and hands the bottle back to me. ‘Do you want the long answer or the shortanswer?’
‘Long.’
‘Are you sure?’ He adjusts his sleeves. ‘When I say it’s long, I mean it’sverylong.’
‘Heard that before and been extremely disappointed,’ I say with a sigh, about to take another sip.
He looks at me shrewdly. ‘I’m not known for disappointing people.’ The bottle misses my mouth as he continues, ‘So my Mum’s Irish—’
‘Never mind, give me the short version.’
‘You’re funny,’ he says. He flashes me his lockscreen and I see a woman with auburn hair. ‘This is my mum. She’s Irish, while my dad’s Greek but raised in the US. Add the fact that my mum was a diplomat and we moved around a lot throughout my childhood, and you have the perfect example of a third-culture kid.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Someone who finds thewhere are you from?question difficult to answer.’ I nod at him to elaborate and he says, ‘It’s basically anyone who grows up outside of their parents’ home countries or cultures, or is raised in more than one country.’
‘Look at you,’ I say, taking one more sip before I pass the wine back to him, ‘checking all the boxes.’
He lifts the bottle to his mouth but doesn’t drink yet. ‘Mum worked a lot so I spent more time with my dad back then, which was great for me. I idolised him. Basically just copied him for years. I even had a little American accent like he did. But he left when I was about five to start a company in Silicon Valley.’ He takes a glug of the wine, and then another, before speeding through his next few sentences. ‘He had to do it. He wouldn’t be as successful today if he hadn’t had a base in the US.’ A curl drops into his eye and I get the inexplicable urge to push it back, but then he does it himself. ‘Anyway, around that time, my mum was set to be stationed somewhere kind of volatile, so she sent me to an international boarding school here in the UK for a few years. She wanted to keep doing her job and know I’d be safe.’
It’s difficult to imagine this, knowing that Max and I went to the same secondary school as most kids from our primary school, which also happened to be where our parents met, twenty years prior. ‘Was it weird for you to be so far from your mum and dad?’
‘A little, I guess, but I got used to it.’ His eyebrows draw together for a fraction of a second, but then his expressionrelaxes into a smile. ‘A few years later my mum met my stepdad in Dakar and soon after, they had the twins.’ He smiles when he brings them up.
Instinctively I say, ‘I’m a twin too. Me and Max.’
His eyes light up. ‘Are you close? Do you see him a lot?’
‘We’re close. But he travels a lot for work, so sometimes I don’t see him for months.’ He opens his mouth to ask another question and I realise he’s latched onto this tiny piece of personal information I’ve granted him, so I quickly add, ‘Sorry. Carry on. Where’d you go next?’
He seems like he wants to keep the focus on me, but thankfully he continues with his own story. ‘Between us we moved around a few more times,’ he lists them on his fingers, ‘to Brussels, Geneva and Singapore, which is where my family has been for about ten years now.’
‘So your siblings haven’t moved around as much as you?’
He shakes his head. ‘Not as much, no. Mum’s not a diplomat anymore; she became a teacher a while back. Her students have probably spent more time with her than I ever did as a kid, to be honest.’ His smile freezes on his face for a split second, then he adds, ‘Anyway, to answer your original accent question, loads of people at international schools have this very specific English-American hybrid accent, which I guess I picked up over the years too.’
I pretend I’m not fascinated hearing about this rootless life so different from mine and ask indifferently, ‘Is that all?’
He gives a short laugh. ‘Almost. I moved to Sydney for uni, stayed there an extra year after graduating, went back to Singapore for a bit, then Paris, and now here I am.’
‘Here you are.’ I take a drag from the bottle. ‘What was theshort answer?’
‘I have a shit ton of passports and minimal need for visas.’
‘Yeah, that probably would’ve sufficed.’ A car beeps its horn below and it drowns out the sound of another laugh from him. ‘Do you enjoy moving around so much?’
‘It’s what I’ve always done,’ he says with a shrug, taking his glasses off to clean them on his shirt.
‘That’s not what I asked.’
The sun’s disappeared by now, but it’s not dark enough to miss the intensity in the gaze he fixes on me. He seems like he’s weighing up how much to say. ‘I start to feel kind of claustrophobic if I’m in the same place for too long. I try not to get too attached to any one place or person. It makes it easier to leave.’ He reaches for the bottle and takes another pull. ‘Plus, I own, like, two and a half suitcases’ worth of belongings. I’ve got no space for emotional baggage too.’
‘Makes sense,’ I say gingerly. ‘So why are you in London now and not Paris?’
His mouth opens and closes before he replies. ‘I kind of had to leave Paris in a hurry. Didn’t really know where to go. But I know Julien from school and he works at PaidUp—this fintech startup here in London—and told me they were looking for a marketing consultant on a six-month contract. It all fell into place. I hadn’t lived in the UK since I was at boarding school, and six months felt like the perfect amount of time to experience London before I move again.’
‘Do you and Julien work on the same team?’ Alcohol, asking questions and avoiding divulging any information about myself? God, I feel like I’m on a date.
