Ashley Strange
by Jacob Milnestein
“You’ll never guess what my surname is!” she declares, her eyes wide, her voice accented by that familiar Essex clip, painfully reminiscent of aunts and uncles and the bitter, hairdresser mother of your former girlfriend.
“It’s Strange!” she continues, and you try not to, but you smile anyway, “Ashley Strange!”
A frown crosses her face, the stitches drawn with lipstick on her cheek smudged and worn by the night’s festivities.
“But I’m not strange, you know!”
It is impossible not to smile, impossible not to warm to her as she stands there with the crowded bus stop at her back, the 205 bus ugly and packed with those escaping their Friday night in the city, costumed and garish each one.
“Actually, people say I’m a bit psychic, you know,” she continues, cigarette smoke a halo above her, “and I think, I mean, I know, I just know you’re going to be really famous. You’re just so nice.”
She gestures with her cigarette, hazel eyes gleaming, her smile impossibly friendly.
“You’re going to be like, who’s that woman that wrote Harry Potter?”
You smile, slightly abashed, slightly bemused.
“J.K. Rowling.”
She nods enthusiastically.
“That’s her! You’re going to be bigger than her, I can tell. I know these things.”
What must it be to have something to believe in, you wonder, to have a framework which you believe the universe must unshakably abide by?
What must it be like to be Leibniz, to believe that we all inhabit the best of all possible worlds?
The thought touches a spark of sadness within you, for if Leibniz believed this was the best of all possible worlds, then truly you have undertaken to make yourself the worst of all possible versions of yourself.
“Do you believe in magic, then?” you ask Ashley Strange, pretending to be more sober than you actually are.
In a young girl’s heart.
“I am a little bit psychic,” she insists again.
It is not even that late outside of Liverpool Street station, yet you are both here, drunk on a Hallowe’en Friday, surrounded by strangers, ghosts by any other name.
This is the true heart of magic, you muse drunkenly to yourself, this secret ability we have inside of ourselves—the strength we have inside of each one of us, like in the opening to that old Incredible Hulk television series you used to watch as a child—to make patterns out of nothing.
The rituals we celebrate, the patterns we look for in life; this is what it means to be in love with magic; to search for patterns amidst the meaninglessness.
This was what Jung meant when he coined the phrase synchronicity, the way in which seemingly unrelated events became bound together to form a web of consequence.
“How old do you think I am?” she asks suddenly, leaning in close to you.
The question is a loaded one, you know that from previous conversations with girls; it is inherited wisdom, some old lesson passed down from a time long before you were born, that you should never ask a lady her age—and if you ever did find yourself in such a situation, it was always appropriate to state an age several years younger than you thought she was.
Not that it always worked, of course.
“I’m terrible with guessing people’s ages,” you protest, and then assuming that she is 25, you guess, “24, maybe?”
She shakes her head vigorously.
“Younger,” she declares, her arm crooked, the cigarette between her fingers.
You shrug, yet there is a smile on your face.
“21?” you ask.
Again, she shakes her head.
“Younger,” she says once more.
“How old then?” you ask her finally, no longer courageous enough to play this dangerous game of potential age-gap Russian roulette.
She inhales from the tip of her cigarette.
“I’m 18!”
And so you all but applaud her, nodding appreciatively at her youth, her innocence, her drunkenness.
“I’ve got this feeling we’ll never see each other again,” she says with the sudden earnestness of intoxication. “Can we take a picture together?”
You do, iPhones held up against the light of the station, the darkness behind you and your faces close together.
You can feel the warmth of her closeness, that impossible, aching sensation of another in such close proximity, and it is both a sad and gentle reminder of what you once had before with someone who has long since left your left.
But here beneath the bright lights of the station, you are drunk and together, strangers meeting for the first and only time in the cold of autumn and the slow encroach of winter.
“You’re so lovely, you know,” she says, and you begin to believe her.
Inside the station, she looks up at you with deep hazel eyes and you lean close and kiss her softly on the forehead.
“Don’t make me fall in love with you,” you say with genuine earnestness.
If this was a story, you think sadly to yourself, then this moment would be weighted with the proper context, there would be the understanding of the girl who once stood where now Ashley Strange waits for her train to Romford; there would be discussion, there would be poetic diffusion of themes, and the realisation that there are only two people, just two people, and that’s the whole extent of the world.
There would be that quote from thatWong Kar-wai film, the recent one, The Grandmaster—Gong Er, played by Zhang Ziyi, standing with her back to the camera, her face partially glimpsed—‘All encounters in this world are a kind of reunion.’
But this is not a story, this is not a love song, and in this moment, there is only you and Ashley Strange—and it occurs to you that much of your life has been made up of these tiny, dull, hesitant moments waiting around train stations for a girl who holds your heart.
From Victoria to Tufnell Park to Marylebone, you wonder what the tube map of your heart might look like.
Her hand slips from yours, and she does not look back as she passes through the gate,
Later, as the 205 bus carries you back along the path of the Northern Line—Old Street, Angel, King’s Cross—and you feel the reassuring presence of North London, of its well-worn streets and familiar postcodes, you try not to dwell on your meeting with her.
Time passes…
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The first time I saw her, like not in one of those god-awful videos they show endlessly on VH-1, was at my dad’s house during some big Thanksgiving celebration. My dad sort of came out of nowhere and told us we were going to be celebrating Thanksgiving this year and I was all like, what the hell have I got to be thankful for? But, as is kind of the case in our family, my questions were conveniently brushed aside.
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