chapter014
Edie messaged Meg to warn her she was bringing an unexpected visitor home. However, Meg was a fair-weather mobile phone user and sporadic bill payer, and it didn’t show as read. Inevitably, when she and Declan got through the door, Meg was dancing to Rage Against the Machinein the kitchen, wearing t-shirt, knickers, and socks, smacking a spatula as a drumstick on the counter.
Meg screamed and grabbed a tea towel bearing the words VISIT SKEGNESS: IT’S SO brACING to improvise a pelmet skirt.
‘Who are you?!’ she screeched at Declan, over the din of ‘Killing in the Name’. The only machine that Edie had known Meg to rage against recently was their microwave when it went Oppenheimer on her lentil gumbo.
Edie located the speaker to turn off the music while Declan retreated back down the hallway, making fulsome apologies.
‘Meg, this is my colleague, Declan. Declan, this is my sister. Meg, I did WhatsApp you.’
Edie pledged a large Chinese takeaway with plentiful vegan options to ameliorate the situation, parking Declan with a herbal tea in the front room and leaving Meg to go upstairs and find trousers.
Bonhomie returned faster than she expected, which Edie attributed in part to her soothing front room, complete with vast cage for her birds, Meryl and Beryl. She’d gone hard on cosy: pillar candles in storm lanterns and a faux fur rug that Meg objected to as it ‘encourages a lust for fur’.
Edie once sweetly asked if fake meat gives you a lust for meat, and Meg said she only had Quorn pieces, which were not meat mimicry, and Edie liked getting on better with Meg too well to mention the Quorn ham slices.
‘They’re beautiful,’ Declan said, indicating the vivid plumage of the grey and yellow budgies.
‘They belonged to my dad’s characterful and glamorous late neighbour Margot,’ Edie said.
‘Bit of a fascist,’ Meg advised. ‘But then so is my sister. She could really bake a cake though.’
‘She left them to you in her will?’ Declan said.
‘Her estranged son and his nuclear-wintery wife turned up to do house clearance and were going to turf the birds out on their arses, so I intervened,’ Edie said. ‘Not thinking what I’d spend on Trill.’
Declan gazed at her, visibly impressed, possibly imagining Edie some variant of Manic Pixie Dream Girl.
She checked her delivery app. ‘Our noodles are on Alfreton Road!’
The three of them ate on their laps, forked down platefuls of mapo tofu, mushroom chow mein and spring rolls, companionably channel surfing.
Declan made a considerable effort with Meg, and Meg seemed surprised and then gratified that one of Edie’s wanky ad exec associates from fancy London was, in fact, great.
‘You work in a care home, which is one of the best things you can do for society,’ Declan told her. ‘I try to flog you things you don’t need, for capitalism. One of the worst.’
‘To be fair, I love my gadget that mashes potatoes – it’s amazing. I forget what it’s called. Mashy, I think. Do you like mashed potatoes?’
‘I’m Irish. My blood is part potato.’
‘You have to come back for dinner another time and try it,’ Meg said. ‘Right, Edie?’
Declan shot Edie a discomfited look: it contained an ongoing apology for abruptly inserting himself into her existence to this extent.
It provoked Edie to reply: ‘One hundred per cent he does. I won’t even need a hospital to insist, next time. And you can have wine on that visit.’
She could see his body language easing.
‘Then thank you very much. You’re the only people I know in Nottingham, and you’re a great start.’
‘You came here not knowing anyone?’ Meg said with awe.
Edie privately congratulated herself on subtly challenging Meg’s assumptions. Meg’s identity was very home-city-forever, and she had an unexamined attitude that those who left were quitters and pseuds, no doubt based on feeling abandoned by Edie. Now, she could see it also involved bravery.
‘I like a voyage of discovery.’
‘We’ll look after you,’ Meg said, patting his knee.
There was something very solid about Declan: both in his broad shoulders but also his manner. He knew who he was, and Edie detected a sort of … centre of moral gravity that she liked. She realised it made her feel – a funny word to apply, really – safe.
The reason Team Jessica loved Declan wasn’t because he was one of them; it was because he was one of those people everyone loved, who became hotly contested territory.
Edie hadn’t had a single qualm about him seeing her home, and that was an acid test of trust, she always thought. Someone like Jess would be hoping to find mould on her shower curtain. He mentioned his sisters a lot, partly to thoughtfully draw connections with Meg. He’d make a lovely dad, one day.
And he was well-travelled but wore it lightly: only a few years younger than Edie but he’d had many adventures, often solo. That sort of self-reliance was cool.
Edie suspected Ad Hoc and Nottingham wouldn’t keep him long – she was unsurprised it ended with the girl back home – and was glad they got him passing through, before he settled down in Brisbane or Knock.
When Declan insisted honestly, he wasn’t lying, the in-house band on a ferry crossing to Bilbao was genuinely called Smooth Passage, Edie near-prolapsed in laughter.
Declan looked back at her, warm appraisal of her written on his face, and she knew that his being clipped by a Toyota Avensis had fast-tracked a firm friendship.
Edie was drifting off around one a.m. when she heard an ungodly, primal howl from below her room that she recognised as emitting from Meg’s lungs. She was out of bed and skittering down the stairs in seconds flat, adrenaline sufficient to lift a lorry from a child. Intruders were scary, but no one, absolutely no one, threatened her younger sibling without awakening lioness instincts in Edie.
The light was on in the kitchen, and Edie turned the corner and shrieked.
On one side of the room, there was Meg in her nightwear leggings and t-shirt, a serrated bread knife held threateningly aloft.
On the other was a fully naked Declan, staring impassively at the shelving on the far wall. To call it a dark, surreal tableau was to undersell it. David Lynch himself would decline to direct it.
‘OK. What the fuck?’ Edie said, heart blocking her throat, hands out and palms up, as if she needed to balance.
A few seconds ticked by where Edie tried to form her own interpretation and completely failed.
‘I was down here making myself a midnight snack, and he walked in behind me with his penis PROUDLY ON SHOW …’ Meg said, pointing the tip of the knife down at the offending genitals, as if Edie might not know where they were otherwise. That’s the schlong, officer! ‘Scaring the shit out of me … And now he’s not speaking, trying to freak me out even more!’ Meg said.
‘Declan,’ Edie said, trying to keep her breathing steady and her gaze locked on his face. Who or what had she allowed into her home? Declan was a huge man – it turned out, in more than one sense – and she felt the horror of putting Meg at risk. And herself. ‘It’s a bit of a house rule that we don’t walk around with our penises out.’
‘I’ll fucking amputate it, flasher fucker! See how you enjoy your sick kicks then,’ Meg said, raising her arm higher, and Edie shushed her desperately. Meg committing a GBH wasn’t likely to improve things.
A small element of pathos: Declan had a bandage in the same place that Edie had wound her makeshift effort round him. She remembered blushing at being so close to a strange male torso. Well. If only she’d known she was very much on the beginner slopes yesterday.
Edie looked back up at Declan’s impassive expression, trying to work out what was going on and why the friendly man of earlier had turned into this statue. Why wasn’t he looking at either of them? Was this an effect of the concussion?
Hang on …
‘Megan,’ Edie said, in an effortfully calm, low voice and using her sister’s full name to get her full attention. ‘… I think he’s sleepwalking?’
Meg lowered the knife. ‘Is he?’
‘I think so. That’s why he seems to be in a trance?’ She turned towards him. ‘Declan. Hi? Hello?’ Edie said, waving her hand, and Declan merely swayed gently, still staring beyond them at the shelving.
Edie had never encountered a sleepwalker before, and her introduction was a six-foot-two nude man hung like a donkey.
It was spookily like someone doing a youth theatre exercise impression of a sleepwalker. A rather basic impersonation. It seemed like, if she made a loud noise, he’d be tricked into snapping out of it and laugh.
But if he wasn’t sleepwalking, he was deliberately staging an impromptu full frontal with his new line manager and her sister to no discernible purpose. And not flinching when the latter was wielding means of violently cleaving member from body.
‘What do we do? You’re not meant to wake a sleepwalker?’ Edie said uncertainly.
‘You’re not meant to make me look at your willy and balls when I want an almond butter crumpet either,’ Meg said.
‘I think you’re meant to guide them gently back to bed?’ Edie said.
‘You first – I’m not touching him.’
Edie had to admit, it was a worrying notion. ‘Where’s the Skegness tea towel?’ she said, with serious urgency, and at this point she and Meg simultaneously broke and started sniggering.
Suddenly, with the vacant yet deliberate lurch of Frankenstein’s monster, Declan approached the swing top bin.
He positioned his penis over it in such a way that strongly suggested Dream Architect had told him it was the toilet.
Whatever the correct protocols for managing somnambulism, before a stream of urine could appear, Edie involuntary cried: ‘Declan, no!’
He stopped what he was doing and woke with a start, his head jerking backwards and then his face changing from the absent stare to one of greater comprehension.
‘Where am I?’ he asked, not unreasonably. New city, concussion, new colleague, hospital, strange house, and now he’d teleported sans clothes into a kitchen in the small hours. Like the man who fell to Earth.
‘My house, remember? I’m Edie? This is my sister, Meg. You hit your head when you came off your bike. I think you’ve been sleepwalking.’
Declan looked as if understanding was dawning, and then right behind the geography of where he was and the history of how he arrived here was biology: an awareness of nakedness.
‘Uhm … Am I … Why …?’ He glanced down and almost started at confirmation of the sight of himself, an anxiety fantasy finally made real.
Edie gritted her teeth.
‘Oh my Lord …’ Declan said and put his hands over his crotch. Edie had never seen someone sweat like that before: his face became damp in a split second. Declan backed away, bumping into a worktop. ‘I hope I’m still dreaming.’
‘If you are, you’re in my nightmare,’ Meg said. ‘Maybe don’t go bare-arsed in bed if you’re a guest.’
This was the first time Edie had ever heard Meg chiding someone about modesty and etiquette.
‘Meg, shhh.’
‘I wasn’t – I had joggers on. I must have taken them off,’ Declan said, the full misery of his situation descending upon him. ‘I’ve not done any sleepwalking since I was nine or ten.’
‘Probably giving your head a bump shook it loose,’ Edie said.
‘Were you nude then, too?’ Meg asked, unable to let go of her indignance this fast.
Edie shushed her.
‘I think I was, but …’
The unfinished sentence was that there had been less of him to go on tour.
‘We’ll leave you to get to bed,’ Edie said, hurriedly motioning at Meg to set the knife down and follow her – fleeing the scene before Declan had to despondently trudge back up the stairs, realising he didn’t need to cup his junk without his onlookers. Edie was not a physically confident person herself, and every time she put herself in Declan’s non-existent shoes, she flinched.
As she lay with her duvet up to her neck, she felt like she could hear his thoughts. It was as if they were psychically communicating.
There was the sound of something being pulled across carpet, and she realised he was putting a chest of drawers in front of the door to stop himself repeating the expedition.
Edie tried to think what she’d say in the morning to make this better. Her job was choosingwords designed to elicit a certain response or feeling, after all.
The trouble with humour here was: it was too close to ridiculing the person’s body. She could try for perspective?
Look, it’s not a consultant telling you whether it’s treatable, it’s not charged with three counts of murder, it’s not messing up your slot at the Super Bowl. It’s just a colleague having more information about your anatomy than you intended. Information that she’ll have forgotten in a week’s time.
Yeah, that was straight up untrue.