Chapter 5
ALARIC
I stir awake at two forty-five a.m. From then on, I’m strung out.
Wired. To be fair, I’m always wired. I can’t remember the last time I slept for longer than a five-hour stretch.
I’ve tried everything: melatonin, antihistamines, zopiclone.
I’ve even tried all the ‘sleep hygiene’ tricks, like a mug of cocoa, a night-time relaxing bath, not having my phone by the bedside.
The latter resulted in me being wide awake and bored.
Developing a regular routine is never going to wash—hello night shifts—as is the no booze and no nicotine thing.
Mind you, I didn’t spot any alcohol in Gerald’s fridge, so maybe I’ll cut down whether I want to or not.
Blindly, I feel for my vape. Gerald would have a fit if he discovered I vaped in the flat (another bullshit reason Marcus wanted me out, conveniently overlooking that baggy of coke he keeps in his briefcase), but I need something to occupy the witching hours.
Perhaps Gerald should go live with Marcus, and I could return to my heavenly room at Stefan’s.
Stefan vapes too, when Marcus isn’t around.
Just one night of eight hours’ kip would be nice, though.
I swear it would help me calm the fuck down.
Clear my head, make me less jittery. Make my thoughts sharper, nicer, more contemplative.
Make me more likeable, less annoying. I’d have more friends.
Marcus and Stefan might realise there’s an Alaric-shaped hole in the flat.
Who knows? Even Gerald might like me.
The mythical eight aren’t happening tonight, that’s for sure.
As the hours bleed into each other on a never-ending loop, my new room hums with the restless energy of a mind refusing to switch off.
The bed I rated as comfy several hours earlier is now too soft and too firm in all the wrong places.
Often when this happens, sleeping on the floor does the trick.
The freedom to be able to stretch out in any direction helps, especially if I put a couple of layers of Stefan’s soft sofa throws underneath.
Gerald’s extensive set of rules didn’t say anything to trap me on the mattress.
Shame I don’t have any spare bedding to pad the oak floorboards with.
My thoughts chase each other like excitable kids trapped in an impossible maze.
Why was the last patient’s potassium low?
Did I complete that CT request before leaving the ward yesterday?
What shall I have for dinner tomorrow? Which shirt needs ironing?
When is an acceptable time in Sutton Common to get up and go for a run?
Will my sister’s birthday card reach her if I post it on Saturday?
Will it arrive too soon if I post it on Friday?
Why do I have a sneaking feeling Gerald avoided me last night by taking a non-existent dog out for a walk?
Who, except for my brain at three a.m., gives a flying fuck?
Gerald’s definitely avoiding me. When I return on Sunday morning from an early run, he’s at the tiny table in the kitchen, eating a bowl of overnight oats (why do people go to the effort of planning misery the night before?) and listening to a programme on Radio 4 about Mongolian farming techniques.
When I join him with my dish of Coco Pops, I swear he chomps faster.
But I’m nothing if not super fucking perseverant. “Great flat, Gerald.” Thanks for asking how I’m settling in. “Such a quiet area.” Like sleeping alongside the dead.
“Yeah.”
I glance up at the window. “It was trying to rain again earlier. It’s a good thing, probably. The gardens need some rain.”
Oh God, I’ve only lived in suburbia twenty-four hours, and already I sound like a 1950’s housewife. I’ll be invited to join the Neighbourhood Watch if I don’t rein it in.
According to the radio, turns out Mongolian livestock herders follow a pattern of nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralism. My new flat is the gift that keeps on giving.
“What are your plans for the day?” Please say robbing a bank or defacing the neighbour’s lawn.
Perhaps he’s a guerrilla graffiti artist in his spare time.
Perhaps Gerald’s secretly responsible for the colourfully daubed your eyebrows look like two slugs fucking accompanied by an excellent sketch of two fat cartoon slugs doing exactly that, scrawled on a wall next to Embankment Tube Station.
Or perhaps not. Gerald gapes at me as if I’ve given him five seconds to calculate the cube root of 3567.
His eyes are big and brown, but not in a smouldering, “pools of dark chocolate” kind of way.
More judgy, like he’s slightly suspicious and wary of my nonsense, confirmed when he raises one of his thick, untamed slugbrows.
“I’ll… um…take the dog out in a minute.”
I arch one of my own, far thinner, shapelier brows. Yep, avoiding me and not giving a shit that I know it. “Uh-huh.”
“And…um.” Gerald spoons virtuous oat mush into his mouth. He’s sprinkled fucking chia seeds over it too; the whole thing is almost enough to put a man off his Coco Pops. “I have book club at eight o’clock tonight.”
“Cool.” The remote control will be mine for the evening. “Where’s that at?”
He shovels in some more oats. I nearly tell him to slow down; he’ll give himself indigestion. That stuff is heavy as fuck. “It’s online. I run it. I… um… I sometimes Airplay it to the TV in the lounge so I can have everyone on screen. So if you don’t mind…”
Yep, that’s me back in my room. “Sure, no worries. I’ve got some work admin to catch up on anyhow. I’ll be quiet as a mouse. Promise. Hey, we could eat together first,” I suggest, like a fucking masochist. “Before book club.”
Gerald jerks his head up. Both slugbrows climb his forehead again.
“Only if you want,” I amend. “Uber Eats delivers to here, I guess? And you probably already know the best takeaway places. I’m easy.
I’ll eat anything as long as someone else is cooking; Thai, Indian, Chinese—pizza if you like, though I had pizza yesterday when you were out with your…
um…dog. It was okay, an 8-inch Hot Hawaiian, and who doesn’t fantasise about chowing down on one of those on a Saturday night? ”
Gerald, from the looks of things.
“Though not my favourite Hot Hawaiian,” I blabber on, “as they didn’t put sweetcorn on it and I forgot to ask, ‘cos the amazing pizza place near my last flat had sweetcorn as standard on the Hot Hawaiian and so—“
“I flattened the box and put it in the recycling bin,” he interrupts. “I recycle everything, if I can.”
“God, absolutely. Yeah. Me too.” Guiltily, my gaze darts to the kitchen bin hiding last night’s empty aluminium gin and tonic can.
“Reduce. Reuse. Recycle,” I add, with as much conviction as I can muster.
“Flattening that box was absolutely at the top of my to-do list this morning. Greta for the win, yeah?”
Gerald blinks. “Right.”
“So, dinner?”
“Um.”
If panic had a posture, it would be Gerald, paralysed with an oaty spoon halfway to his mouth and deeply regretting every decision bringing him to this moment. “I… uh… don’t really eat fast food.”
A tiny fairy nesting in my soul dies. Goody two shoes. Don’t drink, don’t smoke. What do you fucking do?
“Wow, wish I could say the same. But no worries. It’s fine.
” Improvise, adapt, overcome. “I can do us some baked potatoes and tuna melt. I mean, I can’t cook much else, and opening a tin of fish and grating some cheese over it hardly constitutes cooking.
But I’m literally the king of cheesy tuna, and I have a trick of getting the potato skins just the right level of crispiness.
What, say seven o’clock? Does that give you plenty of time to prepare for book club?
Yeah? Cool! Just point me to the nearest supermarket. ”
Sutton Common on a Sunday afternoon is serene as fuck.
Too serene. Too civilised. Too much of a perfectly trimmed nauseatingly suburban dystopia.
Recycling bins are out in force, lined up like tin soldiers, some with smiley faces and cutesy stickers on them saying bin there, recycled that!
And superhero bin activated! Don’t get me wrong.
I’ve got nothing against saving the planet—David Attenborough is one of my all-time (non-sexual) idols—but it still sets my teeth on edge.
Isaac and Ezra are out in suburbia these days, too.
I wonder if they have stickers on their recycling bins.
Ugh. Probably not, Ezra’s way too cool, even if I did catch them chatting about dental plans.
Turning thirty earlier this year sneaked up on me like a cat wearing socks.
Dwelling on it is like being forced in front of a mirror I don’t want to look into.
One minute, I’m off my head and dancing on Stefan’s shoulders in Aiya Napa.
The next, he’s telling me about his and Marcus’s recent trip to the garden centre to price up three panels of brushwood fencing.
I haven’t the foggiest what brushwood is, nor do I care.
But, overnight, my friends have split into two camps; one lot quitting the rat race to go find themselves (and hard drugs) in Vietnam, and the others selling their souls to mortgages, air fryers, five-year plans, and fence panels.
Meanwhile, I’m stuck in no man’s land with Gerald and having an existential crisis. Concede and wither on the vine or fuck off to Far East and convert to Buddhism? Or stay and fight? Rage against the machine and the inevitable slide into proper adulthood for as long as possible?
I mooch down the uninspiring supermarket aisles, sending a snap to Stefan accompanied by a bored emoji.
Music plays, some soft, royalty-free panpipe shit.
Every time it hits a high note, the fluorescent lights flicker, casting a jerky glow over where someone has dropped a tin of tomatoes and another shopper has walked through the mess.
I sling two own brand tins of tuna into my basket.
A bumper-sized bottle of ketchup joins them.
Five-year plans? I’m still figuring out what snacks to buy to get me through the next set of night shifts.
And the quickest way out of Sutton Common.
I’m paying rent by the month on a verbal agreement, seeing as Luke and Isaac vouched for me, so I can leave whenever I want, without giving formal notice.
Stefan texts back a picture of his and Marcus’s entwined hairy ankles with the words lol still in bed. Goblins have prettier feet than Marcus.
I toss a bag of nutritious mini cucumbers into my shopping basket then balance them out with a comforting supersized bag of Maltesers, always well received during a night shift.
I throw in a one-litre bottle of Tanqueray too.
Fiscal prudence, my arse. I wish she was a bloody drag queen.
She’d be way more fun on a Sunday afternoon than schlepping around the Sutton Common branch of Sainsburys.
Ah well, at least I have my shit together at work. No, scrap that, at least I excel at work. And thank fuck I don’t have trotters like Marcus.
I don’t text Stefan back.