Chapter 13
ALARIC
Over the next few days, Gerald is a model patient.
As far as I know, anyhow. I’m mostly at work.
The evidence around the flat points to him sleeping a lot, binge-watching a super-worthy series about Eleanor of Aquitaine on the History Channel, and eating disgustingly healthy quantities of organic fruit and salad and a brand of muesli a famished goat might decline.
He’s no longer rude to me or shutting me out.
Our quarrels are well and truly in the rear-view mirror.
He’s simply comfortable in his own steady rhythm.
And a wired, needy housemate, for whom spewing out every microscopic detail of his day is on a par with a requirement for oxygen, unfortunately, dances to a different beat.
Each time Gerald’s door closes gently behind him, when he needs his own space, only to emerge hours later with a softer, calmer expression, I try not to take it personally.
I sleep badly, mulling over my housing situation and why everyone around me except for Gerald (I swear he was born aged forty-seven) views hitting thirty as a deadline to reassess.
Everyone knows what they’re doing with their lives, even Stefan and Marcus, in between throwing things at each other.
It’s as if they’re avidly following some cosmic checklist, ticking off the tedious essentials like making wills, carparking apps, airline loyalty points, applying daily sunscreen moisturisers.
Whereas I’m lying wide-awake, night after night, wondering whether I’ve actually already met the love of my life but got distracted by a rack of cinnamon swirls in a baker’s window, apologised for bumping into them, then moved on.
And also why no one else has realised that the sign at the end of our hospital’s east corridor saying if you’re looking for the Sexual Health Clinic then you’ve gone too far is funny as fuck.
I mull over a few of the rubbish flats I’ve viewed this week.
Flat hunting in central London is essentially speed dating, but with next to zero chance of a drink and a shag afterwards.
The similarities don’t stop there; anything that’s been on the market for yonks is a red flag, ditto quirky layouts and strange smells.
Anyhow, I viewed a handful, and they were all shite.
One owner bragged about original features (meaning the mould on the ceilings was from circa 1972), and another demanded the financial equivalent of my left kidney as a deposit.
I have three lined up next week. Flats, not kidneys.
Otherwise, I’m so desperate I’d hand one over.
Some days, I feel like I’m digging through shit for a jewel.
At 2.30 a.m., I’ve got the munchies. A biscuit or two might settle me down.
Ninja-like, so as not to wake Gerald, I tiptoe across the hallway into the kitchen, only to find him there already, bent over the fridge.
His tartan jim-jams are doing their warm and comfy thing, and his fluffy hair be fluffing.
For a moment, I’m afflicted by contradictory urges to snuggle against the former and smooth down the latter.
Perhaps it’s simply relief at no longer being alone in the middle of the night with my mad brain.
From his colour, and the way he holds himself less stiffly, Gerald’s much improved.
“Just getting a glass of iced water,” he says guiltily, as if I’ve caught him nicking condoms in Tesco. “I wonder if the painkillers make me thirsty.”
“Opioid-based ones often give people a dry mouth.”
At least I’m wearing briefs and a T-shirt this time, leaving only my pasty, pipe-cleaner legs on show.
On the ends of them, my feet look like two blue ice pops.
Gerald’s big feet are very cosy in his sheepskin-lined suede slippers.
I squeeze past him to get to the food cupboard.
Are his brown eyes following my cotton-covered little tush as I stand on tippy toes to reach into it?
Why, yes they are. I don’t need to turn and verify; I can feel them.
“What are you doing up?” Gerald leans against the sink.
“Can’t sleep.”
“No?”
With a thick gluck, he swallows a gulp of water and then another. Gerald’s Adam’s apple juts out like a knuckle under the skin of his throat.
“No.”
I only have three chocolate digestives left in the packet. Reluctantly, I offer them out. “Do you want one?” Please say no.
“No. Thank you.”
He rinses his water glass, dries it carefully on a tea towel, and replaces it in the cupboard. Then he walks out, the soles of his worn slippers making soft, sticky sounds as they move across the hardwood floor. Unexpectedly, he pauses, then comes back, filling the doorway.
“Why?” His cool brown eyes settle on mine, slugbrows tilted with mild curiosity.
“Why what?”
“Why can’t you sleep?”
I lick a stripe across the top of my biscuit, savouring sweet chocolate.
Probably don’t need a sugar rush right now.
I wonder how to reply. The bland answer to Gerald’s question is already halfway to my lips.
After all, Gerald doesn’t give a fuck whether I sleep well or not.
He’s simply counting down the days until he can wander around his flat at whatever hellish time it is now and not bump into an underdressed, aggravating housemate.
Or I can splurge the messy truth and watch him edge away. I imagine Gerald doesn’t relish conversations about existential crises and feelings and emotions, especially in the dead of night.
The latter is far more amusing.
“For a start, I catastrophise about everything,” I declare, waving my biscuit around as if on the verge of a full Shakespearian meltdown.
The only thing missing is a swishy bathrobe.
“I can’t switch off, like ever. I have dialogues with myself in my head, like every single thought I’ve ever had needs to be analysed and categorised and a solution found from five different angles.
If I haven’t unloaded during the day, it’s ten times worse.
The bedside light switches off, and my head switches on.
I fret and worry and basically tie myself up in knots over mostly nothing. ”
Gerald must think I’m mad. His wide eyes blink a couple of times as if trying to fathom whether I’m simply a drama queen (I mean, yes, obviously) or whether it’s something more alarming.
“I don’t collect stranger’s hair samples,” I say quickly, “Just so you know.”
“I never thought you did.” He studies me some more as I nibble around the edges of my biscuit. “What are you specifically worrying about? Your job’s okay, isn’t it? Isaac says you seem to manage it standing on your head.”
“Oh, the job’s fine.” I nod rapidly. “It always has been. I aced the surgery exams. I can still draw and explain the Krebs cycle twelve years after learning it at med school, and, though I say it myself, my technical skills are amazing. It’s the only reason the boss puts up with me.
Don’t tell anyone, but once you get the hang of it, robotic-assisted radical prostatectomy is pretty much like a huge fucking game of Tetris. ”
He says nothing, just lets those two brown laser pointers bore holes in me.
So I do what comes naturally and keep babbling on.
“All my responsible friends have coupled up.” I give choccie biscuit number two a long lick.
Now the floodgates are open, I’m going to get all of it off my chest. “Like my oldest friend, Stefan, and his fiancé. They didn’t mind me living with them when they were new and fresh.
But Marcus doesn’t want a third hanging around anymore, especially one that caught him sniffing my pants, even though they don’t seem to have stopped bickering since I left. ”
“Sniffing your pants,” Gerald clarifies with a grave expression.
“Yes, a blue pair with hearts dotted on them. And wanking. Stefan doesn’t know.
I should probably tell him, but Marcus will deny it, and Stefan’s so enamoured by the tosser I can’t guarantee he’ll believe me.
I’m not going to risk causing a rift between us.
He’ll work Marcus out eventually. Anyhow, because of that and other things, half of me wants them to break up and crazy Marcus to fuck off so I can go back.
Living with Stefan in central London is literally my dream setup.
The other half of me knows it’s pretty shitty to hope for, because obviously, I also want Stefan to be happy. ”
“Will he be, with…um… someone like that?”
I roll my eyes. “Obviously not in the long term, but he’s kind of got to work that out for himself. Stefan’s the sort of person who, if someone says ‘fuck me harder’, he’ll fuck them like they’re made of glass.”
Gerald pinches his brow, drawing the slugs closer. “Did you… did you say these were your responsible friends?”
“Yes. Mostly.” In case Gerald suddenly changes his mind and decides he wants it, I lick biscuit number three.
“My more intellectual friends—yes, I have some—have seen the light and fucked off somewhere warm and sunny where they don’t have to battle the Tube every day.
One doctor I used to hang around with is teaching kids to windsurf in New Zealand.
Another has opened a bar in Phuket. Which means the only ones left in the game are emotionally still stuck at twenty-one, like me, light years behind in terms of grasping their own lives by the horns.
Or people like you, who are totally self-contained and don’t need anyone else to suck up all their minor and inconsequential insecurities in order to get a decent night’s kip, because you’re perfectly happy and capable on your own.
And now I sound like a whingy, self-pitying arsehole. ”