Zeke
Zeke
While Lexi plays tinned-food roulette to decide the ingredients for our holiday lunch, I head back to the houseboat to check on the shower drain and fetch the spatula. In all the weird stuff left on this rig, there’s not a single spatula, and I just can’t cook without one. It’s like trying to cook left-handed. You can take my clothes and my good-for-curls conditioner, but I can’t survive without a spatula.
The water’s different here underneath the rig. Quieter, darker. And the houseboat’s so small . The little bench-sofa, the narrow kitchen cabinets, the ceiling barely an inch above my head. As I check my new makeshift drain plug—I found masking tape in the storeroom of the rig, which has been a game changer—I find myself thinking about showering in here as a kid, elbows tucked in, head ducked to fit under the spray.
Being alone changes how I see this place. Heading back out into the living space, I don’t look at that sofa and think of Lexi trying to get comfortable as she waits for dinner; I think of sitting there myself, age ten, knees drawn up to make room for Jeremy, watching Dad burning fish fingers on the hob. Penny’s not even changed the kitchen handles that Dad whittled and painted himself—small Rubik’s cubes in brown and white.
Without Lexi here, it really does feel like Dad’s houseboat, and he’s in my head, after reading those logbooks. He seemed different on the page—softer, almost, than I remember him. I think of Dad as so frustratingly hard to get through to, and I guess I felt he wasn’t trying to connect with me, but the man in those logbooks was muddled and wistful, a bit lost. Never sure of anything but his puzzles. I wonder what would have happened if I’d opened up to him, just once, instead of pulling away. He wrote that I was a mystery he wanted to solve, and it was so weird to read that, because that’s exactly how I see him.
Lexi’s right: he was my dad. One way or another. And he died. And yeah, maybe there’s some biological dad out there who could fill that hole for me, but even if there is, who’s to say he’s going to be the father ten-year-old Zeke had wanted? I’d probably be better off if I could just say, I had a dad. He wasn’t perfect, but he was mine. Then he died, and just like that, I lost the chance to know him.
I blink away tears and look down at the floor, registering what I’ve failed to see as I’ve been standing here feeling sorry for myself.
The planks of the kitchen floor are shiny.
Shinier than they should be.
Wet.
I don’t tell Lexi.
It’s not that I want to deceive her—I really want to tell her, because to be honest, I’m scared. If there’s water coming in from somewhere other than the shower drain, then there’s a real chance The Merry Dormouse will go down before the day’s out. I couldn’t find the leak, but the water didn’t come back when I wiped it away, so I’m hoping it was some rogue rainwater that snuck in through a ceiling hole I missed.
The reality is, that houseboat’s our only escape route from here if a ship or helicopter doesn’t turn up. We found spaces around the rig where we’re sure there were lifeboats once, and there’re signs everywhere pointing to them, but no actual boats. Kind of terrifying to know that when they left this rig, they left it in a hurry, but we’ve always felt all right about it because if worst comes to worst, we’ve got The Merry Dormouse .
I’ll just keep checking on her. I’ll keep drying her out, then drying out the towels, then drying her out again. It takes a lot of water to sink a boat, right?
“What is it?” Lexi says, looking at me over her lunch—broad bean stew, not my best dish.
We’re sitting out on pillows on the concrete, facing each other, her back to the door we first entered through when we came to the rig. She’s looking better. Less…gaunt. Every time she clears another plate or drinks another glass of water, I relax a bit more. The weather’s pretty mild today, but we’re both in jumpers—it’s windier up here on the rig than it was down on the boat. Lexi’s jumper swamps her, its sleeves covering right up to the first knuckle on both hands. I like this look on her. It makes me want to spend lazy Sundays in bed together; it’s that kind of vibe.
“Nothing. It’s fine. I was just thinking how whenever I’m on holiday, I always do the big-picture thinking. What do I want from my life? All that stuff.”
She smiles slightly. “Oh yeah? And? What do you want from your life?”
I think about my last holiday: four days in Barcelona with Brady, Will and Emiliano. The big-picture stuff that holiday had been about relationships. Women. I’d brought up that I was looking for something serious, trying to work out how to find the one, and Emiliano had laughed at me. Who’d have you now? he’d said, slapping me on the arm. You hoping a good woman will make an honest man of you?
It had annoyed me. I’ve never been anything other than honest.
“I want to open my own restaurant,” I find myself saying. “Fresh food, different menu every day. I know it’s stupid, but the way we’ve been cooking out here, making do with whatever we’ve got, that’s my favorite way to work. I love the challenge, the way it takes the pressure off because you can only do what you can do…”
“Can I just ban the word stupid once and for all?”
I blink at Lexi as she settles back against the heap of pillows.
“Hey?”
“You said, I know it’s stupid . It’s not stupid. You’re a chef. What’s stupid about wanting to open your own restaurant one day? That’s a really reasonable ambition, Zeke.”
“Junior chef,” I say automatically. “But…yeah, I…”
I didn’t actually notice I’d used the word stupid at all. I swallow back an instinctive apology and reach for her hand. I want to touch her all the time, but especially when she does this—when she looks at me in a way that makes me see myself differently.
“Thank you,” I say.
“Why do you think it feels stupid to you?”
“I guess I just feel like it’s unrealistic for someone like me.”
“Someone young, talented and driven…?”
I pull a quick face, dropping her hand. Nobody has ever called me driven . Talented in the kitchen, maybe. Talented in bed. But running a business like a restaurant…
“I’ve not got that sort of brain,” I say. “Like, I’m always…”
“What are you doing with your hands right now?”
“Showing you what my brain looks like,” I say, as I wave my arms around between us in a sort of whirly cloud of chaos.
Lexi tilts her head to the side. “This is your brain?”
“Imagine smoke from a fire, only it’s windy and it goes everywhere.”
“Sounds beautiful,” she says, holding my gaze.
“It’s messy. I wouldn’t be any good at running something. I can follow orders, but that’s about it.”
“I wish you’d see the Zeke I see,” she says, pulling her pillow closer, so our legs are touching. “I wish you’d see the person who’s keeping me alive.”
I think of that wet floor in the houseboat and try not to let the wince of fear show on my face.
“It’s weird,” she says, shifting to lean back on her hands, legs still touching mine. “Our lives are so different in so many ways, but…”
I like this but .
“But?”
“But I’ve always wanted to run a café.”
“No way,” I say, sitting up straighter. “Seriously?”
I suddenly feel horrified.
“Have I been—have you wanted to cook this whole time, are you also really into cooking, and…”
She laughs, knocking her knee against mine. “No! I love you cooking for me. It’s not really about the food. It’s about the people. Growing up in the pub, I got to see what a place can do for bringing people together, and the weird connections that get made when you all overlap somewhere—people who’d never usually chat, all in one room. But I also saw the bad stuff. The drunks. The fights. What alcohol does.”
Her eyes flick to my stomach, and I know she’s thinking about what alcohol did to us.
“So I want to have that, but with coffee instead of booze.” She does one of her frowns that’s actually a smile. Lexi language for This is big for me and I feel kind of embarrassed and excited at the same time .
“I love that.” And I love you , I think. I love you, I love you, I love you.
But I bite it back. Too soon. Too…much. She’ll write it off as something I’m just feeling because I’m stuck with her. I know Lexi, and I know she’ll be waiting for me to leave her the minute we hit dry land. So that’s when I’m going to tell her. Once we’re home, and she sees I’m not going anywhere.
“When we get back, I’ll open my cute café in Gilmouth and you’ll open your swanky restaurant in…London? I guess?” she says.
I smile, watching her look away from me. I love that we were clearly thinking about the same problem at the same time.
“The whole we-live-in-different-places thing seems kind of…” I am about to say stupid . “Kind of unimportant given what we’ve already survived, no?”
She shrugs one shoulder, the breeze catching a loose hair on her cheek. “Not really. Your life, your job, it’s all in London, and mine is where Mae is.”
“Lexi.”
“Yeah?”
“I want to be where you are. I can get work in Newcastle—I’ve got a good CV.”
When Lexi smiles, she looks as if she’s trying not to—like the smile’s growing despite her best efforts to hold it in. But right now she’s smiling as if she doesn’t see a single reason to stop, and that makes me feel amazing.
“Come on,” I say. “We’ve got an afternoon of art therapy ahead of us.”
Her eyebrows shoot up. “ Art therapy?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“I thought this was a holiday. Are we actually just in a really elaborate kind of rehab?” she says, looking around, as if she’s checking for doctors.
I laugh, pulling her up by both hands. She stumbles into me slightly, and I relish the feeling. I love the way we’re taking things slowly—this is new for me. We’re not rushing to bed, but we both know today’s really the two of us meandering there. Every time she touches me it’s like low-key foreplay, even if she’s just tucking one of my curls behind my ear.
“We’re on a retreat,” I tell her. “It’s going to chill us out. Relax us.”
I let myself kiss her, then get drawn in a bit more than planned. We break apart slightly breathless, and I rest my forehead against hers.
“I’m a very relaxed person already,” Lexi says, deadpan. “I’m so laid back, Zeke. I’m extremely chill.”
“When I first saw you, you had your arms folded and your legs, like, double folded,” I say, shifting back to demonstrate the bind she’d twisted her legs into at The Anchor. “I’ve never met someone so tense.”
“In fairness, you’re not seeing me at my best.” She waves a hand to capture the whole near-deathness of everything.
“God save me when I do,” I say, pulling her in the direction of the storeroom. There’s paint in there—just dried-up scraps in the bottom of a tub, but enough to mess around with. I like the idea of seeing Lexi loosen up.
“If you’re going to ask God to save you at some point,” Lexi says dryly, “could you maybe ask Him now?”