Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-five
Eddie
At ten-thirty on a cool, bright Edinburgh morning, Eddie looks at the photo of him and Lyla on her Instagram and feels as if his heart could break.
That party. God. He plonks his phone face down on the duvet and glares at the towel pinned up at his window. Obviously he can’t draw it, like a curtain. But the concept of taking it down every morning and pinning it back up again at night is too much to wrap his head around. There’s the blind his mum ordered for him, still in its packaging, propped up in a corner of his room. Your Blind From EasyBlinds has arrived! reads the yellow sticker on the hefty cardboard tube.
Nothing easy about installing a blind, Eddie reckons. Nothing easy about life when you’re having to fend for yourself, without the comforts of home. In this miserable room Eddie exists either in the unforgiving glare of the room’s centre light, or the meagre amount of sunlight that struggles through the towelling layer.
Neither option creates the ambience he’d envisaged when Raj and Calum had told him about the vacant room. Edinburgh with his best mates! Finally, Eddie’s adult life would properly begin. No more getting stoned at the bandstand and watching the Arran ferry chugging back and forth as the years slid away. No locking himself in the bathroom at home just to glean a bit of privacy from his parents. Moving out, he’d decided, would be bliss.
Eddie had pictured his friends’ flat as being scruffy but relaxed and fun, with impromptu gatherings and late nights sitting up, having a smoke and a few drinks and long, hilarious conversations.
It hasn’t quite turned out that way. Okay, there was that first night when he’d just moved in. The party and meeting Lyla and look what happened then! But since that night, Raj and Calum have been too busy to go out beyond the occasional quick drink. Too busy with work, that is. Eddie had never realised how serious they are now; proper corporate types, working for the same company and forever going on about systems and targets and ‘awaydays’ with ‘the team’. It’s as if they went straight from being normal teenagers to being instantly forty-five. While Raj is single, Calum has a girlfriend, Zara, who also seems oddly mature for twenty-three with her sensible blazers and curled-under brown bob and talk of how she and her flatmate want a modular sofa. What’s that all about?
Not only that, but these days Raj and Calum are up at dawn and heading off to their workplace’s gym together. They even go there at weekends! They’ll be there now, working out on a Saturday morning when they should be lying around the flat, drinking coffee and nursing hangovers like normal people. Eddie’s suggested finding a skate park they could all go to, but they looked at him as if he was mad.
Now Eddie mooches through to the kitchen in the otherwise empty flat, cringing at the sight of the huge, pearly-white helium balloon that’s hovering at the ceiling. Zara brought it round for Calum – she ‘stole’ it from a work event, this is what counts as rebellion these days! – and Eddie couldn’t admit that he still fears balloons.
Trying not to look at it, he fills a greasy pint glass with tap water. It tastes as if it’s come out of a rusting tank with a dead pigeon floating in it. Maybe it has – who knows? He saw a rat running along their street with a bit of battered sausage in its mouth the other night. At least, he thinks it was sausage. He didn’t exactly get up close to inspect it. Anyway, nothing would surprise him around here.
He glugs down the stale water while glaring at another appalling object in the kitchen. Sitting there on the worktop is a ridiculously huge, clear plastic bottle with a spout and measurements marked down the side. Eddie knows it’s to encourage you to guzzle water all day long. He faintly remembers a time when life was all about messing around and laughing with your mates. Now it’s about staying hydrated . All the same, he’s desperately hungover and needs liquid before he can function. He drank way too much at that party last night. It was the only way he could handle it.
Please come to Josh’s thing, Lyla had messaged him. We can do some photos. Mum’ll like that. Obligingly, he said he’d go. But it wasn’t like the party where they’d first met. It was a fancy thing in a hotel suite, full of braying people with loud, confident laughs. And the loudest and brashest was Lyla’s uni friend Josh.
Of course he was a Josh : holding court with his big white teeth and expensive shirt and a job at the Scottish parliament. ‘What d’you do, Eddie?’ he asked.
‘I’m a chef,’ Eddie replied, and Josh looked at him as if he’d said, ‘I shovel shit’. There were loads of Joshes last night. Joshes and Bens and Millies and Tillies and even a Dilly, he remembers now. Under the feeble dribble of the shower, he replays it all like a terrible movie as he tries to wash the mint-scented lather off his skinny body. It’s like standing under a dripping leaf.
At least no one seemed to care about the nature of Lyla and Eddie’s relationship last night. He was just there, like some amusing random she’d picked up and made a baby with. And everyone seemed cool with that. They kept teasing her, calling her ‘Mama’, and she lapped it all up while Eddie was basically ignored. Apart from being called upon to do photos, that is.
Eddie dries himself on a fraying towel and gets dressed. As he pulls on battered trainers he tries to push away how weird it all is, acting this part. As weird as his mum going away with Suki this weekend.
They’re going to be best mates, Eddie decides as he steps out into the musty hallway, shuts the flat door behind him and heads downstairs. It’s all too much. It feels like a tangled web he’s in – trapped, with no means of escape.
As he steps out into the chilly morning, trying to rev himself up for his shift at the restaurant, what Eddie really wants to do is call home. Or, more specifically, his mum. His dad’s great, and Eddie loves him to bits but it’s his mum he wants to talk to now. But he can’t do that because she’s away with Suki. And even if she wasn’t he couldn’t bear to admit what an almighty fuck-up he’s made of everything, and that the girl he’s having to pretend to be in love with – well, he really is in love with her.
Lyla is amazing. She’s so incredibly beautiful he can hardly bear to look at her face.
So, in a bizarre tangle Eddie is having to pretend not to be in love with the person he’s pretending to be in love with. Right now, with the hangover steadily crushing his brain, Eddie can’t make sense of that at all. It feels like the time his little sister Ana tipped out a whole load of jigsaw puzzles onto the living room floor and all the pieces were muddled up. Occasionally, his sisters message him: Bella being all: I’m here for you, give me a call sometime when you’re free? and Ana sending him jokey videos that have nothing to do with babies or the mess of his life. Eddie appreciates it, that his sisters think about him sometimes. But his replies are brief. All fine yeah talk soon.
Eddie’s running late for work now. Even so, he stops to roll a cigarette. Why does he go along with this crazy pretence that he and Lyla are together? Because he’d go along with anything she asked of him. He lights his roll-up and looks at that photo again, of the two of them at the party last night. Now he’s really scrutinising it, deciding that anyone would think they were together and in love. Then he can’t see it properly because something shocking is happening.
Tears are falling out of Eddie’s eyes. He’s crying, right there in the street, with people going about their business all around him. People carrying books, whizzing past him on bikes and striding along with takeaway coffees. They’re all so normal – just regular people who’ve got their lives together.
Eddie should be rushing to work now. But he can’t. He can’t go to the restaurant and pretend everything’s okay because he’s crying, and the hand that’s holding his skinny roll-up is shaking, so how could he possibly work with knives? So he messages his boss, Marius, who’s been so great with him, teaching him how to make the perfect reduction and sear a fillet of fish to perfection, rather than lightly poaching it and turning it grey.
Sorry can’t make it in today feel really ill.
Immediately, his phone buzzes into life. ‘Hey, what’s up?’ Marius asks, clearly busy. There’s clattering and urgent voices in the background as the team prepares for lunchtime service.
‘Um, I just feel really bad,’ Eddie croaks, hoping Marius doesn’t pick up on all the outdoor sounds around him. The traffic, a dog barking, the ding of an approaching tram.
‘Don’t give me that,’ he booms. ‘We need you here on prep today. Remember we’ve got that big party coming in? The table of ten? They booked two months ago!’
‘Yeah, I know,’ Eddie starts as an ambulance siren shrieks.
‘Where are you?’
‘In bed—’
‘Don’t give me that. I can’t be one man down, today of all days. What’ve you got? A Hangover? Take some fucking ibuprofen and get yourself in right now—’
‘Honestly, Marius, I can’t,’ Eddie protests. ‘I’d be no use. Really. I’m going to have to go. Sorry. I’ll be in tomorrow—’
‘Oh, so you’ll be better then, will you?’ his boss snaps.
‘I think it’s just one of those twenty-four-hour things,’ Eddie starts. But Marius has already ended the call.