The Full Nest

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-two

Eddie

All’s quiet when Eddie comes home after his shift on Thursday night. He assumes Raj and Calum must be asleep. They’re like that these days, off to bed early like a couple of monks.

Although he doesn’t have his phone he reckons it must be nearly midnight. He is absolutely shattered, not only from his shift, but also from running on adrenalin all day following his thrilling morning with Lyla. Marius commented that he seemed a bit ‘giddy’ today: ‘Great to see you buzzing, Eddie. But can you dial it down a bit tomorrow when Jill Gilbert’s in?’

Eddie laughed it off. But really, it’s a wonder he’s managed to keep his mind on the job at all today. What he’d dearly love to do now is fall into bed. But he can’t do that yet, because tonight he has important stuff to do.

On his way to the bathroom he notices that Raj’s bedroom door is open, and there’s no one there. Calum’s is open too. He wonders where they’ve gone, now they’re such boring old men? Late night bingo, perhaps?

This is great, he decides, heading into the living room where he surveys the usual chaos. Despite being clean-living professionals, Raj and Calum don’t half leave a mess sometimes. Sweaters and T-shirts are flung everywhere, and dirty plates are cluttering the woodworm-ridden old crate they use for a table. It’s no place for a baby, Eddie reflects. But of more immediate concern is that it’s no place for a girl like Lyla. He sets about gathering everything up, and then washes up the pile of dirty mugs and glasses with an enthusiasm he’s never experienced before, when engaged in a domestic task.

Now he notices that the living room rug has acquired a gravelly layer of crumbs. Eddie can imagine that Lyla’s the type to pad around barefoot. He can’t have her resting her dainty little pregnant feet on that when she comes over tomorrow after his shift. So he starts looking for the hoover, hoping now that neither Calum nor Raj are planning to work from home tomorrow, as they do occasionally. With a shudder he remembers Lyla describing Raj as ‘handsome’. Eddie would far prefer to have the place to himself.

Having checked the hall cupboard, and found only a headless shop dummy and a mangled bicycle wheel, he has no idea where the hoover might be. Or if they have one, even (no one’s used it since he’s lived here). Finally he locates a dustpan and brush buried under the sink, and makes do with that. Then he turns his attention to his bedroom and realises, with a jolt of horror, that this will not do at all.

It’s dingy and depressing and, he realises now, a bit smelly. He can’t possibly invite Lyla into his sleeping quarters when they’re in this state. At the bottom of his wardrobe he finds the new bed linen set, still in its clear plastic packaging, that his mum ordered for him. He’d flung it in there without much thought – irritated, actually, at her ‘interference’ – but now he decides that these items are in fact extremely useful. They’re a stripy design, grey and blue; perfectly acceptable for a young man to have. Not that his mum would have picked a SpongeBob set, but still. Eddie is conscious that everything has to be just right for Lyla.

Spirits rising now, he strips off his grubby bedclothes and stuffs them into the wardrobe to be dealt with at a later date. Then he rips the packaging from the new set and pulls it all out.

Eddie frowns. A vital component seems to be missing.

There’s no sheet! Where’s the sheet ? He checks the label on the packaging: Pure Cotton Duvet and Pillowcase Set. What’s the use of that? Is he supposed to sleep on a bare mattress, like it’s a crack den? Eddie can’t imagine Lyla would be crazy about that. What can he use instead? A tablecloth? Of course there isn’t a tablecloth here; there isn’t even a table.

There’s the option of putting the same sheet back on. But on further inspection Eddie discovers that it has a huge greyish patch in the middle. And by ‘middle’ it’s more like the whole sheet, apart from the edges, from where he’s been lying on it. So the greyness must be his skin cells that have fallen off in the night. Is this the colour he is now, from these long, hard shifts in the kitchen?

Tentatively, he sniffs the sheet. Ew, no, this definitely can’t go back on the bed. Five months is too long to sleep on the same sheet, he realises now. But Eddie can rectify that. He bundles it up and carries it through to the kitchen, locates some washing powder under the sink and stuffs it into the washing machine on the quickest cycle.

With it churning already he bounds back to his room to tidy and even dust , wincing at the filth that comes off onto the pair of boxers he uses as a duster.

Now for the most challenging task – the one he’s put off until last.

Eddie rotates his clicky shoulders, takes a big suck of water from Raj’s spout bottle and pops a handful of vitamin pills he swiped from the tub in the kitchen. Thus fortified, he eyes the blind, still propped up in the corner in its cardboard tube. He steps closer, squaring up to it as if it might fight him.

Eddie Silva is a hard-working man now and a father-to-be. Surely he can put up a simple window covering?

He knows there’s zero chance of there being any tools in the flat. (Where is Eddie’s dad when he needs him?) But he can improvise, can’t he? He has a good brain, Marius reckons. He’s resourceful. So Eddie tips out the components out of the tube, tossing aside the sheet of instructions as obviously he won’t need those. Now he picks up the little packet of screws and two white plastic thingies. Brackets, he surmises, to hold the thing up. How can he fix them in place without a drill, a screwdriver or a ladder to stand on? Even at six foot tall, Eddie can’t reach the top of the window.

Filled with determination now, he fetches a wooden chair from the living room, plus the only frying pan in the flat. With the washing machine whirring reassuringly, Eddie tries to measure the blind’s width ‘by eye’. Then he climbs onto the chair and, wobbling a little, he places a bracket above the top left corner of the window. He fits a screw through the hole and whacks it hard with the frying pan.

Shards of wood and plaster fly out at him. But amazingly, it stays up!

Somehow Eddie needs to know exactly where to place the second. He clambers off the chair and checks the blind’s width from the instruction sheet he’d tossed aside. Then he stares up at the top of the window, wondering how wide fifty-two centimetres might be.

The presenter of Cash or Crash pops into his mind. With his neat little teeth and a caramel tan, he always looks a bit too pleased with himself. ‘Okay, Eddie. For a chance of the jackpot of ten thousand pounds …’ expectant pause … ‘… how wide is fifty-two centimetres?’

Eddie’s brain seems to freeze. Now he’s cursing himself for not searching Lyla’s flat for his phone. In his panic he’d been more concerned about rushing off to work. However, not having it about his person is making him feel all out of kilter, because googling everything is Eddie’s way of navigating life. For instance, Jill Gilbert’s restaurant reviews. Eddie has pored over them as if prepping for an exam.

Suddenly, it’s as if his brain switches on. Fifty-two centimetres is fifty-two centimetres you idiot!!! – i.e. the width of the blind! All he needs to do it hold it in place and make a pencil mark at its end. He peers up at the top of the window again, trying to dredge up the energy to get this thing done. His mum would announce sometimes that she was tired after cooking dinner – but she never cooked for ten hours straight. If only his dad were here. Then the blind would be up already, and everything would be all set for tomorrow and Eddie could go to bed.

He hears the washing machine bleep in the kitchen, signalling that the cycle is done. He runs through to pull out the sheet. In the absence of a tumble dryer he’ll have to dry it somehow. There’s only one answer to that, Eddie decides. He’s not going to blast it with Raj’s hairdryer for hours on end. Instead, in a burst of rebellion, he does something he has been warned, very firmly by his prematurely aged flatmates, to never do.

Eddie marches into the hallway to the little gizmo stuck on the wall and he puts the heating on.

Yes, in June. It’s expressively not allowed ‘until at least November’, Raj declared. But Eddie is sick of house rules and, with the sheet now bunched over the living room radiator, he heads back into his bedroom.

And this is where he’s hit by a tidal wave of exhaustion. Tottering on the wobbly chair with the blind, the bracket and the frying pan, Eddie is painfully aware that today’s shift was especially hectic and he really should be lying down. Instead, he is holding up the blind horizontally and, quivering with the effort, trying to position the bracket at the same time. He’s young and healthy and he should be able to do this when his dad can build a truck with his bare hands, from bits of crap lying around in Dev’s garage. But Eddie is shaking, and he drops the blind, then the bracket. Then the spindly chair tips, propelling Eddie forward towards the window where his head and forearm and the frying pan smash into the glass.

Eddie screams as the window shatters and somehow he ends up on his bedroom floor with bits of glass and some kind of dark liquid splattered all over. His vision is swimming but he manages to raise his arm and look at it. The sight of it – all that blood pouring out of him – triggers a surge of nausea. Briefly, he thinks: Jill Gilbert’s booking at one o’clock!

And then Eddie isn’t worrying about restaurant critics or what Marius will do to him if he doesn’t show up for work, because he promptly passes out. At least, he thinks that’s what happened because now Raj is here, Raj and Calum, and they’re crouching over him in the harsh glare of his bedroom’s centre light.

‘Mate … what happened?’ Calum cries out.

‘I … I was just trying …’ Eddie starts. ‘I fell. Cut myself …’

‘Yeah, I can see that.’

‘Blind,’ Eddie croaks.

‘You can’t see? Fucking hell,’ Raj gasps.

‘No, the blind .’ Eddie manages to indicate the broken window. ‘I was trying to put it up. I just, uh …’

‘Why didn’t you ask us to help you?’ Calum exclaims.

Slowly, painfully, Eddie manages to sit up. ‘You weren’t here.’

‘Yeah, we were at a spoken word night,’ Raj murmurs.

‘A what?’

‘Y’know. Poetry. Kind of free-form stuff.’ Raj pauses and then, trying for a joke, he adds, ‘If we’d known you were gonna throw yourself through the window, we would’ve asked you along.’

‘Uh.’ Eddie grunts. ‘Not really my thing—’

‘Yeah, well, we’re getting you to hospital, mate,’ Calum says now, wincing at the gash on Eddie’s forearm that’s possibly still bleeding; Eddie doesn’t know, he can’t bear to look at it.

‘I don’t need hospital. I just need to sleep—’

‘Nope, you’re going,’ Raj announces, jumping up, already gripping his phone. ‘I’m getting an Uber. No arguments. We’re coming with you, all right?’

So that’s what they do. The three of them go to hospital in a car that smells strongly of synthetic cherry air freshener. Eddie is jammed miserably between his friends on the back seat, his bad arm rather messily bandaged in a greying towel with a Lidl carrier bag taped over it.

To give them credit, Calum and Raj aren’t such arseholes after all. In fact Eddie can’t help feeling touched when they sit with him the entire night, in this grim waiting room with damaged people arriving, limping and bleeding and off their faces, some of them – arguing and punching the vending machine.

Numerous people are seen before Eddie. Fair enough, he thinks, that guy looked like his ear was hanging off – but is he ever going to get out of here? Meanwhile Calum and Raj have work to go to, yet they’re still making no move to leave. Eddie does too – or did . His shift was meant to start at seven-thirty a.m. An early today, which he was pleased about, as it meant he’d be free to see Lyla later. But seven-thirty has passed and by eight o’clock Eddie still hasn’t been seen, and nor has he figured what to do about contacting Marius.

Finally, as Calum reluctantly heads off to the office, Eddie asks to borrow Raj’s phone. Of course he doesn’t know Marius’s number, and nor can he access the Bracken kitchen’s WhatsApp group. So he googles the restaurant and calls the main number. It’s the booking line – an answerphone. He leaves a garbled message, actually forgetting to say his name, and hangs up.

‘Think he’ll be okay with that?’ Raj asks, looking doubtful as Eddie hands him his phone.

‘Yeah, be fine,’ he replies, feigning confidence. Later still, at ten-thirty a.m., Eddie looks at Raj. ‘You should go now. No point in waiting with me anymore.’

‘I’m not going anywhere,’ Raj says firmly. ‘I’ve texted my manager, he’s cool.’ How amazing to have a ‘cool’ boss, Eddie reflects as finally a nurse calls his name, and he is taken through to a small curtained cubicle where he is examined and then left interminably, to the point at which he worries that he’s been forgotten about.

Finally, Eddie is treated. While the small cut on his forehead is merely given a clean, the wound on his arm requires stitches. Forty minutes later he is released back into the bright and breezy Edinburgh day, with Raj having waited patiently to take him home. No point in going to the restaurant now, not in the midst of lunchtime service. He simply can’t face the wrath of Marius, and what use would he be anyway with his right arm out of action?

Two hours later, as Jill Gilbert tucks into her mussels in a smoky red pepper sauce, Marius leans against the huge industrial fridge in the kitchen and taps out a message on his phone.

What happened Eddie? Where are you today? You’ll be paid up to yesterday. Don’t you dare bother coming back.