Chapter Six 3 January 2023 #5
A comfortable silence settled between us, like it used to in the old days.
The “old days” were only days ago, but I suspected they were already lost to me.
Sometimes we used to talk on the phone with just the wall separating our rooms. I would get into bed and dial his number.
He wouldn’t even say a word, just open the line and place the phone on the pillow beside him.
“What are you doing?” I would eventually ask.
“Just lying here. What are you doing?” he’d respond, his voice more vibration than sound, striking a chord inside me that I didn’t care to examine.
Finn and I had moved in with Jack seven years earlier, when he needed housemates and we needed a safer place to live.
His place was on the family property, a sandstone cottage, partially buried in a tumble of jasmine.
The best part of the cottage was the converted, slope-roofed barn attached to its side.
Jack insisted I have it, while he and Finn took the bedrooms in the main part of the cottage.
When we first moved in, I found Jack alarmingly attractive.
I was relieved that he had a girlfriend, Georgia, who bought and restored antiques before selling them at a breathtaking mark-up on Instagram.
She wore paint-splattered Blundstones and overalls.
She came from a nice Tasmanian family, which, unlike mine, had never inflicted colonial trauma on the entire planet.
With her sweet face and her useful hands, she was basically perfect for him.
I swiftly turned her into my friend to annihilate my tiny crush on Jack and ensure he remained out of reach.
But when Georgia received an offer to work with a famous furniture restorer in New York three years ago, Jack declined to go with her.
On the night she left, I dialled his phone across the wall to make sure he was okay.
It was a habit we had never attempted to break.
“I’m really sorry about your dad and Louis. I don’t know if I had a chance to say that before.”
I said nothing for a long moment. “How long did it take you to get over your dad’s death?”
“Well, I was eight, so it’s probably a bit different,” he said.
His father had fallen off a ladder trying to fix a shingle on the roof of the main house.
It was only a few metres, and he’d seemed fine.
By the time anyone realised the knock to his head had triggered a catastrophic bleed, it was too late to save him.
Jack had watched as his dad staggered, then swayed like a felled tree, dead before he hit the ground.
“How long did it take you to get over your mum?”
“I’m still waiting.”
He was quiet for a while. “Yeah. Same, I guess.”
“Hey,” I asked suddenly, “before the helicopter came, do you think we were about to kiss?”
I knew every iteration of his laugh, but this particular version was new to me. He hesitated. “Are you drunk?”
“Maybe, why?”
I could hear him sifting through his thoughts, deciding which one he would share with me. “I was going to kiss you, yeah.”
“Have you ever thought about doing that before?” I asked, my face flushing at my own recklessness. Our friendship was a delicate thing that depended on certain doors never being opened, even though we loved nothing more than to rattle the handles to see what would happen.
Again, he was silent. “Well, yeah… but maybe this is something we should talk about when you’ve sobered up.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ll wake up in the morning and regret this conversation, and then you’ll avoid me for a while.”
He was right. The helicopter coming in to break up our potentially life-altering kiss had been both maddening and a reprieve.
“You know,” I said, barely following my own thoughts as they flowed out of me, “I’ve always suspected that if I didn’t have my title, I wouldn’t be half as interesting. Isn’t that pathetic?”
I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was smiling that smile of his, the annoying one he gave me when I was crabby in the morning or worried about an exam, the one that made me want to sink my teeth into his neck.
“You’re the most interesting person I know, and I couldn’t care less about your title,” he said.
He could name all 160 grape varieties that grow in Australia.
He could easily have spent his life trading on his rebellious family’s fame but never did.
He still borrowed library books. He danced with old ladies at weddings.
When we first met, I was oddly determined to scare him by telling him stories about my parents, the worst ones that never made it into the tabloids: The time Papa shoved her and she fell back into a mirror.
The time Mum found Annabelle’s nightgown in his bed and ran up to the roof with it.
But Jack only listened intently and squeezed my shoulder.
Oh, shit, I had thought. Who is this? He was undoubtedly the most interesting person I knew.
“Lex,” he said, “you’ve got a lot going on right now. I don’t want to pressure you.”
His voice in my ear and the gin in my blood was edging me to sleep.
“I wish you could come to the funeral,” I murmured. “I have to go alone.”
“I would come. But it doesn’t sound like the kind of funeral where anyone can just rock up and pay their respects.”
I thought of the impossible day that lay ahead, the second time I would have to trail a coffin as everyone watched.
“No, they’re checking every manhole and lamppost in central London for explosives,” I said. “Half the world’s heads of state will be there.”
“I’ll just grab a seat next to the Emperor of Japan then.”
“He can’t come—he’s having gallbladder surgery. He’s sending his son instead.”
We both laughed softly. It was that hour of night when nothing really counted.
“Will you pat Ragu for me?” I asked.
“He keeps looking for you. Every time I go to find him, he’s standing at the barn doors peering inside.”
My eyes were closing. “I’m falling asleep.”
“That’s okay. Go to sleep. Call me later.”
“Goodnight.”
“Night, Lex.”