Chapter Eleven
Nash
They drive back down the mountain, away from Myffy and towards the sea, just as the weather starts to turn again.
After the last decade and a half in LA, Nash is admittedly unused to the stormy, grey fury before him.
The Californian beaches are pristine and beautiful and filled with astonishingly fit people playing frisbee or surfing, like Kurt.
Not that he gets out there very often. Travelling anywhere in LA is way too much effort, especially the beach.
Nash snaps a photo of the furious white-capped waves to send to Kurt.
He almost sends it before remembering that he’s not supposed to be in Wales.
The problem with being friends with someone you do business with is when you’re hiding from the business part, you have to forget the friendship part too.
And the thing is, he still hasn’t worked out a way to say sorry but actually I don’t want to be an actor any more, I want to write or maybe produce or do anything behind the camera that isn’t being the face.
It’s not the fact that he’s only in romantic comedies – hell, he loves them, and that’s what he wants to write.
He’s just . . . done with being an actor.
And the thing is, if he says that, finally says it and pushes back on this multi-movie contract, it has ramifications for basically everyone else he works with, not least his co-star, Barbie.
He knows the whole Christmas Vet fandom has been desperate for their movie together.
As if on cue, a text from Barbie herself comes through.
Barbie: hey doll, my agent said Kurt pushed your contract negoshh for personal reasons. hope youre safe and okii
He can practically hear the purr of her voice. He should text her back, so she doesn’t worry he’s really sick, but then if he does, he’ll start thinking about this whole contract situation again. He pockets his phone and resolves to reply later.
Just put it away and forget about it, like everything else. Like, how he’s barely dated for years because of how badly his last relationship ended, or how he’s not even sure what he’s doing with his life. Or how he feels as if some of the spark has gone.
But there’s categorically no time for wallowing, not that he’s even convinced that he deserves to wallow. He just needs to get a grip and focus on helping out someone with a genuine need, rather than thinking about his own deeply First World problems.
Plus, going to a supermarket when he’s on vacation in another country is usually his favourite thing to do.
There’s nothing quite like finding an exciting new food he doesn’t recognise or something he’s always wanted to try.
He’ll never forget buying a durian when he was travelling in the Philippines – a delicious, stinky cheese-fruit.
Or all the different flavours of soda he picked up in Japan, though he could do without ever having to drink the jellied one that tasted of grass again.
However, when they arrive at the supermarket, the slightly apocalyptic vibe really throws the joyful escapism off.
The car park is fairly empty, but it turns out, so are the shelves inside, and they pass a handful of stressed staff who are basically rearranging the deckchairs at this point. There really isn’t much at all.
Christopher looks at the list on his phone optimistically. ‘I’m sure we can get some of the things we need, at least? We just have to be creative.’
Nash’s eyes land on a single sad potato in a green plastic crate. ‘I didn’t realise your talent extended to creating food out of nothing.’
There’s no other produce hidden in the crates underneath it either. This is really it. It feels wrong to leave the solitary potato behind, so he picks it up and puts it in the trolley. ‘I’ll push the cart.’
‘Trolley,’ Christopher corrects.
In the most overexaggerated American-doing-a-cockney accent he can muster, Nash repeats, ‘Trolleyyyy’.
‘I do not sound like that,’ Christopher huffs.
They weave through the aisles, and Nash shivers as they pause by the fridges. The shelves are pretty empty here too. How depressing. Christopher sticks his head all the way into a fridge to grab something from the back, so Nash creeps up behind him and yells, ‘’Ello, sister!’
He hears a satisfying clunk as Christopher knocks his head on the shelf.
‘I’m here to push the trolley. Fancy a cuppa?’
As Christopher stands upright, he spins round to face Nash, wielding a fridge-burned pack of bacon like a weapon. ‘Stop that.’
Nash laughs. ‘I will not. It’s much too fun to annoy you.’
With a haughty little eye roll, Christopher drops the bacon into the trolley and stalks off ahead in search of the next thing from his list.
‘To be fair, you sound more like a posh Bond villain or Stephen Fry than my terrible attempt, which is probably more evil CW character that’s going to turn me into a diamond.’
‘I’m sorry, did you say turn you into a diamond?’
‘Yeah. You know, evil English stuff.’
‘I worry about what they’re teaching you over there.’
‘Teaching us? It’s just television.’
‘Precisely my point. It’s amazing that we supposedly speak the same language and yet sometimes I have not a clue what you’re saying.’
‘Not a single clue,’ Nash replies in his terrible English accent, and when Christopher turns his back, he slyly gives him the finger.
He trails Christopher with the trolley. Slowly, it fills with items from the list, though it’s by no means anywhere near full.
A packet of skinny-looking sausages that go out of date that day, and some bags of rice and pasta.
A box of tea. Nothing looks particularly Christmassy, though given Nash wasn’t planning on doing a whole Christmas dinner situation just for himself, it hardly changes things for him.
Plus, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to find some of his favourites here, like the too-sweet almost-candied yams Americans cook, usually for Thanksgiving.
It’s been years since he went back to Canada for Christmas.
The last time must have been when he was still on Parental Units.
The one thing the supermarket does have is cheese.
Lots and lots of it, wrapped in brightly coloured wax and some even stacked up and wrapped in cellophane, like an easy cheesy gift.
It’s all the fancy cheeseboard stuff, but still, he adds a few things to their cart because there’s no point ignoring the one food that’s available.
‘We could make a fondue? Or twelve,’ Nash suggests, to the back of Christopher’s head.
Christopher harrumphs again, the sort of overdramatic sound that a Muppet might make, while he glares at his phone.
‘Are we missing lots?’
‘Quite a few things.’ Christopher hands him the phone with the list, where he has put a tick emoji next to the few things they do have.
That surprises Nash a little; Christopher doesn’t particularly seem like a man who is even aware of the emoji keyboard.
He would have thought he’d do a smiley face like old people do, with a colon for eyes, line dash for a nose and a bracket for a smile.
‘I’m worried. There are no ready meals or easy cooking stuff at all, which Myffy needs,’ Christopher says, running his hands through his hair. ‘And there’s hardly any of the stuff that Shaz wanted for the kids.’
‘Do you need to get those specific ones? Like, does anyone have allergies or anything?’
‘I could call and check. Why?’
‘We could make some food for them?’ The thought comes from his mouth before he can really think it through.
‘If ease is what they need, I mean. We can use the list as guidance to try and make something like the things they asked for, and then it’s a whole meal they can heat up, right?
We have your massive empty bakery, and it’s not like we’ve got anything better to do in this weather.
Plus, it might be better use of my energy than making homemade weights or us sniping at each other.
And I’ve fixed the van already, so what else am I going to do?
This place must sell Tupperware we can use, or maybe you have something like that in the bakery?
’ He trails off as he watches a soft, lazy smile blossom on Christopher’s face. The kind that makes his stomach ache.
‘That’s really very thoughtful of you, Nash.’
‘I can be thoughtful,’ he sniffs, brushing off the compliment. ‘It’ll be like Meals on Wheels, right? You can cook, and I’ll be sous chef. I’m good at taking direction.’
Christopher snorts at this for some reason, but makes the necessary phone calls to Shaz and Myffy, directing Nash to add a few notes on his own phone of likes and dislikes and an absolutely do not bring that into my house from Shaz about blue cheese.
The next hour goes quickly, and to Nash’s surprise, it’s because he’s having fun. They raid the canned food and the frozen vegetables sections and Nash is surprised by the sheer joy he feels at finding some normal non-Christmas Cheddar for Shaz’s kids.
With all their goods, they decide to make a vegetarian as-many-beans-as-possible chilli for the adults, a low-on-the-seasonings bolognese for Shaz’s kids with lots of hidden canned vegetables, and a big thick soup with crispy bacon or fish finger croutons for the topping.
Solid dishes they can batch-cook in massive quantities this afternoon without it taking hours and hours.
There’s no spaghetti for the bolognese, but they hope the kids will enjoy the novelty of the miscellaneous bags of pasta shapes they pick up.
Strangely enough, the dietary section is another part of the store relatively untouched by the plague of locusts that must have come through, so they stock up on long-life oat-based cream for the soup.