Chapter Thirteen #2
In the kitchen, all the food is still laid out, though it has moved back and forth slightly with Christopher’s cleaning.
‘Come on, we need to get cooking. I’ve got some recipes drafted out so we should be good to get going. I just need to get some seasonings and bits from upstairs.’
‘I’ll get them,’ says Nash, peering at the notes on the counter. ‘I could do with putting on dry socks.’ He disappears out of view.
But then Christopher hears Nash go halfway up the stairs and . . . stop?
Christopher wanders to the bottom of the stairs and looks up, where he sees Nash inexplicably crouching, as though about to pounce. Sensing his presence, Nash doesn’t turn but waves down the stairs to Christopher, beckoning him closer.
‘What are you doing?’ Christopher whispers, because it seems like a situation that calls for whispering. ‘I thought you wanted to work in a kitchen that had cat-swinging spatial capabilities.’
‘Shh. It’s funny you should say that,’ Nash whispers.
Something is . . . crinkling?
Christopher slinks up behind Nash, and follows Nash’s pointed finger to the kitchen where, on the table, where Christopher had left the bag of supplies, is, rather inexplicably, a cat.
A sleek but very small black cat that he’s pretty sure is a little too thin.
He’s always surprised by how small cats can be, expecting them to be as chunky as his parents’ Border terriers, Stella and Luna, but this cat is tiny. It can’t be much more than a kitten.
How did it even get into the kitchen?
Christopher is a little worried they might frighten it just by being there. The poor creature needs some lunch. There must be a can of tuna in one of the cupboards.
But before they can do anything, the cat spots them both, and, as it raises its little head, Christopher sees there’s a half-eaten sausage protruding from its mouth. A sausage from the only pack they found at the supermarket and were saving for dinner.
‘Christ!’ says Christopher, clambering over Nash to rescue the sausages. The tiny thief slips as smoothly as an eel through a gap in a pushed-open window, sausage in tow.
The window had been closed when they left, but upon inspection, Christopher can see the latch must have loosened in the bad weather so the window doesn’t actually shut properly. The cat would have only had to get a claw at the right angle to open it.
‘I didn’t even know cats liked sausages,’ Nash murmurs, admiring the wreckage the cat had left behind. ‘I guess that’s not your cat then?’
‘I don’t own a cat, and no, I’ve never seen that one before either.’ Christopher turns back to the table and sees that, in the time they’d been downstairs busying themselves, the cat had snuck in and snaffled three sausages.
‘That makes tea a bit thinner, I’m afraid. Sorry. It’s my fault for forgetting to put them in the fridge before we left with Shaz.’
‘Well, it’s cold enough in here that it would have been okay, if it wasn’t for the cat. The others will be fine if we cook them thoroughly.’
‘That doesn’t seem very LA of you.’
Nash shrugs. ‘I like to camp and do cookouts. What’s a bit of dirt, what’s a bit of cat saliva, etc., etc.’
‘Many health and safety risks, I can tell you.’
‘Worst case, I get food poisoning and get to sample your famous National Health Service.’
Christopher was too busy thinking to listen to what Nash was saying.
Is the cat okay? Why was it sneaking into his house to eat table sausages?
Raw, uncooked sausages, at that. It seems quite desperate.
Though, there really aren’t many birds or small mammals around at this time of year, especially with the weather being so bad.
It must be hard to be a cat, if you’re not getting fed enough.
What if it’s not getting fed enough? What if it never comes back and it starves?
‘Christopher? Hello?’
Snapping back to himself, Christopher breaks his gaze from the window. ‘Sorry. Let’s go.’
He picks up the seasonings from his cupboards, while Nash changes into dry clothes, and they finally meet back downstairs in the kitchen for the third time lucky.
On autopilot, Christopher gathers chopping boards and pans and gets to work on a bolognese first of all, so that it can slow-cook on the hob while they get onto the next bits.
They work in companionable quiet, Christopher directing Nash, who takes instructions without a retort or comeback, while Christopher slowly melts down a soffritto in a large wide pan.
After a little while, Nash asks, ‘Still thinking about that cat?’
Christopher feels his cheeks heat up. ‘Yes. Just hope it’s okay.’
He expects Nash to tease him, or to say something cutting back. To start up the usual back-and-forth. But instead, he gives him a lazy, lopsided smile and says, ‘We’ll keep an eye out for it. I’m sure it’ll come back now it knows there’s food here. It’ll be okay.’
He feels a warm stirring in his chest. It’s probably just the thought of seeing the cat again. Probably.
Nash gets started on the soup, a real broth of odds-and-ends vegetables that they can blend down later.
As he’s on such good behaviour, Christopher doesn’t make a comment when Nash starts playing a Christmas playlist without asking.
This is what Christmas was supposed to be like this year – cooking together and no fighting, except instead of a wayward film star, it was meant to be his sister and best friend.
At least the music is nice. He checks Nash’s screen occasionally to see what’s playing – pretty much a mixture of Wrabel, She it’s the cooking.
Sure, Best-Bet Vegetable Soup and Every-Bean-You-Can-Find Chilli aren’t the same as the multi-hour-long process of proving dough and baking a loaf, or decorating a cake just right, but there’s still that centre of peace he can find in himself.
‘So,’ he begins, ‘other than escaping to Wales, which I presume isn’t a tradition, what do you normally do for Christmas? Are you usually on holiday break on the 22nd?’
‘Sometimes. Most of the time I’d be travelling home to my parents’, in order to minimise the amount of actual time I spent there.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Christopher says, regretting that he asked this question because surely someone doesn’t cross the Atlantic for a solo Christmas without there being something up.
‘Oh, no they’re fine, and we are fine. They love me a lot; we just don’t have a lot in common.
They’ve been supportive of everything my whole life, including the acting, and they were pretty good at making sure I was only on sets that were safe when I was young.
But we just don’t have that kind of close relationship. ’
‘Did they live in LA with you?’
‘Yeah, for a while when I was still a minor. Sometimes it would just be one of them, while the other went back to Canada to work for a bit. They both moved back home permanently when I turned eighteen – I don’t think LA was really for them.
They’re proud of me and what I’ve achieved, but I think they don’t really know what to talk to me about, and when I try to make a wedge into their lives .
. . Sorry, you don’t want to hear this.’
‘I asked,’ Christopher says, meeting Nash’s eyes.
‘I’m sure you were asking politely, not fishing for awkward family stories,’ he smiles, which of course is correct. ‘Otherwise, I do a waifs-and-strays Christmas with my friends, many of whom are actually estranged from their family for, you know, queer acceptance reasons.’
Well then, perhaps Ambrose’s suit theory was correct? Either that, or Nash just happens to have a lot of queer friends, as he’s an actor. ‘That’s nice of you.’
Nash shrugs. ‘No one wants to go home and be called the wrong name, or asked not remotely subtle questions about when they’re going to conform to heterosexuality.
So, we all just gravitated together instead.
Though, we haven’t managed to do that for a few years.
I’m often on the PR circuit at Christmas, you know? What about you?’
‘My ex-girlfriend Laurel’s family throws a ball for charity at their house, and it’s a huge affair with live music and food. And my mother, Esther, she runs the Christmas fête. Usually, I’d be there helping with set-up or trying to stop everyone from fighting each other.’
‘Are you close with all your exes, or just her?’
Christopher laughs. ‘There’s no “all”. It’s literally just her.’
‘Wow. Like, just her or . . . ?’
He can feel the blush heat up his cheeks. ‘There’ve been dates, but no one else. Apart from my fake ex-girlfriend.’