Chapter 8
CHAPTER
EIGHT
SUNDAY
“Hang on.” Matt Holland had half an eye on his sister and half an eye on the TV, signing almost faster than I could keep up with fully rested, let alone missing a night of sleep.
“You’re telling me that you, personally, bought all of the plates?
” Ramping up the incredulity on his face, my housemate’s signing veered towards unruly. His sneer was already there.
“Yes.” Cathy barely paused in her newspaper-rumpling, plate-wrapping packathon to sign back to him. “I, personally, bought all the plates.”
Sibling disharmony on a Sunday morning. Home sweet home.
I spectacularly failed to kill another zombie. Not because I was shit at killing zombies. Because it was impossible to look in two directions at once. Ok. And I was shit at killing zombies. But after yesterday, I’d wanted to try.
“And you’re taking them? Just like that—”
None of this was news. Generally, people took their things with them when they moved out. I button jabbed with ruthless ineffectiveness.
“—with no consideration for your broth—Oh my god Ben – shoot them. Shoot them! You’re going to get—”Matt dropped his hands in sheer frustration.
The camera spun out to a distance shot: me writhing on the floor while a hoard of animated undead clawed into me and my brains splattered the screen.
I chucked down the controller. It bounced off the only-slightly-dubious stain on the seat cushion next to me. One of Cathy’s throw blankets had artfully hidden that stain, until she’d packed that up too.
Cathy shoved all the cushions into a box, and my eyes started stinging, right at the back.
The three of us had lugged the sofa back from Catford strapped to the roof of Matt’s car when we first moved in.
Oh god. She was only moving to Balham. I smashed my tongue hard up against the roof of my mouth and breathed through my nose.
Gorilla hands. That was my problem. Button-mashing gorilla hands.
And inappropriate attachments.
I used to fancy Cathy too, but I never did anything about it. Eventually, it went away. My obsession with Simon would too. With enough time.
“We don’t need her plates,” I signed. “We can get new plates.” The last roll of packing tape from the three-pack she’d picked up at Poundland sat on the coffee table she was also taking with her. I chucked it at Matt.
Helping. We were supposed to be helping.
“I like those plates.”
Matt’s goodwill was currently being hampered by the unparalleled rejection of his hearing twin shacking up with her hearing boyfriend of six months, after nearly twenty-six years of them living under the same roof (minus the time Cathy was finishing her course in Wolverhampton with me while Matt was on placement down in London).
When I wasn’t judgmentally deciding it was a little bit codependent, I could empathise.
“You hate those plates.”
It’d be like, say, if the guy whose work life I’d been entwined with for three years hooked up with someone right under my nose and never bothered telling me until my career was on the line, and then got mad when I tried to save us both by telling his boss we were so much of an item any unobserved horizontal surface was too much of a temptation.
Like, if he’d then kissed me, in front of said boss.
Entirely for show. Bought me breakfast, then told me to piss off home because he hadn’t got a plan for how to convince anybody in the world he might actually like me, because that reality was laughable enough to need serious suspension of disbelief.
Just possibly, this wasn’t about plates. Just possibly it wasn’t about killing zombies either.
Picking up another box from the flattened stack Cathy was systematically using to denude the entire house, I popped it to three-dimensional life and reeled off a new length of brown tape in a sharp staccato stutter-buzz.
“Suck it up Matt,” I signed. Like hell I was spending my Sunday moping. “Put her books in there. We’re helping.”
Cathy disappeared midway through dismantling the emptied bookcase.
I found her hunched in the kitchen, surrounded by an avalanche of cake tins and saucepans, relieving the lower cupboards of anything you might conceivably use to cook.
I tiptoed in through the tupperware as she stuffed mixing bowls into a box, in what did not look like the most space-efficient way possible. At this rate, she’d need a removal van.
She startled. “Bloody hell. Creep up on me, why don’t you? You are far too good at lurking in the background.”
“Sorry.” I winced at myself. “You’re not taking the kettle, are you?”
Twisting the wok in her hand a couple of times, she shoved it upside down on a pile of tea-towels. “I bought it, and the toaster too. Look, I’m just trying to get on as quick as possible. I’ve got a client defending their thesis on Monday, and a packed week. I can’t take any time off.”
“I know.” While I fully supported her right to move out and take everything she owned that wasn’t bolted to the floor, if I was going to be jobless and broken-hearted in an entirely empty house, I needed tea. “How about I buy you a brand new one if you don’t take the kettle?”
Cathy rolled her eyes. “An extra special, super fancy one, mind. And make us a cuppa you moody git. You’ve been in a right snit since yesterday.”
How very dare she. I had not.
“Done.” Anything was worth the continued ability to self-caffeinate.
One hand in the box of teabags, I watched her climb onto the worktop, brandishing a screwdriver. And start taking down the blinds.
“Seriously mate?”
“They’re vintage Laura Ashley!”
To buy: plates, bowls, curtains. A life.
I flipped the cupboard door open, and ducked right back out of it again. “Erm, Cathy...? You didn’t buy all the mugs as well, did you?”
“I’ve left you those ridiculous horse ones.”
Of course she bloody had.
Matt appeared in the doorway like he’d been summoned by the kettle, but the app on his phone wasn’t that clever. Leaning past me, he snagged one of the Hobnobs of Guilt Cathy had put on a plate, signing one handed.
“Not being funny, but there’s this bloke outside who looks like he’s taken the wrong turn on his way to a wedding.
” He dumped a teabag into the novelty mug shaped like a flower pot Cathy was leaving behind because the handle had come off.
Which, actually just meant it was a flower pot. Minus the hole.
“He’s been going up and down the street for fifteen minutes.”
Very carefully, I set my tea down to free my hands up. Albert the #notahorse goggle-eyed me.
“What d’you mean a wedding?” Crumbs from the third Hobnob I would absolutely burn off in the gym tumbled from my t-shirt as I signed back to him.
“Full on three-piece suit.” Matt’s hands traced down his chest, like he was mapping out the long line of the lapel on both sides. “Dead nice one.”
I stopped crunching.
Simon would not come here. There was no reason Simon would come here. It was Sunday. He lived miles away. On a legitimate tube line.
The doorbell ding-donged. Matt’s alarm app on his phone waggle-danced to tell him about it.
“You might want to get that, Ben,” he signed, smirking his head off. “Pretty sure it’s for you.”
On the doorstep, Simon looked up with so much genuine relief it couldn’t have been the first bell he’d rung that morning.
“Something seems to have happened to the numbers on your street.”
“Yeah.” Really, who needed friends when they’d remorselessly dismantle your home, and let your boss wander about outside for a quarter of an hour like you were actively trying to get him mugged? “There was a bomb.”
Simon’s eyes widened. “A bomb?”
“Not like that. In the Blitz.” Why couldn’t he have been a shit fake kisser? When he read my lips, my brain stopped working and all I could think about was his mouth. Which was so not ok. “About five houses got taken out, and they chucked these up in the gap.”
The memory of his lips prickled against mine and the phantom coolness of the glass of our office building hit between my shoulder blades. What the hell was I supposed to do about that?
“I see.”
The toes of his shoes faded from nearly orange to a duller tan brown. Jaunty fabric panels on the sides in a pale blue and cream floral pattern matched the sky, and his impossibly creaseless jacket, and the exact shade of not-faded-white of his shirt. And absolutely nothing about me.
I tilted my chin, oh-so-casually leaning against the woodchip wallpaper like doorstep chats about local history with someone who was definitely not just passing-by were totally normal.
“Why are you here?”
Simon’s jaw flexed. “No way to greet your boyfriend.”
“Ha bloody ha.”
He stretched a smile, and I stretched one back, and two doors over Mrs F’s dog started barking its tiny head off.
“Are you going to let me in?”
“I’m still deciding.”
With all Cathy’s stuff taken out, the place was a barren shit hole. Simon was way too posh and put together to be still living in anything resembling even the nicest of house-shares.
Laughter lit his eyes, and I scowled.
“How do you even know where I live?”
“Ben, your address is on every single invoice you ever hand me.”
“Doesn’t mean you can just turn up. You’re supposed to wait for an invite.” Especially after giving no shits about kissing me.
“I’m not a vampire.”
“Debatable.” Suave and highly sophisticated, soul sucking, manipulative, hypnotically handsome. That was a lot of ticked boxes.
The door to the kitchen creaked open, and Matt wandered up behind me, munching on the last Hobnob of Guilt.
“Are you not going to let him in?” he signed, and punched my arm. Dead blokey. “Ben, you’ve got no manners, mate.”
Simon’s eyes darted between me and Matt, and back again.
With a deep sigh, I switched to signing too, stepping back to let him in. “Come in then.”
“I’m Matt, The Twin.” Leaning in for a handshake, Matt squared right in front of Simon. I stepped back so he didn’t squash me into the wall.