Chapter 8 #2
“You’re Big Ben’s boss, right? We’ve heard so much about you.” He rattled through signs, half-shaping words on his lips, too incomplete to read, because that was not the point.
The glint in Simon’s eyes went missing. For half a heartbeat he looked truly panicked, then his face shuttered to neutral. He took a breath, and warmed his expression, pulling on his usual effortless friendliness.
“Sorry, please slower. My BSL isn’t very good.”
Matt shot me a confused look, but I had no idea what he was playing at either. Simon managed alright with me.
“Forgive me?” Simon signed. “I’m used to Ben, but I need to work on it.” Oh this was his very best school room signing. Painfully, carefully articulated. Was Simon Azie nervous?
“You should.” Matt visibly softened, one shoulder rising up in a shrug. He didn’t laugh. Because he wasn’t a total dick when someone was making an effort. “Did he tell you I’m a teacher. I do evening classes for adults. All levels. You should come along.”
Simon nodded slowly, his real smile gradually easing in. “Ben already offered conversation practice.”
“Oh, did he?” My ears went hot at the arch rise of Matt’s eyebrow.
“Don’t let him teach you though. He’s always cutting corners.
” My housemate slapped his hand onto my shoulder and left it there for a long weighty beat.
“Happens when you don’t practice for a decade then pick it up again all formal. ”
What an endorsement. Did you know your interpreter’s a bit shit?
“There’s nothing wrong with my BSL.” I signed, shoving Matt off on an awkward half laugh.
“Tell yourself that mate.”
“Matt thinks he wrote the dictionary. Third generation Deaf.” In their family, Cathy was the odd one out. But they loved her anyway.
Angling towards me, Simon frowned. Opening his mouth, he turned to Matt again, and closed it. He knew enough to go voice off, even if he had to pick his signs carefully. “I thought you grew up with it, because of your mum?”
Shit.
“I— Did.” I hadn’t been lying exactly. But now he thought I had. Fantastic.
“His grandparents are oralist bastards.” Matt leaned against the wall, signing slow and relaxed, settling in for a good chat.
Irritation itched up the back of my neck. How many times had I asked him not to say that?
“Anyway.” I made a grab for Simon’s wrist, practically towing him up the stairs.
Away from Matt. Because we fundamentally disagreed everyone in the world had the right to every scrap of personal information about you the moment you met.
If we stayed down here much longer it was odds-on he’d outright ask Simon why he didn’t fancy me.
“We’ve got work stuff. Sorry,” I signed, pulling out my regretful face. “I’ll have to leave you to the packing.”
Matt sent me a theatrical eye-roll. “Slacker.” He bumped his fist against Simon’s shoulder, gesturing in my direction. “Make him work really hard, yeah? Good to meet you.”
Upstairs, I steered Simon to my bedroom, feeling more like a teenager having his mate over than a successful adult entertaining his boss. At least I’d picked up after myself this morning.
“Wow.” Simon drawled. He raised an eyebrow, already pacing around my space as I made sure the door was firmly closed. He was touching things. Adjusting them. Picking them up. “Did you Marie Kondo in here?”
“What?”
“You know – the Japanese Mary Poppins with an extreme tidying fetish and a grave misunderstanding of why anyone owns books.”
The heat in the back of my neck renewed itself with vigour. Bare walls and mostly empty shelves. Simon had a point.
“No.” Self-consciously, I rammed a handful of scattered papers on the desk into a box file. “I… I don’t have a lot of stuff. “
This was why I didn’t want him in the house, looking around at all the gaps people filled with all the somethings and the nothings they liked and cherished and wanted to hold onto.
“This is just—This is me.”
Simon’s face contorted awkwardly, like I’d told him I also used my toothbrush to clean the grouting in the shower, but he didn’t want to be rude about my personal hygiene choices.
“You should consider getting some art work.”
He’d probably have grouped my three tattered paperbacks and my hand exercisers in a deeply intentional, minimalist arrangement. But I didn’t know how to do that. It wasn’t artistic and considered. It was empty.
“What, like a horse with a moustache?”
Simon barked a glorious laugh, and picked up my copy of James and the Giant Peach, leafing fondly through the soft yellowed pages. “I didn’t have you down for childhood nostalgia.”
Taking it off him, I set it firmly in its place on my bedside table. “It was a present from Mam.”
Simon’s eyebrows hitched upward. This time I felt like the butt of the joke. “Recently?”
“None of your business.”
The walls were obnoxiously bare. Posters had felt too studenty and Gran’s voice echoed in my ear telling me Bluetack would pull off her paint.
Waste of money. What did I need posters for?
At a push, I could pack everything I owned into the duffle bag stuffed under my bed, heft it up on my shoulder and walk out. I’d done it before.
It’s not like I asked him to come and discover the emptiness that was my life.
“Why are you here, Simon?”
“I’m picking you up. Do you have a bag packed?”
Wait, what?
Simon sighed at my blank expression. “I did text.”
Oh bollocks. My phone was on the floor under the bed because the cable wouldn’t quite reach all the way out. I hadn’t checked it all morning.
“Are you having second thoughts?”
“You mean am I going to drop you in it?” Christ. Three years having his back in every single meeting, and he still didn’t trust me at all. What a reality check.
“This is a bit above and beyond. You’re not obliged to—”
“I haven’t changed my mind.”
He held his hands up, full-on surrender gesture, stepping back. “Ok.”
He looked tired when he wasn’t smiling. The thin skin under his eyes was all grey and washed out.
He probably hadn’t gone back to bed yesterday, had he?
He’d probably been working since I left the office yesterday, fielding the avalanche of queries and emails a PR disaster generated.
Coming up with counter-narratives and distractions and strategies all the time had to be exhausting.
“Sorry – where are we going?”
Maybe Mel had forked out for us to stay in an exclusive hotel swarming with paparazzi so we’d get photographed together to tie a nice little bow under the drama.
“Richard’s place.”
Or maybe Simon had hit his head really, really hard.
“Sev’s going to shoot more footage with the pair of us, get our faces in shot, and pass it off as the original.”
“Have you both gone mad?”
“It shouldn’t take all day. An hour and a half each way, but we only need three minutes of footage.”
Because timing was the major flaw with this plan.
My eyes boggled. I’m sure they did. It felt like they were about to fall out of my skull.
“Simon. I look nothing like Richard!”
“You’re right.” His lips quirked with amusement. “You’re much more interesting.”
“Oh fuck off.”
Interesting was for things you found abandoned and liquifying at the back of the salad drawer in the fridge.
On no planet was that a compliment. Not when you were being compared to a chiselled temple of manly perfection who had graced the cover of Men’s Health explaining how his muscles had muscles, on more than one occasion.
“Sev and I discussed it. The lighting and the camera angles make it very difficult to tell what’s going on. It’s all just skin, really. You both have dark hair. You’re both—”
“White? Because, honestly, that’s the only thing we’ve got in common.”
“Well.” Simon gave me a once over, way too slow; my entire face exploded with heat. “I was going to say muscular, but it certainly helps you’re both very pale.”
Read: must sit in the shade. Do not eat shiny red apples.
Did he not realise the cinch we’d have to get into to make any new film halfway believable? Christ, of course he did. He’d starred in the first one. It wouldn’t be anything to him, would it? He only wanted to mop up the disaster.
Simon pursed his lips. “The thing is, Ben, it really was very sweet of you to come to the rescue – but we’re trying to torpedo the juiciest story most of the tabloids have come across for at least six months.
And they’re going to need a teensy bit more than our insistence it was actually someone they’ve never set eyes on before, or they’re never going to swallow it. ”
Over his shoulder, through the window, a little scrap of bright blue sky flared up between the roofs of the houses, and the colours throbbed too deep and dark and vibrant.
Sweet. Simon thought I was sweet. The patronising shit.
Puppies were sweet. Puppies, and kittens, and idiots who made ineffective gestures that were never going to work because they hadn’t thought it through, and weren’t remotely close to sexy. Better luck next time. Don’t call us, we’ll call you.
I straightened up, full on Alexander technique, squeezing everything I had out of my very last half inch of height.
“We’d better get creating some proof then, hadn’t we?”
If he thought I was backing out of my piss poor decision that easily, he really didn’t know how stubborn I could be.