Chapter 19
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
Simon took me home.
The taxi dumped us outside an oversized Victorian townhouse with half-height black painted railings topping the pristine garden wall and a chequered path leading to the sweep of steps up to the main door. No wheelie bins in sight.
Yellow London brick stretched up four storeys, all big windows and high ceilings. A nanny flying down from the clouds holding onto an umbrella would not have been out of place on this street.
My palms went amphibious and my heartbeat kicked up a gear. I’d been kidding myself thinking we existed in the same universe of possibilities. He’d never live anywhere less than fabulous.
Simon let us into the entrance hall, past a bank of varnished pigeon holes for post, jangling his keys. The front door to his flat caught, sticking instead of swinging open and he glanced at me over his shoulder. “There’s a knack.”
So maybe it wasn’t all flawless perfection. I could handle that.
The letterbox clattered as he shouldered into it, and then – I was in his hallway. His actual home. Like someone he voluntarily spent time with without getting into career-saving fake-sexcapades.
Inside, Simon took his case off me and parked it next to the neat line of dress shoes. They could have lived in the window display of the kind of shoe shop I had never been into. This was a shoes-off kind of home.
I trampled the backs of my trainers instead of unlacing them and nudged them to the wall, balanced on one foot to corral them into order without bending down.
“Nice place.” Impressed, flashed my eyebrow raise.
At least I didn’t have holes in my socks. My mostly-empty carrier bag looked silly enough on the bentwood arm of his coat stand between Simon’s wool coat and his deep green scarf without anything else to highlight my comparative scruffiness.
“So...” His bedroom was through one of those doors.
“Coffee?”
I snorted a laugh. He did not.
“Oh.” That was not a euphemism. Simon did adult things like legitimately offer guests beverages of their choice. I scrubbed the back of my neck. “...Alright then?”
Reality check: Bedding me was not the be-all and end-all of his existence. Ego downsize required.
In the kitchen-half of the open-plan space, tall windows opened onto a stretch of lawn edged with gravel and well-tended flower pots that was bigger than the entire footprint of my building.
Simon touched my shoulder, smoothing his hand towards my neck.
His fingers skimmed above the collar of Richard’s shirt, lingering with something I could have mistaken for affection.
More than catching my attention. My skin tingled.
“Go through.” He nodded to the half of the flat set out like a living room. I gawped at him. Brain malfunction. Full on space cadet. “Make yourself comfortable.”
He probably did not mean press myself to his chest and refuse to move, did he?
Dutifully, I sloped towards his Ikat print sofa and the cream rug over the not-quite-black painted boards.
Bloody hell it was a nice flat. The size of his deposit alone had to be more than any sane bank would lend me on a mortgage.
No way he was renting. The walls were all colour.
Greens and blues and deep yellows so saturated they made my eyes vibrate.
He had things everywhere. Books, and artfully sculpted paperweights.
A jam jar of shells. A vintage film camera.
Plants. Indoor ones he hadn’t tortured. I could kill an artificial cactus, but Simon was growing himself a rainforest in a rainbow of brightly coloured pots.
A vining triffid thing draped down from the top of a bookcase, lush and verdant. Not a single leaf turning yellow at the edges.
My thumb purred over the page edges of a thin, corner-curled paperback he’d left out on a side table. Aesop’s Fables.
Not the only one hanging onto kids’ books then.
This was more than me prowling an unfamiliar flat, getting nervous about the next move. Simon’s whole enviable life was on display.
He’d squeezed an upright piano in by the door.
A palm stood in an oversized terracotta pot in the window.
And there was one with long, fat, stripey purplish leaves, next to a photo of a woman roughly Simon’s age, with her hair in a perfectly rounded afro.
She had the same tall, lean build as him, and the same humour shimmering in her eyes.
This had to be Jo, his sister.
She was holding an award – clearly excellence ran in the family – teeth and eyes flashing her happiness so contagiously I grinned too. The bold geometric print of her dress was an artwork in its own right.
Another picture showed Simon with his arm slung around Jo’s shoulders, and an older couple standing on her other side.
The white woman had crows feet at the corners of her eyes, her hair gone to grey beneath a knotted headband in the same pattern as Jo’s dress.
The shape of their eyes told me this was their mum.
And the Black man with stylish, thick-framed glasses had to be their dad next to her, ducking unnecessarily for the picture, like he thought he was too tall to fit, brimming with pride.
I blinked hard. Other pictures dotted the shelves, in frames or leaning against the spines of his books, their shiny paper curling. And I didn’t want to look at any more.
Through the bay window at the front, the leafy residential street we’d pulled up on in the cab was calm and quiet with smug, uncomplicated affluence. Everything was easy and warm here. Full of so much love Simon could take it or leave it from me.
In the kitchen an espresso machine gurgled and growled. Simon clattered crockery. Coffee wafted in.
At night, outside would be lit up like all those bright, happy, perfect homes I peeped in on from the train on my commute as it snuck past all the back gardens, rocking and sighing over the points.
This was up there with all those glass-windowed extensions going through Dulwich, with their stripy close-clipped lawns and their brimming borders. And he deserved it all. Good for him.
Out the window, it wasn’t garages instead of football goals, PVC patio doors with yellowed net curtains pulled half across, or dodgy lean-to conservatories with the guttering leaking green down the brickwork.
The brambles did not grow up higher than the grass, knotting up into sleeping beauty fox-hole tangles no one was ever going to slash through.
Simon brought two mugs out on an actual tray.
And I turned back to the bookcase, pretending I hadn’t been having a silent crisis about my lot in life compared to all this.
A colour-faded photo of another Black man, maybe in in his late forties, stared me in the face.
The cut of his jacket was almost as sharp as one of Simon’s and just as old-fashioned.
The lines around his mouth crinkled up like baking paper, and I bet the smile never smoothed out of him.
Over his shoulder, the side of an old-style London bus blurred into the background.
Simon set the tray on top of the piano.
“Great Uncle Morris. Absolute style icon, as you can see.”
“Must run in the family,” I teased, looking back at him.
“Actually, I inherited a suitcase of his clothes when I was about fifteen. Or rather, when Grandad was moving closer to us, Dad found it stashed in the attic. I convinced him to let me keep it. So, the world has him to blame for my sixth-form fashion choices, and everything after that too.”
I could picture Simon as a defiant teen, going to school with his shoulders high, dressing like Prince Charming’s wet dream while the rest of the class rolled up looking like junior estate agents stuck on lettings to fulfill the obligatory suit requirement. A stage I’d never graduated past.
“Were you two close?”
Simon shook his head. “Died when I was very small. Wish I’d really known him.
When I came out, Dad told me all these stories.
How he and his partner at the time used to take Dad up to London when he was a kid and spoil him rotten – free choice in the toy department, or the coolest backpack going.
Then they’d end up having tea with a drag queen in an underground bar, or crowding into a house party in a tiny upstairs flat off Dean Street. ”
Simon’s smile warmed his words. The layers of memory from each retelling folded into them like the ingredients from the recipes his father had taught him.
A complicated wash of jealousy cleaned me out.
Maybe I’d be as outgoing as Simon in a parallel universe where someone who loved me told me I only ever had to be myself.
“Thank god for Great Uncle Morris,” I muttered, and I meant it. The world would be a shitter place if Simon dulled himself down like I’d learnt to.
“Exactly.”
I examined the photo again. It hit differently now I knew how similar he was to me and Simon.
“What happened to his partner?”
Simon shrugged carefully. “They spilt up before he died.”
“Oh.” Why had I been hoping they’d had a happy ending? Real life didn’t work like a romance novel.
“Right – coffee.” He handed me one. “Two sugars. Careful. It’s hot.”
“Cheers.”
Had he remembered how I took it from me tearing open sugar packets at that breakfast place? Both of us studied the contents of our cups like we were set on reading the grounds. Silence stretched. Simon clattered his cup down on top of the piano.
“Do you play?” He flipped the lid open, planting his fingers on the keys. “Aside from Chopsticks, I mean. Everyone knows how to play Chopsticks.”
A vaguely familiar tune filled the room.
“Not me.”
His hands stilled. “I see.”
Flexing his knuckles with theatrical exaggeration, Simon leaned back to fix me with a faux-serious expression. His hands splayed out over the keys, and he effortlessly trilled out the chorus of Hotel California without even looking.
I snorted. “Bet that comes off like a magic trick in a room full of hearing people.”
Abruptly, the music cut off. Simon studied me for the longest moment of my life before he closed the lid so gently it didn’t make a sound.