Chapter 24
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
I forced myself to speed-walk the first five bus stops home in penance.
Really, it was self-preservation. Waiting twelve and a half minutes, churning over how long it was going to take Simon to fire me for being a massive creep? Not a good idea.
What had I been thinking showing him those pictures? He’d told me he just did sex. We had done just sex. Epically. Coming face to face with me staring longingly at the side of his head at every work event for three years? Probably not the way he’d been hoping to round out the afternoon.
Right now we could be snapping half a dozen selfies to go with whatever we turfed up from the work photos, and hand-waving over anything earlier than last week. We’d only needed something showing us together. But no. I had to try to be helpful.
And why?
None of this held water under scrutiny. It barely stood up as reasonable. At some point, we’d get found out, and Mel Booker would cover her arse and fire Simon like she’d always been going to, and he’d never have to speak to me again.
Sev would tell him it was a lucky escape. Clearly I was not the casual, unattached fling he was after. And she’d be right.
It started raining. Again. With a dramatic thunder-rumble and a flash of incandescent white.
My trainers were never going to get dry.
Home, my front door swung open before I even stepped out of the hall. The side-edge of a man-sized cardboard box surged right at me through the doorway. Shuddering violently through, it stammered over the threshold, not even breaking speed.
“Oi!” I jumped back. Not nearly far enough. The box heeled over with the last home-penetrating shove into the narrow hall. Right onto my wet foot.
“For fucksake!”
Hobbling forward, I lunged for the top corner of the box. Too late. It embedded itself into the woodchip paper, laddering a deposit-incinerating beige gauge into the dubious magnolia. Maybe we’d never move out. No one could charge us for anything then.
I hammered on the cardboard.
“Matt, stop!” As if shouting at a Deaf man would get me anywhere at all.
The box teetered back to me, still forging its way inward, like the side of a lorry trapping a cyclist up against railings.
I shouldered into the long side, bracing hard to wedge the box against his momentum. He had to take a hint when the whole thing stopped moving. Right?
Everything stilled.
A swishy-scrabble of trainers on cardboard. Then Matt peered around the corner at me contorting myself against the wall.
“Sorry,” he signed, wincing. “Didn’t see you there.”
“No shit Sherlock.”
Between us we heaved it upright, and the box swayed threateningly, disapproving of being otherwise unsupported. I could empathise.
Sweat glistened on Matt’s forehead, mirroring mine. Only, it looked like he’d been battling furniture shops, not exorcising the ghosts of every bad decision he’d ever made.
“Wasn’t sure you’d be back tonight.” Matt gave me a once-over. Maybe he was picturing me naked. He’d probably watched The Video along with half the known universe. “Give us a hand getting the rest in, would you?”
“Sure.”
We wrangled another three long boxes off the roof of his Corsa. He must have come over all Incredible Hulk to get them stacked on top single-handed, because they had the approximate specific gravity of tombstone slabs.
Twenty minutes later we had an ominous stack of flat-pack brown boxes in the middle of the living room. And the Catford sofa had been shoved out of the way to make room.
Murder-suicide via flatpack assembly with my flatmate had not been how I’d hoped to spend the rest of the evening. But anything had to be better than torturing myself about the imminent implosion of my career. And reputation. And love life.
I nudged the boxes with my bruised toe. “Tell us what you bought then?” I signed.
“A table,” he signed back.
The stack we’d hauled in was currently blocking out all of the carpet not underneath the sofa or the telly stand. Had he decided we were going to open up a supper club, or re-enact medieval feasts?
“...Bit big isn’t it?”
Matt’s face lit with gleeful enthusiasm. “It was in the bargain corner. They were practically giving it away.”
Those two sentences filled me with dread. “Great. I’ll put the kettle on.”
I gave Matt the only clean mug with a handle. Because he’d been trying to get our house back together and I’d been off shagging my boss and plastering my arse all over the internet.
Matt set the instructions down on the window sill when I handed it to him.
“So would the bloke poking through the bins earlier have anything to do with Your Simon being all over my newsfeed?” he signed.
I spluttered on a hot mouthful of tea, nearly scalding myself. “What?”
Matt fished a batch of pastel-toned post-it notes, dense with smudgy biro, out of his pocket. “Mrs F spent ten minutes writing down her concerns about that video bringing down the tone of the neighbourhood.”
“He’s not my Simon.” I laughed. Borderline hysterically. How very hilarious. Matt would see us like that, now it was never going to happen. “Why would you call him that?”
Matt full-on scoffed. “Mate, he’s been Your Simon for three years. You’ve been going on about him long enough. And according to the internet, all that time, you’ve actually been screwing each other senseless. So yeah, he’s Your Simon.”
I sagged against the wall. None of that was even remotely true. “Did you watch it?”
Matt’s nose wrinkled. “God no. I don’t want to see you naked.”
“It’s not full-frontal!” Why did my brain decide that was the important bit?
“Oh, in that case...” Matt pulled his phone out of his pocket, making a show of scrolling to find it, before he widened his eyes at me like I’d truly lost it.
He had a point.
“Look, “ I signed, “it’s not real. It’s for Simon’s work, so he doesn’t get fired.” After today, I really needed to remember that.
Matt’s face contorted, his signs sizing up. “What are you on, Ben? That is not your job description.”
“It’s fine. It’ll blow over in a couple of days. People only care about Richard Whittaker, and now they don’t think it’s him, so it’ll just... fade away. And anyway, It’s only sex.”
“Wait—”Matt’s raised hand halted everything. Disbelief boggled into his eyes. “It’s fake, but you’re actually sleeping with him?”
I cringed. How had I juggled this many versions of the truth? “It doesn’t mean anything. I don’t think.”
“You don’t think?” Matt echoed me with perfect intonation to his signs. “What is wrong with you? You’re his interpreter – if he didn’t like you, it’d be harassment at this point. You’re not subtle.”
“Harassment?” The golf ball in my throat was back. No way had Simon known I was into him this whole time. He’d have fired me years ago. Exactly like he was going to first thing in the morning.
My breathing shuddered. Oh god. It had all caught up to me now, and I was the only one to blame.
Matt stopped counting out wing-nuts from the bits bag. “Are you alright mate?”
The sting in my sinuses redoubled. I wedged my tongue hard up against the roof of my mouth and it still didn’t stop hurting. “Not really. No.”
Without a word, Matt went out of the room, and came back with a handful of loo roll.
“I’m not fucking crying.”
“So wank with it later. What’s going on?”
I spluttered a laugh.
“I… said no-strings was fine – and it is – but we needed pictures for the Richard thing, and I showed him all the ones I took of me and him.”
Matt winced. He knew what I was talking about immediately; I’d been unsubtle about Simon forever.
“Not the Christmas Party one?”
“All of them.” My gut turned over again at the look of horror on his face.
“Why would you do that?”
“I don’t know! There were three billion shitty work ones to sort through, and Simon was going on about how absolutely vital it was. And my brain malfunctioned, alright?” I gritted my teeth. “And now he probably thinks I’m obsessed.”
“Oh, mate. You are obsessed, let’s be fair.” His nose scrunched up all soft and sympathetic, which told me exactly what he thought very, very eloquently. “It’s not like it’s telephoto shots of him through his bedroom window though is it? You’re just looking at him like he invented happiness.”
Oh shit. “Take that back right now.”
The invention of happiness was a bit beyond a casual blow job.
Two years from now, Simon was probably going to turn the story of this into a docu-drama about his stalker, starring an actor who’d really bring out my psychopathic qualities.
All my photos would be scrolled into a deeply disturbing montage with a heavy breathing soundtrack.
Matt grimaced. “He’s not keen on you actually liking him?”
I ground down my tooth enamel. “Don’t think so. No.”
“Bit shit isn’t it? He seemed alright apart from rubbish signing skills.”
“Yeah.” Something clenched painfully in my chest. “He is.”
Turned out, assembling a table was exactly what I needed.
Every page of the instructions demanded deciphering. Matt dug about in a bag the size of my head, scattering screws and circular thing-a-me-bobs onto the carpet, and I hammered in dowels, picturing Richard Whittaker’s face.
There were a lot of bits. Smaller rectangles slotted together to form a base and another slightly smaller rectangle fitted inside it. We were supposed to screw the top on somehow.
And by the time we had two oversized slabs to manhandle into place, it felt like maybe I hadn’t catastrophically altered the trajectory of the entire universe by showing Simon some pictures.
Matt sat back on his heels and I titled my head to make sense of the monstrosity we were about to bring to life.
“What is this?” Oddly, I felt kind of proud.
“Really starting to worry about you Ben. Clearly it’s a dining table.”
“For the garden, right?”
“Don’t be dense. It wouldn’t fit in the garden.”
“Mate, it doesn’t fit in here.”
He scoffed a laugh, like he didn’t realise I was serious. “Stop picking holes. At least I’ve gone out and got what I wanted. You’d leave the whole place empty.”
“Would not.”
He gave me a long look. “You wouldn’t have a bed if it hadn’t come with the place.”
“That’s different.” I was being economical. Why would I go out and buy another one? A single worked for sleeping the same as any other bed.
“Alright then. Name one bit of furniture you own.”
“I’m barely ever here!”
Matt shook his head like I’d proved his point. Because he didn’t know anything at all. “Grab the end.”
Knees bent, we both ducked down to heave the table top up, wobble-walking it up to heft it into place. It clattered against the frame as it settled, and Matt dusted his hands off, beaming.
“Look, it’s multi-purpose. Goes up and down. Coffee table, dining table, coffee table, dining—”
“I get it.”
“And then, look...” He shoved me down onto the sofa wedged between it and the wall, scraping the skin off my shins on the glass top. “Perfect angle for the TV.”
I failed to muster any convincing enthusiasm. Watching me, Matt’s happiness sloped off his face into a little wounded puddle on the floor.
“It’ll grow on you.”
After being in Simon’s place, it bloody well would not.
“Course it will,” I lied, ignoring the shrivelling of my soul.
“Think about how practical, it is. Water resistant. Wipe clean.”
I bit my tongue instead of telling him all tables wiped clean, not just outdoor ones.
My chest constricted, clamping tight around my lungs. Was this really it? The pinnacle of my twenties. A house-share in the bit of Croydon that hadn’t up and come, and might never get there now it was all full of fucking garden furniture.
I didn’t want this. I wanted bookshelves full of photographs and plants and life. Walls wrapping me up in colour and brightness. I wanted someone to show me how to cook things that filled the air with smells like love and home and family.
Shit. I wanted Simon so badly it ached. And now he knew. So what the hell was I supposed to do?