by Simon Lelic
It was only as we were wrapping things up that Winters said something that brought me forward in my chair. I thanked him for his time, and then again—almost as an afterthought—for having picked me and Syd as buyers. But he turned that around, insisted he was the one who should have been thanking us. Who’d have thought, he said, that selling a house during a property boom would have proved so problematic? He was just grateful we’d come along and made an offer, because if we hadn’t, there was no telling how long the process might have taken.
He hung up the phone then, and I was left staring at the receiver. Because there it was: the source of the unease I’d been struggling with before. Just lucky, I guess, Evan had told us when Syd and I had expressed our surprise that the bid we’d made for the house had been accepted. But it wasn’t simply down to luck. It couldn’t have been, not given what Winters had just told me, and when I knew for a fact that at the open house day there’d been people falling over one another to submit their offers. It was as I’d suspected: there was some other reason the house had come to us. And if that was the case, I had to wonder about something else as well. The debt we owed. Me and Syd. Because if my father had taught me anything, it was that real bargains are few and far between. Everything worth having has a price attached. It’s just a question of how and when you’re made to pay.
CHAPTER TWELVE
JACK
I ALMOST SAID something. To Syd, I mean. I wanted to. The problem was, nothing I’d discovered amounted to anything tangible, and I couldn’t think of a way of telling Syd that wouldn’t make it sound like I was jumping at shadows.
The closest I came was one evening when we were curled up together in the living room. It was the homeliest room in the house, mostly due to all the books Winters had left behind on the bookshelves, which themselves covered almost an entire wall. The heavy curtains were drawn and the table lamps were on, and the TV was babbling in the corner. I can’t recall exactly what we were watching. Some BBC2 comedy, I think, like a quiz program or something, which normally would have had me chuckling at the very least. Not that night, though. That night Syd could have flipped over to one of those trashy American makeover shows she loves so much and I probably wouldn’t even have noticed.
“Syd . . .” I started to say.
She was nestled against me, her shoulders enfolded by my arm, and her left hand linked loosely to my right. She didn’t answer and I angled my head so I could see her.
“Syd?”
She blinked and moved her eyes from the television screen toward mine. “Huh?”
It was only then that I realized Syd hadn’t been laughing at the comedy program either. “Hey. Are you OK?”
“Sorry,” she said. “I was just . . . I’d zoned out, that’s all.” She smiled at me weakly.
“Is something on your mind?” I asked her, my own preoccupations temporarily forgotten.
I felt her shoulder rise briefly into my armpit. “Just thinking about a friend of mine, that’s all. She’s . . . having a bit of trouble.”
I lifted our joined hands toward my lips and kissed Syd’s knuckles. “Want to talk about it?”
She considered for a moment, then shook her head. “That’s OK. To be honest, I’m not sure what there is to say.”
A corner of my mouth, at that, gave a little twitch. For a few long seconds we both stared vacantly across the living room, our minds adrift amid our thoughts.
I shuffled upright.
“We should look at paint charts,” I declared.
Syd responded with a flummoxed laugh. “Paint charts?”
I extricated myself from Syd’s warmth and leaned to gather up the stack of brochures that had made their way on to the shelf beneath Patrick Winters’s old coffee table. Crown, Dulux, Farrow & Ball—the last of which Syd had picked up from one of the aisles in the DIY store in spite of my outraged protestations. (“Fifty shades of sludge,” I judged. “And fifty quid a can, too. Whoever pays that for a tin of paint is going straight to hell.”)
“Here.” I tossed two of the brochures into Syd’s lap and opened one of the others in mine. “I reckon it’s about time we did something to make this place feel more like home. So far all we’ve done is shift stuff in and out of boxes.”
Once again Syd laughed, surprised by my sudden enthusiasm. The last time either one of us had so much as mentioned DIY was the week before we’d moved in. We’d been raring to go at that stage, before the move itself had sapped our energies. And in the end we’d been put off as well by the enormity of the task we’d suddenly been faced with. Possibly if the house had been empty we would have made a start sooner, but with so much still to clear we’d willingly allowed ourselves to become distracted. And it occurred to me that maybe that accounted for the unease I’d been feeling lately as well. Maybe all I was doing was subconsciously manufacturing a reason to avoid committing emotionally to the house, in an attempt to put off picking up a paintbrush for as long as possible.
“So which room are we going to tackle first?” Syd asked, fanning the pages of one of her brochures.
“Let’s do it the other way around,” I said. “Let’s pick colors we like, then decide after that where we’re going to put them.”
“Got one,” Syd announced, virtually the instant I’d finished speaking. “Raspberry Bellini.”
I looked where she was pointing. “Purple?”
“I’d say it was closer to red. And anyway I wasn’t looking at the color. It’s the alcoholic content that interests me.”
“Here, then, Appletini. Or this one, Tequila Sunrise.”
Syd made a face and shuddered. “Tequila. Yuck.”
I’d forgotten about Syd’s relationship with tequila. They’d been close, once, until one night at a mutual friend’s twenty-fifth birthday party they’d abruptly—and rather messily—fallen out.
For a moment or two we sat in silence, flicking pages.
“Do people get paid to think up these names, do you think?” Syd asked.
“I think you’ll find it’s a highly specialized role,” I replied. “Six years’ training, another three in an apprenticeship writing greetings cards . . . and anyway you’re supposed to be looking at the colors. Here, what about this for our bedroom?” I was pointing to a shade of red that in a bedroom would have been practically indecent.
“Classy. Maybe we could put a mirror on the ceiling while we’re at it.”
I raised my eyebrows like that wasn’t such a bad idea and earned a jab from Syd’s elbow into my stomach.
“Seriously, Jack, this is making me hungry. Lemon Meringue Pie,” Syd quoted. “Apple Cobbler. Millionaire’s Fudge Delight. Which is brown to you and me, in case you’re wondering.”
I gave a snort—half at what Syd was saying, half at one of the names on the page in front of me. “Forget hungry. It’s making me horny. Subtle Touch,” I read aloud. “Velvet Glove. And, ha, Golden Spray.” The adolescent in me sniggered. The adult, too.
Syd, beside me, couldn’t stop herself smiling. “I’ve got one,” she said. “Salty Whip.”
I giggled again and bobbed my head appreciatively, then after a second held up a hand. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a winner.” I pointed and angled the brochure so Syd could see.
“Electric Banana,” she read, smiling.
I grinned and moved the brochure so I could look again. “I think my mum has one of those hidden in her sock drawer.”
“Jack Walsh!” Syd declared, in mock outrage, and this time her elbow was sharp enough to puncture me of air. I feigned being winded, which only encouraged Syd to tickle me, and we started scuffling until somehow we ended up horizontal. Syd was still giggling as I kissed her.
“You weren’t kidding about feeling horny,” she said.
I grinned down at her. “Who’d have thought?” I answered. “Paint-chart porn.” And this time Syd was the on
e to kiss me.
—
AFTERWARD WE WERE lying there on the sofa. I’d tugged my hoodie across us as a makeshift blanket, though the evening was warm enough that we didn’t really need it.
“Jack?” Syd ventured, sleepily.
“Mm?”
“You started to say something. Didn’t you? Earlier. Before you got . . . distracted.”
I looked and saw she’d parted one eye. There was a gleam clearly visible through the gap.
“Before you distracted me, you mean,” I corrected her, and traced my fingertips along her bare spine.
Her eye shuttered again and I watched her smile.
“Well?” she whispered.
“Well what?” I mumbled back.
“What was it you were going to say?”
The hand I was stroking her with paused . . . but only for an instant.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and I shuffled a little lower on the sofa. Because at that moment, it didn’t. Just lying there like that, holding Syd and being held by her . . . I could almost have forgotten what it was I’d been so worried about.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SYDNEY
IT LASTED A week. Me and Elsie. Our nighttime chats.
I can’t remember how exactly but we’d progressed from drawing pictures to playing games. We’d tried hangman, which worked so long as we kept the words short. The problem was, most of the three- and four-letter words I knew weren’t suitable for a thirteen-year-old’s consumption. I didn’t doubt Elsie knew just as many swear words as I did but I didn’t want to be responsible for her developing a vocabulary as degenerate as mine and when she guessed “tit” before I’d even confirmed any individual letters, I had to draw a line. (Literally, even though I was laughing as I did it.)
After hangman we tried a contest where one person would blink their torch in a particular pattern (short flash, long, short short, long, looooong—you get the idea) and the other person would have to remember it and copy it. I flashed the beats from my favorite songs when it was my turn (“Rid of Me” by PJ Harvey, “The Fear” by Lily Allen, “Imagine” by—do I really have to tell you?) and though there was no way I could be certain, I was fairly sure Elsie was doing the same. I tried not to think about the fact that Elsie would almost certainly never have heard of any of the tunes I’d chosen, just as I would no doubt never have recognized hers.
Eventually we settled mainly on playing noughts and crosses, which sounds dull I expect but was actually hilarious. Normally with noughts and crosses no one ever wins, which somehow seems to be the entire point. In our version it was a challenge just to fill the board. Not only did you have to remember where you’d placed your marks, you also had to remember where the blanks were and which spaces the other person had already taken. Usually the games we played would end with one or the other of us making a mistake and the other person winking out their laughter. Whenever anyone did win it was usually Elsie—at first, I thought, because I was letting her, although it turned out she was the one going easy on me.
So that’s what we were doing when it happened. We were halfway through another game and it was Elsie’s turn to place her mark. (I was occupying the top two corners. On Elsie’s only turn so far she’d put her blob right in the center.) All of a sudden her torch beam started dancing. I thought at first she was scrubbing away the game and I pictured her laughing in frustration. But the dancing went on for far too long. Six, seven seconds maybe? And then abruptly the light went off. In its place I saw a shadow—an outline darker in the middle of the windowpane than the blackness all around it. Too big to have been Elsie. About the right size for her father. He was looking out, I realized. Searching. And although I’d meant to turn it off, my own torch was glowing guiltily in my lap.
I fumbled for the switch to kill the beam but I knew I was already too late. The shadow withdrew from Elsie’s window and the only thing in the darkness left watching me was a thin and fragile-looking moon.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
JACK
I KEEP THINKING this is like trying to do a jigsaw, one where the pieces are all jumbled up and you don’t even know if they’re all part of the same puzzle. Or a dot to dot. One of the hard ones. Where everything seems to follow in sequence, but no matter how many times you add a line, you still can’t guess the final picture. And actually that’s the most frightening thing about it: not knowing how what’s been happening connects to what.
Take Elsie. My instinct is to talk about the house, about what we found there—about all the things that have happened to us since. But maybe I’m getting it all back to front. Maybe Syd’s clearer on this than I am. I mean, maybe she’s only writing about Elsie because she feels she has to, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t got the right idea.
—
I WAS MINDING my own business. It was, what? Nine thirty or so on a Sunday morning? I was up early because I’d stayed out late, and I can never sleep after I’ve been drinking. Partly it’s the alcohol. Mainly it’s the worry that at some point over the course of the evening I’ve made a fool of myself. Which I’m pretty sure I hardly ever do, but it’s why me and alcohol have a lukewarm relationship at best. This isn’t a criticism, but there’s no way I could drink as much as Syd does, for example. I just wouldn’t feel confident I’d be able to stay in control.
But anyway, Syd and I had been out with Bart and four or five others. Nothing extravagant. Just to a bar in Borough Market. It had been my idea—another attempt, like with the paint charts, to put the unease I’d been feeling behind us. A sort of housewarming without the house, if you like. We’d been meaning to have a proper party, and this was our way of celebrating until we’d made enough progress with the decorating to be able to invite people over.
When I’d woken up that morning I’d left Syd face down between our pillows. My plan was to be back before she woke up, the coffee brewed and the bacon frying, and the newspaper laid out on the kitchen table. I like the reviews section. Syd likes the sport. She doesn’t follow any team in particular, but she enjoys the psychology of it all. The mind games. Plus, if you ask me, she’s not averse to a picture or two of Roger Federer wearing shorts.
I was just coming out of the shop when I saw him. Not Roger Federer. This bloke, he reminded me a bit of John Malkovich, in that film where he’s trying to kill the president. He was shorter than John Malkovich, though, and broader. He was bald the way people used to be, before they discovered they’d look better with a grade one. He didn’t have a comb-over or anything, but his hair was thick around his ears, in contrast to what was missing on top. I thought at first that he was smiling, which is why I didn’t stop when I saw him coming toward me. I assumed he’d mistaken me for someone he knew. Then, when he didn’t look away, I got paranoid, and my first thought was that I’d left the house wearing my slippers. The lack of sleep had made me groggy and, quite honestly, I wouldn’t have put it past me. So I looked down, just in case. I had my trainers on, which was a relief, so I looked up again—and that’s when he grabbed me by the throat.
I dropped the newspaper, the thin blue carrier bag I was holding, too, and all I could think about initially were the eggs I’d bought to go with the bacon—which probably if we were going to eat them still, we were going to have to eat them scrambled.
“Morning, neighbor,” said John Malkovich, and he drove me against the wall of Mr. Hirani’s shop.
I couldn’t respond, because he had his hand around my windpipe. Also because I had no idea what to say.
“Stay away from her,” my assailant hissed. “You, your bitch girlfriend, you stay away from my daughter. Do you understand me?”
I didn’t. I didn’t have a clue who or what he was talking about.
“I said, do you understand?” he said again, and this time he loosened his grip enough for me to answer.
“Who . . . who are you?” I gasped.
; His knee came up into my groin. “Ask your missus,” I heard him say, just before I collapsed onto the pavement.
—
SYD WAS ALREADY up when I got home. She was hunched over a cup of tea at the kitchen table.
“I just got bloody assaulted,” I told her as I limped into the room.
She must have assumed I was talking in metaphors. “I know how you feel,” she said, squeezing her forehead into a frown. “The wine they serve at that place comes in buckets. Remind me next time to stick to halves of lager.”
I dropped the carrier bag into the sink and tossed the newspaper straight into the recycling. “I mean it, Syd. I just got assaulted. Some . . . nutter . . . he just . . . he grabbed my throat and then kneed me in the bollocks. Right outside Mr. Hirani’s shop.”
Syd’s brain was stuck in sleep mode. I’d got her attention, but she was clearly struggling to process what she’d just heard.
“I’m calling the police,” I announced.
“What? Jack, wait.”
I carried on looking for my mobile.
“Jack! Stop a minute. Are you OK? What . . . I mean, who . . .” I sensed rather than saw her shake her head. “Jack, please. Stand still and tell me what happened.”
“I told you what happened!”
“But . . . are you OK?”
“Yes, I’m OK. OK? I’m fan-bloody-tastic. Where the hell is my phone?”
It wasn’t on the table where it usually lived and it wasn’t plugged into the charger. I better not have lost it, I was thinking. Please don’t tell me I’ve lost it. On top of everything else, that would be just bloody—
“It’s here. Jack? Your phone’s here.” Syd was wiggling my iPhone in the air. “It was on the floor by your jeans so I brought it in for you.”
“Thanks,” I growled, and held out my palm.
