by JL Merrow
The giggling was bad enough, but Rufus really wished she’d stop talking in exclamation marks.
“Yeah? That’s great,” Trix said, leading them into a small living room mostly occupied by a large punchbag hanging from a bracket on the ceiling. Oh god. She looked like she was about to start giggling any minute.
Rufus wanted to run far, far away.
“I’ll put the kettle on, yeah?” Trix said, leaving them in the tiny living room, staring at the punchbag. She moved to a pocket-sized kitchen area and started to unwrap her hands, which hopefully meant she wasn’t planning on punching anything soon.
Liz grabbed Rufus’s arm. “Oh God. Kill me now. Did you see her?”
“She’s a bit hard to miss,” Rufus whispered back.
“She’s amazing. And I’m making a total tit of myself. I am, aren’t I? Oh God.”
“Yep. At least a double D. Maybe even a double E. You like her?” Rufus hoped Trix hadn’t overheard the disbelief in his voice.
She might decide she needed a new punchbag.
“Are you blind?” Liz whispered way too loud. “She’s, like, an Amazon or something. But with two boobs. Oh God, did you see her boobs?”
“Not particularly.” He’d been too busy looking at her shoulders. And feeling totally inadequate in comparison. The knowledge Michael had come straight from her bed to his, via a minor detour into Sandown Bay, wasn’t helping either.
“Tea, yeah?” Trix called from the kitchen area. “How do you want it?”
“White, ta, no sugar,” Rufus called back.
Liz didn’t say anything, so he elbowed her. “Ow! Just white, please!”
“Like her women,” Rufus’s inner demon couldn’t help adding.
“Ignore him!” Liz squeaked. “That is so not true! Um. Not that there’s anything wrong with being white. I like white girls. I’m white myself. My kid’s half-white.” She buried her head in Rufus’s shoulder. “Oh God, you bastard, kill me now.”
“How did you and Clea ever manage to get together and produce Kieran?” Rufus muttered, amazed. “Were you, like, struck dumb that day or something?”
Liz muttered something into his sweater that sounded a lot like “laryngitis.”
“Sit down, yeah?” Trix said coming back with the mugs of tea, all hostess-like.
She was so not what Rufus had been expecting. He and Liz sat on the squishy leather sofa, and Trix perched on a chair opposite. “How old’s your kid?” she asked.
“Twenty-seven months,” Liz said, managing to sound a bit more normal. “Been potty-trained for nearly three months now,” she added proudly.
Trix leaned forward. “You gotta give me some tips on that. My sister’s kid’s nearly three and still in nappies, and it’s driving her mental.”
“Well, see, the key thing is—”
Rufus coughed loudly. “Um. Michael’s address?”
Liz glared at him.
Trix looked a bit uneasy. “Look, I had a chance to think about it while I was making drinks, and I’m not sure I oughtta tell you where he lives. See, I dunno what he done to you, but I was thinking, he’s got this thing? Like, you get all taken in by the smile and stuff, and you think, ‘Yeah, he’s the one’? But, like, it doesn’t mean as much to him. And that’s not his fault, see? That’s just the way he is. And when you’re not with him, you start thinking, oh my God, what was I thinking? Like, I went way overboard on him when he dumped me. Like, way overboard.”
Rufus nodded fervently, although there was a weird feeling coiling inside him like an animated Chelsea bun, laced with the cinnamon of doubt and lightly sprinkled with the icing sugar of unease. Had he just been a bit of fun to Michael after all?
“So maybe right now you’re thinking, what a total bastard, and you wanna go round and egg his house or kick his lights in or something, but maybe if you left it a couple of days, you’d feel different?”
“I won’t feel different!” Rufus burst out with.
“Yeah, but still—I mean, he’s not my best mate or anything, and I’m still gonna kick the shit out of him next time I see him—” She must have seen something in Rufus’s face. Or Liz’s face. Or both of them, cos she caught herself. “Kickboxing, yeah? We go to the same club.”
“That is so awesome,” Liz breathed.
“Anyway, so I’m not sure I oughtta give you his address. Sorry.”
Rufus stood up, sloshing tea on his jeans. “But you’ve got to! And, ow.”
“What’ve you got planned for when you find him?”
“Um . . .” Rufus crumbled. “Look, I just want to talk to him, okay? He left cos of something he thought about me, and it wasn’t true.”
Trix’s big brown eyes went all soft and wet, like dates soaked in brandy. “Look, din’t I just tell you, he’s got this thing? You’ll get over him. I mean, how long have you known him? Couple of days?”
Well, yeah. Technically speaking. But they’d been a really intense couple of days. “Sort of?”
“Well, there you have it. I’d known him for weeks, and I got over him.”
“Yeah, but . . .” But it was different for Rufus, because him and Michael had been real, yeah? But no way could he say that.
“I mean, God, I even proposed to him.” Trix laughed. “God, what was I on?”
See, this was where he’d expect Liz to shove her oar in and say, Yeah, why did you do that? But she was still all gooey-eyed and giggly. Rufus sighed. “Why did you do that?”
For the first time, Trix went a bit pink. “Look, I’d been having a rough time, yeah? Family and all that shit. See, my brother Harry, who’s two years younger than me, he rang last week to say he’s got his wife up the spout again. And my brother Hayden, who’s four years younger than me, he’s getting hitched to his girlfriend Kaycee in the summer. ’Cept they don’t want me to be a bridesmaid, cos I’m ‘too tall and it’d put the photos all out of balance,’ but anyway, they’re sure I wouldn’t wanna do it cos I never wear dresses. And yeah, maybe I don’t, but I could’ve made an exception. Or even worn the same as the ushers, couldn’t I?”
Liz nodded, rapt.
“So anyway,” Trix carried on. “I’d been feeling a bit crap and left out, all right? And then I met Michael at kickboxing, and he was great, know what I mean? Din’t treat me like a girl when we sparred, and when we went out, he was all over me like a turbo-powered octopus on Viagra. It was flattering, all right? Sort of thing that makes a girl feel special. And he never gave me the sleazy crap I get from most guys, who—if they’re not too shit-scared of my height or my muscles to go out with me in the first place—always seem to think ‘I’m bi’ is code for ‘I’m just gagging to act out all your stupid lesbian porn fantasies for you to wank off to.’” She paused for breath. “And there was this bloke on breakfast telly in the morning, going on about it being the traditional day for girls to propose to their blokes. And then I get this text from Hayden, the wanker, who must’ve seen it too, telling me the big three-oh’s coming next year, like I don’t know, and the twenty-ninth of Feb could be my last chance to not get left on the shelf.”
“You realise that’s, like, a totally outdated patriarchal concept that degrades women, yeah?” Liz said dreamily.
“Well, yeah,” Trix said, leaning towards her. “I just wasn’t thinking straight.”
“And it’s total bollocks saying a girl can’t propose any day she bloody well wants to, yeah?”
“I know, all right? I just lost my head. It’s so hard, innit? When you got your family on your back with all this ‘time to settle down’ crap and ‘I only want you to be happy.’”
“God, I hate that one,” Liz said, nodding. “Like, ‘you’d be so pretty if you grew your hair long.’”
“Or, ‘you only go out with girls who look like men, so why don’t you just stick to men anyway?’”
“God, yeah. They got no idea, have they?”
“Not a clue.”
Rufus coughed so loudly he hurt his throat. “Um,
excuse me? Can we get back to the point, here?”
They turned to him with identical looks of surprise, as if to say, Oh, are you still here? Why?
Teeth-grinding, Rufus reminded himself, was a really bad habit and he didn’t want to get into it. “Michael’s address, please?”
“Oh, that,” Trix said. “He lives in Redbridge—you know, just down the road from here? Number 23, Coronation Road. But seriously, you don’t wanna go there. He’s a self-centred bastard, and his mum’s a total witch. Like, no one’s ever gonna be good enough for her precious baby boy.”
“I knew it,” Liz put in. “Bet she spoiled him rotten when he was a kid. My Kieran’s gonna be brought up proper. There’ll be none of this entitled bullshit from him.”
“Good for you. I bet he’s really cute, your kid. You got a picture?”
“I’ve got, like, zillions on my phone. Hang on a mo.” Liz rummaged around in her backpack. “Here you go—that’s Kieran on the swings yesterday.”
Trix came over to sit close to her on the sofa. Very close. “Oh my God, he’s adorbs! He looks just like you too.”
“Wait a minute, I’ll find the one with him all dressed up like a tiger for his second birthday . . . There you go. Is that cute or what?”
“Oh my God, I could just eat him!”
“And wait till you see him blowing out his little candles—I got that on video—”
Rufus had seen that video more times than he’d cooked hot dinners, and all right, it was totes adorbs, but enough was enough. He stood up, stumbled into the punchbag, and righted it hurriedly before it could swing back and knock him over. “Right, time to see Michael.”
Liz didn’t move.
“Um, aren’t you coming?” he asked after a mo.
“You don’t want me cramping your style,” Liz said immediately. “And anyway, you should, like, leave me here as security.”
“Security? What for?”
“Uh . . . In case we’ve been lying to Trix, and you really are just out to slash Michael’s tyres and chuck bricks through his windows? I mean, she’s only got our word for all this.”
Trix nodded, shifting closer to Liz on the sofa, which Rufus hadn’t thought was actually possible. “Yeah. You stay here, right, and when your mate comes back from Michael’s, we’ll take him out for lunch to cheer him up.”
“Good idea,” Liz said. “You got any good pizza places round here? He always likes pizza when he’s moping, don’t you, Roo? And ice cream, that’s good too.”
“Who says I’m going to need cheering up?”
They both turned to give him sad little smiles. “Nobody,” Liz said reassuringly.
“Yeah, course not,” Trix agreed with about the same level of sincerity as a politician come polling time.
Somehow that was worse.
The short drive from Calmore to Redbridge seemed to happen in some kind of weird wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey thing, where it felt like it took forever but was still somehow over way before Rufus was ready for it to be. The houses on Coronation Road were arranged in short, identical terraces of four houses, with the odd semi thrown in here and there to confuse you, and Michael’s house was one of the middle ones in one of the middle terraces. Unlike most of its neighbours, it still had a front lawn and hadn’t converted it to off-road parking. There was a Saab convertible parked outside, looking a bit lonely.
Most of the street’s residents were out at work and had taken their cars with them, Rufus supposed. At any rate, it made it easy enough for Rufus to park Dad’s Focus only a hop, skip, and a jump away.
Not that Rufus felt much like hopping right now. Or skipping and jumping, for that matter. He was pretty certain, the way his legs were shaking, he’d just end up falling flat on his face. Now he was here, this whole trip seemed a bit, well, stalkerish. Maybe what happened on the island should have stayed on the island?
Would Michael even want to see him?
He knocked, and waited.
The door opened.
And Rufus found himself staring straight into Michael’s wide, blue eyes.
Rufus dredged up a wobbly smile. “Surprise,” he said.
Michael wasn’t smiling. Although he did look surprised. “Fucking hell.”
Michael stared. What the hell was Rufus doing here? Not on the island. On the mainland. Here. At Michael’s house.
At his mum’s house. Michael’s chest was tight. It was like some bastard had just hosed him down with cold water, which was doing its best to freeze him to the core.
Come to think of it, it was a lot like the first time they’d met. Christ, he was gonna go insane.
“W-what?” he stuttered, which was at least better than “fucking hell,” although not by much.
“Um,” Rufus said. “So the ferry thing? Not so much a thing. Long story. Can I come in and tell it to you?”
Michael’s mouth unfroze a bit quicker than the rest of him. “No.”
Rufus’s face fell.
“Michael, who is it?” Mum called out from the kitchen.
Shit. “Jehovah’s Witnesses,” he yelled back. Mum hated them worse than she hated buy-sex-you-alls. “Look, you can’t come in,” he whispered urgently to Rufus.
“Oh.” Rufus blinked several times. “Right. Okay.” He swallowed and turned away.
Shit.
Shit, shit, shit. “Look, I don’t want you to go, but it’s my mum, yeah?”
“Your mum?”
Shit. Michael glanced back into the hallway, then stepped outside, pulling the door to behind him. “I’m not out to her, all right?”
Finally he got it. “Oh. Oh my god. Sorry. Um. I’ll, um . . .” Rufus looked at him as if Michael would have the first idea what to do now.
Christ, this was a mess.
“Look, there’s a pub down the road, yeah? The Pig and Whistle.”
“You want me to meet you there?”
“No!” People knew him in there. People who might talk to Mum. “But you turn left after the pub, carry on down the road, and there’s a bit of parkland, right? Meet you down there in ten minutes.” He stepped back inside and closed the door in Rufus’s face, a trickle of cold sweat running down his spine and into his crack. Shit, that was gross. And itchy. And Jesus fucking Christ, what the hell? Rufus had been the last person he’d expected to see here.
Christ, his hands were shaking. He couldn’t believe Rufus had just turned up out of the blue. What about his bloody thalassophobia, which hadn’t been on Michael’s word-of-the-day calendar but he’d looked it up on the internet, all right? Michael fought the urge to open the front door again to check Rufus really had come here. He’d probably legged it by now, anyway.
Oh God.
Michael needed to get down the road right now, before Rufus got fed up waiting and buggered off again. Shit, he’d be there, wouldn’t he? He wouldn’t just shove a finger up in Michael’s general direction and get back on the ferry, would he? Not after coming all this way, facing his ferry thing—although he’d said it wasn’t a thing, hadn’t he? Michael was well confused.
“Michael?” Mum hobbled into the hallway. “Oh, you’ve got rid of them. Good. I’ve told you before, you don’t want to get talking to these people. You can’t reason with them.”
“Mum, I gotta go out.”
“You’ll be back for tea?”
“Yeah. Definitely. See you later, yeah?” Michael grabbed his jacket and jammed his feet into his trainers. Then he ran down the road towards the scrappy bit of park he’d told Rufus to meet him at, telling himself Rufus would be there, all right? Why wouldn’t he be?
Then again, why would he be? Some evil bastard kept whispering nasty little things in Michael’s head. Like, You didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet, did you?
Oh God. But what the hell was he supposed to do? Michael sped up. He’d thought he might pass Rufus on the way, but there was no sign of him. Did that mean he hadn’t come this way? Michael’s heart was pounding when he rounded the corner int
o the park—and saw Rufus standing under a tree, hugging himself.
Thank God.
“Oi, Rufus,” he called out. Rufus looked up but didn’t come to meet him. Michael jogged up to the tree. “You all right?”
He didn’t smile. “Yeah, fine. Bit chilly, though. Like the welcome.”
Christ, stab him in the heart, why not? Michael swallowed. “Uh, yeah, sorry about that.”
“You never told me you weren’t out to your mum,” Rufus said accusingly.
Michael felt he was entitled to get a bit narked about that. “Oi, I never knew you were gonna turn up at our house without a word of warning, did I? Last I heard, you never left the Isle of Wight.”
“I tried ringing you, but your phone’s never on. What was I supposed to do?” The words were bolshie, but Rufus just looked sad. He blinked a few times. It was making Michael feel weird inside. Like he wanted to hold him and stroke him and keep him safe. Preferably while punching something.
“You never let me explain about the ferry thing,” Rufus went on. “You just stormed out in a huff. And without explaining about Trix.”
“Yeah, like anyone was gonna believe my side of the story.” Michael’s need to punch something was getting stronger. That tree they were standing under had better watch its fucking step.
“I’d have believed it!” Rufus gave him a challenging look. “So tell me now, all right?”
Shit. “Look, I didn’t know she was gonna propose, yeah? I’d only known her a few weeks. I mean, come on. If I’d known that was what the holiday was all about, I’d of run a bloody mile before I got on a ferry with her. For fuck’s sake, we’d seen each other literally three or four times. Who the bloody hell wants to get married after that?”
“It could happen,” Rufus insisted. Then his eyes narrowed. “Even if she does now realise she had a narrow escape.”
“Maybe she does. I ain’t seen her.” Michael shrugged. “Not in that much of a hurry to put myself in the firing line. Anyhow, you’ve heard my story. Gonna believe it?”
Michael looked Rufus right in the eye and folded his arms to show it was no skin off his nose either way. Except his guts felt like someone was filming a remake of The Birds inside him, and that bastard trickle of sweat was back and itching like fuck. “Well? I ain’t got all day.”
