by Lissa Evans
‘Jesus H Christ,’ she said, jerking her head back. ‘You stink.’
He leapt away from her, but the smell remained, almost tangible – the unmistakable odour of wet pig.
‘Bloody hell, Barry. What have you been doing – sleeping in the sty?’
He froze, the muscles of his jaw clenching and unclenching as he worked through a decision. ‘Yes,’ he said, after a moment and then bent to retrieve the jumper.
‘You’ve been sleeping in the sty,’ she repeated, a statement this time, just to check that they’d both been hearing the same words.
He nodded. ‘Since last Thursday. Not on the floor, obviously,’ he added, as if to dismiss a really ridiculous idea. ‘On the raised bit where we keep the bales.’
‘But why?’
‘Well, the straw’s really warm and you can pile it –’
‘No. I mean why are you sleeping in the pigsty?’
‘Oh. Because my girlfriend threw me out. Changed the locks when I was at work.’
‘And that was the only place you could find to stay?’
‘Thursday night I slept in the classroom but I nearly got caught by the cleaner.’
‘What about friends?’
‘Well…’ He looked discomfited. ‘They were all Janette’s friends first. And she’s really angry with me.’
Fran opened her mouth.
‘I can’t say why,’ he said quickly. ‘I just can’t.’
‘What about bed and breakfast?’
‘Not enough money. Everything’s at the flat – cards, cheque-book. All my clothes.’
‘What have you been eating?’
‘Pot noodles.’
‘Well –’ she shook her head, dazed by the sheer inanity of his solution, the last possible idea that would ever have occurred to anyone else ‘– how long were you intending to stay here?’
He looked blank.
‘A couple of weeks? Right through the summer? Put in double glazing and spend the winter there? I warn you, Porky might start charging rent.’
He grasped the point. ‘No, no, it was just until Janette came round to… to what I did. I thought it would only be a day or two but she won’t answer the door and she keeps putting the phone down on me. We just need a bit of a talk. I’ve sent her a letter explaining things.’
He had drifted towards her during the course of the conversation, and she caught a second noseful. The porcine whiff seemed to extend a good two yards beyond him.
‘Couldn’t you at least have washed? We’ve got basins here.’
‘It’s my clothes,’ he said earnestly. ‘The smell’s in my clothes. I hadn’t realized it would get this bad. If I could just use someone’s washing machine, or borrow a pair of jeans or something, I’d be all right.’
‘You can’t carry on sleeping in the pigsty, Barry. Not now that I know about it.’
‘But where can I go?’
Fran clasped her hands behind her head and swung round to look at her fellow workers: Costas, still digging, but shortly to return to the one-bedroomed fourteenth-floor flat that he shared with his disabled wife; Spike (re-felting the hen-house roof) whose partner had recently given birth to twins; and Claud (supposedly helping Spike but in fact looking anxiously at Fran), unlikely fount of testosterone and father of six, five of them still living at home. With a sigh of resignation, she turned back to Barry.
There was an arthritic twang as the frame of the sofa bed swung out from the crumb-strewn interior. It was a while since it had been used, and after unpleating the mattress and easing out the stiffened legs, Fran bounced cautiously on the edge a couple of times and then wriggled to the centre and lay flat. It had a distinct starboard list and she got up again and slid a folded newspaper under the right leg. The living room seemed even colder than the rest of the house, and she made up the bed with three blankets and the duvet from Peter and Sylvie’s room before returning to her vigil beside the boiler. She had reached page nineteen out of twenty-six of the central-heating instruction manual without any hint as to why the pilot light sometimes stayed lit, and sometimes didn’t.
Barry was next door, scrubbing himself raw, she hoped, in Iris’s bath, while his clothes whirled through an ecologically unsound but in this case necessary boil wash with some specially bought biological powder.
Iris had been very understanding when they had turned up at her front door in search of hot water. ‘I wasn’t doing anything,’ she’d said and for once that had appeared to be the case; there had been an open book on the kitchen table and a half-eaten apple beside it and Iris herself had had the slightly guilty air of a truant.
‘Evening to myself,’ she’d said, after Barry had been banished to the bathroom, and she was rinsing out the teapot. ‘Dad’s gone to the cinema again. He’s decided he likes Harrison Ford.’
‘And where are the boys?’
‘Oh… out somewhere. They’ve been a bit mysterious lately. I’m protecting my sanity by not asking.’
‘And by reading a psychiatry textbook?’ Fran had said, incredulously, picking it off the table. It was the real thing: five hundred pages of polysyllables interspersed with graphs.
Iris had looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Spencer lent it to me. We were talking about phobias.’
‘Oh right.’ Fran had suppressed the infantile twinge of jealousy she always felt when Iris talked about Spencer, the pre-school urge to shout ‘but he’s my friend’.
‘Anyway, I was only dipping into a chapter,’ Iris had said, dismissively. She’d poured some milk into Fran’s mug. ‘So how long’s Barry going to stay for?’
‘One night. Only. Just to make himself presentable again. If Janette won’t take him back he can stay at the YMCA. I’ll lend him the money if necessary.’
‘It’s very kind of you.’
‘No it’s not,’ Fran had said, disconcerted. ‘It’s just –’ she’d shied away from Sylvie’s favourite word ‘– the obvious solution.’
She reached the last page of the manual without revelation, closed it and looked at the boiler. The little flame danced tauntingly in the window. She turned the black knob so that the arrow pointed towards the words CONSTANT HOT WATER and the flame went out again. For the ninth time she relit the pilot light and then closed the boiler door and looked at the manual, weighing it in her hands. The clue was in the colour; the paper was a mottled yellow, the pages curled at the edges, the spine a series of parallel cracks from which little threads dangled. Like the boiler, it was a museum piece. She threw it into a corner and a sunburst of pages broke loose and fluttered to the floor.
‘It’s a bit cold in here,’ said Barry, when she showed him his bed in the living room. ‘Can’t we light the fire?’
‘Chimney’s not swept.’
‘Oh. Pity.’ He rested his mug of tea on the piano and bent over to fiddle with his trouser legs. He had returned from next door smelling of sweet-pea body lotion and dressed in a selection of laughably enormous clothing from the twins’ wardrobe.
‘They must be complete freaks,’ he said, aggrieved, adjusting the turn-ups around his knees.
‘Just taller than you, Barry,’ said Fran, removing the mug, ‘and this piano belongs to somebody who’s very strict about how it should be treated. Apparently it’s very old and very valuable.’
‘Is it?’ Barry flipped up the lid and played a speedy two-finger version of ‘Chopsticks’. ‘It’s not bad. Keys are a bit yellow.’
‘And only she’s allowed to play it,’ said Fran, repressively (and untruthfully), putting the lid back down again.
‘Sowwy,’ he said, in a baby voice. Fran frowned; the touching gratitude he’d shown when she’d first invited him back to the house had given way to a disconcerting perkiness, the excitement of a kid on a school trip.
‘I’m going to cook some pasta,’ she said. ‘Do you want to try phoning Janette?’
His face fell. ‘Yeah, all right.’
He bounced into the kitchen as she was picking the bones out
of Mr Tibbs’s supper, a repulsive sludge of steamed fish and vitamin powder. The cat sat at her ankles, mouth stretched in a soundless mew.
‘Any luck?’
He shook his head. ‘She’s not in. I left a message.’
‘What are you going to do if she doesn’t get back to you? You’ll have to collect your stuff sometime.’
‘I think she’ll be fine when she gets the letter,’ said Barry. ‘I explained everything in it, I think she’ll come round.’
‘When did you send it?’
‘Day before yesterday.’
‘Then she should have got it by now.’
‘Second-class stamp,’ said Barry laconically. He opened the fridge and took a good long look at the contents. ‘Any beer?’
‘No.’ She put down her fork decisively. ‘Barry.’
‘Uhuh?’ He turned, a piece of cheese in his hand.
‘I’m serious, you know, about you only staying one night. This is not an open-ended invitation.’
‘Yeah, yeah. Sure.’ His vivid blue eyes widened with sincerity. ‘God, Fran, I’m really grateful, I mean – you saved my life. I’m not going to take advantage.’
‘Right. I just wanted to…’ She paused. What she really wanted to do was question her own sanity. What on earth had possessed her to offer him a bed in the first place? She didn’t like to think that part of the reason might have been the unexpected creakiness of the house last night, after Peter and Sylvie had left for the airport. She had realized, lying awake at 3 a.m., listening to a slithering noise that was almost certainly another tile easing its way off the roof, that she had never before stayed there alone, without either Peter’s antiphonal snoring down the hall, or Duncan’s long body beside her. She had never before been conscious of the absence of window locks in her own room, or the fact that only a couple of low garden walls separated the back door from the ill-lit street full of dented cars that ran behind the house. She was still slightly ashamed that she had shoved the bedside table in front of the door before finally managing to sleep.
Something nudged her leg, and she looked down to see that Mr Tibbs, desperate for his bowl of mush, had edged so close that he was dribbling on her trousers. She gave the dish a final stir to check for bones, and then plonked it beside him.
‘Can I do anything?’ asked Barry, his mouth full.
‘You could grate some cheese.’
‘Er….’ He swallowed. ‘I’ve just eaten it.’
‘Never mind.’
She stirred the pasta and gave a crusty-lidded jar of pesto a cautious sniff. With only a few flabby tomatoes to cut up for a salad, it seemed a poor first meal for someone who’d just spent half a week in a pigsty.
‘Tell you what,’ she said, ‘you could go and get a bottle of wine. Here –’ she fished a fiver from her purse and handed it to him ‘ – there’s an offie on the corner.’
‘Thanks, Fran.’ He gave her fingers a squeeze as he took the money.
‘Do you think I’ve got better?’ he asked, three glasses of Turkish Chardonnay later (‘I got two bottles for £4.30,’ he’d said excitedly on his return).
‘At what?’
‘At the job. Do you think I’ve got better at it?’ He rolled his glass along one cheekbone and looked at her through it.
‘Yes,’ said Fran, cautiously.
‘You think I’m definitely better at the job?’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Because of you,’ he said, setting down the glass half on and half off a coaster. ‘You made me what I am.’
‘Do you want some coffee?’ she said, getting to her feet and readjusting the glass before it fell over.
‘No, I’m fine. I’m soooo fine.’
‘I’ll make you some anyway.’
He had wolfed down the pasta and then got drunk with amazing rapidity, passing straight from giggling silliness to soused philosophy in the course of about three mouthfuls.
‘The thing is, Fran, the thing about you is –’ his eyes followed her as she washed up a couple of mugs ‘– the thing is you’re strong.’
‘Do you take sugar?’
‘You’re small but you’re strong, like a… a… diamond.’
‘Sugar?’
‘Or the bit that’s not going round in the middle of a hurricane. What’s it called?’
‘The eye,’ said Fran, through gritted teeth.
‘So when the storm blows you’re always… in the middle. To cling onto. Where’s the corkscrew?’ He looked vaguely around the table, the second bottle in his hand.
‘Ah no.’ She moved swiftly to confiscate it. ‘You’ve had plenty.’
‘Strong,’ he said, looking up at her admiringly.
The phone rang and she went to answer it, taking the bottle with her.
‘Hello?’
There was a pause and then a woman’s voice, cool as water, said, ‘Who’s that?’
‘Fran,’ said Fran, and realized, in the microsecond it took to say the word, that she shouldn’t have.
‘In that case,’ said the woman, ‘you can tell Barry he’s a lying fuckwit and he’ll find his stuff all over the pavement tomorrow morning.’ The line went dead.
Fran looked at the receiver for a moment before replacing it. Then, holding the bottle like a club, she went back to the kitchen.
‘Hey,’ said Barry, giving her what he probably imagined was a winning smile.
‘That was Janette.’
The smile faded. ‘Huh?’
‘Janette. You gave her this number, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah.’ The implication filtered through. ‘Oh… I should have answered –’
‘When I said my name she said “in that case” she was throwing your stuff out. What did she mean, “in that case”?’
He looked alarmed. ‘Throwing my stuff out? But I’ve got a guitar, I mean she can’t –’
‘Barry!’ He jumped and knocked his glass over. ‘Tell me what she meant. What have you been saying to her about me?’
‘I haven’t said anything.’
‘Bollocks you haven’t.’
‘I swear,’ he said, his expression so shifty that he looked like Wile Ε Coyote. ‘Not deliberately, anyway.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘It was accidental.’
‘What was?’
‘I –’ He looked at her helplessly. ‘You’re going to be angry.’
‘I’m angry now. You’ve got to tell me.’
‘OK, OK.’ He took a deep breath. ‘Can I have another glass of wine?’
‘No.’
‘Right. You see, I’d been thinking about you. I mean, I never stopped thinking about you even when I got back with Janette, but I was thinking about you more because I’d been thinking… well, I’d just been starting to think… what it was, was that I’d started to think that you’d probably…’
Fran put the bottle on the table with a thump and sat down opposite him; he blinked at her nervously and cleared his throat.
‘Right. You see, what it was, you stopped reading your letters in lunch break so I guessed you’d broken up with Duncan. If he wasn’t writing to you any more.’ He waited for her to say something. ‘That’s what I guessed,’ he added, when it became clear that she wasn’t going to. ‘That’s what I thought had probably happened.’
‘Get on with it.’
‘So, anyway, I… I kept thinking about you, and thinking I might be in with a chance again, and just – you know – working myself up, and there was one day last week when it rained and you got all wet, and you were in that black t-shirt –’
‘Oh God,’ said Fran.
‘And that night, I was with Janette and we were – having sex – and it came to the – you know –’
‘Oh God,’ said Fran, again, with awful prescience.
‘And I said – I said your name. Pretty loudly really. You know, shouted it. Several times.’ He laced his fingers together and looked at them. ‘Janette’s quite a jealous sort of a person.
’
Fran’s first coherent thought was a vow never again to wear the black t-shirt; her second was more nebulous – a vague hope that at some time in the future she might attract someone who wasn’t looking for the calm in the centre of the storm, who didn’t require a lodestone, or a rock, or a compass, or a steady North Star – someone, in fact, who could read maps and stand upright all by himself, but who just liked having her along for the ride.
Barry sat silent, sneaking occasional glances at her, the expression on his face somewhere between fear and pleasurable anticipation, as if – and she suddenly knew this to be the case – as if he thought that she would find his confession so powerful that her defences would melt and she’d hurl herself into his arms.
‘Are you still angry?’ he asked, after a while.
‘Depressed,’ said Fran. ‘Deeply, deeply depressed.’
It took her a long time to get to sleep; at first she was disturbed by the sound of Barry doing the washing-up with careless vigour and then by the long, guilty silence after something smashed onto the floor. Her senses sharp with annoyance, she was sure that the next noise was the sound of a cork being drawn.
After that she drifted into a long and irritating dream, in which she was sitting in the Hagwood staffroom, reading a letter from Duncan. The letter was only three sentences long, but she could sense Barry watching her, so she sat with her eyes glued to the paper, reading the words over and over again. ‘Dear Fran, I hear you are looking for lodgers. Hella and I are moving to England and would love to move in. She is expecting twins in October. Love Duncan.’
She was woken instantly, completely, by a hoarse eldritch screech, followed by a couple of staccato footfalls, an indefinable rending sound, and a final enormous thud. As she leapt for the light switch there was a galloping noise that ended just outside her door and she opened it to see Mr Tibbs, more alert than she had ever seen him, sides heaving, tail cracking back and forth like a whip.
Barry was lying ghost-pale on the hall floor, dressed only in a pair of Tom and Jerry boxer shorts, his limbs flung outwards as if trying to acquire a tan. As Fran hurtled downstairs towards him she could see his chest jerking irregularly, ominously, his mouth searching for air, his head lolling. The sound he was making only registered as she knelt beside him, her face cold with fear. He was laughing.
