by Lia Louis
Mum smiles at him. ‘Clever,’ she says. ‘And the sandwiches are all right, are they, boys?’
‘Stellar, Mum.’ Dilly chews. ‘Mad to think he was in the nick, that butcher.’
‘Burgled a pub,’ adds Dwayne, and at that Ian yelps, as if he’s just got four corners in bingo. ‘Burglary!’ he exclaims. ‘I can’t believe I just did that. I was right, Belinda. Right on the nose.’
Chapter Fifteen
It takes me a while to find the correct entrance to the block of flats in Farthing Heights and by the time I find the right one, I’m flustered and sweaty, and nervous I’ve blown this casual job interview that I didn’t even want in the first place. Frank’s son is home and waiting for me apparently, at his dad’s flat on the seventh floor, and for what feels like an age, I stand in the lift on the ground floor waiting for the doors to close. It’s like they know. ‘I thought you wanted to spend your spare time on that floristry course you saw on that online university,’ the doors say. ‘I’ll remain open, you know, just to give you a chance to walk away.’ I don’t move. They close. The lift starts slowly drifting upwards.
Ed and I viewed a flat in a block a little like this about seven years ago, when he got back from uni. Ed had side-eyed me as the estate agent looked at his watch and the elevator light above our head flickered, wordlessly saying, ‘Let’s hope the flat is better than this lift, eh, Nell?’ And God, it really hadn’t been. There was a shower over the toilet, a terrace that wasn’t a terrace, but a window that you could climb out of onto a tiny square of flat asbestos-looking roof, and every room had smelled like raw potatoes, especially the bedroom, which had a huge mirror on the ceiling. We’d stifled giggles the whole way around, which we released as soon as the estate agent drove off.
‘I know the carpet stain isn’t appetising,’ Ed had imitated the estate agent on the way home, his hand squeezing mine, ‘but a good rug and Bob’s your uncle! No, mate, sorry. Bob is not my bloody uncle if my uncle is that absolute pile of shit.’ We’d found somewhere better a few weeks later. Cleaner, more modern, but still tiny, and everything – absolutely everything felt possible the day we put the deposit down. A year. That’s all we got, until I moved back home. I pull out my phone as the lift continues to glide upwards. Should I text him back? He’d sent one straight after the coffee at the hospital. ‘Nice seeing you, Nell, hope your mum is OK,’ is all it’d said. But I hadn’t responded. I’ve typed out numerous replies since – a couple every day. But then deleted them and closed the window. I stare at his name on my screen. I put my phone back in my bag.
When the elevator doors clatter open, I’m greeted by the smell of garlic and the piney smell of a newly mopped floor, and Frank’s flat directly across the corridor, just as Ian had said. 178A. There is silence. No television mumbling, no music playing. Daisy lived in a flat similar to this in a block a few streets away, and there were always sounds to be heard when I approached her door. The clatter of pots and pans where her mum would be cooking, the tinny music of Daisy’s bedroom, the mumble of Saturday evening game shows when Daisy’s dad was home from work. But here, there is nothing. I knock on the door, the wood hard beneath my knuckles.
For a moment, I don’t think anyone’s in. Then I hear the clatter of a latch on the other side of the door. It opens in one swoop.
‘Sam.’
‘Noelle.’
Chapter Sixteen
Holy. Shit.
My hands fly up to my face. That’s the first thing I do. Well, besides gasp so loudly, I sound like I’m in some sort of cartoon. Then both in unison, Sam and I burst out laughing. I even snort which makes us laugh even more.
‘Were you expecting––’
‘No,’ he says.
‘Wow, this is––’
‘Crazy.’ Sam laughs, hand at his chin. ‘What are you doing here?’
I stare at him, my eyes sliding towards the brass, rust-blistered numbers on the door. ‘Um. 178A. Right?’ And I see that it registers in his face then, just as I say, ‘Frank?’
‘Oh. Oh. Of course.’
‘Yup. It’s me. The cleaner,’ I say. ‘At your service. And – Frank must be your …?’
‘My dad.’ Sam nods, a deep duck of his head. ‘This is his place.’
Then it clicks into place, like two puzzle pieces conjoining. The hospital. The sick dad. Of course. Then the leaflet bursts into my mind like an unwelcome guest at a party, screwed in that ball on the bench, and like a shield, I cross my arms over my chest. Yes, that’s right, I feel like saying, I remember you mentioning your dad before you swiftly wiped your arse with my phone number.
‘Do you want to come on in?’
‘I suppose I’d better.’
Sam steps aside to let me pass over the threshold onto the thin, bottle-green carpet. Despite myself, my heart is racing, as if it’s going to shake itself free, and go bouncing all around my body. How has this happened … again? Destiny, Theo had said, like magnets. Is this what it is? Some weird magnetic force at work? God, if I carry on with this stuff, I might as well open a reiki retreat of my own. But seeing him in a hospital waiting room in the middle of the night, seeing him today – more than just a coincidence, Charlie and Theo would insist. But … why? What would be the point? He isn’t interested in even being my friend, sending the odd text or email, ‘keeping in touch’. It’s almost torturous, then, a big joke, that this keeps happening. Especially since the man clearly didn’t want it to happen a third time. He literally threw my phone number away to ensure it didn’t. Which turns this from beautifully serendipitous, to plainly and simply, as Dilly would definitely say: awks as fuck.
Sam takes me through the large but musty flat, and I follow. There are boxes and objects piled high, reams of hotchpotch papers, and towers of books, like those teetering stone cairns on rocky beaches. We stop in the doorway of the living room, side by side. Our upper arms touch, and there goes my heart again, like a crazed horse, and I wish so much that it would just chill.
‘So,’ he says, ‘I uh, I know this is crazy …’
‘You can say that again, Samuel.’
Sam hesitates, hand at his chin but avoids my gaze. ‘I uh – I meant the apartment.’
‘Oh. Oh. Yeah, I suppose it is a bit.’
There’s a painful, awkward silence again until Sam clears his throat and steps into the cluttered living room – it’s a square space filled with more books and papers in piles, and a round dining table with barely an inch of sandy wood showing, thanks to the crowds of objects balancing on top of it, like a garage sale. ‘So, the old man. He needs to move. Somewhere, ground floor. Safer. Somewhere he can navigate if the elevators are out.’
‘And how is he, your dad? Since the hospital?’
Sam nods, looking around the room more than he looks at me. ‘He’s – well, he’s getting there. He had a bad fall. He’s not great on his feet. Severe arthritis that took a turn for the worst last year. I don’t know, he’s sort of … difficult. But you know, that has shit to do with the arthritis. He’s always been difficult.’
‘Well, that sounds hard.’
Sam shrugs his broad shoulders. ‘We’re not really close, so …’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah. Classic neglectful, shitty father problems.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah.’
God, this is awkward. Hard work, I suppose is the phrase, like wading through treacle, and so much so, that I keep checking my teeth aren’t clamped together, that I’m not visibly cringing like that emoji with the white teeth. Every hour in that car on the motorway, the walk along the hard shoulder (our Quebec park, in that moment), the hospital waiting room – none of it felt like this. Painfully, could-cut-the-atmosphere-with a-knife-or-perhaps-the-chin-of-one-of-my-predictable-crushes awkward. I certainly wouldn’t have stayed a moment longer than I needed to in that car, if it’d felt like this. I’d have tried to charge my phone using the light of the bloody moon if it had. But it didn’t. Those hours were
… alive. Buzzing. Electric. But this feels different. All rigid and standoffish and stiff, as if we’re in a room full of invisible tripwires.
‘I’ll show you the kitchen,’ Sam says flatly, and I nod, follow him through the stale-smelling living room.
Perhaps he thought I was too keen. Maybe he was just being nice, making the most out of a bad situation on the motorway. Maybe he’s married. Or maybe he’s a secret prick. And if any of those are true, of course he’d throw my number away. And maybe this is what this is, this standoffishness – a way to tell me that OK, the car was lovely and everything, and we had a really nice evening together, especially nice because we knew it was what it was – a few weird, freezing, stranded hours and we’d never see each other again. But I have a hot, smart, worldly girlfriend and a hot, smart, worldly job and I really don’t want a new friend, and certainly not one who blushes when I breathe in her direction. I have plenty of those in my full, busy, travelling mountaineering, bearskin-wearing prick-ish life. And I get it, I suppose. The car – it was almost unreal. A pocket away from reality. But the hospital, and this. This is real life.
We stand silently in the kitchen. A boiler ticks and then rumbles on the wall, and a small, white fridge under the counter buzzes.
‘So,’ I say, breaking through the awkward silence, ‘you want it decluttered? Cleared, so you can pack for the move. And then cleaned, ready for new owners.’
‘Exactly,’ says Sam. ‘It’s a big job, and there’s a lot of personal stuff, and I figured the house clearance guys would probably just come in and take it all, and I mean, he’s a jackass. But he deserves his stuff.’
I gaze around the kitchen. Large, really, for a two-bed flat, but cramped with things and overstuffed drawers. A hoarder’s home, but definitely not as bad as the ones you see on TV. It just looks like nobody has spring cleaned for twenty years, that there are jars of food in the cupboards that could be used to resurrect the seventies.
‘Do you want a tour?’ he asks. ‘No pressure if you’re thinking this is not a job for you or …’
‘No. No, a tour seems a good idea.’
I stay a while with Sam, in Frank’s stuffy flat. There are two bedrooms, and a tiny olive-coloured bathroom, and a balcony too. You can see the sandy buildings of Bath city centre in the distance and I’m not sure I’ve ever seen it from this high up. Under the blue Spring sky, it looks idyllic. Grand. Proud and historic. Sam is quiet as he takes me around, but he tells me he and his parents split before he was born, that his step-sister and his mum live over in Oregon, and he isn’t close to Frank, because Frank didn’t really ever try – didn’t really care, as Sam put it. ‘But he has no one else,’ he says. ‘So, it’s down to me.’
Despite myself, my heart blooms in my chest like a flower opening when he says that. ‘You’re a good person,’ I want to say, ‘and no wonder I felt like you really got it about Mum, in the car, about being “the shoulders” because you know how it feels,’ but I don’t. Because it feels like there’s an invisible electric fence between us now, that if I was to get too close, step too far, I’d be thrown backwards. He’s guarded. And maybe he’s wishing the cleaner wasn’t me. That I hadn’t exploded my way into his life again, however serendipitously, however random.
‘Do you stay with him, when you come over?’ I ask.
Sam shakes his head. ‘I try to keep my distance. Hotels and stuff. Now I’m over in Wales, I just drive back. I tried once or twice to come here, to live here with him when I was in my teens. Longest I managed was four months. It wasn’t an easy place to live, with him. And I’ve lived all over.’
‘Icy mountains,’ I add, and there’s a tiny shadow of a smile on his face.
After the tour, we end up back at the front door, and I’m surprised when he opens it and steps aside, as if to prompt me to leave, and quickly.
‘There’s no pressure,’ says Sam. ‘To take the job.’ His hand holds on to the door, and I clutch the buttons of my cardigan, as if they’re life buoys for us both. A mahogany clock with a ship on the face ticks noisily on the hallway wall.
And I don’t want to take it. Not really. But we could use the money – really use the money. But despite myself, despite the awkwardness and my best judgement, I want to do it. For Sam. I don’t feel I can walk away, say no.
‘I’m happy to take it on.’
Sam gives a reluctant smile, brings a hand to his square jaw. ‘Cool,’ he says. ‘Shall we say … start the week after next?’
I nod. ‘I can do Tuesday afternoons?’
‘That should be OK,’ Sam says, pulling out his phone. ‘Let’s get your––’ Then he looks at me as if he realises what he’s said. ‘Number.’
‘Noelle!’
I’m walking away from Farthing Heights into the warm May sunshine, when he calls my name. I know it’s him before I even turn, but when I do, Sam is on the concrete, tall and broad, brown eyes squinting against the sun. It feels like summer today – blue skies, apple-green grass, bursts of colour in gardens the colours of feather boas – and I can’t help but notice the golden tan on Sam’s bare arms, out here in daylight.
‘You walk fast,’ he says breathlessly.
‘Sorry. Is everything OK? Do you need to change my start date or …’
‘No.’ Sam shakes his head and walks closer, closing the big grey space between us on the street. ‘No, that’s … Tuesday’s fine. It’s … it’s your phone number …’
Ah. He’d grimaced as I’d punched it into his phone on the doorstep, and then a neighbour had come out of 178B and asked how Sam’s dad was and I’d made excuses and left, and I’d been so thankful to be saved by the bell, I could’ve kissed her for interrupting us.
‘I didn’t take your number,’ says Sam now, guiltily, a breeze ruffling his soft, dark hair. ‘At the hospital.’
‘I know.’
‘And I wanted to keep it, Noelle,’ he says softly, ‘I did,’ and his shoulders relax as he says the words, as if it’s a load he’s finally set down. At the same time, I feel my body tense. ‘I wanted to call you, text you. I couldn’t believe that I’d seen you again. I mean, I hoped I would, somehow, and God knows how …’ My heart races looking up at him, at the burnt-sugar eyes, the thick black lashes. He always looks so good. He’s one of those people who doesn’t even have to try. Like today. Just jeans, just a t-shirt, muscular arms snug against the seams of the sleeves. ‘Tell me how tall and strong he is again?’ Charlie had asked a few weeks back, and I’d told her that I predicted Sam could carry me like I was nothing but a bread roll. Not like Aaron, that date I went on just after Ed, to try and feel better. We’d sat on his living room floor watching films, and when he tried to lift me in a sudden act of passion he’d likely seen on a Netflix period drama, he acted like he was trying to single-handedly shift a shipping container.
‘And when I do see you,’ carries on Sam. His brow furrows as if trying to work something out. ‘I don’t know, I – it’s hard to explain.’
My heart bangs inside my chest. He feels it too. He must. He must feel that weird something too. Maybe it is destiny. Maybe I am meant to know Sam. Maybe he is meant to know––
‘But Noelle. I’m with someone.’
I stare at him.
‘I wasn’t,’ he jumps in, ‘for quite a while. But we’re … trying. To fix things. And I don’t know if it’s the right thing, but … we’ve been together since we were nineteen and …’ He gives a shrug and looks down at me. ‘It just didn’t feel right taking your phone number.’
And despite the sinking feeling I have in my chest, despite the ache he’s seemed to prompt in my stomach, I feel weirdly lifted. Because he is a good person. That is why he threw my number away. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to see me, to stay in touch, or he thought I was some weird bush-dwelling stalker with a moustache disguise. He has a girlfriend. Sam has a girlfriend.
‘I get it,’ I say. ‘I mean, you know I do, I talked your ear off about Ed in the car.’
&nb
sp; ‘Ed the ped,’ says Sam with a small wistful smile.
‘Exactly.’
‘It’s similar I guess, with me and Jenna. We met when we were students. In Amsterdam. Both Americans, both travelling. I’d lost someone close to me, and I was in a bad way. And then we met. And …’ He suddenly shakes his head, as if snapping himself out of a trance, and laughs. ‘I don’t know what I’m trying to say here—’
‘You feel like you owe something to all those years,’ I say.
‘Yeah. Yeah, I guess that’s it.’ Sam gives a nod and tucks his hands in his pockets and looks at me and laughs.
‘What?’
He shakes his head, gives me a flash of a grin, dimples and white teeth, that annoyingly melts my kneecaps. ‘Nothing. Just – you know more about me than some people I’ve worked with for a decade.’
‘Bump into each other, have an emotional breakdown, use each other as confessionals,’ I say. ‘It’s just what we do.’
iMessage to Ed McDonnell: Hey, thanks again for being there at the hospital the other morning. Mum’s home, doing well! I wondered if you wanted to grab a coffee. I could meet you after a shift? Nell x
Chapter Seventeen
Ed and I sit beside one another on a bench outside the train station, two warm, creamy takeaway coffees in our hands. I’d bought them from Theo’s parents’ cute little wooden coffee kiosk as I waited for Ed’s train to get in. They’ve owned it for years, but now they want to retire, spend more time in Athens with their family. Theo’s Mum, Yolanda, told me all about the trouble they’re having with letting agencies, about renting it out, about how she doesn’t enjoy it any more, and as she stirred milk into the drinks, took another order, I’d daydreamed for just a moment, about what it really would be like, to have it as mine, as Theo suggested. A flower stall of my own. Imagine. It was almost too painful to, and I was grateful then, when Ed’s train from work got in, and Yolanda passed me the drinks then leaned to squash a kiss onto both of my cheeks.
