“Hello, little brother.” Calling me that is my younger brother’s private joke that only he finds funny. He congratulates himself with a swig of beer.
I resist the urge to comment on his jumper. I’m sure he probably thinks of it as golfing apparel, despite never having swung a club in his life.
From out of nowhere, Doug produces a packet of fags. I stare at him sparking up. “What are you—”
“I tell you what.” He drags, then exhales. “It’s actually kind of exciting, trying not to get caught.” He glances over his shoulder toward the living room window. His wife Lou’s in there with their kids, Bella and Buddy, trying to persuade them off the iPad and toward Dad’s game of Boggle.
Doug takes a couple of furtive steps left, so he’s shielded by the crab apple tree.
I have to laugh. “You are tragic.” My own breath looks like smoke in the frigid air.
“Yep. Lou and I don’t have much fun these days. My life is essentially work, gym, TV, sleep. Talk about dull.”
An uneventful life, I think, not without a pang of jealousy.Don’t knock it.“So you’re a smoker with a gym membership,” I remark conversationally. “Kind of a bad investment, wouldn’t you say?”
He ignores me. Takes another drag, eyes narrowing. “Speaking of fun.”
I wait. Doug’s definition of fun is almost never the same as mine.
“This ‘anxiety’ of yours...” He gives the word air quotes, just to demonstrate his manliness. “Lou’s talking about going on holiday next year. Fuerteventura. The kids’ first time abroad.”
I breathe through a couple of minor palpitations. “Nice.”
“Yeah, one of those all-inclusive places.”
A thought cartwheels my way. “What—with kids’ clubs? Swimming pools and stuff?”
Doug shrugs. “Probably.”
“You should get Bella involved. Lou said she’s a proper little fish.”
Doug snorts. “Okay, well, cheers for the parenting advice. Anyway, the whole thing depends on whether you’re planning to turn up at the airport, waving your arms above your head and ordering us not to get on the plane.”
Well, I would if his plane was going down. Fortunately for Doug, it’s unlikely. I happen to know his chances of dying in a commercial jet crash are about one in eleven million.
Still, I reckon I deserve a little more credit. It’s doubtful I’d be that blatant, unless it was a hands-down emergency. Yes, I come out with weird warnings, strange bits of advice, but I’ve tried to be subtle, over the years. Like when I steered Doug gently clear of a pub brawl that would have fractured his jaw. Advised Lou against a trip to a dodgy dentist, her fated trigger for months of chronic neck pain. Intercepted them both before they got mugged in town. (I reported the guy in question, though the most I could actually lay claim to was “witnessing suspicious behavior,” the irony of which did not escape me.)
“Maybe a holiday is whatyouneed,” Doug says. “When was the last time you went anywhere?”
I fail to reply. Who admits, in this Instagram age with the world at our fingertips, that they’ve never once left the UK?
“Oh, I know,” Doug says. “Magaluf, 2003.”
(I’d lied, of course. Told my family I’d gone abroad with the lads I’d met in my first year of uni. In fact, I moved into my second-year house-share early, then eavesdropped on their stories when they eventually joined me. Repeated them to Doug like they were my own.)
Doug shakes his head. “A lads’ holiday at uni and nothing since. And you sayI’mtragic.”
“I’m happy here.” By which I mean it’s good to know I can get somewhere fast if I dream something heart-stopping and need to intervene.
“Oh, yeah. You do seem really happy, Joel.” Doug’s eyebrows draw together as he drags on his fag again. “You know what you need? A good—”
“All right,” I cut in, before he can say it. I shove my hands in my pockets. Stamp my feet against the cold.
“It’s not natural. Going for so long without a girlfriend.”
Unwittingly, he’s reminded me of my conversation with Callie last week about speed-dating. I remember taking in the loop of her handwriting as she scribbled down my order. How her hair slipped free from its knot, flew with her breath as she spoke. The earrings she was wearing, a pair of birds in sterling silver.
But most of all I remember the lodestone pull of her eyes. It was so powerful, I almost leaned forward to suggest we try a date of our own sometime. But at the last moment I righted myself. Turned quickly, walked away. For fear of her reading my mind. For fear of what it meant.
