He let out a reluctant breath. ‘Okay. Well, I should probably start off by saying I’m not one of those people who dials 999 if they get a splinter or stub their toe. But, last night... I thought I was having a heart attack. I mean, I really did believe it.’ Hestared up at the sky, where the candy-floss clouds were fringing gold. ‘I have this weird fear that I’m going to die young.’
‘Why?’ I whispered.
‘Because none of the men on my dad’s side of my family have made it past the age of thirty.’
I felt a little simmer of shock. I turned to look at him, my mouth opening involuntarily. ‘Including your dad?’
He nodded. ‘He died when I was four.’
‘That’s awful. I’m so sorry.’
I’d never had cause to think I was having a heart attack, but I could imagine how real the fear must have felt. A primal kind of panic – like choking, or drowning. The loneliest kind of helplessness.
Instinctively, I reached for his hand. The world was fridge-cold that morning, but his fingers in mine were warm. And it didn’t seem weird, or too soon. It felt just right. I leaned forward, put my lips to his. He responded instantly, bringing a palm to my face. My mouth parted, letting him in for a kiss that was startlingly intense for such a tender beginning. His lips were laced with sugar from the vending machine hot chocolate we had earlier pooled our change to share.
‘I would ask you in,’ I whispered, as we drew apart after a few moments, ‘but, you know. The patch.’
‘Is it weird to say I like the patch?’
‘Yes, that’s incredibly weird.’ I smiled. ‘It’ll be off in a couple of days.’
Three nights later, I called him to confirm the patch was gone and my squint cured. He asked me to dinner, and suggested Sorelli’s, a local trattoria where people queued out of the door for the slow-cooked ragù.
After platefuls of candlelit pasta, and laughing so hard, for so long, that I was risking heartburn, we returned to halls, whereI invited him up to the room that had once been his. We were standing by my kettle, valiantly pretending to be interested in drinking coffee, when he turned and kissed me again mid-sentence, as if he simply couldn’t wait another moment.
I kissed him back. Seconds began to race. He slid his hands beneath my top, my bloodstream liquid vertigo as his fingers hit my goosebumped skin. He moved closer, pressing against me. The friction felt nuclear. Between my legs, a wet, pulsing heat.
We kissed for a while longer, before I pulled him gently on to my single bed, and slowly, slowly, he reached down to where I was aching and arching for him. And, from that moment on, he was the only man in the world, my orbit, the universe.
8.
Josh
March 2000
We are together in the kitchen when I tell her.
Over the years, cooking has become something of a creative outlet for me, I guess. Especially when I have writer’s block. A way of tricking my brain into believing I haven’t entirely lost the ability to create things. And it helps that Rachel’s a foodie. She spent much of her childhood eating things out of cans, because her dad was working all the time, and they kept shifting between houses. So when we moved in together I resolved to make up for that. My mum taught me young, grounding me in the basics like how to make a really good béchamel, a failsafe Victoria sponge, a crisped-to-perfection roast chicken.
I’ve been working through the recipes fromThe Naked Chef. I’m trimming artichokes for roasting, rubbing them with lemon. We’ll eat them with blackened cod and crusty bread, a chopped green salad, cold white wine.
Rachel is at the table, sketching me. This used to make me slightly self-conscious, the first few times she did it. These days, though, I’m so accustomed to it, I barely notice.
In another life, my wife is an artist. She works at a bank right now, but has sketched in her spare time ever since I’ve known her. I used to nudge her to take it further. But she has always said she wouldn’t want to turn her hobby into work.
As I start to oil the artichokes, Rachel sets down her pen and asks after Wilf.
I let out a tangled breath. I know I need to tell her. In fact, I should have filled her in on the pill the moment I returned from Wilf’s flat a week ago.
I abandon the food, wipe my hands, then try to figure out how to put into words the thing that could change our lives forever.
‘But they can’t be real,’ Rachel says, for the fourth time. ‘Maybe they’re a placebo.’
We are sitting opposite each other at the kitchen table, where I have set down the small plastic bag containing the two white pills. We seem unable to stop gazing at it, as if it’s an unexploded bomb.
‘Wilf wouldn’t lie,’ I say. ‘He wouldn’t know how.’
‘So, what, he’s been mixing them up in his lab after hours like a mad professor?’
