Aidan groans. “I’m not calling the cat Nigel. Why can’t you give him a normal name?”
“Define normal.”
“I thought you already had by isolating yourself from your cousin.”
Touché. “Okay, how about... Marcus?”
Aidan shrugs. “I can live with that. Little fucker still ain’t my cat though.”
Whatever. Aidan can think what he wants, and I’m grateful that he lets me balance tough conversations with banter. It makes them last longer, which means I learn more about him. “So... both your parents are dead, right?”
“Yup.”
“No siblings?”
“Nope.”
“How old were you when your mum died?”
“Six.”
Aidan’s hair is hanging over his face. I tuck it behind his ears. “So you remember her?”
“Of course I do.” He starts to move away but seems to catch himself, as though running from this conversation is a constant bad habit.
Maybe it is.
He starts over. “I do remember her, but not as much as I want to, and it gets harder over time.”
I glance around his utilitarian bedsit. “Do you have any photos of her?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“My dad left them in the garage and it got flooded. We lost them all, and pretty much anything else that mattered, but that was my dad all over, useless fucker.”
“What was so bad about him?”
Aidan shrugs. “He was a raging pisshead who didn’t give a fuck about me or anyone else. I spent my whole life hating him, not realising I was well on my way to becoming him.”
He’s wrong, of course, because Aidan does care about people. He cares about me, about trees and saving the planet, and about the old man upstairs who can’t get to the shops. Not to mention Marcus the cat. But Aidan isn’t a man who can be told who he is, so I kiss him again and let it go.
Twenty-One
Ludo
Aidan:do u fancy a swim?
I glance at the message, distracted and bemused. The closest swimming pool is seven miles away and probably laced with dysentery. It will take more than Aidan to get me to dip a toe, and that’s saying something.
Ludo:What are you talking about?
I flip my phone face down and go back to the reality I’ve spread out on my bed. Pills,allthe pills, separated into heaping piles that I’ve counted sixteen times and come up with the same number—two doses too many.You’ve skipped days. But when? I fish out the diary I’m supposed to use to avoid exactly this, but the pages since I started seeing Aidan are mostly blank. It seems that while my head has been full of him, I’ve let a bunch of things slide.
Angsting, I pack the pills back into their bottles and return them to the drawer. Missing doses of my medication is always dangerous, but never more so than right now—when I’m the closest to happy I’ve ever been. The little voice in my head has already stepped up a gear:you don’t need drugs, you don’t need drugs, you don’t need drugs.Lucky for me I’m presently grounded enough to ignore it, but I have too many scars to believe it will last, and what then?
So it’s better to ditch the drugs now and get it over with?
