“Have you been in the other room since you came home?”
“No.”
“Come with me?”
For a moment, Rupert looked like he might hold out his hand, a notion that made Jodi feel slightly strange, but it passed quickly, and Rupert turned away.
Jodi followed him back to the hallway, to the closed door of the second bedroom. Rupert opened it and motioned inside. “Do you remember this?”
Jodi peered around Rupert. The room was like nothing he’d ever seen before. The white walls he’d expected to see were striped with candy pink, except the one by the window, which was painted blue and decorated with football paraphernalia, punctuated by a wooden slatted blind that alternated with the same shades of pink and blue. A tiny cabin bed completed the picture ... blue duvet, pink pillow.
“Did a hermaphrodite kid throw up in here?”
“Not quite. It’s my daughter’s room. You decorated it yourself.”
“Your daughter’s room?” Rupert was taking the piss, he had to be. Stoned and half-dead Jodi may have been, but he would’ve noticed a child in the flat. Besides, he didn’t even like kids. Why the fuck would he consent to living with one?
Then he remembered the photographs in the living room. “The blonde girl. That’s your daughter?”
“Yup. That’s Indie.”
“She’s pretty.” It was all Jodi could think to say, and it was true. He couldn’t recall ever meeting a child he liked, but the girl was beautiful.
And by Rupert’s smile, it was clear he thought so too. “Thanks.”
“You’re welcome. So, where is she?”
“With her mum. She stays here every other weekend, though I wasn’t sure if ...”
“If what?” Jodi studied the pink stripes. The colour was vile, but he had to admit he’d done a cracking job at keeping them straight. Shame he could barely pull a pair of socks on anymore. “What weren’t you sure of?”
Rupert stared into space before looking back at Jodi. “I wasn’t sure if you’d want her here, or if it’s a good idea for her. There’s so much you don’t remember, and you were close, really close. I don’t want her getting upset when you don’t know who she is.”
“Upset?” Jodi jerked his head up a little faster than was sensible. “I wouldn’t do that, would I? Am I that much of a bastard?”
“You’re not a bastard at all. Indie loves you, but she won’t understand why you don’t remember her, and I can’t let her get hurt like that. I’d move out if I could, but ...”
Rupert’s voice fell away, and though Jodi didn’t understand the anguish in his gaze, an odd urge to dispel it swept over him, and it came to him far clearer than anything else had in a long while. “Does she know?”
“Hmm?” Rupert blinked, apparently startled, like he’d forgotten Jodi was there. “Know what?”
“That I don’t remember her, or you?”
“No. Haven’t quite figured out how to explain that one. I’ve told her some pretty heavy stuff before, but this ... Shit. She won’t understand this.”
Jodi wondered why Rupert’s pain mattered so much, but though the blank void in his brain made Rupert a stranger, the hurt in his hazel gaze felt somehow like Jodi’s own. “I don’t understand it either. Maybe it’s better if you just let her forget.”
Eight
Rupert’s life had become a monotonous sequence of waiting rooms and squeaky chairs. It was a pink chair today—that vile, salmon pink that made him think of salmonella. The MRSA posters on the walls weren’t much better, though they did remind him that no matter the tragedy of the last few months, Jodi had at least been spared a hospital-acquired blood infection. The persistent UTI had been bad enough.
The thought did little to cheer him up. Jodi had been home for a week or so, but the only change it had brought was they were now strangers to each other in the privacy of their own home rather than under the all-seeing gaze of the hospital team. Not that Jodi seemed to realise he was at home half the time. Barely an hour passed without him staring around the flat, confusion colouring his sunken features. And it was worse on the rare occasions he truly looked at Rupert. The doctors had said there was a good chance Jodi’s amnesia would fade as he rehabilitated in once-familiar surroundings, but as the days passed and nothing changed, the other side of the coin—the dark, bleak side, where Jodi remained a subdued, bewildered shell of the punchy man he’d once been—became horribly more real.
“Are you waiting for me?”
Rupert tore his gaze from the shiny waiting room floor. Jodi stood in front of him, sulky and tired, like a teenager who’d just been scolded by their headmaster. “Of course I am. Said I would, didn’t I?”
Jodi shrugged like he didn’t care, and it was likely he didn’t.
