The presenter ofCash or Crashpops into his mind. With his neat little teeth and a caramel tan, he always looks a bit too pleased with himself. ‘Okay, Eddie. For a chance of the jackpot of ten thousand pounds …’ expectant pause … ‘… how wide is fifty-two centimetres?’
Eddie’s brain seems to freeze. Now he’s cursing himself for not searching Lyla’s flat for his phone. In his panic he’d been more concerned about rushing off to work. However, not having it about his person is making him feel all out of kilter, because googling everything is Eddie’s way of navigating life. For instance, Jill Gilbert’s restaurant reviews. Eddie has pored over them as if prepping for an exam.
Suddenly, it’s as if his brain switches on. Fifty-two centimetres isfifty-two centimetres you idiot!!!– i.e. the width of the blind! All he needs to do it hold it in placeand make a pencil mark at its end. He peers up at the top of the window again, trying to dredge up the energy to get this thing done. His mum would announce sometimes that she was tired after cooking dinner – but she never cooked for ten hours straight. If only his dad were here. Then the blind would be up already, and everything would be all set for tomorrow and Eddie could go to bed.
He hears the washing machine bleep in the kitchen, signalling that the cycle is done. He runs through to pull out the sheet. In the absence of a tumble dryer he’ll have to dry it somehow. There’s only one answer to that, Eddie decides. He’s not going to blast it with Raj’s hairdryer for hours on end. Instead, in a burst of rebellion, he does something he has been warned, very firmly by his prematurely aged flatmates, to never do.
Eddie marches into the hallway to the little gizmo stuck on the wall and heputs the heating on.
Yes, in June. It’s expressively not allowed ‘until at least November’, Raj declared. But Eddie is sick of house rules and, with the sheet now bunched over the living room radiator, he heads back into his bedroom.
And this is where he’s hit by a tidal wave of exhaustion. Tottering on the wobbly chair with the blind, the bracket and the frying pan, Eddie is painfully aware that today’s shift was especially hectic and he really should be lying down. Instead, he is holding up the blind horizontally and, quivering with the effort, trying to position the bracket at the same time. He’s young and healthy and he should be able to do this when his dad can build a truck with his bare hands, from bits of crap lying around in Dev’sgarage. But Eddie is shaking, and he drops the blind, then the bracket. Then the spindly chair tips, propelling Eddie forward towards the window where his head and forearm and the frying pan smash into the glass.
Eddie screams as the window shatters and somehow he ends up on his bedroom floor with bits of glass and some kind of dark liquid splattered all over. His vision is swimming but he manages to raise his arm and look at it. The sight of it – all that blood pouring out of him – triggers a surge of nausea. Briefly, he thinks:Jill Gilbert’s booking at one o’clock!
And then Eddie isn’t worrying about restaurant critics or what Marius will do to him if he doesn’t show up for work, because he promptly passes out. At least, he thinks that’s what happened because now Raj is here, Raj and Calum, and they’re crouching over him in the harsh glare of his bedroom’s centre light.
‘Mate … what happened?’ Calum cries out.
‘I … I was just trying …’ Eddie starts. ‘I fell. Cut myself …’
‘Yeah, I can see that.’
‘Blind,’ Eddie croaks.
‘You can’t see? Fucking hell,’ Raj gasps.
‘No, theblind.’ Eddie manages to indicate the broken window. ‘I was trying to put it up. I just, uh …’
‘Why didn’t you ask us to help you?’ Calum exclaims.
Slowly, painfully, Eddie manages to sit up. ‘You weren’t here.’
‘Yeah, we were at a spoken word night,’ Raj murmurs.
‘A what?’
‘Y’know. Poetry. Kind of free-form stuff.’ Raj pausesand then, trying for a joke, he adds, ‘If we’d known you were gonna throw yourself through the window, we would’ve asked you along.’
‘Uh.’ Eddie grunts. ‘Not really my thing—’
‘Yeah, well, we’re getting you to hospital, mate,’ Calum says now, wincing at the gash on Eddie’s forearm that’s possibly still bleeding; Eddie doesn’t know, he can’t bear to look at it.
‘I don’t need hospital. I just need to sleep—’
‘Nope, you’re going,’ Raj announces, jumping up, already gripping his phone. ‘I’m getting an Uber. No arguments. We’re coming with you, all right?’
So that’s what they do. The three of them go to hospital in a car that smells strongly of synthetic cherry air freshener. Eddie is jammed miserably between his friends on the back seat, his bad arm rather messily bandaged in a greying towel with a Lidl carrier bag taped over it.
To give them credit, Calum and Raj aren’t such arseholes after all. In fact Eddie can’t help feeling touched when they sit with him the entire night, in this grim waiting room with damaged people arriving, limping and bleeding and off their faces, some of them – arguing and punching the vending machine.
Numerous people are seen before Eddie. Fair enough, he thinks, that guy looked like his ear was hanging off – but is he ever going to get out of here? Meanwhile Calum and Raj have work to go to, yet they’re still making no move to leave. Eddie does too – ordid. His shift was meant to start at seven-thirty a.m. An early today, which he was pleased about, as it meant he’d be free to see Lyla later. But seven-thirty has passed and by eight o’clock Eddie stillhasn’t been seen, and nor has he figured what to do about contacting Marius.
Finally, as Calum reluctantly heads off to the office, Eddie asks to borrow Raj’s phone. Of course he doesn’t know Marius’s number, and nor can he access the Bracken kitchen’s WhatsApp group. So he googles the restaurant and calls the main number. It’s the booking line – an answerphone. He leaves a garbled message, actually forgetting to say his name, and hangs up.
‘Think he’ll be okay with that?’ Raj asks, looking doubtful as Eddie hands him his phone.
‘Yeah, be fine,’ he replies, feigning confidence. Later still, at ten-thirty a.m., Eddie looks at Raj. ‘You should go now. No point in waiting with me anymore.’
