I only have three chocolate digestives left in the packet. Reluctantly, I offer them out. “Do you want one?”Please say no.
“No. Thank you.”
He rinses his water glass, dries it carefully on a tea towel, and replaces it in the cupboard. Then he walks out, the soles of his worn slippers making soft, sticky sounds as they move across the hardwood floor. Unexpectedly, he pauses, then comes back, filling the doorway.
“Why?” His cool brown eyes settle on mine, slugbrows tilted with mild curiosity.
“Why what?”
“Why can’t you sleep?”
I lick a stripe across the top of my biscuit, savouring sweet chocolate. Probably don’t need a sugar rush right now. I wonder how to reply. The bland answer to Gerald’s question is alreadyhalfway to my lips. After all, Gerald doesn’t give a fuck whether I sleep well or not. He’s simply counting down the days until he can wander around his flat at whatever hellish time it is now and not bump into an underdressed, aggravating housemate.
Or I can splurge the messy truth and watch him edge away. I imagine Gerald doesn’t relish conversations about existential crises and feelings and emotions, especially in the dead of night.
The latter is far more amusing.
“For a start, I catastrophise about everything,” I declare, waving my biscuit around as if on the verge of a full Shakespearian meltdown. The only thing missing is a swishy bathrobe. “I can’t switch off, like ever. I have dialogues with myself in my head, like every single thought I’ve ever had needs to be analysed and categorised and a solution found from five different angles. If I haven’t unloaded during the day, it’s ten times worse. The bedside light switches off, and my head switches on. I fret and worry and basically tie myself up in knots over mostly nothing.”
Gerald must think I’m mad. His wide eyes blink a couple of times as if trying to fathom whether I’m simply a drama queen (I mean, yes, obviously) or whether it’s something more alarming.
“I don’t collect stranger’s hair samples,” I say quickly, “Just so you know.”
“I never thought you did.” He studies me some more as I nibble around the edges of my biscuit. “What are you specifically worrying about? Your job’s okay, isn’t it? Isaac says you seem to manage it standing on your head.”
“Oh, the job’s fine.” I nod rapidly. “It always has been. I aced the surgery exams. I can still draw and explain the Krebs cycle twelve years after learning it at med school, and, though I say it myself, my technical skills are amazing. It’s the only reason the boss puts up with me. Don’t tell anyone, but once you get thehang of it, robotic-assisted radical prostatectomy is pretty much like a huge fucking game of Tetris.”
He says nothing, just lets those two brown laser pointers bore holes in me. So I do what comes naturally and keep babbling on. “All my responsible friends have coupled up.” I give choccie biscuit number two a long lick. Now the floodgates are open, I’m going to get all of it off my chest. “Like my oldest friend, Stefan, and his fiancé. They didn’t mind me living with them when they were new and fresh. But Marcus doesn’t want a third hanging around anymore, especially one that caught him sniffing my pants, even though they don’t seem to have stopped bickering since I left.”
“Sniffing your pants,” Gerald clarifies with a grave expression.
“Yes, a blue pair with hearts dotted on them. And wanking. Stefan doesn’t know. I should probably tell him, but Marcus will deny it, and Stefan’s so enamoured by the tosser I can’t guarantee he’ll believe me. I’m not going to risk causing a rift between us. He’ll work Marcus out eventually. Anyhow, because of that and other things, half of me wants them to break up and crazy Marcus to fuck off so I can go back. Living with Stefan in central London is literally my dream setup. The other half of me knows it’s pretty shitty to hope for, because obviously, I also want Stefan to be happy.”
“Will he be, with…um… someone like that?”
I roll my eyes. “Obviously not in the long term, but he’s kind of got to work that out for himself. Stefan’s the sort of person who, if someone says ‘fuck me harder’, he’ll fuck them like they’re made of glass.”
Gerald pinches his brow, drawing the slugs closer. “Did you… did you say these were your responsible friends?”
“Yes. Mostly.” In case Gerald suddenly changes his mind and decides he wants it, I lick biscuit number three. “My moreintellectual friends—yes, I have some—have seen the light and fucked off somewhere warm and sunny where they don’t have to battle the Tube every day. One doctor I used to hang around with is teaching kids to windsurf in New Zealand. Another has opened a bar in Phuket. Which means the only ones left in the game are emotionally still stuck at twenty-one, like me, light years behind in terms of grasping their own lives by the horns. Or people like you, who are totally self-contained and don’t need anyone else to suck up all their minor and inconsequential insecurities in order to get a decent night’s kip, because you’re perfectly happy and capable on your own. And now I sound like a whingy, self-pitying arsehole.”
I brush biscuit crumbs from my T-shirt onto the floor. Any second, Gerald will reach for the dustpan. “Oh, plus, I lie awake thinking about all the fancy breed herds of cows I’d buy if I won a gazillion quid on the lottery. Not to milk or to turn into steaks, but just to look at and enjoy. And whether all the kidney stones and gallstones we remove from patients’ bodies could be polished up and fashioned into a mosaic. You know, the important stuff. And the less I sleep, the more my mind plays these silly games.”
With every word I unload, tension streams out. Gerald’s steady stillness, the way he’s listening as if I’m not background noise calms me. If I could somehow get him to consent to tolerate this shite every night, I’d sleep like a babe. We would arrange it for a more sensible time, obviously. Perhaps he’s open to a cash bribe.
When I eventually run out of puff, Gerald nods once, then extracts the dustpan from under the kitchen sink and peacefully sweeps up the crumbs. After that, he takes a deep controlled breath in through his big nose and then exhales just as equably. “Finished?”
“Yeah.”
“Good.” He tips the crumbs into the kitchen bin. “I never said I was happy on my own.”
Of all the potential responses, I wasn’t expecting that one.
“No?”
“I wouldn’t have attempted to date Isaac if I wasn’t in the market for a relationship.”
“No. I suppose. Have… have you dated anyone since? Or, you know, played around?” Gerald’s sex life is absolutely not my circus, not my monkeys. In my defence, he brought it up, and in the short time we’ve cohabited it seems to be non-existent. Unless the walks with Mrs Gregson’s dog are an elaborate ruse to hide meeting a Grindr hookup. Although, in my experience, blokes don’t generally take along a Tupperware of snacks. They are the snack.
