If panic had a posture, it would be Gerald, paralysed with an oaty spoon halfway to his mouth and deeply regretting every decision bringing him to this moment. “I… uh… don’t really eat fast food.”
A tiny fairy nesting in my soul dies.Goody two shoes.Don’t drink, don’t smoke. What do you fucking do?
“Wow, wish I could say the same. But no worries. It’s fine.”Improvise, adapt, overcome.“I can do us some baked potatoes and tuna melt. I mean, I can’t cook much else, and opening a tin of fish and grating some cheese over it hardly constitutes cooking. But I’m literally the king of cheesy tuna, and I have a trick of getting the potato skins just the right level of crispiness. What, say seven o’clock? Does that give you plenty of time to prepare for book club? Yeah? Cool! Just point me to the nearest supermarket.”
Sutton Common on a Sunday afternoon is serene as fuck. Too serene. Too civilised. Too much of a perfectly trimmed nauseatingly suburban dystopia. Recycling bins are out in force, lined up like tin soldiers, some with smiley faces and cutesy stickers on them sayingbin there, recycled that!Andsuperhero bin activated!Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against saving the planet—David Attenborough is one of my all-time (non-sexual) idols—but it still sets my teeth on edge.
Isaac and Ezra are out in suburbia these days, too. I wonder if they have stickers on their recycling bins. Ugh. Probably not, Ezra’s way too cool, even if I did catch them chatting aboutdental plans. Turning thirty earlier this year sneaked up on me like a cat wearing socks. Dwelling on it is like being forced in front of a mirror I don’t want to look into. One minute, I’m off my head and dancing on Stefan’s shoulders in Aiya Napa. The next, he’s telling me about his and Marcus’s recent trip to the garden centre to price up three panels of brushwood fencing. I haven’t the foggiest what brushwood is, nor do I care. But, overnight, my friends have split into two camps; one lot quitting the rat race to go find themselves (and hard drugs) in Vietnam, and the others selling their souls to mortgages, air fryers, five-year plans, and fence panels.
Meanwhile, I’m stuck in no man’s land with Gerald and having an existential crisis. Concede and wither on the vine or fuck off to Far East and convert to Buddhism? Or stay and fight? Rage against the machine and the inevitable slide into proper adulthood for as long as possible?
I mooch down the uninspiring supermarket aisles, sending a snap to Stefan accompanied by a bored emoji. Music plays, some soft, royalty-free panpipe shit. Every time it hits a high note, the fluorescent lights flicker, casting a jerky glow over where someone has dropped a tin of tomatoes and another shopper has walked through the mess. I sling two own brand tins of tuna into my basket. A bumper-sized bottle of ketchup joins them.
Five-year plans? I’m still figuring out what snacks to buy to get me through the next set of night shifts. And the quickest way out of Sutton Common. I’m paying rent by the month on a verbal agreement, seeing as Luke and Isaac vouched for me, so I can leave whenever I want, without giving formal notice. Stefan texts back a picture of his and Marcus’s entwined hairy ankles with the wordslolstill in bed. Goblins have prettier feet than Marcus.
I toss a bag of nutritious mini cucumbers into my shopping basket then balance them out with a comforting supersized bag of Maltesers, always well received during a night shift. I throw ina one-litre bottle of Tanqueray too.Fiscal prudence, my arse. I wish shewasa bloody drag queen. She’d be way more fun on a Sunday afternoon than schlepping around the Sutton Common branch of Sainsburys.
Ah well, at least I have my shit together at work. No, scrap that, at least Iexcelat work. And thank fuck I don’t have trotters like Marcus.
I don’t text Stefan back.
CHAPTER 6
GERALD
I’m cohabiting with a hobbit, not an elf. Alaric Alvin is about five feet six inches tall, has dark blond hair itching to curl up at the edges, and a relentlessly cheerful attitude despite interacting with me. He hardly ever wears shoes, either inside or when he slips out into my tiny back yard for a smoke. Literally, he sleeps on the floor; when I crept past his room late last night, his door was ajar and there he was, curled up on his side in what can only be explained as a nest of clothing and towels.
His soft lisp and his teeth and the shine around his pink mouth—a regular application of lip gloss or lip balm—are too much. They do strange things to my insides. Now I’ve got to watch his gappy front teeth bite down on buttery baked potato while he licks his glossy lips and the lispy voice witters on about the wonders of living in his last flat with his beloved oldest friend Stefan and how it was situated a stone’s throw from the beating pulse of London. Politicians should hire him for filibustering; one sentence segues into the next without so much as a pause for breath.
Book club can’t come quick enough.
In general, the hobbit’s dietary regime leaves a lot to be required, although credit where it’s due, he’s nailed cheesy tuna melt over baked potato. Coco Pops, crisps, sugary full fat yoghurts, and takeaway pizzas are surprising nutritional choices for a surgeon who should know better. If I pigged out on that lot, I’d be shapeless, greasy, and spotty. Dr Alaric Alvin, cross-legged on the sofa with no intention of retreating to his room whilst I chair book club, is none of those things. Mind you, it must be a rocket-fuel concoction; he views silence as a personal affront.
“What’s the book this month?” he enquires as I set up my laptop on the coffee table. Shifting the heavy table away from him to a different position in front of the armchair would be excessively rude, so I’m forced to join him on the sofa. I sit at the far end.
“Wolf Hall.”
“Never heard of it.”
“Here.” I wave my thick hardback copy at him.
“Wow,” he exclaims, “that’s not a book, it’s an upper-body workout.”
“It’s by Hilary Mantel.”
“Nope, none the wiser. Never heard of him, either.”
In the nick of time, I stop my mouth from hanging open. “He’s a she.”
Alaric studies the plain red book cover. “Wolf Hall. Is it a paranormal, like with supernatural creatures or something?”
Oh my, I’m living with aPhilistine.“Not even close. It won the Booker Prize in 2009. The BBC serialisation, one of the greatest programmes they’ve ever produced, won a BAFTA.”
“Very cool. But really? No wolves? Or, even better, vampires and wolves? Werewolves? Gotta love a good werewolf story. Ghosts?”
“No. It’s a fictionalised version of the life of Thomas Cromwell. The title alludes to the Latin phrase'Man is wolf toman,'signifying the scheming political world of the Reformation Cromwell negotiated daily, rather than the actual bricks and mortar place, which is a medieval hall in Wiltshire. I’m astonished someone like you hasn’t come across it.”
My derision hangs awkwardly between us. As Alaric’s ever-ready smile falters, a flicker of guilt twists in my chest. I don’t mean to sound contemptuous or highhanded, but when a supposedly highly educated person displays that level of ignorance, it’s difficult not to be. For heaven’s sake. Who, with an ounce of intelligence, hasn’t heard ofWolf Hall? Don’t you have to be clever to be a doctor?
