‘Fine, fine. Forget I asked,’ I said, trying to sound unfazed as I turned away from him and dropped into one of the barbarically uncomfortable chairs in the sterically lit hospital corridor. I watched the tense lines on Bill’s face begin to gradually thaw as I tried to find some kind of seating position that didn’t make me feel like I was about to slip right off and onto the floor that had probably seen litres of blood spilled onto it.
‘Thank you for driving us,’ Bill said eventually, surprising me with what sounded like an actual attempt at gratitude. ‘I’m just… stressed. This whole situation is stressful.’
I gave a thumbs-up as a response. I was far too exhausted to navigate the landmine-infested field that was talking to Bill at the best of times.
‘And I shouldn’t have asked you to leave,’ he continued, not making eye contact with me. ‘I wanted to say that to your face too. I really thought I was doing Ben a favour with everything going on with him, but clearly, I wasn’t.’
‘It’s fine,’ I replied somewhat aloof but attempting to be poised. I tried not to be completely imperious, he was expressing some kind of regret to me, after all, although falling short of an actual apology. Not sure exactly what he meant, though. Why did he think he was helping Ben by kicking me out and what exactly did he have on?
He turned and slumped his body into the seat next to me. From the way he tried to shift his body, he was finding it as obnoxiously uncomfortable as I did.
‘But yeah, thanks for not killing us on the way here,’ he said wryly.
‘Oh, you’re quite welcome. I did think about driving us into the Thames but decided against it this time.’
‘You might have done me a favour,’ he responded,scoffingly.
Were Bill and I havinga moment? Even though he was his usual self, dripping with sarcasm and lacing his dry cruelty as banter, it felt like he was being just the tiniest bit softer towards me.
‘You know – and I don’t really expect you to care,’ he said, starting up the conversation again – ‘but Ben and I were meant to celebrate our anniversary tonight.’
‘No way,’ I said, forgetting for a brief moment that to Ben, Bill was my replacement. I knew I shouldn’t have expressed any kind of sympathy for his cancelled celebrations, but I still felt a little bit bad. ‘You should have said. I mean, what happened?’
‘I had to work, or I guess I chose to work, anyway, Ben got really mad. I mean, did you not wonder why I went straight up to bed without a word?’
‘I just thought maybe you were feeling tired,’ I admitted, trying to spare him the embarrassment of knowing I’d overheard theEastEnders-style shouting match from the shed. ‘I didn’t realise you two were upset with each other. I thought maybe he had just found your cigarettes again. Did you really have to work?’
‘No,’ Bill muttered, a little softly, almost repentant with the way that he bowed his head as he said it. From what I could tell, Bill’s second job wasn’t really about the extra money. Between software engineering and private equity, I imagined the two of them were hardly struggling to pay a mortgage, even in London. So why he kept vanishing at odd hours and coming home smelling of weird ointments was still beyond me. I still kept coming back to stripper. I could see people going crazy for Ben.
I couldn’t stop myself from asking what I said next. Maybe it was the flutter of camaraderie Bill was showing me, or maybe I was still bitter about him trying to boot me out of the shed.
‘How many years?’
‘What?’
‘How many years were you celebrating?’
He harrumphed. It was stupid of me to ask, and he was wise enough not to answer.
EIGHTEEN
Back when I was younger, Greta and I once got the stern gaze of our teacher when, sat at the back of the class, we decided to draw enormous vulvas on the textbooks. Penises were so overrated and overexposed within the education curriculum but vulvas, nowthat’snot something you see doodled in the back of a school textbook every day. That’s got some originality, that’s breaking new ground in the art of textbook graffiti.
You’d be surprised how hard it is to draw one from memory, from the clitoris down to the labia majora, making sure you got the shape and curve of things quite right. Our teacher spotted it, of course, but I always remember very clearly that we didn’t get in trouble for our art pieces.
We didn’t get in trouble mostly because Greta’s mum was in hospital at the time. While I’ll never be thankful that Greta was only fourteen when her mum died, a part of meisthankful that, when I drew the fattest labia I could summon, we were spared the wrath of Mr Trimmer’s detention, and it was the first time she’d smiled in months.
After that, Mr Trimmer never looked at me the same way again. Probably because I gave one of the labias a very fetching bow tie.
Bill had remained annoyingly vague about why we were here, saying only, and rather obtusely, that ‘Ben just fell’. But I could tell there was something he wasn’t telling me. After he lent me his charger for my phone that was as flat as a dab, he had claimed he would try to stay awake, but by the time I stirred at 5.30 a.m. on Sunday morning, he was still out like a light, long heavy snores emanating from his nasal passageways. The first rays of a pinky-red dawn were beginning to filter through the hospital blinds, stretching wide across the linoleum flooring.
I rose to my feet, trotted the ten feet over to the other end of the corridor and stretched my arms as high as I could above my head. Then I noticed, through the glazed window to the hospital room, I could just about make out the figure of Ben sitting upright in bed. He was awake, presumably watching TV with the colours of the screen casting an iridescent gleam across his face. I crept into the room as quietly as I could, wary of catching the attention of a rogue doctor or nurse who might curtly remind me of the hospital’s visiting hours.
‘Hey, champ,’ I said, keeping my tone as light and playful as possible. ‘I told you if you kept doing it too much you’d go blind or your palms would get hairy.’
‘What’s up, sport?’ he replied, mirroring my tone of fake ebullience. I could see it clearly on his face. He looked tired, no, actually he looked weary. As if someone had taken some kind of industrial-grade emotional vacuum to suck all of the joy and hope out of his face.
‘Is anyone going to tell me what’s wrong with you, or am I going to have to play doctor and diagnose you myself?’ I asked, half joking, but I was starting to feel the unease in my gut. Something wasn’t right and it had been that way for a few days now.
