“Who are you texting?” Ollie asked as he looked over.
“No one.” I fumbled to hide my phone. He looked as if he was going to say something, but at that moment, there was a crash somewhere in the house and we both yelled in unison, “Cats!”
I got up to check what they’d destroyed and was joined by Kenny for the walk. In the darkness of the middle of the house, I brought up the message app again, and my finger hovered.I hope you’re okayI wrote. No, too blasé. I couldn’t rely on trite concern. This was someoneI’d been hoping would pin me up against a wall and convince me of the merits of the trickle-down effect mere seconds before this had all been blown open. This is shitI typed.Can’t begin to imagine how you feel. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.I hit send.
No, no, that was a terrible text. I fumbled to undo it and delete the message, but it was too late. The two ticks appeared in the corner. Sent. Received.
My phone started ringing, and in shock, I answered it. “Hello?”
“Mr Forrest! Arden! Please don’t hang up!” said a man’s voice down the line. A Brummie accent. “My name’s Dominic Grundy, I work for theDaily—”
“I’m not speaking to journalists,” I snapped.
“Wait, I want to help you!” he said, but I hung up.
Ollie’s head appeared around the door frame, and I nearly screamed in surprise. “Did you find what they’ve broken?”
“Oh, what?” My heart was racing. “No, not yet.”
“What’s got you all distracted tonight?” His eyes narrowed. “You’re not on Twitter again, are you?”
I scoffed and went looking for the cats instead of answering.
Wednesday dawned as the hottest day of the year. The radio was blaring out the weather as I entered to find Ollie cooking again and feeding Kenny all the scraps.
The weather presenter was telling us that this was expected to be the hottest day in fifty years. “That is, until tomorrow when it’s expected to be even hotter. London and parts of the home counties could see temperatures of nearly forty degrees,” the manic sounding presenter chuntered on.
“This is awful,” I said.
Ollie looked up from where he was doing something fiddly with cheese. “It’ll blow over. The weather is the lead story this morning. They’ve barely even mentionedthat Macauley Sheridan once got caught with rent boys in his office, which was trending all over Twitter last night.”
“No, I meant the weather. I’m not built for heat.”
“I think it’s glorious!” Ollie shouted as he threw whatever he’d made in the oven and departed off to another room in the house. “I have loads of work to catch up on today,” he said coming back into the kitchen. “I’m going to sit in the garden and answer my four million emails. I wish Verity had thought to put a pool in.”
The last thing I needed was to see Ollie in tiny swimming shorts.
I decided to do some work myself. And once I had purposely not connected my laptop to the Wi-Fi, I began to get down to the matter at hand. It was easy to lose myself in the process, and thankfully, when I next looked up, it was lunchtime. I was just writing a scene where my main character jumps off a waterfall into the viscous lakes of Planet Zzxx IV chased by its native carnivorous crocodile people, while also feeling guilty for missing her boyfriend’s big football game, when I heard a door close and looked down to the floor to see I’d been deserted by Kenny.
I shrugged and ate a plate of the cheesy concoction Ollie had made earlier. It was some sort of pasta; whatever it was, it was incredibly calorific, so I was doing him a favour by eating it.
Half an hour later, the door banged again, and in came Kennedy, who went straight to his water bowl in the corner and began to lap like his life depended on it. Ollie, at a much slower pace, followed him in. I did a double take. “You didnotgo running in this weather?” I asked.
Ollie was bright red with sweat coming off him in rivulets. His hair, which was the exact shade where blond turned to brown, was much darker than usual and slicked back with moisture. His sweat-wicking T-shirt was plastered to his body from his perspiration. His armsbelow the sleeve were baby pink from their exposure to the sun.
“Please tell me you were wearing sunscreen?” I asked, looking at his arms and then down at his legs, which were surely the same.
“Like I mentioned earlier, I love this weather.”
“Ollie – you’re Scottish,” I said. “Your people were not designed for summer. You shouldn’t be outside, and if you do go, you should hide under a sheet and run from shady patch to shady patch.”
Ollie scoffed, the effort of which seemed to nearly do him in. He leaned on the counter and gulped a pint of water down.
“Remember Valencia?” I told him. Our first anniversary had been around the same time as Ollie’s thirtieth birthday, and when my book was going to get its first big print run in the US market. We’d celebrated with a fortnight in July at a luxury villa in Spain, where we sat by the pool all day, ate carbs, and tried our best to destroy the four-poster bed in the master bedroom every night.
Well, we had, until the mercury kept going up every day, and Ollie had taken against it and become a walking lobster person. Even when he took ice-cold showers, he was bright red and looked like he’d run a marathon. People came up to him in restaurants and asked if he needed to lie down. Spanish grandmothers approached him as we toured beautiful old churches and tried to make him take their seats in the shade and force him to drink lemonade.
To make Ollie’s mood worse, my Slavic genes discovered a lost Mediterranean side, and I never burnt nor had a moment of discomfort the whole time, instead I got darker and darker, until by our last night I was basically mahogany. Ollie sulkily accused me of doing it on purpose. I’d crawled up him as he sat stoney faced on the bed and tried to entice him with my newly discoveredability to tan to place his hands all over me. It had worked. Eventually. I don’t think he properly stopped sulking until months later, when he saw me looking at myself in the mirror and smirked over my now completely faded tan.
