Chapter Eleven
Colinshut off the tap and reached for the tea towel folded over the handle of the oven. He’d had to lie on his side under the sink to get at the p-trap, and his shoulder was yelling at him about it now. He worked the towel between his fingers, getting the wetness out from under his nails.
Diwa was at the kitchen island opposite, watching him with the full attention Colin had got used to over the past month.
The kitchen was finished now. The skirting boards had been painted, and the marble of the island had been sealed and buffed and was catching the late afternoon light. Through the doorway he could see the hall where the wiring had once hung in a tangle, all closed up now behind smooth plaster. The tools and offcuts and bits of dowel that had lived in small drifts along the walls for a month were all gone, packed away neatly by Diwa’s newly departed contractors.
It was a truly beautiful house.
Colin folded the tea towel back over the handle of the oven. He kept his face turned to the rail a beat longer than he neededto, as the realisation sank in that Diwa wasn’t going to need him anymore.
He’d been making good money out of Diwa’s home improvements. Better than good. At forty quid an hour, cash-in-hand, no invoice required, and the lad never once quibbled about the tariff or asked for a discount the way half of Colin’s clients did, sliding their eyes sideways and mentioning that the Polish fellow down the road charged thirty-five. Diwa paid what Colin quoted, and sometimes added a twenty on top.
That was a decent wedge to lose. Especially with the new prescriptions eating into his monthly income, and the boiler in the flat making that strange gurgling sound again. The one that meant he’d probably need a new ignition board soon.
Colin wiped down the counter that didn’t need wiping. He straightened the washing-up liquid so it sat square with the edge of the sink.
It was the money he was going to miss. Obviously it was the money. The fact that this particular client happened to smell like warm wood and clean cotton was irrelevant to the financial calculation.
Across the island, Diwa shifted his weight onto one elbow and smiled at him, dimples and all, oblivious about where Colin’s mind had gone.
“So,” Diwa said, straightening up on his stool and pulling his mobile out of his back pocket. “Next week. I’ve been making a list.” He thumbed at the screen, already scrolling, and Colin would have put money on there being a spreadsheet involved. “The towel rail in the guest en-suite is slightly loose on the left bracket. The garden tap is dripping, which I think is the same job as the washer thing we did upstairs, but I want to make sure it’s not going to end up flooding the patio. There’s a draught coming from somewhere around the bay window in the front room, and I can’t work out if it’s the frame or the seal. Oh, and the extractorfan in the downstairs bathroom is making a noise. Not a bad noise, but a noise. A sort of ticking, like there might be a bird trapped inside the wall.”
There was another flurry of tapping against his mobile’s screen.
“And I want to put up a picture rail in the study,” Diwa went on. “I found this reclaimed oak one on a salvage website, and I think it’d look really nice against the paint colour, but it needs to go up level, obviously, and the walls are original plaster, so I’m not sure about the fixings. Whether it’s a masonry bit or a —”
“Diwa.”
Diwa’s thumb stopped moving on the screen.
“Your house is done.” Colin folded the tea towel once more and set it on the counter between them. “It’s bloody beautiful, and you don’t need me to do all that simple shit for you anymore.”
Diwa shook his head. “The picture rail, though. That still needs —”
“You know how to put up a picture rail. We did that last week, and I’ve watched you drill into masonry, hang shelving, and bleed every radiator in this house. You’ve got a spirit level, a decent drill, and a bag of wall plugs.” He nodded at the garden through the bay window. “All sitting in that shed of yours, lined up like they’re in a shop display.”
“The point is,” Diwa said, and his voice had gone a fraction higher, “that I’ll hang it crooked. You know I will. It’ll be three millimetres off and I’ll notice it every single time I walk into the room. It’ll drive me mad, and then I’ll have to call you back anyway, so really this is just me being efficient.”
“You might hang it crooked, but at least you’d have hung it yourself, mate.”
The kitchen went quiet. Diwa bit down on his bottom lip. His thumb was still resting on the screen of his mobile, on the list he’d made. “I need you here, Colin.”
“No, you don’t,” Colin said.
The silence that followed was long enough for Colin to hear the fridge ticking over in the corner. Diwa’s teeth bit down on his bottom lip, working at the skin there while his thumb pressed a groove into the edge of the countertop. “Iwantyou here,” Diwa said.
The word came out with a force that didn’t match his usual displays of easy charm. Diwa set his mobile face-down on the marble countertop. “We should celebrate, Colin. Properly. Look at this place.” He gestured at the kitchen, the painted skirting, and the hallway beyond where the plaster was smooth and the pendant lighting was still glowing away perfectly. “We put so much work into this house. Let me take you to dinner. Wherever you want. Not sushi, obviously. We’ll dress up, we’ll have a great night, we’ll go somewhere with actual plates and actual cutlery and nobody will serve anything on a roofing tile.”
Colin stayed very still on his side of the island.
What Diwa was describing was a date. There was no angle from which a man taking another man to dinner, dressed up, to celebrate a shared achievement, was not a date. Colin had been on precisely one date in his life, in 2006, with a beta called Gary who had asked him out for a coffee and then spent forty minutes talking about his ex-wife’s solicitor. He’d walked home afterwards and not tried again.
The whole exercise had felt like a con; sitting across from a decent man with a coffee going cold between them, pretending he was someone who could be touched without his nervous system treating it as a threat. At one point, Gary had reached across the table to brush a crumb off Colin’s sleeve, and Colin’shand had come up so fast he’d knocked the sugar bowl off the table.
Diwa was still babbling. “I just want to say thank you. For everything. You came in here and you taught me how to do things I should’ve known how to do at fifteen, and you never once made me feel stupid about it. Well, you did, actually, quite a lot. But in a way that was somehow fine? And I want to do something for you that isn’t just handing you cash in my hallway, because that’s always felt wrong, and I think you know it’s felt wrong, and —”
“Diwa.”
