I’m not hungry, but I intend on consuming a considerable amount of wine tonight and I need something to line my stomach first. And actually, when we’re tucking into bowls of very spicy stew in the living room, sitting side by side on the sofa in our comfy clothes, it’s the perfect meal.
‘How much ginger did you put in this?’ Joe asks, his cheeks flushed.
‘Quite a bit. With allspice and cardamom.’
‘It’s good,’ Joe says, but I can see beads of sweat glisten along his brow. ‘I might have chucked in a handful of chilli flakes, too.’
That explains the heat. ‘I don’t think we’ll get colds for the foreseeable.’
‘Excellent,’ Joe squeaks as he coughs, sending us both giggling. He wipes his eyes on his sleeve. ‘It may be painful but at least we’re in this together.’
When he looks at me I’m suddenly not sure if he’s still talking about the stew. I stuff the question away. Right now I just need to have fun.
We eat for a while without talking, Film4 playing an indie movie we missed the start of, so that it appears we’re casually spying on someone else’s life from the comfort of our sofa.
If someone were watching Joe and me, what would they see?
I’m still shaken by what happened this afternoon, as much by Joe’s response to it as by the whole boyfriendgate situation with everybody else. He properly rescued me. Taking my hand like that and spiriting me away. I don’t think I’ve been rescued before – usually it’s me saving everyone else. I’ve always thought the whole bloke-rescuing-a-woman thing was a bit of macho positioning, as if every woman is expected to automatically reset to ‘helpless’ whenever a man decides to take over. But it wasn’t like that with Joe. I don’t think he even thought about it before he moved. The spontaneity surprised me. I think it surprised him as well.
Of course, the mess hasn’t gone away: it will still be waiting for me. I’ll have to work out how to deal with it soon. But not tonight. I don’t want to think about it tonight.
‘You are not drinking fast enough, Ms Perry,’ Joe says when he leans over to refill my wine glass and finds it still half-full. ‘Pathetic effort.’
‘Sorry.’ I reach over and down the remaining wine in one swallow, holding the empty glass out to my startled housemate. ‘There you go.’
‘That’s one way to do it…’
We watch new red wine tumble from bottle into glass as Joe pours it. The moment is inexplicably, remarkably intimate. He swaps the bottle for his own glass and clinks it against mine.
‘To forgetting,’ he says.
‘To forgetting.’
We drink.
And I wonder. What does Joe really think? Is he embarrassed? Amused? Does he regret his part in it? I want to know, but I can’t bring myself to ask. And the whole ‘I’m Otty’s boyfriend’ thing: did he do that because he felt sorry for me? Is he wishing he hadn’t bothered now?
Another bottle soon sits empty on the coffee table. Joe shuffles into the kitchen to find more. I rest my head back against the sofa cushions and close my eyes. I can hear my housemate crashing about, banging cupboard doors and voraciously singing out of tune. My mind swims in today’s tide: cricket and family and Chris and Sheila and tears in the Cannon Hill bandstand, all swirling in the alcoholic blur, carrying me far out…
‘Crisps!’ Joe yells triumphantly and I open my dizzy eyes to see him plonk three large bags of them on the table, followed by two wine bottles from under his arm.
‘Result!’ I yell back, the room spinning a little now.
He flops down beside me, bag of crisps in hand, and rests his head on my shoulder. ‘You’re ace, you are.’
I snigger. ‘Ace? What decade did you just drop in from?’
‘Ace… Groovy… Fab… Splendid… Top notch… Spiffing… Look at me, Otts, I’m going back in time in superlatives!’ His voice trails away and he waves his hands above his head as if falling through time and space.
‘Nutter.’
‘You called?’ He sits up and rips open the packet, sending a shower of artisan potato crisps across us both. Breathless with laughter, we wipe them away. As we do, our hands brush against each other’s – and in the tipsy clumsiness there’s endearing warmth.
There’s something I should say now – I feel it teetering on my tongue. I take a breath…
Then Joe stuffs his mouth with crisps and starts doing a Don Corleone impression from The Godfather, causing a fit of helpless laughter. It steals the words from me and the moment to say them is gone.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
JOE
A university mate once told me there are seven stages you pass through on a drunken night out. He called them The Seven Dwarves of Drunkenness:
Happy
Tipsy
Rowdy
Forgetful
Hilarious
Maudlin
and Comatose.
I thought he was kidding, until I encountered each and every one of them during my three-year degree. Some lasted as long as a single round, others arrived together, but all of the blighters showed up eventually.
Otty and I are currently entertaining Hilarious, although I fear Maudlin might be waiting in the wings. I’ve lost count of the glasses of wine we’ve drunk. Two of the three bags of crisps are empty save for crumbs and salt dust. I don’t even know what time it is – I don’t have my watch on and it’s hours since I last looked at my phone. Several films have passed by on television and because neither of us has been paying attention they’ve merged into one strange, multi-genre, incomprehensible screenplay.
But right now, everything is funny.
At one point Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves came on and I did my best Bryan Adams impression singing ‘(Everything I Do) I Do It For You’. Otty laughed so hard she fell off the sofa and cracked her head on the edge of the coffee table. I rushed over to her but by the time I got there she’d passed through shock and was laughing at the pain. Then she started quoting lines from the Mel Brooks’ spoof, Robin Hood: Men in Tights – which, once you watch it, will guarantee you can never take the Kevin Costner film seriously ever again – and it sent us both gasping for air somewhere between the floor and the sofa.
The urge to laugh still clings to everything we say, but I can feel its grip loosening a little. We’re back in a sensible seating position now and I’ve fetched us two pint glasses of water in a vain attempt to lessen what are bound to be kamikaze hangovers in the morning.
We needed this after the events at Edgbaston. I’m not sure we’ve fully addressed what happened but tonight I don’t care. It’s been a hell of a couple of weeks and this is the blowout we deserve.
I look at Otty now, sleepily content amid the cushions, the rise and fall of her breath soft and every line of worry smoothed from her skin, and I’m in awe. I can’t imagine the years she endured, trapped between her family’s expectations and the pull of her own heart. I don’t know how she found strength to leave Chris. Knowing what it would do to the people she loved most. And then having to work with them all for a year, their pain and disapproval at close quarters.
She’s braver than me. And even more remarkable than I thought.