- the first fifty pages in three parts -
chapters 4, 5 & 6
4. HUTCH, I’M
HOMELESS.
I stayed in the
café for almost thirty minutes after E left while I regained my composure and
steadied myself enough to bury my head firmly in the sand and call Hutch. I
opened the conversation with the words, “Hutch, I’m homeless.”
He understood the implications of this immediately and so we
arranged to meet up and pass the evening together at a lounge bar called Chime,
a windowless bar which from the outside was identifiable only by the three
horizontal white lines painted on its main door, a place we now considered our
second home thanks to a combination of their uncommon opening hours and their
enthusiastic grasp of our language. We stayed until I noticed the huge steel
clock behind the bar tick over to three a.m.
“Come on, it’s time to go,” I told Hutch, taking control of our
situation. I pulled him sharply by the shoulders but couldn’t get him to loosen
his grip on the bar, so I chose to abandon him and instead look after number
one.
It had been a suitably eventful night, exactly what I had needed
after the madness of the late afternoon. I remember familiar people sitting at
the circular bar reading aloud from sheets of paper with my writing on them
while I was too far gone to feel ashamed or even wonder where they had got them
from. Click, the owner of Chime for as long as we’d been coming here, had been
one of them. A woman I recognised from a TV show was there and I was quick off
the mark to make a connection with her. There was a Ukrainian man who didn’t
understand me and who grabbed my arms at least twice as I tried to bedazzle him
with my late-night wit and logic. Stepek may have appeared briefly and
complained openly about the smell of other people, or I could have dreamt that
part. At one-point Hutch, while taking a swallow from his bottle, touched a
girl’s breast much too deliberately with his elbow causing major problems for
both of us.
Later, in a fast taxi going firmly into an uphill bend I found
myself squashed between the Ukrainian’s sister, who had passed out and was
holding onto my hand, and the TV woman who’s shoulder I believe my head was
resting upon. While I reflected on the craziness of the day just gone and tried
to rationalise my current actions, the city simply buzzed past, no doubt
blissfully unaware of its influence upon us all, silently suggesting that none
of this really mattered anyway.
* * *
In the early
afternoon I waited for Hutch outside his apartment, crouched on the pavement
and wearing sunglasses despite the heavy cloud coverage, my arms wrapped
tightly around my body. Like a pantomime horse we held on to each other and
struggled down the street to the fake diner two blocks from Hutch’s place, all
prepared to reward ourselves with a victory breakfast of sorts.
“I’ve surely felt better,” Hutch grumbled as we collapsed into a
booth at the back of the room. “I wish I had eaten some food last night, Jonas.
My stomach feels like a dirty fish tank. Don’t talk to me today man. I’m
miserable.” He closed his eyes and folded his hands on his lap, his breathing
shallow. “No, on second thoughts I can’t eat anything yet,” he said, bursting into
a semblance of life once again. “I’m just ordering coffee.”
I opened a menu but let it slide out of my hands and onto the
table top the second I saw the names and descriptions of the various plates.
“I’m joining you,” I told him. “Food’s not going to help. Coffee it is,” I
said, flagging the waitress down.
On any normal day, the food in here would have been perfect for
us. Our digestive systems had still not fully adjusted to the complexities of
beginning a new life in a foreign country, and therefore eating in this
approximate representation of a diner from back home had always been viewed by
us as both a pleasure and a necessity.
“How did your night end?” I asked him once we had been supplied
with our rather weak looking beverages.
“I have no idea. I was standing at the bar talking to Click about
the lighting in there, I think, and then... I’m not sure. Next thing I can
remember was Rachel shoving me out of the bed because I was snoring. Honestly,
I can’t cope with blackouts. Anything could have happened to me. You?”
“Similar,” I lied, hoping to make him feel less ashamed. “Except I
woke up on the floor of someone’s hallway. I found the bathroom, washed,
flossed, rinsed, left.” I gave a shrug. “Then I came to get you and here we
are. New day. New life I guess.”
“Hardly a new life yet,” he said. “I mean, you’re going to go and
see E right? Sort this all out?”
“I’m not sure. I was thinking of just waiting until all this blows
over.”
He stared at me and then laughed out loud. “Blows over! What a
strategy!”
I shook my head, regretting having said that.
“Did Stepek appear at Chime last night?” Hutch asked suddenly. “I
have very vague memories of arguing with him and having his pointed nose poking
against my face.”
“I’ve been wondering that myself,” I replied. “I can’t think
straight. I should never have gone down the drinking route last night after the
afternoon I’d had.”
“Oooh, ‘a man comes around now!’” he said, wiggling his fingers
either side of his head, laughing at me.
“Shurrup Kenneth! How the hell would you feel if Rachel said that
to you?”
“Oh geez-o, I dunno,” he replied, looking deadly serious again. “I
guess I’d step in front of a train too.”
“Hutch! Come on...” I said, shaking my head at him. He knew how
inappropriate that was.
“Jump out of window then? Is that a better way? No, really. I
couldn’t take that. What was she thinking? It’s beyond harsh.” He took a large
slurp of coffee and swallowed hard, grimacing. “It’s just not on, old boy! Is
it?” he spluttered in an exaggerated British military tone, laughing and then
coughing.
“This is no joke Hutch,” I told him. “I’m completely lost here.”
“So, what’s the plan then?” he asked.
“Just stay at Norf’s I guess until this, you know…”
“Blows over,” he said.
“When is Norf coming back anyway?” I asked him after a few minutes
of silence. “I may need to stay in that apartment of his for quite some time.”
“No idea. I haven’t heard from him since he asked us to keep an
eye on the place.”
“Well, I’m sure he won’t mind me being there,” I said. We shrugged
simultaneously.
Knowing that Norf owned a property over here in Paris was the seed
that grew into the idea to come and live over here in the first place, an idea
originally thought up and enthused over by Julie Anderson, the realist idealist
and lynchpin of our small group who had by then become, to my horror, Stepek’s
better half. By the time we emigrated en
masse however, all the way from the Windy City to this City of Light, all
thoughts of using Norf’s place had been forgotten until one day when he
contacted Hutch and asked us to look after the place for him, “for a couple of
weeks.” That had been about three months ago. Neither of us had heard from him
since, thankfully.
I watched as Hutch took an enormous slug of coffee, his eyes
widening as some of the liquid exited the mug at each corner of his mouth and
ran down his chin and neck. He wiped most of this away with his hand as he
replaced his mug on the tabletop. From the front of the room I heard the older
of the two waitresses yell through the hatch into the kitchen, “Hey Charlie! My
pen broke, can I go home now?” followed by a burst of cackling laughter. I felt
momentarily homesick.
“I need more coffee,” I said once the laughter had subsided. I
turned around and waved my empty mug pathetically at the other waitress until
she got the message and came sloping over with a fresh pot, pouring me a much-needed
refill. Just as she was turning to leave Hutch began bouncing on his seat,
pointing violently into his almost empty mug causing me to forget everything
and burst out laughing once again.
“I warned you last time not to bring the monkey back here,” the
waitress scolded me as she filled his mug, finally escaping our pull and
returning to her other customers.
“God, I’m in love with her,” Hutch blurted out pointlessly.
“Can you imagine Rachel saying such things to you?” I asked him,
reflecting once again on my conversation with E. “Nonsense. Insulting,
disrespectful nonsense.”
He shrugged once more and asked, “Are you not even going to go
around there? Bang on the door, see this new man?”
“No Hutch, it’s a game, it’s… I knew it would end this way, complicated games. Why are you looking
at me like that?”
“Because games are your department. You’re projecting your own
bullshit onto her. I don’t understand you J, she is practically perfect.”
“You’re talking about appearance. I’m talking about everything
else.”
“Give me a second to digest that last statement. Jonas I’m
beginning to think that you may just be an even worse person than I’d always
thought.” He rolled his eyes and drank down his fresh coffee, glaring at me
over the top of his mug. “I am talking about her as a person, as a friend, and
don’t forget I’ve known her almost as long as you have, so long that the
difference is practically negligible.”
“You go see her then.”
Hutch slammed his mug down. “You just let her tell you that some
random man comes around to see her now and you accepted that? What if she is in
trouble? Or… wait, are you sure she didn’t mean something like a salesman is
going to be coming around, and maybe she was worried that he would be there at
your usual getting it on time, so it wouldn’t be possible for you two to, you
know, get it on normally?”
“What are you talking about? Of course she didn’t mean that. We
don’t have a ‘getting it on’ time!”
“You don’t?”
“Hutch, seriously, these repulsive insights into your home life
are quite alarming! You never fail to amaze me!” I shook my head at him and
laughed, even though I don’t think Hutch really understood why I found this so
amusing. “So, tell me. When is ‘getting it on’ time for you and Rachel?”
“Nine.”
“Of course it is.”
“In the p.m.”
“Right.”
“Oh shit, that reminds me!” Hutch said, digging around in his
pockets before finally pulling out a small camera and pointing it at me. “Say ‘cheese’,”
he said, his face completely serious.
“What are you doing?”
“Gathering evidence for my trial,” he muttered, looking down and
frowning at the photo he’d just taken of me. “Rachel will never believe I was
with you twice in two days. This picture of you is going to be Exhibit A.”
“Understood. But if she doesn’t think you are here with me now
then what does she think you are doing?”
“I don't know. Looking for a job?”
“Well let’s get the waitress to take one of the two of us
together. You could have taken that photo of me at any time.”
I went over to the counter and tried to explain the situation to
our waitress in a way that didn’t make us sound like complete morons. With a
small shrug she agreed to come over and take a picture of the two of us installed
at our table.
“Honey, make sure you get the clock in!” Hutch demanded. “The
current time is essential.”
“Can you get that thing to stop calling me ‘honey’?” she asked me.
“Hey Hutch, hold the newspaper up so that Rachel can see that it’s
today’s front page,” I suggested while the waitress took a couple of shots and
then dropped the camera into Hutch’s impatient, outstretched hand.
“Oh no, look at this,” he remarked, punching the screen with a
chubby index finger. “You’re smiling too much J. I’m going to have to tell her
that I was consoling you, that you are an emotional wreck. That’s the only way
I’m getting out of this unscathed. Let’s take another. Look miserable J.”
I pulled an unhappy face.
“This is pathetic,” the waitress correctly observed, taking the
camera back. “I do have other people to attend to, you know?”
“Shut up, we’re gonna tip you for your time. Take another one,”
Hutch barked at her.
“I’m not a prostitute you asshole!” she snapped, throwing the
camera directly at him and walking away.
“Okay this’ll have to do then. What are you laughing at? This is
no joke, Jonas. These are the lengths I have to go to in order to exist in
peace.”
It went without saying that despite my relatively jovial demeanour
the weight of the conversation I’d had with E the day before was just killing
me. “A man comes around now.” That one line that just wouldn’t leave my head. “What a shitty thing to say, did you really
mean it?” I quietly sang to myself. “Who did that one?” I looked at Hutch
for an answer, but by then he was too busy brutalising the newspaper to notice,
flattening the pages like an excited kitten, so I instead tried to flag down
the waitress for more coffee until she made it clear that we had outstayed our
welcome and allowed my mug to remain empty.
My despair and desperate second-guessing ended soon after,
however, when the door of the diner was flung open to reveal Stepek standing
there, waving an arm and yelling across the room at us. “Wunderman! Hutch! Get
out here!”
“Oh, what the...? What does he want?” Hutch grumbled, looking up
and spinning round to look over the back of our booth. “How does he always know
where we are?” he hissed, looking back at me.
“What is it?” I shouted across the room, lifting my empty mug as I
raised my voice.
“It’s here, come and see! It’s out here!”
I could see it before I even reached the door of the diner; a
gleaming yellow that looked as out of place in this environment as we all did.
It was Stepek’s taxi, an ex-New York City cab he'd bought from someone back home
in Chicago. There were already a couple of people taking photos, no doubt
thinking it was a publicity stunt of some kind for the diner.
“How the hell did you get that here?” I asked. The last I’d heard
Stepek was mourning the fact that it was sitting in a garage back home,
decaying.
“I had her shipped! Cost me two grand.”
“Two grand to ship a car? Is that expensive?”
“I don’t know.”
“It looks shinier here than it did at home,” I observed.
“I had a lot of work done. Replaced that engine finally.”
I nodded, reflecting on the awful noise it used to make.
“It’s making me feel ill just looking at it,” Hutch said. “The
last time I was in that thing I was with Mose. We were loaded. He was lying
passed out with his head on my lap. I kept wondering if the blue dye from his
hair would rub off onto my clothes,” he told us. “He was begging me to let him
come and live with me and Rachel. I told him straight up - she would never
allow it. I wanted to help him, but you know what it’s like. I couldn’t make
her unhappy.”
“You constantly make her unhappy,” I reminded him.
“I know, but none of it is premeditated. This was something else.
I couldn’t deliberately, by choice I mean, make things worse.”
“Forget this,” Stepek interrupted. “Let’s just jump in and go
collect the girls. I’m picking Julie up at from her work when she finishes.
Let’s go get Rachel and E. Call them up. They’ll love this! It’ll be like the
old days back home!”
Hutch looked directly at me, searching for guidance.
“Yeah, I think I’ll skip this part,” I said, turning to go back
inside. I went straight to the counter, paid the check and apologised for
Hutch’s behaviour and then went out the back to use the bathroom.
“Told him?” I asked Hutch when I made it outside again, knowing
that the first thing he would have told Stepek when I left would have been the
story about E meeting someone else.
“Yep.”
“What’s your opinion then?” I asked Stepek. “I know you’ll have
one, so let’s just hear it.”
“About E? My professional opinion is that you should tell her
about the cab, man. Immediately. That’ll cheer her up.”
“I’ll be sure to do that. Meanwhile can you just drop me off at
Norf’s? I’m going to crash there until all this...” I was going to add “blows
over” but of course, as Hutch had suggested, that particular way of thinking
was going to get me nowhere and would probably make things worse, which is a
lesson that I thought I had learned a long time ago.
5. I THINK YOU
SHOULD LEAVE HIM.
Is living with no
memory of what came before, when my recent past was surely the cause of the
situation I found myself in, even possible? If I were to survive this ordeal,
if I were to move forward again, then I would need to look back. That’s just
how life works.
* * *
“E, listen to
me," I recall Mose saying. "This is important! Seriously, it’s
important so try and keep a straight face will you?”
“I’m trying! Wait! Wait. Right, okay. This is it. Serious face.
Serious face. This is my serious face. Tell me.”
“E, you’re without doubt the most beautiful, intelligent… oh come
on, quit it will you? I’m deadly serious here. Stop laughing.”
“I’m sorry! I can’t help it. Woo… this weed is something else!
Just stop with this beautiful intelligent stuff! You were telling me about
travelling, that’s what I want to hear about. I miss moving around. Tell me
everywhere you plan to go and give me that back now please.”
“Here. Okay, listen: I think you should leave him.”
“Leave him?” I laughed before drawing back on the joint.
“Yeah, you should leave Jonas.”
The seriousness of his expression brought me instantly back to the
moment. “Mose, tell me once again, why would I do that?” I asked him.
We had been here before. Mose telling me that I should leave Jonas
for him had become a regular part of life. Even J himself accepted it and
brushed it off as a joke.
“‘Well, he’s just an
excitable boy’,” J sang at me when I eventually found the courage to bring
it up.
“It doesn’t bother you?” I asked him, annoyed.
“No, because I don’t blame him!” J responded disappointingly. “I’d
go crazy having to be in your company and not being able to get my hands on
you.”
“Well you’re about to find out what that’s like,” I’d told him,
leaving him alone to go and sleep on the couch for the night, annoyed that all
he could take into consideration when his closest friend was trying to threaten
our relationship was that it was probably my own fault for being attractive to
him.
J had of course come through soon after and whined about me having
no sense of humour. I most certainly did have a sense of humour, however. I had
to, because almost everything in life was a joke to them. I just used to wish,
even though the pacifist in me was outraged, that he had occasionally gone a
little crazy and at least pretended to be angry at Mose.
6. PULL YOURSELF
TOGETHER I SAY!
“You see, I kept
thinking about how much I spend on cabs,” Stepek told me as he wove the bright
yellow machine through the city streets, “and then one day I suddenly thought:
why don’t I just buy one?” I had
heard him recount this epiphany more times than I could be bothered trying to
remember.
Hutch had waved us off as we left him standing outside the diner,
departing with a violent U-turn which did not seem to take the other road users
into any kind of consideration. This ‘look-at-me’ manoeuvre was typical of
Stepek, his arrivals and departures always framed with as much noise or
commotion as he could muster.
“You do realise,” I told him, “that people use cabs because they
don’t want to take their own car, yeah? I know you think this makes you special
but all you’ve done is buy a car, like everyone else, except you’ve paid a lot
for one that is, based on our past experiences, terrifying on long journeys.”
“No, this makes me unique, Wunderman,” Stepek informed me as he
barely scraped through a yellow light at a busy crossroads.
“If only everyone thought that way,” I reflected.
“They don’t, and I’m glad they don’t. My kind of logic isn’t
obvious to your regular person on the street,” he replied, staring right at me
as he accelerated out of a bend.
“Stepek, I think there is some kind of weird law that says you
can’t just drive around in one of these if you don’t have a license or
something.”
“Even here?”
“I don’t know. You don’t see many around. You don’t see any
around.”
I looked out the window and observed some of the impressive
architecture the city had on display. “Mose would have dug this place,” I said.
“He always planned to travel.”
Stepek offered nothing but silence in response, which suited me
just fine, but I knew him well enough to know that this silence was nothing but
a dramatic prelude to whatever profound sentiment he was preparing to utter.
Eventually it arrived. Without taking his eyes from the road this
time, Stepek proceeded to give me his own take on the subject: “Life is a
joke,” he said. “And death,” he added, now looking at me and pausing for
effect, “is a bigger joke.”
“You know, Paul, being this close to one so wise is having a huge
effect on my ability to maintain a respectable level of self-confidence,” I
informed him.
“Well, I’m just saying. That’s all. The sun went down for Mose,
and it didn’t come back up. End of story.”
“I feel all the better for hearing it, thanks.”
“So what’s exactly is all this about E then?” he asked. “She’s
finally found someone in her league?”
“That appears to be the case, yes.”
“What does that feel like? Hutch said you didn’t seem to care.”
I shook my head. “Let’s put it this way,” I replied, “there is
nothing good about it.” There was nothing good about this discussion either.
Sharing feelings with Stepek was not something I ever felt inclined to do.
“I could give you a list of positives right now.”
“I’m sure that I could draw up a long list as well. I just need a
little more time. I don’t even know for sure what’s going on. She was a little
vague about everything.”
“Yeah. Definitely deliberate vagueness. Stops people having to
self-analyse too much. They don’t want to hear anyone, let alone themselves,
say out loud what they have just done.”
“I’m not sure. E is usually pretty direct.”
I momentarily considered the days ahead, sleeping alone at Norf’s
place while fretting over the situation with E. It was too much of a black hole
and the thought of standing on such a cliff-edge was making me nauseous. I sat
there in the non-passenger seat of Stepek’s cab, feeling like a cut-out
photograph of myself, not quite glued correctly to the surroundings and not
quite the right size, either too big or too small for the background it had
been pasted onto. It hadn’t yet been a full twenty-four hours since we spoke,
but I felt myself missing E’s presence already.
“Don’t you want to grab some clothes or something from your place
before we head to Norf’s?” Stepek asked. “We’re not that far away anyway.”
“Err...” was all I managed to say in response. I couldn't believe
I hadn't thought of this. I could think of a few things I needed but the
thought of going there was in no way appealing to me. The idea of sending
Stepek up there for me was even less agreeable, and of course E had asked me
not to go there, I reminded myself, so I should respect that. I should switch
off my hurt and anger and not think about her. I needed to get a system
together in my head to deal with all of this. I was not planning to spend the
weeks ahead concerning myself with whatever she was doing at any point in time,
and I would most certainly not be trying to imagine her and her new man
together. I was not interested in seeing him. I did not care what he looked
like, and I was definitely not interested in seeing the two of them together or
seeing what the home E and I started together looked like with someone else in
it, or …
“Fuck it, let’s go,” I said.
“I’m coming up, Wunderman. I want to see this motherfucker.”
“You’re not coming up.”
“Yes I am! You’ll need help carrying everything.”
“You’re not coming up Paul!”
* * *
Deciding whether
to use my key or just knock on the door was the first conundrum. This was my
home after all, but then I didn’t live here anymore, apparently. While
contemplating the pros and cons of these options I found myself sliding the key
into the lock as slowly and silently as possible, aware that as soon as I began
to turn it the noise of the lock would alert those inside that someone was
coming in. With the key fully inside I leaned against the door, putting all my
weight against it. I took a deep breath and then in one well-practised move I
turned the key and swung the door open smoothly and quietly.
If I am being honest I had fully imagined that I would burst in to
find E and her new man in the middle of some athletic sex session on the couch
right there in front of me, and then of course, the anger, shock and horror of
seeing this would be enough to end my sadness and make me hate her, banishing
her from my mind forever and allowing me to spend the next few months or maybe
years in decadent anger at the world, doing whatever I like, using and abusing
anyone that came my way.
What I did not expect to experience was the pungent odour that
drifted out at me, the air full of a terrible smell of decay and mould, like
stale food. My perverse arousal was gone in a flash, replaced by frightening
confusion. The only conclusion I could come to was that somehow in the last
twenty-four hours E had moved out and a bunch of lowlife skankers and junkies
had taken over the place.
The television was on, seemingly caught between channels. The
screen was filled with static with vague shadowy figures moving around, action
of some kind barely visible. This threw me for a second; I had seen this before
somewhere. The voices of a man and a woman arguing in that one-sided male-dominating
style you’d expect from a film made fifty years ago filled the audio. It was
loud enough to be the second thing to strike my senses after the dreadful
smell. My armchair was positioned where it always was, facing the screen. This
is where I would sit to read, doze, write, reflect and only occasionally look
at the old television set itself. I couldn’t see clearly from where I stood,
but I had a strong impression that someone was sitting there. Someone had taken
my place.
“I’ve had enough of your whimpering,” the male actor’s voice, a
clipped, privately educated tone snapped. “Enough! You’ll be leaving in the
morning. It’s all arranged. Pull yourself together woman… pull yourself
together I say!”
“What?” I heard myself mumble.
I was so focused, so stunned by the claustrophobic atmosphere that
I almost jumped when I realised E was standing right there before me, her hands
clasped together in front of her. I looked right at her and said something
awful, to which she just shook her head and looked even more disappointed in me
that she had in the café.
I then said something about wanting some of my things, as she had
offered. She stood back, suggesting I could enter the apartment. By now
anything that was possibly being said, including the dialogue from the
television was lost to me. My ears were reacting as if I were under water; my
eardrums felt compressed, and I could hear nothing but a dull rumble. My mouth
felt loose, my jaw ached. Forming coherent words was out of the question.
In this state I drifted through to what had been known until just
yesterday morning as “our bedroom,” where I quickly grabbed a few items from
next to what I could no longer call “my side of the bed”. I grabbed my small
backpack and then hurriedly stuffed some clothes inside, rushing through to the
bathroom to grab one or two things that I probably didn’t need to take. I took
a moment to have one last look into the bedroom and instantly decided on two
other items that were going to be mine. On the desk at the end of the bed I’d
kept a small, framed photo of E, taken soon after we met. It seemed important
to me to take this and not let it become the keepsake of anyone else. The
second thing I took was the quilt from the bed. It was a deep crimson red, and
it was in fact one of the only items I had bought for the apartment. I had
bought it originally because I’d suspected that the colour of E’s skin would
contrast wonderfully with the deep red, and I had been right. Again, the
thought of anyone else getting to experience this particular sight clouded out
every other thought, and so I snatched it and then left the room, my bag on my
back and the quilt bundled up in my arms.
E appeared to be asking me a question as I moved towards the front
door, her hand movements suggesting that she was quite rightly asking about the
quilt, but all I could hear now was a muffled “Jmmn bmmm pmmnnmm mmm nmm nmmn,”
from her as she gestured anxiously at me, protesting.
With my eyes fixed firmly on the corridor beyond and my life outside
of that place, I hurried through the doorway, stumbling and almost falling as I
rushed down the stairs.
* * *
“Got your blankie
then?” Stepek remarked as I stuffed myself back into the passenger seat of the
cab.
“Just get me to Norf’s!” I managed to blurt out. I could barely
breathe. Trapped in the throes of an immense anxiety attack I tilted my head
back and tried to take long, deep breaths.
“So was her new man there?”
“Norf’s please!” I barked at him. I visualised myself as a
frenzied cadaver; eyes unblinking, mouth locked open in an unnatural position.
“No need to be rude man,” he grumbled as he started the engine and
pulled away from the side of the road. Stepek really was the last person I
needed to be with at a time like this.
“So, what’s happening? What did she say?” Stepek asked while we
sat in the gridlocked evening streets. He looked more serious now, finally
grasping the reality of my mood.
“I don’t know,” I replied. “I didn’t listen. I just took this
stuff.” I looked out at the shops next to where we were currently stuck and
realised that it was only a half-hour walk from there to Norf’s. “I think I’m
going to walk the rest of the way,” I told him as I opened the door. “Thanks
for the ride,” I added as I gathered both the bag and the quilt up in my arms
and tried to get out of my seat.
“You should probably wash that,” he suggested, turning the corners
of his mouth down and nodding towards the quilt as I struggled to move.
I sat back down again and looked at him for a few seconds.
“What?” he asked, raising his voice with faux innocence.
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” I muttered, turning once again to try
and exit the cab.
*