Not Exactly What I Had in Mind E-Book

Kate Brook

• Herausgeber: Corvus
• Kategorie: Wissenschaft und neue Technologien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 426

Beschreibung

Flatmates? Friends? Or something else entirely? Hazel and Alfie have just moved in together as flatmates. They've also just slept together, which was either a catastrophic mistake, or the best decision of their lives. Before they can decide, Hazel's sister Emily and her wife Daria arrive for a visit, setting in motion a chain of events that will turn everything upside down. What follows will bind the four of them together, bringing joy and heartache, hope and anxiety, and reshaping their relationships in ways that none of them quite predicted. Warm, witty, and devastatingly relatable, Not Exactly What I Had in Mind is a painfully true-to-life story about family, friends, and everything in between.

Leseprobe

Kate Brook has a PhD in French Literature and Visual Art from King’s College London, and a Masters in European Literature and Culture from the University of Cambridge. Her short-form writing has been published in The Fiction Pool and The Real Story. She lives in London, and Not Exactly What I Had in Mind is her first novel.

Published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Corvus,an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Kate Brook, 2022

The moral right of Kate Brook to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 500 7

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 83895 501 4

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 502 1

Printed in Great Britain

Corvus

An imprint of Atlantic Books LtdOrmond House

26–27 Boswell Street

LondonWC1N 3JZ

www.corvus-books.co.uk

For my friends

Part I

1

HAZEL DIDN’T know much about Alfie except that he was tall and couldn’t grow a full beard, and that he wore socks and sandals around the flat but somehow that was okay; also that he was a primary school teacher, and was half Jamaican but didn’t seem to ever eat Jamaican food, instead surviving on pasta and pesto and that bagged salad from Sainsbury’s with the grated beetroot mixed in. She knew that he had lived in two London flats before this one, that he liked Black Mirror and Louis Theroux, that his most cherished pipe dream was to hike across Europe from Sweden to Sicily, and that his top three fears were fascism, climate change and terminal disease. She also knew he had an electric toothbrush, and a one-person cafetière that he never washed up except when he was about to make coffee in it; and she knew he’d had sex last week, because the woman had been so noisy that the whole procedure had been audible from her own room across the hall. Now she herself was kneeling naked on Alfie’s mattress, forehead on forearm, various parts of her pressed against the textured wallpaper. He was thrusting from the back and fingering from the front, his spare hand on her breast. His coordination was virtuosic. The bed was squeaking and she was moaning as loudly as that other woman, probably louder, and then louder still until the moans became ecstatic sobs. In the next room Tony was playing World of Warcraft, raising the volume in tandem with her, so that by the time she came the soundtrack was blasting self-righteously through the wall.

Afterwards they lay on their backs and stared at the swirling Artex above. Hazel wondered how ill-advised it had been on a scale of one to ten, where one meant they would fall in love and ten meant such extreme discomfort in each other’s company that one of them would have to move house. Almost certainly over five; possibly an eight, maybe even higher. But it had also been inspired. The afterglow was warm and potent. Even if it was a ten it might still have been worth it.

‘Can we make a pact that this won’t be awkward?’ said Alfie. What was meant by this was that awkwardness was a likely outcome, far more so than love, and Hazel, for all that she knew this was true, felt a stab of something like disappointment.

‘I think that’s a very good idea,’ she replied. She turned onto her side to face him, and they shook hands.

‘It’s probably time for bed,’ she said after that, and Alfie reached for his phone and said, ‘It’s one thirty.’ Hazel swore, pushed back the covers and sat up.

‘You can sleep here, you know,’ said Alfie. ‘I mean, if you want to.’

‘I feel like that’d make it harder for us to stick to the pact? Might make it sort of … complicated?’

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Alfie with a slow nod. ‘You could be right. Whatever you think.’

She got up to gather her clothes from the floor. ‘Night, then.’

‘Are you going out there in the buff?’

‘I think I can make a dash for it.’ She grinned and reached for the door handle, then hesitated and turned to look at him. She was tempted to lean over and kiss him on the cheek, but on leaving the bed she had crossed over into separate territory, and it did not now seem right to go back. ‘Thanks, by the way,’ she said instead. ‘That was awesome. A-plus-plus.’

‘Agreed,’ he said, smiling.

She opened the door a fraction and looked out. The hall was empty and Tony was still shut up in his bedroom. ‘Got to run,’ she said, and in two paces she was in her own room with the door shut behind her.

Alfie was a bad idea, she thought in the morning as she got dressed for work. It was far too early to be up on a Saturday, especially a rainy Saturday. Every day had been rainy lately. The July heatwave had been washed decisively away and the cracked earthenware parks now stood lush and swampy and empty. If it carried on there might be floods. It felt wrong. It was pre-apocalyptic, a micro-sample of the psychotic weather that was coming for them, only no one liked to say so.

Alfie was a bad idea, she thought as she brushed her teeth and blinked down onto a mascara wand. He was a slut, quite possibly very unscrupulous. He was affable in a way that she had taken to be natural but now suspected of being calculated. She would not be surprised if all his behavioural decisions were made with the end goal of sex in mind. He was evidently a man who followed his cock.

Because Alfie was such a bad idea, she did not respond when he texted her saying: Great time last night. Still thinking about it. X

It sounded like he might want to repeat the experience, which was flattering, but she would not allow herself to be drawn in. The stakes were too high. She couldn’t move house; she couldn’t afford it. The landlord had only put her rent up once in the three years she had been there, which meant everywhere else would be more expensive by now, and anyway, she didn’t have enough in her bank account to cover the costs of moving. If she was going to have to listen to him driving women wild every weekend it was best she try to forget that she had once been one of those women herself.

To avoid the temptation of messaging him back, she left her phone in her bag, hanging by the staff toilet at the café, and for several hours made a concerted effort not to think about it. On her lunch break she didn’t go near it, instead picking up a crime novel from the bookshelf by the sofa, which hooked her for the entire hour. You were supposed to leave a book if you wanted to take one, but since they only paid her minimum wage she reasoned that a secondhand paperback was the least she deserved. When she put it in her bag her hand hovered over her phone, but with a monumental effort of willpower she resisted, and went back out to the coffee machine.

It wasn’t until three o’clock that she allowed herself to break the embargo. As her hand closed around the phone she felt a rush of excitement and relief. Then she saw that she had twenty-four WhatsApp messages, five missed calls and two voicemails. Every single one of them was from her older sister, words to the effect of ‘where are you?’ and ‘have we got the date wrong?’ and ‘are you okay?’

She remembered now: Emily and Daria were supposed to be visiting this weekend. She’d forgotten about it because she’d written it down on a scrap of paper instead of in her calendar, and then when someone asked to swap a shift with her she had looked at the calendar and seen nothing there. She called her sister back.

‘Oh my God,’ she began as soon as there was an answer. ‘I’m really sorry, I’m so useless, were you waiting in the rain? What are you up to? Did you find a café or something?’

There were voices in the background.

‘It’s fine!’ said Emily, laughing at something. ‘Your flatmate let us in.’

‘Oh? Which one?’

‘Er,’ said Emily, pausing, and then quieter, as if she’d moved the phone away from her mouth: ‘I’m so sorry, remind me what your name is?’

‘Alfie,’ came Alfie’s voice.

‘Alfie!’ said Emily, full volume again. ‘We’re just having a beer. When are you getting back?’

2

ALFIE HAD RETURNED home that afternoon to find two women standing at the entrance to his building. He held the door open for them, assuming they were waiting to be buzzed up, and they walked behind him up the stairs to the second floor, then followed him along the corridor that led to number twelve.

‘Oh!’ one of them had said when he put his key in the door. ‘Do you live in this flat?’

‘Y-yes?’ said Alfie, suddenly wondering whether he did or not.

‘Then you know Hazel?’

Alfie felt his face warm up. ‘I know Hazel, yeah. Are you …?’

‘Her sister,’ said the woman, holding out her hand, which he shook. ‘Emily.’ Her hair was the same dark blondish colour as Hazel’s, only it was cut just above her shoulders and she had a fringe. ‘This is my wife Daria,’ she said.

‘Nice to meet you both,’ he replied. ‘I’m Alfie. Come in.’

‘So where is she, do you know?’ said Emily as they piled in through the door.

‘At work, I think. Were you expecting her to be here?’

Emily sighed and exchanged glances with Daria, who laughed and said, ‘Oh my God.’

‘She knew we were coming!’ cried Emily. ‘We discussed it! She said she was free! I’m so sorry, turning up on your doorstep like this. We were supposed to be staying here for a couple of days. Hazel, honestly.’

‘She never mentioned it,’ said Alfie, in surprise. He considered himself fairly easygoing, as a rule, but he wouldn’t have minded a little advance notice. ‘I guess she forgot.’

‘Is it inconvenient?’ said Daria, looking worried. ‘We could probably find a Travelodge or something?’

‘Oh, no!’ cried Alfie. ‘Don’t be silly.’ He smiled broadly, for good measure. He couldn’t honestly say it was convenient, when he’d had hopes of being the sole or at least the main object of Hazel’s attention that evening, but they seemed nice enough, and he didn’t want them to feel unwelcome. ‘It shouldn’t be too long before she gets back,’ he said. ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Coffee? Or a beer?’

They requested beer, and sat sipping it at the kitchen table while he gathered up all the dirty dishes and stacked them next to the sink. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered, leaning across them to wipe the crumbs off the table, and they sat back a little to give him more space. They talked all the while, unfazed, telling him about Australia, where they’d been living for two years while Daria did a post-doc at the University of Melbourne. They’d been back a fortnight. Daria had been offered a permanent job at the University of East Anglia, Emily told him proudly, putting a hand on Daria’s shoulder.

Daria smiled, looking slightly embarrassed. ‘Which means we need to find a place to live in Norwich,’ she said hurriedly, ‘which is why we’re here. We’ve got some house viewings on Monday. You’re only a couple of stops from Liverpool Street so you’re saving us a good two hours’ travelling time.’ They were staying with Emily’s parents in rural Kent, they explained, which had no direct transport links to any of the places they needed to go, and no decent coffee either, and certainly no decent vegan food.

At the first break in the conversation Alfie excused himself and hurried to the bathroom, ostensibly to use it, but really to make it halfway presentable before either of them went in there. A deep scowl settled on his face as he removed Hazel’s hair from the shower and Tony’s shaving scum from the sink. He couldn’t remember whose turn it was to clean that week, but it certainly wasn’t his. When it looked less like an undergraduate hovel he returned to the kitchen and opened a beer. Emily and Daria launched into an interrogation, asking him how long he’d been in London (eight years) and how long he’d been in the flat (four months). What had possessed him to move into a shithole like this, Emily asked (‘Em!’ cried Daria), and he wondered if he should have bothered cleaning the bathroom after all. He told them he wasn’t long out of a relationship and this was just an interim measure.

‘Oh man, sorry,’ said Daria, and he said it was fine, which it was, sort of, only he wasn’t sure they believed him. They were quiet for a while, and then Emily pointed at an empty Yazoo bottle in the recycling bin and said, ‘You can tell Hazel lives here.’

At the mention of Hazel, whose fondness for chocolate milk was juvenile and very charming, Alfie’s cheeks warmed again. What was it like living with her, Emily wanted to know, and he replied that it was good, fine, great. He would have stopped there but they were looking at him expectantly, so he said he wouldn’t object to her taking the cleaning rota a little more seriously, and they laughed, satisfied.

‘So are you an academic too?’ he asked Emily, keen to change the subject.

‘Oh God, no. I’m a software engineer.’

Alfie said that was cool; he wished he was a bit more techy. The world was your oyster when you were techy. Emily asked what he did, and he told them about primary teaching and the school where he worked.

‘I’ve got a uni friend who’s just left teaching,’ said Emily. ‘She was written off for three months. Stress. Then she just said fuck it.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said Alfie. ‘We’ve had one or two at our school. I’ve thought about quitting so many times. I just can’t really see myself being any good at anything else.’

From there began a discussion about education policy, during which Alfie talked in great depth about SATs and phonics and academisation, and Emily and Daria groaned in all the right places, and frowned, and asked him lots of very pertinent questions that required time-consuming answers. Then they talked about governments, British and Australian and American, and then about where they were the night Donald Trump got elected. Alfie had had a beautiful dream about Hillary winning, he recounted, then woken up at four a.m. with a jolt of nervous dread.

They were on to Brexit when Hazel rang. After that they talked about climate change and the many ways in which they were all fucked, and they must have kept this up for quite a while because suddenly the door banged and Hazel was there, looking at them all with bemusement.

‘Fancy seeing you here,’ said Emily.

‘I’m really sorry,’ Hazel replied, pulling out a chair. She had a stud in her nose and her hair was done in a complicated sort of plait. A few strands were coming loose about her face. She was smiling apologetically, which brought out her dimples. Or maybe it was just the one dimple, Alfie couldn’t quite remember. She was sitting side-on, so that he couldn’t see the other cheek.

‘You should have messaged me yesterday,’ Hazel continued.

‘Don’t victim blame!’ said Emily. ‘You’re just a flake!’ She reached over and squeezed Hazel’s face until her lips were folded up and bulging. ‘What are you?’

‘A flake,’ said Hazel through her squashed-up mouth.

Emily released Hazel’s face and ruffled her hair instead, until she was crowned by a nest of tangles and electricity. The complicated plait was ruined.

‘Fucking hell!’ Hazel cried. ‘Are you satisfied?’ She flopped back in her chair and started undoing the plait, combing through her hair with her fingers.

‘Give the woman a beer,’ said Daria, and Alfie did so. Hazel sighed and muttered her thanks.

‘I don’t know about the rest of you,’ Daria went on, ‘but I’m getting hungry.’

‘Shall we get a takeaway?’ said Alfie. ‘I could eat a dirty pizza.’

‘Oh,’ said Hazel, shaking out her hair and tying it back in a messy knot, ‘have you not been made aware? These guys are vegans.’ She rolled her eyes.

‘Shit! I forgot. I’m so sorry.’

Emily and Daria told him not to be silly. ‘You don’t have to worry about offending us,’ said Emily. She turned and looked pointedly at her sister. ‘But Hazel does, because she’s a dick.’

Hazel laughed, and choked on her beer. Daria reached over and thumped her on the back, explaining as she did so that Hazel had once done a hatchet job on veganism in an article for her university paper, and Emily had never forgiven her.

‘I didn’t know she was vegan when I wrote it,’ said Hazel, when she’d recovered.

‘She always says that!’ cried Emily. ‘As if that makes it better!’

‘What’s your problem with vegans?’ said Alfie, like he didn’t have three cans of foie gras in the cupboard, left over from the trip to Paris he and Rachel had made in a last-ditch attempt to save their relationship.

‘I don’t have a problem now,’ said Hazel. She launched into a story about a vegan potluck she’d attended once with a friend who was dabbling, where everyone had been very unfriendly and a woman (‘a real vegan, like profoundly vegan, you know?’) had insulted her chickpea salad.

‘So you wrote an article as revenge?’ said Alfie, thinking how creative it was to respond in such a way.

‘A terrible article,’ she replied.

‘Worse than terrible,’ said Emily. ‘It was hate speech.’

‘It was ten years ago!’ Hazel protested. ‘It was a different time!’ Emily simply shook her head.

‘Can I read it?’ said Alfie.

‘Absolutely not,’ said Hazel. Their eyes met, and something squeezed beneath his ribcage.

Then Daria pointed out that they still hadn’t decided what kind of takeaway they were having, and Hazel went to fetch her laptop so they could look at Deliveroo. Alfie sat back and sipped his beer and thought, Now this is a family.

3

EMILY AND DARIA found a little house in Norwich, fifteen minutes from the city centre, with a back garden and period features and a park opposite. The estate agent gave them a form to sign and told them they would receive the final documents once the landlords had given their approval. At the station they bought a bottle of prosecco in the M&S while they waited for their train.

On the way back to London they listed all the virtues and drawbacks of their new house, and then listed them all again using slightly different words. Then they settled into their usual argument about Emily’s future commute, which was going to be very long because she was applying for jobs in Cambridge, where all the tech companies were. She thought two hours on a train each way was doable; Daria disagreed, and had made much of her willingness to live somewhere between the two cities.

‘I’m just saying, it’s not too late,’ she said now.

But it was clear to Emily that Daria, a gay Middle Eastern vegan, would be ill suited to life in a leave-voting town in the arse-end of nowhere. ‘You need your scenes, babe,’ she said. ‘You need a music scene and a gay scene and a vegan scene, just as much as I do.’

‘I just can’t stop thinking about you being all pregnant and exhausted,’ said Daria, and Emily smiled.

‘I know,’ she said. She stroked her stomach, which was flat. ‘You might be right. Let’s just give it a year, okay? Then we’ll see where we are.’

‘I would do it, you know. I’d move to the arse-end of nowhere, if it made your life easier.’

‘I know you would,’ said Emily, putting her head on Daria’s shoulder and taking her hand. ‘Because you’re sweet and selfless and I love you.’ Daria put her arm around Emily, and they sat like this for a while. Then Emily said, ‘Alfie’s nice, isn’t he?’

‘Oh my God, so nice!’ said Daria, and Emily could hear that she was smiling.

‘Can we steal him away? Take him to Norwich with us?’

Daria laughed. ‘I think Hazel would have something to say about that. Do you think there’s something going on there?’

‘I wish,’ said Emily. ‘But I won’t get my hopes up. Hazel has terrible taste in men.’

When they broke the news about the house Hazel whooped so loudly that Alfie put his head out of his bedroom door in curiosity.

‘What’s going on?’ he said.

‘We found a house!’ said Emily. ‘Come and have some prosecco!’

When the cork had popped Hazel asked how much the rent was, and when they told her she snorted and said, ‘Are you serious? That’s literally only a hundred quid more than I pay for that cupboard.’ She gestured in the direction of her room, which was big enough for a single bed and not very much else. She muttered that London took the piss, she would have to start thinking about moving.

‘Don’t do that!’ cried Emily. ‘Where will we stay when we visit?’

Hazel looked at her witheringly and opened the fridge to inspect the contents. She took out a packet of tofu and an array of vegetables. ‘I’m doing a stir-fry,’ she said to Alfie. ‘Do you want some?’

Alfie did want some, partly because he’d noticed that his own section of the fridge was empty except for a shrivelled yellow pepper and a jar of tartare sauce, and partly because he’d ended up enjoying their company so much on Saturday night that he had entirely forgotten he was supposed to be going to someone’s house party instead.

‘Well. Maybe. I don’t know,’ he said, because he also didn’t want to intrude, or seem too keen. ‘Will there be enough?’

Hazel said there would be plenty, and Alfie vacillated until she said, ‘For God’s sake, I’m going to make you some anyway, okay?’ He thanked her, and donated his pepper.

Over dinner Emily asked Hazel about work and Hazel wrinkled her nose. She’d had a few freelance illustration gigs this year and her webcomic had a growing following, but none of it was enough for her to quit working in the café. She was having trouble imagining that it ever would be. But then, she said, she might not quit even if she could. She complained about it, but she did like it. It was a world away from working in an office, for which she would forever be grateful. It was tiring, but nothing like the mental drudgery of staring at spreadsheets all day. The regulars liked her, and she them, and two of her colleagues were genuine kindred spirits. It was just that the pay was so bad.

‘Yes, but if you’re happy,’ said Emily, through a mouthful of stir-fry.

‘Yeah,’ said Hazel uncertainly. ‘I’m happier, definitely. What about you? Have you got a job yet?’

‘No,’ said Emily. ‘But I’ve got my feelers out.’

‘You can get in trouble for that, you know,’ said Hazel, and Daria tittered. Emily sighed and looked at Alfie.

‘So juvenile,’ he said, shaking his head, as if saddened.

After dinner Daria stretched out her arms and said, ‘So are any of you losers going to take me on at Scrabble?’

They’d finished the prosecco but there was still beer in the fridge, so they took it into the living room with them and settled themselves on the floor around the coffee table. Hazel extracted the Scrabble set from a heap of clutter on the bookshelf, and the letters were mixed and distributed. A concentrated silence descended on the room, broken every so often by oohs and dammits, sighs of satisfaction and tuts of regret, and on one occasion by the entrance of Tony, who shuffled into the room to get his phone and then out again without saying anything, leaving behind him a lingering scent of unwashed polyester.

For most of the game, Daria and Hazel were neck and neck, overtaking each other with every turn. But then Alfie put down EXPECTING, enclosing the P of Daria’s STEEP and the N of Emily’s LAWN. The X was on a double letter score, the T on a triple word score, and he’d used all his letters at once, which gave him a fifty-point bonus.

‘Ugh,’ said Daria. ‘Fuck it.’

‘You jammy bastard,’ said Hazel, as Alfie added up his score.

‘A hundred and thirty-seven!’ he crowed.

Emily said nothing. Her heart was thumping drunkenly in her chest. Of all the words! Obviously she didn’t believe in signs from the universe, but say such things existed. They didn’t, but say they did. If you gave your imagination a free rein, there could be no doubt that this was a pretty fucking good one.

4

HAZEL AND ALFIE had not been alone together since It happened, because she had been at work all weekend, and on Monday he had been off somewhere or other that couldn’t have been work, because it was the school holidays. There had therefore been no opportunity to acknowledge It, much less to discuss It, or even skirt awkwardly around It. Hazel was glad of this, in a way. Better a clean break, she thought. Never mind that her belly swooped downwards when the front door banged; never mind that her cheeks burned when he smiled in her direction. Feelings like these tended to lead her into situations from which she would sooner or later want to extricate herself, and as such were best ignored. To assist her in ignoring them she arranged to go on a date, and made sure Alfie knew about it.

From the outset, it did not go to plan. She was late, and then there were delays on the tube, which made her later. By the time she arrived her date was two pints in.

‘Excuse me? Brandon?’ she said, and he looked up from his phone.

‘Yes! Hazel, hi!’ he said, standing to kiss her on the cheek.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said gravely. ‘The fucking Central Line.’

‘Oh God, I know,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It’s hell, and I mean that literally. Let me get you a drink. What d’you fancy?’

She asked for a glass of white wine, and settled herself at the table while he went to the bar. She was too warm, but she kept her jacket on to hide her sweat patches.

Brandon came back with her wine, and an additional pint for himself. The wine was vinegary, and Brandon, though not yet drunk, was loud. There was something oddly familiar about him, she thought as they talked. Nothing prominent enough to have shown up on his profile picture, but something in the manner, and the voice. Had they met before? She learned that he was an engineer for a property developer and liked cars, Swiss watches and playing squash. He didn’t tell her he liked football, but he gave himself away by letting his eyes wander, at regular intervals, to the QPR–Chelsea game on the giant TV behind her. They might have friends in common, she supposed, but it was starting to seem unlikely.

She bought a second round of drinks, wondering if they would have enough conversation to see them through it. Eventually, stuck for a question, she said, ‘I’m sorry, but I really feel like I’ve met you before.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Is it just me?’

He narrowed his eyes and looked at her, his head slightly tilted. ‘Maybe there is something familiar about you, now you mention it,’ he said, obviously unconvinced. ‘Were you at Exeter?’

‘No.’

‘King Ed’s?’

She shook her head.

‘D’you work round here?’

‘Nope.’ At a loss, they took contemplative sips from their glasses. Then Hazel remembered.

‘Oh my God!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you have a sister called Hannah?’

‘Y-yes …?’

‘Hannah Fox?’

‘That’s her. Do you know her, then?’

Hazel smiled. She’d always had a soft spot for Hannah Fox. ‘Do you remember Emily Phillips?’ she said. ‘Hannah’s girlfriend at UCL – ten, twelve years ago now?’

His eyes widened. ‘Emily Phillips? Now that takes me back!’ He nodded excitedly, not even trying to temper his enthusiasm. ‘How d’you know her?’

‘She’s my sister,’ said Hazel.

Brandon almost choked on his pint. ‘Your sister? What, actually?’

‘Yep.’

‘So we’ve met before?’

‘Do you remember when Emily and Hannah graduated, and Emily got absolutely paralytic and had to be carried home?’

‘Oh yeah! God, that was mental! She was a mess. I don’t remember a sister, though.’

Hazel sighed internally. ‘Well, I was there,’ she said. ‘In fact, you wouldn’t have made it home if it wasn’t for me. I persuaded the taxi driver to take us. He didn’t want to. He made me swear on his Bible that Emily wouldn’t throw up.’

Brandon laughed uproariously. ‘No shit!’ he said. ‘Classic! Yeah, I’m starting to remember you now. To tell you the truth, Hazel, my memory of that night’s a bit hazy. I was pretty far gone myself.’ He chuckled and shook his head, and took another swig from his glass. His laughter died out slowly. Then he looked up, still smiling.

‘Did you … I thought you … Did you say girlfriend?’

‘What? Oh. Yeah.’

‘Your sister was my sister’s girlfriend? Girlfriend as in girlfriend?’

‘Er, yes?’

‘What?’ he cried. ‘Fuck! No! They were together?’

‘Oh, wow. You missed that memo, then.’

Brandon had his hand on his forehead. ‘Oh my God! I never even suspected! Hannah wasn’t out then. They never … I thought … I assumed—’

‘They weren’t just close friends, Brandon,’ said Hazel. She was starting to feel very tired.

‘Are you sure?’ said Brandon wildly. ‘Yeah, you’re sure. Fuck!’

‘Why is this such a big deal? Did you think Emily fancied you?’

Brandon laughed so loudly and for so long at this suggestion that Hazel knew she was right. ‘Of course I didn’t,’ he said.

Hazel drained her glass and reached into her bag for her phone. Discreetly she typed ‘SOS’ into a WhatsApp message and sent it to her friend Nish. Thirty seconds later her phone rang.

‘Hi, babe,’ said Nish when she picked up. ‘I think you should come over. I’ve fallen down the stairs. I might have broken my arm, actually, so I’ll be needing someone to feed me my noodle soup before it gets cold. You’d better come quick, I’ll be dead soon.’

It took discipline not to laugh. She got up and walked away from the table, as if called away by something serious and private, then returned to Brandon with her features arranged into an expression of grave concern.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, ‘but I’m going to have to go. A friend of mine just got some really shitty news.’

Brandon raised his eyebrows very slightly.

‘Thanks for a lovely evening,’ she said, pulling on her coat.

‘You too,’ said Brandon. He knew, she could tell, but he didn’t dare say so. She stooped to kiss him on the cheek, and then started towards the door.

‘Hey,’ came Brandon’s voice a second later, and she turned back. He grinned sheepishly, as if he’d decided to be spontaneous and wasn’t sure it was a good idea. ‘This isn’t very gallant of me,’ he said. ‘Maybe it’s not … I mean … Ah, what the hell. Can I just ask what your sister’s up to these days?’

Hazel pursed her lips. ‘She’s a software engineer.’

‘That’s cool. Is she, er …?’

‘She’s married.’

‘Oh really? Okay. Great. Good for her. So she’s not … you know.’

‘She’s married to a woman.’

‘Oh, right. Cool. Nice.’ He nodded interminably. ‘Well, thanks again, Hazel. Tell Emily I said hi.’

Hazel went straight to the flat in Bow in which Nish lived with her other friend Roisin. Both of them worked with Hazel in the café and, like her, aspired to loftier things. Hazel had her illustration; Nish wrote music on his computer; Roisin had a Masters in Fine Art and a bedroom filled with chicken wire and plaster of Paris.

When she arrived she collapsed onto Roisin’s bed and recounted the whole story. ‘What the fuck was that?’ she exclaimed in conclusion. ‘Why did I match with him?’

‘It was just algorithms,’ Nish soothed. ‘Your sister’s probably still friends with his sister on Facebook.’

‘Is that why? That’s creepy! Fuck this!’

‘Look, it’s always going to be a bit hit-and-miss, Hazel. We all have our fair share of duffers. You mustn’t let it put you off. You’ve got to get back on the horse.’

‘And you can always put this in a cartoon,’ added Roisin from the doorway. She disappeared, returning five minutes later with three cups of tea.

‘Are you working tomorrow?’ said Nish to Hazel, blowing into his mug.

‘Yeah.’

‘Us too. Stay over, we’ll all go together. You can sleep in my bed.’

‘I don’t want to sleep in your gross bed,’ said Hazel.

Roisin agreed that this would be unimaginably disgusting. Hazel could have the inflatable mattress instead. This belonged to Roisin but could not be set up in her room because of all the chicken wire, so they squeezed it into the narrow space on Nish’s floor. A pillow, a sleeping bag and an old T-shirt were provided. Roisin assured Hazel that the sleeping bag, while not freshly laundered, had been recently aired, and that no one had been having sex in or on it, which was more than could be said for Nish’s bed.

A good half-hour was then given over to discussing Nish’s latest sexual escapades, most of which were facilitated by Grindr, and required a level of spontaneity and audaciousness that Hazel could not in her wildest dreams have sustained.

‘What about you guys?’ said Nish when he’d run out of stories. ‘I can’t be the only person having sex.’

‘Nothing to report,’ said Roisin, lounging across the airbed. ‘I’m having some great wanks, though.’

Hazel didn’t say anything, which immediately alerted their suspicions. She let them tease her for a while, and then she said, ‘So you know Alfie?’ She recounted their conversations at the kitchen table about music and documentaries and webcomics. Then there had been the evening with the gin and the back-to-back episodes of Black Mirror, following which they had speculated tipsily about the cyber-dystopia towards which humanity was sleepwalking. Then they’d had sex. Alfie was very good at sex. Suspiciously good. Practised.

‘You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing,’ said Nish.

Hazel explained about the cries of pleasure she had heard emanating from Alfie’s room the weekend before, but he was unmoved.

‘What’s your point?’ he said.

‘I just feel like he’s probably the kind of guy who sleeps with someone new every week. Not that there’s anything wrong with that,’ she added hurriedly, ‘but I have to live with him. I should probably just … not get involved.’

‘Right,’ said Roisin. ‘Recipe for disaster.’

‘Have you actually heard him having sex every week?’demanded Nish.

‘Well, two weeks ago. And then a week later, with me.’

‘And he’s lived with you how long?’

‘I mean, four months, but …’

Nish was looking at her with his eyebrows raised. ‘So he’s had sex twice in the last four months.’

‘In our flat, yeah. But who knows what he’s been getting up to when he’s not at home?’

‘Hazel,’ said Nish, ‘you’re inventing problems where no problems exist.’

Roisin asked to see a picture, so Hazel brought up Alfie’s Instagram on her phone and they leaned in to peer at it.

‘Nice,’ said Roisin.

‘Sweet lord,’ said Nish. ‘Hazel, in what world are you not into this guy?’

‘I didn’t say I wasn’t, I just—’

‘So you are?’

‘A bit, maybe, but—’

‘And he’s into you.’

‘You don’t know that. He was into some other girl two weeks ago.’

‘Pfff.’

‘He texted you saying he couldn’t stop thinking about you,’ put in Roisin, going over to the other side.

‘About it. About the sex.’

‘Same difference.’

‘No it isn’t!’

‘Hazel, just be grateful to the universe when it gives you good stuff,’ said Nish. ‘Why are you going on dates with city-boy wankers when you’ve got that at home?’

‘Because! I need to move on! Okay?’

‘This is too much,’ said Nish. He put down his tea and turned towards her, taking both her hands. ‘Repeat after me. When I get home tomorrow.’

Hazel eyed him suspiciously, but obeyed. ‘When I get home tomorrow.’

‘I am going.’

‘I am going.’

‘To have sex with Alfie for ever and ever amen.’

Hazel clipped him round the head and he yelped. ‘You want me to get screwed over!’

‘Yeah, and under! And backwards! And upside down!’ he cried, curling up in a ball to protect himself from a volley of tiny blows. Roisin rolled onto her back, laughing.

‘When I come to you crying,’ said Hazel, ‘because my heart’s broken and it’s too awkward for me to live in my own home—’

‘I will wipe your tears away and I will kick out that fucker Julian so you can move in with us,’ said Nish.

‘Shh,’ said Roisin. ‘He’ll hear you.’

‘I swear to you I will,’ whispered Nish. ‘He picks his nose and flicks it.’

Hazel tensed her mouth so as not to grin. ‘This is all going to end badly,’ she said. ‘I’ll regret I ever listened to you.’

‘Deal with that when it happens, Hazel!’ he cried. ‘Carpe fucking diem!’

5

ALFIE HAD SPENT the evening in an intimidating Swedish bar, drinking beer and eating smoked fish on dark bread with his friend Clara. Technically Clara was his ex-girlfriend, but this fact barely registered with him any more because the relationship had been so fleeting and inconsequential. He couldn’t remember what she looked like naked, and assumed the reverse was also true. Even so, he had suggested the meeting shortly after learning that Hazel was going on a date, so that if she asked about his own plans he could say, ‘Oh, I’m meeting up with a friend. My ex, actually,’ and follow this with a casual grimace, the precise meaning of which would be unclear to her. So far, however, she hadn’t asked him anything at all.

Alfie and Clara had been overdue their annual catchup, so Clara did not suspect an ulterior motive. As usual she had scouted out a new and overpriced location for the purpose; as usual a large portion of the evening was devoted to complaining about work. Clara raged about her manager, who took her for granted, and Alfie raged about a clique of female teachers and classroom assistants who had treated him as a pariah ever since the end of his relationship with Rachel. He and Rachel had been colleagues at the same school for several years, but Rachel, apparently judging this to be untenable postbreak-up, had left at the end of last term. The prevailing belief among her cheerleaders was that she had martyred herself, giving up a job she loved so that harmony might be restored in the staffroom, but the irony of this was that any disharmony had been entirely of her own making. Alfie had never been anything but civil, had taken great pains to keep the fall-out contained, and yet now he was perceived to have driven her away, and resented for not having left himself. He might very well give them what they wanted, he said. He would start checking the job ads in September. Fuck them.

He hadn’t really thought about any of this since the beginning of the holidays, and was a little taken aback by the strength of his own anger. Clara was pleasingly outraged, but as the conversation moved on she grew quieter, until her voice was small and sad.

‘Clar?’ said Alfie. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘So much breaking up this year,’ she said wearily. ‘I’ve joined the club, actually.’

‘Oh. Wait, what? You mean …?’

Yes, she replied, she was single as of two weeks ago, and miserable about it. She had broken up with a man named Hill (real name), whom Alfie had never met, but whose SoundCloud profile he had listened to with horrified fascination, every last wretched song. It had so appalled him that for a brief moment he questioned the viability of his friendship with Clara, who thought Hill was ‘creative’ and ‘not like other guys (no offence, Alfie)’.

Clara missed Hill, but also didn’t miss him, and was also angry with herself for sticking around so long, trying to make it work, when she’d only really been wasting time. Now here she was, back at square one, and turning thirty next birthday.

‘Turning thirty’s no big deal,’ said Alfie, who was the same age and thoroughly okay with it. His hairline was not yet receding, not even a little bit.

Clara raised one eyebrow and reminded him sharply that turning thirty was one thing when you were a man and quite another when you were woman, specifically a newly single woman hoping to have kids in the next five years.

‘I didn’t know you wanted kids,’ he said guiltily.

She sighed and said yes, she wanted lots. Three at least. She couldn’t help it, she was old-fashioned. She sighed again, more heavily.

Alfie wanted to reassure her that there was still plenty of time, that she would find someone, but given his own romantic history, he suspected it might come out sounding like a hollow platitude.

Instead he said: ‘I think I’d like to have kids. I’d obviously be an awesome dad.’

Clara laughed. ‘Yeah, you probably would. Fortunately for you, there’s no deadline.’

‘I don’t know. Seventy’s a bit old, I think.’

She gave him a gentle shove and said she was going to get another drink. While she was gone Alfie ruminated on what he had just said. Generally speaking parenthood was not something to which he gave much thought, but he hadn’t entirely been joking about being an awesome dad. He spent his working week suffering the consequences of other people’s parenting choices, which he felt ought to give him a head start.

Clara came back and put a pint of pale ale down on the table in front of him. ‘So,’ she said brightly, ‘who are you going to be making all these babies with?’

‘No idea,’ he replied, not meeting her eye.

‘What, at all? No one you’re flirting with? No one at school catching your eye?’ He gave her a look. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But seriously, nothing? You disappoint me.’

‘Well …’

‘That’s more like it!’

‘Yeah, don’t get excited. It’s a big old mess. I slept with someone.’ Clara rubbed her hands together with glee, and Alfie smiled a little, at the memory. ‘It was … Well, it was great,’ he said. ‘But she’s my flatmate.’

‘Oh!’ said Clara. ‘Okay. Complicated. Is it making things awkward?’

‘I wouldn’t say that exactly,’ said Alfie. He told her about the appearance of Emily and Daria, and how little time there had been for awkwardness.

‘Do you think anything will come of it?’ asked Clara, and Alfie shrugged. ‘Do you want it to?’

‘Wouldn’t mind.’

‘Do you like her, then?’ she said, and when Alfie did not immediately answer: ‘You do! You like her! Oh my God, Alfie!’ She made her voice go high and put on an American accent. ‘Do you love her?’

‘Fuck off.’

‘Flatmates can make good couples, you know. Hey!’ She hit the table with her palm. ‘I went to a wedding last month. How do you think they met? Flatshare!’

Alfie shook his head. ‘She’s not interested, Clara. It was just a one-night thing.’

‘Oh,’ said Clara, deflated. ‘So she used you for sex.’

‘Looks like it. The first moment we had just the two of us, she told me she was going on a date this week with some guy.’

‘She might be trying to make you jealous?’ said Clara hopefully, but Alfie shook his head.

‘I don’t think she’d go in for that kind of strategy.’

‘Oh. Fuck. Well, that’s a bummer. I’m sorry.’ Clara raised her glass. ‘Here’s to being a pair of losers,’ she said, with unmistakable relish, and Alfie clinked his glass against hers.

On the bus home Alfie’s eye started twitching, as it had been doing, sporadically, for several weeks. It was irritating, and made him uneasy. He’d sworn to himself he wouldn’t google it, but he felt a strange compulsion to do so all of a sudden. He took out his phone and typed in ‘twitching eye’. Lack of sleep, the articles all suggested. Or stress, although this was unlikely in the school holidays. Otherwise too much caffeine – but he’d tried giving up coffee and it had made no difference. Then he got to the end of one article and read that in rare cases a twitching eye could be a symptom of degenerative neurological disease.

In a horrified sort of trance, he followed the link to the article on one such disease and read the list of symptoms. It seemed he had several of them. He held his hand in front of his face and saw that it was shaking. He moved his fingers into different positions, trying to keep them still, but he found that they wouldn’t keep still. Then he pushed his hair forward so that if he looked up he could see it in front of his eyes. The strands jumped and pulsated, and he wondered if this was an early signal of ‘uncontrollable movement of the head’, which, he now knew, was always a serious matter that merited immediate medical attention.

He stumbled into the flat in a daze. He was going to die – soon, and horribly. He thought of making an appointment with his GP, but a wave of nausea hit him when he imagined the sleepless nights leading up to it, then the heavy trudge to the surgery, then the anxious wait to go in. And the grave look, if it was something serious, the gentle tones, the referral for further tests.

He sat down at the kitchen table, at a loss. He could hear the sound of video games emanating from beneath Tony’s bedroom door, and for a moment he considered knocking and asking him if he fancied a beer. But that would be an extreme response to any situation. What he really wanted was to talk to Hazel – not about what had happened between them, but about anything and everything else, as they’d done once or twice, long into the night. A cup of tea with her would have distracted him from the possibility of his imminent diagnosis and death. He might tell her about his symptoms and find they seemed entirely inconsequential, once spoken aloud. He might tell her that there were bad genes in his family, that his mother and grandmother had both died of breast cancer before their time, and that he probably shouldn’t have kids himself if he was only going to die and leave them. She would laugh at him, most likely, and say something reassuring (if untrue)like, ‘You’re literally the healthiest person I know’ or ‘I’ve had a twitch in my eye since last year’. Or actually, no – she wouldn’t laugh at him, she would say something unshakeably logical, like: ‘Wow, that’s terrible, I can see why you’d worry about cancer, but motor neurone disease? Really?’ It was the sort of thing that might have made him feel better if she had actually been there to say it, but in his own head it only reminded him that there was cancer to fret about too. He got up and went into his bedroom, pulled down his jeans and underwear, and felt his testicles for lumps. There weren’t any, that he could detect. That was something.

He wondered where Hazel was. Presumably her absence meant her date had been a success. Perhaps he should message her, check all was well. But he didn’t know at what point prudence became prying, or if by sleeping with her last week he had given up any right to appear concerned, because concern could too easily be mistaken for jealousy. He typed out a message, edited it to appear more casual, and then deleted it anyway.

He felt like there was something going on with his fingers, though not anything he could describe. Tiredness perhaps. Muscle fatigue. Or maybe numbness. Was it numbness? Had his fingers gone numb? He could feel the panic rising again, the claustrophobia, like he was trapped in a burning building. He looked around for something sharp and found a biro. He pressed the pointed end into his fingers at random, leaving a scattering of little black dots. He could feel the biro, yes. But was he feeling a normal amount of pressure, or had his sensation dulled? He couldn’t be sure.

He lay back against the pillows and tried to reason with himself, but he was hyper-aware of his fingers and his hands, heavy and clammy, possibly working properly, possibly not. He was buzzing with an uncomfortable sort of energy, a strange tension.

His phone vibrated and he jumped. It was Jasmine, the woman he’d spent the night with the other week. They’d met at someone’s thirtieth and hooked up twice since then. She was the first person he’d done it with since the end of his relationship with Rachel, and it was all very shallow and uncomplicated. She’d made a lot of noise, which was gratifying, but also embarrassing. He hadn’t particularly wanted them to announce themselves so stridently. She had a wide-eyed innocence about her that belied her ferocious libido.