Somewhere Close to Happy: The heart-warming, laugh-out-loud debut of the year

by Lia Louis

  Roman smiles. ‘Cool,’ he says. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Hubble nods again, just the once, and says, ‘Less of the sir.’ He turns and goes inside, leaving the door ajar.

  Roman looks down at me, hair in his eyes. ‘Your grandad’s a ledge, d’you know that?’

  ‘I know. Shame his son’s a bit of a cock.’

  Roman laughs and takes a few steps backwards, readjusting the rucksack strap on his shoulder. ‘His granddaughter got all the good genes,’ he laughs, and I can’t help but laugh too; it warms me through, like treacle. And then the words jump from my mouth, disobediently. He’s a few paces away when I ask, and I don’t know why I do. Maybe because I’m nosey. Maybe because I desperately want to know everything about him; about all the things that make up Roman Meyers, my newest, dearest friend. ‘What’s his name? Your dad.’

  Roman stops, an unlit cigarette stuck to his lip, on the busted side. He takes it out between two knuckles. ‘Frank,’ he says. ‘Frank Matias. Spanish, apparently.’ He laughs, eyes raised to the sky for a moment, as if it’s amusing – pathetic, even.

  I open my mouth to speak but can think of nothing to say.

  ‘Speak to you online later, yeah?’ he smiles, and I give a quick nod.

  ‘Yeah. Speak to you later.’

  Chapter Eight

  ‘What are you trying to say?’

  ‘Nothing terrible, Calvin, honest. Just that, well, I’m not entirely sure linen suits you.’

  ‘It’s hideous, Lizzie, just tell him. He looks hideous.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say he looks hideous,’ I say. ‘You just look … I don’t know. As if you belong on a Benidorm beach buying fridge magnets or something. As opposed to, you know, running an accounts office in Camden Town.’

  Calvin looks down at the fawn-coloured linen trousers he’s wearing, as Eva nods once, victoriously. Eva, Cal’s wife, works with us twice a week, where she does nothing but bicker with Calvin while disinfecting surfaces with antibacterial wipes as if me and Cal do nothing but sit in our own faeces while she’s away.

  ‘See,’ she scoffs. ‘Ridiculous. You look ridiculous, Calvin. Not someone in a position of power. Not someone who people respect.’

  I duck behind my computer to hide the grimace stretching across my mouth involuntarily and continue working my way down the long list of outstanding invoices printed on a piece of A4 on my desk. Calvin Ellis ‘in a position of power’ is the thing that did it for me. The only power Cal would be suited to would be if an island made solely of egg custard tarts was discovered and they needed a king. Still. The trousers aren’t that bad, but then I don’t suppose it would matter if he was standing in a full blown, expertly-fitted Armani suit, complete with a shimmering six-pack beneath. Eva rarely says a nice word about her husband. I often wonder how they managed to have actual child-creating intercourse twice without it ending in Calvin having his head bludgeoned to bits. Priscilla reckons they have angry sex where they shout insults and marital disappointments at each other as they go, which to be fair, seems far more plausible than cuddling and Dr Hook albums.

  It’s Thursday – five days since we met Helen at Broxton Farm – and things have been at a bit of a standstill since. Frank Matias’s phone number is a dead line. Nothing but a long, harsh bleep; a heart, flatlining. It was a long shot, a number so old, but I would be lying if I said it hasn’t made me lose faith. I called it on Sunday, after spending almost twenty-four hours hyping myself up to do it, practising what I would say as if rehearsing lines for a play. I tried, Priscilla did, we even tried at work, but every time we were greeted with the same long, cold, dead beep. Then we called the sorting office – Priscilla’s idea – and a woman had answered, her voice sing-songy and helpful, all ‘no problem’ and ‘I’m sure we can help with that’ and we waited, pen poised on paper. But then she passed us onto a man – her ‘supervisor’ – who as good as laughed us off the phone, making a joke about being able to dust envelopes for fingerprints. Priscilla though, remains fiercely undeterred and excitable, and spends lunch hours and evenings speculating, or showing me obscure Facebook or Twitter pages that could be Roman but turn out not to be. ‘Leads’ as she calls them. She’s really quite taken with this detective lifestyle. She’s started calling me Watson both in emails and in real life, and she called me at ten o’clock the other night as I sat in the dark watching an old episode of The Office asking if Roman had ever been known as ‘Cassius’ as there was a bloke on Instagram who has his ‘exact nose’ except he had a different name and was currently hiking in Venezuela.

  ‘I feel like Sherlock Holmes,’ she said, afterwards. ‘But you know. Reincarnated.’

  ‘Well, you have to be dead to be reincarnated,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, they never actually killed him off, so …’

  Then she cackled down the phone – that infamous dirty laugh. ‘Oh, babe,’ she laughed. ‘He’s dead. Dead as a dodo. Died bloody years ago!’

  ‘Priscilla, Sherlock isn’t real.’

  ‘Well no, course, not now he isn’t, he’s bloody dead,’ tutted Priscilla. ‘Now, babe, open up Twitter and put in this name.’

  And while Priscilla may be coursing with a level of adrenaline only Inspector Morse could empathise with, I have spent most of the time since Thursday cocooned in the flat in baggy clothes, eating beans on toast, watching lost memories unravel like ribbons, and leaping from wanting to tut and laugh at the ridiculousness of it all – of chasing a white rabbit to a farm in bloody Kent and bothering innocent postmen at work – to staring in the face the worries that have grabbed me by the lapels and won’t let me go. I’m worrying in a way I haven’t in so long. It’s in the way I’d worry back then, about Roman at home with his mum, about myself, about what would become of my family with its fresh cut right down the middle; Mum living in ignorant bliss with her toy boy, and Dad barely fit enough to look after himself, let alone us. It’s the sort of consuming worry that seeps into everything, like drops of ink in water, gradually clouding your world. I can’t concentrate. I can’t stop thinking about everything. About that box of old crap from Dad’s loft. About that book wrapped in black tissue, its pages blank and still waiting, patiently, inside. About Hubble, about Roman, and those last few days before he disappeared. I’m replaying them, over and over, just like I would back then, until the circles I run in my mind kick up dust and nothing is clear. His dad. His awful, awful dad. He’d just turned eighteen. They were going to help him get a flat after he left The Grove, move out of his mum’s, start afresh, and the money we had … it was into triple figures. We were getting there. He counted down to that birthday. We both did. But he left – he chose then to run away. Why? What happened that was so bad – that he was so sorry for – that the only option he felt he had was to disappear?

  ‘So, I think we’ve established that Lizzie also disapproves of my wardrobe choices today.’ Cal cuts through my thoughts. He’s standing by the printer, and his hand is running up and down his lineny thigh.

  I blink out of the trance I’m caught in. ‘W-what’s that?’

  ‘My trousers, Lizzie.’

  I look down at them again. ‘Er, well, I would just say that linen is a fickle beast in that it doesn’t hold any sort of shape so maybe that’s why—’

  ‘Oh, a fickle beast, indeed.’ Eva makes a ‘hmm!’ sound in her throat and carries on scribbling on her desk. ‘They’re going into the bin as soon as you get home,’ says Eva. ‘Honestly, the second you walk in the door I’m tearing them off.’

  ‘Oh?’ smirks Calvin, sitting back down at his desk, pulling at the knees of the material as he does. ‘That almost sounds sexy, my gorgeous wife, I’d be careful what you’re saying.’ He tips his glasses down his nose and looks over the top of them. ‘Tell me what else you’ll tear off.’

  At that moment – the precise second my libido shrivels inside me and dies a death – Boring Jeremy from marketing, with his criminally beautiful arms, walks in, notebook
and pen in hand.

  ‘Hiya,’ he says to Calvin.

  ‘Oh, hello, Jeremy!’ jumps in Eva, chucking down her pen. She sits up straight and grins widely. ‘How are you? I haven’t seen you in for ever!’

  He smiles. ‘Yes. It’s err, been a few days.’

  Eva fancies Jeremy. I mean, we all do a little bit. He’s very handsome with his dark curls, sharp jawline, and it has to be said, the most beautiful, muscular arms in the human race. They’re huge, and so hard, that he once tripped in reception and as his arms fell to the ground, they made a clanging sound, like metal poles being dropped in a ballroom. It’s just a shame he’s so boring and serious. Eva doesn’t seem to care, though. She lights up when he comes into the room and notices the tiniest of things about him, from new nose hairs to new shirt cuts.

  ‘Oh, look, you’ve got new shoes!’

  See.

  ‘Oh, h-have I?’ Jeremy’s eyes drop to the ground. ‘Oh, yes. I bought these a few months ago but I forgot about them.’

  Eva bursts out laughing and Jeremy looks pleased that his anecdote has hit the spot, and continues to tell Eva the reasons he forgot all about his new shoes. I tune out. Cal raises his eyebrows at me over the top of his monitor and continues typing.

  ‘So,’ smiles Eva, with a clap. ‘What can I do for you, Jez?’

  Jez.

  ‘Actually, it’s Lizzie I’m after.’

  Eva’s smile fades, as if he’s rejected her for a cha-cha at a school dance. She looks over at me and says, ‘Oh. OK, then.’

  I stop typing. ‘How can I help?’

  ‘Two things.’ He frowns down at the notebook in his hand. ‘Strawberry Moons.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  And for a minute I think it’s poetry. For a minute I imagine he’s describing what he thinks it might be like to kiss me, under a pink sky, him in a bronze body plate, the light of the moon illuminating our faces. But then he says, ‘Louisa’s leaving celebration tonight at Strawberry Moons. I’m trying to get numbers.’

  ‘Oh. I can’t,’ I lie, ‘I wish I could, but I actually have plans with my brother tonight. We’re … going to the cinema.’ I’m not. Me and Nathan haven’t been to the cinema together for at least a year. I just don’t like going to work dos. I don’t like Louisa, either. She reminds me of all the nasty pieces of work I went to school with and spent five years avoiding in classrooms at lunchtime – the type to insult your new haircut or outfit, or slag off your ‘fattening’ lunch, but then cover it over by telling you they’re only saying it because they’re being ‘a mate’ even though, most of the time, they can’t remember your name. There’s at least one in every office and every school. There wasn’t one at The Grove, though. Perhaps we were all too exhausted with our own lives to consider reviewing someone else’s. Perhaps because it was a place so many of us went to escape those people.

  Jeremy scribbles something down in his notebook. ‘Right. And will you be coming to Newport?’

  I look at him blankly.

  ‘The annual summer work trip. Twenty-sixth of August. We’ll be meeting at the Newport offices, staying one night, and this time onto Bath the following day.’

  Ah. Yes. The annual summer work trip. When every singleton and/or party animal at Fisher and Bolt (UK and Germany offices) travel by coach from across the country to some poor, unsuspecting town, get drunk and/or naked and/or off with each other.

  ‘Oh. Oh, no.’ I shake my head. ‘No. But thanks.’

  Jeremy shrugs. ‘Well, you’ll be missing out on a stellar itinerary.’

  ‘I’m sure. Really not my thing, though,’ I tell him, but I really want to ask him why he’s bothering. Every year, Jeremy and his boss Graham arrange it, and each year, Jeremy tries to make it a respectable little mini break with drinks, National Trust sites, and continental breakfasts, and somehow, every single time, Graham manages to turn it into an 18-30s event with added syphilis, and returns home to find his belongings turfed out, yet again, by his wife.

  Jeremy scribbles something down. ‘I thought as much,’ he says. ‘I just thought I’d ask. You should think about it, though, Lizzie. Our first stop is Newport Cathedral.’

  ‘Perfect,’ chuckles Calvin. ‘Free holy wine for Graham to pickle his bloody liver in.’

  And as Jeremy grimaces so awkwardly that his jaw practically dislodges, Priscilla appears in the doorway, face flushed, and from nowhere, as if shot from a cannon.

  ‘Hi,’ she says, taking a deep breath, her eyes widening as if she wasn’t expecting our little Shoebox of Doom to be full of so many people. ‘Um, Lizzie, can I—’

  ‘I was just telling Lizzie,’ Jeremy cuts in, ‘that she should think about it. What do you think, Priscilla?’

  Priscilla raises her eyebrows. ‘About what?’

  ‘The work trip. She could share your room.’

  I blink. Priscilla is going? I open my mouth to speak, but before I can say a word, Priscilla swoops in. ‘Um. Yeah. Sure. Sorry— Lizzie, can I have a word?’

  Calvin looks over his shoulder at her, eyebrow cocked.

  ‘It’s work,’ she says to Calvin. ‘Tim needs her to look at … something.’

  Calvin shrugs and says with the face of a defeated man, ‘Right-o,’ and goes back to his work. He can’t be bothered to argue today. He only knows Priscilla will then escalate the matter and say she needs me because of periods or tampons, like she would when trying to get me out of Mr Greenwood’s Geography class, and he’d rather live in blissful ignorance that women piss only dried flowers and pressed apple juice.

  We walk through the office, Priscilla leading me straight past her desk (and Tim’s, as expected) and she says nothing until we’re out in the corridor, in silence. ‘So, I think I’ve found out why the number doesn’t work,’ she says, barely a space between her words. ‘Frank Matias’s,’ she says. ‘I’ve just had a sales meeting and we were all given some new accounts to look after. Two of them are in Wales. One in Cardiff. Totally different area code to what we have.’

  My heart thumps. ‘Right?’

  ‘So, I asked Adrian, he’s been here since time began and is a literal dinosaur,’ Priscilla says. ‘He couldn’t work it out at first. Said it can’t be a Cardiff number, that we’d got it wrong. But he grabbed me as he was going to lunch. He said he thinks it’s an old area code.’

  ‘Old?’

  ‘Yep. Defunct. Some big number exchange thing happened ages ago. 0181 and London codes changed to 020 and Cardiff …’ She trails off, handing me a Post-it note. ‘If you change the 01222 bit to that …’

  ‘It’ll work?’

  Priscilla shrugs, her mouth stretched into a grin. ‘Hopefully,’ she says. ‘So, shall we try it?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘He’s dead. Frank. Frank’s dead.’

  ‘Oh, gosh. God, I’m so sorry, I didn’t realise—’

  ‘Mmm. Update your bloody databases.’

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t have a— I’m not selling anything.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘I … well, see, I’m not actually looking for Frank Matias.’

  ‘Then why’re you calling his bloody widow and asking for him when he’s been in the ground almost ten years?’

  ‘I’m r-really sorry. I’m actually calling because I’m looking to get in contact with his son.’

  ‘His son?’

  ‘Yes. I’m looking for his son, Roman. We’re old friends and—’

  ‘Roman? No, no, no, no. I don’t know where you got this number, but I suggest you remove it because he doesn’t live here now and won’t be back.’

  ‘Ah. OK, sorry, I do have old information, I’m afraid, but that’s all I have to go on. Do you happen to have a forwarding address or a number or—’

  ‘Did you not hear me, lovie?’

  ‘Yes, I—’

  ‘I just said he isn’t here, he won’t ever be, and I have no idea where the hell he is and don’t care to know, OK? Alright? You listening?�
�

  ‘S-sorry, I just— I’m just trying to find my friend, I really didn’t mean to disturb or upset anyone—’

  ‘Listen, love, I’m not interested in anyone that’s got anything to do with the waster, OK? It’s done. We’re well shot of the robbing nutjob, so don’t you be ringing this number again, alright? You understand? Hello? Are you still there?’

  This PC/D: Lizzie Laptop/Roman/

  Roman signed in on 20/01/05 23:03

  Roman: Hey. You’re on late J.

  Lizzie: can’t sleep. dad’s still not home yet. Nathan’s asleep in his room. tried calling my mum. she was out somewhere loud n couldn’t talk.

  Roman: You ok?

  Lizzie: I don’t think so :(

  Lizzie: I just feel so sad. sad and lonely.

  Roman: I’m sorry you’re sad :(

  Lizzie: everything’s so messed up. this house doesn’t even feel like my home anymore Ro.

  Lizzie: it’s dark and cold and silent and always a fucking mess. & Mum and Dad are off doing these things they’ve never done before. my mum is in bars on a Tuesday night and I don’t even know where my dad is. actually. bet I can guess :(

  Roman: I wish there was something I could do.

  Lizzie: I don’t trust them anymore. I feel like they’ve been lying to me and Nate our whole lives or hiding these whole other versions of themselves or something. I don’t even know them.

  Lizzie: I’m just so lost Roman.

  Roman: :(

  Roman: I wish I could fix this for you.

  Roman: But we will soon. I promise you. On my life.

  Roman: We won’t even pack. We’ll get behind the wheel and drive Sea Fog for miles and miles and just keep going.

  Lizzie: wish we could just go now.

  Roman: Only 17 and a half months to go. College first.

  Lizzie: that sounds like forever.

  Roman: I know. But it’s not. Plus £54.60 in the plant pot now. Added another tenner :P