by Jenny Colgan
‘So, I mean, what’s he like?’ I started again. A man of mystery? Sounded good to me.
‘Oh, you tell her, Josh. I’m absolutely exhausted,’ said Kate. She took out her Psion and started stabbing at it, making me feel like a complete idiot. Then Josh and I shared our ‘it’s Kate’ glance, and I felt a bit better.
‘Well …’ started Josh, stirring the sauce. I went and leaned on the cabinet next to him.
‘He’s quiet. Very quiet. In fact, I think he’d rather not speak at all. He was amazed when we didn’t have e-mail in every room in the house so we could just communicate that way.’
I raised my eyebrows. At the table, Kate let out a long ‘How can I be so busy and successful when there are people in my kitchen making spaghetti bolognese?’ type sigh.
‘Whenever he bumps into one of us in the hallway he acts like a startled rabbit, like he genuinely wasn’t expecting anyone to be there. And he refuses to answer the phone or the doorbell. And he never eats.’
‘Hence the food drops.’
‘Hmm? Yes.’ Josh artfully splashed a measure of red wine into the sauce, crying out ‘Whoops!’ flamboyantly when he got a bit on his professional apron. I really could understand why women had a hard time taking him seriously.
He caught me watching him.
‘Am I being gay again?’
I smiled at him, colouring slightly. When we were at college, I used to tease him on a semi-continual basis when he’d bring his girl stories to me, but now I was his tenant, and it felt a bit uncomfortable.
‘That was a very masculine dash of wine. But I am definitely fascinated by my new invisible flatmate.’
‘Try taking the room next to his – it’ll wear off soon enough,’ growled Kate from the table, where she continued to do Very Hard Sums.
‘Oh, can I?!’ I yelped, before realizing the faux pas.
‘Sorry, darling,’ said Josh, ‘but you’re not – aha! – coffin up enough rent for that!’
Kate and I stared at him in disgust until he apologized.
Dinner was good. Josh liked to cook, and was good at it. He had a sinecure at his family’s ancient law firm near Chancery Lane, which required him to turn up at about ten thirty looking well groomed, take long lunches and impress foreign clients with his Englishness and hand-made shoes, before retiring to the senior partners’ offices at four thirty to partake of an early gin and tonic before heading home. Which was just as well, as he wasn’t the most academic of characters: you wouldn’t want him defending you in a murder trial whilst simultaneously admiring the court cornicing. The only thing preventing the absolute outbreak of class war was that he didn’t get paid that much for it. It just stunned me that such things still existed outside of the kind of stuff Rupert Graves does in all his films.
Kate ate about three bites, wiped her lips ostentatiously with a napkin then declared she had mounds to do and retreated to her room with the remainder of the wine. Her good night to me was curt, to say the least.
I looked at Josh.
‘What is with her?’ I asked. I mean, she’d always been uptight, but this was real carrot-up-the-bum stuff.
Josh toyed with his spaghetti.
‘Oh, it’s that stupid job of hers,’ he said. ‘She works fourteen-hour days, then comes home like a bear.’
‘What, pooing in the woods?’
‘Grizzly.’
‘Oh. Good spag bol.’
‘Thank you.’ Josh coloured prettily. ‘So, anyway, I keep saying she should change it, do something less stressful, but she just bares her teeth at me and hisses something about me being privileged and how I would never understand what it means to fight for something.’
‘Her dad’s a GP, isn’t he?’
‘Uh huh.’
‘Hmm. But she must make an absolute fortune. Why does she live here?’
Josh looked faintly amused.
‘Charmingly direct as ever, darling.’
‘Oh, you know what I mean.’
‘I know. I’m not sure, really. She does make a stinking amount of money, though. Something like more in her bonus than I do in a year.’
Than I will in a decade, I thought to myself mournfully.
‘We moved in together when I came down,’ Josh went on, ‘and she’s been here ever since, so I suppose she likes it. It’s only four stops on the tube, and pretty cheap.’
I remembered a rather better reason though. Well well well, after all this time. But then, even if she didn’t still fancy him, I suppose if I was feeling stressed out, I wouldn’t mind coming back to a nice warm flat and spaghetti bolognese and someone nice like Josh you could be rude to. Well, she certainly wouldn’t get away with being rude to me.
‘Would you mind getting out of that shower!’ screeched Kate, banging her Clarins bottles on the door at five o’clock one morning (I was doing nights at the market). She carried them daily in and out of the bathroom, presumably in case I stole them.
‘I don’t know what can be keeping you in there that long. You can only smell of flowers, surely.’
She banged again.
‘OK, OK, I’m coming,’ I yelled back, frantically drying myself and wondering if I could stab her with a cotton bud.
‘I have got a plane to catch, Holly,’ she said. Because I have a career and you don’t, she might as well have added.
‘Oh no! The Euro will fall!’ I opened the bathroom door dishevelled, wrapped in two threadbare towels which almost but didn’t quite cover all my bits.
‘Will it?’ she said, instantly alert, then relaxed as her brain realized the context. She gave a tight smile, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and slipped past me, unbelting her Liberty robe.
Bitch, I thought to myself – one of my litany of dreaded ‘thought retorts’ – and headed for bed.
Over the next week or so I started to settle in. I was working part-time shifts at the New Covent Garden market, day and night, and as Kate went to work at 6.30 a.m. and returned at 9 p.m., I normally missed her, and steered well clear of the shower in the morning.
The house, though always untidy, was clean – for me, a perfect state of affairs. Kate paid someone to come in and ‘do’ once a week, which I disagreed with in principle but thoroughly enjoyed the benefits of. It began to feel like home, despite the coffin, which was nine foot by seven. Not the kind of place you’d let a cat visit, in case its brains got bashed to bits in a nasty swinging incident.
I was used to creeping in at odd times of night, and was always amazed to hear the faint tapping of fingers on a keyboard, random beeps and small buzzing noises from Addison’s room.
I never saw him, but fantasized wildly about him. A monster? Kate and Josh’s deformed lovechild, half man half robocop? Perhaps he was blind! That was why he crept around in the dark and didn’t go outside. I had a brief romantic reverie of my being his life partner, caring for him, being his lover and his guide; ‘Holly,’ he would say, ‘you, you are my eyes.’ And, plus it would be a double bonus when I got to forty and wouldn’t have to bother about how I looked.
Then, ping, I realized that the Internet is in fact an almost purely visual medium, and apologized in my head to all the blind people in the world.
Finally, after about a fortnight, I cracked.
It was about 3 a.m., and the house was completely still. I’d been unpacking tulips from 11 p.m., but the work had thinned out and Johnny, my gaffer, had sent me home. It took about ten minutes on Josh’s bicycle – in the very dead of night I would glide down hills, hands free, and have to restrain myself from shouting out loud to fill up the rare London silence.
I had crept into the house, exhilarated and pink-cheeked from the spring wind. My hair was tangled, and I didn’t feel sleepy. My hours were so topsy-turvy, I didn’t know when I slept. The television, however, was in the sitting room, which backed on to Kate’s room – so, no Channel 5 soft porn for me. I was about to head through to the chilly kitchen to make some tea when I saw the omnipresent blue glow underneath the
door, the familiar tap tap tap.
Well, sod it, I thought to myself. Two weeks living in the same house as someone and not seeing them is simply freaky and unnatural. There could be nothing wrong with just popping in and introducing myself, for fuck’s sake. It was only … well, ten past three in the morning. I felt strangely excited, like playing ring-the-bell-and-run-away. If I got yelled at, I could always hide and say it was Kate.
I crept across the hall, instead of walking across it like I normally did when I came in late at night so everyone would know it was me and not a burglar; steeled myself and rapped gently on the door.
The typing noise stopped. Encouraged, I tapped again. ‘Hello?’
There was no response.
Feeling like an idiot, I repeated, ‘Hello?’ leaning slightly on the door.
Clearly it wasn’t locked.
Half horrified at what I was doing, I pushed open the door.
The large room was dark, but light streamed in from the moon and the streetlights. The place was also lit up with an unearthly green glow, which I realized, once my eyes adjusted, came from a huge VDU. The room was so filled with banks of electronic equipment it was like the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise. LEDs lit up and monitors bleeped quietly.
Sitting with his back to me was a very tall man, who resembled a normal man who’d been put on a rack and stretched out. His black spiky hair stuck up straight from his head, and I couldn’t see his face.
He didn’t turn round, although he must have heard me, because his back stiffened.
‘Hello?’ I whispered. ‘Sorry to disturb you, but I saw you were still working and, well, I moved in here a couple of weeks ago and my name’s Holly and I thought that, you know, since we lived together, we should perhaps lay eyes on one another.’
I swallowed. My voice seemed to echo in the empty room, and I felt like a complete dork. Then, when he didn’t reply, I started to get annoyed. It wasn’t like I was demanding anything unreasonable. This was only basic human contact, for fuck’s sake! The way Kate and Josh tiptoed around him was ridiculous. He needed shaking up, if you asked me. He still hadn’t even bothered turning round! That was bloody rude.
‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realize you were so rude. I won’t bother you again. Excuse me.’
I turned to go. Slowly, I heard the revolving chair creep round behind me. I looked back.
A huge pair of dark brown eyes, blinking rapidly, regarded me with a mixture of curiosity and fear. I almost gasped aloud. He was … well, just spectacularly beautiful. Just, like, Oh my GAWD! Not in a pretty, boyband poofy kind of way, but that chiselled, sensitive look that cries out, ‘I may have been staring at this computer screen for fifteen hours, but as my physiognomy suggests, I have the soul of a poet. And not one of those ones with hair in their noses that you see in the Sunday supplements.’ Even from behind his glasses you could see that his eyelashes cast long shadows on his ludicrously high cheekbones and a frown seemed to pass over his exquisitely high forehead.
I managed to quell my first urge, which was to lie at his feet and present my stomach to him to be tickled, when I noticed he was wearing a Star Trek T-shirt. How original of someone who played with computers all day long to like Star Trek, I thought.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. His voice was quiet and soft, with no discernible accent – not like mine. I got very London, selling flowers every day.
He looked at his hands. His fingers were incredibly long – practically prehensile. I actually sighed.
‘I was a bit caught up in what I was doing.’
He sounded apologetic, and I was in one of those brain-twisting moods whereby if you meet someone who is clearly your soul mate you feel an overwhelming urge to be rude to them.
‘So you don’t listen to people when they come to say “hello”? What were you doing?’
He stared at his hands again and didn’t say anything. I thought for a bit.
‘OK, shall we start again?’ I announced. ‘I’m Holly, and you’re Mr Addison, I presume.’
‘Not mister, just Addison,’ he said quietly.
‘Ooh, what a great name!’ I said, reaching out to shake his hand. He didn’t take mine, and regarded it with some alarm. ‘Addison Madison?’
What? What magic potion had I just taken to turn me into the Moron of the Western World? I cringed.
He blinked. His eyelashes practically bounced off his sweetly pouted lips. ‘Ehm, no … Addison Farthing.’
‘Farthing, Farthing – right, of course, how silly of me,’ I gushed, like I was interviewing him on a breakfast show. ‘Of course.’
I was backing away and backing down big time.
‘So, anyway, I thought, you know, time to say hello, pop in, have a chat …’
Addison continued to regard me impassively.
‘So, here we are, having a chat … and it’s been lovely chatting to you. Really. We must do it again some time.’
He continued staring at me as I backed out of the room.
‘Great! Nice to meet you! Nice Starship Enterprise, by the way!’ I said as I got to the door, but he was already turning back to his enormous screen and had clearly forgotten my very existence. Huge cables twisted round the table legs, heading off God knows where. The tapping started up again and I closed the door gently. Outside in the hall I leaned on the wall and let my jaw drop in wonder. Oh my God. No wonder Kate liked him locked away.
‘I spoke to Addison last night,’ I announced to Josh the next day. He was eating dinner and I was eating breakfast and trying to avoid his dinner – the smell of pork chops half an hour after I’d woken up made me feel a bit sick, I had discovered.
Josh looked up at me from an article he was reading in Homes & Gardens. I’d suggested Loaded as a slightly more useful manual for pulling, but it didn’t quite suit him, somehow.
‘And?’
‘And?? AND?? Excuse me, but as landlord of this establishment, I do believe it is your duty to let me know when you’re hoarding Johnny Depp in geek form on your property!’
‘You never asked.’
‘Why did I never think to ask?’ I asked, slapping myself on the forehead. ‘So many gorgeous computer geeks in the world, so little time. Josh! If it hadn’t been for my extreme bravery last night I might never have met my future life partner! Ooh –’ a thought occurred to me – ‘and our kids get to be brainy, too!’
‘He is very pretty, I suppose,’ said Josh, a tad dreamily. I narrowed my eyes at him.
‘Only in an objectively aesthetic way! Not in a romantic way! Not that there would be anything wrong with that! But I don’t! Not that it’s bad!’
‘Stop, stop! You’ve got caught in the Richard Gere “I’m not gay/but it’s OK” cycle of eternal justification. The only way to break free is to remove that plate of pork chops from my vicinity before I vomit on it.’
‘Thank goodness for your magic spell-breaking powers,’ said Josh, picking up his plate and moving over to the sink.
‘You know, I must have him,’ I went on. ‘He will be mine.’
‘But he doesn’t talk.’
‘That’s OK. I can talk to you, or my mother. Addison is for kissing and worshipping.’
‘So, like, there’s no difference between me and your mother?’ asked Josh gloomily, rinsing his plate off.
‘Well, you haven’t ordered me to help with the washing-up yet, so, perhaps there is.’
‘Don’t you have work to go to?’ he asked, a tad crossly.
‘Ah, that’s more like it.’
‘Fine. See you later. I’ll just continue here on my lifelong mission of female identification.’
I popped my head back round the door.
‘You know, if you meant that sarcastically, you should really take that pinny off.’
He gave me the V’s.
‘Bye, Addison!’ I called out cheerily as I passed his door. There was a small break in tapping in response. I took it as a good sign.
Two
It was getting dark when I hopped on the bike and headed up to the market. Going out in the chilly nights was the worst; I knew I had several hours of rushing about with my hands wet to come, and all around me the nine-to-fivers were heading for home, fresh pasta and The Bill. And they all made twice as much as me. It didn’t seem fair. Working in the market wasn’t anything like working in a shop. Then, you got to choose things yourself and put them together, and if someone had been rude to you on the phone you could put a bug in their gladioli. Here, I had to check ten thousand tulips and try to work out which ones were the best.
I worked for Johnny, who was wizened and had been on the flower markets for four hundred and seventy years, as he never stopped reminding me.
‘Aye, you never saw colours like that in my day,’ he’d snort derisively at one of the more over-the-top hybrids.
‘That’s because everything was in black and white, then,’ I’d point out to him. ‘It was the olden days.’
‘People used to eat flowers during the war, you know.’ He was quite one for reminiscing. In fact, he was absolutely, bar none, the best person I’d ever met at making up things about the war.
‘Hey, Johnny,’ I waved to him as I whizzed round the corner. The lorries hadn’t started to unload yet, so people were standing around, smoking roll-ups and gossiping about magnolias. The flower people despised the fruit people in the next set of bays, and they in turn thought the flower people were a bunch of big pansies who couldn’t lift a box of melons if their lives depended on it.
‘Hey there, lass.’ He regarded me critically. ‘You know, when I was your age, I was selling out the back of my own van.’
‘Johnny, you have no idea how old I am. In fact, I’m nine years old. And I have my own van. I do this for fun.’
‘I never met a lassie who knew when to shut up,’ he observed mournfully, and threw me over a pair of heavy gloves.
I’d only been there a couple of weeks, and already I hated it. It was exactly like school. The girls all wore inappropriate clothing, smoked behind the sheds and picked on me. Either that or they were so stupid they had to be reminded every day how to pick up a box of flowers without drooling on it.