‘Coffee?’ I ask.
I move into the organ loft that is now my kitchen.
He blinks. ‘Thank you. Yes. Milk, one sugar.’
I dig in the boxes marked ‘Kitchen Cupboards, 3 of 6’. My things seem unfamiliar. I find cups but no saucers. Toby opens the boiler cupboard and prises off the casing. He is stocky with a low belly. Early forties, I estimate. An oversized tattoo runs up his forearm through the curling dark hair: ‘MADISON’, it reads in cursive lettering.
It’s Day One of our four-day works schedule. Toby tells me, haltingly, that, this morning, he’ll do the full boiler service. The boiler is old, so he’ll check the controls and clear away dirt and debris; he’ll do a gas analysis to monitor carbon monoxide; he’ll confirm there are no weeping joints; he’ll test the circuitry, the fan pressure and the inlet pressure. He’ll inspect the heat exchanger and the burner. He’ll clean out the condensate trap.
Toby’s mouth has seen better days. His front teeth are missing, along with the cuspids and miscellaneous others. I hear the soft nasal sing-song of a Birmingham accent. I imagine backstreet punch-ups in his youth.
He speaks quickly, mistrustful of his mouth, but finally, he nods, relieved to have got through the speech. Later I’ll be sent an electronic survey from his company; it will ask me to confirm that, prior to the given job, Toby explained the full nature of it.
‘Thank you.’ I pass him a steaming coffee. ‘You’ve made everything clear.’
He nods. His head is small and neat, almost feral; his hair is shorn close to his scalp. The dark stubble along his jawline is flecked with grey, and his eyelashes are thick like a child’s. He lowers them often.
When his phone starts to vibrate, he sighs. ‘Hi, love. Can’t. On a job. I’ll call you later, right?’ He slides the phone into a pocket. ‘My girlfriend,’ he explains. ‘She’s a lot younger.’ He smiles apologetically. ‘She does my head in.’
‘That’s wonderful,’ I hear myself say. I make no sense.
Toby reaches, quickly, for a pair of pliers.
I blush and lift the vase of nearly dead tulips from the kitchen table. A new neighbour deposited the yellow bunch on my doorstep on the day of the move. At the sink, I turn away and let the water run and run. I cannot say what I actually meant: that I hope his broken mouth will kiss and be kissed. I cannot say it because what could it possibly matter to me?
In recent days, the tulips drooped, drowsy as narcoleptics. Now, their yellow heads are full-blown, too weighty for their slender stems and leaves. Since yesterday, they’ve been resting only millimetres above the tabletop, a lost cause. I fill the vase anyway. A distraction. An excuse.
Toby keeps his eyes, front and centre, on the boiler’s innards. I switch on Radio 4, waiting for its calm to neutralise the atmosphere; to cover the odd sense of domesticity into which we’ve been cast. The proximity of strangers is a peculiar thing, and the open-plan design means there is nowhere to hide. I unpack dishes, pots, canisters, oven mitts, a stray pair of socks and a bra. I stuff the latter in a kitchen drawer.
Even so, when it happens, it seems wrong not to risk it, wrong not to say, ‘Look. Toby, look at the tulips.’ He turns, I point and, together, we watch the oversized heads rise, infinitesimally higher and higher, in an act of blind, magnificent will.
‘You wouldn’t think,’ he murmurs.
‘No,’ I breathe.
I fold tea towels and behold the resurrection. He tinkers again in the boiler cupboard, glancing back to watch it over his shoulder. Before long, the tulips are half their natural height and still rising.
‘Life,’ he says. ‘Bloody stubborn, isn’t it.’
We find our equilibrium.
‘Biscuit?’ I venture.
He shakes his head and adjusts a pressure valve. ‘Never eat in the day.’
‘No breakfast?’
‘Coffee only – till dinner time.’
There’s something fight-or-flight-like in his bearing, a potential clenched in his shoulders. Yet his movements are slow, wary. ‘See this dial?’
I walk to his side.
‘The needle should hover around the one mark. When it’s too low, just top it up, with this black knob.’
‘Right.’ I nod. ‘Yes.’
He picks up his coffee. We look to the sea. Half a dozen sailboats navigate the dazzle, white sails tipping on the breeze.
‘That’s a view,’ he says.
‘Yes,’ I say.
At home in Portslade, if he crooks his head a certain way in his toddler’s room, he can just see a skinny ‘V’ of sea. He has a fishing boat which he hasn’t had out since his youngest – Madison – was born. It’s moored at Newhaven, waiting to be scraped and sanded. He says: ‘I know I should say “she”, like all the marina types do, but I always feel daft saying that.’
‘I do too,’ I say. I fold another tea towel. ‘Maybe the “she” of me resists.’
‘Feminist,’ he says. ‘That explains it.’
I look up. ‘Explains what?’
‘Being good looking and on your own.’ He carries on tinkering in the cupboard. ‘Me, I’m ugly and surrounded. Ex-wife always on the blower. Our son up in Stoke getting himself into trouble. My girlfriend. Plus her mates in our kitchen most nights of the week. I used to wonder why they behaved like teenagers till I realised they are teenagers, or not far off. Then there’s her mother tutting and painting her toenails on the Radio Times. Not to mention our three kiddies. Each night when I get home, the two older boys are either on the PlayStation or torturing the cat. Forgot to mention the cat. One old, incontinent cat.’ He looks up. ‘It’s a madhouse basically.’
These days, he says, the boat is like someone else’s memory. So he makes do with an old reel near Hove Lagoon, at the edge of Fatboy Slim’s private beachfront. As he speaks, he draws his arm back and casts an imaginary line in a long fluid gesture. Suddenly he is supple. His eyes shine.
But his fishing is interrupted by his phone. ‘A perfect demonstration,’ he tells me, ‘of why I never take my phone when I’m off out with my reel.’
I turn off the radio.
‘Like I said, love – can’t.’ He rolls his eyes for my benefit, then stabs the phone with his finger, and returns to the gauge hooked up to the boiler.
I hold out a packet of biscuits. ‘Sure?’
He waves it politely away. ‘I hear my kids say, “I’m starving! Dad, I’m starving.” As if.’ He starts to laugh, then draws in his upper lip.
I carry on unpacking boxes and smile. ‘We have no idea, do we?’ Olive oil. Balsamic. Sea salt. Quinoa. Wild rice. Omega oil and green tea supplements.
The boiler fires up, so that, at first, I hardly hear him. ‘It’s an agony,’ he says. ‘Plain and simple.’
I straighten. I’ve missed some causal link.
‘After the first week it gets a little easier. Because your body is giving up, and your head feels like it’s floating away.’ His words are a fast-moving stream. ‘And that’s what calms you down finally, what saves you, that floating feeling, as you start to die.’ He turns and stares through the window at the twenty-five feet of consecrated sky.
In the direct light, lines and shadows appear on his face. I stand, clutching vitamin bottles.
He walks across the room to the nearest radiator and turns the bleed key. His hands are small and solid, but the joints on his fingers look overlarge, misshapen. A silence opens up between us, wide as a crevasse. His brow tightens, then in he lurches. ‘There were four of us. All from the 42nd Commando Division. We were dropped into a port town near Basra. Iraq. March 2003. You know.’ He glances up, smiling faintly. ‘That malarkey.’
I nod. I fold my arms. To be steady.
‘One minute, you’re up in the Hercules, breathing in a hundred per cent oxygen so you don’t get the bends, and the next minute you’re in free fall for the longest fifteen seconds of your life. You have to pull the ripcord when you’re crazy high up – twenty-five thousand feet – becau
se otherwise, the sound of the chutes opening might be detected by the enemy lower down. The world is roaring around you and at the same time everything’s deadly quiet, and the four of us form up in a stack, like quadruplets waiting to drop. All you want is to feel the ground beneath your feet. The chap at the bottom of the stack is the one with the compass. No GPS then. We’re drifting cross-country, across a desert without landmarks, and just praying we don’t freeze to death. It’s minus twenty-nine degrees in the air, then forty-five degrees in the Drop Zone when we hit. Nothing prepares you for that.
‘The truth is, nothing prepares you for any of it. When you do land, it’s all rock and sand, so everything’s always giving way underfoot. You can hardly run. Not even when you’re twenty-three and fitter than you’ll ever be again and your life depends on it’ – his voice drops – ‘which it did more or less.’ He shrugs. ‘Got ourselves captured on Day One, didn’t we.’ His eyes darken and the lashes dip.
‘God,’ I say. ‘How awful.’
The radiator bangs and chokes, as if the dust of the desert is here too. ‘Air lock,’ he says.
He glances up, checking that I’m okay; checking that I’m not checking the clock. Then he looks away again. ‘They left us tied to metal chairs in that heat. Four of us in a row in a concrete courtyard. By the second week, they didn’t even need to tie us up because there was nowhere to go. No way out and no way back inside. We were dehydrated. Starving. We sat till we fell off. You only knew you’d fallen off when you came to on the ground. After a point, you were just glad of the chair. You’re baking in the heat but you love your bloody chair.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say.
‘I never had much religion but what I had left me out there.’
I pull out two kitchen chairs. Neither of us sits.
‘Of course,’ I say. ‘No wonder.’
‘No wonder. No feeling. No nothing after. Because all that heat gets inside you and it flares sometimes. Like when my mates go on about their Sky being on the blink. Or when my ex-wife gets upset because I won’t help pay for her European city break. Or when I see a busker in Brighton. Ever seen that chap in the zebra costume playing piano in East Street? I think, is he why we were tied to chairs? So he could dress like a zebra and play the piano? Did I join up so that, one day, my kids could feel deprived if they weren’t given two-for-one Cadbury eggs? Not that I’m complaining. All that’s normal. It’s not normal to prefer fish to people. I know that. It’s not normal to get worked up about a grown man who calls himself Fatboy Slim and owns the best of the flipping beachfront. Only trouble is, a couple years ago, I came off my motorbike, and the MoD claimed I tried to top myself. Now they’re withholding my pension. I didn’t try anything – a car came round the corner – but they’re keeping it anyway.’ He looks up. ‘My girlfriend doesn’t know.’
‘About the pension.’
‘No.’ He turns the bleed key. ‘About Iraq.’
In the morning, I’m woken by the buzzing of my phone beside the bed. It’s ten past seven on the clock. ‘Hello,’ I say. I hear the sound of a child splashing in the bath. ‘Hello?’ Then the call is ended.
I check my log. Toby’s number.
An accidental call. I go back to sleep.
But when I open my bedroom door, a hot breeze laps at my legs and a fine layer of yellow sand eddies across the floor.
At half past eight, Toby appears carrying six-foot lengths of copper piping over his shoulder and a long hose looped over one arm. He deposits it all, heads out to the company van and returns, manoeuvring a wet-dry vacuum.
I boil the kettle. I don’t mention the call. I don’t mention the desert sand.
Today, it’s another speech. His boss is a sadist. ‘I’ll move the radiator as per. That means I’ll have to drain the radiators first, on both levels. Don’t worry. I’ll run the extractor hose outside. I’ll also need to remove the rad nearest the front door – because it doesn’t have a drain-off valve. I’ll cut and relocate the pipework, reposition the radiator you want moved and make tight the compressed joint-work. The soldering will stink – sorry about that – but it will clear quickly if you open a few windows. I’ll plumb the rad back up, fill the new system and add inhibitor. Then I’ll bleed off the air, and fix a drain-off valve to make jobs easier in the future.’ He consults a mental checklist. ‘I’ll lay a water blanket and will hoover any spillages. I’ll leave it like I found it. Three to four hours’ work. We don’t paint the new pipework but I recommend the use of a primer.’ Spit dribbles down his chin, and he turns to wipe it with his sleeve.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
His gums are red and vulnerable when he smiles. I can see the uncertainty in his eyes, now that he’s clear of the speech. He’s wondering if he said too much yesterday. I’m wondering too.
Upstairs in my kitchen, he leans against the banister, careful to avoid the laundry drying in the morning light. ‘You’ll be suntanning up here by August.’
Through my chapel window, we study the ridge of the Downs. The hills, the grass, the salt-bitten edges seem lit from within.
‘You’re going to need binoculars,’ he adds.
The sea today is lagoon-green near the shore, turquoise where the shelf of England drops off and – deeper still, farther out – the fierce blue of the open Channel.
He is about to make a start on the drainage when it appears: the Portsmouth-to-Caen ferry, edging into view like a phantom ship. In outline, it looks too big, too bloated to be so close to shore.
‘Shouldn’t that be in the Solent?’ he asks.
I nod. ‘It passed the West Pier a few hours ago, adrift apparently. They were saying on the news. Just a skeleton crew. No passengers. I suppose it must still be going, carried on the tide.’
He squints into the day. ‘Sounds like someone’s big-whoops to me.’
‘French ferry strike today. So the berth in Portsmouth is overfull, and they put this one to sea. No engines – to save fuel. They’re calling it a “calculated drift”.’
His smile is half grimace. ‘Next time someone asks me what I’m up to, I’m going to borrow that. Calculated drift. “I’m in a calculated drift.”’
We watch the lonely monolith of steel.
‘Perhaps your girlfriend should know,’ I say.
Two hours later, as the ferry drifts beyond my chapel arch, I call down the stairs. ‘Almost gone.’
‘God bless her,’ he calls over his soldering torch, ‘and all who forgot to sail in her!’
The stink of burnt metal rises. I heave windows open. ‘Toby, you couldn’t give me a hand, could you?’ I forgot. Fresh laundry is everywhere. Sheets are drying over chairs, railings, my sofa, the kitchen table.
‘I did warn you,’ he calls.
‘You did. So much for Lemon Fresh.’ I reach for a sheet from the banister, pulling it up and across.
He goes to the stairs below, gets hold of the far edge and travels up, sparing it the dust of each step. ‘My girlfriend can’t keep house to save her life, but she’s good with the kids and that, and she says they’ll fuss in a few years if we’re not married – sticklers for rules, kids are – so I did it. I booked the Registry Office.’
‘Congratulations,’ I say, beaming for him. ‘That’s lovely news.’ I think of his broken mouth filled with vows.
‘Second time round for me. When you’re a marine, they say: marry desperate. Because anyone truly sane would have to be desperate to marry a Royal Marine. Anna, my ex, was out of my league. My own father said as much, but I ignored him. I was doolally for her.’
We shake out the sheet and pull it taut between us. Then we begin a quadrille of meetings and separations, slow at first, halting, until we find our momentum – reaching and folding, reaching and folding. When the sheet is reduced to a compact square of linen, we find ourselves stopped, hand to hand. ‘They don’t look it,’ he says, ‘but my hands are clean. The nails are only black where they didn’t heal right after they were pulled.’
> I blink. ‘So you’ve set a date. That’s wonderful.’
‘She wants me to get dental implants first. She says, you only have one set of wedding photographs. I’ve told her about the last time, but she forgets, you know, on purpose like.’
I lay the folded sheet on the table, and he reaches for the next. Meet and fold. Meet and fold. ‘I keep trying to explain there won’t be any date if I have to pay for implants. And when I see my mouth, I’m fine with it. It reminds me – I got off easy.’
He turns his face to the vaulted ceiling and wooden beams high over our heads. ‘Original, those.’ He points to the iron truss that runs the length of the kitchen and living room. ‘And that. A single blacksmith made that. Not a foundry. A single man. Look at those iron knuckles. You could swing from that truss, and it wouldn’t budge.’
‘Sometimes,’ I say, ‘I stand here and imagine all those prayers downstairs in the old nave, a century’s worth offered up.’
‘It’s peaceful here.’ He nods. ‘Solid.’ Downstairs, among his tools, his phone buzzes but he ignores it. ‘She was only ten in 2003. She knows I was a marine but she doesn’t want details. The past is passed. Fair enough, I said. She said she thought she remembered it being on the news. The Invasion.’
We begin our quadrille again. The sheets in our hands hold the warmth of April. On my kitchen table, the tulips are risen. At the top of the chapel window, the circular panes cast mandalas of light. A breeze moves through the skylight windows. Prayers roost in my roof space. Together we are Methodists.
Then Toby passes me the last sheet, grabs a blue corner and glances over the banister to check the drain-off hose downstairs. ‘Your teeth,’ he says, ‘they’re beautiful.’
That evening, the call comes around nine.
‘Hello?’ I say. I press my ear to a burble of voices and tinny, distant music. I wait, staring at my bedroom ceiling. ‘Toby?’
The phone must be in his pocket. He’s sitting on it. Down the pub.
Best British Short Stories 2018 Page 6