Everything You Need: Short Stories (15 page)

W
hen after two
days the discomfort in his side had not lessened, merely mutated, Richard finally began to get mildly concerned. It didn’t hurt as often as it had at first, and he could make a wider range of movements without triggering epic discomfort, but when the pain did come it was somehow deeper, as if settled into the bone.

Christine’s solution to the problem was straightforward in its logic and strident in delivery. He should go to the casualty department of the nearest hospital, or at the very least to the doctor’s surgery just down the street from their new flat in Kingsley Road.

Richard’s view, though unspoken, was just as definite: bollocks to that. There were more than enough dull post-move tasks to be endured without traipsing up to the Royal Free Hospital and sitting amongst stoic old women and bleeding youths in a purgatory of peeling linoleum. As they were now condemned to living on a different branch of the Northern line to Hampstead, it would require two dogleg trips down to Camden and back out again — together with a potentially limitless spell on a waiting room bench — and burn up a whole afternoon. Even less appealing was the prospect of going down the road to the nearest GP and explaining in front of an audience of whey-faced locals that he had been living somewhere else, now lived nearby, and wished both to register with the surgery and have the doctor’s apathetic opinion on a rather unspecific pain in Richard’s side. And that he was very sorry for being middle-class and would they please not beat him up.

He couldn’t be bothered, in other words, and instead decided to dedicate Monday to taking a variety of objects out of cardboard boxes and trying to work out where they could be least unattractively placed. Christine had returned to work, at least, which meant she couldn’t see his winces or hear the swearing which greeted every new object for which there simply wasn’t room.

The weekend had been hell, and not just because Richard hadn’t been a hundred percent behind the move in the first place. He
had
wanted to, kind of; or at least he’d believed they
should
do. It had come to him one night while lying in bed in the flat in Belsize Park, listening to the even cadence of Chris’s breathing and wondering at what point in the last couple of months they had stopped falling asleep together. At first they’d drifted off simultaneously, facing each other, four hands clasped into a declaration, determined not to leave each other even for the hours they spent in another realm. Richard half-remembered a poem by someone long dead — Herrick, possibly? — the gist of which had been that though we all inhabit the same place during the day, at night each one of us is hurled into a several world. Well, it hadn’t been that way with them, not at first. Yet after nine months there he was, lying awake, happy to be in the same bed as Chris but wondering where she was.

Eventually he’d got up and wandered through into the sitting room. In the half-light it looked the same as always. You couldn’t see which pictures had been taken down, which objects had been removed from shelves and hidden in boxes at the bottom of cupboards. You couldn’t tell that for three years he had lived there with someone else.

But Richard knew that he had, and so did Christine. As he gazed out over the garden in which Susan’s attempts as horticulture still struggled for life in the face of his indifference, Richard finally realised that they should move. Understood, suddenly and with cold guilt, that Chris probably didn’t like living here. It was a lovely flat with huge rooms and high ceilings. It was on Belsize Avenue, which meant not only was it within three minutes walk of Haverstock Hill, with its cafés, stores, and tube station, but also Belsize ‘village’ just around the corner. A small enclave of shops specifically designed to cater to the needs of the local well-heeled, the village was so comprehensively stocked with patés, wine, videos, and magazines that you hardly ever needed to go up to Hampstead, itself only a pleasant ten minutes’ stroll. The view from the front of the flat was onto the Avenue, wide and spaced with ancient trees. The back was onto a garden neatly bordered by an old brick wall, and although only a few plants grew with any real enthusiasm, the overall effect remained pleasing.

The view through Christine’s eyes was probably different. however. She perhaps saw the local pubs and restaurants in which Richard and Susan had spent years of happy evenings. She maybe felt the tightness with which her predecessor had held Richard’s hand as they walked down to the village, past the gnarled Mulberry tree which was the sole survivor of the garden of the country house which had originally stood there.

She certainly wondered which particular patches of carpet within the flat had provided arenas for cheerful, drunken sex. This had come out one night after they’d come back from an unsuccessful dinner party at one of Christine’s friends, drunk themselves, but irritably drunk. Richard had been bored enough by the evening to respond angrily to her question, and the matter had been dropped.

Standing there in the middle of the night, staring around a room stripped of its familiarity by darkness, he remembered the conversation, the nearest thing they’d yet had to a full-blown row. For a moment he saw the flat as she did, and almost believed he could hear the rustling of gifts from another woman, condemned to storage but stirring in their boxes, remembering the places where they had once stood.

The next morning, over cappuccinos on Haverstock Hill, he’d suggested they move. At the eagerness of her response he felt a band loosen in his chest that he hadn’t even realized was there, and the rest of the day was wonderful.

N
ot so the move
.

Three years’ worth of flotsam, fifty boxes full of stuff. Possessions and belongings which he’d believed to be individual objects somehow metamorphosed into a mass of generic crap to be manhandled and sorted through. The flat they’d finally found was tiny. Well, not
tiny
; the living room and kitchen were big enough, and there was a roof garden — but a good deal smaller than Belsize Avenue, and nearly twenty boxes of Richard’s stuff had to go into storage. Books which he seldom looked at but would have preferred to have around; DVDs which he didn’t want to watch next week, but might in a couple of months; old clothes which he never wore but which had too much sentimental value to be thrown away.

And, of course, The Susan Collection. Objects in boxes, rounded up and buried deeper by putting in further boxes, then sent off to be hidden in some warehouse in Kings Cross.

At a cost of fifteen pounds a week this was going to make living in the new flat even more expensive than the old one — despite the fact it was in Kentish Town and you couldn’t buy a decent chicken liver and hazelnut paté locally for love or money.

On Friday night the two of them huddled baffled and exhausted together in the huge living room in Belsize Avenue, surrounded by mountains of cardboard. They drank cups of coffee and tried to watch television, but the flat had already taken its leave of them. When they went to bed it was if they were lying on a cold hillside in some country where their visa had expired.

The next morning two affable Australians arrived with a van the size of Denmark, and Richard watched, vicariously exhausted, as they trotted up and down the stairs, taking his life away. Chris bristled with cleaning know-how in the kitchen, periodically sweeping past him with a damp cloth in her hand, humming to herself. As the final pieces of furniture were dragged away Richard tried to say goodbye to the flat, but the walls stared back at him with vacant indifference, and offered nothing more than dust in corners which had previously been hidden. Dust, some particles of which were probably Susan’s skin — and his and Chris’s, of course. He left to the sound of a vacuum cleaner and followed the van to their new home.

Where, it transpired, his main bookcase could not be taken up the stairs. The two Australians, by now bedraggled and hot, struggled gamely in the dying light but eventually had to confess themselves beaten. Richard, rather depressed, allowed them to put the bookcase back in the van, to be taken off with the other storage items.

Much later he held out ten pounds to each of them, watched the van squeeze off down the narrow road, and then turned and walked into his new home.

Chris was still at Belsize Avenue, putting finishing touches to the cleaning and negotiating with the old twonk who owned the place. Richard moved a few boxes around while he waited for her to arrive, not wanting to do anything significant before she was there to share it with him, but too tired to just sit still. The lower hallway was almost completely impassable, and he resolved to carry a couple of boxes up to the living room.

It was while he was struggling up the stairs with one of them that he hurt himself.

He was about halfway up, panting under a box which seemed to weigh more than the house itself, when he slipped on a cushion lying on the stairs. Muscles which he hadn’t used since his athletic glory days at school kicked into action, and he managed to avoid falling, colliding heavily with the wall instead. The corner of the box he was carrying crunched solidly into his ribs.

For a moment the pain was truly startling, and a small voice in his head said ‘Well, that’s done it’.

He let the box slide to the floor, and stood panting for a while, fingers tentatively feeling for what he was sure must be at least one broken rib. He half-expected it to be protruding from his chest. He couldn’t find anything which yielded more than usual, however, and after a recuperative cigarette he carefully pushed the box the remainder of the journey up the stairs.

Half an hour later Chris arrived, cheerfully cross about their previous landlord’s attempts to whittle money off their deposit, and set to work on the kitchen.

They fell asleep together that night, three of their hands together; one of Richard’s unconsciously guarding his side.

T
he next morning
his side hurt like hell, but as a fully-fledged male human, Richard knew exactly how to deal with the situation: he ignored it. After four days of looking at the cardboard boxes cheerfully emblazoned with the logo of the removal firm, he had begun to hate the sight of them, and concentrated first on unpacking everything so he could be rid of the boxes.

In the morning he worked in the living room, unpacking to the sound of Chris whistling in the kitchen and bathroom. He discovered that two of the boxes shouldn’t even have been there at all, but were supposed to have been taken with the others and put in storage. One was full of manuals for software he either never used or knew back to front; the other was a box of Susan Objects. As he opened it, Richard realized why it had hurt quite so much when making contact with his ribs. It contained, amongst other things, a heavy and angular bronze which she had made and presented to him. He was lucky it hadn’t impaled him to the wall.

It wasn’t worth calling the removal men out to collect the misplaced boxes and so they ended up in his microscopic study, squatting on top of the filing cabinet. More precious space taken up by stuff which shouldn’t be there; either in the flat or in his life.

The rest of the weekend disappeared in a blur of tidal movement and pizza. Objects migrated from room to room in smaller and slower circles before finally finding new resting places. Chris efficiently unpacked all their clothes and put them in the fitted wardrobes, cooing over the increase in hanging opportunities. Richard tried to organize his books into his
decreased
shelving space, eventually having to lay many on their side and pile them up vertically. He tried to tell himself this looked funky and less anal, but couldn’t get the idea to take. He set up his desk and computer.

By Monday most of it was done, and Richard spent the morning trying to make his study habitable by clearing the few remaining boxes. At eleven Chris called from work, cheerful and full of vim, and he was glad to sense that the move had made her happy. As they were chatting he realized that he must at some point during the morning he have scraped his left hand, because there were a series of shallow scratches, like paper cuts, over the palm and underside of the fingers.

They hardly seemed significant against the pain in his side, and aside from washing his hands when the conversation was over, he ignored them.

In the afternoon he took a break and walked down to the local corner store for cigarettes. It was only his second visit but he knew he’d already seen all it had to offer. The equivalent establishment in Belsize Village had stocked fresh-baked bread, the New York Times and three different types of hand-made pesto. Next door had stood the delicatessen with home-made duck’s liver and port paté. ‘Raj’s EZShop’ sold none of these things, having elected instead to focus single-mindedly on the pot noodle and cheap toilet paper end of the market.

After he left — empty handed but for the cigarettes, which had never happened in Belsize Park — Richard went and peered dispiritedly at the grubby menu hanging in the window of the restaurant opposite. Eritrean food, whatever the hell that was. One of the dishes was described as ‘three pieces of cooked meat’, which seemed both strangely specific and discomfortingly vague.

He turned and walked for home, huddling into his jacket against the cold and feeling — he imagined —like a deposed Russian aristocrat, allowed against all odds to remain alive after the revolution, but condemned to lack everything which he had once held dear. The sight of a small white dog scuttling by only seemed to underline his isolation.

When Chris returned at six she couldn’t understand his quietness, and he didn’t have the heart to try to explain it to her.

‘
W
hat’s that
?’

The answer, Richard saw, appeared to be “a scratch.” About four inches long, it ran across his chest, directly over his heart. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it seemed to have healed and so must have been there for a day or two.