December 2013
Simon’s legs widen as the doors beep rapidly ten times and close. Catherine hasn’t got on. Catherine hasn’t not got on the 6.18 train since Simon first offered her a Polo mint and they started talking, travelling together, exchanging texts… and for a moment, a rare thing happens and Simon starts to doubt himself. He looks at his phone and scrolls through their most recent flirtation. Simon always ends the conversation on a text from Catherine. In business, he’ll respond, look keen, be last to send a friendly note, but with women, he ensures he isn’t the last to reply. That’s how he works and it’s never failed him before. Keep ’em hanging. Last night, Simon made one simple suggestion as he arched his phone screen towards the radiator, away from his wife Laura sitting next to him on the sofa doing online banking, while Gracie, Monty and Esmée slept upstairs, dreaming feverishly of Christmas to come: ‘Meet for an after-party of our own?’
Catherine didn’t answer. The conversation ended with him texting her. That made Simon feel more uncomfortable than the risk he had taken, putting the idea out there, of he and Catherine meeting after their works’ Christmas parties. Now Catherine isn’t on the train and Simon’s face feels hot with embarrassment and rejection and he’s worried he might have blown it when it felt so obvious they were going to fuck.
He looks out of the window as the train gathers speed. Over the bridge. Past the house with the two iron butterflies nailed to the render. Towards bare brown fields, ploughed into orderly lines that are gently kissed by the first frost of the season.
A phone vibrates in Simon’s tight raspberry red trouser pocket. Party trousers. A little jazzier than his usual work attire. He runs a hand to push his grey hair back from forehead to crown and it perches obediently in place, as if on tenterhooks to see what communication awaits its master.
Stuck in back half so found a seat here. But I like your style. I’ll see you at the Hotel du Vin you Naughty Boy.’
He replies with a wink,
Happy fucking Christmas.
Oh, and I’m not wearing any knickers.
Simon laughs audibly and northbound commuters look at him witheringly.
Slut. She deliberately got on the back half of the train, the tease.
Simon wonders what Catherine’s beautiful pixie face will look like when they’re having sex. And doesn’t reply.
*
Jacob and Florian lift the last of the boxes over the threshold and into the hallway of Maya’s new home. As with all the other boxes, trunks and suitcases they moved five streets from Jacob’s terraced house to this airy Victorian maisonette, they carried them at an incline of fifteen degrees as Florian’s formidable height made the contents of, well, everything, slide to Jacob’s end, and stockier shoulders had to bear extra weight.
Jacob leans his back against the hallway wall and slides down it until his bottom hits the black and white checked tiles of the floor. Florian looks at him with brotherly disdain and a dry mouth.
‘Jesus Christ any chance of a tea?’ Florian shouts up the flight of stairs.
‘Kettle’s boiling!’ Maya hollers back.
Maya stands in the small kitchen at the top of the stairs with Jacob’s girlfriend Amelia, who is rummaging for mugs in a crate marked ‘crockery’. Maya opens a box of tea bags she just picked up from the corner shop on the next street. The boys regroup.
‘Watch it bellend!’ snaps Jacob as Florian nearly lets go of the last box and sends it down the stairs, flattening Jacob in its wake.
‘Sorry, my bad.’
As brothers with tired arms leave the box at the top and walk into the kitchen, both are hit by the glimmering light of winter sunshine bouncing through an undressed window and onto the stainless-steel kettle. Both make a visor with their right hand to protect their eyes. Both have the same pistachio green eyes of their father, the same light brown hair, and the same acerbic wit. Clara and Maya got their mother’s darker eyes, although only Maya’s flash with shards of orange.
‘Got any biscuits?’ grumbles a disgruntled babygiant. ‘I’m starving.’
‘Oh yeah,’ Maya says, rummaging through the red and white stripy plastic bag from the corner shop.
‘Custard Creams, Jaffa Cakes or Lindt Santas?’
‘Two of each,’ Florian commands.
Amelia, with her deep auburn mane plaited into a braid, hands mugs of tea out while Maya, dusting her hands down on her running sweatshirt and leggings, opens the biscuits.
‘I’m really so so grateful, guys,’ she says, eyebrows rising just in the middle.
‘No problem,’ says Jacob, ever accommodating. ‘Flowers & Flowers Removals really ought to go into business.’
This weekend the brothers will move Amelia from her Nottingham flat into Jacob’s house in time for their first Christmas together.
‘No, we shouldn’t,’ Florian says flatly.
Maya gives him a grateful rub on the back.
‘Got any bread?’
Maya opens a box marked ‘food’ and finds some pumpernickel.
‘Any good?’ she shrugs apologetically.
Maya’s baby brothers, as reliable as ever. Clara’s hands are so full with her three sons that it’s always Jacob and Florian who rise to this kind of occasion. They are young, they are strong and they are around. They helped Maya out of her Finsbury Park flat three years ago, when her hair turned wavy, and brought her back home. At first, home was Flowers Towers, as their father Herbert calls it. The Georgian house at the top of the hill overlooking Hazelworth that has the perfect balance of symmetry for its orderly patriarch. Two chimneys at opposing ends of the long roof. Two long white windows on either side of the threshold, and one more with a small wrought-iron balcony perched above the grand white stone surround of the front door. Inside, pictures adorn every wall in pleasing, if dusty, alignment, and how fortuitous that Herbert and Dolores Flowers filled the house with two girls and two boys. It was healthy for Maya to be home, to be reunited with the bookcase she gazed at as a child, but when Jacob bought the terraced house near the train station, he offered Maya the spare room while she fixed her heart and found her feet. Jacob. NASA StarChild at five, Young Scientist of The Year at thirteen, first-time buyer before his big sister.
‘It really is lovely, Maya,’ says Amelia, looking to the high kitchen ceiling. ‘And it doesn’t need all that much work.’
‘Oh god it does, look at those frames,’ Maya motions to the kitchen window, sun still beating in. ‘I could break into those windows with a toothpick! Good job my most valuable item is only a KitchenAid.’
‘Bingo!’ says Florian, pulling a squashed loaf of bread out of a cardboard box.
Florian stays for a sandwich while Jacob and Amelia stroll down the road arm in arm, back five streets to his house – their house – and an exciting future ahead of them.