CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“You need to change the ringtone on your mobile phone,” Jarrod said around a mouthful of scrambled eggs, and I pushed myself away from the table to answer it.
“What’s the problem?” I said. “Too tinny?”
I picked up his cell from beside the bed. “Hello?”
“Sebastian, this is Francine Perlman. I hope I didn’t wake you.”
I checked the time on my watch; it was half-past eight in the morning, kind of early for a lawyer to be calling. “No, I was awake.”
“We’ve made progress. Your ex’s lawyer has been in touch with me, so you can come out of hiding. We jousted a little on the phone, indulged in litigious-chest beating, and made progress. I’ve arranged for our tame social worker to do a home visit to you on Monday. She’ll write a report about what a shining example of humanity you are, that thing. Now, what I need you to do is clean your house up. If you’re a slob, get someone else to help you, someone who’s a control freak. Pretend your mother is coming to stay; get rid of your porn and booze and drugs, don’t hide them. Fill your fridge with nutritious food, not beer and algae.”
“Oh, God,” I said. “How'd you know about my fridge?”
Francine chuckled. “Honey, that was an educated guess. Think you can do all of this for me?”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling too. “I can do that.”
“Someone wanted to talk to you about your fridge?” Jarrod said when I sat back down.
“Kind of. That was Francine, the lawyer. I’ve got to clean my house up this weekend. Clean it. And I can stop hiding here too.”
There was a flicker of something on Jarrod’s face. Regret? He said, “I’ll help you, you know, don’t you?”
“I will need a hand,” I said. “The place is a mess and I’m supposed to make it fit for a social worker to inspect.”
“A mess?” Jarrod said. “A mess? If you think your place is a mess, we will need extra help on this.”
***
I recognized Chloe when she climbed out of her car. She had her hair tied back in a ponytail and was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and no make-up. Apart from the impressive bust stretching her T-shirt, she wasn’t someone that I would have looked twice at if he were at the mall.
She lugged her vacuum cleaner up to my porch, kissed Jarrod on the cheek, then me, and wrinkled her nose at the stack of boxes that filled the porch.
“Hi, Jarrod,” she said, and she tipped her head to one side and looked at me. “Is Sebastian your name? Or is that just a stage name?”
“Sebastian is my name,” I said.
Chloe smiled. “Hi Sebastian, call me Ella. I hope you’re ready to throw away almost everything you own.”
I looked at the pile of boxes on the porch. “Do you think so?” he asked. “Are you sure?”
Ella took a roll of garbage bags out of the carry bag over her shoulder. “Oh yeah. You carry all these boxes to the curb, and I’ll start inside. Come on, Jarrod, let’s go tackle the bathroom first.” She produced a bottle of bleach from the bag too.
I looked at the boxes on the porch. I was sure I had important stuff in them, I couldn’t remember what now. As I picked up the first box, I heard Jarrod say, “The shower has lumps in it, Ella.”
There was a pause, and the bottom dropped out of the box I was holding, sending ancient magazines tumbling across the porch. “So you’ve had a shower here, have you? Isn’t that interesting?” Ella said, and I dropped the box to the porch and picked up the next one and lugged it out to the curb.
When the porch was cleared, I found Jarrod stacking everything that was on the living room floor onto the couch in a mound of debris, and Ella standing in front of the painting in the living room that took up one entire wall.
“… towels,” she said. “And sheets and a bed cover. As many of your household plants as you can fit in your car. And saucepans… Thanks, babe. And you’ve got to come and see his paintings, they’re awesome.” She chuckled. “See you soon.”
Ella turned to smile at me. “I was calling for reinforcements. Yolande will come and help too and bring over the stuff you’re missing.”
“Yolande?” I asked.
“Yuki,” Ella explained. “I woke her up, but there isn’t much she wouldn’t do for you after you got her that contract with Minx.”
Feeling the need to explain myself, I said, “I did nothing, just shot a few minutes footage of her, that’s all.”
“She loves you anyway. Said she saw the footage you took of her and it smoldered.” Ella chuckled. “You were out driving so you didn’t hear this, but Yolande carried on about how sexy you were and how much you must love women to have been able to film that footage. Then Selene said you were gay, that you didn’t fancy women at all, and they had a row about it.”
“I would have thought having an ex-wife, and a son was a sign, even if I knocked Selene back,” I said, and I looked at Jarrod, who was carrying an armful of coffee cups to the kitchen. “Jarrod? You said nothing about this?”
Jarrod shrugged as much as he could with his arms full and put the cups down on the counter. “I figured inscrutable was the best option. I could of have told them I knew from personal experience you swung and that you were a screamer too, but that wouldn’t have been discreet.”
Ella shook her head. “Well, paint me stupid. I’ve been trying to get you two together. You could have let me know or something.”
I hugged Ella. “It was just too much fun watching you.”
Ella hugged me back. “OK, Sebastian. Load the washing machine, then go through the stuff on the sofa. If you can’t put it away, you can’t keep it. I coated the bathroom in bleach, soaking, so I’ll start in on the kitchen. I’m not doing the fridge though, that’s just too disgusting.”
By the time that Yolande arrived, I had cleared the couch off and was vacuuming the carpet. Even I could tell it was in a bad state, but I had a sneaking suspicion it had never vacuumed it before. I hadn’t seen it for at least six months. There was paint splattered over it and copious coffee stains, and it looked hideous like someone had vomited all over it.
Yolande dropped a rolled-up rug beside me when I stood up, and I turned the vacuum cleaner off and hugged her.
“Hi, babe,” she said. “Concentrate on the edges of the room, we can hide the middle with this.” She spotted the paintings on the wall, and her eyes went wide and her jaw dropped. “These are yours?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said, and she turned to look at me.
“Why the hell are you working for Eamon when you could be a painter?”
“I’ve sold three paintings in my life, for a combined total of $700,” I said. “If I can’t make a living as an actor, I’m not going to make it as a painter.”
She shook her head. “Come and carry stuff in from the car for me.”
She had baskets of linen in her car, and the back seat was full of plants, which she made him put on the porch.
“OK, Sebastian,” she said, slapping me on the back. “We’re doing your bedroom next. Grab one basket and you can stack all your porn in it.”
I went to complain about wanting privacy to sort out my porn, but I caught sight of Ella glaring at me from the kitchen where she was scrubbing the countertops, and I thought better. There was no way I could do this job by myself.
I stood on a chair in my bedroom and handed down all of my porn videos to Yolande, who chuckled over the range. “I knew you were into women,” she said when I handed her the tapes. What she made of the rest of the collection I didn’t find out, but I guessed that as a prostitute nothing that a guy would be into would surprise her anymore.
My fridge was gross, I decided as I emptied the stuff out. Not that it smelt bad, it was the gunk in the bottom. The freezer was empty of anything except ice and my stash, so that wasn’t a problem, and as for the beer, I had three thirsty prostitutes in this kitchen disposing of that for mr.
Jarrod handed me down a beer and I ignored the state of his hands and took it.
Yolande picked up the plastic container that my stash was in and opened it. “Great,” she said. “Got papers?”
“Top of the fridge,” I said. “Roll me one too.”
“Don’t even think of it,” Jarrod said, searching around on top of the fridge. “Someone’s bound to want to drug test you. We’ll get rid of it for you.”
Jarrod was grinning down at him when I looked up. “A noble sacrifice,” I said. “Save me from just throwing it away.”
When I carried the wash basket full of wet clothes out to the washing line, the three of them were sitting on the brick paving out the back, amidst the weeds, passing a joint between them. He heard Yolande say, “Really?” in a salacious voice, and they all looked up at me.
We took all day, but by the late afternoon, my house was clean. There was a pervasive smell of bleach through the place, and there was a huge mound of rubbish on the curb that I would have to haul somewhere in my car, but the house was clean. We made the beds with the linen borrowed from Yolande, clean crisp sheets and fluffy blankets. There were thick white towels hanging in the sparkling bathroom, stainless steel saucepans sitting on his gleaming stove, and we cleaned the porch of boxes, cobwebs, and dirt, and lined with household plants. My clothes were folded in the drawers as were Billy’s. All I had left to do the next day was to buy food for the fridge.
The baskets of porn were in my car, with the rest of the beer, ready to go to Jarrod’s place, along with a decent chunk of my video collection. Ella had been put in charge of censoring that and had culled out all the movies that could be considered offensive.
When I carried the pizzas back in, Yolande, Ella, and Jarrod were all sprawled out on the rug that Yolande had brought over, watching an old movie I had had a part in and cooing over my handsome co-star. I put the pizza boxes down on the coffee table, something Ihadn’t been able to do for the past year because of the clutter, and slumped down on the couch.
I was dead tired, absolutely exhausted, and relieved I didn’t have to work that night. Jarrod didn’t because, saying nothing to me, he’d changed his days off so we matched, something that I was pleased about.
How Yolande and Ella would work, I wasn’t sure, but they’d nap in the TV room as much as they could.
“Thank you,” I said to the three as they reached for pizza slices. “I owe all of you for this.”
Ella waved her pizza at me and said, “No problem, love. We all just want you to get your son back.”
I looked around the room, unrecognizable now in its pristine neatness and sighed. “Me too.”
As Ella and Yolande left, Ella slapped me on the back. “No sex here, OK? You’ll just mess up the sheets. You’ve got to go to Jarrod’s place to do that.”
“I liked you better when you were just trying to set us up,” I said, and Ella laughed as she unlocked her car and pushed the vacuum cleaner onto the backseat.
Jarrod put his arms around my waist as Yolande and Ella’s cars disappeared down the road. “I’m too tired to have sex,” he wailed. “Too tired, too wasted. Take me home, Sebastian.”