Page 43 of The Key to My Heart

We make our way across the hot car park, heat shimmering in airwaves above the ground.

‘Beautiful, eh?’ Tom throws the car keys in the air and catches them, grins at me. ‘Don’t say I don’t take you anywhere.’

‘Wouldn’t dare,’ I reply as a juddering, blue-framed automatic door swallows us up.

The warehouse is exactly what you would expect. Windowless with high ceilings and caged pallets full of boxes and too-bright fluorescent lights. The air smells of something nostalgic too – glue, maybe. A sort of varnish. It reminds me of the construction block in secondary school where we’d make letter holders, and boys would glue-gun their fingers together before getting sent to the headmaster with hands like lobster claws.

‘So, what I’m thinking is,’ says Tom, strolling easily beside me, ‘tile paint in the kitchen, and for the bathroom, you want something plain. White, or maybe even a grey …’

‘Ooh, good plan.’

‘Because plain and modern sells. Not that you’ve decided yet,’ Tom carries on, ‘but … well, you said you like neutral too, so, win-win, right?’

Tom points out plain, white brick-like tiles with bevelled edges, white square tiles, and ones in a blueish grey, like fish scales. There’s a couple in front of us, picking up samples, holding them against a bookmark-shaped pieceof card – a paint colour, I suppose. ‘I think that would go so nice with the yellow,’ I hear one of them say, ‘especially if we get white towels, white accessories …’ And I feel something that practically stops me in my tracks. Right there, in the gluey warehouse. It’s …possibility.That’s the word if I had to find one. Possibility, that, maybe, like others do, Icansell the cottage. I can move. And maybe I can find somewhere new, pick tiles out for that, like these people – a fresh slate, with no history, no blueprint. God, imagine not living next to Roy and his disapproving tutting …

But then, there it is. Of course it is.

One of the couple reaches for the other’s hand and one of them says something, and they laugh. And, like clockwork, there’s that hot pang that rises like a slow tide.Guilt.Russ. Russ loved Three Sycamore. We put everything on the line to buy Three Sycamore. Being here feels like betrayal.

‘These are cool, too, no?’ says Tom, obliviously. ‘I have something similar at my flat. Flatmate hates them, but I like to think he’s a styleless animal, so—’

‘Yeah. Let’s get them.’

‘Yeah?’ He raises his eyebrows. ‘I mean, you can look at some more, there’s about abillion—’

‘No, let’s just grab them. And go.’

Tom crosses his arms over his broad chest. ‘We don’t have to do this if you don’t want to,’ he says softly. ‘We can – wait? Or you can order some samples online or—’

‘No, I do. I do want to do it. I just – I feel like if I don’t get them now, I’ll talk myself out of it. I’m reallygood at that. Con-artist levels of persuasion. But if I just buy them, it means … it’s done.’

Tom hesitates, then nods.

‘But I want to. To buy the tiles.’

‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Well, I reckon three boxes should do it. We’re only doing the splashbacks, so … these ones?’

‘These ones.’

We buy the tiles, silently standing side by side at the till, and on the way back, neither of us really speaks. The radio plays and a warm breeze thick with the smell of cut grass and hot charcoal blows through the car, and I people-watch out of the window. I think of Joe, wonder if he felt this, when he left Dorset for London, where he lived with his brother until he died. I think of the tiles in boxes at my feet. I think of Three Sycamore. I think of Russ’s face at the bedroom window of the cottage the day we viewed it; him in the hospital bed; the car mounting that kerb, him being left there, in the road, like a hit squirrel, like a bird. This is what happens. This is what happens every single time I try to move forward. It’s like treacle. Like vines, wrapping around my ankles, dragging me back. The guilt and the grief and the stop signs that seem to appear the second I hold my head up high and choose a path.

‘Hey,’ says Tom, and I’ve hardly noticed that we’ve pulled over into a small, quiet residential street. The sort with perfect red-brick Victorian houses and neat hedges and pastel-painted doors. ‘Do you fancy a drink somewhere? Cool pub ’round the corner.’

Within minutes, Tom and I are upstairs at a tiny, tucked-away pub, at an even tinier roof terrace which is mostly shaded by a wooden pergola, and flowers, which tumble down and along the wooden trellis edges. There are so many. Big, beautiful puffs of pansies and begonias, in reds, corals and lemon-curd yellows, bees constantly arriving and taking off, like flights on an airport runway.

Tom and I sit at one of only two tables squashed up here, cold shandies in straight, curveless glasses in front of us. At the other table, a woman sits alone, rolling cigarettes, long blonde hair trailing down her back, steam from a small chimney behind her puffing out the smell of the kitchen downstairs. Yeasty batter and hot vegetable oil.

‘So, come on, is it the tiles?’ says Tom, sitting back in the wooden chair opposite me, shaded, except from a beam of sun that hits his tanned arm. ‘You’re quiet. Do you think I’ve got terrible taste and you’re trying to think of a way to break it to me?’

‘Nah, your taste is all right, Thomas,’ I say with a smile. ‘And I’m okay. Probably just tired, that’s all. Didn’t sleep well.’ And, of course, it’s not that. It’s the house. It’s moving. Or not moving. It’s every decision I have to make and wish I didn’t have to.

Tom gives a nod. A warm breeze ruffles his hair.

‘Nice place, this, anyway,’ I say. ‘Super quiet and tucked away. It’s like … an old man pub having a mid-life crisis.’

Tom laughs. ‘Yeah, I like it. Especially up here. It feels like an afterthought. As if we could just suddenlyfall through the roof and land in some old codger’s lap because it’s notquitea terrace, is it? More a … decorated roof. This is my old street actually.’

‘Really? I thought you were a Finsbury Park man.’

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