Page 91 of For Real

I turned away from the mirror, two bands of crumpled silk hanging loose around my shoulders. “What the fuck do you think I’m doing?”

“I honestly have no idea. It looks like a car crash from here.”

“Why,” I snapped, “is yours on a string?”

“No way. Some of us are classy and know what we’re doing.” He crooked his finger at me. “C’mere.”

Infinitely worse than the plug was kneeling between Toby’s legs as the classy nineteen-year-old expertly tied my bow tie for me.

Except it wasn’t embarrassing at all.

It was intimate. Toby’s fingers at my throat, his breath against my cheek, like the moment of a kiss.

It didn’t stop the little monster buzzing me as I stepped into the hallway, making me gasp and steady myself on the wall.

It was going to be an interesting evening.

Jasper had rooms on the next staircase. We should have been there twenty minutes ago, so I knocked and pushed open the door without really paying much attention to whatever was happening inside.

“Um,” I said, “hello, Jasper.”

Toby came in after me, and then came to an abrupt halt. “That”—his eyes had gone comically wide—“is so not black tie.”

8

Toby

So I guess I’m expecting somebody like Laurie. Or somebody sort of teachery. Or maybe somebody sort of grandfathery, since I think academics are supposed to be old.

What I’m not expecting is a guy slumped in an armchair wearing a pair of grey silk boxers and drinking something that’s probably brandy straight from one of those crystal decanter things they have in costume dramas.

And Laurie is all, “Hello, Jasper,” like this is normal.

Oxford, man. Fucking nuts.1

He stares at us a moment, totally not freaking out that he’s sitting there practically naked. “Oh. Laurie. And your plus-one. I didn’t know pederasty was a vice of yours.”

Laurie has his stern face on. “My vices are both well documented and none of your business. This is my… This is Toby.”

My Toby? I can live with that.

Jasper gives me this sort of pale, graceful hand, limply palm down, like I’m supposed to bow over it and kiss it. Which I’m totally not doing, so I ignore it. “Uh. Hi.”

“Delighted, I’m sure, Tobias.”

I scowl. It takes a special kind of wanker to call you something that isn’t the name they’ve been given. “It’s Toby. And it’s not Tobias, it’s Tobermory, actually.”

I hate my name. Words cannot express how much I hate my name. But right now I’m really fucking pleased my mum’s a nutcase so that when he says, Ah, like the city, or maybe, Ah, like the whisky, I can be all smug and, Actually no.

He’s looking at me again, which is when I realise he’s wearing glasses as well as underwear. I don’t know if that makes it worse or better. And, finally, what he says is, “‘Here and there among cats one comes across an outstanding superior intellect, just as one does among the ruck of human beings, and when I made the acquaintance of Tobermory a week ago I saw at once that I was in contact with a “Beyond-cat” of extraordinary intelligence.’”

Which kind of takes the wind out of my sails because it means he gets it. Gets a little piece of me. Some bloke I’m not sure I’d trust to open a can of beans. But that’s when he smiles at me, and it’s like he’s totally delighted, and weirdly, I feel okay again.

“Am I missing something?” asks Laurie.

“Only something sublime, darling. Go back to your skulls and your stethoscopes.” Jasper’s diction is a bit too perfect, the way you only get when you’re a Beyond-drunk of (probably) extraordinary intelligence. “You know, Toby, if I was called Tobermory, I would never let anyone call me anything else.”2

All my instincts are screaming at me that I’m in the presence of a complete arse-pot, but when he’s looking at me and smiling at me like that, I feel like the centre of an amazing, shiny universe. My mum does that sometimes. It scares me that some people have that much power, and half the time they don’t even care.

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