Page 141 of For Real

“You should wait for him. As long as you wait quietly and stay out of my way.”

“Really? I… Yes…thank you.”

“Shh.”

I put my hand over my mouth before an instinctive “sorry” could escape.

Coal’s loft was mainly a space and a view. Spectacular, but I wasn’t sure I would have been entirely comfortable living here. There was a tiny kitchen tucked into one corner, what looked like a portioned-off bathroom, and a curtain that I tentatively drew aside to reveal what must have been Toby’s bedroom. I felt awkward for trespassing, but there wasn’t really anywhere else I could go.

Toby’s little bit of home was surprisingly austere: just a rack for his clothes, a futon to sleep on, a little bookcase stuffed mainly with poetry and cookery books, and a cuddly honey badger sitting on top of his pillow. The walls were haphazardly plastered with the accumulated passions of all his nineteen years. From the number of starscapes and earth rises and maps of the solar system, it seemed that once upon a time Toby might have wanted to be an astronaut. Or perhaps, from the dinosaur evolution charts and fossil guides, a palaeontologist. There was also a biodiversity poster of Western Australia’s deep sea, a National Geographic spread of angelfish, and a cross section of a coral reef from what was presumably his marine biologist phase.

Oh, Toby. Toby.

Less easily classifiable were the cover art for the Penguin Dorothy Parker, a film still of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers I recognised from Swing Time, a concert poster for Rufus Wainwright—5 Nights of Velvet, Glamour, and Guilt at the Royal Opera House, and a Dr. Seuss verse: “Today you are You, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is Youer than You.” And finally what turned out to be a detail of Saint Sebastian from Titian’s Averoldi Polyptych—something I only knew because it was written on the bottom of the print. It showed a particularly muscular and slightly wild St. Sebastian struggling with the arrows that pierced him.

I could see why he liked it.

I took off my shoes and sat cross-legged on Toby’s futon, staring at the image and wondering if he had stared at it, dreaming of a man on his knees and yearning for the real thing. I reached into my pocket and checked my phone. No messages. No missed calls. Tried Toby again and got only his recorded voice while I sat in his empty room.

Time passed slowly. The sky through Toby’s sloping window turned pearly grey.

Eventually I lay down. The pillow smelled of his hair product.

I thought maybe I could cry now, but I was afraid that might constitute a disturbance of his mother, so I cuddled his honey badger instead and waited for him to find me.

* * *

I end up at Granddad’s room before I remember it isn’t his room anymore.

The door is slightly ajar, which is what stops me barging in on some strangers. It’s like looking into Narnia or something. This unfamiliar world, full of wrong things, when I’d got used to it being his. Ours.

There’s someone asleep in the bed. This frail, person-shaped outline, breathing too faint, too shallow. I recognise that fractured rhythm. It’s the way you breathe when your body thinks every breath might be the last. And there’s two women, hand in hand, waiting there, one of them dozing in an oh fuck, your neck is going to hurt tomorrow slump, and the other reading on a Kindle. She glances up, and I’m stuck standing there, feeling awkward and intrusive and creepy as fuck. I mouth sorry and she smiles, and I back away.

I wander the silent, shadowy corridors a bit and end up in the sunroom. It’s empty, of course, since it’s gone two. It’s weird in there at night: surrounded by dark glass and the sheen of moonlight. I grope my way over to the chair I’d sat in when Granddad was having a super-good day. What with him dying during the winter, we’d never actually got much sun in here, but it was light and he liked being able to look at the garden. Not much to see there, either, to be honest. Dark soil and bits of green. And right now, nothing at all.

I take off my shoes and curl up.

My own reflection in the windows makes me look like a ghost.

I guess I fall asleep. I don’t really remember, but the next thing I know there’s a hand on my shoulder, shaking me gently awake.

“Wuzzat,” I say. Someone’s switched on a lamp and even that’s enough to dazzle me. Eventually though, I knuckle my eyes clear and discover Marwa—one of the nurses—leaning over me.

“What are you doing here?” It’s a fair question and she doesn’t ask it unkindly.

Unfortunately, I don’t have an answer. “Um…I just… I…”

She doesn’t say anything for a bit, and I wonder what I’ll do if I get thrown out since the Tube isn’t running and—as usual—I’ve got no money. But then she holds out a hand to help me out of the chair. “I was going to put the kettle on. Do you fancy a cuppa?”

I nod and follow her to the staff kitchen, and she makes me the sort of tea you’re not supposed to like, all full of milk and sugar. Except I do like it. And even holding the mug feels good, my hands coming slowly to life in the warmth. Then we sit down at this rickety little table, and for what seems like ages we don’t do anything. Just drink our tea in the quiet.

“Must feel strange,” she says. “Not coming here every day.”

I shrug. I hadn’t come every day. Just most days. And it wasn’t a chore.

She gives me this wicked little smile. “And what are we going to do without your cakes?”

I used to like her smile—she was Granddad’s favourite—but now it just hurts in this unexpected way. I don’t know what to do, how to handle it, and shrug again.

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