Page 90 of Textbook Romance

Jack

‘So you’re basically telling me you can’t be arsed to pay for storage so you’re gifting me all your winter clothes?’ Ben asks me. ‘What if you come back? Do I have to give them back to you?’

Ben looks down at my bed marvelling at my packing system. There is no order here. It’s Borneo so I figured I just needed shorts, t-shirts, pants. Go light, go easy. I just hadn’t accounted for the nine years of crap that I had accumulated since university. Ben tuts at me. He knows I had two months, including the Christmas break, to sort all of this out but I wouldn’t be me without a touch of last-minute spontaneity in my bones. It was why I went to Sarah three weeks after the deadline to ask her if there was still a job on the table. I was lucky it was still there.

‘Frank!’ he says, as he peers his head around the door.

‘I would like to gift you all of these things,’ I say, pointing towards the desk in my room. It’s a tennis racquet, a screwdriver set, and three rolls of Christmas wrapping paper. ‘You can also take any coat you want.’

‘What about the box of paper clips?’ he asks me.

I look down at them, throwing them in my suitcase. ‘Oh, I’m afraid they’re coming with me.’

They both enter the room, sifting through this very last-minute jumble sale that is my life. Frank picks up a jumper and holds it to his face, smelling it.

‘Frank, I didn’t realise you loved me so,’ I joke.

He pulls a face at me, but poor Frank has not taken the news of me leaving too well. Ben and I were his first housemates since leaving home. I think he sensed that even though we took the piss out of him constantly, we were fiercely protective of him, too.

‘If you’re ever out that way, you will come and see me, right?’ I gesture to Frank as he goes through some of my old toiletries. He picks up a toiletry set that was my Secret Santa at school before I left. ‘Both of you will, yeah?’

‘Mate, that’s the beauty of friends who move abroad. The perfect excuse for holidays,’ Ben replies. He comes over to embrace me, and we usher Frank over to join in.

‘My next housemates will likely be mosquitoes,’ I tell them.

‘I need to make a small prick joke now, don’t I?’ Ben says.

‘Don’t cheapen Jack’s leaving by making jokes about his penis,’ Frank says.

And we all laugh, which is a relief. He’s getting the banter, finally.

‘Is that why you kept a ruler under the bathroom sink?’ Frank asks. Ben doubles over laughing.

‘I kept that to help unplug the shower,’ I tell them, which is the truth.

‘Yeah, whatever,’ Ben says. ‘Make sure you wash that ruler before you use it, Frank.’

I shake my head at them as they continue to rummage through my belongings.

‘Oooh, hangers!’ Frank says, distracted, and heads over to the wardrobe. Frank has a work colleague lined up to move in next week, but I hope that we can all agree that I will be forever missed. I reach over to a folder on my bed, stuffed to the brim with visas and travel documents, looking around this small space I called home for a while. Downstairs, I hear the patter of tiny feet running down the hallway.

‘JACK?’ Dom’s voice thunders up the stairs. ‘WE’RE HERE!’

I figured. I leave Ben and Frank to continue scavenging and head down to see Barney and George have run straight into the living room and found Frank’s PS4 almost immediately, like homing pigeons. ‘Lads, shoes off the sofa, yeah?’ I say, popping my head through the door. I head down to the kitchen where I find Dom staring at the alarming number of sockets that seem to be held together by gaffer tape.

‘Is that safe?’ he asks.

‘Who knows?’

‘Have we got time for a cuppa?’

‘Always.’

I turn on the kettle and he takes a seat, balancing at my wobbly kitchen table. If Frank has not taken my leaving well, I’m not quite sure what emotion I’m getting from Dom. It seems to be some sort of push-and-pull feeling where he can’t wait for me to leave but every time I hold him in an embrace, I’m not sure he wants to let me go.

‘So, have you thought about bringing the boys over to see me in the summer?’ I ask him.

He laughs. ‘Those boys on a thirteen-hour flight and living in a treehouse? I’m not sure that’s a holiday!’

---