“Do you want me to hogtie and gag my family so that you can get a few moments of peace?”
“Do you want another Buck’s fizz?”
“Maybe a sneaky tug in the garage?”
There are three rooms in the downstairs part of the house. The kitchen-diner, the lounge, and a microscopic little toilet cubicle just off the even more microscopic porch. The people here seem to be working some kind of ballet that only they know the moves for, dancing from one room to another. Even Stu, who mostly seems tied to the stove, pops his head into the lounge to catch up on the recent family gossip and rugby news. When that runs dry, they all switch to playing a game I’ve mentally labelled as “let’s see who can embarrass Eggo the most,” as they regale me with stories from his youth.
My favourites include the time Eggo locked himself inside a rabbit hutch, the time he tried to collar a badger and keep it as a pet but ended up renewing his tetanus jab instead, the time he got drunk and stole an Avant loader from a gasworks site, the time he got drunk and told a police officer to “wind your fucking neck in,” and the time he got drunk, stripped naked, and fell asleep at the miniature golf course. He was twenty, and to everyone’s great enjoyment there’s lasting photographic evidence of this.
“Sir, I can see your derriere,” I tell him, handing the photo back to Kelly and making everybody in the living room laugh. The folk in the kitchen are retold my comment like hearsay whispers of a historical moment.
Eggo shows me his childhood bedroom. It might even be smaller than the downstairs toilet. I’m able to touch opposite walls at the same time. There’s a cabin-style bunk bed, and underneath is a beanbag, an old-school television set with a bulbous back, and a couple of game consoles. On the other side of the room is a built-in wardrobe, and covering the walls are a mixture of Pokémon and rugby posters, and a handful of photos of either Jody, Eggo, or Logan, or a mix of the three.
“Logan stays here now when my folks look after him,” Eggo tells me. He closes the door, but there’s nowhere for us to sit so we stand wedged in beside the loft bed.
“Do you stay here too?”
“I usually sleep in Lee’s old room. It’s next door. It’s bigger, though not by much, and it has a double bed, but she’s already bagsied it for Christmas.” His smile drops and his eyes caress my face. I’m willing him to kiss me, but he doesn’t. “Listen, if it gets too much for you down there, just let me know and we’ll leave, okay? Or if you don’t want to leave, we could stand in the garden for a bit.”
“Okay.” I can’t quite find the words to summon the gratitude I feel. It’s Halloween all over again, except this time it’s his family that he hasn’t seen for at least a couple of months. He’s willing to give that up to comfort me.
“We’ll work out a secret code.” He scratches his beard as he thinks. “‘Eggs, fancy a vape?’ That’s code for ‘I need to go outside and get some air’ and . . . Ooh, I’ve got it. ‘I’ve left my meds at the hotel,’ is code for ‘Get me the fuck out of here.’ How’s that?”
I laugh.
“I’m being serious. If you need to leave, just let me know.”
“Sure.” I nod. “Thank you.”
He pats me on the shoulder, then turns to walk away, but I grab his hand and tug him back round to face me. And I kiss him. Pour all of my gratitude into something where words can’t fail me.
It’s urgent and breathy, and Eggo is grabbing my ass and squeezing me close to him.
“Fuck, Campbell. I’m gonna let you ruin me tonight.” Eggo pulls away and catches his breath. “I’m hard as a fucking goal post now.”
“Come on,” I say, seizing his shoulders and spinning him, since there’s no space for me to pass. “We’re not here to fuck spiders. They’ll be getting suspicious downstairs.”
“Okay, princess.”
They were indeed getting suspicious.
“Your T-shirts are inside out,” Leoni says, and even though neither Eggo nor I stripped off our clothes, we both check the seams on our shoulders, making us look a thousand times guiltier than we actually are. “Busted,” she sings.
Eggo’s eyes turn to saucers and he glances towards the kitchen to see who else is around, hammering the final nail in the guilty coffin. “Well, we didn’t do . . . what you think we were doing, so . . .”
“Sure, Jan,” she says.
He grabs her forearm. “Do not tell Dale, okay?”
“Oh, Dale already knows,” Dale says, joining us in the increasingly cramped living room.
“Dale already knows what?” Fi asks from the doorway.
A grin, very reminiscent of one of Eggo’s grins, spreads across Leoni’s face. She opens her mouth to speak, but Eggo gets there first.
“That it was in fact Lee who used your fabric scissors to cut all of Titan’s fur off.”
Everyone gasps.
