Page 25 of Read My Lips

“Expense yourself a cab home,” he signed, short and hurried. “I’ll message you tomorrow. Get some sleep.”

CHAPTER

EIGHT

SUNDAY

“Hang on.” Matt Holland had half an eye on his sister and half an eye on the TV, signing almost faster than I could keep up with fully rested, let alone missing a night of sleep. “You’re telling me that you, personally, bought all of the plates?” Ramping up the incredulity on his face, my housemate’s signing veered towards unruly. His sneer was already there.

“Yes.” Cathy barely paused in her newspaper-rumpling, plate-wrapping packathon to sign back to him. “I, personally, bought all the plates.”

Sibling disharmony on a Sunday morning. Home sweet home.

I spectacularly failed to kill another zombie. Not because I was shit at killing zombies. Because it was impossible to look in two directions at once. Ok. And I was shit at killing zombies. But after yesterday, I’d wanted to try.

“And you’re taking them? Just like that⁠—”

None of this was news. Generally, people took their things with them when they moved out. I button jabbed with ruthless ineffectiveness.

“—with no consideration for your broth—Oh my god Ben – shoot them. Shoot them! You’re going to get—”Matt dropped his hands in sheer frustration.

The camera spun out to a distance shot: me writhing on the floor while a hoard of animated undead clawed into me and my brains splattered the screen.

I chucked down the controller. It bounced off the only-slightly-dubious stain on the seat cushion next to me. One of Cathy’s throw blankets had artfully hidden that stain, until she’d packed that up too.

Cathy shoved all the cushions into a box, and my eyes started stinging, right at the back. The three of us had lugged the sofa back from Catford strapped to the roof of Matt’s car when we first moved in. Oh god. She was only moving to Balham. I smashed my tongue hard up against the roof of my mouth and breathed through my nose. Gorilla hands. That was my problem. Button-mashing gorilla hands.

And inappropriate attachments.

I used to fancy Cathy too, but I never did anything about it. Eventually, it went away. My obsession with Simon would too. With enough time.

“We don’t need her plates,” I signed. “We can get new plates.” The last roll of packing tape from the three-pack she’d picked up at Poundland sat on the coffee table she was also taking with her. I chucked it at Matt.

Helping. We were supposed to be helping.

“I like those plates.”

Matt’s goodwill was currently being hampered by the unparalleled rejection of his hearing twin shacking up with her hearing boyfriend of six months, after nearly twenty-six years of them living under the same roof (minus the time Cathy was finishing her course in Wolverhampton with me while Matt was on placement down in London). When I wasn’t judgmentally deciding it was a little bit codependent, I could empathise.

“You hate those plates.”

It’d be like, say, if the guy whose work life I’d been entwined with for three years hooked up with someone right under my nose and never bothered telling me until my career was on the line, and then got mad when I tried to save us both by telling his boss we were so much of an item any unobserved horizontal surface was too much of a temptation. Like, if he’d then kissed me, in front of said boss. Entirely for show. Bought me breakfast, then told me to piss off home because he hadn’t got a plan for how to convince anybody in the world he might actually like me, because that reality was laughable enough to need serious suspension of disbelief.

Just possibly, this wasn’t about plates. Just possibly it wasn’t about killing zombies either.

Picking up another box from the flattened stack Cathy was systematically using to denude the entire house, I popped it to three-dimensional life and reeled off a new length of brown tape in a sharp staccato stutter-buzz.

“Suck it up Matt,” I signed. Like hell I was spending my Sunday moping. “Put her books in there. We’re helping.”

Cathy disappeared midway through dismantling the emptied bookcase.

I found her hunched in the kitchen, surrounded by an avalanche of cake tins and saucepans, relieving the lower cupboards of anything you might conceivably use to cook. I tiptoed in through the tupperware as she stuffed mixing bowls into a box, in what did not look like the most space-efficient way possible. At this rate, she’d need a removal van.

She startled. “Bloody hell. Creep up on me, why don’t you? You are far too good at lurking in the background.”

“Sorry.” I winced at myself. “You’re not taking the kettle, are you?”

Twisting the wok in her hand a couple of times, she shoved it upside down on a pile of tea-towels. “I bought it, and the toaster too. Look, I’m just trying to get on as quick as possible. I’ve got a client defending their thesis on Monday, and a packed week. I can’t take any time off.”