Page 93 of Read My Lips

“I brought the shopping.”

Only Gran would see letting me use my day off to pick up her shopping and come round to put it all away in her cupboards, as her doing me a favour.

Scratch that. It was a massive favour. Anything to distract me from trying to message Simon a garbled excuse for my backlog of stalker pictures. I’d deleted drafts of a dozen grovelled justifications last night.

“Speak up! Big lad like you mumbling all the time... Ridiculous.”

I raised my voice above the drone of the TV, trying to round in front of her to talk, but her eyes were down, set into her usual frown.

“I said I brought the shopping.” The bags twisted, spinning tight around my fingers, strangling the blood right out of them.

After she broke her hip, I helped her move out of the bungalow up in Newcastle and come down to London. Not her choice, she always reminded me. This flat. She’d have been fine in her own home. Except she’d still have wanted me to do her shopping for her every week, even if it would be a fourteen hour round trip.

“Bet you spent too much and all. Put it away then. Go on. And I want the change.”

She padded after me to the kitchen to oversee the cans stacked into the cupboard, low enough on the shelves she could reach without dragging over a chair to stand on. She’d be alright when the apocalypse hit. All set for kitting out a nuclear bunker for one.

Her receipt added up to more than the tenner she’d given me, but I dug about for a handful of change anyway, setting it down by the kettle.

She flicked it on, her wrinkled lips pursed tight. “You didn’t go to that man on the checkout, did you pet?”

I stopped unpacking.

Milk went in the door of the fridge, and a new box of tea on the counter. Next to the nearly full one. I didn’t move to put anything anywhere.

She was talking about the bright young guy with a rainbow pin badge on his work shirt who was kind to everyone, and sometimes painted his nails. Normally, I’d let it go, like a coward. Tell myself old people couldn’t be expected to understand.

But that wasn’t true. Simon’s Great Uncle Morris would have been her age, maybe even older, if he’d still been alive. Age didn’t give her an excuse.

“Why wouldn’t I?” My heart thudded in my ears.

When I was a kid she’d told me I must be confused because I wasn’t like the ones mincing about on the telly. I’d grow out of it. Find a nice girl. And maybe I would fall for a woman, once I got over Simon. But it still wouldn’t be someone Gran would like. How could anybody be? All she cared about were groceries and the countless ways me and Mam had ruined her life.

For half a second she floundered, like I’d broken the rules by making her spell out exactly what she meant. She hardened, tutting at me.

“I’m not having this conversation. You were such a good boy when you were little. I don’t know where I went wrong. All you want to do is pick arguments over nothing. Thought you were supposed to be clever with all your schooling.” She scoffed, and the ugly scrape of it dug in claws.

“Waste of bloody money,” she mumbled. “Not that bright after all, are you? Could have told you that for free just looking at you.”

Knuckle-dragging meathead at your service.

“Thought you’d turn out like your Grandad, but he’d be turning in his grave the way you carry on.”

Her scrawny frame was all angles and edges. Always had been, right from when I turned up in her house, needing more than a roof over my head and failing to find it.

Her house. It had always been her house.

I swallowed hard.

“I’m nothing like him.”

“There’s something we agree on. And now you’re pratting about getting up to who knows what with⁠—”

She stopped, hissing a breath through her teeth like she’d scalded herself.

The water in the kettle thrashed against the sides, filling up the silence until it clicked off and the bubbling died down.

She smiled serenely. “Kettle’s boiled, pet. One lump or two?”