Copyright © 2026 Nuno R.F.C.R. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher or author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews, and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by applicable copyright law.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, organizations, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), actual events, or real locales is entirely coincidental.
“Every Gay Man’s Dream”
Three minutes and forty seconds into the worst ten minutes of his professional life, Elliot Reyes heard somebody at the far end of the table turn a page of his handout, and understood that they weren’t turning it because they had finished reading it.
"…so the recharge originates in Logistics," he said, "and is posted to a code which had been opened in 2019, and which…as I say…was never formally closed following the cessation of the project, meaning that subsequent postings were, ah, absorbed rather than allocated."
‘Absorbed rather than allocated’.
He had written that. He had written it at half past nine on a Tuesday night, taken a joke out of it, and put ‘absorbed rather than allocated’ in the hole.
The board room on thirty-eight was the size of the entire coffee area on fourteen and had a table in it made of a single piece of something that had probably been a tree with a name. Eleven people. Water glasses. A wall of glass with the whole of the City behind it, the Gherkin sitting there looking pleased with itself. Elliot had been on this floor precisely twice in his life and both times he had been carrying paper for Marjorie.
He turned to the next slide, which he hadn’t wanted, and which Marjorie had advised against, and which he’d made anyway at midnight because a slide is a thing to hide behind.
"The second element," he said, "concerns the periodicity of the postings, which…if we look at the movement dates…"
Somebody checked their phone under the table.
Somebody else did the thing where they made a note, which sounds encouraging and is not, because at nine o'clock in the morning nobody in a board room writes down anything about intercompany recharges. They write down ‘lunch’ or ‘call Fitz’ or nothing at all in a manner that looks like something.
And Elliot stood there in a shirt he’d bought at seven fifty that morning from the Marks and Spencer at Liverpool Street, having had no sleep whatsoever, and listened to himself and thought, with a sort of distant horror: ‘I sound like Callum’.
That was it. That was exactly it. He had spent thirty hours sanding every recognizable feature off his own voice, ‘don't be funny’, and what was left standing in front of the board of Pellicorp Holdings was a beige man saying beige words at a table that had stopped listening four minutes ago.
He risked a glance down the room.
Marjorie was two seats along, absolutely motionless, wearing an expression of what he could only describe as ‘managed grief’.
And at the far end of the table, in the chair by the window, sat Ian Pellicorp.
Everybody on fourteen had a theory about Ian Pellicorp and none of them had ever met him.
Elliot had contributed to several of these theories over the years, most of them slanderous. The known facts were these: he was thirty-five. He’d taken the business over four years ago when his father died. He’d done something before that in New York that nobody could describe with any precision. And he was, this was the detail that had entered the building's folklore and never left, absurdly good-looking.
The reality of it was somehow worse.
He was sitting slightly back from the table with one ankle on the opposite knee, in a suit that had clearly not been bought in a shop that had a sale rail, and he was so comfortable in that room that he made everybody else in it look like they were visiting. Dark hair going very slightly grey at one temple in a manner that could only be described as ‘strategic’. A face that had never had to be funny to get a room. Good teeth. The kind of watch you don't notice until you notice, and then can't stop noticing.
He had not said a single word since Marjorie's introduction.
He had not looked at his phone. He had not looked at the handout. He had not made a note.
He was looking, steadily and without any apparent hurry, directly at Elliot, and had been for four minutes, and it was, of all the things going wrong in that room, comfortably the most unnerving.
‘Right’, Elliot thought. ‘Fine. Great. Twenty-three hours awake, dying on my feet, and the boss is doing an impression of a hawk’.
"…and, ah, in aggregate," he said, "the implications for the group's reconciliation controls are, I think, worth considering…"
"Sorry, can I come in here," said Duncan Hale.
Duncan Hale was Group Finance Director. He was fifty-six and had a voice like an apology being read out by a lawyer, and he had, over the preceding four minutes, arranged his face into an expression of extreme reasonableness.
"I think this is really useful," said Duncan, in the tone that was not. "And Elliot's done…is it Elliot?"
"Elliot."
"Elliot's done a lot of work here. But I do think we're at risk of looking at the wrong thing." He turned very slightly away from Elliot, which was, Elliot understood immediately, the whole maneuver: the smallest available rotation of a chair, thirty degrees, and now the conversation was happening between Duncan Hale and the rest of the table and Elliot was a man standing near a screen. "Because what this actually tells us, and I've said this before, is that we've got a systems problem. This is a legacy ledger issue. This is exactly the argument for bringing the migration forward, and I'd rather we spent the ten minutes on that than on the, with respect, on the four thousand pounds."
There was a murmur. It was a supportive murmur.
Somebody said, "Well, quite."
Somebody else said something about the migration business case and the word rebaselining entered the room.
And Elliot Reyes stood at the front of a board room on the thirty-eighth floor with a clicker in his hand and watched eleven weeks of work get picked up, carried across the table, and set down in front of an entirely different argument, in real time, by a man who hadn’t read past page two.
‘Say something’.
He looked down at his notes.
There they were: sixty-eight seconds of flat, clean, sanded-down prose, with nine jokes crossed out in biro. He’d said it out loud four times in an empty office to nobody. He had thought, at the time, that it was the bravest thing he’d ever done.
‘Say something’.
He heard Marjorie's voice from a corridor a week ago: ‘It's your work. You found it, you fixed it, you wrote the note’.
Elliot put his notes face-down on the table.
"No," he said.
The room stopped.
It is remarkable how much noise a room makes until it stops making it. Eleven people, a page turning, a jug of water somebody had been fiddling with, and then all of it simply gone, and the two syllables sitting there in the middle of the table.
Duncan Hale's eyebrows went up.
"Sorry?"
"No," said Elliot. "It's not a systems problem."
He came out from behind the screen.
"And I'd like ten seconds to explain why, and then you can have the migration, honestly, take it, I'll help you write the business case, I'll do the slides…but it isn't a systems problem, and if we tell ourselves it is, we'll spend two million quid and it'll happen again in 2031."
"I don't think that's…"
"The system did everything right," said Elliot.
He hadn't planned any of this. That was the astonishing part. He would try to reconstruct it later, in the lift, and wouldn’t be able to. There was no draft. There was just a floor, and a room, and the physical sensation of the fence coming down.
"The system opened the code because a human being filled in a form. It stayed open because closing it needs a director's signature and nobody wanted to be the one who asked. Every posting into it was made by a real person picking a real option off a real dropdown, and the reason they picked it, and I want to be honest with you about this, because I've traced eleven of them, is that the dropdown is alphabetical and that code begins with A."
Somebody made a small sound.
"That's it," said Elliot. "Four thousand, one hundred and sixteen pounds sat in the dark for four years because a menu was in alphabetical order and because signing a form is embarrassing. You can migrate whatever you want. You can spend two million pounds on the finest ledger system in Northern Europe and it will also have a dropdown, and it will also be in alphabetical order, and Trevor in Logistics will still be at his desk at half four on a Friday picking the top one."
"Now hang on…"
"And here's the bit I actually came up here to say." He was talking too fast and had entirely stopped caring. "The four thousand pounds doesn't matter. Everybody in this room knows it doesn't matter, it's a rounding error, I'd have to find nine hundred of them before anyone's bonus moved. It's not the money. It's that for four years, this company had a lay-by on the side of its own accounts that nobody ever drove past. And the only reason anybody found it is that in July, a junior in accounts had a bad night and stayed late."
There was a silence.
"That's not a control," said Elliot. "That's a coincidence. And I'd…very gently suggest that a company with a revenue of four hundred million shouldn't be relying on my personal life for assurance."
And at the far end of the table, by the window, Ian Pellicorp laughed out loud.
It was one bark, short and genuinely surprised, and it did what laughs from that chair do in rooms like that one, which is rearrange everything.
Duncan Hale's face performed an extraordinary maneuver, arriving, after visiting several other options, at amused.
Somebody else laughed, half a second late, which is the most honest sound a board room ever makes.
Marjorie didn’t laugh. Marjorie looked at the table, and something happened around her mouth that Elliot would think about for a week.
"Say the last bit again," said Ian Pellicorp.
His voice was, Elliot registered this without having any bandwidth to do anything about it, extremely pleasant.
"Which bit?"
"About the lay-by."
"There's a lay-by on the side of the accounts," said Elliot, "and nobody drives past it."
"And how many lay-bys have we got?"
"I don't know," said Elliot, and then, because he was thirty hours awake and past all reasonable caution: "That's rather my point."
Pellicorp smiled. It was a good smile, and Elliot noticed the quality of it in the abstract way one notices architecture while running for a train.
"Duncan," he said, "how much is the migration?"
"Two point one, as it stands, but the phasing…"
"And this," Pellicorp said, tipping his head fractionally toward Elliot, "cost us what? A junior's Thursday night?"
Nobody said anything at all.
"Do the paper," said Pellicorp, to Duncan Hale, without any perceptible edge, in the tone of someone suggesting a restaurant. "Both papers. Migration and the control point. Same meeting. I'd like to see them next to each other."
And that was it. That was the whole intervention: four sentences, no volume, and the entire direction of the meeting simply changed course like a river being shown a different valley, and Elliot Reyes stood there in a shirt he’d bought ninety minutes earlier and watched it happen.
They did the rest of the agenda.
It took forty minutes.
Afterwards, in the milling about, the packs being gathered, the water glasses abandoned, the small talk that happens in rooms like that where nobody says anything with any information in it, Marjorie came past him on her way out.
She didn’t stop walking.
"Well," she said. "You didn't do what I told you."
"No."
"No." A beat. "Don't make a habit of that."
But she said it with something in her voice he’d never heard before, and she didn’t look at him when she said it, and Elliot stood in the middle of the board room on the thirty-eighth floor of Pellicorp Tower with his ears ringing and the strong suspicion that he’d just been told he’d done well.
Then a shadow arrived at his shoulder, and it was Ian Pellicorp.
Up close he was, if anything, worse. He had the unhurriedness of a person who has genuinely never had to wonder whether he was welcome anywhere, and he’d brought his coffee with him, and was standing at exactly the distance at which a conversation becomes a private one.
"That was the best ten minutes I've had in this room in four years," he said.
"It was nine and a half. I ran short. I lost a slide."
"You lost a slide."
"I abandoned a slide," said Elliot. "It's face-down on the table. It's got a chart on it."
Pellicorp laughed again, properly, the second time, easy as anything, and said: "Reyes, isn't it?"
"That's right."
"Elliot." He said it as though checking a fact he already had. "I read your note. The full one, not the summary. The bit about the code being older than the graduate scheme…that didn't make it into the pack, did it?"
Elliot blinked.
That line had been in draft four. He’d crossed it out on the Tuesday, in biro, along with eight others, and the only version anyone had ever seen was the one he'd sent to Marjorie at ten to eleven at night.
"No," he said. "It didn't."
"Shame," said Ian Pellicorp. "It was the best line in it."
He drank some of his coffee.
"Book something with Adaeze," he said. "My assistant, she's on thirty-eight, she'll find twenty minutes. Not about this. About what else you've noticed." A small, warm, entirely disarming shrug. "I've been running this company for four years and until about eleven minutes ago nobody in it had told me anything I didn't already know."
"Right," said Elliot. "Yes. Absolutely. I'll…yes."
"Good."
And there, for something under a second, in a room full of people gathering their packs, Ian Pellicorp's eyes went down and came back up.
It wasn’t a leer. Nothing so crude as that. It was quick, and it was thorough, a man taking in the whole of somebody and filing it, and it happened while he was still smiling and it didn’t disturb the smile at all.
Elliot Reyes, who had been awake for twenty-eight hours, who’d just survived the single most terrifying professional event of his life, and who was at that moment approximately six percent present in his own body, didn’t notice it in any way whatsoever.
"Cheers," he said.
Pellicorp went to talk to Duncan Hale.
The lift down from thirty-eight took a very long time and Elliot spent all of it looking at his own reflection in the brushed steel with an expression of total idiot joy.
He got his phone out at thirty-one.
Elliot: IT WENT WELL
Elliot: no. no. that's underselling it. it went CATASTROPHICALLY BADLY and then it went well
Elliot: I died. I properly died for four minutes. I was doing the boring version and it was going so badly I could FEEL it going badly, like watching a man reverse into a bollard
Elliot: and then hale tried to take it off me. he did the CHAIR THING.
Elliot: so I put the notes down
Elliot: face down. on the table. very dramatic. genuinely I might have looked insane
The reply came at floor nineteen.
T: And?
Elliot: and I did it my way and PELLICORP LAUGHED
Elliot: OUT LOUD. TWICE. the actual man.
Elliot: he's told me to book twenty minutes with his assistant. NOT about the codes. about "what else I've noticed"
Elliot: marchetti I don't think you understand. people on my floor have worked here eleven years and never been in that room
T: I understand.
Elliot: you don't sound sufficiently amazed
T: I'm at Mateo's swimming.
Elliot: OH
Elliot: oh god sorry. go. go and be a dad. we'll debrief later
T: No, you're all right.
Then, after a moment:
T: I knew you'd do that.
Elliot: do what
T: Put the notes down.
Elliot stopped walking.
He was in the lift lobby on fourteen by then, and the doors had closed behind him, and he stood in the middle of the floor he’d crossed twice a day for fourteen months and read that four times.
Elliot: how could you possibly have known that
T: Because I've met you.
And Elliot Reyes put his phone in his pocket and walked to his desk past forty people who had absolutely no idea what had happened to him in the last twelve hours, and sat down, and turned on his monitor, and couldn’t, for the entire remainder of the day, get his face to behave.
*
(Monday)
The thing about a secret is that it is, for about the first ten days, the most fun you’ve ever had in your life.
Elliot came in on the Monday morning and said "morning" to Gav and "morning" to the girl on the barriers and got in a lift with eleven other people and went up to the fourteenth floor and did seven hours of work, and at no point did anybody look at him and say ‘you had sex on Callum's desk’.
Nobody knew. That was the whole substance of it. Nadia didn’t know. Marjorie didn’t know. Callum, who sat at that desk for eight hours a day with his monitor squared to within a centimeter of where it’d been, didn’t know, and had complained twice about somebody moving his pens.
Elliot Reyes walked round that building for a week like a man carrying a live grenade in a shopping bag, and had never been happier.
Elliot: callum has raised the pen situation at the team meeting
T: What did you say?
Elliot: I said it was probably the cleaners
Elliot: MARCHETTI I THREW ROSA UNDER THE BUS. an innocent woman with a bad back
T: Rosa's tougher than you.
Elliot: everyone's tougher than me. that's not the point
(Tuesday)
At half past twelve at night, Elliot's phone lit up on his bedside table.
T: Rounds.
That was it. That was the entire message. It arrived at twelve thirty-one, and it had arrived at twelve thirty-one the night before, and it would arrive at twelve thirty-one every night for the rest of the week, and Elliot had begun, he was aware of how bad this was, to wait for it.
There was no content in it. It was a man logging a shift pattern to somebody who hadn’t asked. It was, by any reasonable literary standard, the worst text message ever composed by a human being.
Elliot looked at it in the dark and grinned at the ceiling like an idiot.
Elliot: thrilling. gripping. do the fire doors get you in the end
T: Every time.
Elliot: god that's bleak
Elliot: send me a picture of something. anything. I'm awake and I've got nothing to look at
Forty seconds later, a photograph arrived.
It was, in the flat institutional light of a plant room, a cardboard box. Inside it: nine umbrellas, a bike helmet, one glove, a paperback with the cover off, and, sitting on top, in a small clear bag with a label on it, a wedding ring.
Elliot: THE BOX
Elliot: you've sent me a picture of THE SADNESS BOX at half twelve at night
T: You said anything.
Elliot: I did say anything
Elliot: is that the ring
T: 2022.
Elliot: marchetti I'm going to be honest with you, I've thought about that ring about once a day since you told me about it
T: So have I. Four years.
Elliot lay in the dark with the phone on his chest and didn’t answer for a while.
Elliot: we're going to have to talk about the fact that you're accidentally the most devastating man in london
T: Go to sleep.
Elliot: you go to sleep
T: I'm at work.
Elliot: THEN GO AND DO YOUR ROUNDS
(Wednesday)
Adaeze from thirty-eight rang at ten past nine and offered him twenty minutes on the eleventh, then rang back at half eleven and moved it to the eighteenth, and Elliot said "of course, no problem at all" both times in a voice he didn’t recognize.
He told Nadia, because he couldn’t physically not tell somebody.
"Twenty minutes," said Nadia. "With Pellicorp."
"With Pellicorp."
"On the thirty-eighth floor."
"Apparently there's a lift that only goes to thirty-eight," said Elliot. "Apparently you need a different pass."
"I've been here eleven years," said Nadia. She took her glasses out of her hair. She put them back in her hair. "Eleven years, Elliot. I've got a mug."
"I know."
"I want you to remember me when you're up there."
"I'll send parcels."
"You'll forget," said Nadia. "They all forget," and she rolled back to her desk, and then, over her shoulder: "Well done, by the way. Rob says you were unhinged and Marjorie hasn't said anything at all, which from Marjorie is basically a parade."
(Thursday, 8:23 a.m.)
The lift was full.
It was the morning lift, the 8:20-ish crush, and Elliot got into it with about eleven other people and found himself, by the ordinary physics of a crowded box, standing at the back, shoulder to shoulder, facing the doors, in the middle of a wall of colleagues.
And the man on his left was Theo Marchetti.
He'd been in the lift already, doing something to the panel with a service key, the doors had opened on him, and then eleven people had got in around him and he’d ended up shoved to the back with everybody else, and the doors had closed, and the whole car had done the thing where everybody stops talking and looks up at the numbers.
Elliot didn’t turn his head.
He looked at the doors. He looked at the number bar. He looked at the reflection of the back of somebody's head and thought about absolutely nothing at all, and he was aware, with the whole of his skin, on his entire left side, from shoulder to elbow, of six foot four of security guard standing an inch and a half away.
Two floors went by.
Somebody near the front was explaining the parking situation at their sister's new build to somebody who didn’t want to know. There was a bag digging into Elliot's back. Somebody's headphones were leaking.
And then, at about floor five, in the small dark gap between their two bodies where nobody in the world could see it, the back of a hand touched the back of his hand.
Elliot's heart went off like a car alarm.
He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe, particularly. He kept his eyes on the number bar and, very slowly, turned his hand over.
Their fingers went together in the dark between them.
Six.
There were eleven people in that lift and every single one of them was six inches away and not one of them saw a thing, because nobody in a lift looks at anybody, because that’s the entire social contract of lifts, and so Elliot Reyes stood in a crowded box at twenty-three minutes past eight on a Thursday morning holding hands with a man he wasn’t allowed to know.
Seven.
Theo's thumb moved once, across the back of his knuckle.
Elliot had to look at the ceiling.
Eight. Nine.
"…and they've given them one space per flat," the parking man was saying, "which for a three-bed is just…"
Ten.
Theo's grip tightened, very slightly, in the way you'd hold something you were about to have to put down.
Eleven.
The lift stopped. The doors opened. Four people got out and the whole car rearranged itself, and their hands came apart in the shuffle as naturally as anything, and by the time the doors closed again there was a foot of clear air between them and neither of them had looked at the other once.
Elliot got out at fourteen.
He walked to his desk. Sat down. He put both hands flat on the keyboard and looked at his monitor, which was asleep, which meant he was looking at his own face.
"Right," he said, to nobody.
(Thursday, 6:40 p.m.)
T: 13.
Elliot was in a meeting.
He was in the back half of a meeting, the part where Marjorie had stopped needing him and he’d begun mentally drafting his Pellicorp twenty minutes, and his phone was face-down on his notebook, and it buzzed once.
He turned it over under the table.
Two characters. A number and a full stop.
He’d never in his life stood up from a chair so smoothly.
The service stairwell at twenty to seven was cold and echoey, and Elliot did the flight from fourteen down to thirteen at a speed that would have concerned a doctor, and came round the half-landing, and Theo was there under the strip light with the fault in it, on-on-on-off-on.
He was kissed before he was fully off the last step.
It wasn’t a conversation. It went straight past hello and into something with real weight behind it, Theo's hands coming up either side of his face and the wall arriving at Elliot's back and the whole cold industrial stairwell reduced immediately to about four square feet of very hot air. Elliot got two handfuls of uniform shirt and made a sound that came back off the concrete.
They stayed there for some time.
"Hi," said Elliot eventually, at about an inch.
"Hi."
"That's…yeah. That's a good hello. Strong opener."
"Been a day."
"Has it." Elliot's hands were still in the man's shirt. "Has it been a day?"
"Long shift."
"Right." He was grinning. He could feel himself doing it and couldn’t stop. "Long shift. Sure. And this is just…what, this is a routine part of a long shift, is it? You just come down to thirteen and put a man against a wall for twenty seconds? Standard security procedure?"
"It's in the training."
"Nothing is in the training…"
Theo kissed him again, mostly to stop him, and it worked for about eleven seconds.
"I saw you this morning," Elliot said, into his jaw.
"Yeah."
"In the lift."
"Yeah."
"That was…" Elliot pulled back a couple of inches, so he could do the face properly. "Marchetti, I want you to understand that I had to sit at my desk afterwards and pretend to read an email about stationery ordering."
"Same."
"You had to read an email about stationery ordering?"
"I had to stand in a lobby for four hours," said Theo.
There was a pause.
"Was that hard?" said Elliot.
"What?"
"The four hours. In the lobby." He was aware, with total clarity, of exactly what he was doing, which was fishing for a thing he could have simply said himself in half the words. "Just…you know. Standing about. Nothing happening. Long old stretch."
Theo looked at him.
"It was all right," he said.
"Right."
"Quiet."
"Right," said Elliot. "Good. Great. Love that for the lobby."
And then, because neither of them could get any closer to it than that, and because both of them knew exactly what the other was failing to say, and because the whole thing had become, in about four sentences, completely absurd, they both started laughing.
"You're ridiculous," said Elliot.
"You started it."
"I didn’t start it, you're the one who…thirteen, full stop, like a ransom note…"
"It worked."
"It absolutely worked, that's not the…I stood up in a meeting, Marchetti, I said 'sorry, quick call' to Marjorie…"
"So next time I'll put more in it," said Theo. "I'll do 'Floor thirteen, please, if convenient.'"
"Oh, that's awful."
"'Yours sincerely.'"
"Stop it…"
And Theo laughed, the whole one, in a concrete stairwell on a floor that didn’t officially exist, and Elliot pulled him back down by the collar and neither of them said the thing, again, and it was, on balance, the best twenty minutes of the week.
Then, two floors below them, a fire door banged open.
They came apart instantly.
It was extraordinary how fast it happened, some animal reflex, both of them, gone from one shape to another in under a second, and then they were standing four feet apart in a stairwell listening to a set of footsteps and the metallic rattle of a bucket on a trolley coming up from eleven, and a man humming something tuneless and cheerful, very slightly out of breath.
"Kwame," said Theo, under his breath. "Evenings. He does the eleventh."
"Is he coming up?"
"He does eleven to fourteen."
"He does eleven to…Marchetti, he's coming up…"
They looked at each other.
"Go," said Theo.
"Which way…?"
"Up."
And Elliot went up and Theo went down, at speed, in opposite directions, on the stairs of a building they both worked in, like two people fleeing an entirely different sort of incident, and Elliot got through the fire door onto fourteen and let it swing shut behind him and stood in the empty lift lobby with his heart absolutely going.
He caught himself in the black window.
Hair: destroyed. Tie: somewhere near his sternum. Collar: open, and there was a mark coming up on the side of his neck that was, he calculated rapidly, going to be a matter for a scarf.
He straightened the tie. He did up the collar. He put his hair back into some approximation of its intended shape with both hands.
And then he stood there for a second, looking at himself in the dark glass with the City behind it, and found that he couldn’t get the grin off his face, that it simply wouldn’t go, that it had taken up residence somewhere around the second week of November and had no plans to move, and he thought, quite clearly:
‘I'm in so much trouble’.
*
Elliot's flat was on the top floor of a converted Victorian terrace in Bethnal Green, up two flights of stairs that had been carpeted in 1987 and left to think about what they'd done, and it consisted of one bedroom, one bathroom with a boiler that sounded like a man clearing his throat, and one main room in which he’d made a series of decisions.
The chief decision was the walls.
He’d painted them in his first month, having gone to a shop and looked at a chart and selected a color called ‘Bruise’, on the grounds that it’d been called Bruise and he’d found that funny at the time. It was a deep purple-grey, and the tin had promised it would read as ‘sophisticated in low light’, and this had turned out to be entirely true, and the tin had said nothing whatsoever about how it would read at two in the afternoon in February, which was: like the inside of a bad decision.
He loved it. He defended it constantly. He would die on it.
There was a good sofa he'd overspent on, a table that seated four if two of them were friendly, a shelf of nonfiction he’d genuinely read, and, on the windowsill, in a pot, in a condition best described as ongoing, a plant.
"That plant is not well," said Priya, taking her coat off.
"It’s fine."
"Elliot, that plant is asking for help."
"It's a seasonal…it does this. It does this every year and then it comes back."
"Does it, though," said Sef, arriving behind her with four bottles of wine for three and a half people. "Does it come back? Has anyone actually seen it come back?"
"Leave the plant alone."
Dom came in last, took off his coat, hung it up properly on the hook rather than throwing it at the sofa like the other two, looked at the plant for a moment, and said nothing at all.
Elliot had cooked.
That was the headline, and it’d been the headline in the group chat for two days, and it was, the moment they were all sitting down and the dish was on the table, immediately and comprehensively investigated.
"What is it?"
"It's a ragù."
"Elliot."
"It's a slow-cooked ragù…"
"How slow?" said Sef.
"Forty minutes."
"That's not slow. That's not…Priya, that's not slow, is it?"
"That's a brisk ragù," said Priya.
"That's a ragù with somewhere to be," said Sef.
"It's lovely," said Priya, tasting it, "it is, it's genuinely lovely, and I want you to know I'd have said if it wasn't because I've done that before and I'd do it again."
"She would," said Dom.
"I would."
They ate. The first bottle went in about twenty-five minutes, which was standard, and the candle Elliot had lit in a moment of ambition was doing something quite nice against the ‘Bruise’, and the whole room had that specific warmth that only ever happens with people who have known you for fifteen years and have already seen the worst of it.
And then Priya put her fork down and said:
"Right. Go on then."
"Go on then what?"
"Elliot."
"I don't know what you…"
"You've been lit up for nine days," said Priya. "You replied to the group chat with an emoji on Tuesday. An emoji, Elliot, you've never sent an emoji in your life, you think they're for people who can't finish a sentence."
"That's a…okay, that's a fair evidential point…"
"And you've cooked," said Sef, "which you only do when something's happened. You cooked when you got the job. You cooked when Marcus left. You made a lasagna the week your nan died, and it was terrible, and none of us said anything…"
"It was terrible," said Dom.
"So," said Priya. "Talk."
And Elliot opened his mouth to do the thing, to do the version, the arch one, the one with the eyebrow and the timing, the one where you hand over the shape and keep the middle, and found, for the second time in a month, that it wasn't there.
He put his glass down.
"Okay," he said. "So. It's the security guard."
He told them everything.
That was the thing that got them, afterwards, more than any individual piece of it, Priya said as much three weeks later, on a completely different night, in a completely different context. It wasn't the content. It was that Elliot Reyes sat at his own table with a glass of wine and told the three people who had known him longest an entirely unedited version of something, for twenty-five minutes, without once making it into a bit.
He told them about the lift. Properly, not the ‘panicking makes you hot’ version, not the wetsuit man, but the actual thing: the heat, the shirt, the man apologizing before taking it off, and what Theo had said at half twelve at night about Sunday nights being the worst because everybody else had had a Sunday.
He told them about the comment in the lobby. He watched Sef's face change, and Priya's, and he said, before either of them could get there, "no, listen, I know what it sounds like, and I'm telling you what it actually was, which was a bloke slamming a door on himself in front of me."
He told them about eleven miles of stairs.
He told them about the stairwell, and the thirteenth floor that doesn't exist, and the fire door two floors down, and what it’s like to have a man you have wanted for four months tell you he's sorry and then run.
He told them about Mateo. About a six-year-old on a floor with eleven felt-tips and a dinosaur called Barry with the wrong number of legs, and ‘he hasn't got any friends’, said in exactly the tone you'd use to ask for juice.
He told them about the night in the office, most of it, editing lightly for volume.
And he told them about the coffee room sofa at three in the morning, and a man holding his chin so he couldn't look away, and ‘it's always the good ones that reckon they're rubbish’.
When he stopped, nobody said anything for a moment.
"Right," said Priya. Her voice had gone slightly odd. "Well."
"Yeah."
"That's…yeah."
Sef was staring at him. "You've been carrying that around for nine days?"
"About six weeks, actually."
"Six weeks…"
"There's a lot of it," said Elliot. "It's been a busy autumn."
Priya put her hand flat on the table and said "right" again, in a completely different register, and got up and went to get the second bottle.
She wasn’t entirely happy.
Elliot could see it. She hid it well and she hid it deliberately, because Priya Raval had been managing his weather since they were ten years old and had never once made a bad night worse, but he could see it in the way she was pouring.
"Go on," he said.
"No."
"Priya."
"I'm delighted," she said. "I'm properly, genuinely delighted, I've never seen you like this, you've gone all…" she waved a hand at the entirety of him "…soft, it's revolting, I love it."
"But."
She sat down.
"He's twenty-seven and he's never told a single person," she said. "That's not a small thing, babe. That's a whole life he's got to take apart. There's an ex-wife, who by the sound of it is lovely, which is somehow worse. There's a little boy. There's a job where you both work, in a building where he needs the money and you've got a career that's just…" she gestured "…you're going up to the thirty-eighth floor, Elliot."
"I know."
"And you fall in love like a piano falling out of a window, you always have, since you were fifteen…"
"I'm not in…"
"Don't," said Priya.
There was a pause.
"Yeah," said Elliot, to his glass. "All right."
"So I'm allowed to be a bit frightened for you," she said. "That's all. That's the speech, it's over, it's done. And now I'm going to drink this and we're going to talk about something else."
"Thank you."
"Any questions I'm not asking, I'm not asking on purpose," said Priya, "and I want credit for that, and it is costing me…"
"I've got questions," said Sef.
The second bottle changed the temperature of the room.
It always did.
"So he's how tall?" Sef asked.
"Six four."
"And built."
"And built."
"Built how? Give me…no, listen, give me a comparison. Give me a doorframe."
"He's…" Elliot took a drink. "Okay. When he's on the desk, in the lobby, he makes the desk look like something he's wearing."
Sef put both hands over his face.
"And he's got the…" Elliot gestured vaguely at his own forearms and gave up. "There's a uniform. It's a size too small. The company orders them small to save money and on him it's just…it's a situation, Sef, it's genuinely a public safety matter…"
"I'm going to be sick."
"You asked."
"And he's shy," said Priya, in a voice of pure wonder.
"He's not shy. He's…he's contained. He's the most contained man I've ever met. Until he isn't."
There was a small, appreciative, entirely filthy silence.
"Right," said Sef, sitting forward. "I'm going to ask it."
"Don't."
"I'm asking it…"
"Sef."
"Is it…" Sef made a gesture. It was not a subtle gesture. "Is it, you know. Proportionate."
Elliot looked at him for a long moment.
Then he picked up his wine, and drank some of it, and put it down, and said: "I'm not going to answer that."
"OH," said Sef.
"I'm not answering it."
"He's not answering it…"
"Because it's vulgar," said Elliot, "and because I'm a gentleman, and because it's got nothing to do with any of you…"
"He's got a face on," said Priya. "Look at his face."
"All I'm saying," said Elliot, with enormous dignity, "purely for the record, and with no further detail whatsoever, is that I have subsequently revised my position on several things I previously believed to be true about the human body."
"I'm leaving…"
And it was Dom, who had said perhaps eleven words all evening, who had hung his coat on the actual hook, who’d spent the last twenty minutes quietly finishing the ragù and watching the whole thing with mild interest, who put his fork down, and looked up, and said:
"So let me get this straight."
The table quietened, because it always did when Dom spoke.
"He's six four. Built like a door. He's shy, he's kind, he's good with kids, he does a job with a uniform, he's got a full head of hair, he can lift you up, he says almost nothing, and when he does say something it's devastating." He picked his glass up. "And he's never been with a bloke, so he thinks you're the expert."
"…Yes," said Elliot.
"Right," said Dom. "So you've got every gay man's dream, then. You've got the actual, literal dream. That's not a boyfriend, that's a press release."
Elliot laughed so hard he had to put his head down on the table.
"And the rest of us," said Dom, "are on the apps. Talking to a man called Gareth. Who has opinions about ketamine."
"Gareth's real?" said Priya.
"Gareth's very real," said Dom, "and this is a hate crime," and he raised his glass to Elliot with total sincerity, and the whole table went up.
*
They left just after midnight.
There was the usual protracted business of it, the coats, the second round of goodbyes at the door, Sef coming back for his scarf, Priya holding Elliot's face in both hands on the landing and saying "I mean it" without specifying which part she meant, Dom putting a hand on his shoulder for exactly two seconds on the way out and saying nothing at all.
Then the stairs, and their voices going down and getting smaller, and the front door two floors below, and their voices out on the street, and then not.
And then the flat.
Elliot stood in the middle of his own main room with the Bruise walls and the guttering candle and four plates and a knocked-over glass nobody had dealt with, and listened to it.
The silence in this flat had always had a particular quality to it.
It was different now. It wasn't better, exactly. It was louder, if anything.
Elliot stacked the plates. He blew out the candle. He put the wine bottles by the door for the recycling and got the knocked-over glass and ran it under the tap, and stood at the sink for a while looking at his own reflection in the black kitchen window with the London orange behind it.
Then he picked his phone up off the counter.
It said twelve twenty-six.
Four minutes, he thought.
And he took it with him, and put his coat back on, and went up.
Getting onto the roof of 41 Marchmont Row was not, strictly speaking, possible.
That was the official position, which had a great deal of evidence behind it. The internal stairs stopped at the top floor, at Elliot's own front door, and above that there was a hatch that had been painted shut sometime during the Blair administration. The only other route was outside: a Victorian fire escape bolted to the back of the building, iron, black, and in a condition that Elliot preferred not to think about in high wind, which went up past the bathroom windows of three flats and stopped, this was the crucial detail, about four feet short of the parapet.
To finish the journey you had to get onto the top platform, take hold of the parapet with both hands, put one foot on the handrail of the fire escape, and swing yourself round and up.
There was, underneath you while you did this, a drop of four stories into a communal yard containing five wheelie bins and a bicycle nobody had touched since 2019.
Elliot had done it, at a conservative estimate, four hundred times.
He’d found it in his first month in the building, at two in the morning, drunk and twenty-two and looking for somewhere to be alone, and he’d stood up there on the flat asphalt with the whole of east London laid out around him, going about its night, and had understood immediately that this was the best place he’d ever been.
He’d never told anybody about it.
Not Marcus, in three years. Not his mother. Not Nadia, Rob, Sef, or Dom.
Not even Priya, and that was the one that told you something, because Priya Raval knew everything about him including several things he’d never actually said out loud, and she didn’t know that on top of his building there was a roof, and that on the roof there was a sofa.
The sofa had taken two summers.
It had come from a house clearance on the Roman Road and had cost eleven pounds, and getting it up a Victorian fire escape had been a project of such spectacular idiocy that Elliot had done it in stages over two separate Julys, alone, at night, in a state of total commitment. It was brown. Enormous. It had been rained on for three years and had achieved a kind of weathered municipal dignity, like a bench.
Next to it there was a plastic crate.
In the crate: a string of LED fairy lights on a battery pack, which he draped along the parapet. Two blankets in a zip bag. A folding camping chair nobody had ever sat in. And a CD player.
It was a Panasonic portable from 2003, silver and blue, with a rubberized anti-skip button and a lid you had to press down until it clicked. He’d bought it for four quid at a car boot sale in Chatham when he was nineteen and it had worked ever since without complaint. The disc in it was a burned CD-R with track names written on it in his own fifteen-year-old handwriting, and it skipped in the same two places, and he had long ago stopped hearing the skips as faults and had started hearing them as part of the songs.
Elliot came over the parapet at twenty-nine minutes past midnight, in his coat, with a glass of wine he’d brought up in his teeth like a Labrador.
He put the lights on. He put the CD on. He lay down on the sofa on his back with his feet up on the arm, and looked up.
You couldn’t see stars. That was the one thing the roof didn’t have. What you got instead over Bethnal Green at half twelve on a Saturday night in November was the sky-glow: that low orange-brown ceiling of a city throwing its light back at itself, with the planes going over in a slow ordered queue toward the west, and a helicopter somewhere south doing something none of his business, and six million people not being asleep yet.
Elliot had come up here after every significant event of the last three years. He had come up here when Marcus left. He had come up here when he got the job. He had come up here in July at two in the morning after a bad Sunday and had put the CD on and lain here and thought, quite calmly, ‘there is nobody I could ring right now’, and had gone downstairs and gone to bed and been fine about it on Monday.
His phone buzzed on his chest.
T: Rounds.
Twelve thirty-one.
He tried to text back.
He tried, for eleven minutes, and there is a specific shape to eleven minutes of failed texting that anybody who has ever done it will recognize: the typing, the reading back, the sag, the delete.
Draft one.
‘can I tell you something mad’
He looked at that for a while. It was fine. It was perfectly serviceable. It was also, he recognized, a trapdoor, because ‘can I tell you something mad’ is the opening of a joke, and once he'd sent it he'd have to make what followed funny, because that was the deal he'd have set up.
Deleted.
Draft two.
‘I've had the gang round and I've told them everything, and now they've gone home and the flat's gone quiet and I’
He deleted that one halfway through the word ‘and’, at speed, as though it had gone off in his hand.
Draft three was the worst. Draft three was four lines long and had the word ‘thinking’ in it twice, and he read it back in lowercase on a small bright screen at twelve forty-one and it looked pathetic. Not the feeling. The feeling was fine. But there is no font in which ‘I can't stop thinking about you’ doesn’t look like something you'd find written on a toilet wall.
Deleted.
Elliot put the phone on his chest and looked up at the orange nothing and said, out loud, "Right, well, this is useless."
The CD skipped in the place it always skipped.
And into his head, uninvited, from several days ago, from a woman holding a bottle of wine, came:
‘Fifteen years, and I have never once heard you describe a man without doing the voice’.
He lay very still for a moment.
Then he said, "Oh, no," and picked up the phone, and pressed the green button before he could hold a meeting about it.
It rang three times.
"Reyes."
And Elliot, who had prepared absolutely nothing, said: "Right, okay, so before you say anything, I want to establish that this is a phone call, which I'm aware is a deeply aggressive thing to do to a man in 2019…"
"It's not 2019."
"It's an expression, Marchetti…"
"It's not, though."
"Marchetti, it's a…okay, I've lost that already, that's gone." He put a hand over his eyes. "Right. I'm on my roof."
"Your roof."
"I've got a roof. There's a sofa up here and a CD player and about nine feet of fairy lights and ‘nobody has ever been up here except me’, which I've just this second realized is probably quite bleak, but I'd like to move past that…"
"Right."
"And I've been trying to text you for eleven minutes." He took the hand off his eyes. "That's why I'm ringing. I've written three texts and deleted all three of them, because everything I try to say looks insane in lowercase, and I've decided the only way through it is to say it out loud like a Victorian, so if you could just…don't say anything. Genuinely. Don't say anything until I've stopped, because if you say anything I'll make a joke and then I'll never do this again."
There was a pause.
"Go on then," said Theo.
So Elliot went on.
"I can't stop thinking about you," he said. "That's…that's the whole thing, really, everything else is appendices. I think about you at work. I think about you on the Tube. I thought about you in a board meeting, which nearly ended my career. Priya said something the other day about how I've never talked about anyone without doing a voice, and I've been lying up here for twenty minutes working out that she's right, and that I can't do the voice about you, and I've tried, and it won't come."
The line was completely silent.
"And it's not…" He stopped. Started again. "It's not the big stuff. That's what I wasn't expecting. It's not the…I mean, obviously, the big stuff, we've discussed the big stuff at length and I stand by everything I said…"
Nothing. Not a sound. Somewhere behind Theo, very faintly, a fire door.
"It's…your breath," said Elliot.
He heard his own voice go slightly odd and kept going anyway.
"It's the thing I keep…I've got this whole thing in my head about what your breath is like when you're close, and I memorized it, actually, like an absolute lunatic. And your weight. When you're on me and I can't move. And your skin. Your hair. That's what I think about all day…not the…just that. Just having you near enough to touch. And I'm aware of how that sounds and I'd like it on the record that I've been trying to say it in lowercase for eleven minutes and it wouldn't go."
He breathed.
"So," he said. "Come to mine. After your shift. You finish at six, and I'm…I'll be here, I'll be awake, and you could come over. That's it. That's the thing. And I'm going to stop talking now."
And he did.
The silence went on for a very long time.
It went on long enough that Elliot heard the CD skip in the second place, and a plane go over, and his own pulse. He looked at the orange sky and felt the whole thing arrive at once, the enormous, cold, entirely familiar understanding that he’d just taken his armor off in front of somebody and got it wrong.
‘Too much’, he thought. ‘That was too much’.
"Marchetti…"
"I need to go and do my rounds," said Theo.
And there it was.
Elliot shut his eyes.
"Right," he said. His voice came out light and pleasant, which was, at that moment, the single greatest technical achievement of his career. "Course. No, of course. It's…yeah. Go and do your…"
"Reyes."
"…it's fine, honestly, I'm…I've had wine, I've had a lot of wine, and there's been a whole dinner situation, and I think…"
"Reyes."
Elliot stopped.
There was a pause of perhaps two seconds.
"Text me the address," said Theo.
Elliot didn’t say anything.
He couldn’t, immediately, because his throat had closed, and because his eyes had gone hot in a manner that would’ve been extremely inconvenient in any room with people in it, and because he was lying on an eleven-pound sofa on a roof in Bethnal Green with a string of fairy lights along the parapet and a burned CD-R from 2003 skipping in the second place, and something enormous had just happened to him.
He took the phone away from his ear.
He put it flat against his chest, over his coat, over his sternum, and held it there with both hands, and looked up at the orange nothing above London, and breathed out very slowly and shakily for about four seconds.
Then he put the phone back to his ear.
"Sure," he said.
It came out perfectly. Level, easy, faintly amused.
"Right," said Theo.
"Six o'clock."
"About quarter past, by the time I've…"
"Quarter past. Yeah. Whenever."
"Right."
"Right," said Elliot.
Neither of them hung up.
They stayed there for a moment, on a roof and in a lobby, four miles apart, at eleven minutes to one in the morning, listening to each other not saying anything.
"Go and do your rounds," said Elliot.
"Yeah," said Theo.
And then the line went dead.
And Elliot Reyes lay in the dark under the biggest orange ceiling in the world with his phone on his chest and a grin coming up his face like sunrise.
And didn’t move for a very long time.
(To be continued…)
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