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.
“Bruise”
The plan, formed at four minutes past one in the morning on the way down from the roof, was to do the plates.
That was it. Four plates, four glasses, one pan, the wine bottles out for the recycling, and then bed, because it was one in the morning, and because he had a man arriving at quarter past six, and because a person who has slept for five hours is a substantially better proposition than a person who hasn’t.
Elliot did the plates in eleven minutes.
Then he looked at the kitchen.
(1:15 A.M.)
The problem with the kitchen was the hob.
The hob was fine. The hob was, by any objective standard, in acceptable condition. It’d been wiped down on Wednesday and there was nothing on it that would have troubled an environmental health officer. But there was a thing on the back left ring, a small archaeological deposit, brown, and once Elliot had seen it he couldn’t stop seeing it.
He got the wire wool out.
It took twenty-five minutes. At twenty to two he stood up, with his hands wet and his back complaining, and looked at a hob ring that now gleamed like something from an advertisement, and thought: ‘right. Good. Done’.
And then he noticed the extractor hood.
(2:04 A.M.)
The wine bottles went out at four minutes past two.
There were four of them and they went into the recycling box on the landing, and Elliot came back in and shut the door and stood in the middle of the flat and did a full survey, coat still on, hair up, sleeves rolled, and felt, for approximately eight seconds, a sense of genuine accomplishment.
Then he thought: ‘that looks like I've cleared up’.
He stood with that for a moment.
Because the flat now looked, unmistakably, like a flat in which somebody had made an effort. There was a shine on things. There was a folded tea towel. And what Elliot Reyes wanted, what the entire operation was in aid of, was for a man to walk into this flat at quarter past six in the morning and think ‘yes, this is how he lives, this is just what it's like here, he hasn't done anything special’.
You couldn’t achieve that with a folded tea towel.
He went back out to the landing and got two of the wine bottles and brought them back in and put them by the bin, casually, at an angle, as though they’d been abandoned there.
He looked at them.
They looked staged. They looked exactly like two wine bottles that a man had gone out onto a landing to retrieve at two o'clock in the morning in order to create an impression of effortlessness, which is precisely what they were.
He took them back out.
Then he unfolded the tea towel.
(2:40 A.M.)
He hoovered under the sofa.
There is no defending this. Nobody has ever looked under a sofa. In the entire history of human courtship, no man has ever arrived at another man's flat, moved a two-seater, and made a judgement. Elliot knew this. He knew it while he was doing it, and he did it anyway, on his knees, at twenty to three, with the hoover attachment that he’d never previously identified a use for.
He found: a pound coin, a pen, an earring belonging to nobody he could think of, and, this genuinely upset him, a Christmas cracker joke from December.
He read it. It wasn't funny.
He hoovered the rest of the flat.
(3:15 A.M.)
The bedroom presented a philosophical difficulty.
The sheets needed changing. That was straightforward. They'd been on since Tuesday and there was no argument to be had about it, and he stripped the bed and put fresh ones on and did the pillowcases and stood back.
And the bed looked, there was no other word for it, expectant.
It had that crisp, smoothed, four-corners quality of a bed in a hotel, and the whole room around it had suddenly become a room with a made bed in it, and Elliot stood in the doorway at twenty past three in the morning and thought, with genuine horror: ‘that's presumptuous’.
Because what was he saying? What was the message? A man arrives at six in the morning and there are fresh sheets on, tight as a drum, and what that says is ‘I’ve thought about this’, and what it also says is ‘I’ve made a series of assumptions’, and Elliot didn’t want to be a man who’d made a series of assumptions.
He considered un-making it.
He got as far as pulling the corner of the duvet back and rumpling it slightly, in order to suggest a bed that had merely happened, and then caught sight of himself in the wardrobe mirror and said, out loud:
"You’re a lunatic."
He straightened the corner. He left the room. He shut the door behind him, which was itself a decision he then reviewed twice.
(3:52 A.M.)
He googled ‘how to save a dying plant’.
The results weren’t encouraging and were also, he felt, unnecessarily judgmental. He read four articles. He learned about root rot and about overwatering and about the fact that the thing he’d been doing for three years, a good drenching once a fortnight when he remembered, was apparently the single worst available approach.
He took the plant to the sink and did some things to it.
At six minutes past four he put it back on the windowsill, turned it forty degrees to a better angle, stood back, and had to admit that it looked precisely as it had looked before, which was: like something that had given up during a previous administration.
"You could at least try," he told it.
(4:11 A.M.)
And then, somewhere in the middle of the room, holding a cloth, he stopped.
It came over him quite suddenly and without any warning, the way these things do at four in the morning: a complete and unwanted clarity about what he was actually doing.
He’d never done this before.
Not the tidying. He had tidied for people. Priya. He had once spent an entire Saturday preparing this flat for his mother and had hidden things in the oven. But he had never done this. He had never, in his entire adult life, had a man come to his flat.
Not once.
He ran it back to be sure, and it held up, which was the horrible part. Marcus: three years. Marcus had been here perhaps eleven times, and every single one of those had been Elliot's flat as an afterthought, a stop-off, a picking-something-up, an ending-up-here because it was closer. It had never been the destination. Elliot had gone to Marcus's. Always. Every time. For three years he had crossed London at eleven at night with a toothbrush in his coat pocket and had thought of it as being easy-going.
And before Marcus, the same. Other people's flats, other people's beds, other people's kitchens in the morning, and always, always, the little clean private pleasure of being the one who could get up and put his shoes on and go.
That was the whole of it. That was the entire mechanism, laid bare on a Sunday morning at eleven minutes past four with a cloth in his hand.
‘If you're always the one at their place, you're always the one who leaves’.
He sat down on the arm of the sofa.
Because the corollary had arrived immediately behind it, and it was worse. If you never let anybody come to yours, nobody ever gets to leave you. Nobody ever stands in your doorway at eight in the morning saying they'd better be off. Nobody ever walks down your stairs. You never have to stand at your own window and watch anybody go.
Elliot Reyes had built an entire romantic life on the principle of never being the one left behind in a room.
And in, he checked, two hours and four minutes, a man was coming here.
"Oh, brilliant," he said, to the empty flat.
Then he got up and cleaned the inside of the kettle, because the alternative was continuing to think.
(4:48 A.M.)
He moved the armchair four inches to the left.
He looked at it.
He moved it back.
(5:00 A.M.)
He showered for a long time and thought about nothing at all in a determined way, and then he came out and stood in front of the wardrobe with a towel round his waist and encountered the final problem, which was the largest, and which he’d been deferring for four hours.
What do you wear at quarter past six in the morning in your own home?
The situation had no precedent and no etiquette. Too dressed and you look like you've been up all night preparing, which he had. Too undressed and you're a man making a statement at dawn. Pajamas: absolutely not, he didn’t even own pajamas.
He tried a shirt. He looked like he was going to work.
He tried a T-shirt and joggers, which was what he actually wore in this flat ninety percent of the time, and looked in the mirror and thought: ‘you look like you've given up’.
He tried the good jumper. The grey one. He put it on and looked at himself and thought, ‘right, that's it, that's the one’, and then he saw the price of the deception, which was that he was standing in front of a mirror at ten past five in the morning selecting an outfit to convey ‘effortlessness’, and had been for eighteen minutes.
He kept the jumper.
(5:40 A.M.)
There was nothing left to do and thirty-five minutes to do it in.
He stood at the window. He checked the flat one final time, and it was, he had to concede, perfect. It was clean and warm and it looked, to any reasonable observer, entirely unremarkable.
Five hours. Five hours to make a flat look like nobody had done anything to it.
At quarter to six he sat down on the sofa and immediately stood up again because sitting felt like waiting.
At ten to six he took his phone out and put it back in his pocket without looking at it.
At six he took it out and looked at it.
T: Off in ten. Do you want anything?
Elliot stared at it.
The answer was no, obviously.
Elliot: no. just come
Elliot: god that sounded…I meant just come over. don't stop. don't buy anything. I've got a kitchen and everything, it's fully operational
T: Right.
Elliot: it's the flat above the launderette. blue door. buzzer's the top one, it says REYES, I wrote it on with a biro like a criminal
T: Fifteen minutes.
And Elliot Reyes, on four hours of no sleep and five of unnecessary cleaning, in a grey jumper he had spent eighteen minutes selecting, sat down on his own sofa in a flat that had never in its life been this tidy, and discovered that his hands were shaking.
"Right," he said.
He looked at the plant.
"Don't you dare die today," he said.
*
The buzzer in Elliot's flat had been installed at some point in the 1970s and had the tonal quality of a fire alarm having a breakdown.
He’d lived with it for three years. It’d never once bothered him. At sixteen minutes past six it went off like a factory whistle and Elliot came about four inches off the sofa.
He got to the handset. He pressed the button.
"Top floor."
Then he put the handset down, and stood in the middle of his own hallway, and listened.
The front door two floors below opened and closed with the boom it always made. And then, coming up the stairs, unhurried, heavy, entirely distinct from any other footstep that had ever climbed those stairs, a set of boots.
Elliot had a complete physical memory of the last time he had listened to that tread coming up a staircase, and it’d involved a strip light with a fault in it and a floor that didn’t officially exist, and his whole body remembered it before he did.
He opened the door before the knock.
And there was Theo Marchetti, out of uniform, on his landing, at sixteen minutes past six in the morning.
It was, Elliot thought, extraordinarily disorientating.
He had known this man for nine weeks and had seen him, he did the sum, perhaps forty times, and every single one of those forty times he’d been in the same navy polyester shirt with the Pellicorp crest on the breast and the sleeves shoved to the elbow. The uniform was so total, so much a part of the man's outline, that Elliot had never seriously considered that there was a wardrobe somewhere in Bermondsey with other things in it.
There was.
Dark jeans. Boots, actual boots, not work ones, brown and scuffed at the toe. A canvas jacket the color of wet pavement. And underneath it a jumper, dark green, thick, which fitted him almost exactly as well as the uniform did, which is to say not at all.
He looked bigger. The uniform had at least been a uniform, it had that flattening institutional quality, it made him a role. In his own clothes he was just a very large man standing on a landing, taking up the entire top of the stairwell, with the whole of him unaccounted for.
And he looked wrecked. Elliot registered that a half-second later and felt something in his chest go soft: the man had been awake since four o'clock the previous afternoon, and it was in his face, under the eyes, in the set of his shoulders, in the slight delay on everything.
He had a plastic bag in one hand.
"Right," said Elliot. "Okay. Well. This is upsetting."
Theo blinked. "What?"
"You've got clothes."
"...Yeah."
"No, you don't understand, I'd conceptually accepted that you owned clothes, but I hadn't…" Elliot gestured at the entirety of him, helplessly. "You've got a jacket, Marchetti. You've got a whole outside jacket. You're a civilian."
"I'm always a civilian."
"You’re not always a civilian, you're a…an institution, you're part of the fabric of that building…" He stopped. "Sorry. Come in. Obviously. Come in."
Theo came in.
Except that he didn’t, immediately, come in.
He stepped over the threshold and stopped, and then he wiped his boots on the mat.
He wiped them for a long time. He wiped them for considerably longer than any boots have ever needed to be wiped, four or five passes each, looking down, and Elliot stood in his own hallway watching this happen and felt the temperature of the morning change.
Because the man had gone to stone.
Completely. That flat, closed, unreadable thing had come down over the whole of him, the face doing nothing at all, the hands finding a task, the total absence of anything that could be read, and Elliot, who had spent four months developing a doctorate in misinterpreting exactly this, felt the bottom drop out of his stomach.
‘He's changed his mind’, he thought, with total conviction. ‘He's been on a bus for twenty minutes and he's changed his mind and now he's stood in my hallway working out how to leave’.
"You all right?" he said.
"Yeah."
"You've done your boots four times."
"They were wet."
"It's not raining."
Theo looked at him.
And then he handed over the plastic bag, slightly too fast.
"Got you a coffee," he said. "It's…there's a place by the station does one at six. It'll be cold now. I got on the wrong bus."
Elliot took the bag.
There was a paper cup in it, and it was, indeed, entirely cold, and there was also, this was the detail that finished him, a pastry in a separate paper bag, folded over twice at the top.
"You got on the wrong bus?" said Elliot.
"The 388 goes a different way on Sundays."
"So you've been carrying a cold coffee around Bethnal Green."
"Twenty-five minutes," said Theo, to the wall.
And Elliot Reyes stood in his hallway holding a cold coffee and understood, about ninety seconds late, which for him was a personal record for slowness, that he had got it completely wrong. That the stone was not the man leaving. That the stone was what happened to Theo Marchetti when he was so nervous he couldn’t operate his own face, and that he’d been standing on a landing outside a blue door with a cold coffee in his hand for God knows how long before he pressed a buzzer.
"Right," said Elliot, much more gently. "Come and sit down before you fall down."
Theo came into the main room and stopped in the middle of it and looked around.
Elliot had, over the preceding five hours, developed an extremely detailed sense of what a person would notice on entering this room. He had a list. He had ranked the list. He was braced, in descending order of probability, for a comment about the sofa, or the shelf, or possibly the plant.
Theo looked at the walls.
He did it within about four seconds of coming through the door, no reaction, no eyebrow, just a slow and complete assessment, his head turning to take in all four of them, and then coming back round to the one behind the sofa and staying there.
He didn’t say anything.
Elliot waited.
Theo continued not saying anything, at length, with total commitment.
"Go on," said Elliot.
"Nothing."
"You've been looking at that wall for eleven seconds."
"It's a wall."
"It's a color, Marchetti, and you've got an opinion…"
"I've not got an opinion."
"It's coming off you in waves…"
Theo put his hands in his jacket pockets.
"I can do that for you," he said. "If you want. The walls."
There was a small silence.
"I'm sorry?" said Elliot.
"Two coats. It'd take a Saturday." He was still looking at the wall, entirely matter-of-fact. "You'd want to go under it with something first, mind, that's a dark one. Three coats, probably. But yeah. I could do that."
"You could…"
"I did Mateo's room. And Dani's kitchen, after. It's not hard, it's just boring."
"Right," said Elliot. "Okay. So what's happened here is that you've walked into my home and offered to redecorate it."
"You asked."
"I asked what you thought…"
"That's what I thought."
"That's not a thought, that's a project proposal…"
"You said go on," said Theo.
And Elliot put the cold coffee down on the table with slightly more force than was necessary and turned round and pointed at him.
"That color," he said, "is called ‘Bruise’."
"...Right."
"It's called ‘Bruise’, it's from a proper range, it was forty-eight pounds a tin, and I chose it because it was called Bruise and because I found that funny, and I have defended it to every single person who has ever come into this flat, including my mother, who cried…"
"She cried?"
"She did a thing with her mouth which is worse than crying, and I have held the line for three years, Marchetti, three years, and I'm not going to be talked out of it at dawn by a man who owns one jacket…"
"I've got two jackets."
"I DON'T CARE HOW MANY JACKETS YOU'VE GOT."
And Theo laughed.
It came out of him properly, that rough surprised sound, and he put a hand over his face for a second, and when he took it away the stone had gone entirely, the whole thing, from the doorway and the boots and the twenty-five minutes on the wrong bus, just gone.
"All right," he said. "It's your wall."
"Thank you."
"It's a horrible wall."
"Get out."
"But it's your wall."
And then it was over, and the room was quiet, and they were two men standing four feet apart in a flat above a launderette at twenty-two minutes past six on a Sunday morning with absolutely nothing to do.
That was the difficulty. There was no desk. There was no lobby, no fifteen meters of marble, no lift with eleven people in it, no fire door and no shift and no reason for either of them to be anywhere in particular. Everything they had ever done together had happened inside a building that told them what to do, walk here, stand there, say evening, and now there was just a room with a sofa in it and no instructions of any kind.
Theo took his jacket off. Then he stood holding it, because there was nowhere obvious to put it.
Elliot took it off him and hung it on the hook by the door, and became immediately and acutely aware that he’d just hung a man's coat up in his own hallway, and that it looked, hanging there next to his own, like something that lived there.
He came back in.
Theo was standing by the sofa.
"Do you want a…" said Elliot.
"I'm all right."
"Right."
"Yeah."
They looked at each other across four feet of carpet.
"So," said Elliot.
"Yeah," said Theo.
"This is…"
"Yeah."
"Right," said Elliot.
The trouble with a silence, in Elliot's experience, was that somebody had to do something about it, and he’d never in his life been able to wait long enough to find out whether that person might be somebody else.
He lasted about four seconds.
"So the last time we talked about this," he said, "you told me you’d…rather see me out of my clothes."
Theo looked up.
"And I’m wearing them now," Elliot went on, at speed, "Well…obviously. But I did want to flag that I remembered the instruction. I've been carrying it around. It's been load-bearing, actually, that instruction, it's had a hell of a week…"
"Reyes."
"…and I suppose what I'm asking is whether the instruction is still standing, in a general sense, going forward, as a sort of policy…"
"Reyes."
"…because if it is I'd want it minuted…"
"You can leave them on," said Theo.
Elliot stopped.
"...Right," he said. "Great. Fine. That's…yeah, that's a bit of a swerve, actually, I'd got quite invested in the other…"
"I was hoping I could take them off you."
There was no drop in Theo’s voice, no lift of an eyebrow and nothing on his face at all. He said it in exactly the register he had used ten minutes earlier to estimate the number of coats a wall would need, standing in the middle of a living room in a jumper that didn't fit him, having been awake for twenty-six hours.
And every single thing in Elliot's head went out at once, like a fuse.
He opened his mouth.
Nothing came out of it. Not a syllable. There was no line. No queue of eight of them jostling at the gate. Nothing there at all, the shelf entirely bare.
"Okay," he said.
That was it. That was the whole contribution. ‘Okay’.
Theo crossed the four feet of carpet.
He did it slowly, and that was what undid Elliot completely, because everything up to now had been fast.
Everything. Every single time.
This was not that.
Theo put his hands on Elliot's waist first, over the jumper, and just stood there for a moment with the whole warm span of them holding on, and then he pushed the hem up and got the thing off over his head in one movement and dropped it on the sofa.
Then he stopped and looked at him.
"You've gone quiet."
"I’ve not gone…"
"You've gone quiet twice this morning," said Theo. "I'm keeping count."
"That is my thing, you can't just take my…"
Theo kissed him, once, on the mouth, briefly, and then went back to what he was doing, which was undoing the button on Elliot's jeans.
And Elliot stood there and let him.
That was the strangest part of the whole thing. He wasn’t doing anything. He had his arms at his sides. He’d spent his entire adult life being the one who ran the room, who set the temperature, who made the joke that decided how the next ten minutes were going to feel, who arrived at every encounter with a lighting rig and a set list, and now, he was standing in the middle of his own front room doing absolutely nothing at all while somebody undressed him.
Theo was taking his time about it. In an order, without hurry, no wasted movement, checking each thing as he went. And every so often he would stop and put his mouth somewhere, the shoulder, the base of the throat, the flat of the chest, as though these were things that had to be attended to before he could continue.
"You're very thorough," said Elliot.
He heard it leave. He heard exactly what it was, and he heard the pitch it came out at, and he shut his eyes.
"Sorry," he said. "Sorry. Ignore that. That's a…that's nerves, that's a nervous…I do that, I've got a thing where if something's actually good I have to immediately…"
"I know," said Theo.
"Right."
Theo smiled.
He didn’t look up while he did it. He was working on the last of it, crouched slightly, one hand at Elliot's hip for balance, and the smile happened somewhere down there in the half-dark of a Sunday morning and Elliot got about eleven percent of it and it went through him like a dropped glass.
Then he straightened up.
Elliot Reyes was standing in his living room with nothing on and a man in a green jumper standing entirely dressed in front of him, and every light in the flat off, and the grey-blue coming up through the window behind the sofa, and he’d never in his life felt so completely, terrifyingly, comprehensively looked at.
"Right," he said. "Well, this is…"
Theo picked him up.
He did it exactly the way he’d done it in the office, which was to say the way you'd pick up a coat: no bracing, no visible effort, no moment in which the man gathered himself. One arm under, one arm across the back, and Elliot's legs went round his waist automatically, the way they had learned to.
"Which room?" said Theo.
His voice had gone somewhere down at the bottom of itself.
"It's…"
"Reyes. Which room?"
And Elliot, who couldn’t for the life of him have produced a coherent sentence, and whose hands were both occupied, tipped his chin toward the door on the left.
Theo carried him there.
Four unhurried steps across a living room with a man in his arms at twenty-five to seven in the morning, in absolute silence, and at the door he turned, and got it with his shoulder, and once they were through he put a heel back behind him and kicked it shut.
*
The light in Elliot's bedroom at half eleven on a Sunday morning was the best light in the flat, and he’d never once been awake in it.
That was the discovery. Three years in this building and the room had only ever been somewhere he arrived at midnight and left at half seven, and it turned out that if you stayed, if you simply didn’t get up, the sun came round the back of the terraces at about eleven and put a long warm slab of light across the foot of the bed and up the wall, and the whole room went gold and slightly dusty and looked like somewhere in a different country.
He was on his back with the sheet up round his waist. Theo was next to him, on his side, taking up roughly two thirds of the available bed as a simple matter of displacement, one arm folded under the pillow.
Neither of them had moved in about twenty minutes.
"That's a water stain," said Theo.
"Where?"
"Ceiling. Over the window."
Elliot looked. There was, indeed, a faint brown-edged shape above the curtain rail, roughly the size of a dinner plate, which he’d been looking at for three years without ever seeing.
"That's been there since I moved in."
"Has it got worse?"
"I don't know. I don't…Marchetti, I've never photographed it."
"You want to keep an eye on that."
"Do I?"
"Could be the flashing round the parapet," said Theo, to the ceiling. "Or the gutter's blocked. Four-story Victorian, that'll be the gutter. Nobody ever does the gutters."
"I'm not doing the gutters."
"Somebody should."
"I've got a roof, Marchetti, I'm not going anywhere near the…" Elliot stopped. "Actually, no, that's a lie. I'm on the roof constantly. I'm just not going near the gutters specifically."
"Right."
They lay there.
Somewhere below, the launderette had got going properly and there was a low regular thump coming up through the floor, which Elliot had stopped hearing in about 2022 and was now hearing again, apparently, because there was somebody in the bed to hear it with.
"There's a spring in the sofa," he said.
"I know. I sat on it."
"Everyone sits on it. It's a rite of passage. Priya's been sitting on that spring for three years and she still hasn't learned…"
"You can fix that," said Theo. "You'd want to get underneath it. It's a clip that's gone, usually. Take the lining off, you'd see it."
"And what, you'd just…"
"Twenty minutes."
"Twenty minutes."
"It's not hard, it's just…"
"…boring, yes, thank you, I'm becoming familiar with the taxonomy." Elliot put an arm over his eyes. "This is a pattern with you. You've been in this flat five hours and you've offered to paint it and fix the furniture and inspect the guttering…"
"You've got a lot wrong with it."
"There is nothing wrong with…"
"Your bathroom door doesn't shut properly."
"IT SHUTS."
"It catches on the frame," said Theo, calmly. "Bottom left. That's a hinge that's dropped. Two minutes with a screwdriver."
Elliot took the arm off his eyes and turned his head and looked at him, and Theo Marchetti looked back at him with absolutely no expression whatsoever, and it took Elliot a full three seconds to understand that he was being wound up.
"Oh, you swine," he said.
And Theo's mouth did the thing, and the whole warm gold room went about four degrees warmer.
They talked about nothing for an hour.
That was the actual content of it, and Elliot couldn’t afterwards have reconstructed more than about a fifth. They talked about Kwame on eleven, who’d been at Pellicorp longer than anybody including the building manager, and who had once found a man asleep in the fourth-floor shower room and had simply left him there on the grounds that he seemed tired. They talked about the sandwich courier and the birthday cake and the wetsuit man, who Theo now believed had been on some sort of stag do, a theory Elliot rejected on structural grounds.
They talked about Marjorie, at length, because Theo had never met her and had constructed a mental image of her that was so wildly inaccurate that it took Elliot fifteen minutes to dismantle it.
They talked about the CD player on the roof. Elliot explained the burned CD-R and the two skips and Theo asked what was on it and Elliot said "you'll laugh" and Theo said "probably" and Elliot told him anyway.
They talked about Rosa's back.
And somewhere in the middle of it, somewhere around the point where Theo was explaining, with total seriousness, the correct order in which to walk a set of fire doors, and Elliot was interrupting him with objections he didn’t believe in for the pleasure of watching him deal with them, Elliot noticed something and stopped dead in the middle of his own sentence.
‘I'm not working’.
That was the thing. That was exactly it.
He wasn’t doing anything. There was no lag. There was no half-second of assessment before he spoke, no reading of the room, no small constant background calculation about whether this was going all right and what he would need to deploy if it wasn't. He wasn’t four seconds ahead. He wasn’t anywhere at all except lying in a bed at half twelve on a Sunday talking absolute rubbish about fire doors, and it was, he searched for a comparison and came up with a stupid one, and used it anyway, like walking downhill.
He’d never had this.
Not with Marcus, who had been clever and who had made everything faintly competitive, so that three years of conversation had felt like a sport played to a good standard. Not at parties, where he was magnificent and where every single minute of it was work. Not even, quite, with Priya and Sef and Dom, who he loved and who had known him for fifteen years, and around whom he still, he saw it now, clearly, still performed. Not as much. But still.
He’d spent twenty-five years being brilliant at conversation. He had never once had an easy one.
And the moment he noticed it, it frightened him so badly that he looked away.
He did it at the ceiling first, which was subtle.
Then, four minutes later, at the window.
Then at his own hand, which was, he was aware, not subtle at all, because there is nothing to look at on your own hand and everybody knows it.
He kept talking. That was the mechanism, the talking got faster and the eye contact got worse, and he was aware of both things happening and couldn’t do a single thing about either, because every time he turned his head and found Theo Marchetti already looking at him from eighteen inches away with that steady undefended attention, something in his chest did a thing that he couldn’t manage.
"…and the point about the segmental commentary is that Callum genuinely believes it's a good document, which is the…"
"Reyes."
"…which is the tragedy of it, really, because if he knew it was bad you could fix it, but he thinks it's…"
"Look at me."
Elliot stopped.
"I am."
"You're looking at the curtain."
"I'm looking at you, I've been looking at you for…"
"You've looked at me twice in ten minutes," said Theo. "Look at me."
"Right," he said. "Fine. Look. Looking. I'm looking."
He turned his head and looked at him.
Eighteen inches. Dark eyes with something warmer coming up through the middle of them where the light got in. The white scar through the eyebrow. The beard. The whole enormous quiet fact of him lying on a pillow, entirely still, looking back.
Four seconds went by.
"This is a staring contest," Elliot said. "You do realize. This has become a staring contest, and I want to establish some rules…"
"There's no rules."
"There are always rules. Rule one: no talking."
"You're talking."
"I'm establishing the rules, that's an exemption, that's…okay. Rule two. Blinking is permitted, we're not animals. Rule three: I'm the judge."
"You're not the judge."
"I'm always the judge, Marchetti, it's the one consistent feature of my…"
"Reyes."
"Right. Yes. Starting. Now."
And it started.
It was appalling.
Four seconds in, Elliot's entire nervous system had begun submitting objections. Seven seconds in he made a face, a big one, a full comedy face, eyebrows and everything, and got absolutely nothing back, because Theo Marchetti's face was doing what it’d done in a marble lobby for four months, which was nothing at all, except that this version of nothing was not a closed door. It was the opposite. It was wide open and entirely steady and it was pointed directly at him.
At fifteen seconds Elliot cheated, and looked at the scar instead of the eyes.
"You're looking at my eyebrow."
"I'm not."
"You're looking at my eyebrow."
"That's WITHIN the rules…"
"You made the rules."
"And I'm the judge, and I've ruled it…"
"Reyes," said Theo. "Look at me."
So he did.
And then it went quiet.
It went quiet for a long time.
That was the part Elliot hadn’t been ready for. He’d been ready for a game, he was good at games, he could run a game for eleven minutes, he’d once got an entire table at a wedding to play something he’d invented on the spot, and what this turned into, somewhere around the thirty-second mark, was not a game at all.
It was just a man looking at him.
In an entire adult life, in offices and pubs and beds, in fifteen years of a friendship group and three years of a relationship, nobody had ever simply held his eyes and kept holding them with nothing else going on and no reason to stop, and Elliot lay eighteen inches away and found that it was almost physically unbearable.
Because there was nowhere to put anything.
Every tool he owned needed somewhere to go, a room, an audience, a gap in the conversation. Here there was no gap. There was no conversation. There was no audience and no room and no timing to be brilliant about, and so all of it simply had nothing to do, and stood there uselessly, and left him lying in a bed being looked at with absolutely nothing between himself and another person.
Fifty seconds.
He felt his eyes go hot and told himself it was the not-blinking.
A minute.
Theo didn’t move and didn’t smile and did not say anything. He just lay there and looked at him.
A minute and ten. A minute and twenty.
And at approximately a minute and twenty-five seconds, Elliot Reyes broke completely and said, at volume:
"YOUR NOSE IS SLIGHTLY BENT."
There was a beat.
"What?"
"Your nose," said Elliot, "it's got a…there's a kink in it, about two thirds of the way down, I've been looking at it for a minute and a quarter and I can't unsee it, it goes left, Marchetti, your nose goes left…"
"I broke it."
"WHEN?"
"Rugby. I was seventeen."
"That is the most predictable thing I have ever…"
And they went. Both of them, at once, completely, Theo with his face down in the pillow making the huffing sound and Elliot lying flat on his back howling at a water-stained ceiling, the pair of them entirely gone, the way you only laugh when something has been wound extremely tight for a minute and a half and is suddenly let go.
"I lost," said Elliot, when he could. "I'm resigning as judge."
"You resigned as judge weeks ago."
"I RESIGNED WEEKS AGO AND I CAME BACK…"
And then Theo moved.
He came up onto one elbow and got a hand round Elliot's shoulder and pulled, not gently, and rolled him over and put him flat on his back in the middle of the bed and came over him, one forearm braced into the mattress beside his head, and the laughing stopped like a tap being turned.
The gold light was on the side of his face.
"Right," said Elliot. His voice had gone. "Okay. That's…"
And then, Theo said something.
He said it very low, and very close, somewhere in the two inches between them, and Elliot, whose blood was going in his ears, and whose whole attention had collapsed to a single point, and who had at that moment approximately no cognitive function available at all, didn’t catch it.
He caught the shape of it. Three or four syllables and the fact that it was said in a voice he hadn’t heard the man use before, quieter than the log book voice, quieter than anything.
"What?" said Elliot.
Theo kissed him.
And it was not like the others.
There was nothing frantic, nothing apologetic and nothing being proved by it at all.
It was just certain. That was the only word Elliot could find for it, then or afterwards. He got both arms round the enormous span of Theo’s back and held on and stopped, for a while, being anybody in particular.
When it ended, Theo didn’t go far.
"What did you say?" said Elliot, into about an inch of air.
"Nothing."
"You said something."
"Didn't."
"Marchetti…"
"Go to sleep," said Theo, and put his face down into the side of Elliot's neck, and didn’t say it again.
And Elliot Reyes lay under the weight of him with his eyes wide open and a water stain on the ceiling and a launderette going below and a whole Sunday afternoon ahead of them, and understood, quite calmly, with no jokes anywhere near it, that he was going to spend a considerable portion of the rest of his life wondering what those four syllables had been.
*
It was Theo's stomach that ended it, at about ten past two, in a manner that could be heard from the other side of the bed.
"Right," said Elliot. "That's…how long has that been going on?"
"A while."
"Marchetti, that wasn't a stomach, that was a distress signal. When did you last eat?"
Theo thought about it, which was itself an answer.
"Half four," he said.
"Half four this morning?"
"Half four yesterday. Before shift. Fish fingers."
"You've eaten fish fingers," said Elliot, sitting up, "at half four yesterday afternoon, and since then you've done a twelve-hour night shift and got on the wrong bus and come here and…" he gestured at the entire room, the bed, the last eight hours "…this, all of it, on the strength of a fish finger?"
"There were four of them."
"Get up."
The fridge didn’t go well.
Elliot had known this would be the case and had made a private decision, somewhere around eleven o'clock, to head it off by ordering something. That plan collapsed at the point where Theo opened the fridge door and stood there looking into it.
He looked into it for a long time.
He didn’t say anything. He crouched slightly, and moved one thing, and looked behind it, and straightened up. He opened the salad drawer, which was a mistake, and closed it again.
Then he said: "Do you eat?"
"Don't."
"I'm asking."
"I eat, I eat constantly, I'm a…"
"There's half a lemon in here," said Theo. "There's a lemon that's been cut in half, and it's…Reyes, it's gone grey."
"That's for cooking."
"For cooking what…?"
"Things." Elliot had hoisted himself up onto the counter, which was where he sat in his own kitchen and always had, in a T-shirt and nothing much else. "There's eggs. There's definitely eggs."
"There's four eggs."
"There you are then."
"And a takeaway box." Theo took it out and held it up and didn’t open it. "What's in this?"
"That's…okay, in the interests of a full and frank disclosure, I don't know."
"You don't know."
"I know what it was. I'm not confident about what it is."
Theo put it in the bin. He didn’t consult anybody about this and there was no discussion, and Elliot found the decisiveness of it unreasonably attractive, which he decided not to examine.
"Ragù," said Theo, finding the tub.
"Ah. Now…"
"Is this the ragù?"
"That's the famous ragù, yes. That's the one that fed four people."
Theo took the lid off. He looked at it. He smelled it. He got a fork out of the drawer, first drawer, first try, which Elliot noticed and filed, and turned some of it over, and looked at it some more.
"You didn't brown it," he said.
"I'm sorry?"
"The mince. You've not browned it. You've put it in and it's gone grey and then you've put the tomatoes in on top."
"That’s a…that's an extraordinary accusation to make in a man's own kitchen…"
"It's fine," said Theo. "It's just not brown."
"IT WAS DELICIOUS. Priya said…"
"Priya's your mate."
"Priya has never spared my feelings in fifteen years…"
"Then Priya's not eaten a lot of ragù," said Theo, and put the lid back on and put it in the fridge, and got the eggs out, and that was the end of the discussion, and Elliot sat on the counter making an outraged noise that nobody in the room acknowledged.
And then Theo cooked.
There was no run-up to it. There was no ‘what have you got’, no ‘shall I do something’, no standing about with a pan looking for permission. The man simply started, the way you start a task, and within ninety seconds the kitchen had reorganised itself around him.
He found the pan. He put the heat on under it and left it to come up rather than putting anything in it straight away, which Elliot had never once in his life done. He put four slices of bread by the toaster and didn’t put them in.
He filled a glass with water and put an egg in it.
"What are you doing?"
"Checking."
"Checking what?"
"If it sinks, it's all right," said Theo, watching it. "If it stands up on the end, it's old but it's fine. If it floats, chuck it."
"That's witchcraft."
"It's an egg."
"That's medieval, that's…where did you learn that?"
"My nan," said Theo, and took the egg out, and did the next one.
The third one stood up on its end. He looked at it, and made a small noise, and used it anyway. The fourth one sank.
Elliot sat on the counter and watched the whole thing with a growing and entirely unmanageable feeling in his chest.
Because it wasn’t that Theo could cook. He wasn’t, in any recognizable sense, cooking. There was no ambition anywhere in it. He was making eggs on toast at two in the afternoon out of a fridge with nothing in it, and it was the single most competent thing Elliot had ever watched a human being do.
He did it in an order. He put the eggs on and while they were going he wiped down the bit of counter he'd been using with a cloth he'd found and wrung out without being told where it was. He put the bread in at the moment that meant it would come up when the eggs were done rather than four minutes before. He found salt in a cupboard he had never opened, on the second guess.
And at no point did he say anything, or check whether it was going all right, or look up for a response.
"You've done this a lot," said Elliot.
"Every day."
"No, I mean…you've done this. Made something out of nothing. At the wrong time of day."
Theo turned the eggs.
"That's Tuesdays," he said. "You come off nights, you've had four hours, you've got to get him from school at half three and there's nothing in and the shop's a twenty-minute round trip and he's starving." He shrugged, one shoulder. "You learn. You look in the fridge and you go right, that's dinner."
"And what's he like about it?"
"He's six. He'd eat toast every night of his life." Something moved at the corner of the man's mouth. "He went through a thing where he'd only eat off the blue plate. Four months. If it wasn't the blue plate it wasn't dinner."
"What did you do?"
"Bought three more blue plates," said Theo.
Elliot got down off the counter to help and was immediately stopped.
"Sit down, Reyes."
And Elliot sat down.
And that was the moment, actually, when the thing he’d been circling all afternoon finally arrived and stood in the middle of his own kitchen and looked at him.
He wasn’t needed.
Somebody was making him food in his own home and had told him to sit down, and there was nothing whatsoever for him to do, no room to run, no gap to fill, nobody to be all right for.
Because that was the job. That had always been the job, for as long as he could remember: in his mother's kitchen with nine people in it, at every party since he was seventeen, at Priya's table on Friday, on the fourteenth floor five days a week. Elliot Reyes was the person who made sure everybody was all right. He arrived early and read the room and found the one who wasn't talking and got them talking, and he did it brilliantly, and he did it because if he stopped doing it he could not think of a single reason why anybody would want him in the room.
And here was a man who’d been awake for thirty-two hours, standing at his hob at ten past two on a Sunday, doing eggs, requiring absolutely nothing from him.
Not a joke. Not a story. Not a single thing.
‘I could just sit here’, Elliot thought, and it arrived like a physical sensation, somewhere behind the sternum, warm and enormous and quite frightening. ‘He'd still make the eggs’.
"You've gone quiet again," said Theo.
"Yeah."
"That's three."
"You're not counting."
"I'm counting," said Theo, and put the toast on.
He cut it into triangles.
He took the knife and went corner to corner, twice, four triangles a slice, and moved them onto the plates in a fan, and then he did the second plate the same way, and put the eggs on, and turned round with both of them.
And stopped.
"What?" he said.
"Nothing."
"You're doing a face."
"I'm not doing a face."
"Yes, you are…"
"You've cut it into triangles," said Elliot.
Theo looked down at the plates.
He looked at them for a second and a half, and Elliot watched the man work out what he'd done, and watched something go across his face, brief, and complicated, and entirely private, before he shut it down.
"Yeah, well," he said.
"No, I…"
"He won't have squares." Theo put the plate down on the counter next to Elliot's leg, a bit too firmly. "Says the corners are wrong. There's no arguing with him, he's…" and he stopped, because the next word was the one he never got to, the one he'd stopped at in a lift and again on a sofa and every single time since. "Anyway."
"Marchetti."
"It's just how I do it."
"I know," said Elliot.
And he didn’t say the other thing, which was sitting fully formed in his chest and which was ‘I'd like to meet him properly one day’, because it was the second Sunday of a thing neither of them had named and there was a six-year-old at his mother's on the other side of London and you don’t say that, not yet, not at two in the afternoon over eggs.
So instead he picked up a triangle of toast and ate it and said, "This is a tactically superior shape, actually. More edge. Better structural…"
"It's toast."
"It's engineering…"
"Eat your eggs."
They ate them standing up in the kitchen, because the table had four chairs and going and sitting at it would have made it a meal.
The eggs were, Elliot noted with some resentment, perfect: the whites done and the yolks not, which he had personally never once achieved in three years of trying, and which had apparently been managed on a hob with a broken ignition by a man who’d been awake since Saturday teatime.
"These are annoyingly good."
"They're eggs."
"They’re not just eggs, I do eggs, mine come out like a…"
"You've got the heat too high."
"I have not…"
"Everyone has the heat too high," said Theo, to his plate. "Everyone's in a rush."
And Elliot Reyes stood in his own kitchen in a T-shirt at twenty past two on a Sunday afternoon, eating triangular toast off a plate somebody else had put in front of him, next to an enormous exhausted man in a green jumper who was not in a rush about anything at all and felt, for the first time in a very long while, absolutely no need to say anything whatsoever.
So he didn't.
And neither did Theo.
*
"He's at his mum's till Tuesday," said Theo.
They were back on the sofa by then, at about three. Elliot was along one end with his feet up. Theo was at the other, taking up rather more than his share, one arm along the back.
"Mateo?"
"Yeah. She's got him for the weekend, her sister's over from Lisbon." He rubbed the heel of his hand into one eye. "So I've got till Tuesday morning."
And something in Elliot's chest went up like a firework.
Because that was, well, that was the whole rest of the day, wasn't it. And the evening. And it was Sunday, which meant tomorrow was Monday and they both had to be at Pellicorp Tower anyway, and there was a bed in the next room with fresh sheets on it that had already been comprehensively wasted once, and there was a roof upstairs that nobody in the world had ever been on except him, and he’d just this second decided to show it to somebody.
"Right," said Elliot, sitting up. "Well, that's…okay. So."
"I'm on at ten, though."
Elliot stopped.
"Tonight?"
"Yeah."
"You're on at ten tonight."
"It's my shift," said Theo, as though this settled it, which, Elliot understood a beat later, and far too late, it did.
He did the math anyway. He did it out loud, because he couldn’t help himself, and because doing it out loud was the closest thing available to an argument.
"Marchetti, you got off at six this morning."
"Yeah."
"You've been awake since four o'clock yesterday afternoon."
"About that."
"That's…" Elliot counted on his fingers, which he regretted immediately. "That's thirty-five hours. And you're going to go home now and get, what, four hours? Five? And then do another twelve?"
"That's the job."
"That's not a job, that's a hostage situation…"
"I've done worse."
"THAT'S NOT THE REASSURANCE YOU THINK IT IS."
And Theo huffed, and Elliot laughed, and for about four more seconds it was still fine.
Then he said it.
He didn’t plan to.
"Don't go."
Theo opened his eyes.
"What?"
"Don't…" And Elliot immediately, reflexively, put a joke in front of it, the way you'd put your hand in front of a candle. "I mean, obviously, in a purely humanitarian sense, as a bystander, I have concerns about the state of you, and I feel it's my duty as a member of the public to…"
"Reyes."
"…raise the matter with the relevant…"
"Reyes."
Elliot stopped.
He looked at the arm of his own sofa for a second. And then he did the thing he’d been learning to do for about nine days, which he was still very bad at, and which cost him, every single time, considerably more than anybody watching would ever have guessed.
"Don't go," he said. "Swap it. Get Gav to do it, or ring in, or…I don't know how it works, I'm not pretending to. But you've been awake for a day and a half and it's Sunday and you've got till Tuesday and I'd quite like you to stay."
There was a pause.
"I've got a roof," he added.
"You've said."
"Yeah, but I mean I'd…" He gestured vaguely upward, and heard how much was in it, and couldn’t stop. "Nobody's been up there. And I thought…it's meant to be clear tonight, and there's the CD player, and I've got a spare blanket, and I thought I'd…"
He ran out.
And Theo Marchetti went completely still.
Elliot saw it happen and didn’t understand it, and that was the worst part.
It wasn’t a flinch. Not anger, or embarrassment, or any of the things Elliot had a file for. It was the same thing that had happened in his hallway that morning with the boots, and the same thing that had happened in a hot lift eighteen days earlier, and the same thing that had happened in a lobby at the end of the very first night, the whole man going flat and closed and unavailable, in about a second and a half, like a shop shutter coming down over a lit window.
Except that this time there was something else in it.
"I don't do shift changes," said Theo.
And it was the voice.
That was what got in. Elliot had spent four months of his life across fifteen meters of marble learning that voice, ‘floor fourteen, late’, the flat one, the one with nothing in it at all, the one that had made him decide, wrongly, for sixteen weeks, that the man behind the desk disapproved of him. He hadn’t heard it since the night the lights went out. He’d assumed, without ever once articulating it, that it’d been retired.
It arrived now in his own living room, from four feet away, from a man wearing a jumper Elliot had had his hands under.
"Right," said Elliot.
"I don't." Theo was already sitting forward. Already reaching for his boots. "I've had the same shifts for six years. Nights, Sunday to Thursday. You start swapping about and it all…"
"No, it's fine."
"It's not…"
"Marchetti, it's fine," said Elliot, brightly. "God. It was a…it wasn't even a suggestion, it was a noise, honestly, I've had four hours' sleep and I'm saying things…"
"Reyes."
"You've got a job. You've got a child. Obviously you're going to work, what am I, some sort of…" and he laughed, an entirely convincing laugh, the good one, the reliable one, the one that had never once let him down. "No. Go. Absolutely go."
And there it was. Up it went.
Elliot felt it go up, the whole apparatus, the whole fourteen-year-old fence, plank by plank, in about four seconds flat, and the extraordinary thing, was that he watched Theo watch it happen.
Because he did. He saw it. Something moved behind the man's face, some recognition, some late arriving comprehension of exactly what he’d just done and exactly what was now being built in front of him, and his mouth opened.
And nothing came out of it.
And he put his boots on.
The next eleven minutes were among the worst Elliot had ever spent in his own home.
They were, on the surface, entirely fine. That was the horror of it. Nobody said anything unkind. Nobody said anything at all, particularly, except a series of small pleasant offcuts of language that two people do when they’re both concentrating very hard on being normal at each other.
Theo said something about the buses on a Sunday.
Elliot said something about the 388 and its unusual route, and got a laugh, and the laugh was polite, and the politeness of it went through him like a splinter.
Theo found his jacket on the hook, where Elliot had hung it that morning, and put it on.
Elliot said, "Right."
Theo said, "Yeah."
They went to the door.
And this was the part that Elliot would take out and examine over and over for the next twenty minutes, because it happened in complete silence and it took about a second and a half and neither of them did anything at all.
There was a moment at the door. There is always a moment at the door. It is the most heavily signposted moment in the entire human catalogue, the pause, the turn, the small closing of the distance, and both of them arrived at it, and both of them stood in it, and neither of them moved.
Theo didn’t lean in. Elliot didn’t reach up.
They stood eighteen inches apart in a hallway above a launderette and looked somewhere in the region of each other, and then Theo said "Right, well," and Elliot said "Yeah, see you," and Theo went out onto the landing and down the stairs.
The front door boomed two floors below.
Elliot went to the window.
He crossed the room fast and got to the glass in time to see the blue door open below him and a man come out onto the pavement in a canvas jacket, and stand for a second, and look up the road toward the bus stop.
‘Turn round’, he thought.
Theo didn’t turn round.
He put his hands in his pockets and walked up the street past the launderette and past the newsagent and past the corner where the road bends, and Elliot watched him go all the way to the end and out of sight.
Four story’s down, on a grey street, on a Sunday afternoon.
He’d spent three years making sure this exact thing never happened to him. Always the one in the taxi. Always the one with his shoes on at eight in the morning saying he'd better be off. Never once the person standing at their own window afterwards.
"Right," he said, to the glass.
And then he did what he always did, which was to have a very reasonable conversation with himself at high volume in an empty room while tidying it.
"It's fine," he told the plates, running the water. "This is a completely normal thing that has happened. A man has gone to work. That's…people go to work, Elliot, that's the basis of the economy."
He washed a plate.
"He's got a shift. He's got a child. You’ve known this man for nine weeks and you’re not going to be the person who…" He put the plate on the rack. "You’re not going to be the person who asks a single father with a night job to ‘bin off his shift’ because you've had a nice Sunday and you wanted to show him a roof."
He washed the second plate.
"And you have known him nine weeks," he said, "and you’ve already told him things you haven't told Priya, and that's…that's on you, not him, that's a you problem, and if you're going to start doing this…" he gestured with the sponge at the entire flat, the sofa, the door, the window "…every time a man leaves the building, then this is going to be an absolute catastrophe."
He dried his hands.
"And he was cold," he said, to the kitchen, more quietly. "I'm allowed to have noticed that. He was properly cold, and I wasn't imagining it."
He stood there.
"But he's tired," he said. "He's been up for thirty-five hours and he's about to do twelve more, and you asked him to blow up the one thing in his life that works, at three o'clock in the afternoon, out of nowhere, and he panicked, because he panics, that's what he does, that's been established across multiple…"
He put the tea towel down.
"You're doing it again," he said.
Because he was. He'd caught himself at it: constructing a case for the defense, building the man an alibi out of everything he knew about him, doing the emotional labor of both parties simultaneously so that nobody anywhere would have to be uncomfortable.
"God, you're exhausting," he told himself.
And that’s when somebody knocked on the door.
Not the buzzer.
The buzzer was downstairs and made a noise like a factory whistle, and this was a knock, on the actual door of the flat, four feet away, which meant somebody had come through the front door two floors below, which meant somebody had been let in.
Elliot opened it.
Theo Marchetti was leaning on the doorframe.
He was filling it entirely, one shoulder against the jamb and one hand up on the top of it, still in the canvas jacket, with the cold off the street on him and his hair damp at the front where it had started raining somewhere around the corner of the road.
"Gav's taking it," he said.
Elliot stood there.
"...Sorry?"
"Tonight. Gav's taking my shift." Theo said it flatly, to the doorframe. "I've rung him. He wanted the hours anyway, he's saving for a caravan."
"He's…"
"He's got a caravan thing. It's a whole…"
"Marchetti." Elliot's brain had caught up and was now running at some speed. "Hang on. If Gav does tonight, then…"
"I do his tomorrow."
"You do his tomorrow."
"And mine."
"You do his and yours?" Elliot's voice went up. "That's…ten at night till ten at night, that's a twenty-four hour shift, that's not even…that's got to be against about nine different…"
"It's a swap."
"You'll be hallucinating by Tuesday…"
"Probably."
"So why would you…?"
And Theo shrugged.
A small movement, one shoulder.
"Didn't fancy the bus," he said.
And then, before Elliot could get anywhere near a reply, he looked down at his own boots, and the whole flat and the whole landing and the whole grey afternoon went quiet, and he said, much lower:
"Didn't want to go."
Elliot did not say anything.
“Anyway…” Theo cleared his throat. "About what I said. Before. I don't…" His jaw worked. "It come out wrong."
"Marchetti…"
"It's not the shift. It's just…" and he stopped, and gave up on it entirely, and looked up. "I'm rubbish at this."
"You've mentioned."
"I'm going to be rubbish at it for a while."
"I know," said Elliot.
And Theo Marchetti, thirty-six hours awake, standing in the rain on somebody's landing having just signed himself up for a twenty-four hour shift, with a caravan-shaped favor owed to a man with a moustache, smiled.
The whole one.
(To be continued…)
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