Page 16 of This Thing With Charlie

“I’m not your Charlie.”

“I know,” I said quietly.

“But you’ll always be my Daniel. Okay?”

I smiled as he hung up on me. I curled up on my sofa and fell asleep. There were no twinkling lights in my windows and no tree in front of the filthy fireplace with its cracked tiles, but I had a leaking roof over my head and all my belongings in one place. Then I dreamed of crackling fires and ginger teas. I dreamed of crinkly eyes and the smile on his face. I dreamed of everything and nothing as the world around me just disappeared.

This thing with Charlie made the days come and go as I tried to busy myself enough to get through the week. I didn’t hear from Charlie again, apart from sending through the number for some builder called Big Derek and a name of an architect firm in town. I set up appointments for quotes I wouldn’t be able to afford and dragged my sorry arse down to the bank to try to plead my case for a desperate remortgage, using the ramshackle building I slept in as my useless collateral. The mortgage advisor looked at me with pity as I cringed at the sums on her screen and compared it to the desperate state of my bank account. At least I got paid on the day before New Year’s Eve, and I swiftly invested in a microwave oven and a set of sheets for the mattress that still had no base or frame.

I bought too many pillows in the homeware shop and also grabbed some extra blankets. Added candles, too, for a homely touch, which I had to laugh at when I got home and placed them on the small table next to my sofa. The room looked anything but amazing with the peeling wallpaper and damp patch on the wall, but the finishing touch was obviously the broken windowsill where I’d carelessly stood trying to get the old-fashioned curtain pole reattached to the wall. I’d spent days removing all the carpet, hoping to find some long-forgotten treasures underneath. Instead, I was now walking around on bare wooden floorboards, and there were damp and droppings wherever I peeled back something new.

At least the fireplace in the front room brought me heat at night. I even had a chimney sweep come out to service it after I found some firewood neatly stacked under a dirty tarpaulin at the back of the house.

I was warm and the smell of wood burning brought me comfort as I ate a microwave meal straight out of the packet, perched on the only worktop in the rundown kitchen. I had my crockery, which I neatly stacked on a shelf, and I had running water and food in the small fridge. I could survive here for weeks if I needed to. Well, apart from that I was running dangerously low on clean clothes and the laundrette behind the health centre still had a sign posted, “Closed for theholidays.”

I needed a washing machine, and I sighed to myself as I added that little expense to my massive list of things to buy on a non-existent budget.

I should have saved harder and not lived my life as if every day was my last. I thought of all the meals out Justine and I had shared, the holidays, minibreaks, and the car I had so carelessly told her to keep. Not that I needed a car, but I should have fought harder for what was half mine. I should have taken the curtains and a couple of rugs. I should have maybe kept the lovely paintings we had bought, so I would have had something to put on the walls, but then the thought of a life now long gone would have just made me remember things that I no longer had.

It was better to just start over. Start afresh. Be someone else for a while because the person who slept in his clothes and sometimes forgot to shower was definitely not the person I was aiming to be. It was just, at the moment, this seemed to be the only thing I could be and that... that was a worry.

I showered on New Year’s Eve, just in case, letting my hair dry in front of the fire as I installed the Wi-Fi router that had finally arrived. I drank cups of tea and tried not to text Charlie, hoping my indifference to his whereabouts would make him more inclined to come and see me. It was stupid, of course, because he said he would come back. Yet he didn’t.

He didn’t turn up on New Year’s Day, despite me taking a brisk walk through town, hoping there would be light above the bakery and fresh goods on display.

There weren’t, of course, and I went to bed feeling crushed and distraught. I’d hoped he would come, and he didn’t. I rang him in desperation, only to listen to his cheery voicemail in despair.

I texted him, wishing him a Happy New Year and hoping this was the year when we laid down some roots.

It sounded great in my head but reading it back, my stomach twisted with fear.

I didn’t want this. I didn’t want to be here. Alone.

But the days went on, and I went back to work, getting back into routines and filling my evenings with TV and sleep. I met with the architects and showed Big Derek around the house. He laughed at the state of it and told me he’d seen worse. Then he quoted me a ridiculous amount of money, and I laughed right back in his face. Then he laughed even more and sat down on my sofa and told me not to be stupid because he knew Mrs. Hallet’s son, who’d said I was a decent bloke. He also lived for Graham Shaw’s meat and potato pies, so anyone who was a friend of Charlie’s would be looked after. He would build whatever I wanted, and I shouldn’t worry about a thing. His grandma was apparently one of my patients too, so that, he said, sealed the deal. I couldn’t follow much of his logic, but he shook my hand, and I signed his contract, and the planning permission sheet was stuck to my door the following week.

It was crazy, but I needed crazy. I needed anything to get my head screwed on right because Charlie? I missed him every day. I knew it was madness, something that had spiralled out of control in my head, but I couldn’t let go of the thought. The ridiculous fantasy that perhaps I could do this. That I could make him happy when I couldn’t even make myself smile.

This thing with Charlie? It had destroyed everything I thought I was, and there was nothing I could do about it.

It was a cold evening at the end of January when I finally took a day off, so Geoff the Kitchen-fitter-who-also-owned-a-Gay-Bar could come and take measurements for what was to become an open-plan kitchen in the new improved hovel that I now couldn’t wait to get started on. Both rooms upstairs now leaked, the loft had bats, and I was going batshit crazy, trying to control the constant migration of rodents in the downstairs toilet. They were probably rampant in the kitchen too. I was sure of it as I held my breath every morning, hoping my teabags were still intact. I’d bought a fire alarm in case my four-legged squatters chewed through my wiring. I lived in squalor and misery, but at least my clothes were cleaned weekly, and the sofa I slept on had blankets and enough warmth that I slept well at night.

But Charlie? Charlie was never where I was, and I avoided town as much as I could. I thought I was giving him space, the space he had asked for, but the thoughts in my head were filling me with doubt because I was more than likely doing this all wrong.

So, I sat down on my sofa and stared at my phone. I stared at his number and pressed it. I knew he wouldn’t answer and almost jumped at the sound of his voice.

“Hi, Daniel,” he said in my ear, and the lump in my throat made me shudder with fear.

“Charlie,” I said, my voice cracking up. “Fucking hell, Charlie.”

“You all right?”

“No,” I said because I just couldn’t lie. Not to him. “I’m not all right. I’m lonely and messed up, and I bloody miss you.”

“I’ve not been around much,” he said, sounding completely indifferent to my pain. “Gave up the job at the hotel and got another one teaching down at the college. Just two days a week but it’s… It’s been good, you know?”

“How are you?” I said weakly because I needed to know. I needed to hear him speak because just hearing his voice had already settled the anxiety in my chest down to a small flutter in my stomach.

“I’m fine…” he said. Then there was just the sound of breathing in my ear.

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