Page 31 of Hard Tail
***
I went straight to the hospital to see Jay after work. He was supposed to have had his surgery today, so I wanted to make sure it had gone okay. “Where’s Mum?” I asked when I got in the door to find Jay, against all probability, on his own.
Then I caught sight of Jay’s leg, resting on the blanket, and forgot I’d even asked. “Bloody hell, Jay! What have they done to you?”
The cast was gone, and his leg had…bits of metal sticking out of it. Shiny silver rods and screws, as if some medical student had been given a Meccano set for his birthday and decided to combine his two loves. The rods disappeared into Jay’s flesh just above his knee. My stomach gave an uneasy lurch. “Is that supposed to be animprovement? When you said they were going to put a framework in, I thought you meant, well,in.”
Jay gave Frankenstein’s limb a cursory glance. “Yeah, it’s actually feeling a lot better now. I’ve got to be careful not to knock it, though.”
It didn’t look better to me. It looked swollen, painful and frankly nauseating. “Can you walk on it now?”
“Nah. Tomorrow, I’m supposed to start with all that. Be good to get back on my feet.”
I swallowed. “So…will you be coming back to the shop soon?”
“Had enough of slumming it down here, have you?”
“Don’t be a prat!” It came out a bit more forcefully than I meant it to, and Jay shot me an astonished look. “No—I’m, well, I’m kind of enjoying it, actually. So you don’t need to worry about hurrying back. Why not leave it until your leg’s healed properly? Take a break. Pun not intended.”
Jay was staring at me like I’d announced my intention to start dressing in rabbit skins and living wild in the forest.
“What?” I asked.
“This isn’t some kind of midlife crisis, is it?”
Not him as well. “I’m twenty-eight, Jay. I’m three years younger than you are.”
“Yeah, but you’ve been living life in the fast lane, haven’t you?”
“The fast lane? I’m an accountant from Mill Hill, for God’s sake.”
“Yeah, but you work in the City. Did work, anyway. And I know you; you never eat properly. Physiologically speaking, you’re probably nearer forty.”
My jaw dropped—and Olivia glided in just in time to see me standing there like Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. Mum followed in her wake, looking as though she was seething over something and would erupt any minute like the apocalypse kicking off.
Olivia gave me a cool smile. “Hello, Tim. Have you given any thought to what I said?”
It was too much. No way was I staying there to be humiliated while Olivia shared the tale of my greying pubes. I squared my shoulders, gathered my dignity—and slunk out of there like a weasel who’d been caught pushing dodgy carrots to little baby bunnies.
***
By the time I got home, all enthusiasm for going up to Mill Hill that evening had fled. I could live without the rest of my stuff for a little while longer. Actually, to be honest, I could probably live without most of it indefinitely. My clothes were all wrong for down here, Jay had duplicates of most of the decent stuff in my CD collection and as I wasn’t planning to enter any tournaments down here, my sparring mitts and pads wouldn’t be required.
I wondered if Kate had any plans for the household stuff. Most of it had been wedding gifts from elderly relatives; the kitchen stuff in particular had hardly been used. Was it a bit late now to return the stuff to the original givers? Of course, some of the crumblier great-aunts and uncles had died since then… I thought guiltily of Auntie Pat and her matched set of copper-bottomed pans. Maybe I should have put in a bit more effort to learn how to use them?
Stung by Jay’s comments about my diet, I’d popped into Asda on the way back and bought some healthy stuff from their Good For You range, but it was still ready meals. I had a nasty suspicion they still wouldn’t be a patch on cooking stuff from scratch.
After all, millions of people cooked food every day—how hard could it be? Feeling inspired, I grabbed one of Jay’s cookbooks from the kitchen shelf and flicked through until I found a recipe for something I recognised. Lasagna. That was just pasta, and pasta was easy, right? Trying not to be put off by the list of ingredients longer than my small intestine, I scanned the instructions.Chop onions… I could do that.Brown mince…trickier but manageable. Probably.Make a roux in the usual way… I sighed, shut the book with a snap and went off to make dinner inmyusual way: pierce film; bung in microwave; wait for bell.
