Page 9 of Hard Tail
Then I realised he’d seen me staring at his eggs, so I had to say something to cover my embarrassment. “So, er, did Jay tell you much about me? Apart from that I was married?”
“He said you were posh,” Matt said cheerfully, his mouth half full of food.
I gave a nervous little laugh and spread some egg yolk on a chip. “We’re brothers. I’m not any posher than Jay is.”
“Yeah, you are,” Matt contradicted me, gesturing with his fork and nearly taking my eye out. “Sorry. You don’t talk like him, for a start.”
“I don’t?” How did Jay talk, anyway? I tried to think if he sounded, well, more common than me. All I could think of was that he sounded likeJay. I ate another chip, this one with a bit of egg white to get it over with.
“Nah. He talks like everyone else.”
Great. My accent had social leprosy. “So how do I talk?”
Matt shrugged. “Well. Posh. Didn’t you go to Oxford or Cambridge, or something?”
I could feel my face growing warm. “Durham, actually.” So I hadn’t got into Cambridge, so what? It wasn’t like my mother constantly bewailed my failure… Oh. Wait. She did. I took a gulp of coffee, finding the predominant flavour was the salt that had been deposited on the mug by the dishwasher. Still, as long as it had caffeine in, I decided I didn’t care.
“Is that where you met your wife?”
I was a bit thrown by the sudden mention. “Kate?”
Matt grinned. “Why, how many wives have you had?”
The furnace in my face turned up to Gas Mark 12. I put my mug down slowly. “Uh, just the one. And yes, we met at Uni.” We’d been friends before we were girlfriend and boyfriend. Alongtime before. I think, in the end, it was just that neither of us could think of any convincing reasons to give to people when they asked, yet again, why we weren’t going out. So we did, and it had seemed to work all right. The sex hadn’t been brilliant, but Kate hadn’t seemed all that interested in sex in any case, so that had taken the pressure off quite a bit. We’d been happy enough, I guess—until Kate had started wanting more from life than a husband who was more like a brother.
I’d always wanted a sister, I recalled.
It wasn’t a subject I was particularly keen to talk to Matt about, so I tried to shift the focus away from me. “So are you, er, seeing someone?” I asked, cringing internally because when I asked girls this, they always seemed to assume it was a chat-up line.
Matt gave me a wary look. I wondered what Jay had told him about me. “Yeah. Actually, we live together. Um. So do you know the area well?”
I guessed I wasn’t the only one for whom it was a touchy subject, although it worried me it might just be that Matt thought I was judgmental. “It’s not a problem, you know,” I insisted. Matt just looked puzzled, so I was forced to carry on. “You being, well, gay.” I cleared my throat, feeling like an idiot. “Do you live in Totton?”
“Oh! Yeah—I mean, no. But I used to. My, um, Steve’s place is out in the New Forest.” Matt smiled, and his tone got warmer. I wasn’t sure if it was for the forest, the house, or for the mysterious and presumably comfortably well-off Steve.
I was already starting to dislike the bloke. “Sounds nice,” I said shortly.
“It is—we get wild ponies coming right up to the garden fence, and it’s really peaceful out there. The pubs are great too. You should try a few. Most of them do food.”
I shrugged. “Never really been that keen on eating out alone.”
“We could go to one next Wednesday, if you like. There’s this brilliant one I know out towards Lyndhurst—they do a great lasagna. Loads of other stuff too. If it’s nice, we could eat out in the garden.” Matt made excited gestures with his fork, and a blob of brown sauce teetered but just failed to fall on the table.
His enthusiasm had me sold on the idea even before I’d had time to think it over. “Yes, why not? We could make it a regular weekly lunch date.” Matt’s eyes went wide, and I cursed myself. “Not that it’ll be a date, obviously,” I added hurriedly. “Just…two blokes going for a pub lunch. Drinking beer and, um, talking about football. Not a date at all, really. I don’t know why I called it that.” I took a gulp of lukewarm coffee to cover my embarrassment.
Matt fiddled with one of the little packets of salt that had survived his ministrations earlier. In a belated reversion to form, it came apart in his hands, spilling tiny granules all over the table. “Shit.” He sounded miserable, and I felt like a bastard. “Look, Jay said you were a bit…and it doesn’t matter, I know some blokes are uncomfortable with the gay thing.” Now I felt even more like a bastard.
“It’s not…” I stopped. Because itwasthat, and denying it would just make me a lying bastard. I pushed my chair back and stood. “Look, I’ve got shopping I need to get done. Thanks for lunch; it’s been great. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”
Then I dropped a £20 note on the table and walked out like the coward I was.
