On Friday night the two of them huddled baffled and alone in the huge living room in Belsize Avenue, surrounded by mountains of cardboard. They drank cups of coffee and tried to watch television, but it was as if the flat had already taken its leave of them. When they went to bed it was if they were lying on a cold hillside in a country where their visa had expired.
The next morning two affable Australians arrived with a van the size of Denmark, and Richard watched, vicariously exhausted, as they trotted up and down the stairs, taking his life away. Chris bristled with female cleaning know-how in the kitchen, periodically sweeping past him with a damp cloth in her hand, humming to herself. As the final pieces of furniture were dragged away Richard tried to say goodbye to the flat, but the walls stared back at him with vacant indifference, and offered nothing more than dust in corners which had previously always been hidden. Dust, some particles of which were probably Susan’s skin — and his and Chris’s, of course. He left to the sound of a Hoover, and followed the van to their new home.
Where, it transpired, his main bookcase could not be taken up the stairs. The two Australians, by now rather bedraggled and hot, struggled gamely in the dying light but eventually had to confess themselves beaten. Richard, by now rather depressed, allowed them to put the bookcase back in the van, to be taken off with the other storage items. Much later he held out a tenner to each of them, watched the van squeeze off down the narrow road, and then turned and walked into his new home.
Chris was still at Belsize Avenue, putting the finishing touches to the cleaning and negotiating with the old twonk who owned the place. While he waited for her to arrive, Richard moved a few boxes around, not wanting to do anything significant before Chris was there to share it with him, but too tired to simply sit still. The lower hallway was almost completely impassable, and he resolved to carry a couple of boxes up to the living room. It was while he was struggling up the stairs with one of them that he hurt himself.
He was about halfway up, panting under a box which seemed to weigh more than the house itself, when he slipped on a cushion lying on the stairs. Muscles which he hadn’t used since his athletic glory days at school kicked into action, and he managed to avoid falling but collided heavily with the wall instead. The corner of the box he was carrying crunched solidly into his ribs. For a moment the pain was startling, and a small voice in his head said, ‘Well, that’s done it.’
He let the box slide to the floor and stood panting for a while, fingers tentatively feeling for what he was sure must be at least one broken rib. He couldn’t find anything which gave more than usual, and after a recuperative cigarette carefully pushed the box the rest of the way up the stairs. Half an hour later Chris arrived, happily cross about their old landlord’s attempts to whittle money off their deposit, and set to work on the kitchen.
They fell asleep together that night, three of their hands together; one of Richard’s unconsciously guarding his side.
The next morning it hurt like hell, but as a fully-fledged male Richard knew how to deal with this: he ignored it. After four days of looking at the cardboard boxes cheerfully emblazoned with the logo of the removal firm, he had begun to hate the sight of them, and concentrated first on unpacking everything so he could be rid of them. In the morning he worked in the living room, listening to the sound of Chris whistling in the kitchen and bathroom, those female domains. He discovered that two of the boxes shouldn’t even have been there at all, but were supposed to have been taken with the others and put in storage. One was full of computer manuals for software he either never used or knew back to front; the other was a box of Susan Objects. As he opened it, Richard realized why it had hurt quite so much when making contact with his ribs: it contained, amongst other things, a heavy and angular bronze which she had made and presented to him. He was lucky it hadn’t impaled him.
As it wasn’t worth calling the removal men out to collect the boxes, they both ended up in his microscopic study, squatting on top of the filing cabinet. More precious space taken up by stuff which shouldn’t even be there; either in the flat or in his life.
The rest of the weekend disappeared into a blur of tidal movement and pizza. Objects migrated from room to room, in smaller and slower circles, until they finally found their new nesting places. Chris efficiently unpacked all the clothes and put them in the fitted wardrobes, cooing over the increase in hanging space. Richard tried to organize his books into his decreased shelving space, eventually having to lay many of them on their side and pile them up vertically. He set his desk and computer up, and checked his e-mail, obscurely irritated to find that no one had tried to contact him in the couple of days he’d been off-line.
By Monday most of it was done, and Richard spent the morning trying to turn his study into a habitable room by clearing the few remaining boxes. At eleven Chris called from work, cheerful and full of vim, and he was glad to sense that the move had made her happy. As they were chatting he realized that he must at some point have scraped his left hand, because there were a series of shallow scratches, like paper cuts, over the palm and underside of the fingers. They hardly seemed significant against the pain in his side, and aside from washing his hands when the conversation was over, he ignored them.
In the afternoon he took a break and walked down to the local corner store for some cigarettes. It was only his second visit, but he knew he’d already seen all it had to offer. The equivalent store in Belsize Village had stocked American magazines, fresh-baked bread and three different types of pesto. Next door had been a delicatessen with home-made duck’s liver and port pâté to die for. ‘Raj’s EZShop’ sold none of these things, and instead concentrated rather single-mindedly on the pot noodle and toilet roll end of the market. When he left the shop Richard went and peered dispiritedly at the grubby menu hanging in the window of the restaurant opposite. Eritrean food, whatever the hell that was. One of the dishes was described as ‘three pieces of cooked meat’, which seemed both strangely specific and uncomfortingly vague.
Huddling into his jacket against the cold, Richard turned and walked for home, feeling — he imagined — rather like a deposed Russian aristocrat, allowed to live after the revolution but condemned to lack everything which he had once held dear. The sight of a small white dog scuttling by seemed only to underline his isolation.
When Chris returned at six she couldn’t understand his quietness, and he didn’t have the heart to try to explain it to her.
‘What’s that?’
The answer, Richard saw, appeared to be that it was a scratch. About four inches long, it ran across his chest directly over his heart. He hadn’t noticed it before, but it seemed to have healed and thus must have been there for a day or two.
‘Another souvenir from the move,’ he said. It was after midnight and they were lying in bed, having just abandoned an attempt to make love. It wasn’t that there was any lack of enthusiasm — far from it — simply that the pain in Richard’s ribs was a bit too bracing to ignore. He was fine so long as he kept his chest facing directly forwards, but any twisting and it felt as if someone was stoving in his rib cage with a well-aimed boot. ‘And no, I’m not going to the doctor about it.’
Chris smiled, started to tickle him, and then realized she shouldn’t. Instead she sighed theatrically and kissed him on the nose before turning to lie on her side.