‘But you know I’m okay,’ I told her.
‘No I don’t,’ Sarah explained it to me as if I was a slow learner, ‘I only have your word you’re okay, and you might have a concussion. You need someone with you for the night,’ and she must have seen the worried look, ‘don’t panic. I’m not here for a shag. I don’t think you’re really up to that.’
‘Thanks.’
‘I got Finney to drop me outside Joanne’s and got a cab back here as soon as he left, so you don’t have to worry about him or the rest of the boys talking.’
‘It’s not him I’m worried about.’
‘Well I won’t tell dad unless you do. Now are you going to let me in or what?’
I held the door wide and she walked in. I slipped the gun back in the golf bag without her seeing it.
‘You’ve not got any overnight things.’
‘You can lend me a T-shirt,’ she said, ‘now sit down on that couch while I boil the kettle.’ She walked off into the kitchen and, though I had wanted to be alone to work all of this out, I had to admit it was nice to see her. I was touched by her concern for my wellbeing, which was a marked contrast to my girlfriend’s mood.
She made me cups of sweet tea, for energy. I never take sugar but there was something warm and comforting about them. We stayed up and talked for a while and then she told me to get my battered head down. We argued about who should get the bed and who the couch. She eventually wore me down by insisting I was an invalid who needed a proper pillow and mattress.
‘I’ll be fine on the couch with a blanket and a cushion,’ she said.
‘Well,’ I admitted, ‘we’ve got plenty of those.’
She told me she was going to watch some brain-rotting, reality TV show that I wouldn’t want to bother with. She was right on that score.
Sarah went into my bedroom and came back dragging the spare duvet from the bottom of my wardrobe where I told her it would be. She’d taken off her jeans and shirt and was now wearing something of mine instead. I’d told her she could have one of my shirts, anything she liked the look of or felt comfy in but, even in my concussed state, I did a double take when I saw her.
‘Christ lass,’ I said, ‘do you do this sort of thing deliberately?’
‘What?’ she asked innocently. She let the duvet cover fall out of her arms then stood straight and turned to one side like she’d just reached the end of the catwalk at a fashion show, ‘I thought you’d approve.’
Of course I approved. She looked amazing, standing there in just my Newcastle shirt.
I shook my head, ‘Peter Beardsley never looked that good.’
‘I should hope not.’
‘I’m off to bed,’ I said, before I did something really stupid.
She laughed, ‘night-night pet.’
My sleep was restless, filled with nightmares in which I was repeatedly attacked by faceless assassins who would never give up or drop no matter what I did to them. I finally woke, feeling like I’d been run over by a lorry, to the smell of sizzling bacon coming from my kitchen. At first I was confused. Laura never made me that kind of breakfast. She disapproved of anything that didn’t come in a bowl containing nuts and inedible chunks of oats welded together. Also, she wasn’t really one for cooking. For her, preparing a meal meant saying ‘why don’t you book us a table at… ’ then inserting the name of the latest fashionable eatery that had just opened on the Quayside.
By the time I’d surfaced, Sarah had set my kitchen table with cutlery, plates and a little ovenproof dish onto which she’d piled bacon, sausages and eggs. There was toast, proper butter and a bottle of ketchup. Sarah was still wearing my Newcastle shirt but she’d put her jeans back on and I was thankful for that.
‘You darling,’ I said and meant it. For some reason I was starving, ‘where’d you get all this?’
‘There’s a shop on the corner,’ she gently rebuked me, ‘or have you never noticed?’
‘I’m vaguely aware of it.’
‘Thought so, that oven looks like it’s never been used.’
‘I sometimes use the rings to light a cigarette.’
I sat down and grabbed a piece of toast, spread a dollop of melting butter over it and took a big bite, ‘I never have time for cooking,’ I said, talking with my mouth full, ‘I usually eat breakfast at the gym and… ’ I shrugged. I couldn’t be bothered to explain that meals were taken wherever I happened to be at the time.
I ate loads and thanked her. ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. She was sitting bare foot on my couch a few moments later looking like she’d been living with me for weeks when a key turned in the lock and Laura walked in. When she saw Sarah in my football top her mouth literally fell open.
I have no idea what she would have said to me if Sarah hadn’t been there. I will never know if she had come back to apologise, to continue the row or to leave me for good. She didn’t look like she was about to beg my forgiveness, check my vital signs then shag me as a way of assuaging her guilt.
Instead she just went into one. ‘Well YOU didn’t waste your fucking time!’ she shouted, leaving me with no idea if the you in question was meant to be me or Sarah or both of us. ‘For fuck’s sake, I’ve only been gone a night.’
I opened my mouth to say something like, ‘Laura, it’s not the way it looks,’ but I realised that was such a corny line it would have been completely counterproductive. Deep down I knew it probably did look pretty bad. Laura knew, or at least sensed, that Sarah liked me and now she was sitting on my sofa, wearing my Newcastle shirt, the one with my name on the back, having just enjoyed what appeared to be, judging by the pile of dirty plates and pans in the sink, a hearty post-conjugal breakfast. The trouble was I hadn’t shagged Sarah and I was starting to feel more than a little aggrieved with Laura. To use her phrase, she had not been there for me last night and Sarah had. Now she was treating me like a bad boy and I’d done fuck-all to deserve it. I didn’t count the occasional fleeting thought about what Sarah looked like under my football shirt.
I was going to argue the toss but I felt indescribably weary. Watching Laura virtually foaming at the mouth as she continued to bollock Sarah, I suddenly got a vivid insight into my future; a sexless, mundane place, punctuated by meaningless rows over nothing on the way back from Ikea. I knew deep down that, if we still had something worth saving, I could have turned things around. I could have forced her to listen, told her I loved her, made her see that Sarah and I were little more than longstanding, platonic friends. I could have got her to believe me. I was sure of it. I just didn’t want to. In fact, all of a sudden, I didn’t give a shit.
Sarah was fighting her corner. ‘I only stayed to make sure he didn’t have a concussion. That’s meant to be your job, but you didn’t care!’
‘Don’t give me that, you little slag. Do you think I don’t know what’s been going on? That I haven’t seen the way you look at him, like you want to have his bloody babies!’
Sarah’s face reddened. She looked like she was just about to explode and knock Laura out. It was time to intervene.
‘Laura,’ I said it very calmly and very quietly and because of that they both turned to listen to me, ‘I realise you are upset but what you think has happened hasn’t happened, though that’s not even what’s important right now.’
‘What?’ she asked me incredulously, ‘what do you mean it’s not important?’
‘No,’ I assured her, ‘the important thing is this; if you keep calling my good friend Sarah here a slag, very soon she is going to get really tired of it. She is going to walk over there and grab you by the hair then she is going to bitch-slap you all round my apartment and throw you out.’ For the second time that morning Laura’s mouth gaped open. She looked at me, then she looked at Sarah who nodded at her slowly for emphasis, but I wasn’t finished. ‘More to the point, I’m going to do sod-all to stop her. Have you got that?’