The floor of Max’s room looked like a battlefield, various items of discarded clothing lying on the carpet like wounded soldiers. My knickers, my bra, my shirt, my jeans, all at different spots. I swung my legs out and reached for my knickers, pulled them on and then tiptoed to listen at his bathroom door. Nope. Nothing. I retrieved my clothes from their various locations, put everything on and opened his bedroom door a fraction to the hall to see if I could hear a kettle or a radio out there. Still nothing. I found my way back to the living room but he wasn’t there either. Then I saw a note on the kitchen counter.
L, SORRY TO ABANDON YOU, JUST GOT A FEW WORK THINGS TO DO. BUT MAKE YOURSELF A CUP OF TEA AND GREAT TO MEET. M.
I stood at the kitchen counter analysing it. Analysing every word. Analysing every letter. No kiss after the M, was my first thought. And did ‘great to meet!’ feel a bit corporate? I don’t want to harp on about the bottom thing, but ‘great to meet!’ felt like something you said after meeting someone at a middle-management awayday, not what you said after putting your tongue in – I quickly counted in my head – three of their orifices. And who had work this early on a Sunday morning? But he’d also called me ‘L’, which seemed sweet. A bit intimate. L&M, we’d be, if we were a couple. As in ‘Shall we have L&M round for dinner?’ or ‘I wonder if L&M are free this weekend?’
I ordered myself to stop. What was I doing, standing barefoot in a stranger’s kitchen, wondering about what we’d be called if we were a couple? That was nuts. I needed a cup of tea and thirty-seven glasses of water, plus toast. And some Nurofen. And some more water. Lots more water. My mouth felt like something had died in it. But I didn’t want a cup of tea in Max’s flat. I wanted to get out of there and into my own space where I could go over the evening in my head, or at least the bits I could remember.
I folded the note up and slid it into my pocket, grabbed my bag off the sofa and went back to the bedroom. I resisted the urge to poke around his room too much – what if he was watching, somehow? – so made the bed and then took my bag into his bathroom to sort out my face. It was predictably terrible. Dry flaky skin. Faintly bloodshot eyes. Probably a good thing Max wasn’t there. I’d seen better-looking animals when I took my class to London Zoo.
A few minutes later I let myself out, praying silently that I didn’t bump into a neighbour. I made it to the front door of his building when I realized I didn’t know how to get home. What line was Hampstead on? I felt for my phone in my bag and retrieved it. Uh-ohhhhh. Eight missed calls from Jess and a mad number of WhatsApps. I scrolled through them. The gist, basically, was had I been murdered.
Are you dead? Please don’t be dead read her penultimate message.
Then the last one, sent at midnight: If you’re just shagging and not dead, then I might kill you myself when you surface. LET ME KNOW YOU’RE ALL RIGHT xxxxx.
I was about to open Citymapper and work out how long it would take me to get home when my phone started buzzing in my hand. It was Jess.
‘Hi,’ I croaked into the phone.
‘Oh thank God, you’re not dead,’ she said, deadpan.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘Not quite. But I feel like I might die soon.’
‘Did you stay with him?’
Christ. I wasn’t up to this before a cup of tea. It was like being on the phone to MI5.
‘Yup.’
Jess whooped down the phone. ‘String up the bunting, let the bells ring out. I need to see you immediately.’
I sighed on the pavement. Had anyone in history ever needed a sugary tea more than I did at that very moment? ‘I’m about to go home, love, think I need a bath and piece of toast. What are you doing later?’
‘No, forget later. Where are you? Why don’t you come over now and I’ll cook us breakfast while you have a bath here. I can hear Clem clanking downstairs in the kitchen.’
She was in one of her determined moods. No point in arguing. I didn’t have the energy. And maybe it would be better to go debrief with Jess. To be fed and watered by someone else and go home afterwards. Grace and Riley were probably making the flat walls shake this morning anyway.
‘OK,’ I replied. ‘I’m… in Hampstead… somewhere. Fuck knows how I get down to you. But give me, say, forty-five minutes?’
‘Amazing,’ said Jess. ‘I’ll go to Nisa and get some juice.’
It took me an hour to cross London. Jess and Clem lived in a tall, thin house on the north side of the river near Chiswick. Theirs was one of those red-brick houses that overlook the Thames, with big windows surrounded by climbing ivy; a road ran in front of the house and beyond that there was a little private garden which sloped down to the river. Most of the houses along this stretch were immaculate, the sort of homes lived in by rich hedge-funders or app millionaires. They had wisteria climbing up their walls, roses twisting over the railings and painted signs on their gates with grand names like Heron House and River View. Dog walkers strolled up and down the road, peering nosily into the bay windows, trying to gawp at the owners.
Jess and Clem’s house was different. Chaotic was the word I’d use, but I mean it affectionately. It was just as big as all the others – three storeys, plus an attic room in the roof which Jess – a portrait artist – had turned into her studio when she and Clem moved in. But if you were a dog walker wandering past their place, you might have assumed it had been taken over by squatters. The paint was peeling off the window frames, the path to their front door was uneven because several bricks had mysteriously disappeared and moss had long since covered the others. There was no painted sign on their railings – which were rusting – just a number: 19. Although the ‘9’ had swung upside down so it looked a bit like it was number 16 Chiswick Mall.
Clem and Jess couldn’t afford to patch it up. They couldn’t have afforded to live there at all, but they’d inherited their house from their grandmother, Blanche. She’s dead now but she was a famous concert pianist, who had a daughter with an Italian conductor in the 1960s. The daughter was Jess and Clem’s mum, Nicoletta, who’d inherited the conductor’s fiery tendencies and just about managed to get her two children safely to adulthood before abandoning London a decade or so ago for an apartment in Rome.
By the time I knocked on their door that morning, I was practically hallucinating about tea.
‘Here she is,’ said Jess, as she opened the door in her dressing gown. She stood back and squinted at me. ‘I can tell you’ve had sex.’
‘What?’ I rasped, standing on the step but leaning on the door frame. ‘You can’t possibly tell that.’
‘I can,’ she said, standing aside as I went in. ‘You look shattered. And you have sex hair.’ She waggled a finger in small circles at my head and then closed the door behind me. ‘Plus I can smell it.’
‘You’re a bloodhound, are you?’ I said, heading towards the kitchen. ‘That’s gross, by the way.’
‘I have a very sensitive nose. Tea?’
I nodded and pulled out a seat at the kitchen table, then sat down and put my arms on the table in front of me, laying my face on top of them. ‘Where’s Clem gone?’
‘Out walking.’
Clem was a terrible musician who had to supplement his creative endeavours by dog-walking. He’d gone through various musical stages since leaving uni. The guitar phase. The drumming phase. Even, at one particularly bad moment, an accordion phase. Now he was into his electronic phase and was