The Night That Changed Everything (6 page)

I feel relieved, although I still don't know what was up back at the house.

‘Can't believe Dad's giving me a deposit,' she says.

‘I know, right?' I say. ‘You should start looking at places, get a feel for what's out there – I'll come with you.'

My enthusiasm isn't one hundred per cent genuine, but I'll get over it. I guess I should be grateful the whole topic came up. I'd be popping the
Will you live with me?
question right now if she hadn't told her dad that she couldn't see herself living in the flat with someone new.

Yes, I'm disappointed, but as an ex-girlfriend once pointed out, I'm a bit of an emotional express train, and I know Rebecca is more like a cross-country service that stops at every town. It's another reason I fell in love with her. I've got bored of every girlfriend I ever had before Rebecca. I guess I like a challenge.

So I'll wait, and maybe in a couple of years we'll buy somewhere together. That's the reason I accepted a permanent job at London Transport – so I could start saving for a deposit. Which reminds me: I really should start saving for a deposit.

‘You know I designed my very first building on this beach?' she says. ‘Sometimes I'd spend my summer holidays here if Dad was on a particularly busy job. Granny would bring us to the beach but I hated it back then. You can't make sand castles out of pebbles.'

I grin, happy to be finding out something I don't know.

‘One year we came here just before Christmas. I was seven or eight. Me and Stefan were going to spend a few days with Granny and then Dad would arrive on Christmas Eve and we'd have Christmas together. So the day we arrived it started to snow. It just kept falling, and the next day Granny brought us here and I swear you couldn't see a single pebble. The beach was completely white. Stefan wanted to build a snowman but I made him build a snow house instead. I was like the foreman, telling him what needed to be done until we had a mini mansion with windows and everything. It even had a front garden.'

I widen my eyes to show that I'm suitably impressed.

‘The next day we came back and it was still there, good as new. Same the day after, even though most of the snow had melted. The next day Dad was arriving and I couldn't wait to show him. He was knackered from his flight but it must have been obvious how excited I was so he came along to the beach. Except the house wasn't here. It had finally melted.'

I stop and draw her into me, overcome by affection.

‘Dad still claims it was the only time he ever saw me inconsolable as a kid. I just wanted to make him proud.'

After a few moments I withdraw from the hug so that I can take her hands in mine, as though I'm about to say something sincere and comforting. ‘And you call
me
a suck-up?'

She laughs, but it stumbles.

‘What's up, Rebecca?'

She presses an index finger into the corner of each eye in turn, like she's trying to shove any tears back into their ducts.

‘It's the sea breeze, it makes my eyes water.'

‘There isn't a breeze, Becs.'

She digs her right foot into the pebbles, looks to the sky and sighs.

‘I took a pregnancy test earlier.'

I feel like a puppet whose strings have been cut. My jaw just drops. And then it's like I'm on my deathbed, except the thing that's flashing before my eyes is not my life over the
last
twenty-seven years, but my life over the
next
twenty-seven, the life of an unborn child, which in my head is a boy, and I'm taking him to the park in his first-ever Man City top, and then I'm teasing him about the bum fluff on his chin, and then we're in the pub for his first legal pint.

‘It was negative,' says Rebecca.

A heaviness swells inside my chest, and I realize it is disappointment. Neither of us says anything for what seems like minutes.

‘I don't understand,' I say, confused. ‘You're on the pill – how could it even be an issue?' I try to look into her eyes but they're playing dodgeball again. ‘I mean, my boys are obviously good, but . . .'

I trail off. I guess the whys and wherefores aren't important right now.

‘So this is why you've been so distant the last hour or two?'

‘No.' She shakes her head but without conviction. ‘I don't know.'

Rebecca starts walking again. I follow, intending to ask what she means, but she takes my hand and squeezes her fingers into my palm, and I know it is her way of acknowledging that she's not the easiest girlfriend.

‘I reckon I'd be pretty good at all that dad stuff,' I eventually say.

‘I reckon you would too,' she says. ‘That's if . . .' She nods insinuatingly at my crotch.

‘What?'

‘Well, you've got to wonder after today's result whether your boys have got it in them.'

I stick out my foot to trip her but she sees it coming and mocks me with a
Ha
. We start to walk back, and as I hook my arm around her ribcage it dawns on me exactly why I'd wanted the pregnancy test to be positive. It would have given my life some kind of purpose, but I was being an idiot, because Rebecca already gave me that eleven months ago.

‘I'd be lost without you, Becs.'

She glances up at me and smiles like she's prepared to tolerate my soppiness on this occasion. ‘Aw.'

‘No, seriously,' I say, looking around the town exaggeratedly. ‘I've absolutely no idea where I am.'

She laughs, not even pretending to be scolded, and I think she knows that I wasn't joking first time around at all.

Saturday, 4 October

The estate agent is late.

Ben and I sit on the steps outside a ‘deceptively spacious and charming two-bed garden flat with original features' in East Greenwich, waiting for a woman called Liudvik. I drum the step with a baton made from three rolled-up property specs.

‘What's the time?' I ask.

Ben looks at his watch. ‘Two minutes since you last asked.'

I sigh. Twenty minutes late.

As far as steps go, they're not the best – crumbling so the edges are smooth rather than sharp, with cigarette butts jammed in the crevices. They're not enough to put me off, though. I'm realistic about what I can get. It won't be a showroom when I move in. But that's fine. Original features! That's far more my taste, and if it means I need to do it up a bit, so be it. That'll make it so much more my own.

‘This takes the piss,' I groan, checking my phone for missed calls, and wondering how much of my annoyance is actually about the fact Ben never suggested we move in together.

I wonder if I'm the only one assuming we're long term. Maybe I've been assumptive. Ben's passion for things tends to be short lived.

‘I know,' Ben admits. ‘It is a bit . . . Oh look, this'll be her now.'

A red Mini screeches to a halt at a twenty-degree angle from the kerb.

‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,' a lady cries in a heavy accent – Russian perhaps – as she jumps out of the car and hurries past us down to the front door. ‘I'm Liudvik. Hope you veren't vaiting long?'

‘Oh, don't worry about it,' Ben replies cheerily. ‘I'm Ben, and this is Rebecca.'

‘Hallo,' Liudvik replies, not looking our way as she tries one key after another.

‘
Oh, don't worry about it
,' I mimic quietly in Ben's ear.

‘I feel sorry for her,' Ben whispers back. ‘She's a mess.' As he says it, our estate agent drops her folder on the floor, and papers fly everywhere.

‘There,' she says with a smile as the door swings open, though her lip is trembling. ‘This is lovely flat. You vill love.' Then she starts to pick up her notes, talking to herself.

Never believe an estate agent who tells you,
You vill love
. I should know this. I should also know ‘charming' is just another word for ‘little' and ‘original features' means ‘nothing has been updated since the building was built last century' – and not in an adorable, shabby-chic way, but in a can't-believe-this-hasn't-been-condemned-yet way.

And ‘deceptively spacious'? Well, if you believe this is spacious, you have indeed been deceived.

‘It's kot charm, yes?' Liudvik says, stroking a wall, then examining her fingertips and wiping them on her trousers.

‘If by charm you mean that you could have a shower and cook dinner at the same time, without missing the ten o'clock news, then yes, sure.'

I'm back to the front door eight seconds after starting my tour of the place.

‘Sshhh,' Ben says with a titter. ‘Hey, do you reckon I'd be a good estate agent?'

‘But I thought you loved working in HR?'

‘Maybe I could be a comedian, like you.'

Despite my teasing, I'm grateful he's here: his presence means it's becoming a funny story, as opposed to a tragic waste of my time, or indeed the tragic mystery of a Russian estate agent being found under the floorboards of a derelict flat in south-east London . . .

‘Anyway,' she tells Ben while I inspect the bedroom again, ‘I'd buy soon – it's popular area and this place has lots potential.'

‘Potential' means ‘currently shite', and it occurs to me I should probably drag Ben away from her before the impulsive spender in him says something li—

‘I'll take it,' I hear him say.

‘What the feck are you doing?' I cry, running through. ‘I don't want to live in this hellhole.'

I arrive in time to see Liudvik handing Ben her pile of paperwork.

‘She couldn't get that closet open with one hand,' Ben explains.

I sigh, relieved.

‘I just don't understand how they can get away with charging so much for this,' I tell him.

Liudvik tilts her head and looks at me like I'm an idiot.

The reason for this becomes clear once I've seen the other two places. Turns out the first one was pretty good for my budget. The second one, described as ‘a blank canvas', is so blank it has no toilet, shower or sink. The last one isn't an actual home. Seriously, back when the whole building was someone's mansion, the section Liudvik is trying to flog me was probably used to house the dustpan and brush. Not even a Hoover – Henry would have refused the living conditions.

‘What do you reckon?' asks Ben, though my face says it all.

‘I need a drink. Let's say bye to the Russian and get the hell out of here.'

‘She's Ukrainian.'

‘How do you know?'

‘I was chatting to her about it earlier.'

Course he was, friendly bastard.

‘That was the most depressing experience of my life.' I throw myself dramatically into our booth at Arch 13 and slump over the table. ‘Why does Danielle have to move out?' I sigh heavily. ‘I don't want to live by myself.'

Ben looks at me as though he's confused.

‘What?' I ask.

‘Nothing,' he says, reviewing me for a second or two longer before his face returns to normal. ‘So what are you going to do?'

I sigh. That's the two-hundred-thousand-pound question. ‘Maybe I should widen my search. Try somewhere a bit more up and coming?'

‘Estate-agent-speak for currently down and out?'

‘Maybe I should ask for a bigger mortgage.'

‘Maybe you should give yourself a bit more time. There's no rush to buy, is there?'

‘Maybe I should sell a kidney.'

‘Maybe we should live together.'

‘Maybe I should—' I sit bolt upright. ‘Hang on, what?'

‘What?' he echoes.

‘Did you just say . . . ?'

‘Yeah, OK.' He adjusts himself in his seat like he's trying to get comfortable, though he ends up in the same position he started. ‘I said it: we could live together. If you like. I thought you wanted to live by yourself, but if you don't, I'm just saying, I . . .' He shuffles in his seat again. ‘Look, I don't want to push you into anything. But it's my last chance to say anything, so . . .'

I stare at him, baffled. ‘Ben, do you want to move in together or not?'

He stares back. ‘Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.'

‘You need to be clearer, Ben . . . Is that a yes?'

‘YES.'

‘Why haven't you asked before? I figured you were having doubts about us, or you weren't ready or something.'

‘Doubts? I'm not having doubts, you wally – I wanted to ask but then at your dad's you said you couldn't imagine living at the flat with anyone else, and then you started to look for somewhere to live by yourself.'

‘I didn't think I had a choice – you never asked. So, er . . .' I shrug, unable to stop a smile spreading across my face. ‘Are we doing this?'

‘I'm in if you are?'

‘I'm in.' Relief washes over me – he
is
in this for the long haul.

He grabs my head and kisses my lips, laughing at my scrunched-up face.

‘Put her down, Nicholls, and drink your beer,' interrupts Jamie, placing a pint in front of Ben, followed by a glass that clinks with ice as he slides it towards me. ‘And a Scotch for the lady.'

‘I can't see any ladies,' says Danielle, appearing in a puff of Chanel No. 5. ‘Sorry I'm late.'

‘Not like you,' says Jamie with a wink. ‘Drink?'

‘Mojito please.'

‘Coming up.'

‘Hang on a bit, mate,' says Ben. ‘We have something to tell you.'

‘We're moving in together,' I add quickly, in case they think we're about to announce an engagement or something ludicrous like that.

Is that ludicrous?

Yes, of course it is.

‘No big deal,' I add, squeezing Ben's hand under the table and watching Danielle to see her reaction. I can't fool my best mate – she'll know it's a massive deal.