before she leaves.’
‘I’m puzzled,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘This is Ealing in London you’re calling from, right? When was she living with you?’
‘Till two weeks ago,’ Mrs Baxter said. ‘It’s taken me that long to get this number out of her people in Kenya. She was with me for six months. I had to pretend to her family that I’d bought her a gold necklace and I wanted it to be a surprise for her. Otherwise they wouldn’t give me her new number – they’re no fools. She told me she was going back to Africa, but of course I didn’t believe that. She came to me from a friend of a friend in Acton, and I’ve just heard she had concerns about some missing knives. Sounds like she’s preparing to furnish a flat. At our expense, if you don’t mind me giving you some advice.’
‘I’ll let her know,’ Fitzgerald said, and put the phone down. Rage filled his soul.
‘I said that,’ Timothy Storey said, when she returned and Fitzgerald asked her for some more details. ‘I do come from Kenya. Mrs Baxter didn’t tell you that I didn’t come from Africa, did she?’
‘But you asked me to meet you at Paddington,’ Fitzgerald said. ‘I thought you’d come from Kenya just that moment. I thought you were coming on the Heathrow Express.’
‘Oh, no,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I was coming from Southall on the train. It’s only fourteen minutes, it’s quite convenient. Mrs Baxter says she lives in Ealing, but it’s really Southall, she thinks it sounds smarter. It was nice of you to meet me at Paddington. I could have made my own way here, but I thought it would be good if we met somewhere neutral before you took me home – you hear such awful stories. Mrs Baxter, she was a bitch from Hell, I’ll tell you. She was always complaining about me watching TV when she wanted to watch something, and telling me I shouldn’t be lying on the couch eating snacks, and there was something on the other side she wanted to watch, like she owned the TV or something.’
‘But she did own the TV,’ Fitzgerald said, almost incapable of speech. ‘Didn’t she?’
‘No, I mean the TV channels, like she owned the TV channels. She always had her own thing she wanted to watch. She was a prize bitch. I’m glad to be out of there.’
‘You know,’ Fitzgerald said, ‘I think I’m going to have to ask you to move out. I don’t think you’ve been truthful with me at all.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I like it here. It’s been nice of you to let me have the room for nothing, but some people might wonder why a single man wanted to have a girl to stay in his house and gave her a room for nothing. It looks a little bit fishy, don’t you think? I would only have to say to someone that you’ve been touching me—’
‘I’m gay, you know. Everyone knows that.’
‘Yes, indeed, what people in my country and some people in this one, too, like to call a sexual pervert. And then I might have to show them the hole that you drilled in the wall to watch me getting undressed at night. It’s there, that hole.’
‘There’s no hole in the wall.’
‘Take a look. I think you’ll find there is.’
‘You’ve drilled a fucking hole in the wall of my spare bedroom?’ Fitzgerald said.
‘Of course,’ Timothy Storey said. ‘I’m not going to tell anyone any of those awful things. I like it here, I really do. And another thing – those towels Mrs Baxter was telling you about, they’re my towels. I bought those towels. I swear on my mother’s life, I bought those towels.’
Satisfied that the conversation was over, Timothy Storey pushed off her shoes and lay back on the sofa. Fitzgerald went without speaking into the kitchen. A voice through a microphone in the other room began to announce the results of a phone-in vote, to wild applause, yellings of names and long, dramatic silences. The kitchen table was covered with the detritus of a quickly arranged snack; a tub of taramasalata lay open with the edge of a cream cracker broken off in it, like a tiny Excalibur. Fitzgerald pulled it out. Small fragments of cheese, of bread, lay scattered like bleak waste across the surface of the table; an open carton of orange juice had spilt onto the floor. The fridge door stood open, waiting for Timothy Storey to return to graze some more. Underneath the cork message board, Fitzgerald looked, and there was, indeed, a new hole, drilled in the wall, giving onto the spare bedroom. How had he failed to notice that? The situation bore down on him; where people like Bradbury had a handsome half-naked beast like Eduardo lolling around waiting for Bradbury’s attentions, someone like Fitzgerald would only have a Timothy Storey, spilling biscuit crumbs down the sofa, thinking up blackmail attempts, destroying the masonry and eyeing up the bath towels.
‘Can you give me a hand?’ a voice called from the sitting room. ‘This seems to be stuck.’ Hopeless and speechless, Fitzgerald went into the room. Timothy Storey was kneeling before the DVD player, jabbing at buttons. ‘I’ve tried this and I’ve tried that,’ she was saying. ‘But none of it does anything.’ Fitzgerald contemplated, with hatred, her enormous, lying, blackmailing, cotton-straining, homophobic, racist, idle arse. Then a joyous possibility occurred to him. There was no reason not to do it. With three fast and accelerating steps, he was behind her, and he did it. He had never been good at school at football or rugby, but there, with a single, confident, long smooth swing, he gave Timothy Storey’s arse the single kick of a lifetime.
He took a detour on his way to Eduardo’s flat, going to the fancy confectioner’s on Clapham High Street and buying an expensive box of chocolates – two pounds of pralines and fruit creams. Only when he reached Bradbury’s road did he remember Eduardo’s obsession with not eating or drinking anything that might make him fat. But it was too late; and, anyway, he realized he had bought the chocolates for himself, really.
‘I want to say sorry, Eduardo,’ he said, coming into the flat. The sun was streaming through the long windows, and lighting up half of Eduardo’s face. ‘And also goodbye, I suppose.’
‘Goodbye?’ Eduardo said. ‘Are you going away?’
‘No,’ Fitzgerald said. The pathos of his farewell almost made him lapse into tears. ‘No, I just think it’s better that I don’t see you again. It seems like a bad idea.’
‘But where are you going?’ Eduardo said.
He hadn’t understood, and Fitzgerald said, ‘I don’t know yet. You might as well have these.’
He handed over the box of chocolates, and from the way Eduardo took the bag, eagerly, peering in at the confectioner-wrapped box of ribbons and bright paper, Fitzgerald saw that he was a man who liked to get presents, to get a present every day, no matter what it was. ‘It’s only chocolates,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to eat them if you don’t like them.’
‘You can come in,’ Eduardo said. ‘I’m on my own. Daniel went to Monaco and he won’t be back until Friday night. He went away this morning. It’s so boring here.’
‘I thought he went to Munich?’
‘Yes, he did, he went to Monaco.’
‘That’s not the same place.’
‘OK,’ Eduardo said. ‘I didn’t know that. You want a coffee?’
‘Only if you’re making one. I’ll stay and fend off your boredom, if you like.’
‘Excuse
