can’t we start bringing it up before I start panicking about that?’
‘Lib, there’s no way we can get all that heavy stuff up here by ourselves. Which is why I asked Jesse to meet me here … ah, hang on. That could be a text from him right now.’ He fishes in his jacket pocket, takes out his phone, and nods. ‘Yep. That’s him, on his way from the tube. Look, I’ll go down and meet him, and you can crack …’ He produces, from the paper carrier I’ve only just noticed he brought with him, a bottle of champagne. ‘… this open!’
‘Oh, Olly, you shouldn’t have.’
‘Well, you don’t move into a new flat every day. Not even a chopped-in-half one with a pervert for a landlord.’
I laugh. I can’t help it.
‘My wine glasses are all in the boxes you picked up from Mum’s yesterday, though.’
‘Ah, well, that’s precisely why I brought a few of those boxes in already and left them at the bottom of the stairs. I’ll get Jesse to start bringing them up while I get the van open.’
‘No, no, don’t worry. I’ll come down and get them.’
We tramp all the way down the four flights of stairs together, then he heads off to his van, parked just round the corner apparently, and I start lugging one of my cardboard boxes up to my flat … then go back down to get another … then another …
The last thing I want to do is criticize Olly, not when he’s being so lovely and so helpful, but he and Jesse are taking a bloody long time to start getting this furniture in, aren’t they? I mean, seriously, it’s only a small armchair, a coffee table and a three-drawer plywood chest. If it weren’t for the bulk, I’m sure I’d be able to bring them up by myself.
Still, at least I’ve had the time to get all these boxes up, and I ought to be able to find the glasses in one of them. This one, most likely, that I’ve labelled NESPRESSO MACHINE AND MISC: sounds like it’s where I might have packed my kitchen bits and bobs. I open it up just as I hear a rather out-of-breath voice behind me.
‘I’m telling you, Lib. This isn’t going to fit.’
It’s Olly, who’s coming through the doorway. He’s purple in the face with exertion, his shoulders are straining underneath his T-shirt, and he’s gripping one end of the most enormous sofa I’ve ever seen.
Not only enormous, in fact, but upholstered in some truly terrible apricot-hued rose-patterned fabric that makes it look like a bomb has gone off in the world’s most twee garden centre.
‘Well, it might technically fit,’ an equally purple-faced Jesse grunts, inching through the door with the other end of the sofa, ‘but there’s not going to be much room for anything else.’
‘But this isn’t the sofa I put aside!’
‘What do you mean?’ Olly cranes his head round to look at me.
‘I mean, this isn’t the sofa I put aside! I didn’t put aside a sofa at all, in fact! It was meant to be a leather armchair.’
‘Well, this is the stuff Uncle Brian told us you’d chosen.’
Uncle Brian has made, it appears, a terrible, terrible error.
‘And there isn’t a leather armchair in the van,’ Olly adds. ‘There’s this sofa, and the oak blanket box, and the big mahogany chest of drawers, and …’
‘But I didn’t choose any of those things either! I chose an armchair, and a little walnut coffee table, and a small chest for my clothes.’
‘Walnut coffee table?’ Olly turns back to Jesse. ‘Hang on – where have I seen a walnut coffee table recently?’
‘There was one in the stuff we dropped off with your mum last night, for the Woking Players,’ Jesse says, scratching his head in a manner that suggests he’s not quite cottoned on to what’s happened.
Whereas it’s becoming fairly clear to me that the Woking Players are getting my furniture, and that I am getting the Woking Players’ set-dressing for whatever Noël Coward play or Stephen Sondheim musical they’re performing for the next couple of weeks.
‘I’m really sorry, Lib.’ Olly bends his knees to lower the sofa to the floor, and indicates that Jesse should do the same. I can hardly blame them; it must weigh a tonne. ‘Do you want us just to take it back to the van?’
‘Yes … well, no … I mean, did you bring that futon you mentioned?’
‘Futon …’ Olly looks blank-eyed for a moment, until recognition dawns. He slaps a hand to his head. ‘Shit. I forgot about that.’
‘It’s all right. But you’d better leave the sofa here. I’ve not got anything else to sleep on.’
‘Are you sure? I mean, apart from anything else, it’s a bit … well, up close, it’s pretty pongy.’
‘Sort of—’ Jesse leans down and inhales one of the overstuffed cushions – ‘doggy-smelling.’
He’s right, in one sense: the smell coming up out of the sofa cushions, now that they mention it, is distinctly doggy. More specifically, the smell of a dog that’s been out in the rain all morning and is now drying by a warm radiator, whilst letting out the occasional contented fart. Quite a lot like Olly and Nora’s ancient Labrador, Tilly, who farted her way to the grand old age of seventeen; she died five or six years ago but I can still remember her musty pong. Not to mention that there are deep grooves scratched into the wooden part of the arm on one side, as if the rain-dampened dog had a good old go with its claws on there before heading off to dry.
I stare up at Olly, despair taking hold. ‘Did you really think this was the sofa I’d chosen? You didn’t stop to question it at any point?’
‘Well, I don’t know your precise taste in soft furnishings!’ Olly says, indignantly. ‘You make vintage-style jewellery. I thought maybe you wanted a vintage-style living room.’
‘This sofa isn’t vintage style, it’s …’ I glower down at the sofa, blaming it, in all its apricot-hued vileness, for everything that’s gone wrong for me today.
I mean, let’s not beat around the bush: it’s been a torrent of crap ever since I got out of bed this morning. Losing half my hair, losing my job, getting short-changed out of a proper flat, Cass riding off into the sunset with Dillon …
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, plopping myself down, wearily, on the sofa, whereupon a cloud of doggy-smelling dust billows out. It actually makes my eyes water, which obviously makes it look like I’m crying. The irony being that, actually, that’s exactly what I feel like doing. If it were just Olly here, and not Jesse, whom I barely know, I’d probably be bawling my eyes out right now. ‘You’ve been so lovely,’ I sniff. ‘You, too, Jesse, for lugging the bloody thing all the way up here. I’m sorry.’
There’s a short, slightly awkward silence, ended by Olly folding his six-foot-three bulk onto the cushion next to me and putting a brotherly arm around my shoulders.
‘Look, Lib. Why don’t we leave the rest of the furniture in the van to take away with us,
