‘What time is it?’ Jake noticed a shaft of sunlight coming through a chink in the curtains.
‘Early. And will you hold still.’
Jake watched Marcus put the finishing touches to the bandage. Marcus still looked tired, but he was shaved and dressed, no longer in a suit but in clean, sand-coloured chinosand a blue cotton shirt. What was more, he seemed to have made a miraculous recovery from the previous night. Either the methadone had worked better than Jake had anticipated, considering the state Marcus had been in, or Marcus had a local source of drugs, which begged the question: how long had this been going on?
‘You’re turning into a regular little medical dispensary,’ said Jake sarcastically.
‘I got them from Gayle,’ Marcus said coolly, referring, Jake hoped, to the bandages.
‘You sleep well?’ Jake glanced over at the sofa, where he could see bedclothes in disarray. Jake looked back at Marcus for a response.
‘There, that’s all done,’ he said, letting go of Jake’s hand.
‘Is that an apology, then?’ said Jake, inspecting his newly bandaged right hand; the hand that Marcus had grabbed the previous night, intending to hurt in his desperate bid to get hold of the methadone in Jake’s possession.
‘An apology for what?’ Marcus took his other bandaged hand. ‘I thinkyoushould apologise tome!’
‘What the hell have I got to apologise for?’ Jake promptly snatched his hand away. ‘It was only the one hand that needed re-bandaging, or don’t you remember?’
‘Suit yourself.’ Marcus shrugged and tossed the roll of fresh bandages onto Jake’s lap. ‘You do it.’
Jake reached for the roll of bandages and noticed that the bandage covering his other hand had mysteriously acquired a pink hue. ‘How did that happen?’ Barring a run-in with a drug-crazed lunatic of a brother-in-law, he’d thought his hands were healing. Jake sighed and started unwinding the bandage to his left hand.
Marcus seated himself on the sofa opposite Jake. ‘Earlier on, you asked me whether I slept well.’
‘Well, did you?’ Jake continued unwinding the sodden bandage.
‘No, I did not.’
Jake wasn’t surprised. He glanced at Marcus. ‘I was going to take the couch, but I obviously fell asleep on the bed while you were in the bathroom – sorry.’ In truth, Jake wasn’t feeling sorry in the slightest; not after Marcus’s behaviour.
Jake unwound the last of the bandage and did his best to keep his face expressionless as he pulled away the last strip, which was painfully stuck to the wound. His hand still looked a mess. He reached for the fresh roll of bandages.
‘The sofa was surprisingly comfortable,’ said Marcus.
Jake looked up in surprise. In his experience, the sofa was never fine, although that usually had less to do with the comfort factor and more to do with the reason you found yourself relegated to the sofa in the first place. Jake unfurled a length of fresh bandage. ‘I thought you said you did not sleep well.’
Marcus nodded.
‘Maybe your meds didn’t kick in …’
‘That wasn’t it!’
Jake stopped what he was doing and looked at Marcus. ‘I give up. Was I snoring or something?’
‘No.’
Jake was getting irritated by the game of twenty questions. ‘You know what – whatever it is, will you just …’ Jake’s hand hurt and now his head hurt too, ‘shut up!’
‘What – like you did last night?’
Jake didn’t know whether it was because he was tired or perhaps not fully awake yet, but Marcus wasn’t making any sense.
Look, whatever you want to say, will you just say it? I am not in the bloody mood for word games.’ Jake held Marcus’s gaze a moment longer, waiting for his response, but he just satthere staring at Jake, making him feel uncomfortable; it was obvious there was something on his mind. Finally, Jake decided that whatever it was couldn’t be that important, so he turned his attention to his injured hand. The wounds had been healing; there were scabs covering them, but somehow, he had managed to open them up afresh.
‘You were thrashing about in the night.’ Marcus broke the silence.
Jake looked up. At least that explained why he needed to re-bandage this hand too. ‘So, I had a restless night. So what?’ He hadn’t slept well at his apartment in London either, but he felt he was acclimatising to his first holiday in almost a year.
