Barclay
I heard the crash just as I was finishing the last email of the night. It was two in the morning, but I’d still manage to get five hours of sleep if I went to bed now. It had been a bloody stupid idea to waste time earlier playing poker of all things, when I had so much mounting up. And yes,maybeI needed to learn to delegate some of this stuff to my undersecretary, but, control freak that I was, I had trouble letting go. So, given that I hadn’t managed to delegate, I should have spent the whole evening tackling everything in my office, but when I thought back to Henry’s laugh I couldn’t bring myself to regret the poker game. My little brother was born to laugh, to be carefree – to be the opposite of my more wary, cautious nature.
I’dalwaysbeen the sensible one. From the age of nine, I hadn’t really had a choice. After Mum lost the baby she spiralled into a deep depression, and Dad’s solution was to work all the time. There wasn’t anyone else around but me to pick up the pieces – to make it so that Henry could still be happy and carefree like he was supposed to be. I’d felt the weight of that responsibility acutely, and even after Mum got better the feeling never went away. The therapist Mum made me see a few years ago told me that my compulsion tofixthings stemmed from that time. When I was a child, I was hell-bent on keeping everything together whilst my mum fell apart; but in adulthood this compulsion manifested in deep concern, not only about my family’s problems, but about those facing the world. My therapist told me nobody could fix everything, that it wasn’t all my responsibility, that I needed to lighten up. I’d listened politely, paid her the exorbitant fee, and never returned. Ineededthat drive, that compulsion – I didn’t know who I was without it.
So that was me, but my brother was my opposite. So, this new sombre personality didn’t suit Henry. I’d always made sure he was free to be the fun brother, the light-hearted one, and I’d always tried to protect him. But I couldn’t protect him from this. His depression had been scaring me for so long that the relief that came with hearing his laughter was immense.
Another smaller crash came from the corridor and I frowned. I wasn’t going to let these bloody security people stay the night if they were going to be banging around down there at all hours. Weren’t they supposed to be stationed outside the house at night anyway? I pushed away from the desk, rolling my stiff neck then scrubbed my hands down my face, which was now rough with stubble. This was the last thing I needed. In annoyance I slammed open my office door and strode out into the corridor, where I very nearly tripped over a set of legs. I froze with my foot suspended in mid-air over a pair of feet clad in furry boots, attached to two legs encased in stripy tights: purple and pink stripes, to be exact.
“What the bloody hell is going on?” I asked the pile of coats and bags blocking my corridor, underneath which I presumed the stripy-tights-wearing female was buried.
“Got it!” I heard in a muffled shout, then an arm emerged from the coats with that ridiculous scarf clutched in its hand. I snatched the scarf and used that hand to haul her to her feet. She was so tiny that I overestimated the force required, and she shot up right into my chest. I froze. If I weren’t mistaken, she took a deep breath in as if she was . . . smelling my shirt? After a long moment, her small face emerged and she tilted her head back to look up at me.
“Yo,” she said, blinking a couple of times as if to try to focus her vision. Her mass of hair was completely crazy, there was a small amount of makeup now residing under eyes, and her huge, bright pink jumper was falling off one of her shoulders. She was a fright, but still my chest tightened with something that felt almost like need, which was unexpected.
My last girlfriend had been five-foot-eleven and a barrister in the City. I’d never seen her in anything other than pencil skirts and four-inch heels; even after sleeping with me, her makeup was never smudged. She certainly didn’t wear ill-fitting jumpers paired with stripy tights, and I couldn’t imagine her ever saying ‘Yo’ as if she was in a New York ghetto rather than a terrace house in Westminster.
I felt the sudden urge to hold Kira closer but instead I stepped back, and set her away from me. Once I’d released my grip on her upper arms, she teetered slowly to the side, righted herself on the wall of the corridor, blinked again and then snorted, before she started giggling. I frowned. Her bright hazel-green eyes flashed to me, and my expression only seemed to make her laugh harder.
“I was just trying to get my–”she hiccupped, let out another small laugh then continued, “bits and bobs.” I extended the scarf to her and she took it from my outstretched hand.
“You found it!” she shouted, both her hands raising the scarf above her head like she was cheering for a bizarre gay-pride football team. She wrapped it around and around her throat, until only her eyes and her mass of red-pink streaked hair was visible over the top. Her hand came up and she wrestled the scarf down until her mouth was free.
“Alright then, mate.” She gave me a surprisingly strong punch in the arm with her small fist and stumbled back two steps as a result. “I’ll be offski.” She then winked at me, clicked her tongue and pointed at me with her finger, before lurching around me down the corridor and making her way to the exit.
“It’s two in the morning,” I said as she started fumbling with the locks on my heavy front door.
“Bugger my badger,” she mumbled as she continued her fruitless attempts to unlock one of the latches. “This place is like Fort Knox.”
I looked up at the ceiling for a moment in frustration.
“Dr Murphy, did you hear me?” My patience was wearing thin now. “Isaidit’s two in the morning.”
“Er . . .” she gave up her battle with the locks and turned to face me, a look of confusion on her face. “Thank you for the time update.”
“It’s too late to–”
“You do know that the flow of time is an illusion, that the past, present and future are all equally real and that time is tenseless?”
I blinked then stared at her. “What?”
“B-theory, man. Get with it.”
“I don’t–”
She held her hand up and cut me off with a “Shhhup!”
I closed my mouth in surprise.
“Don’t ruin one of my fantasies about you and tell me that you aren’t aDoctor Whofan.”
I frowned. “One of your fant–?”
“Shhh!”
I’d not been shushed by anyone since I was a child. This woman got more bizarre by the second. Taking a deep breath, and suppressing the urge to either groan in frustration or laugh harder than I had in years, I watched as she started sliding slowly down the door until she was sitting on the ground.
“I’ll just have a little resty-pest right here,” she sing-songed as her eyes started closing.
