By the time Jim swallowed his pride, he was standing on the pavement with three bin bags and an overgrown spider plant.
“Can you come over?” he asked. “I need your help.” Then he hung up.
Sarah rang back, of course, but Jim didn’t answer. He just sat down on one of the bags, put the plant down next to his boot and leaned back against the railings.
Fuck.
That was the only thing that came to mind. Fuck. How the fuck had he ended up—well, no, he knew exactly how he’d ended up like this. Stupidity and pride and a whole host of other things that weren’t all that flattering. And yet, even as he combed through them all in his head, he’d not change any of them. So, what did that make him?
At least it wasn’t raining.
Stretching out his legs in front of him, Jim examined his tatty boots and absently wondered if he ought to try building sites. But even they needed certificates and shit these days. Only thing Jim knew how to do was put boxes on shelves and say, “Would you like fries with that?”
And even the places that sold fries didn’t want him.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried. They’d known for months that the warehouse was going to fold eventually, and he’d been looking for other work. But everywhere asked for qualifications. And the places that didn’t took one look at his history—specifically that weird little gap after that night with the car—and told him to get packing.
Well, he was packed now.
Whole life in three bin bags. And a plant. Great success he’d made of himself there. Wouldn’t Mum be proud?
He snorted. No doubt Sarah would pass the message along.
He wanted nothing less than to have to ring Sarah, but he was out of options. If he ended up in a cardboard box on the streets—or, worse, a Sally Army hostel—then he would end up back in prison. Knew it just as much as he knew the sky was blue. And even his pride wasn’t so huge as to want to go crawling back in there.
Still—
He’d had a plan, when he got out. Sort himself out. Get a job, find a flat, settle down with the right eight or ten people he’d like to shag for the rest of eternity. Sounded easy, when there were several hundred odd days to think about it in a cell. Only the right person hadn’t been right after all. And the job hadn’t lasted. And the flat needed the job.
Chewing on a corner of his thumb, Jim sighed. At least the bailiffs wouldn’t be on first name terms with him anymore.
A silver Merc came creeping around the end of the road. It looked absurdly out of place in Jim’s road full of burned-out Clios and old Skodas with black alloy wheels. It shimmered like a police car as it inched toward him and stopped right across the entrance to the flats as if it owned the lot of them. Driver probably could have bought the lot of them.
Jim lifted a hand and waved.
The driver’s door opened. A ridiculously tall heel landed on the potholed tarmac and a slim woman unfolded herself from the car. She frowned down at him like a scolding parent or a disappointed probation officer and Jim could have laughed. She looked more like either of those than what she was.
“Hey, sis.”
“What happened?” Sarah asked.
She didn’t greet him. She certainly didn’t hug him. Strip back all the pretence and they would have looked very alike—both tall, both with honey-coloured hair, both with the glass-cutting jawline. But Sarah’s hair was in a perfect bun, her suit pristine, her nails gleaming. She hadn’t even been working today, but that was how a mum of three could look when she hired a nanny. Then there was Jim—hunched over, hands in pockets, hair on end, unshaven, still wearing his hi-vis vest and dirty jeans as if he had a job.
Like peas in a mile-long pod.
“Lost my job,” he said.
“Again?”
“We all did,” he said defensively. “They’ve closed the warehouse.”
Her frown eased a fraction.
“Then came home and the landlord was here. Said if I couldn’t cough up five hundred by Friday he’d evict me. So I told him about the job, and”—Jim gestured to his spider plant—“here I am.”
There was a long, long silence.
So long, in fact, that ice ages came and went. Evolution spawned four hundred new species. Mars underwent a century of its own. The big bang began to revert into the big crunch.
Then Sarah said, “Why did you owe your landlord five hundred pounds?”
“And the rest.”
“What?”
“I owed him a grand and a half.”
Her jaw dropped. “You what?”
Jim shrugged.
“Why weren’t you paying your rent!”
“With what?” Jim asked. “They cut the gas off last week. I owe water like…four hundred and something. Even the bank’s started threatening with bailiffs. I’m out of options. Why d’you think I rang you?”
Her jaw was still agape, but she spluttered.
“Four hun—the bank—bailiffs?”
“Yeah.”
He felt about an inch tall and his stomach was clenching up. He was too hot. His leg started to jiggle.
“Why didn’t you ask me for help?”
“I did. Am.”
“Sooner than being—you’ve been evicted!”
The hot feeling boiled over. “Right. Yeah. Because asking worked so well last time.”
“That was different.”
“It really wasn’t,” he replied tightly. “That was worse than this.”
She pursed her lips, eyeing his spider plant. It looked sorry for itself on the grubby flagstones. But to hell with her and her demands. She hadn’t helped when he’d asked the first time. Why would he ask again?
“I tried everything,” he said. “But today was the last straw. So here I am.”
“Here you are,” she echoed weakly, then shook herself. “Right. Well. Our spare room it is.”
He grimaced but said nothing. The truth was, Jim didn't want Sarah’s help or Sarah’s spare room. He’d tried everyone else while the landlord had been flinging his things in the bin. Old work colleagues who didn’t want to know. An ex-boyfriend who’d asked, “Who?” as though Jim had vanished out of existence when they’d split up. He’d even tried Justin, much as he didn’t want to be around that smug fucker with his new fiancé.
But, in the end, nobody had been able—or wanted—to help.
So here he was, squinting up at Sarah in the dying light.
“Come on,” she said. “Let’s get that lot in the boot.”
She didn’t touch the bags. She just opened the boot and held the plant on her hip like a baby as he moved them. The smackheads over the road were staring and he flipped them off as he banged the lid down.
“Jim! This is a new car!”
“Sorry,” he muttered.
“Let me just call Anthony…”
Jim rolled his eyes, unable to help himself. “I’m sure this’ll go down really well.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you go bringing him into this.”
“Why not?” he asked. “You brought him into it last time.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Really, because it sure felt like that.”
“Well, it wasn’t.”
Jim rolled his eyes but gave up. He wished he could end arguments like that. He wished his interpretation of events was the definitive one. What it must be like, to have that kind of power? But then he’d never had that power with Sarah. He doubted anyone ever did.
He let himself into the passenger seat as she talked on her phone and sulked in the front like a little kid. His skin itched. His stomach was a lump of lead. He desperately didn’t want to be doing this—but it was just temporary, he told himself. Just until he could find another job. A better job. Longer hours and higher pay.
It was a short chat. She waved her hands a lot. And eventually she hung up and got into the driver’s seat, mouth tight as though they’d argued.
“Told you he wouldn’t like it.”
“Enough, please.”
Jim shut his mouth and stared at the flats as Sarah turned the car around, and they slowly vanished in the wing mirror.
“I didn’t realise things had gotten this bad. You should have talked to me.”
Jim grunted.
“You should have talked to Mum.”
“Oh, right, yeah—”
“She’s just worried about you.”
“She screens her calls. She won’t answer. Hasn’t since I came out.”
“I’m sure she—”
“Don’t tell me what Mum means,” Jim said tightly. “You weren’t there. You didn’t hear her. I know exactly what she means.”
An uneasy silence fell between them. Sarah clenched and relaxed her fingers around the steering wheel in an anxious rhythm, and Jim’s leg was jiggling again.
“How good did you think it was?” he asked quietly. “I’m eight grand in debt and I worked minimum wage. What did you think was happening?”
“I don’t want to talk about that,” she snapped.
It was all she’d ever said since that original no. She didn’t want to talk about it. She never wanted to talk about it. If Jim brought it up, she changed the subject. Left up to Sarah, they’d never talk about it.
“I would have helped if you’d told me,” she said after a while and Jim snorted.
“Since when do you help?” he demanded.
She pursed her lips. “Since always. You were just too stubborn to see it.”
His jaw ached and he realised that he was grinding his teeth again. Slowly, he relaxed his jaw. He couldn’t afford to piss her off now. He’d have to be on his best behaviour, at least until he found another job.
But it was a mutinous silence. Because the rub was that Sarah had been right. Anthony had refused to help because he was a judgemental prick, but Sarah had done this pragmatic refusal that had hurt worse, somehow. Religious bigotry, Jim could kind of roll with that. Anthony was dumb as his dog collar anyway—what did Jim expect?
But Sarah? Sarah’s practicality had hurt.
And, worse still, it had been right.
So he seethed quietly as they left the city behind. The traffic was busy, commuters rushing home from their better jobs to their better homes with their partners and kids, not their sisters and crap in-laws. He stared out at the sea of other people as they inched away to the south and wondered if he’d ever get on track. Sarah had only four years on him, but she had it all figured out. Jim…Jim felt as if he’d been careering from one disaster to another ever since he was a kid.
And bleeding away into the wide avenues, long driveways and conservatories of Dore and Totley didn’t help. Sarah fitted in out here. Her Merc, her suit, her manicure drumming ceaselessly on the leather. Jim felt like he had in prison and sank lower and lower in his seat as they left even the outskirts behind and dipped into the countryside proper.
The house lay just shy of the Derbyshire border—Jim could just about see the sign—and the electric gates were a foreboding barrier against the likes of him. The place screamed money. Gated drive. Detached twin garage. A summerhouse visible round the side. Since Jim had last been—when Agnes was born, over a year ago now—they’d had an honest-to-God fountain installed in front of the steps that led up to the front door.
It was more like a mansion than someplace people actually lived.
“It’s been a while,” he said uselessly as Sarah tucked the Merc into the garage next to a gleaming BMW on the latest plates.
“Yes.”
“How’s everyone?”
“Oh, they’re fine.”
Another long pause. Jim lifted his bin bags. Sarah took the plant. Then he was looking up at the house and he wanted to scream.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll show you which room you can have. And you’ll join us for dinner, won’t you?”
“Not really that hung—”
“Of course you will,” she interrupted as she opened the door. A bell chimed. “Zoe! Zoe, are you in?”
Jim was listening.
He stood in the hall and stared at the spiral stairs sweeping away to the first floor like something out of a wedding brochure. At the marble floor. At the chandelier. At the two-storey windows dominating the back of the hall and showing the gardens falling away to the south of the house. At the money oozing off the walls—and at the white dog collar, sitting proudly on a hook by a collection of tidy coats and above a rack of expensive shoes.
Forget Zoe. Anthony was home.
And this was going to be hell on earth.
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