Jack and the medieval mystics Chapter 5
A lightbulb moment
I decided to take the book to Starbucks and was getting my coat on when the doorbell went. Not just once. Whoever was at the door just kept their finger on the bell. They stopped, then started pressing again. And now I could hear someone shouting through the letterbox — sounded like a woman’s voice.
Before I could get to the door of my room, Freddie burst through it. I thought I’d heard him come in. Why didn’t he answer the front door — his room was right next to it? Then I saw he had his finger to his lips.
‘What’s going on?’ I asked, my heart sinking. Anything to do with Freddie was always trouble. The police? What had he done? Drugs? I wouldn’t put it past him.
‘Ssh… keep your voice down,’ he whispered. ‘Can I get out through your window?’
My room was at the back, next to the passage between the houses. I shrugged. ‘OK, but who the hell is it?’ They were still pressing the bell and now rapping at the letterbox too. If it was the police, I wasn’t going to cover for him.
‘Oh — it’s only Jess,’ he said. ‘You can answer it after I’ve gone — she’ll go away when she finds I’m not here.’
He was lifting the sash of my window and I grabbed his sleeve. ‘Hang on. Why is she after you?’ To tell the truth, I was relieved that it was only girl trouble.
He turned and grinned a bit. ‘I slept with her once and now she thinks she owns me. Look what she did last night. We had this row — she bit me! Look.’ He showed me the heel of his hand. There was a crescent-shaped mark and the skin was broken in places. It had even bled. ‘She’s crazy.’
I let him go. There was no point in trying to stop him. But he would have to have a tetanus jab — or was that only if you got bitten by a dog?
I took my time to open the door, yawning, pretending that I’d been asleep and she’d woken me up. The girl was splayed out on the ground in the porch, her hair in a mess. I knew Jess a bit. She’d been to the house a few times and everyone thought she was a bit flaky. Not that it was her fault. I think I heard once that her Mum had died and she’d had to go into care. But, whatever, no one in their right mind would get involved with her.
‘He’s in, isn’t he — Freddie?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s only me. Do you want to check his room?’ I thought she might not go away until she had.
‘Yes, I do,’ she said, getting up and pushing past me into the hall. She clearly didn’t believe me. As she passed, I wasn’t sure but I thought I saw a mark on her cheek and I cursed Freddie in my mind. What the fuck did he think he was doing? Even if she’d hit him first.
After trying Fred’s room, she marched into the kitchen and I followed her.
‘He’s not here,’ I said, trying to decide whether to make her a cup of tea. It was dawning on her that he wasn’t here and she looked as if she was about to burst into tears.
‘You wanna stay?’ I asked. Suddenly I so wanted to land Freddie in the shit. He certainly deserved it. ‘He’ll be in later, I expect. You can wait.’
But she just shook her head and made for the door, like a zombie. As if all the air had been sucked out of her. I watched her go, feeling relieved. But then that made me feel even more shitty. This was turning into a really bad day.
I set off for Starbucks to read. I didn’t feel like doing any work but there was nothing else to do. On the way, I couldn’t stop thinking about Freddie. He’d seemed all right at first -when we needed another house mate. Looking back, he really did a job on all of us, me and Ellie and Karim. Of course he had his charms. He was sociable. Too bloody sociable as it turned out and he never cleared up after himself and his mates. But this — with Jess - was in another league. Didn’t he care about anyone but himself? The girl was fragile, anyone could see that. He couldn’t just pick her up and put her down.
It was cold but bright, one of those days that remind me of being a kid running home from school, when the wind chases clouds across the sky. Outside the law building, my phone went off to remind me to think God. Funny — it was getting to be automatic, like Pavlov’s dogs. Every time I heard the alarm, it all started to come back. Angela and Julian and thinking about being loved.
I was just opening the door of Starbucks when it hit me like a ton of bricks. I was a bloody hypocrite. There I was, judging Fred for being callous to someone he barely knew, when I couldn’t even bear to speak to my own mother on the phone. All right, so I didn’t have fights with her, but I ignored her calls and even when we did speak, I couldn’t bring myself to give her what she wanted. Even though she was my mother and she was ill and I was all she had.
Thank you for reading. You can find Chapter 6 here
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