Authors: Sarah Manning
Unsticky (47 page)
It seemed to go on for ages. Just when Grace thought Vaughn must be finished, it would start all over again. She knew he’d want his privacy so he could retain maybe, like, a shred of dignity, but she couldn’t ignore his pain. He’d looked after her when she’d had flu. Well, technically he’d made her feel a lot worse by giving her an adrenalin shot, then he’d paid someone else to look after her, but he’d tried.
Stopping en route to grab a bottle of water from the mini-bar, Grace tentatively knocked on the bathroom door. There were a few more retching sounds by way of a reply. She sent up a silent prayer and pushed open the door.
Vaughn was on his knees, hugging the toilet. He looked up briefly so Grace got a good view of his red face and streaming eyes, then bent his head again.
‘Oh, poor Vaughn,’ Grace cooed, crouching down so she could rub circles on his back. He’d be furious about the baby talk as soon as he’d got all the booze and lobster out of his system, but right now, he could just suck it up. ‘Come on, better out than in.’
Grace was philosophical about throwing up. First you got pissed, then you puked, then you passed out. But Posy and Liam and Ilonka from the flat upstairs always freaked out, and from his groans and gasps, Vaughn was too.
Eventually Vaughn was done and leaning against the wall to try and get his breath back. The skin around his eyes was a mottled purple from all the burst blood vessels and he was covered in a fine film of sweat - and definitely off his game because he let Grace run a flannel over his face.
‘Are you all right now?’
Vaughn closed his eyes. ‘No.’
‘You should probably brush your teeth, that always makes me feel better. Then I drink as much water as I can so I don’t get such a bad hangover.’ Grace peered at Vaughn’s contorted face.
‘Stop hovering,’ he bit out, getting to his feet with all the grace of a day-old elephant. ‘I’m going to have a shower.’
That would have been Grace’s next suggestion. Vaughn started to unbutton his shirt, then stopped. ‘I don’t need an audience.’
Grace held up her hands and backed away. ‘OK,’ she said, fighting to keep the hurt out of her voice. ‘Just yell if you need me.’
Vaughn was already turning away. ‘Shut the door on your way out.’
chapter twenty-five
They flew back to a London that was carpeted in a thick drift of snow. Grace stared out of the car window at pavements covered in sludge, sooty banks of ice heaped against the side of the road and pasty-faced people trudging grimly through it with their hoods up and their heads down. After the icy white majesty of Whistler, it was kind of lame.
‘So I guess it’s been snowing while we were away.’
Vaughn didn’t even dignify Grace’s comment with a response. Though he came pretty close to an eyeroll. But then he’d been monosyllabic ever since he’d emerged from the bathroom after his pukeathon.
He’d woken up the next day with a killer hangover but that had been twenty-four hours ago and he was still treating Grace like it had been her idea for him to fall off a wagon that she didn’t even know he’d been on. On the plane he’d avoided Grace’s first-class pod after the seat-belt sign pinged off and when she’d eventually sought him out, he barely looked up from his laptop. ‘I’m busy,’ he said. ‘Go away.’
And so they came to the end, not with a bang, but an absolutely deafening silence. This wasn’t how Grace had imagined it. She would have fucked up in some huge, colossal way sooner or later. A fuck-up that would have made all her other fuck-ups seem trivial in comparison. But what had she done that was so terrible, apart from soothing Vaughn’s fevered brow and not once complaining about the stale smell of vomit in the bathroom the next day? It was because the power balance had briefly shifted in her favour for maybe half an hour - and for Vaughn that seemed to be an absolute deal-breaker.
By the time the car nosed carefully into Montague Terrace, Grace’s lips were sore from all her worried nibbling. ‘You can just let me out here,’ she called to Jimmy, the driver. ‘You’ll never be able to turn the car around.’ If she’d been concentrating instead of angsting, then she’d have made him stop on Junction Road.
‘Don’t be stupid. You can’t drag all your luggage through the snow.’ Vaughn wouldn’t speak to her but apparently arguing was a completely different story. ‘What number is it?’
Grace gave in to the inevitable. She was on the outs - it didn’t really matter if Vaughn saw where she lived. ‘Number seventeen, it’s right at the bottom.’
Number seventeen was the red-headed stepchild of the street. All the other houses had been gentrified by the assorted Chloes and Jacks who did something at the BBC or the
Guardian
and had moved in with their antique brass door knockers and job lots of Fired Earth paint so they could restore their mortgaged-to-the-hilt Victorian terraces to middle-class splendour. Whereas Mrs Beattie, the slum landlady of North London, had simply got her octogenarian handyman to come round and paint Grace’s front door a fetching shade of electric blue last year.
Guardian
and had moved in with their antique brass door knockers and job lots of Fired Earth paint so they could restore their mortgaged-to-the-hilt Victorian terraces to middle-class splendour. Whereas Mrs Beattie, the slum landlady of North London, had simply got her octogenarian handyman to come round and paint Grace’s front door a fetching shade of electric blue last year.
Cringing slightly, Grace was painfully aware that Vaughn was peering over her shoulder. At least the peeling paint, crumbling masonry, and even the mattress, which had been dumped in the front garden long before Grace moved in, was buried under heaps and heaps of lovely snow. It almost looked respectable.
‘Well, I guess I’ll be seeing you,’ Grace said in a voice devoid of hope.
Vaughn nodded in agreement or dismissal but just as Grace started her usual awkward scramble for the car door, his arm curved around her waist, his intention unmistakable.
Vaughn’s mouth moved on hers as gently as his hand traced the curve of her cheek. It said all the words he hadn’t spoken to her over the last two days, but most of all it said goodbye. Grace held herself very still until it was over and Vaughn tapped on the window for Jimmy to open the door. ‘Don’t leave anything behind,’ Vaughn said pointedly.
As she stepped out of the car, the wind tore at Grace’s face, which was the only reason why her eyes watered instantly. It took her two trips to get all her luggage and yank it up the steps, carefully avoiding the middle one which was on the verge of collapse. Grace made sure the car was slowly reversing up the Terrace before she opened the front door and watched her frozen breath curling in the frigid air of the hall. Central heating was for pussies and people who didn’t pay their rent weekly in cash.
As ever, Eileen had thoughtfully left Grace’s post, the usual teetering pile of envelopes, on the hall table. She scooped them up and stuffed them in her duty-free carrier bag.
Even that wasn’t enough to send her back to reality with a jolt. That happened when she shouldered open the door to her flat, flicked on the light switch and realised that the electricity had gone out. A quick rummage in her purse and then a frantic search through her collection of fifties china pots netted the grand sum of seventy-two pence - not enough to nip out to the newsy’s and charge up her PowerKey.
Standing there in her £2,000 coat, Grace wondered for the millionth time why her life was such an abject lesson in irony. Still, she decided wearily, she could manage until tomorrow without electricity. She could light some candles, climb into bed and think warm thoughts . . .
But before anything else, like sorting out her laundry and unpacking her presents and railing at the injustice that flavoured every single part of her life, Grace needed a bath. Even travelling in first class didn’t prevent the scent of eau de plane clinging to her.
Getting undressed was no fun. Each strip of flesh exposed to the air sprang to life with painful goosebumps so her skin looked like an oven-ready chicken.
Bundled into a thick bathrobe and with woolly socks and Uggs on her feet, Grace stumbled down the stairs on tiptoe because she wasn’t in the mood for Eileen beetling out of her lair to start jabbering on about the binmen, the suspicious comings and goings of Ilonka and Anita on the second floor or, God forbid, her late husband, Alfred.
Grace made it to the safety of the unheated, shared bathroom and its bilious green tiles, which no amount of Cillit Bang could ever buff up, set her wash bag down on the windowsill and mentally prepared herself for the ordeal ahead. When you lived in third-world conditions in a first-world country, a girl learned a few tricks. Like, if she ran the bath with only hot water, within minutes it would be warm enough to sit in for the time it took to soap up, rinse off and then be back shivering on the freezing cold lino.
‘This is good for your soul,’ Grace muttered under her breath. Her grandparents were very pro things that were good for the soul or character building. They were always things that Grace hadn’t wanted to do, like getting up at some ungodly hour to do a paper round or taking a GCSE in Physics. Grace’s soul had to be practically glowing with all the good she’d done in its name, she thought glumly as she grappled with the taps. The hot one was always a little stiff, unless you jiggled it slightly to the right. A sudden wrench, which nearly dislocated her wrist, and Grace was good to go.
There was an ominous gurgle, followed by a rattling in the pipes, before a drip of rusty water trickled out of the taps. Grace stared at it transfixed, waiting for a hot gush to spill forth. Instead the pipes kept clanking like an ex’s of Lily’s who’d been really into body piercings.
That was when Grace noticed that the water in the loo was frozen over. There was a solid block of ice in her toilet bowl. A solid block of
yellow
ice. Her life was not meant to be like this.
yellow
ice. Her life was not meant to be like this.
There was nothing else to do but plonk herself down on the edge of the bath, the cold enamel chilling her skin even through the plush terry towelling, and burst into tears. She was all out of other ideas.
Eventually the pity party in her head was penetrated by a loud ringing sound. Some thoughtless bastard was leaning on the doorbell, and if it was Anita or Ilonka who’d forgotten their keys
again
, they were going to get a high-pitched lecture about frozen pipes and not phoning Mrs Beattie, and peeing in iced-over toilets.
again
, they were going to get a high-pitched lecture about frozen pipes and not phoning Mrs Beattie, and peeing in iced-over toilets.
‘What are you doing here?’ Grace yelped in surprise, when she yanked open the door to see Vaughn standing there. For a second her heart rallied - maybe he’d seen the error of his extremely conflicted ways.
He held up her knitting tote. ‘You left this under the seat,’ he said, eyes everywhere all at once: on her tear-streaked face, her Uggs, and over her shoulder at stained wallpaper and torn carpet and oh God . . .
‘Thanks,’ she grunted, making a swipe for the bag, which he adroitly hoisted out of her reach.
‘What’s the matter? Have you been crying?’ he asked sharply, stepping past Grace into a building she’d vowed he’d never enter and striding towards the bathroom, where the pipes were still making clanging noises.
‘You can’t go in there,’ Grace squawked, catching hold of his sleeve, but Vaughn brushed her away as if she was made of air.
When Grace caught up with him, he was staring at the toilet as if he’d never encountered modern plumbing before. Or plumbing that was modern sometime in the 1940s.
‘Good God,’ he whispered. ‘Why isn’t there a radiator in here? No wonder your pipes are frozen.’
Grace flapped her hands but said nothing.
‘Why aren’t you using the bathroom in your flat anyway?’ Vaughn continued and it was hard to distinguish between the icy fingers of fear trailing down Grace’s spine and the onset of hypothermia.
‘I’m having it done up.’ The lamest lie ever came shooting out of Grace’s mouth at a rate of knots. ‘I should have told you. The whole place looks like a building site.’
Vaughn was already turning. ‘What floor are you on?’
‘No, you can’t go up there,’ Grace pleaded, and panic was making her voice catch so Vaughn looked at her suspiciously. ‘There’s really no point in getting dust over your coat.’
‘I asked you what floor?’ It was the voice Vaughn had used when he was being spat at by Raoul; the voice that Grace had never wanted to hear when he was talking to her. ‘I can tell when you’re lying. You’re not very good at it and you’re turning into a block of ice in front of me so, again,
what floor
?’
what floor
?’
The tears rallied for an encore presentation, which just made Vaughn sniff contemptuously, his elegant, aquiline nose rosy red in the Arctic wastes of the bathroom. ‘It’s the first floor,’ she said, ‘but I don’t see why you need to go up . . .’
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