Free X20 by Richard Beard

door. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the photo. He said:
    â€˜I don’t believe you.’
    â€˜Believe me.’
    â€˜It’s just a piece of bubble-gum.’
    Then he ran through the waiting-room and away, leaving the door wide open so that we could all hear his trainers slapping along the walk-way.
    â€˜The youth of today,’ Theo said, shaking his head.
    She took off her clothes. When she was naked she shaped herself into the bean-bag. I remember her bones.
    Tuesday arrived. I pulled my desk into the middle of the room and covered it with my spare blue duvet cover. I bought two red candles and stuck them in lumps of Blu-Tack. I went next door to borrow Julian’s desk-chair. I was very nervous.
    â€˜You need hot food for a seduction,’ Julian said.
    He thought he always knew best. I planned to give Lucy three courses, all of them cold so I wouldn’t have to leave the room once while she was with me. Julian pointed out that I’d also chosen the wrong colour wine.
    â€˜You could take her out for an Indian,’ he said.
    Lucy had once told me that I shouldn’t upset myself about Julian because he didn’t fancy her. But anyone can change their mind, and I thought he might be jealous and getting worse at hiding it, which was one more worry to add to the already considerable anxiety which was gathering in my chest, making me linger too long in Julian’s doorway, still holding his desk-chair. I asked him if he thought Lucy liked me. I mean really.
    â€˜Of course she likes you.’
    â€˜How do you know?’
    â€™She told me.’
    â€˜Did she?’
    â€™She said she liked you because you were straight.’
    â€™Straight?’
    â€™Square.’
    â€˜I’m not square.’
    â€˜You hardly drink. You don’t smoke.’
    â€˜Did she really say that?’
    â€˜Why should I lie about it?’
    â€˜You told me that all smokers lie.’
    â€˜I was lying.’
    The Marlboro cowboy never had conversations like these. He was totally unhurried, unworried, unmodern. He was exactly how I imagined myself, tomorrow.
    Some months before he died Theo gave a plant to Emmy Gaston, Walter’s daughter, as a present. Today Walter has brought the plant back and it doesn’t look very healthy. It is about a metre high, but the broad leaves look sorry for themselves, slack in the mouth, in full contemplation of death. There are no flowers on the plant. Theo told Emmy there would be white flowers.
    â€™She wants you to save it,’ Walter says. ‘She imagines Theo passed on the secret. And she gave me a message but I’ve forgotten what it was. I think she wanted you to meet somebody.’
    I tell him not to worry, and he doesn’t. He settles in his chair and starts puffing at his pipe, flicking through a National Geographic feature about cash crops in the Pacific basin. He is wearing a tweed flat cap, with a crimson-feathered fishing fly attached to the cloth stretched over the peak.
    I move the plant slightly to the left so that I can see him better. He looks up and asks me what I want. I’m embarrassed that he catches me looking so I say nothing and bend my head over the desk and write this sentence and will carry on writing it until he goes back to his magazine as if none of this ever happened and now he is reading the magazine again and I think I can stop.
    She was very generous and she refused to let me fumble. Her limbs curled out of the bean-bag, wrapping me in.
    Faced with the possible intimacy of the evening, I felt friendless. I wasn’t sufficiently close to anyone else to take the risk of explaining how much Lucy meant to me. I couldn’t ring home, obviously, and either I was feeling guilty in advance or my mother already suspected something. The last time I’d phoned I’d asked her about Uncle Gregory’s cancer.
    â€˜Are you sure he got it from smoking?’
    â€˜Of course I