Free Zigzag Street by Nick Earls Page B

who lived there .
    Yeah, my grandmother.
    This wasn’t … This may sound a little strange. The cat. It’s not an orange cat, is it ?
    An orange cat called Greg, yes. The cat my grandmother named after you. That’s the one. He’s very nice normally. Just not a fan of the flea bath.
    Who would be ?
    So you’re saying that cutting me to ribbons would be the reasonable response of any orange Greg in the circumstances?
    He laughs, though in a slightly unsettled way, as though I might be offering to flea-bathe him. We miss your grandmother round here. She was certainly a character .
    Yeah.
    She always used to bring biscuits. She made them herself. I always looked at her and thought that’s what I’d like to be like at ninety .
    Yeah, me too. I thought that. There she was, ninetyone and still putting shit on me. You’ve got to respect that.
    So, how do you get to be living in her house ?
    It’s a complicated set of circumstances. Well it’s not really. It’s actually pretty simple. I was in a relationship. It ended. I had to live somewhere. I stayed with my parents but, you know.
    Yeah, I do. I do know. I worked in England for a while and when I came back I stayed with mine for a few months. I hadn’t lived with them for maybe ten years. It was very strange. Too strange. They ate dinner really early, and took an intense interest in my day .
    Yeah. That’s it. That’s it, exactly. They’re great but they’ll drive you crazy. And you want to shake them and say, These things are just habits. They don’t matter. You can get over this. People can eat dinner after dark. But you know they wouldn’t understand. They think there’s something really Bohemian about you because you don’t want to eat till seven-thirty.
    In the end you have to leave, don’t you? You’ve got to get back to some place that’s your own .
    Yeah. Or in my case my grandmother’s. But it’s fine now. I’m settling in.
    And the relationship ?
    It’s over. That’s been made clear to me. So now I’ve got to make it clear to me too, and then work out what happens next.
    He says these things can be rough. Sometimes they’re all you can think about and you can feel them weighing you down, but in the end you pull through, even if there are times when you don’t expect to. We talk a bit more, probably until he decides I’m safe, until he believes his feline namesake caused the harm that brought me here two nights ago. And he says that we could talk again, if I wanted. That I can come back if I notice I’m not coming to terms with any of this and I want to talk to someone who’s not part of the situation.
    And right at this moment I realise that sometimes I still work on the assumption that I’ll be fine. That something will happen, or nothing will happen, and this will all lift from me and I’ll be fine.
    I walk home up the hill. Right now I don’t feel bad.

18
    On Friday Deb asks me what plans I’ve got for the weekend and I tell her I’m going to a thirtieth.
    And she says, Fuck, thirty , slowly and breathily as though it’s almost inconceivable. You’re not thirty are you Ricky ?
    No. I’ve got nearly two years left to do all the ‘before I’m thirty’ things.
    Thirty. I can’t even imagine thirty .
    You don’t have to. It happens anyway. It’s like that.
    So what are you doing ?
    Going out to dinner.
    No, you’ve got to do more than that .
    I’ll give you the guy’s number if you want. You can call him and tell him he’s fucking up his only shot at a decent thirtieth.
    I start working, start looking through this contract again and wading my way with some discomfort to a few things that might become ideas. My phone rings. It’s Deb.
    You know what I’d do for my thirtieth, Ricky ?
    What?
    I’d get one of those bouncy castles, one of those blow up ones