Free The Trouble with Henry and Zoe by Andy Jones Page A

relaxes back into the shadow of his chair. Henry steps out into the cold night, the first suggestions of grey infusing themselves into the black sky.
    And he is gone.

Zoe
He Used To Be A DJ
    Her stomach groans and she feels suddenly nauseous with hunger; too hungry to wait for Alex to bring her breakfast in bed. Zoe shakes out the duvet, plumps up the pillows and
finishes dressing: a pair of knee-length shorts and the t-shirt Alex says makes her boobs look nice.
    As she walks down the stairs, Zoe stops in front of a framed black and white photograph – one of five hung along the incline of these thirteen steps – showing her and Alex surrounded
by boxes on the day they moved in. They had positioned Alex’s camera on the mantelpiece and set the timer. When the mechanical shutter on the fifty-year-old Leica had eventually snapped open,
it had caught Zoe laughing at some comment – she can’t remember what – made by Alex. He was looking at her, amused and in love, while her face was creased with the beginnings of
laughter – mouth partially open, eyes half closed. Knowing they had missed their cue, they reset the camera to take a ‘proper’ picture. But when Zoe had looked over the prints
some weeks later, this was the one she chose to have enlarged and framed.
Our place
, she thinks, smiling.
    ‘You home?’ she calls, as she takes the last few steps at a trot. ‘Alex? Babes?’
    Although Zoe hadn’t really expected to find Alex hidden inside his headphones, she is still disappointed to find he is not in the living room. She looks through the kitchen window into
their ‘yarden’, but he is not home. She flicks on the kettle then opens the fridge to see what she can rustle up for breakfast. They have eggs, but no butter and no milk. There is a jar
of jam and a tub of hummus, but they have no bread and the hummus looks worryingly bubbled. Half a cucumber, a single red pepper, a block of cheese, dry and cracked where someone – it could
be her – failed to wrap it properly, and half a jar of olives. Mustard, anchovies, pesto, a swig of apple juice and a bottle of champagne. Zoe thought they had finished the fizz, but it seems
Alex has found what must surely be the final bottle from their moving-in haul. Maybe they’ll take it with them on their bike ride this afternoon. She notices the freezer door has not been
closed properly and her first instinct is to be annoyed, but this is followed quickly by a pang of guilt. Her shins had been itching in the night, and when she’d told Alex, he had got out of
bed to fetch ice cubes for her to hold against her skin. It had worked, too.
And how many men would do that for you on a Baltic October night?
    She puts two eggs in a saucepan full of boiling water and goes out into the yarden to extract the bicycles from the shed. The sun is out and despite the month it is warm, so Zoe eats her
breakfast and drinks a mug of black tea, sitting on a folding chair outside. When she has finished, Alex is still not home so she finds her phone and calls him. She calls twice, but each time it
rings through to voicemail, so she leaves two separate messages asking – with good humour, because the rest of this glorious day is still ahead of them and she doesn’t want to spoil it
by starting an argument – where the hell he has got to with her breakfast. She paces the living room, trying to recall exactly what he said before leaving:
    I’ll bring you breakfast in bed?
    Or was it
I’ll be back before breakfast?
    Either way, he’s late. She seems to remember him saying he had to ‘get some stuff’, but maybe he’d said ‘
do
some stuff’ – although what stuff she
can’t imagine. The thought suggests itself again:
What if he’s cheating on you?
    But repeating the question does nothing to clarify the answer.
    It occurs to her that he might be playing football. She checks the cupboard where he keeps his kit but everything appears to be there, mud-caked boots and all.