Page 89 of Read My Lips

Sev would tell him it was a lucky escape. Clearly I was not the casual, unattached fling he was after. And she’d be right.

It started raining. Again. With a dramatic thunder-rumble and a flash of incandescent white.

My trainers were never going to get dry.

Home, my front door swung open before I even stepped out of the hall. The side-edge of a man-sized cardboard box surged right at me through the doorway. Shuddering violently through, it stammered over the threshold, not even breaking speed.

“Oi!” I jumped back. Not nearly far enough. The box heeled over with the last home-penetrating shove into the narrow hall. Right onto my wet foot.

“For fucksake!”

Hobbling forward, I lunged for the top corner of the box. Too late. It embedded itself into the woodchip paper, laddering a deposit-incinerating beige gauge into the dubious magnolia. Maybe we’d never move out. No one could charge us for anything then.

I hammered on the cardboard.

“Matt, stop!” As if shouting at a Deaf man would get me anywhere at all.

The box teetered back to me, still forging its way inward, like the side of a lorry trapping a cyclist up against railings.

I shouldered into the long side, bracing hard to wedge the box against his momentum. He had to take a hint when the whole thing stopped moving. Right?

Everything stilled.

A swishy-scrabble of trainers on cardboard. Then Matt peered around the corner at me contorting myself against the wall.

“Sorry,” he signed, wincing. “Didn’t see you there.”

“No shit Sherlock.”

Between us we heaved it upright, and the box swayed threateningly, disapproving of being otherwise unsupported. I could empathise.

Sweat glistened on Matt’s forehead, mirroring mine. Only, it looked like he’d been battling furniture shops, not exorcising the ghosts of every bad decision he’d ever made.

“Wasn’t sure you’d be back tonight.” Matt gave me a once-over. Maybe he was picturing me naked. He’d probably watched The Video along with half the known universe. “Give us a hand getting the rest in, would you?”

“Sure.”

We wrangled another three long boxes off the roof of his Corsa. He must have come over all Incredible Hulk to get them stacked on top single-handed, because they had the approximate specific gravity of tombstone slabs.

Twenty minutes later we had an ominous stack of flat-pack brown boxes in the middle of the living room. And the Catford sofa had been shoved out of the way to make room.

Murder-suicide via flatpack assembly with my flatmate had not been how I’d hoped to spend the rest of the evening. But anything had to be better than torturing myself about the imminent implosion of my career. And reputation. And love life.

I nudged the boxes with my bruised toe. “Tell us what you bought then?” I signed.

“A table,” he signed back.

The stack we’d hauled in was currently blocking out all of the carpet not underneath the sofa or the telly stand. Had he decided we were going to open up a supper club, or re-enact medieval feasts?

“...Bit big isn’t it?”

Matt’s face lit with gleeful enthusiasm. “It was in the bargain corner. They were practically giving it away.”

Those two sentences filled me with dread. “Great. I’ll put the kettle on.”

I gave Matt the only clean mug with a handle. Because he’d been trying to get our house back together and I’d been off shagging my boss and plastering my arse all over the internet.

Matt set the instructions down on the window sill when I handed it to him.