17

I woke up in that way where your eyes are awake before you, and they are ready. I woke up to sun, because we hadn’t shut the curtains. There was Sofi, naked, sheet off, face flat down on the pillow. The gilt square of the window broke on her pillow and spilt onto her shoulder. If I’d wanted to go from flat to standing, I could have done it in a single movement. I lay there, light.

Sofi woke with a ‘fuck’. And then yes, I remembered too, he was back today. A ball bearing rolled around the bottom of my belly.

‘And fuck – fuck.’ She smacked her mattress. ‘I forgot to defrost the Chateaubriand. He told me Chateaubriand.’ She rolled over, and buried her face in the pillow. ‘I’m going to have to put it in the microwave. Fuck.’

Sofi brushed her teeth with her finger, and I got changed on my bed. We cycled fast to Eddy’s and Sofi didn’t sing. When we got there, Pip had cleared all of the kitchen surfaces and said he wanted to make us eggs. ‘No time, no time for eggs,’ Sofi said, reaching up to touch his face as she made her way past him to the vacuum cleaner. He turned to me, ‘Eggs?’

‘Report cards.’

The agency had asked me to fill in weekly progress reports. I hadn’t done a single one; they were hidden in the drawer with my ticket home. We took all of it out. Pip had things to fill in too. He was supposed to give me marks out of five for competence and professionalism. We filled them in at the table as Sofi hoovered around our feet in odd patches, just the bits that looked messy. When Pip was finished, he pushed the papers over to me and got up to get a glass of milk. He’d given me fives for everything.

Sofi had decided to leave the Chateaubriand out in the sun rather than microwave it so she’d hidden it behind the shed, perched on an old bird bath. I was sent to go and turn it.

‘If it looks like it’s cooking,’ she shouted as I left the house, ‘if it’s going grey-y, Jude, whack it under a bush.’

The meat was fine, hard as ice and just as cold, though beads of water rolled off the vacuum pack.

Next to the stone bath, though, there was a bird, the colour of suede shoes, but softer, tiny. It was completely tame and it looked up at me. I started whistling the Carpenters’ ‘Why – do – birds’, then called for Sofi, who ran out, thinking it was about the beef.

‘It must be an island thing, Sof. Come, look how tame it is.’ She got down onto her knees, then got really close. ‘Beautiful baby,’ she said, then stage-whispered for Pip.

He came out slicking his hair with water in that way of his. He knelt right in between us, and then, without even looking properly, he said it was dying.

‘No it’s not,’ I said, joining them on the ground. ‘It’s…’

‘Dying.’ (This was Sofi.) ‘Fuck, man.’

‘No,’ I said. I wanted to say we could feed it water or worms, that it wasn’t too late, but Pip had gone to find a spade.

They did it together, and put it in a bag, with the rubbish, by the porch.

Pip came to find me after it was done. He said that I knew about science, that you had to when it’s like that. He said that line about stopping it from suffering. And then he did this half-hug thing – it was more him draping a bit of his shoulder near mine – and said he was sorry. He looked at my hair like he was tucking it behind my ear for me, and said he really was sorry.

Just then Sofi came in to wash her hands. ‘He smacked it on the head,’ she said. ‘Ka-pow. Out like a light. Stone cold soldier-boy this one.’