The three of them were silent. Hugo got a chair and brought it over to the sofa; sat in front of Chloe and Joe-Nathan, his legs crossed, his arms crossed, his head bowed. The silence was lovely, peaceful, and Joe began to worry about what it would be like when the silence ended, in the same way that he’d worried about breaking the spell of having his eyes closed. He thought back to that time, just a few minutes ago, when things were dark and easy. That was when he thought his mum was still alive. And now he knew she wasn’t.
Chloe cleared her throat and Hugo looked at her, but she didn’t speak.
‘Do you want some water or anything?’ Hugo asked.
Joe didn’t want any water, and he wasn’t sure if Hugo was talking to him or not, so he didn’t say anything. Still, the silence had been broken, and it was okay.
‘What do I do now?’ Joe asked.
‘Well, I guess you can go home,’ said Hugo. ‘Take some time off, compassionate leave.’
‘It is only four-seventeen,’ said Joe, looking at the massive clock on the wall.
‘Not long ’til leaving time,’ Chloe said.
‘It is Friday,’ said Joe. ‘Mum meets me at five-thirty and we go to the pub.’
Chloe and Hugo stared at each other. Hugo blew out through his lips and sounded like a tyre slowly losing air.
‘Do you want to stay at work like normal and then walk with me to the pub?’ Chloe said.
‘Yes.’
‘Do you want to stay in my office for a little while?’ Hugo added.
‘No.’
Hugo Boss lowered his voice and spoke to Chloe. ‘Will you stay with him?’
Chloe nodded.
‘If he wants to go, will you go with him?’
Chloe nodded again.
‘I’d better to talk to HR,’ Hugo said, almost to himself.
Chloe and Joe folded curtains together and slid them onto big hangers and then onto the rails that enabled customers to look through them easily. They worked slowly because time didn’t matter right now and there was no hurry for curtains. Everything Joe did was just a way to get from one moment to the next; that was the way Chloe saw it, anyway.
‘I liked your mum. She was nice,’ she said.
‘Yes, she was nice,’ said Joe. He paused and listened in his head to the words they’d just spoken – was – the use of the past tense.
‘Was, was, was,’ he said, and then shook his head to make the words go away. They didn’t sound good, or satisfying when he repeated them; they made him feel queasy. He tried replacing them with something else. ‘Pip, pip, pip, byob, byob, byob.’ He nodded and continued to murmur these words under his breath.
‘We could leave a bit earlier than usual, if you like,’ said Chloe.
‘Why?’ said Joe.
‘Get to the pub a bit earlier. Hugo will let us do what we want.’
‘But why go early?’
‘Because it’s better than being at work.’
‘I do not understand what you mean.’
Chloe put down her end of the curtains and leaned on them, her head tilted to one side.
‘There are things I do because I like doing them, and there are things I do because I have to do them,’ Chloe said. ‘When I’m doing something I have to do – like work – I’m always thinking about getting it over with, so I can go and do the things I want to do.’
‘You spend forty hours a week at work,’ said Joe.
‘Forty-two.’
‘You spend forty-two hours a week wishing you were doing something else?’
‘Uh-huh. Everyone does.’
‘Not me. When I am here, I know what to do and when to do it. It is soothing.’
‘But the pub is better.’
‘But that is later. It is after work on Fridays. When the time comes, I will know what to do. If we go now, I will be in the wrong place, at the wrong time.’
They resumed the curtain folding and did it in silence for a while. ‘Are you okay, Joe?’
‘Yes.’
‘About your mum?’
‘I will not know what to do when I leave the store at five-thirty. It is okay while I am here because this is always where I am at…’ he looked at his wrist-watch, ‘… at four-fifty-nine on a Friday. But what will happen at five-thirty?’ Joe didn’t often look ahead. If he was comfortable in what he was doing in the moment, and knew what came next, then life felt like a series of stepping stones: good steady ones, not the kind that were slippery or too small or too far apart. Joe was at ease with the comfort of his known world: understanding the now; understanding the next. Sometimes he would think ahead a little, maybe to the evening, but there was no real point; it would come when it came and he knew what it would involve when he got there. But as he dared to imagine five-thirty today (when his mum would normally be next, but now she would be never), he heard his heart thumping and his breath coming fast.
‘What will happen?’ he said again.
Chloe looked very sad and Joe was sorry to see it. She had stopped folding again. ‘I don’t know,’ said Chloe. ‘But I’ll be there with you.’