Eleven A Novel by Mark Watson

Author:Mark Watson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9781847379696
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

VII

Xavier sleeps until three the following afternoon – or lies in bed, at least. Each time he regains consciousness, all he wants is to lose it again. He hears or senses the day going by, like music played in a distant room: Mel taking the squawking Jamie somewhere, footsteps on the stairs around lunchtime, and then the distinctive, heavy silence of the Sunday afternoon outside. The Bayham Road traffic is just a trickle of cars taking couples to pub lunches, or families to early-year picnics provoked by the long-awaited sun.

Eventually he sits up in bed, throws the covers aside and begins to review the events of last night. I fucked everything up, Xavier thinks. For a second all he wants is to call Matilda, or Bec and Russell, just to hear one of those familiar voices, even if they only describe what they can see around them, what they’ve been up to. But it’s night in Australia. Matilda is dancing with her fiancé in Kings Cross, Sydney. Bec and Russell, exhausted as usual, are asleep.

Xavier takes a few exploratory steps to the bathroom, but his head feels as if it is being squeezed in a giant fist, and the floor and walls play maliciously with his eyes, refusing to stay solid or static. I’m still drunk, he thinks, Christ, I drank so much. This memory leads back to the others, to the awful exchange by the door, and further back to the sequence of events which brought him here, which made him withdraw from the world to the extent he has, and made him shout, absurdly, at Pippa, for saying things which were probably true.

Xavier feels sick. He manages to find his phone in the lounge, on the floor by the sofa. The whole room, with its sauce-stained takeaway debris and disrupted cushions, with traces of Pippa on the furniture and her accelerated breaths still in the air, is infused with a regretful ambience, a sad nostalgia for what briefly happened there. Don’t be stupid, Xavier thinks, toughen up, get a grip, for Christ’s sake. It takes him three tries to find Murray’s number on his mobile.

‘Xav? I was going to call you in a couple of hours – I’ve got a zinger of an idea for tonight, basically we get them to call in to evict people from the TV, like, you can choose one person to banish for ever to—’

‘Murray, I’m not well. I’m not going to be able to do it tonight.’

This knocks the words out of Murray for a few moments. Xavier has never cried off once in these five years.

‘I’ve got some sort of virus or something. Sick.’

‘Wer, wer, wer, wer,’ Murray begins, but he fails to come to an agreement with the word. ‘So have you told . . .?’

‘I’m going to call Roland now. They’ll get one of those guys to cover.’

‘OK.’ Murray still sounds shocked. ‘Wer, well, I hope you feel better by tomorrow. Big week of shows coming up.’

There’s no reason

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