Joe Nuthin's Guide to Life by Helen Fisher

Author:Helen Fisher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2023-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

42 Too simple

Hugo suggested that Joe-Nathan go home to wash the bits of hair off himself and change his clothes, and Chloe agreed to go with him. Knowing that Joe would be keen to get back to work and return to normal, Hugo asked them to come back as soon as Joe had washed and changed and not to delay or do anything else. Joe was reluctant to leave work – it was yet another thing that threw this Wednesday out of kilter – but the bits of hair were itching like crazy, so he was pleased at the prospect of washing it off.

While Joe was in the shower, Chloe looked round his bedroom.

‘Don’t touch,’ he had said, just before he left the room to go to the bathroom, when he saw her reach out to pick up a large paperweight with a dandelion clock-head inside it. ‘Anything,’ he clarified.

‘I won’t!’ Chloe held her hands in the air – as if to demonstrate her innocence to the police – and then stuffed them into the tight pockets of her jeans to remove the temptation to touch. She wandered from shelf to shelf and item to item as if she were looking at artifacts in a museum. Joe’s books were organised according to colour in an undulating rainbow effect as the black and dark blues turned to light blue and then into turquoise and green, then to light green, yellow and white; much the same as he organised the T-shirts at The Compass. She read the words on the book spines (none of which were broken) and saw none that she had read.

Chloe withdrew a hand from a pocket and opened Joe’s wardrobe door, pausing (as she realised that she was going against his wishes) to make sure she could still hear water running in the shower. His clothes were pressed and carefully hung with gaps between each item. She quietly closed the wardrobe door and turned, looked at his chest of drawers and had no doubt that the clothes inside would be as tidy and organised as everything else she could see. She wandered over to his desk and admired his pen pot, with one of each colour pen; an in-tray and an out-tray with just a few papers in each; a notebook carefully squared away in the far corner, and two large, identical photo albums sat side by side at the front of his desk. She wondered if there were baby photos inside and glanced towards the bedroom door, listening again for running water. She carefully lifted the cover and then a few of the pages, noting row upon row of Imperial Leather soap stickers.

‘What the…?’ she mumbled to herself. She closed the first album and opened the next one, saw the single Imperial Leather soap sticker in the top left corner and frowned.

Chloe heard the bathroom door open and quickly closed the album and leapt across the room to the bed. She jumped on it and sat cross-legged, trying to give the impression that she’d been there the whole time.

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