Stand by Your Man by Michael Bracken

Author:Michael Bracken
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Xcite Books
Published: 2011-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Halfway up the Stairs

by Josephine Myles

He isn’t there when I wake. His pillow doesn’t even have a dent in it, and I wonder what I could have said that was so awful Josh didn’t even want to share a bed with me. A couple of possibilities present themselves: arrogant tosser was one ... manipulative, scheming bastard was another. Or perhaps it was the point when I yelled that he obviously cared nothing for our shared history in this house if he was so willing to leave it to chase a crappy promotion. Yes, that was probably it.

I groan and rub my eyes, wishing I could grind away the words I’d flung at him. But then I open them and see the bedroom fireplace, and remember how I hunted down the grate and mantel in architectural salvage yards; how I dug the Victorian tiles out of a nearby skip and painstakingly reassembled them. I’ve sweated over this house; built memories into its very fabric. He can’t ask me to leave it all in search of an extra couple of grand a year. He just can’t.

I pull on my dressing gown and decide to go and look for him. If I’m contrite and put my case reasonably then maybe he’ll listen for long enough to understand. He’s not in the other front bedroom. I walk down the corridor to the back of the house and pause at the bottom of the flight of stairs up to the attic. The stairs to Josh’s office; the room that has been his ever since we first moved here as students, over ten years ago. I look up to the bend in the stairs and that memory floods back, sepia toned, but threatening to break out into glorious Technicolor any moment. Of standing there one hot summer’s night and hearing another man’s voice in his room. A man begging Josh to fuck him.

‘Charlie? Do you have a moment?’ Josh asked.

It was the last week of classes and I’d been about to pull my usual fast exit after the English Lit seminar, heading down the Student Union bar for a couple of pints and a few rounds of pool. But this was Josh; nerdy, serious Josh, who’d never spoken a word to me before. What on earth did he want?

I didn’t have to wait long to find out.

‘I hear you have a room going. Would I be able to take a look?’

‘Yeah, course. It’s a bit of a shithole, though. Right at the top of the house. You be OK with that?’

‘I think I can handle a couple of flights of stairs,’ he said, and I swear that behind those glasses he was crinkling his eyes. Maybe he did have a sense of humour after all.

‘Think you can handle me as a landlord, though?’ Thanks to my parents, I had recently found myself in the crazy position of owning a run-down Victorian semi in the suburbs of Bristol. They told me it was an investment in my future.

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