Chapter Text
This time of year, the low sun in the blossom makes the hallway walls ripple like mad. What it reminds him of, more than anything, is Venice. And he fucking hates Venice.
Place is always mobbed. And, honestly, full of tat.
Still, it’s a pretty thing to come home to. He hangs up his coat, subjects himself to the ear-sniffing inspection of an ecstatic little dog, and scoops up the leaflet landslide on the doormat before she skids and breaks her neck on it. Glossy flyers, 2-for-1s, fifteen different charity updates, a neighbourhood news bulletin, and Thames Water, fuck them.
True, innit, he thinks, heading into the kitchen, winnowing out the recycling-bin bullshit with practiced fingers. That they come not single spies but in battalions.
Between a brown envelope and a sad-eyed donkey, he finds a small scrap of grey paper, the white boxes covered in barely legible ballpoint.
Sorry, there’s a fee to pay before we can deliver your item.
Amount due: £ 1 . 70 .
Greg smiles incredulously, scrunches his nose a moment, pops the kettle on, and tries to work out who might have sent him an actual fucking letter. Normally– since whatever’s wrong with Alex appears to be both hereditary and airborne– it’d be a Horne of some description, but he’s fairly sure all the relevant ones are in Corfu right now. Unless it was Croatia.
A quick glance at the calendar confirms his suspicions: amongst February’s usual dinner dates, birthday parties, planning meetings and filming commitments, a clumsy black arrow crawls across the week from the HALF TERM penned into Monday’s square. Confusingly enough, so does next week, only in green. That one’s the girls, though, he’s fairly sure. Because it’s apparently still beyond the wit of man to just have the same half term everywhere.
He mashes the teabag against the inside of the mug a few times, weighing ‘getting to chat briefly to Alex’ against such things as his integrity and self-regard.
About three seconds later, he’s scrolling down his contacts to H.
Two rings. He almost bottles it.
“Greg?”
Rachel, bless her, couldn’t be less accusatory. She almost sounds pleased. Immediately, he feels terrible.
“Hi. Look, I’m sorry.” He shouldn’t really ask to talk to Alex, no matter how much he’d like to. Family time, being so rare for the Hornes now, has become sort of sacrosanct. Not just from Greg– even the most hallowed figures in the litany don’t get a look in, supposedly, although honestly he doubts that. If they’re picking up the phone to him, they’re definitely taking Key’s calls, aren’t they? “But can you just ask him–”
“Present,” says Alex at once, voice a little distant. “Correct. Speaker.”
And just because he’s not there to see it, Greg allows himself to smile. Properly. The ugly one that makes his ears look all asymmetrical. Are you sunburnt yet, he wants to ask. Are there pictures. Have you thought about me at all, having good clean family fun in Crete or wherever the fuck you are now, Alex.
Then he’s irritated at himself. It’s just arrant nonsense, isn’t it? There’s no reason Alex would think of him more this week particularly. Between one thing and another, they’ve not seen each other for over a month now. The fucking school holidays don’t change anything.
“You send me a postcard?”
Alex hesitates a moment too long.
“We did.” Rachel sounds a little bit teasing about it. Some couples’ thing. As is their right, obviously. As a couple.
“Did it come?” Alex, for some reason, is playing nervous: he’s always been quite good at that. Goes to show that it’s true what they say about practice. Greg sighs slightly.
“You forgot the stamp, you prick,” he says. “I’ve got to go and pay for it at the Post Office.”
Alex groans.
“Yeah, I thought that might– that’ll be me, it must have fallen off.”
Greg frowns. With his free hand, he opens the kitchen drawer that’s stuffed with random shit, finds a little purple booklet between the Nicorette packet and the empty biros, and peels a stamp from it. It sticks fast to his finger: when he lays it on the less-than-spotless countertop, it clings like a limpet. Will be a nightmare to get off, in fact. What is Alex talking about?
“Look, it’s fine, it’s not– it’s just a postcard. Don’t bother.” The silly boy sounds mortified. Delightful. Irresistible.
“Bother,” says Rachel. She might be trying not to laugh. “I’ll stand you the money for it, if you like.”
“Oh, sure.” He’s presumed on her time enough already, absolutely has to be going, but he’s not quite sure how to sign off. He’d say take care now, love you, normally, to basically anyone in the world, and especially to these two, but–
“Love you,” Rachel says. “Take care, now.”
And she hangs up.
He stares down at the stamp on the surface, at the mug of stewing tea, slight waxy sheen forming on the top, and the bobbing teabag.
Then he dumps the lot in the sink, and goes to get his coat.
* * *
Bitter cold as it is, it’s a beautiful day. Kids absolutely everywhere, loud and bright, and all of them someone else’s problem. A doll-faced toddler, ringlets clumping together with mud and jam, bares her teeth at him and growls. He’s instantly smitten, and forgets her instantly, too.
Crossing the park, he has to slow down. Leaving the path would clot the white rubber of his trainers with winter mud, so he’s trapped behind a family: of course nauseatingly young; of course with no sense of space; of course in matching scarves. When the wind sends blossom showering down, hectic pink confetti everywhere, the lot of them instantly burst out laughing. Some sort of in-joke, clearly. Incomprehensible from outside.
He imagines, for a moment, how ridiculous he’d look with them, pretending to belong there. It just doesn’t work, does it? Ghosts at the dinner table and all that.
The little boy starts punching one of his sisters, over and over, on the arm.
“Cunt,” she says, grinning, adjusting her scarf. “Smelly little rat boy cunt who’s never gonna get a girlfriend.”
Rat boy cunt screeches, and hits harder, his coat coming increasingly unzipped with each punch, until there’s a real danger that the scarf will catch in the teeth of it and choke him.
Greg smiles, tender, paternal. He really should ring his sister.
* * *
Like every pharmacy he’s ever been in, the place is somehow both overlit and dingy, cluttered and weird-smelling. Neera, irascible sovereign of the Post Office counter, favours him and his grey paper slip with her usual utter contempt.
“Pink in your hair,” she chirps, clicking her tongue. “You are too big for pink.”
Barely comes up to his hip, this woman, and yet somehow she contrives to look down her nose at him every time he’s in here. He just adores her.
“One pound seventy,” she adds, looking suitably disgusted when he has the effrontery to pay it, and pushing his post under the perspex screen with such real disdain that he almost giggles.
It is, as promised, a postcard. Unsigned: they’re not idiots. Or Alex isn’t, anyway. But he knows the handwriting, and if he didn’t know the handwriting, he’d probably just know. He always knows when it’s Alex playing music, after all. Even from the next room. Even if he didn’t expect to see him at that party.
Wish you were here
Same as all the others. Missing an exclamation mark, but otherwise exactly like all his postcards before. Except that this one, under the fluorescent pharmacy lights, has taken on the ugly rainbow rings of an oil slick. Except that it sort of quivers in his hands.
Except that it’s been, for reasons that are absolutely beyond him, laminated.
He slides it from the counter, and tucks it into his coat pocket before he can do anything stupid, like turn it over.
* * *
He stops on the way home and orders a coffee he doesn’t drink, because the sun’s creeping lower and he’s trying to be good. He needs to sit for a bit, though, watching condensation gather on the windows, playing Tetris and chewing gum and slogging by painful inches through the news, because if he goes home now he’ll just– he has to be honest with himself about this– he’ll just call them again. And he’d rather not.
He’s able, if he really tries, to forget the postcard in his pocket for whole minutes at a time.
It’s not an odd thing. Well– it is an odd thing, obviously, but not for Alex. ‘Course he’s taken a fucking laminator on holiday. He does odder things than that every day of the week.
Greg suspects he’s probably making too much of it.
So he heads home. Still in his head a little, clearly, because he never does notice the breeze drop. Only even realises it must've done when he arrives back in the hallway and finds the fading light perfectly still.
He hangs his coat back up, and takes the postcard back out.
The blank end of the sentence bothers him more than it rightly should. He shakes his head to dislodge that thought, because it’s stupid, and turns the postcard over to look at the picture.
Not what he’d expected, actually. Against type as it would be, he’d kind of thought it’d be dirty, even if only in that sly, deniable way that Alex has. Why else make a postcard fucking wipe-clean? But it’s just a painting: the sea, the shore, bright childish lines.
Not Corfu. Boats the world over, of course, look basically the same, rotten little death traps and nauseating carbon-fibre mid-life crises. But he recognises, as it happens, the buildings on the shoreline, and anyway it’s impossible, literally impossible, to mistake the particular beloved drabness of the English Channel.
No sunburn, then.
He pins it to the corkboard alongside innumerable potato paintings (the artists, he reflects morbidly, all teenagers now), amongst the takeaway menus, the cards of the backup dogsitter and the man who does the gutters, and the one particularly awful picture of Roisin he keeps up there to annoy her.
Then he spits his chewing gum in the bin and goes to get some writing done– which is to say, he instantly falls dead asleep on the couch.
* * *
He dreams of their hallway. Their hallway, Rachel-and-Alex’s.
The one warped floorboard they never fix. The polyester P.E. bags, stale-smelling, overstuffed, starting to fray. The beautiful shoe rack she repainted in French Grey last year, always half-empty: pairs of trainers in every size, littering the floor around it in haphazard pairs.
Voices in the garden. Light on the wall. Somewhere, Alex is playing the end of Layla, quite badly, on the piano.
* * *
When Greg jolts awake from the unplanned nap, the dog is curled up on his chest, whuffling softly in her sleep, and there’s a message from Rachel on his phone.
When you get it, call.
It seems cosmically unfair, given the amount of effort he’s put specifically into not doing just that, but he knows better than to think he deserves a nice sulk about it.
She picks up on the third ring, very slightly out of breath. The reception doesn’t seem great, and there’s also quite a lot of screaming in the background, but just the normal kid sort.
“Hi there, beautiful.”
He laughs, pleased, insulted, confused. The dog snorts awake, dismayed, and pads off in search of less unreliable bedding.
“Hello, love. I thought you were in Cannes?”
“No, no. Cornwall. Boys wanted to surf.”
“Urgh.” He lets his head drop against the back of the sofa. “We should do Cannes. Just you and me.” They won’t, of course. It’d look terrible. But he would genuinely like to. Since the little fucker is always so busy. “He didn’t chuck anything out of your suitcase to lug his gadgets along, did he?”
He can see it vividly: Alex cross-legged in a silly jumper on the floor of some hotel suite or holiday cottage, consumed by a fucking idea, an enthusiam that slowly fills the space with sheets of iridescent plastic as Rachel roots about fruitlessly for the sun cream.
“He went out and bought it. They have W. H. Smith even down here, you know.”
He smiles. He’s still not sure, even now, whether it began as a sort of secondhand love, but he really does like her so much.
“Aw, poor things. What’s he laminating his postcards for, then?”
There’s a soft silence.
“Well,” says Alex, eventually. “I wanted your postcard to be laminated.”
Ah. Fucking speaker. Gets him every time.
“Ok. Why?” It’s like he can hear Alex suffering on the other end of the phone. It’s very funny. “Is this the Kerry thing again?”
He’d been so hung up on that, for some reason. Probably it’d done well online. That’s normally why.
“Not Kerry, this time,” says Alex, cagey.
Rachel makes a small, sharp noise of impatience.
“Sorry, dear,” Greg sighs. “Want me to hang up, get back to you when I’ve solved this fucking sphinx’s riddle?”
He can almost taste the silent negotiation that starts to unfold then, inches from Rachel’s phone. He hates that. He doesn’t want to cause problems. Well. He doesn’t want to cause problems for anyone but Alex.
Suddenly not so much sleepy as genuinely tired, he takes the silence as permission, and ends the call without saying anything at all.
He hopes, for her sake, that whatever’s going on with the man is fixable either with a battered fish or a battering.
* * *
Greg pulls the pin out of the corkboard and looks again at the postcard. Like there might be a clue in it, any insight into what the man’s up to this time.
Well, it’s very neat work. Edges all lined up and everything.
He really doesn’t like that full stop, though. Alex should always be cheerful. Is always cheerful, really. It’s part of what used to wind him up in the studio, seeing him so stiff and unsmiling and unlike himself. It used to be a victory to crack that open, see him underneath.
Looking this closely, he can see tiny scraps of glue clinging to the right-hand corner.
After taking the time to keep everything painstakingly parallel, he must have put the stamp on too fast, the warm plastic softening the adhesive. Even though it’s impossible, literally impossible, that Alex wouldn’t have known not to. Things like that– what not to do with a stamp, the little physical quirks of everyday objects– they’re Alex’s bread and butter. More than that, they’re his life, and by happy coincidence, also what he lives for. Greg strokes a thumb over the tattered glue, frowning.
Was he in a rush, then, to run back off down to the beach? Or was it deliberate, done in the hope that it might not arrive?
Either way, Greg’s got it now.
When he puts the postcard back on the board, he’s careful to pin it slightly differently, so there’s an extra puncture mark in Alex’s careful lamination.
* * *
Part of the problem here, Greg thinks, sticking on a Blackadder he knows by heart– how we cheered when they spun. How we shouted when they dived. How we applauded when one chap got sliced in half by his own propeller– part of the problem here is that he’d always known that he didn’t want to fuck Alex.
And then, once he had wanted to fuck Alex, he’d reassured himself that Alex himself would never want to.
And then once he’d realised that Alex did, in fact, really fucking badly want to, he’d at least been sure that wanting to wouldn’t change anything.
It went unsaid, sure, but it was always with them, in mussed hair and eye-bags, meetings ended early, chickenpox is going around again, the smear of Pritt stick in his beard, hummed hymns and nursery rhymes, Lego pieces in his pockets, quick nap on the couch between filming blocks, his silly open mouth and lovely teeth.
They hadn’t seen much of each other, back then, but every time they did it seemed to open another window into why he’d never had Alex, and why he never would. Why it was never even a possibility. He just wouldn’t. Nor would Alex.
Except it seems that they would.
He’s not quite sure, even now, how Alex has squared this with Rachel; how Rachel, herself, is squaring it with God; and he honestly doesn’t like to ask, in case it’s not quite a done deal between the three of them yet. Maybe some day. But she knows a lot more about it than he does, so he just has to trust that she’d let him know if there were problems in that direction.
Still. He should probably start dating again, shouldn’t he? Find someone nice. Someone actually available. Someone a bit more fucking fathomable.
Or, at the very least, he should ring his sister.
* * *
On Saturday night he goes to a dinner party in Camden that he’d been planning to miss, and hears a fantastic story about a champagne sabre that he’s really not sure he believes, and between that and Sunday’s hangover he manages not to disrupt the family peace any further. Monday, though, Monday is fine.
Have fun?
The reply arrives a few minutes later– lightning speed, for Alex, busy thing that he is.
A photo: the page of a diary ripped out, the week just gone, with CORNWALL written all down the side. A letter for every day, and the last L in the Notes section. The middle two letters have been scribbled out and rewritten.
It’s not Alex’s handwriting. He can see that, even in capitals. And Alex doesn’t keep a proper diary, does everything from his phone, because he’s secretly deep down a little yuppie. It’s Rachel who uses paper, who gets biro stains blueing the corners of her mouth like a kid: must be hers.
Next to the letters, though, there’s a cartoon animal, in a rounded, scribbly style– oh, a sphinx. A scruffy sphinx with wonky teeth, patted on the head by a bespectacled scrawl. Greg, almost certainly. Even if he could doubt it, the speech bubble from his mouth looks like it says VGB.
It’s hard to tell for sure, though, because of the air bubbles. The laminating on it is crap.