You Are Dead

47

Sunday 14 December

‘They’re on the table, getting cold!’ Zak shouted. ‘And we have to get going!’

Freya Northrop lay in bed, reading and enjoying ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ which her new doctor, the eccentric but rather jolly Edward Crisp, had been talking about when she’d had her appointment with him on Friday.

She’d left his surgery, walked straight down to Church Road, turned left and along to where it morphed into Western Road, entered City Books, and asked if they had any volumes of T. S. Eliot poetry. Then headed home.

She yawned and called out, ‘Almost finished. Be one minute!’ She could smell the tantalizing aroma of warm toast. The alarm clock beside her read 9.40 a.m.

He shouted back, ‘You said you’d be one minute already — that was about five minutes ago! You wanted your eggs soft, they’ll be stone cold!’

Wow, you sure found out stuff you didn’t know about someone when you started living with them, Freya thought. Like, one of them was goodbye to her Sunday morning lie-ins. Zak hated to waste a minute of the weekend, and had already been up for hours, finally realizing the only way he was going to get her out of bed was by tempting her with her favourite Sunday breakfast, scrambled eggs and smoked salmon. Besides, she thought ruefully, in any case Sundays as a day off were about to become a thing of the past.

Zak Ferguson was an accomplished chef. She’d met him six months ago, when he came into the Notting Hill restaurant where she was waitressing, and where he ate alone. He had returned the next night, alone again, and spent every moment that he could chatting her up. She’d realized, by the time she brought him a double espresso at the end of his meal, that she was a little bit smitten.

Being a totally rubbish cook, she had bought herself a bunch of cookery books, and the one she had found the most comprehensible and which provided really tasty and easy to prepare recipes was called Don’t Sweat the Aubergine by someone called Nicholas Clee. It lay beside her bed now.

Zak had big plans. Thanks to an inheritance — which had also paid for this small executor-sale Edwardian mock-Tudor house in a leafy close near Hove Park — he’d quit his job at an uber-cool restaurant in London’s Hoxton and had bought a bankrupt Brighton restaurant, which he was in the process of revamping. When it opened in two months’ time, Freya was going to be the front-of-house manager.

Until then he was full-on, travelling to the best seafood restaurants around the country, seeing what was on offer, what ideas he could glean and recipes he could ‘borrow’ and improve on. Today they were making the two-hour drive to Whitstable in North Kent at the mouth of the Thames Estuary. Famed for its oysters, in recent years the town had become increasingly fashionable with a number of highly rated restaurants. They were booked to have lunch at two of them. But there were two gastro pubs he wanted to check out on the way, hence the early start.

Zak, who had already done a twenty-mile bike ride at 5.30 this morning, remained thin as a rake, despite the eating marathon they had embarked upon. Freya had put on over a stone. One effect, which had pleased Zak, was that her breasts, never her best feature, had become larger. Another effect, which seriously displeased her, was that her thighs had become larger and dimpled. She should start exercising, too, she knew. Dr Crisp had asked her about that, and had frowned when she’d admitted to smoking ten cigarettes a day, and had frowned even more when she’d confessed to downing the best part of a bottle of white wine a day.

‘You should stop smoking — and that’s too much for someone your age to be drinking,’ he had admonished her.

He was right, she knew. But she enjoyed both. And they were pleasures she shared with Zak. After a year on her own, since she’d been crassly dumped by her previous boyfriend, by text, Zak made her smile. She loved his energy, his humour and his ambition. And she loved just how much he genuinely seemed to enjoy cooking for her, trying out his recipes. Although she’d been less happy last night when he’d knocked over a saucepan and two very bolshy lobsters had skittered across the floor, claws clacking, causing her to shriek and jump onto a chair in fright.

She looked back at the T. S. Eliot poem. God, how prescient Dr Crisp had been. It was all about food! References to sawdust restaurants with oyster shells; tea and toast; a life measured out with coffee spoons; tea and cakes and ices. They were in a seaside city and today they were going to another seaside place. And here in this poem Eliot had written about growing old and wearing the bottoms of his trousers rolled.

Would Zak be like this one day? Would they grow old together? Walk along the seashore, he with his trousers rolled up and barefoot in the lapping water. She could see it. For the first time in her life she had met someone she could truly see having a life with. Growing old with.

She put the poem down, slipped naked out of bed and pulled her dressing gown around her. Then she walked barefoot downstairs into the kitchen where Zak was sitting, showered, shaved and dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, smelling of the aftershave she loved, and studying the food pages of the Observer. She put her arms around his neck, and kissed him on the cheek. ‘You smell delicious,’ she said.

The breakfast was laid out the artistic way it might have been in a top-rated restaurant. The eggs splayed on the plate, with slivers of truffle on top, the smoked salmon in neat curls beside it, interspersed with slices of lemon, and a display of sliced cherry tomatoes. The toast was in a silver rack, butter in a square, modern dish. ‘This looks seriously yum.’ She nuzzled his ear. ‘Almost as yum as you.’

‘Your eggs are going to be rock hard!’

She slid her hand down onto his thigh, then around to his crotch. ‘Hmmn,’ she said. ‘They’re not the only things hard around here.’

‘Eat your bloody breakfast, girl!’ he said, stifling a grin, then he turned and kissed her back.

An hour later they went downstairs again and walked out of the front door of the house, into the dry, blustery morning. Zak’s old MX5 was parked in the short driveway in front of the integral garage, alongside Freya’s beat-up Fiesta. The MX5, which hadn’t been polished in years, had a rip in the canvas roof patched up with black tape, and was spattered with seagull dropping.

‘This dog, how long are we going to be stuck with it?’

‘Bobby!’ she said. ‘He’s called Bobby and he’s totally adorable. You’ll want a puppy after you see him!’

‘Koreans eat dogs. They have great recipes for them.’

‘Zak, that’s horrible.’

‘Yeah, OK, sorry. It’s just I want you to myself, I don’t want to have to share you with a dog.’

‘You’ll love him, I promise you. And it’s only for a week.’

She had agreed to look after her friends’, Emily and Steve’s, mixed-breed terrier, while they were away on holiday. But she hadn’t reckoned on Zak being so negative about the adorable creature.

The man inside the small grey Renault saloon parked a short distance up the road, his face masked by the main section of the Sunday Times, watched the MX5 reverse out into the road and drive off.

He was reading the front page article about Logan Somerville with great interest. On the passenger seat beside him was a yellow hi-viz tabard and a clipboard. Like taxis, he knew, people never took any notice of someone in a hi-viz jacket holding a clipboard.