Fancy Dress

Pete squeezed his way down the side passage to arrive at the back door. The fist above his head grazed the raw walls. He had to duck to fit it into the kitchen.

From the hallway, the party rumbled like a pot coming to a simmer.

Jesse arrived in the kitchen seeking napkins for the blood flowing down his face.

“You’re here!” He said. “The others are already in the living room. I’ll take you.”

He led the way back towards the hall, wiping his nose with his sleeve.

“Jesse.” A woman blocked their way. She put a hand to Jesse’s cheek. “Look at you.” Jesse moved his head. The blood was starting to fill his cupped palms.

“This is my Aunt Jeannie,” he said. Pete nodded the fist against the ceiling.

“It’s really amazing for us to have Jesse here,” said Jeannie. She looked at him. “Your parents must be so pleased. All things considered.”

Jesse pushed on, leaving a dark trail behind him. Crossing into the living room, Pete felt the fist contract.

Georgia and Lois stood by the French doors. The tie on Georgia’s heavy trench coat wouldn’t undo. Before they reached them, Jesse’s mum was saying,

“Hello, Pete, how are you? Jesse, Grandma’s saying you’ve hardly spoken to her all evening.”

“I just sat with her for half an hour.”

“Well, you can’t blame her for wanting to see you. Go and find her. And where’s Vinnie?”

Jesse had one second to try to clean his face before another relative caught him by the shoulder.

“Where have you been?” Said Lois. Georgia fanned herself.

“Sorry,” said Pete, keeping his head as still as he could. “I had to make a phone call.”

“What?” Lois leaned in, shielding her ears.

Jesse’s sister held a glass aloft to plough between bodies.

“Hazel!” Called Georgia. Hazel’s head rotated, then retracted. She was drawn into a joke with a cousin.

Georgia’s skin was beginning to blister. She let herself out the French doors. The others followed. Jesse pressed the door shut behind them, pouring blood. Inside, bodies immediately filled the space they had created.

They sat on garden chairs on the lawn. The evening spread over the hedges like a veil. Jesse cleaned his face and clothes. Lois’ hearing returned. Darkness lapped at their ankles.

“Phew,” said Georgia. “Some party.” She fed one end of the belt through the other and loosened her coat from her shoulders.

“Thanks for coming,” said Jesse.

Lois patted his leg. “That’s alright.”

Behind the Grantham Road house had been ten square metres of paving slabs surrounded on three sides by surprisingly sturdy fences which blocked out almost all the light, where one shrub withered by the year. In the summer, Georgia shouted over their fence for the next-door neighbours to come over and watch the football on someone’s laptop.

The French doors opened again and the leaked commotion plugged Lois’ ears. Jesse stood up to help his grandma down the steps to a chair.

“Who’s this, then?” She said, squinting through neatly outlined eyes. “Friends from work, is it, Jesse?”

“From university,” said Georgia. The old woman scowled at her. She shrugged the coat back onto her shoulders and drew the belt closed.

“Not school, of course. Jesse didn’t have any friends at school,” she said. “It wasn’t your fault, darling. Jesse was unwell as a child. Terribly unwell. It was awful.”

“Grandma.” Jesse had to press his lips shut against a fresh flow.

“No, it really was, Jesse. When I look at you now, with your friends from university. Well, we’d never have imagined it.”

Pete’s phone rang in his pocket. He stood up and walked to the end of the garden. As the man spoke, he felt the great fist contract and swivel. It extended one great finger down in his direction.

By the time he returned, his knees were bowed with its pointing pressure. Jesse’s grandma was gone, replaced by Vinnie.

“I’m hiding from my mum,” he said to Pete.

When Hazel came into the garden, Georgia’s coat was tied too tight for her to speak.

“You,” she said to Vinnie. “Get inside. Mum’s going mad. There are sausage rolls to heat up.”

“I can help,” said Jesse, getting up.

Vinnie hadn’t noticed the blood, but Hazel was frowning at Jesse’s face. She had been thirteen years old. It had been Christmas Eve. It wasn’t easy to forget.

“No,” she said. “You stay here. Vinnie, come with me.”

They went in the direction of the kitchen, leaving Jesse behind. After a moment, he followed them, though the blood had turned hot and vivid and flowed freely, shining the patio paving.

“I’m cold,” said Georgia, so the three of them went back inside. The chatter had built too furiously for Lois to be able to hear a thing. She timed its crescendo on her watch. Georgia kept trying to loosen her coat, but each glassy eye turned her way jerked it more firmly closed. Pete sensed the tip of the great pointing finger skimming his scalp. Relatives of Jesse’s held his gaze too long.

It had been Georgia’s idea for them to play the scratchcards in the first place. The supermarket carpark was lit only by the leaked glow from the floodlights of the far-off McDonald’s. In the grey gloom, Georgia’s handful of red and orange scratchcards had looked like a tarot deck.

If ever one of them won ten or twenty pounds, they split it four ways over the kitchen counter. Now they had moved out of that house on Grantham Road, each one of them might have believed that the others had given up the habit while they alone had found a reason to carry it on.

A couple of pounds was one thing. Eleven million was quite different.

On their last evening at Grantham Road, they spent hours trying to get the kitchen floor clean. Pete steamed microfibre towels in the microwave to attach to the mop head. Jesse held a Magic Eraser aloft while Lois yelled periodically at Georgia to get up off the stairs and help.

Afterwards, when the floor was finally as white as the day they moved in, slick and lemon-smelling, they sat down on their two-seater sofa and looked at the scuffs by the front door from the time Lois had put the chain on before going to bed and Jesse and Georgia, returning late from a party, had tried to unhook it from the outside, and the watermarks underneath the living room from one scorchingly hot day in the summer that had turned into a sudden thunderstorm and they had had to run around the house slamming shut the doors and windows, and the Blu-Tack marks across the walls and up the stairs from the birthday banners and Christmas tinsel that had been hung there.

The neighbours were coming over later for drinks and pizza, but for now it was just the four of them. It had been easy, then, to promise to see each other all the time after they moved out. That was six months ago.

It was difficult to hear what Lois was saying. Eventually she gestured towards her watch and then the door. She had to go. She had moved north of the river with her boyfriend. Georgia had resigned herself to the coat. The collar obscured her face.

Pete crawled towards the bathroom, dragging the great inflated fist. He looked in the mirror and wondered how he, Pete Walker, had come to be singled out by the universe.