Читать книгу One Hundred Names - Cecelia Ahern, Cecelia Ahern - Страница 14

‘I’m so sorry to drag you over so late,’ Kitty apologised to Steve as he got out of his car. She’d wiped her eyes roughly while she waited and now hoped it wasn’t obvious that she’d been crying. ‘I didn’t mean for you to come over at all, I just didn’t know who else to call. The dry-cleaners said they’d evict me next month if I didn’t sort it out and I didn’t want to call the guards and I didn’t know who else to call. Sorry,’ she repeated.

‘Kitty, shut up saying sorry, okay?’ he said gently, putting his arm around her shoulder and giving her as much of an embrace as his PDA-hating body would allow him, and though it was more the kind of hug a footballer would give another she appreciated that he even touched her. ‘What did they do this time?’

She didn’t need to answer, the smell hit as soon as they stepped in the stairwell.

‘Oh God …’ He pulled the neck of his sweater up over his mouth and nose.

It took them twenty minutes of much gagging and retching to clean the door and it seemed it would take eternity to get rid of the stink. As a further apology and thanks, Kitty treated Steve to dinner in a nearby bistro.

‘I have to wash my hands again,’ Steve said, rolling up his nose in disgust, ‘I can still smell it on me. I don’t think I can touch food.’

‘You’ve cleaned your hands six times,’ she laughed, watching him disappear to the bistro toilet.

‘So how is everything with you? Is Victoria Beckham’s new line Fit or Shit?’ she asked as soon as he’d returned.

‘Ha ha,’ he said, without cracking a smile. ‘I wouldn’t know, seeing as I’m no longer a slave to her fashion.’

Steve wasn’t a slave to any particular fashion but his own style, which wasn’t especially bad but it was consistent, had pretty much been the same since their college days, though the fabrics were now more expensive and he tended to wash his clothes more regularly. He was thirty-four years old, with a mop of unruly black curly hair on top of his head, a style he’d had since college and which, like him, never seemed able to be tamed. His curls often hung in front of his blue eyes so that he was constantly jerking his head to move his fringe away, having long ago given up on brushing it away with his fingers. He was always unshaven, his stubble a designer length, but Kitty had never seen him freshly shaven or reach beard stage. He lived in leather jackets and jeans and would have appeared more at home reviewing the alternative music scene than as a sports journalist, or at least a frustrated sports journalist. Even when going to matches he never wore a jersey, his love for the game not having to be proved by his T-shirt. He was the eternal student, never seeming to have any money and sharing houses and flats with unusual characters, chopping and changing accommodation according to their recent behaviour. He was currently living in the suburbs in a nice semi-detached three-bedroom house with a married couple who needed help from a third party to meet the mortgage payments of their negative equity. Living in non-violation of the married couple’s strict household code for the past six months, Steve found his lifestyle now mirrored theirs, and it was almost like he’d grown up a little.

‘Actually,’ he shifted in his chair, a movement that told Kitty he was preparing to say something he deemed interesting, ‘I no longer work for the paper.’

‘What?’

‘I no longer work for the paper,’ he said in exactly the same tone.

‘Yes, I heard you but … they fired you?’

‘No,’ he said, insulted. ‘I left.’

‘Why?’

‘Why? I thought that would be obvious. Because a million reasons, but mainly because you were right about what you said a few weeks ago—’

‘No, no, no,’ she interrupted, not wanting to hear whatever it was that she’d said. ‘I was wrong. Completely wrong. Don’t ever let anything I say be of any value to you in your life at all.’

He smiled. ‘Mostly it isn’t.’

‘Good.’

‘But you were right about one thing. I was hardly setting the world alight by writing the stories I was writing, and even then the editor would change them so much I could hardly call them my own. And the thing is, Kitty, I never wanted to set the world alight with my writing. I just like sports. I like to watch sports, talk about sports, I like to read about sports and I wanted to be one of those people who wrote about it. It was never about anything else.’

‘So who are you writing for now?’

‘No one.’

‘I thought you left so you could write about sport?’

‘I left because I couldn’t write about sports. So what’s the point in staying there? Writing ridiculous articles that aren’t even true about people I have never met and have no interest in is not a job I want. It suits Kyle, who leaves meetings to watch breaking headlines on E! News