I say, What are you thinking about?
His eyes focus on mine, and he says, I’m imagining the face on the movie star’s father, covered in egg. His precious boy – cuckolded and divorced. No wife, no child. The shame, it must be unbearable.
Job done then, I say. We smashed it right?
Charles closes the magazine, pushes it to the side and picks up his teacup.
Not yet, he says.
F
ORTY
-S
EVEN
The walls are white and, for the most part, blank. There’s no furniture, except for a brown leather sofa, smack bang in the middle of the room, almost camouflaging itself into the wooden floorboards.
It’s a small space, but with the lack of stuff inside, it looks cavernous.
There’s no television. No audio system. No bookcase. No plants. No lamps. No shelves on the wall.
Nothing.
Apart from the wall facing the sofa. Hung up there, is a giant print of a photograph.
The photograph – it’s a night photograph.
This photograph, it’s got the Taipei 101 in it – with long-exposure light trails swooping their way across it.
This photograph, it must be three-by-three metres or something – the size of canvases you see in art galleries.
You live here? I say.
Yep, Other Me says. Nice, huh?
He says, Have a seat. Want a drink? Maybe some tea?
I sit down on the sofa, and now I have nowhere else to look except this horrific, gigantic print in front of me.
I say, Sure, I’ll have some tea.
He comes back with a teapot covered by a knitted tea cosy with multicoloured bobbles on it, two fine bone-china teacups with saucers, and a stripy blue and white jar.
I watch as he deftly pours the tea, lifting the pot higher as the pour goes on.
He hands me one of the cups on its saucer, and he says, Biscuit?
I say, Sure, I’ll have a biscuit.
He takes the lid off the jar and offers it to me – inside it’s full of custard creams.
I take one, and I see that he’s lifting his cup in cheers, so I do the same before taking a sip.
The tea takes me by surprise, because it’s English breakfast tea, the kind I would drink buckets of back home – tea I haven’t drunk since I’ve been here.
It hits a spot somewhere deep down in me, and for a second I miss home.
Other Me gets up off his knees and sits down on the sofa next to me. It’s big enough for three, maybe even four, but regardless, he plonks himself right next to me, his thigh pressed on mine once he’s settled.
I try and figure out where to put my cup and saucer – the arm of the sofa? My lap? – and decide on the floor, underneath the sofa so I don’t accidentally kick it over and spill it.
What the hell is that? I say, nodding at the light-trail print.
You like it? he says.
I fucking hate it, I say. It offends every fibre of my being, I say.
Whoa, he says. Easy tiger, I took that myself.
What?
He slouches further into the sofa, hands in his pockets, admiring his work. His elbow digs into my hip.
Yep, he says. On a digital camera, too.
What?
