Sam West: Home Intruder

“You see this?” Jaz said, waving her mobile phone at them. “If you cunts lay one finger on him I swear to God I’ll call the police and we will drag your sorry arses through every court of law we have to until we get justice.”

Boko hesitated, his fists uncurling.

Ed had never heard Jaz use such earthy language before and he couldn’t help but smile, even if it did hurt his face.

“Fucking hit him. ” Linda complained, a note of desperation creeping into her voice.

“You have prior, don’t you Boko?” Jaz said. His silence answered her question. “Yeah, I thought as much. Not going to look too good for you, is it, if you beat an innocent man to a pulp because your girlfriend came on to him.”

“That’s bollocks,” Linda said.

“Look at Ed’s hands!” Jaz shouted, grabbing his hands and stretching them out towards to Boko. “Do you see blood under those fingernails? I bet your bitch of a girlfriend has blood under her fingernails. Why don’t you look, Boko?”

“Let’s just go if you’re not going to hit him,” Linda said, tugging at his arm.

“Yeah, fuck off and don’t come back,” Jaz added.

“That’s enough, sweetheart,” Ed said, gently touching her shoulder. “Let’s go in and let them go home.”

He didn’t want this. He didn’t want to get into a juvenile fist fight with his ex’s bloke. Besides, he actually felt sorry for Boko. Poor bastard, getting saddled with that loony. Fleetingly, he wondered what had happened to Linda over the years to turn her into such a fucking nutter .

Shaking his head sadly he pushed Jaz inside, closing the door on the whole sorry scene. Because Linda and Boko’s problems were nothing to do with him.

Nothing at all.

Jaz lay in the crook of Ed’s arm and he held her close, thinking of nothing apart from how good she felt and how much he loved her.

“I love you,” he mumbled into her hair.

“Yeah, I know,” she said, stretching luxuriously against him. “I’m tired.”

“Me too. I’m one lucky bastard, you know that?”

He sighed in satisfaction and closed his eyes. Making love to Jaz never got old.

“Yeah, and don’t you ever forget it, buster.”

Sleep claimed her quickly, her breathing turning deep and regular. Ed remained wide awake, the disastrous evening weighing heavy on his mind. He couldn’t stop thinking about Linda. Had she always been that loopy and he had just never noticed?

Sleep was a long time coming.

Ed opened his eyes to the sound of scraping and banging. It took much effort to prise open his sticky eyelids, it felt as though a bucket load of treacle had been smeared over his eyes while he slept.

Groggily, he sat up.

Yes, definitely banging sounds. Creaking sounds too.

Sounds like someone climbing a ladder.

He got out the bed and peered through a gap in the bedroom curtains.

“Shit.”

It was someone up a ladder. Boko up a ladder, to be precise, the length of which ran parallel to the bedroom window.

“What the fuck, ” he grumbled, casting around for his clothes.

“Mmm,” Jaz said, stretching her arms above her head so the duvet slid off her naked body. “Wos goin on?”

Ed tripped, his foot trapped in the leg hole of his jeans. He lost his balance and almost fell face first into the floorboards but caught his balance just in time.

Jaz rolled over onto her side, throwing a thigh over the bunched up duvet so that her rump was displayed in all its glory. Under normal circumstances, Ed would have been on that arse, but there were more pressing matters at hand.

Yeah, like a guy that wanted to kill me yesterday pissing around up on my roof.

Her question was apparently rhetorical, if her heavy breathing was anything to go by.

“Jaz. Wake up. You need to get dressed.”

“Huh? No.”

She buried her head in the pillow as if to pretend his voice was a figment of her imagination.

“I mean it, baby. Boko’s here.”

That woke her up. She sat upright, clutching the duvet to her chest.

“He’s what ?”

Her eyes were wide and sleepy all at the same time, lending her the appearance of a sleepy, startled owl. She looked so adorable with her sweetly beautiful face and her long, blonde hair all mussed up, that he felt an actual physical pain in his heart.

If anything ever happens to her… he thought irrationally. And not for the first time since they’d arrived in Treeve. He figured he was still in mourning for his mother, that had to be the reason why he kept experiencing such bouts of overprotective love.

“Just get dressed, sweetheart,” he said, pulling on a t-shirt and sliding on his glasses which he always kept next to him on the bedside table when he slept. “I’m going to sort this nonsense out. You stay inside.”

He didn’t give her a chance to reply.

Ed stood at the foot of the ladder. It was eight in the morning, and sunless. He wrapped his arms around himself, shivering slightly in the thin t-shirt. Boko’s white transit van was parked behind Ed’s hire car, blocking him in.

“Boko?” he called up to the man who was on the tiled roof on all fours. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Cleaning my teeth, what does it look like I’m doing?”

Ed bit back the urge to scream at the stupid oaf.

“Please come down,” he said calmly. “I think we need to talk.”

“Quite a bit needs doing, Ed. Gonna take me at least a week.”

“ Fuck, ” Ed muttered under his breath, then, in a clear voice; “Come down now. I really think we need to talk about this.”

“You’re the boss, boss.”

The big man descended the ladder with surprising grace, every inch the scaffold monkey. Ed took deep breaths, doing everything in his power to keep his temper under control.

“Quite a lot of damage up there,” Boko was saying before his feet even touched the ground. “Don’t reckon the roof will survive if a storm hits. Gotta be fixed as soon as.”

“Why are you here, Boko? What’s going on?”

“To fix your roof, like we arranged yesterday.”

“Like we arranged before you wanted to kill me?”

The big man shrugged. “You were right, I was wrong and I need the work.”

“Ed? What’s going on?”

Jaz stood in the doorway wearing a baggy t-shirt that came to mid-thigh and nothing else.

“Go inside honey, me and Boko have things we need to sort out.”

Ed caught the way Boko was looking at his wife and he did not like it one little bit, no siree. Jaz hesitated for a second, and retreated inside.

Ed regarded him thoughtfully, pushing his glasses up his nose.

“Are you seriously telling me that you believe Linda came onto me and you don’t care ?”

“Of course I care. We had a big argument last night and I moved out. Should have done it ages ago. It’s never been me that she wanted.”

His meaning was clear and Ed’s bad gut feeling intensified.

“Look, Boko, I appreciate you turning up today to do the roof and everything, but I don’t think it’s appropriate, given the circumstances.”

“I came to apologise, it’s not your fault Linda’s still in love with you. You’ve moved on, right? Plus I need the work. I figured you and me could both be real men and put that sorry misunderstanding behind us.”

Sorry misunderstanding. Was this guy for real?

But he sure had put him on the spot. How much of a wanker would he be right now if he told him to piss off? The way he was looking at Jaz aside, (and let’s face, he reasoned, what guy didn’t look at her like that?) he had no legitimate reason to tell him to do one.