Tuesday & Max

14

THE DUST HAS ONLY JUST BEGUN TO FORM

CROP CIRCLES IN THE CARPET

Tuesday leads Max back to the flat, the café plan abandoned.

Kicking the ground-floor door open when they get there, she leads him up three flights of stairs. As they climb, she wonders what he thinks of the chipping paint on the handrails, the muddy footprints on the carpet and the stained ceiling. Where does he live? Probably somewhere better than this.

"Home sweet home," she says cheesily as she unlocks the front door and they go inside, hoping Julia is out.

Nope.

Julia is upon them immediately, voice floating into the hall from the sitting room.

"Jack, honey, I've washed your football kit, I know you said not to-"

Shut up shut up shut up

She appears in the doorway and blinks at them both. "Oh! You're not Jack! Hello there!"

Max smiles at her, waves. "Hi."

He's taken his shoes off already. Julia probably loves that.

"I'm Julia, Tuesday's aunt. It's nice to meet you," she gushes, glancing between them. Tuesday feels, absurdly, as though this is the opposite of when she came home and ended up meeting Richard.

"I'm Max," Max says, smiling at her.

"Well... Welcome, Max!" Julia looks across at Tuesday. "Are you hungry? I made spaghetti Bolognese but I forgot we ran out of pasta so it's more like... rice Bolognese - but that's ok - tastes the same-"

"No," Tuesday says abruptly, desperate for this to be over. "We're fine."

"Okay," she says. She's wringing her hands and Tuesday can't stop looking at them. Why does Julia have to treat everybody she brings around like they're a playdate that she's arranged?

"Okay," Tuesday parrots back.

They stand there together, a triad of expectation, before Julia claps her hands together. The sudden noise in the quiet startles Max, who tries to cover it by rolling up his hoodie sleeves, even though it isn't warm in there.

"Okay! Well! Have a good evening." Julia stops in the doorway to the sitting room.

"Thanks," Tuesday says, opening her bedroom door and ushering Max in. She closes it behind them.

"Wow."

She turns around, and for a fraction of a second, sees her bedroom as a newcomer, through someone else's eyes.

Her walls are the same magnolia as the rest of the house but she's pinned up big drapey scarves to cover them in different shades of pink and purple. Where the draping is unsuccessful, she's papered the cream in posters and cut-outs from magazines instead; even removed the sleeves out of her mother's old CD collection and pieced them together in one big eclectic collage. It's one of her favourite parts of the room.

Some people have montages of friends, she has a four-foot collage of her dead mother's music taste. Each to their own.

The big light bounces off the scarves in here and it's another awful energy saving lightbulb, so Tuesday hurries to switch on her desk and bedside table lamps, flicking the overhead off. They, together with the fairy lights behind her bed and along the back of her desk, make the place a little less rubbish-looking.