Bad Case of Loving You

‘Stay at my place for the day if you want, there’s broadband upstairs in my study and plenty of food in the cupboards. You won’t have to eat olives and pears for lunch.

Unless you want to, of course. Andrew.’

I put the note carefully in my robe pocket, along with the key.

I’d never seen Andrew’s study. Somehow, by the time we made it upstairs, we were pretty focused on the bedroom or the shower. When the coffee percolator had gurgled to a halt, I poured myself a cup, added milk and sugar, and carried the mug upstairs.

There were five doors off the hallway; the three I knew were Andrew’s bedroom, the bathroom and the loo. The fourth door was to Henry’s bedroom; I’d know that teenage boy pong anywhere from my own adolescence. There were clothes piled on the floor and the bed was unmade. Henry had plastered the walls with movie posters, Blade and Underworld, and a faded Rocky Horror poster that made me nostalgic for midnight screenings and outrageous costumes and interjections.

“A toast,” I muttered to the empty room.

The last door was Andrew’s study, and it looked exactly like his office at the hospital, awash with papers, littered with coffee cups, except he had an LCD screen on his PC. Oh, yeah, that was a nineteen inch screen.

I sat down at his desk and dragged a finger gently across the top of the screen, disturbing the dust. God, if I had a nineteen inch LCD screen, it would be lovingly dusted every day and carefully cleaned with a fifty percent solution of isopropyl and water every week. “You’d get microfibre from me, baby,” I said. “Nothing but the best.”

The chair was pretty comfy, too, padded, with armrests.

There were empty Coke cans nestled amongst the debris on the desk, and sweet wrappers, and it seemed that all this technology was wasted on a kid.

There were bills stuck up above the desk, too, and I couldn’t help but see them. I guess I wasn’t really intruding since Andrew had specifically told me I could use his study.

He didn’t owe anything on his credit cards; they were all in positive balances. I’d never imagined a life without debt.

Presumably he owed money on the house, but it had never occurred to me that Andrew might actually earn enough to not be in debt like everyone else.

Not that I had a credit card, of course, but I owed my mum several hundred pounds, and my student loan debt was staggering. I’d be paying that one off for the rest of my working life.

There was a bookshelf behind me and I swiveled around to check it out. Underneath the piles of photocopied journal articles stuffed randomly onto the shelving there were textbooks. Microbiol, communicable dieases, cardiology, haemotology, orthopedics. No ob-gyn and no paediatrics, though.

There were novels, too, hardback editions with sumptuous covers, from small press companies I’d never heard of. Books of poetry, including a leather-bound Emily Dickenson.

Thoreau. Walt Whitman.

The art was gorgeous. There were canvases on the wall, like the rest of the house. I’d never paid any attention to them even though I had harboured secret thoughts of being an artist myself once. The less than secret desire to have a real career that would challenge me and make me feel like my life was not a total waste, while earning me a good income, had won. I stood up, ran a finger over the canvas over the desk. Blue ridges of oil paint, an impasto explosion in aquamarine and cerulean and cobalt blue. When I peered at the painting I could see there was scrawl underneath the paint, random pieces of handwriting.

I took the note out of my robe and chose a bit of the canvas where the scrawl was the right way up and held the note up to it.

There was no signature on the canvas to confirm it, but I was sure that the handwriting was Andrew’s. He must have made coarse papier-mâché out of his own handwritten material, coated a canvas in it, and painted over it.

There was a pattern to the paintings once I had gone carefully around the upper floor of the house, peering at the art. In all of them, the two blue canvases in the study, the green and yellow in the bedroom, and the smaller mixed palette paintings in the hallway, Andrew had painted over handwritten material.

The painting in the bedroom was the most intriguing.

Nothing showed through the thick spread of forest and moss greens, but the yellow was translucent enough to make out that the handwritten material was sheets of scribbled music, written on plain paper, not musical score.

I wasn’t sure how to interpret this. He’d said his ex was a musician, a violinist. I couldn’t read music at all, so couldn’t tell whether it was music for a violin, or for a slide trombone for that matter. It wasn’t torn up or shredded, unlike the painting in the study. The sheets were carefully laid out, lines of musical notes matching up, and I wondered why it was what Andrew chose to keep in his bedroom. Was it a secret message, a memento of a marriage? Or did he just like it?