31 Dream Street Read Free

who had no intention of leaving and he had no intention of making them.
    Toby finished making his dough and pressed it into a loaf tin, which he then slid into the Aga. He could hear the tinny drone of someone’s radio alarm switching itself on upstairs and he headed quickly back towards his room, before he inadvertently crossed paths with anyone. He glanced at things as he passed through the house. A pair of Con’s trainers sat under the coffee table in the TV room, with his socks curled up inside them like sleeping dogs. There was a copy of Now magazine on the arm of the sofa and a mug half full of blotchy tea on the floor. Ruby’s black lacy cardigan was hanging from the back of the armchair and Joanne’s Clarins face powder sat in a little plastic pot on the coffee table next to Ruby’s cereal bowl. A small plastic Christmas tree with multicoloured fibre-optic tips twinkled forlornly in the early morning gloom. A pair of Ruby’s pointy boots lay by the door, one upright, the other on its side, as if it had fallen over drunk. Toby picked up one of the boots and stared at it longingly.
    This was his world, had been for years. A world ofother people’s possessions, rhythms, dramas, smells and habits. His presence left no imprint on the dynamics of his home. It was as if he didn’t exist. What would it be like to live alone, he wondered, to come home and find everything as he’d left it? To never have to take someone else’s unwashed saucepan out of the kitchen sink to pour himself a glass of water, never to be woken up by the sound of someone else’s snoring or someone else’s lovemaking? To know people only as they presented themselves to the world, not to see the ragged, domestic underbelly of strangers any more. Would he feel more substantial? Would he feel more alive?
    He climbed the two flights of stairs to his room, three at a time, and closed the door silently behind him.

2
    Ruby watched Con leaving for work from her bedroom window. He moved with the slightly lolloping gait of a teenage boy in trainers. His dark hair was slick with product and his jeans hung somewhere short of his waist but not quite below his buttocks. He was a lovely-looking boy, clear-skinned, well proportioned with startling indigo eyes. But Ruby didn’t find him attractive. She didn’t appreciate younger men. She liked older men. Not old men, just men who were slightly used, a little creased, like second-hand books. In the same way that you might look at a small child and try to envisage their adult face, she liked to look at a mature man and imagine the young man who’d once inhabited his features.
    ‘What are you staring at out there?’
    Ruby turned and smiled at the man in her bed. Paul Fox. Her slightly creased forty-five-year-old lover.
    ‘Nothing,’ she teased.
    She sat on the edge of her bed. One of Paul’s feet was poking from the bottom of the duvet. She picked up his big toe between her thumb and forefinger, put it between her front teeth and bit down on it, hard.
    ‘Ow.’ He pulled his leg back under the duvet. ‘What was that for?’
    ‘That,’ she said, ‘was for ignoring me last night.’
    ‘What?’ His brow furrowed.
    ‘You know what. Eliza walked in and suddenly it was as if you didn’t know me any more.’
    ‘Oh, Christ. Ruby – she’s my girlfriend .’
    ‘Yeah, I know. But it’s still not very nice, is it?’ Ruby and Paul’s relationship had always been an informal mix of occasional business and no-strings pleasure. He got her the odd support slot for one of his acts, they got together once or twice a week for sex or drinking or both, and he paid her what he jokingly referred to as a ‘salary’, a small monthly cheque, just to keep her ticking over, just to keep her in tampons and vodka, because he could afford to and because he wanted to. It was easy-come, easy-go, a bit of reciprocal fun that had worked for both of them for the past five years. Ruby didn’t expect anything more from