Until It's Over Read Free

paid?’
    ‘The dwarfs represent the parts that make up the psyche,’ said Dario.
    ‘Is this what I flew into a car door for?’ I said. The beer was making me feel mellow and the pain had receded.
    ‘You’re Angry,’ said Dario to Mick.
    Mick ignored him.
    ‘Is there an Angry?’ I asked. ‘I don’t remember him.’
    ‘There’s Grumpy,’ said Davy.
    ‘Pippa’s Randy, right?’ said Dario, winking across the table at Davy.
    This was a reference to the fact that Pippa was not in a proper relationship, but instead had a fair amount of extremely short ones.
    ‘Oh, boys, boys,’ I said. ‘That’s pathetic.’
    ‘I think we can agree that Dopey’s taken,’ said Pippa.
    ‘You can have Sleepy, then,’ said Dario. ‘No one can sleep like you.’
    This wasn’t strictly fair. Pippa only sleeps at weekends, when she goes to bed in the small hours and gets up in the afternoon, looking puffy, dazed and replete. During the week she’s a dutiful worker who rises at seven. Dario, on the other hand, sleeps whenever he likes.
    ‘We’re running out of the good ones,’ said Davy. ‘Owen can be Sneezy.’
    ‘Why?’
    Davy looked at me. ‘Which leaves you and me fighting over Bashful and Happy,’ he said. ‘And you, Astrid Bell, are not bashful. Unless you want to be Snow White.’
    ‘I want to be the Wicked Queen. There’s a real woman.’
    ‘You’re spoiling the game,’ said Dario. ‘You’re Happy.’
    Happy. And groggy. And relaxed. I sat back in my chair. I looked round the people at the table: a motley collection who were, just at the moment, the closest I had to family. There were only three of us left who had been here from the beginning, or perhaps the real beginning was before that, when we were at university together. Miles had bought the house when he was still a post-graduate student who wanted to change the world, paying a ridiculously small amount for this rambling, run-down place at the rougher end of Hackney. Then, he had had no beard and his hair was long, often tied back in a ponytail. Now he had a closely trimmed dark blond beard and no hair at all. If I ran my hand over his head I could feel all the bumps of his velvety skull. Pippa was the other long-termer. In fact, she and I had met in my first term at university and we’d shared a house in our final year, so by the time we moved in with Miles I already knew her domestic habits well. She was tall and willowy, and had a delicate kind of beauty that could mislead people.
    So we were the original trio and we’d survived, even though for a year of that time Miles and I had been sort of a couple and for another six awful months had been sort of not a couple and then definitely not a couple. Now Miles had a proper new girlfriend, Leah, and that felt good, like a fence between us. ‘Good fences make good neighbours,’ someone had said.
    Around us, there had been various others, and the current seven was bound to change sooner or later. Mick was older than the rest of us, and carried his years as if they were a burden that weighed on his broad shoulders. He was stocky and short. He stood with his legs apart as if on the deck of a ship in stormy weather. His eyes were pale blue in a face creased by the sun and wind. He had spent years travelling restlessly round the world. I didn’t know if he’d been searching for something, or even if he had found it. He never talked about it. Now he worked, doing odd jobs, and had drifted to a temporary halt in Maitland Road. When he was at home, he spent much of his time in his small room at the top of the house, though I never knew what he did up there and I’d rarely visited him. None of the doors have locks on them, but some are more firmly closed than others. Sometimes I went downstairs in the middle of the night because I couldn’t sleep, and he was there, sitting quite still at the kitchen table with the steam from a mug of tea curling round his face.
    We were never quite sure how Dario had