This Thing With Charlie Read online

  This Thing With Charlie

  Sophia Soames

  Contents

  Introduction

  This Thing with Charlie

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Sophia Soames

  Ship of Fools

  Author’s Note

  Chapter 1

  “They don’t even begin to understand that if he is to be truly fit to take command of a ship, a real ship’s captain must of necessity be thoroughly familiar with the seasons of the year, the stars in the sky, the winds, and everything to do with his art. As for how he is going to steer the ship - regardless of whether anyone wants him to or not - they do not regard this as an additional skill or study which can be acquired over and above the art of being a ship’s captain. If this is the situation onboard, don’t you think the person who is genuinely equipped to be captain will be called a stargazer, a chatterer, of no use to them, by those who sail in ships with this kind of crew?”

  From The Ship of Fools, by Plato, the ancient Athenian philosopher

  Copyright © 2020 Sophia Soames

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any

  electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,

  without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reviewers, who may quote

  brief passages in a review.

  ISBN 9798573820927

  Cover Design and Photography ©2020 Aurelia Morris

  The people in the cover artwork are models and should not be connected to the

  characters in the book. Any resemblance is incidental.

  All artwork and fonts are licenced and/or free for commercial use by Sophia Soames,

  for distribution via electronic media and/or print. Final copy and promotional rights

  Included.

  Graphics: Love by Andrea Gonzalez from the Noun Project

  Ship of Fools by Mike Pick from the Noun Project

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the

  author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  References to real people, events, TV shows, organisations, establishments, or locations

  are intended to provide a sense of authenticity and are used fictitiously. Any

  resemblance to actual events, locations, organisations or persons living or dead, is

  entirely coincidental.

  The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners

  of the products mentioned in this work.

  Beta reading by Erika Budavölgyiné Paksai

  Final Editing by Twoenns Editing

  Originally Edited by Ann Attwood Editing and Proofreading Services

  Formatting by Leslie Copeland at LesCourt Author Services

  Proofreading Elouise East, ClockTower Editing

  “It’s only words,” Charlie would have said. “Words don’t define you. You are just what you are, and you can’t help who you fall in love with.”

  Not that Charlie is in love with me. Not the way my heart has decided that he’s the only thing allowed in that big cavity in my chest where my feelings hang out.

  “I’m in love with Charlie,” I say to the mirror instead. “I’m in love with him, and I don’t know what to do with all that.”

  This thing with Charlie? It has to end. I can’t go on like this. I just…

  “Get a grip, Daniel,” I say to the face in the mirror. “Get a fucking grip.”

  This thing with Charlie started six months after my divorce finally came through. At the time, I had just moved into the modern-looking budget hotel on the corner of Chistleworth’s town square, having put my meagre belongings from thirty-two years of living into a weird green storage facility on the other side of town. Everything left of my old life, and everything I now owned, securely packed up in pristine cardboard boxes with my surname neatly printed on barcoded labels. Now, it also included an official letter declaring me, once again, a free man.

  I didn’t feel free. I felt burdened with a life I didn’t know what to do with. I didn’t even know how to get around the town I was now going to call home, having lived all my life in London. I had run away from that life faster than I could say arguments, heartbreak and divorce. But I had found myself a new job, packed up the remnants of my splintered life, and decided that life in Chistleworth would heal all my wounds. I had also bought a bike because if I was going to embrace small-town living, I was going to do it properly. No more packed tubes and buses, just a healthy commute along tree-lined streets, with the hills as a postcard-worthy backdrop.

  I should have known then that life as I knew it was over. But it wasn’t the first time I had needed to pick myself out of a deep, dark hole of misery, and it wouldn’t be the last.

  I knew that with certainty now as I slowly unwrapped myself from the comfort of sleep. I was still in the same dingy hotel room with its sleek Scandinavian-wood theme, white crisp linen and framed cheery prints on the walls. It was just that I intuitively knew that he was gone, and the clouds sailed into my head, humming the inevitable song of depression and grief.

  He was gone. Just like he said he would be.

  I tried to sniff the bedlinen, hoping to catch a lasting memory of him, only to find the sheets smelling of detergent and the pillows of nothing at all. It was almost like I’d imagined him, and that nothing from the last week had been remotely real at all.

  I sat myself up and tried to gather my thoughts. They were all over the place, half screaming at me and half wanting to make me cry. The rest of me?

  I was not a hopeless mess. I was not unable to love. Nor was I unable to find someone to love me back. I had so much more to give, so much more to discover, and I thought I could be happy again—one day. If I could just manage to wake up in the morning and figure out how to be me because this new me was like some kind of crazy cartoon version of myself. I needed to learn to be someone who was more normal because I realised that I had absolutely no idea what to do with this strange person I had mysteriously become.

  So, I threw the covers back over my head and let myself sink into darkness as the alarm on my phone set the world alight with its almighty electronic shriek.

  I supposed it was time to get real. Wake up. Stop trying to be something I was not.

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed and hobbled out into the bathroom, the stark light from the bathroom mirror making me look even paler and more dishevelled than normal.

  “Hello, Daniel,” I said to myself in the mirror, grimacing back at my reflection. My hair was too long, unkempt and straggly around my face which was blotchy from sleep. Justine used to say that I looked like an older, scruffier version of fitness guru Joe Wicks with my messy dark curls and stubbly chin. Just less muscular and a bit more mature.

  “Homosexual…” I said sternly. “I am a homosexual man.”

  I giggled, feeling embarrassed at the words coming out of my mouth. If Charlie were here, he would’ve laughed. Joe Wicks would have told me to hit the floor and do push-ups until I cried.

  “It’s only words,” Charlie would’ve said. “Words don’t define you. You are just what you are, and you can’t help who you fall in love with.”

  Not that Charlie was in love with me. Not the way my heart had decided that he was the only thing allowed in that big cavity in my chest where my feelings hung out.

  “I’m in lov
e with Charlie,” I said to the mirror instead. “I’m in love with him, and I don’t know what to do with all that.”

  This thing with Charlie? It had to end. I couldn’t go on like this. I just…

  “Get a grip, Daniel,” I said to the face in the mirror. “Get a fucking grip.”

  This thing with Charlie started on December 2, in the year when my now ex-wife went to Lithuania to get veneers and came back with a different personality instead.

  She had strange new teeth as well, of course. Then she went back again a few weeks later to fix her nose. Huge bandages covering the face that I nursed and cleaned and tended to, soothing her when she was in pain, and checking her medication when her scars got infected and bled.

  I didn’t fully understand why I became so resentful towards that thing on her face, because I’d loved her just the way she was. Her smaller size, her tiny waist and her slender frame. I’d loved her because she was Justine and I’d known her since forever. We’d gone through medical school together, graduated together, had a pregnancy scare together and gotten married because that was what people did when they had jobs and money and wanted to buy a house. That was what people did when they were in love.

  We had done everything right.

  Justine had always wanted to fix her nose. Her boobs. Her teeth. My teeth. My nose. My ridiculously thick chest hair, my paleness and my weird taste in jeans. I told her not to be so vain and self-obsessed. She sulked. We couldn’t afford it, yet suddenly we could. The teeth thing was first on the list, of course, to fix some imagined fault that I struggled to see. It became the most important thing, and I agreed because she was my wife and I wanted to give her the world.

  The truth was, I hated her new look. She loved it. Her newfound confidence annoyed me. She annoyed me even more. I hated all her new clothes, the new underwear she ordered online and her new tanning routine. I hated the looks people gave her and the plunging necklines she suddenly wore, just to show herself off. I hated the new bright red lipsticks she bought. Yet, I loved her. Then she suddenly didn’t love me anymore. I didn’t blame her because I was truly being an arse. I was jealous and controlling and possessive and, frankly, weird. She was nothing like the girl I had married. And me? I was nothing like the boy she used to love.

  The last text she sent me was a selfie of her with her blinding smile on display, sitting on a beach in Barbados, where her new boyfriend was enjoying her brand-new boobs smothered in the beach-ready fake tan she liked to use. That was after we sold the house, that we’d lived in less than a year, at a massive loss. That was after she left me and moved in with the new Junior Doctor in Paediatrics. That was after my life was smashed to splinters for the second time.

  The first time was when Rita, my first wife, told me she wanted to leave because she’d met someone else. Someone who actually wanted a future, a marriage and a baby. Because, apparently, I wanted none of those things. She was right about that. I didn’t. Rita and I married on a whim because the hotel down the road was doing a “Wedding for a grand’’ promotion, and the thought of it, and the fact that we could afford the thousand pounds, had, at the time, made me giddy with excitement. She moved out of our shared apartment a week after our first wedding anniversary, which I celebrated on my own with a crate of beer and entertaining myself royally by downloading all the dating apps I could find on the App Store.

  After Rita took half of our life and moved out of our flat, I nursed myself with alcohol and shagged my way around the local area, through students and nurses and care workers and random girls who would appear on my screen. I even shagged my friend Justine, who had let me cry on her shoulder... then I shagged Justine again.

  Then… Then things had been wonderful, and Justine and I were happy. We had a good life, with friends and holidays in the sun and money to spend, before, suddenly, none of that mattered anymore.

  I didn’t want to remember all those things that happened next—the arguing and the hopeless feeling of desperate sadness. I cried and drank most nights, apart from when I frantically applied for any job I could find. Something far away from London that I could get myself stuck into. I wanted something hectic with long shifts, where I could get lost in just being a doctor and forget about being me.

  I’d never even heard of Chistleworth, but there was a job for a GP there at a small clinic that sold itself on its great location and experienced colleagues, and I was invited to visit. Three weeks later, me and my pathetic-looking suitcase walked into the lobby of The Chistleworth Nordic Star Hotel, the cool budget hotel for the “savvy business traveller”.

  I was neither cool, savvy nor a business traveller, but here I was homeless and in need of a bed for the next couple of weeks while waiting for the small house I’d bought, without even viewing, to become available for me to move into. Chistleworth was far enough north that I could splash out on more than just a bedsit, but the truth was, the dilapidated two-bed wreck that I now owned, was the only house in town I could afford.

  I was back to square one. Broke, single, and with nothing to show for my entire adult life, apart from the name badge that I would pin to my chest.

  Daniel Gilbert, GP

  That’s me. I’d been a doctor for years, working in busy practices all over London. I’d done stints in Emergency rooms, worked in hospital clinics, and even considered taking up a locum Consultant post at St Thomas’s… before Justine left me and put an end to that idea.

  I didn’t want to think about Justine. I didn’t want to think at all. Instead, I spent my days living in a sterile hotel room that didn’t offer me any of the comfort and warmth the website had guaranteed. I was cold, depressed, antsy, and taking my bike on long excursions around the town, riding up and down the road of the building I’d bought to live in. A dull-looking terrace, with windows that needed a truckload of paint, and a front door that looked flimsy enough to kick right in.

  I would need a builder, which was obvious. I would also need a bankruptcy deal and a straitjacket, after buying something I’d never seen. It had been a moment of madness, agreeing to all of this. Another well-aimed arrow in the sparring with Justine, trying to outmanoeuvre each other in our fake newfound happiness. She boasted about the superior qualities and traits of her new man. I retaliated with fake words of financial freedom and a future in the countryside. She laughed at me. I pitied her.

  The fairytale I had made up in my head, was nothing like the existence I now suffered. Instead I wheeled my now-muddy bike through the glass doors at the Nordic Star Hotel, hoping the receptionist would once again let me store it in the baggage room. I was tired and fed up, the bike an obvious mistake, and I was trailing dirt behind me over the rustic wooden flooring. I couldn’t see the bubbly lady who I usually dealt with. Instead, there was a man sat behind the desk, his head bent over a book, scribbling something on a thick notepad. The Chistleworth Nordic Star Hotel didn’t believe in the traditional reception desk. Instead, pushing their concept of a Barception, where you were offered a drink with your key and could enjoy a nightly meal by the fireside rustic bar… ception.

  I had brought all my meals to my room so far, enjoying the solitude of not having to be social with anyone, nor worry if I spilt ketchup on my shirt. I hadn’t worn a proper shirt for weeks, since resigning from my job in London. Hadn’t combed my hair either, by the looks of it, or bothered with deodorant. I had slobbed my way through the days, ignoring the festive decorations and invitations for Christmas drinks from friends back in London—friends that I would swiftly delete from my phone. That wasn’t my life anymore. They were Justine’s friends. Part of Justine’s life.

  I had no family to think of, and no friends who really cared. I had myself and a bike, and a house with a crap front door that I couldn’t live in because… Yeah. The sale hadn’t come through, and instead, I was handing out the last of my savings to a hotel I was starting to detest.

  “Yo, mate,” I called across the room, trying to get the guy’s attention.

  “
Ahh, Mr Gilbert,” he said, standing up with a smile.

  He walked over, his whole demeanour warm and genuine. Younger than me, I observed, with a mop of silky ginger locks and freckled skin, wearing a red plaid shirt and too many pieces of jewellery. There were rings in his ears, another through his nostril, lines and lines of leather straps around his wrists, and a string of wooden pearls around his slim neck. He also had a battered old nametag pinned on his shirt, simply reading: Charlie.

  He looked nothing like a hotel receptionist. Just a dude with a smile, who took my bike from my hands and put it away in the baggage room, locking the door behind him as he wiped his now-soiled hands on his jeans.

  “Did you have a nice day out? The weather was nice today. Did you go up the Havershill pass? It’s a really fun ride once you are up there. Gentle hills and little bridges where you cross the streams. Used to be my favourite. Now, what are you having? We have a new guest ale on, a nice local amber brew, not too heavy. Or we have Guinness on tap and today’s lager is Stella Artois. Cheap and cheerful but will do the trick if that’s your poison. I would go for the guest ale. At least it won’t give you heartburn.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, being roped into a drink by a punk with a nose ring.

  I had planned on a long, hot shower and perhaps a shave, then an early night with a bit of Netflix. Instead, I was reeking of sweat and my hands were cold and dirty as this guy poured me a beer and sat it down in front of me. Then he moved his books over and took a seat opposite my dishevelled self as I took a gulp of the beer.