Spray Painted Bananas

Chapter 5

By the time I’ve lugged the sack of bananas up the hill to my house, I’m sweating, panting and making empty promises about joining the gym. Too lazy to dig through my handbag for the house keys I press the bell. Egg opens the door dressed as an ancient Egyptian mummy and almost pokes my eye out with the long pointed beard on his mask as he pushes it up onto his head.

'I know, don't say anything, completely inaccurate,' he says, looking disgruntled.

I have a feeling he's talking about the mask. Personally I think his jeans are the problem.

'They want me to shave off my beard, but I'm arguing that I could be a foreigner travelling through Egypt...'

He breaks off and I follow his gaze down to the sack at my feet.

‘I had to rescue some bananas,’ I explain.

He nods, as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

'That's good of you.'

He takes my bulky luggage without question, and I follow him into the kitchen. There’s something different about it. He’s cleaned up. The counter, which traps crumbs to its surface like a binge-eating Venus flytrap, has been wiped clean. And there are new additions. On the floor beside the washing machine he’s laid down a wicker place mat and on it are two gleaming metal bowls. I point at them with my mouth open and Egbert looks at me sheepishly.

I sit down at the table and that’s when I see the books: The Cat Whisperer; The Book Your Cat Would Want to Read; Cats: Fit, Fun and Furry and finally, something close to Egg’s heart, Test Your Cat: the Cat IQ Test...

‘I'm just preparing,' he says. 'Can we get our furry friend today?'

It’s the first evidence I’ve seen that Egg can get excited about something living.

‘I'm knackered. Look at all those bananas I had to carry home,’ I say, pointing at the sack. ‘Completely free, I couldn’t pass them up.’

Egg opens the top of the sack and looks in. His frown is disconcerting.

‘Why do they smell of bleach?’

‘They don’t smell of bleach!’

He shrugs, never one to fuel a confrontation.

‘We can make banana bread,’ I say in a huff. I just have to entice one of my bake-happy friends to come over. It will give them something to post on Instagram.

‘But we’ll get him tomorrow won’t we?’ Egg says.

Elliot’s proposal of wine and shellfish springs into my head and I feel nervous and excited.

'I can't do tomorrow. Let's leave it till the weekend, okay?'

Egg is crestfallen. He looks mournfully at the feeding bowls, which I now notice have ‘Fido’ written across them in bubble writing.

‘I’ve got a date tomorrow,’ I say, and just saying it stirs the butterflies in my stomach. It’s not as though I haven’t been on any dates recently. I've made full use of the free trials on several dating sites. The problem is until you pay up they only seem to offer you the duds. There was Joe, who was allergic to nuts and humour, and Mike, the Game of Thrones fans who admitted he couldn't go out with me if I didn't watch it because, 'what would we talk about?'

Elliot is neither a blind date nor a friend of a friend, and my expectations are much higher. His Oxbridge confidence is a little intimidating but I’m not exactly a shy, retiring little thing either.