Merry Measure - Lily Morton Page 0,11

T-shirts rolled into neat balls, and shirts folded as precisely as if they’re on display in a shop.

I open my own bag and look disconsolately at the interior. It looks like a bomb went off, as everything is shoved in regardless of size, weight, or purpose. Hardly surprising, as I’d left off packing until the last minute, still in massive denial that I’d have to get on a plane.

I gather a handful of T-shirts and stuff them into a drawer, adding jeans and boxers and socks to another. After a brief struggle, I manage to close the drawer before hanging my only pair of dressy trousers and my one nice shirt in the wardrobe. They swing there, looking lonely in all the space. I grab my shaving bag and put it in the bathroom, admiring the chocolate-coloured subway tiles and a huge shower that’s big enough for two. Pushing that thought smartly away, I chuck my case in the wardrobe and shut the door. Then I throw myself onto the bed and reach for the remote control.

Becoming aware of Jack’s sudden silence, I look up to find him staring at me, a pair of shoes forgotten in his hand. “You okay?” I ask.

“Oh yes, fine,” he says faintly. Then he seems to shake himself and goes back to the process of colour coding his clothes or whatever he’s doing. I look back at the TV and start flicking through the channels.

I finally settle on an old music channel that’s playing eighties videos. Jack smiles at me. “You love music, don’t you?”

I shrug. “Remember whose house I grew up in.”

My dad was in a band in the early eighties. Blink, and you’d have missed their one hit, but it did put him in the Top of the Pops studio in time to meet my mum, who was a Hot Gossip dancer. She made a career out of dancing around in bizarre outfits to songs of the time. It provided me, Tom, and our sister Sally with endless amounts of material for parental piss-taking.

My dad went on to become a very successful songwriter, and our house was always full of rockers wandering around in leather trousers and drinking vodka for breakfast while we ate our Rice Krispies. My favourite was the man who actually joined us for breakfast and poured vodka on his own Rice Krispies.

“I always liked that we were surrounded by music at your house,” he says suddenly. I raise an eyebrow in question, and he waves the shoe in his hand. “My house was so quiet. The only time music was played was when it was Last Night at the Proms.”

“That’s a shame.” I pause. “Although I have to say that heavy metal for breakfast didn’t go down well with the neighbours. And my parents did seem to be stoned for a large portion of the nineties.”

He smiles. “Stoned and welcoming. I think I spent most of my childhood at your house, and they never turned a hair.”

“Probably just presumed you were a child that they couldn’t remember having,” I say. He laughs, and I grin. “At least you weren’t subject to parents’ evening at school. My dad once came to one and pretended to be Australian for the entire session. And let’s never mention the school performance when, right in the middle of my recorder solo, he fell asleep and rolled off his chair.”

He puts the last of his clothes away and stashes his case neatly in the wardrobe, taking the time to organise mine properly. “I think I’ve got you beaten on parents’ evenings, anyway,” he says wryly. “Try and get through one with Derek and Barbara.”

“I think I’d rather peel my eyelids back with a cocktail stick,” I say seriously. “Was it bad?”

“Well, the one where they had a row with the teacher because they thought she should offer night classes to teach me Mandarin—and, of course, she refused—was pretty embarrassing.”

“Wasn’t Mandarin on the curriculum at that expensive private school you went to before you moved near us?”

“Not in the pre-school, no.” I laugh, and he grins. “My parents had taught me all the flags of the world by the time I was two, which was ironic because, at that age, I wasn’t even too sure where I lived.”

“No wonder you’re so epic at pub quizzes.”

“Not quite the outcome of education they were hoping for,” he says wryly. Then he blinks at the TV. “Isn’t that your mum?”

I look at the video that’s now playing on