CHAPTER EIGHT: 2019 – Ste
Ste Hay was sitting on a small settee in a one-bedroomed flat in East Manchester. His eyes were following a busty TV presenter as she donned a safety helmet and some overalls in preparation for a bungee jump.
His mind was paying no attention to her girlish whimpers, though. Instead, it was rehashing the phone conversation he had just had.
So Doug was engaged. He had apologised before he said it – "Listen, I'm sorry Ste… Me and Andy, we're getting married."
Maybe Doug should be sorry. Maybe that was the normal thing to say, when you were telling your single ex about your new fiancé. Maybe Ste should be feeling hurt, angry, lonely.
But he wasn't. Obviously. He wasn't feeling anything at all.
Logically, he supposed it was good news. Doug was a good person. A kind person. A person who had kept Ste anchored for three years when he could have left him to drift off into empty space. If Doug was happy, then that must be a good thing.
Of course, he wasn't looking forward to telling Amy. He had spent the last three weeks trying to talk her out of the "surprise" thirtieth birthday party she was dying to throw for him. News of Doug's happiness was guaranteed to spur her on into more frenzied efforts. And, naturally, there would be the oh-so-innocent attempts to pry into his non-existent love life. He could hold her at bay for a bit with the tale of the drunken fumble with Pannard's supply man at the Christmas party, maybe. If he left out the part where he'd balked and run out of the place when Ger suggested "meeting up sometime".
In truth, Amy's nagging was not what was playing on his mind as he watched the TV presenter's boobs get squashed into a harness. Nor was news of the engagement. It was what came after that revelation.
"Yeah, I mean, the wedding probably won't be for a while. We're thinking early 2021, actually."
Ste had made general noises of agreement, not entirely sure what responses were expected of him.
"But once we do tie the knot, we're thinking of moving back home. My home I mean. Stateside."
The implication took a few minutes to settle in. Stateside. Doug meant moving to America. Leaving Hollyoaks.
Closing Hollyoaks' Carter and Hay.
After that, the appeasing noises were a bit harder to make. Ste was straining to the end of the phonecall, struggling with the polite interest. When a deep Liverpudlian voice called Doug's name from the background ending their conversation, Ste had immediately flicked on the television and found the most brain-dead, colourful programmed he could to fill the silence of his tiny flat.
It was pointless though. Even as the noise and light of the TV washed over his hunched frame, his mind was reeling with it.
He'd stay in the Manchester branch, obviously. His kids were here. His kids. The thing that had kept him from floating away ever since Doug hadn't been able to anymore. The thing that let him press his nose up against the glass of that sunny world he'd tried to walk in once. For them, he pretended to feel the warmth of the sun on his skin, to shiver in the January breeze, to smile at the smell of a flower. For them, he pretended everything did not taste like plastic. For them, he pretended that the bright, colourful world they lived in wasn't marred by the scratching of a soundtrack and wavering blue transmission lines. Without them, he'd float away.
But selling the Hollyoaks branch. His last link to that place. His last link to…
This was stupid. He clambered to his feet, expertly balancing his TV dinnerplate in one hand as he turned up the volume of the now-sobbing presenter with the other, so he could hear her shrieks from the kitchen. He elbowed the light-switch as he walked, flooding the cramped little room with light, and dumped the plate and cutlery into a beige basin in the sink.
"One… Two… Three… ARRRRRGGGHHHHH!" the television was screaming as he watched the basin fill with hot sudsy water from the tap. He had a dishwasher, bought at Amy's insistence that he spend some money on himself instead of pouring all of it into a nest egg for the kids, but it seemed pointless using it with only him in the place. All the dishes would be dirty before he even got around to turning it on, so he wound up fishing plates out of it and washing them at the sink anyway. Besides, he didn't really mind washing dishes. It was kind of cathartic, the sort of mindless necessary ritual that kept minutes ticking by, filling up hours, filling up days.
When he was done with his plate and knife and fork and glass, he tipped the basin over and watched the barely-dirty water disappear down the plughole. He then set about emptying the washing machine that he had left whirring with a white wash before he sat down to eat. The TV presenter was gushing now, laughing triumphantly at her glorious achievement, tinkling voice swelling through Ste's flat. Methodically he rifled through the pile of washing, separating the mangled ball of clothes and draping them neatly over the waiting clothes-horse in the middle of the living room. He preferred that to tumble-drying, though the machine he had could do both.
He slouched back into the kitchen to fiddle with the heating, timing the water to heat for his shower tomorrow morning before work. Then he wandered into the bathroom and squeezed a dollop of toothpaste onto a brush, scrubbing at his teeth for a minute or two before rinsing and spitting. He peed into the toilet and flushed it away, then stripped down to his boxers, folding his clothes from the day neatly on a chair beside his bed. Only once everything was done did he meander back into the living room, filled with the soapy smell of drying clothes, and turn off the television.
He crept back into his bedroom and slipped between the cold sheets, resting his head on the shapeless pillow, feeling silence leak around him.
The club belonged to Joel now, he reminded himself. And Cheryl had gone back to Ireland, Doug had told him. The past was the gone. He lay with his eyes open on his pillow for a long time before he fell asleep that night, staring into the distance. Watching the next sixty years of existence stretching ahead of him.
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AN: Just to warn you all, rating is probably going to change to M from the next chapter onwards…
Also, just wondering what people think of the character "Leo" (from Chapter 3) – like/dislike/indifferent? Want to see more of him/less of him? Trying to decide exactly where to take this fic…
