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When Mark gets home from work, Jeremy is exactly where he left him: on the couch, pint in one hand, bowl of crisps in the other, staring gormlessly at the telly. Mark plonks his briefcase down beside him, a few crisps spill out of the bowl and into the gaps between the sofa cushions, followed a few seconds later by Jeremy’s hungry, grime-coated fingernails. His eyes remain fixed on the screen.
“Have you moved an inch all day?”
Jeremy gives a non-committal hum in response. This is Shaun of the Dead, only Nick Frost’s character’s been turned five minutes in.
“Jez?”
“Yeah?”
“I said, have you moved an inch all day?”
Jeremy’s eyes flicker away from the screen for all of three seconds, while his mouth says, “I went to the cupboard to get the crisps.”
Mark sighs, wearily slings his briefcase over a chair, and plonks himself besides his flatmate in its place. He peers cautiously over the bowl. “What flavour?”
“Cheese and Onion. Walkers.”
They’re better off where you spilled them. Aloud, Mark wrinkles his nose, and pointedly says nothing.
Jeremy shrugs. “They’ll ward off the vampires.”
Mark is just about to ask Jeremy what the blithering hell he’s on about, when Jeremy points to the screen. With the hand holding the pint. Naturally, the foam slushes over the rim, and Mark diverts his gaze to Hotel Transylvania III while he calmly pretends that Jeremy isn’t licking whatever alcohol he can salvage from up his hoodie sleeve. I live with a zombie, and the only thing he’s worried about is fictional cartoon vampires. This Jonathan is cuter than I remember Stoker’s being. Is it weird that he kind of looks like Jez? Does that make me Dracula? No, he’s more like Johnson. Hell, knowing my luck, I’m probably more of a Dennis. Wait a minute…
“That’s garlic, not onion, you buffoon.” Mark pauses. He sees Jeremy sucking his hoodie sleeve raw. A thought occurs to him. “Jez, are you drunk?”
“No. Why, are you?” His mouth is still deeply engrossed in his sleeve.
“You are drunk. You only get this depressive when you’re on something, and you haven’t been this bad since the cottage.”
“Oh yeah? Well at least you got your girl then!”
“There was absolutely no time for penetration when we thought you had given yourself an overdose!” Mark watches Jeremy sulk, and backs down a little. “Besides, she’s been with Jeff all day.”
“Still not talking to you?”
“No.” Mark bites his lip. God, I really hope he doesn’t get the wrong idea from this.
He looks like a rabbit too stupid to get a piece of lettuce properly aligned with its mouth. If he keeps going like this, he might be having a seizure.
Mark stops biting his lip. “And Nancy?”
“Pah. Nancy.” Jeremy hopes he got the half-mocking, half-dismissive tone right. In reality, he only adds to the impression that he really is depressed. “She’s with You Know Who.”
“What, fucking Voldemort?”
“Fucking the equivalent of. At least Voldemort didn’t try to fuck his dead bodies.”
Mark tries to shed a shred of intellectual light on the conversation. “Ah, so they’re into necrophilia?”
“They’re into necrophilia, shouldrophilia, backrophilia, arserophilia… all sorts of ‘philias’ you haven’t even dreamed of, Mark.” He takes a long swig. “And I hate all of them.” he adds unnecessarily.
Mark groans, partly fed up with Jeremy’s incorrect grammar, mostly tired of his depressive bullshit. He goes to get a drink of his own from the kitchen.
Red wine, no. White wine, no. What the hell is this cider doing here? Nobody drinks cider these days, do they? Tastes like apples stewed in piss. Beer… Every bottle and can is opened, and every one has been drunk from. I can’t drink from the same bottle as Jez, can I? That would mean something, certainly. Something like, ‘Oh yes, Jez, don’t mind me, I’ve just decided that we’ve been flatmates long enough that I’m comfortable sharing your saliva’. That being said, he did have his tongue down my throat the other week… Mark takes the bottle with most of its contents still remaining.
Hold on. Now there’s a thought.
Mark walks back into the living room, a thoughtful look on his face.
“Jez…”
If Jeremy had been sober, he would have immediately recognised Mark’s scheming voice, and called it out for what it was. Scheming. But, as is often the case with unfortunate occasions, he was drunk. And so he replied, “Mm?”
“Do you remember last week, at the retreat?”
“I was rather trying to forget.”
“Well I was thinking… could we try to experiment again?” Seeing Jeremy’s nonplussed expression, he adds, “You know… branch out our sexual tastes?”
Jeremy looks point-blank at him and says, “The last time I did that, I ended up in blackface with Nancy pretending she was my mother.”
“Well- well- maybe we could - I don’t know - just pretend? For a little while? Pretend to branch out our sexual tastes, and…”
“Mark.”
Christ, he sounds colder than a cryogenically frozen mammoth.
“You’d better not be thinking what I think you’re thinking. If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking then I think you’d better stop thinking.”
Right, enough dilly-dallying. It’s time the bush stopped being beaten and got a properly good spanking instead.
“We could pretend that we’re into it!” Mark protests. “For just - for just a little while? Until I get Sophie back from Jeff, and you- you would get-”
“No. I would get you, but not even that, I would get a fake you.” And a ‘fake you’ is hardly better than the ‘real you’ I already have to live with. “No, Mark, I won’t do it.”
“Oh come on Jez! You remember how pleased Sophie was when we-”
Jez stares at him, expectant and bewildered. “When we…?”
Just as Mark still dithers to elaborate, and Jeremy thinks it’s nearing time to put the four-days-stale curry in the microwave, Mark makes a sudden dive for Jeremy’s mouth, lips protruding - like a penguin, only much more slobbery - and Jeremy instantly recoils.
“Mark, you’re not twelve, you can just say ‘snogged’.”
“But it’s such an awful word! It’s like… damp, or wet, or-” he suppresses a shudder, “-moist! Gah!” Realising that he hasn’t quite converted Jeremy to his thought process, Mark gets over himself. “Point is, if that’s how she felt about us kissing, imagine how she’d feel about me…
“Fucking me in the arse?” Jeremy unhelpfully supplies.
“...I was going to say dating.”
Jeremy ponders this.
“Dating?”
He asks that like Chamberlain considering the appeasement policy. He must know it’s a terrible idea, but he sees no better way of avoiding the situation. I must be Hitler, and I must smile like I know it.
“Dating.”
I must not smile this hard. He probably thinks I actually fancy him.
Jesus wept, does he actually fancy me?
“That’s a lot simpler.” Than emailing them a porno featuring us truly.
“Is that a yes, then?”
Jeremy downs the rest of his beer. Mark realises that, much to his own dismay, he’s completely forgotten to drink his own. Might’ve saved me some embarrassment if I’d been as drunk as him.
“If you promise to snog me better than last time.”