1 Chapter 1

1

Noel, the kitten who’d shown up on our back doorstep the night before, was happy to see Mark and I when we opened the kitchen door Boxing Day morning.

Noel’s meows let us know he was hungry. As he’d done the day before, Mark chopped up some leftover turkey and added a little gravy to it.

“I think we should walk round to Mr Patel’s corner shop after breakfast to get some proper pet food,” Mark said, looking down at the black and white kitten who was enjoying his breakfast.

I looked around to see if Noel had left us any little messages on the floor. There were a couple, but the cat had used the newspaper I’d laid down, so it took only a matter of moments to clean up.

Once the cat had had his fill, Mark took him outside to do his business.

“Are you going to do poo-poos for daddy?”

I rolled my eyes and tried not to laugh.

Once Noel had done his thing, Mark scooped him up and praised him for being such a good boy.

“Do you just want toast and cereal this morning?” I asked Mark when he’d tried, and failed, to interest the cat in a bowl of water.

He nodded. “No doubt we’ll be making pigs of ourselves later.”

Helen and Paul Bates, our next door but one neighbours, had invited us round for dinner.

“You only want us to help eat all your leftovers,” I’d told Helen.

“How did you guess?” she’d said, laughing.

“The boys must have decided to have a lie-in,” Mark said as we sat at the table, munching our toast.

I nodded, remembering how I’d often sleep away half the morning during school holidays when I was their age.

Sam Bates and his boyfriend Billy Tranter were regular visitors to our house, sleeping in the loft conversion whenever their parents permitted it.

I left the breakfast plates in the sink to soak. The boys would soon be adding more. Going back into the front room, I got on with the dirty but ultimately rewarding task of cleaning out the fireplace. I carried out the ash in a bucket, returning a minute later with some sticks, an old newspaper, and a fresh bucket of coal.

“We might as well leave the fire unlit till this evening,” I said.

Mark nodded his agreement.

The central heating did a good job of keeping the house warm during the day, but there was nothing better than relaxing in front of a real coal fire during long winter evenings. The fireplace had been a major selling point for me when I’d bought the house a few years earlier.

“Morning, Simon,” Sam said, rubbing his eyes as he entered the living room.

“Morning,” I replied. “Sleep well?”

“Always do when I’m with my man.” He grinned. “Any chance of breakfast?”

I smiled and shook my head. “You know where everything is. Mark and I have already eaten.”

“Thanks. Billy should be down in a few minutes, he’s just finishing up in the bathroom.”

After the boys had had breakfast, they decided to go back to Sam’s.

“We’re running a bed and breakfast hotel,” I told Mark.

The boys laughed.

“We’ll be round later, don’t worry,” Billy said.

“When you’re hungry again.” Mark smiled at them.

“We’re all eating at ours,” Sam reminded.

I nodded.

* * * *

“There you go, little man, some proper kitty food,” Mark cooed as he knelt on the floor, trying to coax Noel into eating the cat food we’d just bought.

Noel, however, wasn’t interested. Nor had he seemed all that impressed by the washing up bowl we’d gotten him as a litter box.

“Just leave him to it. He’s probably still full from breakfast,” I said, rubbing Mark’s back.

We went into the front room, Noel joining us a short while later. But he soon grew bored with our company and went off to explore his new home.

* * * *

Charlotte was holding on to the furniture and taking a few experimental steps when we entered the Bates’s living room.

“You’re a clever little lady,” I said, kneeling next to her. She gave a few happy baby-type gurgles in response. “Do you want to come and sit on Uncle Simon’s knee?”

I took more of the happy baby sounds as a ‘yes’, so I carefully picked her up and bounced her a few times on my knee. She giggled away.

“Okay, everyone,” Helen announced, coming into the room. “The feeding frenzy may begin.”

I carried Charlotte to the kitchen where Helen took over and strapped the baby into her highchair

“Did you have a good day yesterday?” Steve, Helen’s brother, asked Mark and me.

“Yes, thanks. It was our first anniversary actually.”

“Really?”

Mark and I told him an edited version of how we’d bumped into each other on the street, how we’d met up a number of times after that, how Mark had hurt his hands and had come to live with me so I could look after him.

“Staying with matters medical,” I nodded to Steve, “your job sounds fascinating. Why did you choose orthopaedics?”

“It is. I went into bones because the professor at university made it really interesting.”

I nodded, remembering how a good teacher could make any subject fun.