Lenny – the man with the Nintendo – had not so much as glanced in his direction for the past half hour or more, so intent was he on his game. His brow was deeply furrowed in concentration as his thumbs worked feverishly at the console, stopping abruptly every once in a while and swearing in frustration. Considerably less often, he would lift one of his thumbs from its button to punch the air with a victorious exclamation such as ‘Yes!’ or sometimes ‘Oh yes!’
‘What time is it?’
‘Damn it,’ said Lenny, dropping the console onto his lap. ‘I was just about to get to Level Four then till you opened your pie-hole.’
Carrot’s bald head protruded from a blue and yellow sleeping bag in the far corner of the room, his features almost entirely obscured by the ginger toupee, which he had pulled down over his eyes to block out the light while he tried to sleep. He wriggled a hand up through the neck of the sleeping bag and adjusted the wig to its rightful position. Then he unzipped the bag as far as his waist and sat up, rubbing his eyes with his knuckles and yawning loudly.
‘As if it isn’t hard enough to sleep with your constant bloody bleeping,’ he said through the tail end of the yawn, ‘I also have to put up with you shouting “yes” or “bugger” or “shit” every few seconds.’
‘Oh pardon me for breathing.’
Carrot looked at him and stretched expansively. ‘Lenny, I hate to have to tell you this, but you do sound unbelievably camp at times. You know that, don’t you?’
Lenny gave him the finger and took hold of the window sill to haul himself to his feet. He pulled a face and massaged his backside with both hands. ‘Jesus. Remind me to bring a cushion or something next time, will you?’
‘Next time?’ Carrot snorted. ‘I bloody hope not.’
‘It’s all right for you, matey. You’re not the one with the old racing injury.’
Carrot made no reply, but his eyes followed Lenny as he walked stiffly over to the kitchen area and began rummaging through the litter of empty cans, foil takeaway containers and pizza boxes on top of the breakfast bar.
‘So what time is it then?’
Lenny checked his watch. ‘Half four,’ he said with the irritable tone of someone who had yet again been distracted from the job in hand. ‘Don’t tell me there’s no bloody food left in this craphole.’
‘You only just had lunch.’
‘What are you? My mother?’ said Lenny, continuing his fruitless search amongst the debris. ‘Makes me hungry, all this hanging about.’
Carrot gave a heavy sigh. ‘Have a look in my bag. There might still be a few biscuits left.’
‘Holding out on me, eh?’
Lenny strode over to the small black holdall near the door of the flat’s only bedroom. He crouched down and unzipped it, scouring the contents momentarily before snatching up a half-empty packet of McVitie’s plain chocolate digestives.
‘Happy now?’ said Carrot and watched Lenny unravel the twisted neck of the packet and peer inside.
‘Milk chocolate would have been better.’
Carrot called him an ungrateful little prick and told him to hand them over if he didn’t want them.
Lenny teased out a biscuit between forefinger and thumb. His features instantly pinched into a scowl of disdain. ‘Ah, Jeez.’
‘Now what?’
‘They’re bloody melted.’
‘Oh, for f— Well, put them in the fridge or something.’
Lenny was holding the biscuit up to his face, turning it this way and that as if trying to decide whether it was fit for human consumption in its present state. ‘Don’t be a twat,’ he said. ‘There’s no electricity, remember?’
Carrot sucked air in through his teeth as a prelude to launching into a tirade of abuse, but he was interrupted by the ringing of a mobile phone – his mobile phone. He swallowed back the first of the insults that had already begun to form on his tongue and told Lenny to pass him the phone. ‘It’s in my bag.’
For some unaccountable reason, Lenny transferred the still untasted biscuit from his right hand to his left and licked the goo of molten chocolate from his fingertips before delving into the holdall once again. He tossed the phone to Carrot, who fumbled the catch so that it bounced off his chest and onto his lap. The tinny sound of Michael Jackson’s Beat It came to an abrupt end as Carrot pressed the answer button and put the mobile to his ear. Almost immediately, his palm flew to the crown of his toupee as if a sudden gust of wind had threatened to whisk it from his head.
‘It’s Harry.’ He mouthed the words silently at Lenny and then: ‘He’s here… in England.’