I shiver as I’m hit by another gust of frigid wind. Joshua takes a few hurried steps backwards. ‘God, I’m an idiot. You must be freezing! Come inside.’
I take the porch steps till I’m standing beside him. He pauses in the doorway, head tilted. From somewhere, loud music blares, punctuated by angry shouted lyrics.
Joshua looks over his shoulder at me. He places a finger on his lips, eyes twinkling, and whispers, ‘On my signal, make a run for it.’
I hesitate. ‘Joshua, I don’t want to get you in trouble –’
He reaches behind him, fingers closing lightly on the edge of my sleeve. ‘Nah,’ he says in a stage whisper as he tugs me into the house. ‘It’s fine, it’s just, I’d rather my sister didn’t know you were here. Trust me, an interrogation from a Viet Cong proctologist would be way less invasive.’
He hustles us into a spacious foyer. I clock an impossibly high ceiling, polished floorboards that extend down a long corridor, and a curved staircase off-centre, with another, narrower corridor running behind it. To the left are wide double doors that open into a library, plush armchairs nestled in a circle and heavy shelves overflowing with books.
I glance at Joshua, only just now processing that his fingers are still looped loosely around my wrist. He seems to be staring at the spot where our hands meet. Behind his glasses, his eyes are a little wide. He lets go of me quickly at the same time that I, reflexively, pull away. He sticks his hands in his pockets.
‘So this is home,’ he says.
Granted, I don’t have the keenest judgement when it comes to other humans, but the inside of Joshua’s house isn’t what I imagined from the imposing exterior. There’s artwork on the walls that looks fancy and expensive, but it’s fighting for place among framed kids’ drawings and finger-painted canvases. The furniture that I can see is mismatched and well worn, but still manages to look coordinated. And it smells warm inside, like baked fruit and wood smoke.
‘Huh,’ I mutter. Joshua looks at me quizzically, but there’s no way I’m going to voice what I’m thinking – that his house is a little like Joshua himself. Contradictory and anachronistic and improbably comfortable.
There’s a sudden crash somewhere, and a shriek, followed by a chorus of yelling.
Joshua makes this little yeep sound and hurries us towards the narrow corridor behind the staircase.
‘Shouldn’t you, um, check on that?’ I say.
He listens for a few seconds. ‘Nah. My sister broke something or flushed something down the toilet.’ He grins, his bare feet carrying him onwards. ‘Don’t worry – there’s a particular sound you learn to recognise if someone’s bleeding.’
I tiptoe behind him. We pass a few more closed doors, and I can only hypothesise at the contents within. Servants’ quarters? Rooms filled with nothing but ancient funerary urns? The heart of the TARDIS?
Joshua pauses in front of a solid door at the end of the seemingly endless hallway. He nudges it with his hip and holds it open with his back.
I gather the splintering bits of my psyche and step over the threshold.
‘Holy … wow. This is your room?’
‘Ah, yeah. Sorry, it’s a little cosy.’
Joshua’s room is minuscule, no bigger than a walk-in wardrobe. There’s barely enough room for the double bed pushed against the wall and the small chest of drawers that faces it. There’s just enough floor space for a thin rug, faded blue and covered with stars. The sliver of space between the drawers and the bed contains a leather chair and a tiny desk scattered with pens. Like the rest of the house, the ceiling is high, but painted a deep, dark blue, giving the impression of a night sky far above. But the thing that draws my eye, that makes me turn slowly in place like a mystified rotisserie chicken, are his walls.
All four walls, from just above my head to the distant blue ceiling, are lined with mounted shelves, row upon row that encircle the small space. They’re filled with double-stacked books and knick-knacks, weird stuff made of wood that I can’t identify. Placed in between, scattered over the shelves, are multiple ancient-looking clocks, all of which seem to be set to different times, and none of which appear to be working. There are a few dusty framed photos of Joshua with a dark-haired girl half his size, and along the very top shelf, rows of boxes and old stuffed toys. It’s like being cocooned inside a very tiny, ancient library. Or the cell of a well-read lunatic.
‘Um, the clocks are mostly presents from my folks,’ Joshua says from behind me. ‘It’s kind of been a running joke since I was a kid, I guess.’ He grins sheepishly. ‘I’ve been half-arsedly trying to learn how to fix them, but it’s harder than I thought. Clock-making used to actually be a master craft, you know, before they all became manufactured on assembly lines.’ He shrugs. ‘One day I might actually get around to learning.’
He takes a single step from the doorway and ducks his head under the shelves to smooth down his comforter. He flicks on the banker’s lamp mounted upside-down beneath the lowest shelf, and nudges the door closed behind him, all in one balletic move.
His hands are still, which is somehow more disconcerting than his ever-present tapping. I don’t know exactly what information makes me draw this inference, but I think he might be nervous. ‘It’s a bit much, I know. I was really into Harry Potter when we moved in here,’ he says with a crooked smile.
I look at him blankly.
‘The cupboard under the stairs?’ His eyes follow mine around the cluttered room. ‘Mum’s been trying to get me to move to a proper bedroom for years, but I dunno. I like it in here.’
I sit gingerly in his desk chair. ‘It’s … cosy,’ I echo.
Joshua takes a seat on the edge of his bed. ‘What can I say? I’m comfortable with small.’
We contemplate his space. With the door closed and the room lit only by a lamp, I should be right on cue for a momentous freak-out. I barely have the wherewithal to register that no school books of any kind are visible, and there are no study charts or timetables stuck to his walls, when from beneath the desk something soft brushes my leg. I yelp as a fat grey tabby launches itself into my lap and immediately proceeds to knead my legs with razor-sharp claws.
‘Ah, that’s Narda. Sorry. She has no boundaries.’ He reaches for the cat, but I shoo his hands away.
‘No, it’s fine. I like cats.’ I run my hands across the scruff of her neck. Narda flops into my lap with a huff.
The weight of the tabby settles the edges of my nerves a bit. ‘Joshua, considering the available evidence, I’m going to hypothesise that your parents aren’t exactly poor.’
Joshua makes a face. ‘They’ve done okay. So?’
‘Well, so, I guess then, a reasonable question would be, what the hell are you doing at St Augustine’s? It’s not exactly the type of school you guys go to –’