In the morning Webby was gone. The Sofa was empty, all the cushions piled up for a pillow, the blanket that Molly had given him half on the floor. The telephone was in the middle of the room, the cord pulled tight like a trip wire. Barbara put it back where it was supposed to be. George and I started clearing away the beer cans from the night before.
I had only lived in the house for a little while. George, Barbara and Molly had been there for longer and Webby was a friend of theirs. I don’t know how they knew him. He would turn up unannounced from time to time. Sometimes he would bring a book and spend an evening reading quietly. Sometimes he joined in playing video games with us, but he was terrible at them. Mostly he would just watch us play, and he seemed happy enough doing it. Sometimes, like this time, he would drink with us late into the night and then sleep on the sofa.
When Molly walked in she picked up the blanket and folded it neatly.
“Where’s Webby?” she said.
“Not sure,” I said.
Molly hadn’t liked Webby when they first met. She said he was distant and pretentious but they got talking one night and he confided in her that he hadn’t started masturbating until he was almost fourteen years old because when his grandmother died his parents said she would always be watching over him. Molly warmed to him after that.
We checked around the house but he wasn’t anywhere. He wasn’t in the bathroom, he wasn’t having a cigarette on the back patio. He was just gone.
“His coat is still here,” Molly said, and we all gathered at the front door to see that it was.
A few days later George found a sofa he liked in a charity shop and I helped him carry it back to the house.
“What do we need a new sofa for?” Barbara said as we squeezed it through the front door.
It was an ugly colour and smelt of cigarettes.
“It’s for my room,” George said.
George occupied the largest of the bedrooms but had never really filled it out. His few possessions were dotted around the expansive space. I had always been a little jealous of his room. Because I had been the last of the four to move in I had ended up with the worst bedroom, a tiny box room built over an extension that didn’t heat well. I often used a hair dryer to warm the sheets before getting into its single bed.
“I like it,” Molly said, running her hand over the worn fabric of the old sofa. “It’s got character.”
The stairs were in the living room and so we angled it through, tipped it on its side and started trying to manoeuvre it up. It didn’t fit easily. We twisted and pushed until it was half way, but then it became jammed and we couldn’t move it any further, or get it back down.
“How has this happened?” George said, standing back to survey it, like he was puzzling over a ship in a bottle.
I stood at the top and tried to shove it down with my foot. It didn’t budge.
“For god’s sake,” Barbara said.
“It’s okay,” I said. “I think we can still get up and down.” I slid on my back under the v shaped tunnel the sofa had created. I knocked my head on one of the steps but stood triumphant at the bottom.
“It’s fine,” I said, rubbing my head.
Webby worked in a small sex shop, inexplicably located between a post office and a bakery not far from our house. It had been a few days and we hadn’t heard from him, so we decided to pop in one afternoon. He had always seemed a little out of place in the sex shop. He used to sit there behind the counter looking awkward, surrounded by lubricants and underwear and absurd rubber penises.
He wasn’t there. Behind the counter was a girl we had never seen before.
“We’re looking for Webby,” I said, wanting to establish that we hadn’t simply come in to browse. “He works here.”
“What’s his name?”
“Webby,” Molly said.
“No, his real name.”
I looked at Barbara, George and Molly. They looked at each other.
“Craig?” Barbara said.
“It’s not Craig,” Molly said.
“His surname is Webster,” George said.
“Is it?”
“Yeah, that’s why we call him Webby.”
“I thought we called him Webby because of that time he walked into those cobwebs.”
The girl behind the counter rolled her eyes. “What does he look like?”
We tried to describe him but it wasn’t easy. Early twenties, no distinguishing features. Plain eyes, straight nose.
“He has this green jumper,” Molly said. “With elbow patches.”
“Softly spoken,” George said, “hair like this.” He mimed his hair.
“I don’t know who you’re talking about, I’ve only been here a week,” the girl said. “How do you not know your friends name?”
We filed back out into the dull light of a late winter afternoon and walked home.
Yuri, our landlord, popped in one Friday evening. He had a bunch of flowers in one hand, a carrier bag in the other. Apparently Yuri was supposed to be living under an assumed identity as part of the witness protection program but had returned to using his real name. They said my new name was Steven, he had told us in his Russian accent, do I look like a fucking Steven to you?
We didn’t know if any of this was true or not.
George and I were sat on the floor in front of the television playing a fighting game on George’s Playstation in which two samurai circled each other slowly with enormous swords until someone made a move and one or the other died. It was very tense. Barbara was reading on the sofa and Molly was sat at the table with a bowl of soup, but she wasn’t eating it. She was stirring it slowly with her spoon and looking out of the window.
“I bought you cleaning supplies,” Yuri said, kicking off his boots and joining us in the living room.
Yuri had criticized the cleanliness of the toilet but Barbara had told him it had been like that since she moved in and nothing would fix it, so he had taken to bringing us ever increasing strengths of toilet bleach.
“Industrial grade,” he said. I stood up and took it from him. George made his move and a moment later my samurai was dead.
“Who are the flowers for?” Barbara said.
“For my wife. I didn’t do anything wrong. I just though she’d like them.”
Yuri looked at Molly and leant into me.
“What’s wrong with her?” he said, whispering but still loud enough to be heard.
“I’m fine,” Molly said.
“She’s lovesick,” Barbara said.
“I said I’m fine.”
“You poor girl,” Yuri said. “Who is he?”
“He’s just a friend,” Molly said.
“We haven’t seen him for a while,” I said. “He disappeared.”
Yuri drew a single flower out of the bunch and handed it to Molly. “He isn’t good enough for you.”
“Thanks, Yuri,” Molly said, holding the flower to her nose and breathing it in.
When Yuri turned he saw the sofa jammed on the stairs. He looked at it critically for a moment.
“That can’t stay there,” he said.
George, Molly and I made several attempts to get the sofa unstuck. The three of us had become used to it and thought nothing of getting onto our knees so that we could slide backwards up the stairs, but Barbara complained about it constantly. She sat back and watched us trying to move it, having washed her hands of the whole thing.
We never had any success. Brute force did nothing, and we couldn’t find any elegant solution, gently pushing or pulling it in every conceivable direction. It was as though the house had been built around it.
The three of us stood back, evaluating it from afar.
“I wonder,” George said, stepping forward to try something we had already tried a number of times and coming away with the same result.
Barbara stood up and left.
“Can we remove the bannister?” George said.
Molly and I assessed this new idea, but neither of us really knew what we were doing. We looked at the seamless joins of the wood, the invisible way it was all held together.
“No,” she said, “no, we can’t.”
Barbara moved out in stages. She had been seeing some guy and started staying at his place a lot. Whenever she showed up at the house she gathered up more of her things but none of them ever came back. We never met the boyfriend. He worked in radio and kept unusual hours, but even when he wasn’t at work he wouldn’t come into the house. He would call on the phone and tell her he was on his way, and then wait in the car for her to come outside. It felt odd to us, but she seemed happy enough with the arrangement.
Eventually Yuri told us she had terminated her tenancy.
“I’m going to advertise the room,” he said. “You’ll have to show any applicants around.”
We said that was fine.
“Just make sure the place is presentable.” He inclined his head toward the sofa on the stairs.
We said we’d get right on it, as though it had just slipped our minds.
Molly stopped by the sex shop from time to time to see if Webby had turned up. He never had. Molly sensed that the girl in the shop resented her coming in so often, so she took to peering in the window when she walked past. One day she saw someone different in there, so she went in again.
“His name is Webster after all,” Molly told us once she got home. “Marc Webster.”
“He doesn’t look like a Marc,” George said.
“Who were you talking to?” I said.
“The owner of the shop. He knew exactly who I was talking about. He told me to give him a message when I see him next.”
“What’s the message?” George said.
“Terry says go fuck yourself.”
“Why was he mad at Webby?”
“Because he stopped turning up for work. He didn’t even call. He said he had to fire him by post.”
“By post?” I said. “You should have asked for his address.”
Molly took out a scrap of paper with an address written on it.
“I did.”
So the next day we went to the address. The house was nicer than we expected and we were sure it was the wrong place. The flowering gardenias didn’t seem like something Webby would have managed.
An old lady answered the door.
“Is Marc home?” I said.
She shook her head. “He moved out. This was a while ago. Are you friends of his?”
We said that we were and she invited us in. The three of us sat in a line on her sofa and she made us all a cup of tea. Her home smelt of lavender and much of if was pastel coloured. It was hard to imagine Webby there.
“So Marc lived here with you?” George said.
“He was my lodger. He took the spare room.”
“But he moved out?” Molly said.
“It was a little out of the blue,” she said, “but he said it was time to go home.”
“Where was home?” I said.
“Lincoln. I think that’s where his family is. It’s a shame for me. He was nice to have around.”
We all sipped our tea in unison, the cups rattling in their saucers.
“Did he seem upset?” Molly said. “When he moved out.”
“No. Why? Did something happen?”
“We don’t know. It just seemed a bit sudden. And he didn’t say goodbye.”
“That’s odd,” she said. “He made a point of saying goodbye to me.”
She looked pleased with herself as she gathered up the empty cups and took them back to the kitchen.
Webby’s coat remained by the front door. None of us felt responsible for it, or that we had any right to touch it. Our communal living absolved each of us of individual responsibilities and so things in the house tended to remain as they were, or gradually fall apart.
I came home one afternoon and found Molly and George in the kitchen attempting to tackle the washing up. The dishes were stacked and crusted dry in way that looked difficult to handle. For all our collective lack of responsibility it was hard to deny that it had gotten worse since Barbara moved out.
“What are we going to do about Webby’s coat?” I said.
George was removing cups from the sink and trying to find somewhere to stand them.
“We should hang onto it,” he said, “in case he comes back.”
“He’s not coming back,” Molly said.
“Probably not,” I said.
George took a mug with a layer of mould in the bottom and put it directly in the bin.
“Where is Lincoln anyway?” I said.
Molly shrugged. “Not sure.”
“Up north,” George said. “We could go there.”
“How do you get to Lincoln?” I said.
“Train from here to London. Then once you’re in London you can get anywhere in the country.”
“We could turn up on his doorstep,” Molly said. “And say hey, you forgot your coat, Marc Webster.”
We all laughed and said how great it would be, but we knew that it wouldn’t happen. That we would find ourselves in the middle of Lincoln with no idea where to go from there.
Molly drained the sink and scrubbed at the residue it left behind.
We didn’t mention Lincoln again because two days later George got a call from home. One of his parents – we weren’t clear on which – had been rushed to hospital and George had stuffed clothes into a rucksack and left immediately.
The door slammed and Molly and I stood in the hall, unsure what to do next.
For three days we didn’t hear from him but then he called us late in the evening. His voice was low and he sounded like he hadn’t slept for a while.
“Is everything okay?” I said, not knowing how to talk about things like this.
“I’m not sure,” George said.
“Are you at the hospital?”
“I’m at home at the moment.”
Molly mouthed the words what’s going on? I shrugged.
“Listen,” George said, “I’m going to be staying here. I called Yuri and gave him my notice.”
“You’re not coming back?”
“Sorry,” George said.
“What about all your stuff?”
“Keep it,” he said. “It’s yours.”
After George hung up I told Molly what he had said.
“It sounds bad.”
I nodded, looking around at all of George’s stuff. I was pleased about the Playstation, much less so about everything else.
I moved into George’s bedroom. It was at least four times as big as my old one, but by the time I had transported George’s old stuff out and mine in, the room still looked barren. I could see why he wanted the sofa. I bought a small rug from a furniture store, but when I put it down it only had the effect of making the room seem even bigger. I was pleased to have a double bed rather than the single I had been using, but even that seemed lost in the space. I had trouble sleeping, and as I lay awake at night the walls and the ceiling felt distant. The edges of George’s double bed seemed too far away.
“Look at this,” Molly said, as I slid down the stairs on my back one morning.
She was sat at the table, looking at a letter.
“What is it?”
“Phone bill.”
I realised we had made no arrangements with George and Barbara to pay their share of the bills.
“How bad is it?”
“Bad.”
Molly showed me the total. In an average quarter we ran up a bill of about thirty pounds. This bill was for over two hundred. I didn’t understand what I was seeing.
“What is this?”
“I’ve been looking it over,” she said, “there are a lot of numbers I don’t recognise.”
She pointed at a string of phone numbers which didn’t look residential. They had suspicious dialling codes.
I took the bill off her and leafed through it. Mostly it seemed normal, but then there were dozens of these unusual numbers
“They’re all for the same day,” I said.
Molly nodded. All of the calls had taken place between two am and five am, one Saturday night almost two months before.
“It has to be a mistake,” she said.
“What should we do?”
“Let’s call one of them,” she said, “see who it is.”
She dialled one of the numbers and then sat there listening.
“I don’t believe this.” She hung up the phone. “It’s a sex chat line.”
She tried a few more and we huddled close to the receiver so we could both hear. One told us that horny girls were waiting just for us. The next was mainly focused on spanking.
I looked at the bill again and saw that for almost three hours straight someone had sat on our phone listening to this stuff.
“Did George do this?” I said.
Molly shook her head. “Wasn’t that was the night Webby disappeared?”
We both thought back, trying to figure out how long ago that had been. It seemed to add up.
“I think you’re right.”
Molly looked a little disgusted, but also a little impressed.
We sent a copy of the bill to Barbara and George, asking for their share and suggesting that maybe Webby’s sex chat bill should be shared between us. Barbara sent a note back saying that didn’t seem reasonable at all. George sent us a cheque for the calls he had made, but didn’t mention the others. Molly and I ended up paying for the whole thing.
The two of us spent our evenings cleaning the house so it would be presentable for any applicants that might come, but no one ever did. We kept waiting to meet our new house mates but week after week it was just us. One evening we were so bored we watched the same movie twice in a row. We took to playing catch with an old tennis ball, Molly standing in the kitchen, me by the front door, throwing it the full length of the house. We broke two drinking glasses and a picture frame.
After a while Molly got a new job, one with actual prospects, but her new commute was unmanageable. She left for work before I was out of bed in the morning, and got home late in the evening. I hardly saw her. She was so tired by the time she got home she never wanted to do anything. Occasionally we played Playstation but I won all the games and it stopped being fun.
Eventually she decided she couldn’t do it any more and she too handed in her notice to Yuri.
It didn’t take her long to find a new place. She agreed a lease on a small flat close to her new job. She said she was nervous about living alone, having always lived with other people, but she didn’t seem nervous to me. She looked like she couldn’t wait.
When Molly moved out she did it properly, boxing her things and leaving a forwarding address. On her last day we hugged at the doorstep, promised we would keep in touch, and then I closed the door on her.
I woke up most nights, lost in the sea of George’s double bed. Every night I crawled to the edge and lay pressed against the wall, waiting to fall asleep again.
Yuri turned up with more toilet cleaner but I didn’t have the heart to tell him it was the same stuff he had bought before.
“That looks like it should do the job,” I said.
I made a couple of cups of coffee and we sat in the living room together.
“I’ve got some news,” Yuri said. He shifted in his seat. “I’m selling the house. Four weeks, then you’re out.”
He gestured over his shoulder with his thumb, but I could see the concern in his gentle eyes.
Outside a soft rain started tapping against the window. Yuri turned his coffee cup around in his hands. For a moment I was upset, but then it passed.
“That’s okay, Yuri” I said. “I can find somewhere else to live.”
His big shoulders relaxed.
“I’ll give you a good reference,” he said. “Now, shall we see about getting that sofa off the stairs?”
We tackled it together, trying to work it out of the mess we had got it into. Yuri made a better show of it than we had managed, but then a loud crack resounded out. Yuri had split the bannister.
“Don’t worry,” he shouted, “that’s my fault.”
He stepped back, the sofa still in exactly the position it had been in.
“How much do we care about this sofa?” he said.
“Not at all.”
“Good.”
Yuri went to the garden shed and came back with a hacksaw and a claw hammer, then he set to work.
The broken remnants of the sofa lay in a pile on the back patio and the freedom to walk up and down the stairs felt like an extravagance. I spent my last few weeks in that house wandering its big rooms, not entirely sure what to do with myself. I moved back into the small bedroom and with the rising spring weather found I didn’t have to use the hair dryer on the sheets as often.
I packed up George’s things and decided to take them to a charity shop. It didn’t seem fair to leave it to Yuri. There wasn’t a lot, a few clothes, a small box of books and DVDs. I was keeping the Playstation.
On my way out of the house I saw Webby’s old coat, still hanging in exactly the position it had been in from the day he disappeared. I looked at it and realised I was having a hard time even picturing him. The details of his face had slipped away. I wished I could have told him not to worry about the phone bill, that maybe three hours of continuous sex talk with total strangers is just what a person needs from time to time. I wasn’t even that worried about the money.
I took his coat down and gave it away along with everything else.
