Rivers of London - Ben Aaronovitch [122]
I prised off my shoes, climbed under the covers and was asleep before I could wonder where all my posters had gone.
I woke briefly some hours later to the sound of the bedroom door being stealthily closed and the muffled sound of my dad’s voice. My mother said something which made my father laugh and, comforted that everything was all right, I went back to sleep.
I woke again, much later, with the morning sunlight slanting through my bedroom window. I lay on my back feeling refreshed, with a solid erection and the vague memory of an erotic dream about Beverley. What was I going to do about Beverley Brook? That I fancied her was a given, that she fancied me was pretty obvious, that she wasn’t entirely human was a worrying possibility. Beverley wanted me to go swimming in her river, and I had no idea what that meant except Isis had warned me against doing it. I had a strong feeling that you didn’t shag a daughter of the River Thames without getting out of your depth – literally.
‘It’s not that I’m scared of commitment,’ I said to the ceiling. ‘It’s just that I want to know what I’m committing to first.’
‘Are you awake then, Peter?’ said a soft voice outside my door – my father.
‘Yeah, Dad, I’m awake.’
‘Your mum’s left you some lunch,’ he said.
Lunch, I thought. The day was half-done and nothing achieved so far. I rolled out of bed, squeezed past a stack of cardboard boxes and headed for the shower.
The bathroom was as hobbit-sized as everything else in the flat, and it had only been by dint of some serious Polish retro-engineering that a power shower was shoehorned into the gap between the sink and the window. It was me that coughed up the cash for it, so I guaranteed I didn’t have to duck my head to get it wet. There was a new soap dispenser mounted beside the shower, the kind you find in the toilets of executive office suites, bought or liberated from a cleaning wholesaler. I’d noticed that the toilet paper and bath towels were much better brands than the ones we used when I was living at home – Mum was cleaning a much better class of office these days.
I got out and dried myself off with an enormous fluffy towel with ‘Your Institution Here’ embroidered into the corner. My dad was of the ‘real men don’t moisturise’ school of dry skin diseases, and all my mum had was a wholesale tub of cocoa butter. I’ve got nothing against using cocoa butter, it’s just that you end up smelling like a giant Mars Bar for the rest of the day. My skin taken care of, I nipped back into my old room where I cracked open some of the boxes at random until I had a change of clothes. One of my distant cousins was just going to have to go without.
The kitchen was a narrow slot that could have been used to train a mess crew for a Trident submarine. It was just big enough for a sink, cooker and a work surface. A door at the far end opened out onto an equally vestigial balcony which at least caught enough sun to dry clothes most of the year round. Curls of blue tobacco smoke drifted in from the balcony, which meant that my father was out there having one of his four precious daily roll-ups.
My mum had left groundnut chicken and about half a kilo of basmati on the cooker. I threw both in the microwave and asked my father if he wanted a coffee. He did, so I made two cups using instant from a catering-sized tin of Nescafé. I topped them up with a centimetre of condensed milk to mask the taste.
He looked well, my father, which meant that he’d had his ‘medicine’ some time this morning. He’d had a reputation for good grooming in the heyday of