After Kath departs the two of them look at each other for a bit. Or, rather, Sal looks at J and J looks towards the stairs. She appears to be either muttering something or grinding her teeth.
Sal purses her mouth to one side, considering something. She then takes J by the shirt front and drags her over to a bit of the landing, near the top of the stairs, where someone has piled, for some reason best known to, well probably someone else, a quantity of stiff fabric that, nonetheless, looks a lot more comfortable than the floor. She folds down onto, taking J with her. Then stares at her. Then rearranges herself.
She picks a bit of something out of her skirt, interrogation techniques forgotten for the moment. “What in the fuck is this stuff anyway?”
“Either,” says J, “a very thick rug or a very thin carpet.”
“Yes,” says Sal, who then returns the wattage of her eyes to J’s face.
“What?” says J, going for insouciant and witty but coming off rather closer to the teenaged truculence she’s aiming to impersonate. Sal throws her a look of what can only be described as despairing sympathy and she sags. “I’m sorry. I’m just not. I don’t.”
“You’re crap at laying out your own burdens, is what. But you were the one who stayed up with me all night when I was crying like a tiny, tiny child over The Bastard Who Must Not Be Named even though you probably couldn’t even understand half of what I was saying. So. Look upon this as an opportunity to help me pay off a debt.”
J gazes at her in admiration for a few moments. “You devious bint.”
“Exactly.” She gestures. “Go on.” She sighs. “Look, sooner or later the love-bubble floats into something sharp and then you find that...”
“Oh, God, Sal...”
Sal leans forward, radiating sympathy.
“Is it...? You know...”
“What?”
“The ginger thing?”
She guffaws. “Ah, hell, no!” Then she sobers abruptly.
“Well,” says Sal after a while, “like what?”
“P says he’s homophobic.”
“Dan?”
“Yeah.” JJ’s look is a mixture of chagrin, guilt, sorrow and appeal.
Sal lets out a short sigh. “I dunno, love.” She gives it some thought. “I mean, thing is, when it comes down to it, you’re a bit...”
“I said that,” says J, with a bit of a smile.
Sal shakes her head, frowning slightly. “He’s very much a...”
“What?”
“Well, a man, really.”
J’s eyebrows go up. “Well, yes.”
“Listen,” says Sal, “think about your social...”
“Okay...” says J, “but that’s not...”
“What,” says Sal, “is the most irritating Danism you can think of - straight off the top of your head?”
J frowns at her, a bit lost, and she sighs again, remembering that there’s a knack to mining JJ’s memory.
“Where were you the last time you wanted to punch Dan?”
“Queen Street,” came the prompt response. “He was telling me about bystander apathy. Wrongly. He was telling me. You’d think,” she says, “I’d know a bit about crowd dynamics, that it would be, you know, a discussion. Like the bag thing.”
Sal raises her eyebrows silently at the non-sequiteur.
“Yes,” says JJ, “he’s stronger than me. Scientific, empirical reality, right? And if we were shopping or something, and he insisted on carrying food bags or whatever - fine. Seriously. But taking my bag off my fucking shoulder?”
Sal winces.
“Not ‘can I?’ not ‘would you?’ but whoink! Gone. ‘Give that back!’” She swipes at the air.
“Ah,” says Sal, still grimacing.
“And that Cycle of Motherfucking Nature thing - telling me.”
“Yeah,” says Sal, “that’s not exactly...”
“Like when we were trying to Enni’s that time.” Sal just shakes her head gently, wide-eyed. She has no idea, frankly, who Enni is, let alone the incident being denigrated. “Deepest fucking Splott-stroke-Adamsdown, and he’s been to Cardiff - what - seven times in his entire life before then anyway? - let alone the completely never having been to Enni’s part - and he’s telling me how to get there. Sure, we were a bit lost, because of starting from a different direction, but we were going the right way and... rrngh!”
“Fair play,” says Sal, because she can’t resist it, “he may not have known about... you know...” she gestures delicately towards the side of JJ’s head.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” says JJ. “How much more fucking evidence does a man need? But no. No, coz he can fucking navigate - ”
“... on the open fucking water,” says Sal.
“Well, zackly, he says we can do some damn-fool thing with stars.”
“He’s been out in Cardiff at night before?”
“Clearly the fuck not.”
“You got there in the end?”
“’course.” JJ pauses, breathing quite heavily. “I used to quite like it - you know. It’s like, if you’ve ever been out with a woman, and it’s midnight, and then it’s all: ‘what shall we do?’ ‘I dunno, what do you want to do?’ and ‘Well, I don’t mind.’ ‘Neither do I.’ but you know if you get all butch and choose the wrong thing she’ll be whining at you for hours, and reminding you for days...” Sal snorts, eyes crinkling. “You know what I mean...”
“Straight girls do it too, you know.”
“My surprise is minimal. Anyway...”
“Dan...”
“Dan, being Not A Girl, could just go: ‘let’s do this,’ and I’d be all surprised and gratified that someone could just get their arse in gear and be happy to do whatever and not take for-frigging-ever, filled with fake, self-denigratory, time-wasting, coy arse-seepage getting us precisely nowhere in case any of the things that could be, you know, actually chosen, might not be the exactly the right thing and,” she takes an enormous breath, “we eddy in self-flagellation and whining and instead... er...” she visibly reviews the progress of the sentence, “Dan can say: ‘there’s the thing,’ which is awesome, but the thing is that the fucking twentieth time he’s done the take-charge thing and I’m still stuck waiting for the inevitable debate and then me being the butch one so have ended up somehow being a coy fucking female and am just chewing my fucking soul out instead of doing something simple like going to do the thing I wanted to all along and start doubting my own ability to - you know - actually make any kind of decision for my own damn self.” She glares at Sal. “You know?”
“W...”
“And there’s another thing I really can’t abide.”
“What’s that, then?”
“Weeell, he’ll, it’s like, you know, when I ask him about something we’re doing, or whatever, and it turns out that’s not the plan and he’ll look at me like I’ve just spoken in a dialect of, of... Martian that happens to consist of sounds reminiscent of pigs arse-fucking and then, still wide-eyed but no longer slack-fucking-jawed, will say “No-o-o-o,” like I’m a fucking, like, not only a child but one that’s educationally subnormal.”
Sal chokes, caught between laughter and horror. She attempts to rally: “I think you’re supposed to say ‘special needs.’ Or, actually,” she says on reflection, “I think it’s ‘learning difficulties.’”
“Well, fuck that shit and roast it in a bucket - if that’s the only special he’s making me feel then screw it!”
“Is it?”
“Oh, God, I don’t know, do I? Otherwise I wouldn’t be having this fucking conversation, would I?!”
They’re silent for a while. J is staring over Sal’s shoulder, jaw clenched, working. Sal, to prevent herself from reaching over and touching J for comfort, is picking at the carpet stuff. “What,” she says eventually, “does P say?”
J pulls her focus back, grimaces. “Nothing yet. We started the discussion - well, started to start the discussion - and then Luce and Kids came in.”
“Ah.”
“Quite.” She frowns, then her brow clears a little bit. “P used that same phrase.”
“What?”
“‘Love-bubble.’”
“Ah.” Sal smiles slightly. “Weeell...”
“It’s one of those things, I guess. Anyway, P and I had this pact - from before - like when people wait until after the hideously acrimonious split to tell you what they actually thought of your until-recent beau or belle and you curse them with every inch of your scorched soul that they didn’t say anything beforehand. So we said: if thou asketh, thou shalt receive.”
“And you asketh... -ed?”
“Actually, I had to tell P that I was just about to ask before Luce arrived and we agreed to reconvene.”
“Sounds like an imminently sensible plan.”
“Don’t you m...? Oh. Hah. Right.”
“So you’re going to ask, er, P later, right?”
“Right. Our gangly buddy is likely to still be haunting these premises. I’ll ask in a bit.”
Sal blinks a bit. “You always manage that,” she says.
“What?” says J.
“The gender th- the non-gender thing. Sorry, I don’t know...”
“That’s okay.”
“But you do.”
“Practice,” says J, “and commitment. Also: practice.”
“Heh,” says Sal, “yeah.”
“Listen, about that thing earlier. Did that get... I mean, after I left...?”
“I wasn’t about to get lectured,” says Sal, slightly sternly, “on menstruating by someone who doesn’t. Who never has and never will.”
“Though, to be fair,” says J, “P wasn’t going to - just said ‘men- what are they like?’ - meaning that blokes aren’t particularly good at sympathising - or empathising - with period problems.”
Sal looks chagrined. “Well, yeah, but it wasn’t the right thing to say in any case, and, okay, we flew off the handle, but it’s done now and besides - I apologised for that.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah - while Kath was doing something... or someone else.”
“Hah.”
“And before you ask, I don’t know.”
J looks up from the fingernails she’s been contemplating morosely. “Know what?”
“About last night.”
J looks slightly panicked. “What about last night?”
“Kath.”
“Kath? Oh. Oh, Kath at the art gallery! Yeah, P was filling Luce in, but in front of Kids, so it was signed.”
“So no clue then.”
“No, but I know Gretchen was spitting nails.”
Sal’s face cycles through a range of emotions, all mostly-controlled, and settles on rueful.
“Yeah,” says J, “that’s what I thought.”
Sal looks at her for a while. “How you doin now?”
“Um, a bit... oh, look Sal, you look shattered. I’m sorry.”
“Despite the long weekend it’s been a hell of a long week, and Chairman Mao isn’t making things any easier.”
J frowns in confusion at her, then starts to chuckle. “I’ve not heard that one.”
“Have you not? Better than ‘The Curse’ or ‘a visit from Auntie Flo’, I reckon.”
“The last one is a bit twee, frankly.”
“Yeah.” She barely stifles an enormous yawn.
“Jeez, Sal, get on home.”
“I will in a bit,” says Sal. “I’ll just go say goodbye to folk, maybe chill a bit.”
“Good plan. And: I’m sorry. But... I’m grateful, thanks.”
“Good,” she says, patting her hand absent-mindedly. She grins. “You’re welcome. Listen, let’s meet up tomorrow, get the rest of this out of your system when I’ve some sleep in me.”
“Wh-what makes you think there’s...”
Sal fixes her in the eye and says: “Auntie Sal knows. We’ll meet tomorrow by the Pointy Man. Twelve o’clock okay? Lunch?”
J grimaces. “Er, yeah.”
“Well, one, then, but I’ve got to see my folks in the afternoon, see, so...”
“Insh’allah.”
She slaps her hand now. “Infidel!” She grins, starts to get up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
They both rise, pushing through a stiffness that is becoming more frequent on changes in position (though J’s hard-won musculature of the last few years is proving very helpful in that regard), but not yet at the stage where they can easily say that to anyone else.
“Go on with ya,” says J. “I’ll be down in a minute - need the toilet.”
“There’s more downstairs, I think, and easier to find.”
“Okay.”
They descend together, then go their separate ways.