Jake
FADE IN
INT. TOM AND JAKE'S FLAT - DAY
SUPER: '7 JULY 2024’
Sunlight streams into a lived-in Birmingham flat, where JAKE works on his laptop. The living room exudes cluttered charm: a worn leather sofa faces a small TV, and a coffee table is strewn with magazines.
Two weeks before everything changed, Jake’s life had seemed wonderfully, boringly normal. Surrounded by scatter cushions, he perched on the sofa, working from home, reading a complaint from someone whose Düsseldorf mini-break was ‘ruined’ by a lukewarm in-flight beef casserole.
Tom, pale and dishevelled, stumbled from the bedroom, squinting at the sun, and managed a weary groan. He’d strained a hamstring at the gym, showing off in front of his new and way too good-looking personal trainer.
‘Perhaps I should go to hospital,’ he said. ‘Better to be safe than sorry.’
In Boots, Jake had feigned interest in sunscreen while Tom machine-gunned anxious questions at the pharmacist; a woman who made a strong case for two aspirin and a nice lie down.
‘The best cure is rest. And a bag of frozen peas.’ Jake set aside his laptop. ‘Would you like me to make you a drink?’
‘Tea,’ Tom said. ‘But no milk. Best to avoid carbs. If I can’t work out, I’ll balloon.’
‘You’re not having your usual three sugars, then?’
He grimaced. ‘I suppose... but... I could manage a biscuit. The woman in Boots did say to line my stomach if I’m taking painkillers.’
‘You ate the last of the Jammy Dodgers. I could nip out to the minimart.’
‘Well… if you’re going out anyway, would you mind getting me a bag of prawn cocktail Wotsits?’
Jake grinned. ‘Carbs and trans-fats?’
Tom collapsed into his favourite armchair, scrunching into a ball, and turning his voice down to a sickly croak. ‘If they’re out of prawn cocktail, the regular ones are fine. And a Mars Bar. And a can of Fanta Lemon. But only if it’s been in the fridge. I should keep my electrolytes up.’
Jake had always imagined growing old with Tom: long, lazy mornings solving cryptic crossword puzzles, bickering over whose turn it was to walk the dog, arguing politics, planning walking holidays in Cornish cottages they would never take. They both hated walking. And while Cornwall looked pretty in photographs, driving to Penzance took longer than flying any place hot and sunny.
He stepped out of his slippers and pulled on trainers. ‘One fat-bastard junk-food goodie bag coming up.’
Tom frowned and lifted his T-shirt. ‘I’m not fat, though, right?’
INT. TOM AND JAKE'S FLAT - NIGHT
SUPER: '19 JULY 2024'
JAKE lies on top of the bed, surrounded by his iPad, phone, a magazine, and a spine-up book. It's late, the blind is drawn.
Fate doesn’t bother with polite knocks. It doesn’t wait to be let in. Fate boots in your door at stupid o’clock, raids your fridge, eats the leftover Chinese you were saving for tomorrow and drinks straight from the milk carton. The worst houseguest you never invited, with a particular talent for showing up exactly when you think you’ve got your life sorted, just to remind you that you haven’t.
The night pressed in, hot and heavy, and Jake rolled onto Tom’s side of the bed. The alarm clock on the windowsill blinked 22:07, each pale blue pulse marking another minute Tom should have been home. Another minute he wasn’t.
Once a year, Bowers Estate Agency summoned everyone to Bristol for a day of motivational team building. In any couple, one person charms, the other handles crowd control. Jake was their bouncer. Eight hours of talking sales techniques sounded like hell.
‘Networking is an art form,’ Tom insisted, sounding like a LinkedIn meme.
Jake hated being alone in their flat. It wasn’t just his tendency to catastrophise—though that didn’t help. The car had been making a weird knocking noise, and Tom’s solution was to crank up the music and drown out its death rattle. What if he’d broken down in the middle of nowhere? What if the police found his abandoned Volkswagen Passat near the last reported sighting of an axe-wielding psychopath?
Jake’s phone buzzed, and he grabbed for it. Another text from Emma about tomorrow’s barbecue.
‘I drink cranberry juice from wine glasses,’ Tom had insisted that morning, a familiar defensive edge creeping into his voice. ‘That way, nobody has to freak about the recovering alcoholic.’
Jake played his final card: ‘It’s our anniversary on Friday.’
‘Which one?’
‘The first time we... you know.’
Tom snorted as he picked out shoes. ‘Does Hallmark do a card?’
Jake won. Tom had promised to come home. Promised to make his excuses. He’d invent a migraine.
The clock ticked over to 22:09.
Two years sober. Two hours on the M5.
And now, two hours late.
INT. TOM AND JAKE'S FLAT - NIGHT
SUPER: 'TWO YEARS EARLIER'
Tom had been slumped on their sofa, his eyes glassy, his smile lopsided. A bottle of Polish vodka lay on the rug. Jake had caught a bus home after waiting an hour in the Moon Under Water as agreed, for Happy Hour cocktails.
‘Did something happen?’ he said, determined to ignore the evidence. Perhaps Tom had received bad news. After COVID, the property market was up and down. He’d talked about redundancies.
‘Shit. Forgot. Balls.’ Tom slurred the words together and shuffled around, his movements clumsy. ‘Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ Jake managed to say, even though it wasn’t. ‘The place was dead anyway.’
As Tom grabbed the vodka, a smile tugged at his lips. ‘You want to make cocktails now?’
‘You’ve had enough.’
A snort. A bitter, hollow snort. ‘Oh, now you’re keeping count. Are you my keeper or something?’
He heard these words each time drink took over—a blunt weapon meant to deflect and wound.
‘Tom, this isn’t—’ Jake took a breath, steeling himself. ‘I’m not trying to control you, but we’ve talked about this.’ His voice wavered, and he swallowed, forcing his tone steady. ‘You made a promise.’
And there it was. One little word with the power to turn any isolated confrontation into all-out war. A spark of anger flared behind Tom’s unfocused eyes. ‘Don’t start with that again.’
What good would it do to fight back? Jake had said everything there was to say a dozen times. He hung his coat on a hook in the lobby and pulled the door shut.
‘I can’t keep doing this,’ he said, trying to hide his desperation.
A suffocating silence followed. For one horrible second, Jake thought Tom might grab for the bottle. Instead, he just laughed—a joyless, hollow sound—before sinking back against the cushions, defeated in a way that would break even the hardest of hearts.
‘You’re not going to leave me, are you?’ Tom’s voice was small and uncertain.
Jake was angry, tired, and heartbroken. But he wouldn’t leave.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You’re stuck with me, mate.’
Tom let out a breath like he’d been holding it for hours. ‘I’ll stop,’ he said. ‘I’ll get help. I promise.’
That one little word could just as easily end the wars it started.
INT. TOM AND JAKE'S FLAT - NIGHT
SUPER: '19 JULY 2024'
A jarring ringtone shattered the quiet, and Jake fumbled for his phone, heart sinking when he saw it was Tom’s horrible sister.
‘It’s Tom.’ Her voice was strained. ‘There was an accident.’
Jake’s entire world slowed down.
‘But I spoke to him just…’ Jake’s words trailed off, his mind struggling to work out how long ago that had been. They’d texted at seven. At eight, Tom had sent a selfie from Michaelwood Services, posing with a box of Krispy Kremes.
Rona was still on the line, her breathing ragged. ‘They took him into the operating theatre.’
‘The operating theatre? Did he break a leg? Which hospital?’
‘Tom’s dead.’
Jake’s world tilted. The phone slid from his grip, hitting the floor with a soft thud. His gaze landed on a framed photo—the two of them on moving-in day, surrounded by boxes, radiating joy.
He called Rona back, but she sent him to voicemail. Hospital switchboards refused to give out information, passing him to wards that passed him to other wards, until a terse voice confirmed the admission of a Tom Carter, in his early 40s. But data protection rules forbade them saying why, or when, or even how he was doing.
Bile rose in Jake’s throat as he stumbled around the flat, his legs weak and unsteady. In the bathroom, he squinted at his reflection, ghostly in the frosted window pane.
‘This isn’t real.’ His voice became a whisper. ‘You are dreaming. Wake up.’
He gripped the edge of the sink, his knuckles turning white. The cold, hard porcelain was real. Everything was real. He wasn’t dreaming. His chest tightened, his breath coming in shallow gasps. Was this how it felt when your heart gave up? When it saw little point in going on?
He sank to the cold tiled floor, his back against the bathtub. Through an open window, the outside world went about its nocturnal business—a car door slammed, a dog barked.
Someone smoked weed.
