Turn 3 of 11

Ask Dermot more about the 'host' — who decided it?

You put the toast down. "No, but seriously, Dermot — who's the host? Like, whose idea was that?"

Dermot pours water into his mug with the concentration of a man defusing a bomb. He stirs. He taps the spoon on the rim twice, which is twice more than necessary.

"Whose idea was — look, I don't know, it's just the flat, isn't it? We all sat down and sorted it out. Ages ago."

"When?"

"I don't know, Priya, when did we sort out the bins? When did we sort out anything?" He's not irritated, not yet, but there's a flicker of something behind his eyes — not confusion, exactly. More like the expression of a man who's been asked to describe how he breathes. He knows the answer the way you know your own postcode. It's just there, settled, obvious, and the act of being asked about it makes the knowing feel slightly less solid.

"So we voted?"

"I mean — yeah. Must have." He takes a sip of tea and wines because it's too hot, then takes another sip anyway because Dermot has never once learned anything from experience.

"You were there."

"I was there," you repeat, because what else can you say? You were not there. There was no vote. There was no conversation. There was no host. And yet here's Dermot, your flatmate of two years, a man who once argued for forty minutes about whether a Jaffa Cake is a biscuit, telling you that you all sat down and decided this together, and he believes it. He believes it the way he believes the ceiling is above him and the floor is below.

"Well, who did we pick?" You're pushing now and you know you're pushing, but you can't stop. You need to see how far this goes. How deep the board's version of things runs.

Dermot frowns. Actually frowns. His tea lowers an inch.

"I mean — it's not really a pick thing, is it? It's more like — you know when someone just sort of naturally is in charge of something? Like how Marchetti sorts out the building stuff because she's been here longest."

"So Marchetti's the host?"

"No, not Marchetti —" He stops. The frown deepens. He looks at the board, reads it again, and for one second — one second — you see something surface in his face, something that might be a question. Then it sinks, smoothed over like water closing above a stone.

"No, it's just — the flat, you know? The flat has a host. It's just how it works."

He picks up his tea and drifts back toward the front room, and you're left standing in the kitchen with cold toast and a warm marker and the growing certainty that Dermot doesn't know who the host is because there isn't one yet. The board created a role and nobody's filled it. Like a throne with nobody sitting in it, waiting for someone to sit down.