I fling myself face down on the bed. I am safer now, now that I can’t see the things in my room, but the dream starts to come back in threads and there’s that choking feeling in my throat again. There is Simon in my dream wearing an orange t-shirt that says ‘Go Bahamas’. I’m wearing pretty much what I’m wearing now, a tank top and floral pyjama bottoms. I don’t know what I have said to the dream-Simon, or what I have done, but he looks stubborn. He has that look on his face that he gets when we argue, the jaw clenched, the ocean-blue eyes remote and unreachable. He will never forgive me. He should never forgive me. My mother is standing behind him, her arms crossed over her chest. You always do this, she says, you always push people away. I told you. I told you! And then it comes back to me. There had been someone else in my dream, standing behind my mother, looking at me with sad eyes. A dog. Mine and Rose’s dog, Gus-Gus. I gasp for breath as the memory of the dream hits me. Gus-Gus, when was the last time I dreamed of Gus-Gus?
The dream-memory threatens to choke me so I jump off the bed, push my hair to the top of my head, stick a hairclip into it and start cleaning. I have to clean. I have to do something with my hands or I’ll go mad. There is stuff everywhere. There should be boxes, ready to go to the flat Simon and I are – were – moving into, in Crystal Palace. But there aren’t because I hadn’t got that far yet. I had only got to the point of pulling things out of closets and drawers and staring at them. I start folding. Picking up, folding, placing in drawers. This is a good task to do, I can do it for hours. I can do it for the rest of my life.
I’m halfway through the first drawer when my phone rings. It is my mother. I close my eyes, willing her to go away. My parents are possibly the last people I want to talk to right now, but she keeps ringing. After the seventh missed call, I tap the green button.
‘Rilla,’ my mother says without so much as a hello, ‘what are you doing?’ She doesn’t mean right now, in my room at this particular moment, but generally, with my life. ‘Why do you have to ruin everything?’
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I mutter. I stab viciously at strands of my hair that are trying to escape the hairclip.
‘What are you trying to do, show Simon that you’re thoughtless, selfish? Rilla, he’ll find out what you’re really like, don’t you see, and then what will happen?’ Her voice has a panicky note in it, a twang of desperation. ‘You’re twenty-five. When are you going to grow up? Are you there? Are you listening? You can’t treat people like they’re nothing, you just can’t!’
‘Really?’ I grind my teeth. ‘You’ve always said I’m really good at it.’ I whack at a t-shirt to get it into shape and fling it into a drawer, holding the phone between my ear and shoulder.
‘Do you think Simon will take you back after what you did? How will we face him again?’
We?
‘Did I say I want him to take me back?’ I mime thwacking the phone on the floor a few times. ‘Did I say that?’
‘We just want you to be happy. What is wrong with that? Tell me, what is wrong with that?’
‘You want me to be happy?’ I say slowly. ‘Now that’s too much, Mum. I would have said that’s the one thing you’ve never wanted me to be.’
My mother is breathing hard now, I can hear her. I squeeze my eyes tightly shut but the familiar guilt is starting to creep up. My father takes the phone, and in the background I hear my mother say, ‘I don’t know what he sees in her, Manoj, I really don’t!’
‘Rilla, why have you upset your mother? Can you have one conversation that doesn’t end like that?’ Dad says. He doesn’t sound annoyed, he just sounds like my dad – tired and resigned. I picture him sticking a finger and thumb in his eyes and rubbing wearily.
‘Well, Dad, why don’t you tell me?’
‘Rilla, beta—’
‘Sorry,’ I mutter. ‘I’m going now. Sorry, okay? Just – don’t call me, please, okay?’ When I put down the phone, I notice missed calls from Simon, some from last night, others from this morning when my phone was on silent. There is also a text message: Please call me. Just let me know you’re okay.
Tears threaten to rise but I push them down. Not now, Rilla. This is not the time. I stab at my face with the back of my hand and carry on tidying.
I clean obsessively. I can’t think about Simon. I can’t think about Simon and I can’t think about my mother. And I definitely can’t think about Gus-Gus.
After an hour, I give up trying to sort my room out and walk slowly downstairs to the living room. My flatmate Federico is sitting in the middle of the floor in child’s pose, looking in through the window of a miniature Victorian house.
The flat Federico and I share is part of a three-flat house in Lewisham. When I started my MA three years ago, I came across a pamphlet on a notice board at university, advertising for a flatmate. It gave details of the flat, and then ended with the words, ‘Even if you hate everyone else, you’ll love me!’ We met on campus and had a long chat about American politics, Simon Cowell and Lucozade (and how much we couldn’t stand any of those things). I told him about my favourite Mexican restaurant – La Choza in Brighton – and he told me he would make me nachos (all made from scratch) once a fortnight if I lived with him. I moved in the following week.
As I step into the living room, a floorboard creaks under my weight, and the four walls of Federico’s model house collapse. Down comes the sloping roof.
‘Oof,’ Federico says, sitting up. His springy curls are standing up all around his head, his hands are now on his small-boy hips. He is wearing his red tracky bottoms that say ‘Ho Ho Hoe’. A joint sits next to him in an ashtray and there’s some Tibetan chanting emerging in wafts out of his phone. ‘Do you have to come crashing in here like a water buffalo?’
Federico has discovered a passion for model villages and he is trying to build the San Francisco of the 1900s. So far he has built two Victorian houses, one pink, one lilac, a few lamp posts, a post box, and a road – at the moment they look like a post-apocalyptic San Francisco, craggy angles, buildings falling everywhere, everything grey and smudged, all rather steampunk.
‘If you can figure out how to build them so they actually look like something real, that would make a difference,’ I say irritably.
‘Regretting it now?’ he asks, bending down again, trying to get the structure back up, one wall at a time, holding his pinky fingers out for balance. His stare is so dark and intense that his eyes look like they are lined with eyeliner.
I flop down on the window sill. ‘No,’ I say. ‘No, I am not.’
‘Okay, then,’ Federico says. ‘I’m glad you’re happy with your decision. It must be a good feeling.’
Federico is from Mexico. He is short and wiry, and has a mass of curly hair that comes out of his head like an explosion. He is on a post-graduate scholarship to study music at Trinity. He had been accepted by Columbia, but he decided to move to London instead as a protest against the divisionary politics of the American government. (Also he didn’t get a visa.) When he is being sarcastic he talks in exactly the same tone as when he’s not, so sometimes it’s difficult to know if he’s being serious. At the moment, though, his meaning is crystal clear. I glare at him. After a few minutes, I finally think of a good comeback.
‘And anyway, you think you’re better at
