Is Kekipi with you? They let me call someone and I called you but I got your voicemail.’
‘Oh, no way!’ She let go of my arms and laughed, before collapsing happily on my concrete block. ‘I called you! How funny is that?’
‘So funny that I might throw up,’ I replied, awkwardly folding myself up on the floor. My knees had decided that standing up was overrated. ‘Where’s Kekipi?’
‘Don’t know; I didn’t see him after they locked me up.’ Amy placed her hands behind her head and closed her eyes, her own floor-length gown having actually fared quite well. At least, hers didn’t have any blood on it. ‘I’m sure he’s coming. I’ve got to hand it to you – you don’t do things by halves these days. No one could accuse you of being boring any more, could they?’
I crawled forward a couple of feet and wrapped my hands around the bars, pushing my nose out as far as it would go and trying not to cry. I thought of Nick and the look on his face. I thought of Al and how disappointed he would be in me when he found out about all of this. And I thought of Charlie and how I could possibly ever make things up to him. Sniffing at the empty corridor and staring up at the full moon through a tiny window across the way, I sighed.
‘No,’ I said to a half-asleep Amy. ‘No one could accuse me of being boring.’
I stood on the street outside my flat for five full minutes before braving the four concrete steps up to the door.
For five long years I had wrestled with the knackered lock, shoulder-barged the warped wooden door open, and called this place home, but after three short days away I was petrified of stepping over the threshold. Admittedly, it was fair to say I hadn’t been on terribly good terms with my flatmate, Vanessa, when I left. For some reason, she hadn’t taken kindly to me borrowing her life for a week, though I’d done a pretty good job with it, even if I did say so myself. Of course, she had chosen not to focus on the elements of our ‘falling out’ that she was at least somewhat responsible for – like how she’d been passing my photos off as hers for years on end, and how she’d been shagging Charlie, my Charlie, behind my back. That all seemed to slip her mind when she stood screaming in the street that I was the crazy one and if I ever stepped foot in the flat again, she’d have me arrested.
Fingering the key ring in my pocket, I forced myself up another step. She couldn’t actually have me arrested for going into my own flat, I reminded myself, and besides, it was half past eleven on a Thursday morning: she wouldn’t be at home anyway. Given that Vanessa was absolutely shit at her job, her dad had been paying the mortgage on our flat since we moved in and she had a standing Thursday lunch date with him to justify her existence whenever she was in the country. I’d only met Vanessa’s father once, but I had to assume no matter how good he was at making Scrooge McDuck quantities of money, he couldn’t really be that bright because Vanessa had him wrapped around her little finger, even though he was pretty much the only man on earth she couldn’t sleep with to get what she wanted. The whole daddy–daughter thing was a mystery to me. Maybe if I batted eyelash extensions and tossed a long blonde mane at my dad, he would pay all my bills too. Unlikely, given that we hadn’t spoken in almost a decade, but you never know.
One more deep breath in and I was at the top of the stairs, face to face with my knackered red front door. Keys in hand, I rested one palm against the glass pane and pressed my ear against the wood, just to make sure. Hmm. Could I hear something? I should have brought Amy with me. Yes, my best friend was small in stature but she was very big on violence and I did not relish the thought of opening this door to a furious former flatmate without her by my side. Why was I here? Maybe I should just turn tail and run back to Amy’s house, get back under the covers, watch the rest of Step Up 3 and pretend I didn’t need any of my old things. And then I looked down at the T-shirt I had borrowed from Amy that morning. A five-foot-ten woman should never borrow clothes from a five-foot-nothing girl. I loved unicorns as much as the next girl but neon pink unicorns on a cropped black T-shirt? The world wasn’t ready to see my belly button and neither was I. I needed my things.
That was, provided Vanessa hadn’t burnt all my clothes, chucked them in the street or used them as tea towels and toilet paper. I let out a quiet laugh and shook my head: what a silly thought. She hadn’t used a tea towel in the five years I’d known her, so that was hardly about to change. But without me there to buy bog roll, that was a definite possibility.
‘You’re being stupid,’ I whispered to myself as I pulled my sad phone with its broken screen out of my pocket and forced it to shuffle through my contacts until I found the number for our landline. This was a telephone no one but my mother and the world’s finest telemarketers had attempted to call since 2007 and yet, every time it rang, Vanessa had the receiver in her hand within three seconds, ‘just in case’. I had to assume she had once given Brad Pitt that number in a bar and was still waiting for his call.
I listened as the line connected, the two long bleats on my phone translating into two short rings inside. It was fair to say I felt something of a twat, stood on my own doorstep, dialling my own landline from my own mobile, but I figured it was better to feel like a bit of a bell-end than to get into another public slanging match with a psycho. But when the phone inside stopped ringing and I heard the lovely lady from BT invite me to leave myself a message, I hung up and forced my key into the lock and merrily kicked the door wide open.
‘Home sweet home,’ I said with a sigh.
Even though it had only been three days since I’d left, the flat felt strange. The last time I’d left it, I’d been freaked out by the fact that nothing at all had changed in my absence. I wished I could say the same this time around. My keys always lived in the empty bowl by the door and I dropped them gently, listening to the familiar clatter before I stepped into the living room. Fuck. Me. Either Vanessa had started shagging the Tasmanian Devil or we’d been visited by seven very angry burglars. It was difficult to say which was more likely. The floor was covered in broken plates, broken glass and assorted empty bottles; picture frames had been pulled off the wall and dashed on the floor, which I figured explained the glass; and, most heartbreaking of all, my beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs had been hurled around the room like mini Frisbees. She really knew how to hit a girl where it hurt. Picking my way through the debris, I grabbed handfuls of copper locks and tethered my hair back into a ponytail before I braved my bedroom, preparing myself for the inevitable devastation.
Pausing, I closed my eyes, pushed the door open and stepped inside.
‘Oh. Wow!’
If I’d walked in on a family of baby elephants having a tea party with Julia Roberts and the Queen, I couldn’t have been more surprised. My room was exactly as I had left it.
Closing my bedroom door behind me, I did a quick visual check. My suitcase was still sitting by the door, the bed sheets still rumpled from mine and Amy’s sleepover on Sunday night, the mug full of tea still on the nightstand, albeit a bit scummier than I had last seen it. My clothes were still in the wardrobe, unhung pictures still propped against the wall. Whatever madness had possessed Vanessa while she trashed the rest of the flat, she must have run out of steam before she could take my room apart.
Or she booby-trapped it … I froze for a second, taking another look around and searching specifically for anything explosive-looking.
Once I was satisfied there were no landmines hidden under my Ikea rug, I got down to business. Whatever had gone on while I’d been camped out in Shepherd’s Bush at Casa del Amy, all I wanted to do was get my
