rubber duck raised a nonexistent eyebrow and waited, expectantly.
‘Oh God, I’m being so stupid.’ I no longer cared about being heard. I cared about not dying. ‘What am I doing? I’m not jumping out of my own bloody window!’
White knuckles wrapped around the window frame, I twisted around, ready to cock my leg over and in. Unfortunately, I seemed to have forgotten that unless a certain Nick Miller was the one positioning my legs over my head, I was one of the least flexible women on the face of the earth. Getting back inside the flat was going to be a damn sight harder than getting out of it. Somehow, I had managed to get my back up against the UPVC frame and my bum half on and half off the ledge when I realized the belt loop of my jeans was stuck somewhere on the lock. And it was while wriggling around in this impossibly ridiculous position, one leg in and one leg out, doing the hokey cokey twelve feet above the floor, that my door flew open and two uniformed policemen and one towel-clad former flatmate burst into the room.
‘Don’t move!’ shouted policeman number one.
‘Come back inside the house!’ yelled policeman number two.
‘Without wanting to be rude …’ My voice was awfully high. ‘Can you pick one? I can probably do the don’t move one but I’m not sure I can get back inside the house.’
‘Stay where you are, Ms Kittler,’ said policeman number one, who seemed far more interested in what Vanessa was barely covering with her towel than whatever crime they imagined I had committed, ‘we’ve got this.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, a whimper escaping her throat as she cowered behind policeman number two. ‘I was so scared. She must have broken in while I was in the shower.’
‘What?’ I squeaked as policeman number one began to move slowly towards me. ‘I didn’t break in. I used my keys – I live here!’
‘We’ll sort all this out down at the station.’ Policeman number two approached with his hands held out towards me. And in one of those hands was a pair of handcuffs. ‘Now just get down off the ledge.’
‘I’m not going down to the station,’ I said, one hand up in a surrender-friendly position, the other still clinging to the window frame for dear life. ‘I didn’t break in.’
I stared at the scene in front of me with utter disbelief. Vanessa, safe behind the boys in blue, gave me a wicked grin while wrapping her towel a little tighter.
‘I want her arrested,’ she said. ‘Please take her away.’
‘I am so going to kill you!’ I let go of the window frame fully to try to unhook my jeans from the arm of the lock. ‘This is ridiculous.’
‘You heard that!’ Vanessa shrieked. ‘She threatened to kill me!’
Everything that happened after that was a blur. I wasn’t sure if it was self-preservation or a rage-induced blackout, but without warning, I felt my mind leave my body and float up into a cobwebby corner of my bedroom, watching as the scene unfolded. The policeman that wasn’t copping a feel of my treacherous flatmate rushed over to me as soon as I let go of the window frame and reached behind my back. As he came towards me, my belt loop decided it didn’t need to be caught on the window lock after all and that’s when I realized the only thing that was keeping me balanced in the first place was said belt loop hooked around said window lock.
The fall from the window didn’t seem too bad. I did manage to land on top of my great big pile of pants, and at best I was a little bit dazed while at worst I was completely concussed. But looking on the bright side, it was probably better not to be entirely conscious when you were being read your rights and then carted off to the police station in handcuffs, wasn’t it?
‘I’ve told you,’ I said, pressing my palm against the throbbing pain in my shoulder, ‘a thousand times. It’s my flat, my home. Yes, Vanessa owns the flat but I pay rent. My keys are in the bowl by the door. I didn’t break in.’
‘Then remind me why you were climbing out the window with a suitcase full of Miss Kittler’s belongings instead of using the front door?’
Once the officers had established none of my bones had been broken, it was off to the police station for questioning, despite my loud and varied protestations. So far, so The Bill. I had suffered assorted indignities, including being fingerprinted at the same time as a very large skinhead I was sure that I recognized, and then I was left in a small interview room with a female detective who looked about as happy to be there as I did, although she was considerably less bruised and considerably better dressed. Or at least her clothes seemed to a) fit her and b) actually belong to her.
I glanced around the interview room while I tried to work out what to say. It wasn’t as bad as I had thought it might be. More Jobcentre waiting room than terrifying cell – and when you had a friend like Amy, you became very familiar with the inside of the Jobcentre waiting room.
‘We live together, we’ve had a bit of a domestic,’ I explained, wondering how likely a couple of Nurofen and a cup of tea were if I asked very nicely. ‘I didn’t want to talk to her so, you know, I jumped out of a window.’
Made perfect sense to me.
‘So you two are a couple?’ the detective asked, her eyebrow raising for a second and then dropping back into its standard position very quickly. Clearly someone had already had her sensitivity training.
‘We are so not a couple!’ I winced at both the idea of going out with Vanessa and the pain in my shoulder. ‘She’s horrible. She threw a cat at me once. I’d rather go out with you.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The cat was fine,’ I backtracked quickly. ‘Vanessa is my flatmate. Or I’m her flatmate. Or I was her flatmate. I’m moving out, clearly, but I have paid rent for this month so I wasn’t breaking in.’
‘Just breaking out,’ she said, incapable of keeping her eyebrow in its rightful place. ‘And why did you have Miss Kittler’s camera in your suitcase?’
This was the only part I was going to struggle with. ‘It used to be my camera,’ I said. ‘I gave it to her one month when I couldn’t pay my rent but then I borrowed it back for something. That’s all it was, I wasn’t stealing it.’
‘You were borrowing it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Without asking?’
‘Yes.’
‘Which is commonly known as stealing.’
I had been brought up to be very respectful of the police. Even now, I couldn’t walk past them in the street without feeling improbably guilty or mentally humming the tune to ‘If you want to know the time, ask a policeman’ but this was getting silly.
‘I really haven’t done anything wrong,’ I said, attempting to remain as calm as humanly possible. ‘She’s just trying to cause trouble for me.’
‘It just sounds very unlikely, doesn’t
