When
I got back to my flat, my neighbour Hayley was in the front garden sorting out
her recycling. Hayley lived in the
first floor flat, directly below me.
She was wearing a vest and tracksuit bottoms and was in bare feet. She saw me coming which meant I didn’t
get quite as much time looking her over as I would have liked.
‘Hiya’
she said and beamed, her perfect teeth lining up like all the angels in heaven.
Hayley
was hot. Beautiful. So beautiful that it sort of hurt me to
look at her and I found myself averting my gaze whenever I was around her, as
if I’d caught her in the nude.
Which was something I would have loved to do.
‘Hi’
I said and smiled back, but only for a second before I had to look
elsewhere. ‘Sorting out the old
recycling I see’ I said and wished that once in a while I could say something
interesting.
‘Yeah. Got to do my bit for the environment’
she said, clenching a fist in the air and frowning.
For
a second I thought she might have been an environmental extremist, the kind
that scales buildings for Greenpeace.
I didn’t really know her.
But then she laughed. So I
laughed too.
‘Where’ve
you been?’ she asked.
‘Just
visiting the parents.’
‘Oh. I see’ she said in a way that suggested
she understood something from my tone.
‘What did you get from Selfridges?’ she asked, pointing at the fucking
bag in my hand.
‘Oh, uh, nothing’ I said. ‘I met my ex this morning. We’ve just split up and she wanted to
give me back some of my stuff.’
‘Just split up? Oh you poor thing’ she said and she
reached up and gripped my forearm, her thumb stroking across it before letting
her arm drop down again. Even
through the leather of my new jacket, I swear I felt electricity. I suppressed a shiver.
I couldn’t even look at
her now so I looked down and ran a hand through my hair, hoping that made me
look sad and thoughtful.
‘Yeah’ I said.
‘How long ago?’ she asked.
‘About a month.’
She made a noise like something
gentle was hurting her. ‘How long
were you together?’
‘About six years’ I said.
She made the noise again
at a higher pitch and when I looked up her face was textbook sadness – eyebrows
straining up in the middle, her big blue eyes looking out from her downcast
brow, pouting with the corners of her mouth turned down.
‘Do you miss her?’
‘Yeah’ I said.
She smiled at me in a
way that I guessed was supposed to be comforting. I just wanted her to stop asking me painful questions. We had reached an impasse and stood
smiling at each other. I looked at
my shoes. I looked at Hayley’s
bare feet.
‘Aren’t your feet cold?’
I said, recovering the situation with conversational expertise.
She looked at her feet
as if that was going to help her work it out.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘they
are a bit. Should get back in.’
As the front door closed
behind us, the door to the ground floor flat opened. A couple, George and Eliza, lived on the ground floor and
poking her fat little head out at us was Eliza. She had closely cropped, bleach blonde hair and bad
teeth. She was as tall as she was
wide, like how the Egyptians used to build. Except she was built like a ball, not a pyramid. In our previous encounters, she’d
smelled of ham. But standing in
the doorway of her flat that night, all I could smell was the powerful, acrid,
lemon smell of cleaning products.
She looked at us.
‘Hi Eliza’ said Hayley,
her smile fixed.
‘Oh sorry’ said Eliza,
in her voice as high as a whistle.
‘I thought you might be George.’
‘Nope. No, we’re not George’ said Hayley and
laughed, even though nothing was funny.
‘Everything alright?’ I
asked.
‘Oh yes,’ Eliza said,
‘I’m sure he’ll be back soon.’
We all stood there for a
moment, somehow embarrassed and incapable of making the next move.
‘Okay,’ said Hayley in
an exhalation, slapping her hips with her hands. ‘Well if you need anything…’
‘Thanks’ said Eliza.
We all said goodbye or
good night or whatever and Eliza drew her head back into her flat like a red
faced tortoise and closed the door.
On the way up the stairs, Hayley looked back at me and made a face – a
grimace that said shit that was awkward. I screwed my nose up and nodded in a
face that I hoped said yeah, really weird. Hayley smiled back at me and giggled as
she turned back around.
‘Anyway,’ she said, as
if Eliza was just a rude interruption, ‘how’re you settling in to Wood Green?’
Hayley’s head was cocked
a little to her right and her blue eyes blinked in slow motion. As she smiled, her pink lips glowed and
I felt my heart swell.
‘It’s okay actually,’ I
said, willing myself not to say anything stupid. ‘It’s got a bad reputation but people here are actually
really nice. They say sorry if
they bump into you and stuff.’
‘Yeah,’ she mused,
biting her lip, ‘probably scared of getting stabbed.’
We both laughed.
‘Nah, it’s alright
really. I’ve lived here for years
and never had any trouble. Touch
wood’ she said, knocking on her door and sucking air in through her teeth. ‘Fancy coming in?’
I thought about it. So far we’d had a good
conversation. I hadn’t said
anything stupid or mean or unpleasant and we were getting on fine. Why would I have wanted to jeopardise
that by spending more time with her?
‘That’s awfully kind of
you but I’d better get home. Got
some stuff to be getting on with.’
‘No worries’ she said
and she looked like she might be genuinely disappointed. Someone
beautiful was possibly, genuinely disappointed that I wasn’t coming in to her
flat.
‘Another time. I’m right here. Feel free to pop down’ she said.
‘Thank you’ I said. ‘I certainly will.’
We smiled at each other one
last time, then she stepped into her flat and I walked up the stairs.
I
got into my flat and straight away replayed everything I’d said. I still hadn’t said anything
ridiculous. I hadn’t fucked
anything up. So far. I was glad I’d got out of there when I
had.
I
tipped my stuff out of the Selfridges bag onto my coffee table. Then I took the bag, tore it into tiny
pieces and threw them in the bin.
