Precious Little - Chapter 3

            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.