[700 words]
Your house is the Paper Street mansion from Fight Club but for girls. Can’t relax, too many places to snag myself. Catch suit trousers on the corner of a cabinet. Catch skin on that splinter on the banister. Lift a fingernail on peeling laminate in the tea coloured kitchen.
You glide around like a cat.
What a shithole.
Can’t be barefoot here. Carpets mottled like homeless hair, twenty-five year old underlay: it’s just dust. Avocado bathroom. Nothing has changed since the person before the last person before.
Big dopey greyhound you adopted because you can’t say no to a charity case. Couldn’t say no to me. Rubbing all the spores and pollen and shit it brought back from the meadow onto everything then sleeping in your bed.
We sleep in the spare room. I wear socks when we do it.
I want you so bad.
“You only like me because I’m Asian.”
You only like me because I’m tall.
“I want to paint you. You’re so long.”
Nobody had even tried to kiss you on the first date before me. I still don’t believe it. You think this is just a one night stand. A two night stand. I’m trying to play it cool but I’ve deleted all my dating apps. I think we are a couple.
Every surface in your bathroom is covered in bottles. I bump one of the bottles and suddenly it’s the Fidenae amphitheatre, twenty-thousand people dead. All these bottles of off-brand shampoo and shower gel with a thimble of liquid in them. Throw something away for fuck’s sake.
You don’t think I am serious.
One weeknight I’m desperate to see you but I’m stuck on the M60/M62 junction and you say, “You can just turn around, it’s OK.”
I don’t want to turn around. I just want to complain, to let you know that I’m trying.
You don’t think I’m serious and in the morning you’re browsing Tinder in bed. I thought we’d had ‘the conversation’.
“I thought you were joking. You’re always so aloof.”
If I tell you how I feel you’ll leave me.
I picked you and your friend up from the airport after Iceland. We started bickering because I fucked up the pick-up parking. It was nothing really – just the third act starting.
I gripped your hand as I was driving and told you I missed you. Your hair smelled like rotten eggs. You looked annoyed but you gripped back. Your friend said she could get a taxi instead.
And then we argue about the bank holiday. You want to do something. But everything is already booked or really expensive. Let’s just do nothing. Let’s just be together.
But no.
“I don’t want to waste the bank holiday.”
You’re sulking. Frantically browsing your phone for options. Touching the screen as if you’re looking for a vein. You can barely talk to me. You start looking at campsites. Not nice ones, just fields where you can pitch a tent. Nothing to do. Just three nights in a hot field and the tent you probably haven’t cleaned since Glastonbury – since ever. But maybe it’s cleaner than Paper Street.
Let’s go to Chester for a day. Go to the beach for a day.
“No.”
I’ll pay for an overbooked hotel. I’ll pay for an overpriced yurt. I just don’t want to sleep in a field.
“No.”
Two nights in a boujie yurt doesn’t make you a class traitor. Everything doesn’t have to feel like a festival or a backpackers’ hostel. It’s still a holiday if you don’t get gastroenteritis.
Maybe that’s it – maybe your house is a festival campsite after the music has stopped.
“No.” Your face is in your phone. I may as well not be here.
You fucking faker.
You’re just as neurotic as me.
A day later you’re almost having a panic attack about the long weekend, threatening to go somewhere on your own. I’m trying to iron a shirt for work. There is something on the iron I don’t notice. Nasty black tar, looks organic, it was probably alive, it’s gain of function research by now. It’s stuck to my shirt, it’s too late to wash it, I probably need to burn it.
It’s just another thing, another fucking thing…
END
Corporate Clarke's Fiction 