It was an alluring outfit for a young man: red knee-high boots, a flowery dress floating above swan-white skin and an obsidian helmet of hair beginning just above insolent, unfocused eyes. Accessories draped off her like a Christmas tree weighed down by family heirlooms.
The man allured was Tom: scruffy jeans and blue t-shirt. Acceptably tall and, while not muscular, there was nothing overflowing where it shouldn’t be. Short brown hair, ironic smile and unpolished brown shoes.
‘Nice outfit,’ he commented as the door opened.
‘Thanks,’ she curtseyed. Behind her stretched a cavernous kitchen, cathedral-like with its hanging air and neat, rectangular tiles of light draped across the floor from the tall windows. All cupboards and appliances were neatly lined up against one wall and a few stuffed bookshelves sprawled out from a corner. A wide corridor led off into shadows and there was a small door in the far corner.
A wooden table, the altar, was covered in the washed up detritus of a long gone party. She walked over to it, flicked open a slightly crumpled fag packet and, seeing a lone cigarette that had so far escaped its destiny, drew it out and stuck it in her lips. She swung round, ‘Tom, right? Carrie’s brother.’
‘Right, and you’re Alice?’
Alice shrugged agreement as she lit the fag.
‘This place is huge,’ Tom leant against the doorframe and slowly surveyed the panorama.
‘It used to be a warehouse.’
‘What type?’
Alice took a long drag before replying, ‘the type that stored things.’
Tom laughed, ‘no shit. Is my sister around?’
‘She’s out.’
‘Out? She could at least have been here to welcome her favourite and only brother.’
‘Why? We’re hooking up later,’ Alice leisurely looked Tom up and down, ‘are you coming in or what?’
Tom blushed at how bashful he must have looked hovering by the door. He entered, flicked the door shut without looking back, and strode over to the table. Sitting down in a chair, he lounged back and rubbed his face with his hands. ‘Man it’s been a hell of a day. You haven’t got a spare one of those have you? Mine are in the car.’
Alice picked up a fag packet and rattled it. Hearing muffled shuffling from inside she tossed the packet at Tom, ‘help yourself.’
He took out a cigarette and lit it from one of the discarded lighters on the table. Alice sat down opposite him. She crossed her legs, bobbing her dangling boot gently up and down.
Tom’s gaze drifted to it.
She stopped and looked Tom directly in the eye.
He glanced up and caught her gaze, averting his eyes for a moment before recovering, looking straight back at her.
‘So?’
‘So indeed.’
There were a hundred questions about the flat he could ask, about her, about flatmates. Yet it seemed, all of a sudden, that to say anything obvious would be boring, an admission of dullness, defeat even. He needed something random yet relevant and cool. He desperately rummaged through his memory for an acceptable opening. Was she thinking the same?
‘You own a car?’ Alice asked.
‘Mum’s. I have to return it. Do you?’
‘Can’t drive. I’d be terrible anyway, mow down school children by the class.’ Tom laughed while Alice flicked her ash into a mug, ‘besides you can’t drink, so where’s the fun in that?’
‘Right.’
Another pause. Tom forced himself to relax, inter-locking his hands behind his head and purposefully looking casually around the room, taking his time. He looked at the shelves in the corner but couldn’t make out anything worth commenting on. A set of music decks stood in another corner, attached to hefty speakers. He looked at the cupboards, which had words and pictures scrawled across them. One had a photo of a schoolgirl in uniform, another ‘Suggs’ with a scrawled ‘l’ between the ‘S’ and the ‘u’. Tom suddenly realised he was craning his neck round unnaturally and turned back to Alice, his hands dropping from behind his head. He stubbed out his fag.
‘So what do you…,’ he began, but was thankfully cut off before the sterility of the question revealed itself.
‘…do you want to see your room?’
‘Sure.’ Of course. Why hadn’t he asked that?
Alice got up, leading the way out of the kitchen and down the long, windowless corridor. The walls were adorned with paintings, odd sculptures and what seemed like bits of rubbish that had been pulled from the tip. They passed a couple of doors.
‘Nice art,’ he commented.
‘That one’s mine.’ She pointed to a rag doll dressed up like a dominatrix that was holding up a whip, then flicked a switch on the wall and the whip lit up.
‘A lamp, cool.’
‘I know. Suggs did the electrics, we’ve got a few more around.’
She walked through an open door and turned on the light, ‘here it is.’
It was big, far larger than his university hovels. A few empty cardboard boxes lay strewn on the floor and the walls were covered in streaks of blue tack with the occasional nail piercing out. The only furniture was the bed, raised up above their heads on tall stilts but still far below the dizzying ceiling, a ladder leaning against it for access. A limp rag of cloth hung across the tall window. The sordid loneliness of an abandoned room, thought Tom.
‘It’s gigantic.’
‘Yes it is.’
Tom took a leisurely turn about the room, looking around it slowly as though through examination it would reveal itself to be more than the large box with a bed that it seemed at first glance. He even took hold of one of the bed stilts and pushed it, testing its firmness like a builder weighing up a job. It creaked in pain. At the window he stopped and pulled back the cloth. The view was an endless tessellation of dirty yellow brick rectangles - another warehouse built just far enough away to allow Victorian cart to run between them rather than for any considerations about the view. Looking up he could see past the roof to the fading blue sky beyond. To endless freedom, he thought, then wondered if the reality of that was as good as it sounded.
Snapping himself out of his thoughts, he turned around and pointed at the boxes, ‘whose are those?’
Alice shrugged, ‘rubbish I guess. I’ll show you the toilet.’
They began walking back down the corridor.
‘So how long have you been here?’
‘Dunno, about a year or something.’
Alice skipped into a spin which ended with her back draped against the wall, arms above her head and cigarette hanging at a jaunty angle out of her mouth.
‘Do you like the photo?’ she asked, her fag bobbing up and down as she spoke.
Tom examined the massive black and white photograph she was leaning against that extended up half the wall, no mean feat, and spread expansively on either side. He realised it was an extreme close up of part of a neck, a shoulder and an extended arm.
‘Is it you?’
‘In exactly this pose.’
‘Great.’
‘Tanya did it.’
Alice continued back to the kitchen and Tom followed behind. From this view he only now realised how short she was. ‘Stocky’ came to mind, cruel as the word was, though he didn’t mean it cruelly. In fact he had been attracted to her the moment he had laid eyes on her. That sultry, half-friendly, half-cold manner had weaved its web to perfection, leaving him completely unsure as to what she thought of him. He shouldn’t start messing around with housemates anyway, he told himself, he had been alive long enough to know that many a happy household had been dashed on the rocks for the sake of getting a few rocks off.
He suddenly became conscious that he was walking behind her, as though a subordinate or a slave. Why was he doing so? He thought it was because some part of him felt he was being tested on how cool he was and he was failing. That he was being exposed as a novice and his original pretence at being able to play the game was being smitherened. He had fallen behind out of shame, his body accepting defeat even as his mind was still racing to try and pretend to be cool.
But that was only one part of him, one that had momentarily gained the upper hand. Another part thought it was all ridiculous and just his mind playing games. That he was being stupid and should act like an adult. This part banished the other back to the dungeons where he tried to keep it and he jogged a few steps to catch up with Alice as they walked into the kitchen. Where were the dungeons of his mind, he thought? The Cerebellum? The Spinal Column? Anywhere as long as there were enough cells on guard around the perpetrator?
They walked through to the small door in the corner which led to a pokey bathroom draped in damp towels, half full plastic bottles and empty toilet rolls. Pubes ranged far and wide like bacteria under a microscope.
‘It’s a pigsty. Nothing to do with me.’
Alice retreated to the kitchen and Tom followed soon after. He watched her go over to a cupboard scrawled with a huge ‘A’, and take out a bottle. She rinsed out a couple of glasses and poured small measures into them.
‘Down in one,’ came the order along with the glass.
‘Down in one,’ came the confident reply as Tom took the glass and, without pausing, knocked its contents back. Vodka. Tom hated vodka. He hated neat vodka even more.
‘Just what I needed,’ he winced, and slammed the glass down on the side.
‘Another?’
‘Sure. Then I should grab my stuff from the car.’