It’s hard to march on thin, hallway carpet in bare feet. It’s even harder to do it in the sure and certain knowledge that perfect strangers are watching your bare and naked arse doing it. But I did my best. The corridor lights were still off, but there was now enough ambient light from other rooms and the skylight overhead. No need to nick a candle now, I thought grimly, just get in there, get my clothes, fuck the hell off out of here. Questions can be answered later, right now all I want to do is be dressed and heading for home.

Steeling myself for a second in front of the threshold, I pushed the door open decisively and started casting around immediately for my clothes. The girl in the bed seemed to be a remarkably heavy sleeper. Maybe I could just get dressed and out and...

“Sandra! Oi, what the fuck are you doing?! Sandra!”

My friend in the light brown silk was feeling concerned that I was about to nakedly murder her friend, presumably.

“Sandra!“

I turned and, irrationally angry by this stage, rammed the door closed, flicking the light switch as I did so.

“Wsgfl?”

“Hi Sandra,” I said lightly, a mocking edge to my voice. “I’m looking for my clothes.”

“Whaaa?“

Jesus shit. I turned impatiently and, glory be, found them piled fairly neatly near the foot of the bed. I started ramming my legs into my jeans, finding the texture curiously rough and comforting, the weight lending its realness to me. It is impossible to put on socks quickly, while standing up, with any dignity. No, really it is. So fuck dignity, accuracy would do. My knickers were nowhere to be seen, but my black, front-fastening bra was lying over the toe of the right boot.

I risked a look at the woman while pulling on my shirt. Christ, the dark-blue heavy silk one. I’d been out to impress, clearly. Fuck. She was staring, pale-faced and with rumpled dark hair silkily in all directions. Her eyes were still screwed up against the light and the duvet was hauled up under one armpit and over one shoulder.

And she was absolutely drop-dead gorgeous.

I stared for four seconds. Then pushed into my boots, bent rapidly to the laces and hauled my jacket off the floor. I stood up and swept it onto my arms in that smooth movement that only years of wearing that jacket brings. Damn I like that jacket. I was muttering “It’s a far, far better thing I do now...”

“What?”

“Jesus.” I turned without looking at her face and raced to the door. Then raced back, picked up my black army bag and hurled the strap over my head and across my chest. Then I was out of that door.

The dark-skinned girl was still there, but had retreated five yards down the corridor. Her body posture had changed and now she just looked mostly embarrassed. Yes, there was defensiveness and a hint of some slightly more aggressive emotion, but mostly she was sagging, her body twisted slightly with the torture of avoiding looking into the face someone who had been shagging her flatmate. God, did she even know she... Sandra, remember? was... fuck, part of me was aching to turn the shaking in my belly to laughter. My clothes in her room showed an incontrovertible right to be there, along with the fact that, as everyone knows, dykes have right of way! Had I suddenly sprouted a wheelchair, I couldn’t have become less interrogable.

Hah. There’s two ways to go in a scenario like this: imperious or charming. I chose the latter.

“Sorry about that earlier.”

“That’s all right,” she muttered.

“I don’t suppose you could show me where the front door is?”

“Sure.” Golly, she was everso quiet now.

Back past the kitchen in absolute silence, and I spotted the white girl chewing her nails, bum perched against the greasy table, lights off again but candles still lit. She hunched even further into herself as we passed. We came to a heavy fire door (fire door?! Where the fuck were we?), which she drew open, and then gestured to the dark, old-fashioned wooden flight of stairs.

“Down the stairs and it’s straight ahead,” she said curtly, and let the door slump shut behind me as soon as I was through.

Jesus-fucking-shit-Christ, I kept muttering to myself down the stairs. What in the name of buggery-fuck is going on here and where the arse am I? In fact, I had a fair idea about the second part of that question, and was starting to formulate some theories, along with the vague hope that it was the closer of the two most likely.

And so, I’ve crossed the downstairs hallway, I’ve started to open the front door and I’m about to get out of this darkened house of gorgeous-but-crazy, surly young women, I’m about to get some fresh air and start heading from home, when God decides to piss on me yet again.

* * *

“What happened?”

“Guess.”

“What?!”

“It’s the kind of thing you’d say.”

“Which suddenly makes it all right for any sane person to say?”

Glare.

“Oh, okay then! Er, it was raining.”

“No.”

“The door was locked.”

“No.”

“Naked vagina girl comes running down the stairs after you and this story gets less... edgy... and more fruity.”

“No.”

“Argh, a mad axe-murderer.”

“Closer.”

“A shot rings out!” P clasps hand to chest. “And you’re flung to the ground by a rugged stranger who catches the bullet in his chest, sinks to the ground besides you and dies in your arms, eyes locked with yours, the last word on his lips ‘Angeline...‘.”

“Angeline?!”

“No?”

“No.”

“Fuck it, I dunno, the door slams and everyone wakes up and the house security person comes running.”

“It wasn’t that posh a place.”

“Oh for Jesus’ sake what then?”

“Gretchen rang.”

Jaw slackened, P’s voice sinks to a low, serious “No...”

“Yes.”

* * *