I gasped myself awake and sat up, heart pounding. The doorbell was ringing. I looked at my phone: 2 a.m.
No response from Rupert or Nell—they must still be out. I waited for the night caller to go away. After a few minutes, they stopped ringing the bell. I turned my pillow over and tried to go back to sleep. I was almost fully submerged when the bell started going again.
I crept out of my room and down the stairs slowly, my heart beating out of my chest. I was certainly testing its endurance tonight. Obviously weaponless, I pressed myself against the front door and looked through the peephole, guessing that my plan of attack would be to scream as loud as I could if they kicked the door down. Nobody was there.
As if in a horror film, a face flashed up. Fucking Guy. I opened the front door. “What are you doing?” I hissed, blocking him from entering.
“You ain’t go’ any time for me anymore an’ I’on like it,” he slurred, putting his hand on my shoulder. “You don’t wan’ sex anymore an’ thas crap for me because our sex is absolutely cracking.” He moved his hand across my face and I pulled myself out of his reach. “You see? You used to love my touch.”
His head lolled forward and he leaned against the doorframe. I saw a porch light go on across the road as the angry Turkish woman opposite opened her front door.
“Go away, Guy!” I hissed.
“Where’m I goin’ away to?”
“To your house? Where you live?”
“I’on know my postcode. I’on know where my keys are. So I’ve come to see you!” he shouted. “I’ll tell you what—I’ll sleep on the doorstep, shall I?”
“Hey, you!” the woman across the road shouted back. “Stop making the noise!”
“Sorry!” I whispered as loudly as possible. “Fine, come inside.” I growled, pulling Guy in and closing the door behind him. I walked to the kitchen and he stumbled after me, throwing himself into a dining chair as I poured him a glass of water. I handed it to him and watched him down it and slam the empty glass on the table.
“Guy!” I said, smacking at his clumsy hands as he tried to grab at my bottom. “You need to sleep.” I stood behind him and guided him into the living room. He flopped onto one of the sofas and lay on his back.
“?’Member when we fucked here? You loved it. Your big black arse was bouncin’ up an’ down an’ up—hey, hey, where you going?” Guy made one final grab for me as I dropped a blanket on him and turned to walk out of the room.
“I’m going to bed,” I said, ignoring his comment and the reminder that I’d conceded to his request of sofa sex just to stop him from constantly asking.
“Shhh, babe, don’t be cranky. You’re so gorgeous even in your head-wrap thing. Why’on I come up with you? You missed me surely? Missed this, yeah?” He gestured at his lap sloppily. I turned the light off.
“I’m getting up early, my friend Cassandra is coming round for breakfast. Besides, no. No more sex.”
“No Cassandra. I don’t want Cassandra.”
“Good night, Guy. DO NOT come up.” I went back to the kitchen, filled Guy’s empty glass, and crept into the living room. He’d already started to snore. I put the glass on the table by his head, then worried that he’d fall off the sofa and crack his head on the table, so tried to move it across the room silently. I dropped it on its side and froze. I looked over. He continued to snore.
I’d finally got off to sleep around three-thirty, when my bedroom door opened. “It’s too cold down there, I can’t sleep.” Guy, almost naked but for his boxers, climbed into my bed.
“Are you joking?” I hissed at him. “You can’t sleep? I’ve been hearing your snoring through the floor!” He moved closer and pressed himself into me. He slid my T-shirt sleeve up and kissed my neck. “And when did you take your clothes off? Why are all your clothes off?” I slid away.
“Shhh, stop talking,” he said in response.
“Guy. No.” I turned to face him. The moonlight shone on his face. “If you have to stay in here, please, can you just go to sleep? I’m up early. I don’t want to have sex with you,” I said in my sternest voice. “That is my final word. If you push it again, I’ll order you an Uber home. And I’ll go through your phone and find your postcode.”
“Fine. Spoilsport.” He hiccupped, turned away from me, and began to snore 0.3 seconds later.
* * *
I’ve no idea how I got to sleep, but I woke up teetering off the edge of my bed to the sound of the doorbell. Again. I looked over at the sleeper who had taken over most of my bed. Guy was still out cold. I pulled a sweater on and went downstairs.
“Sorry, I’m not prepared for you at all,” I said as Cassandra stepped into the hallway and shook rain off her umbrella and onto my legs.
“Shall we go out instead?” Cassandra suggested, looking me up and down. “I don’t like the smell of this place. Plus, it’ll be nice for you to get fresh air. You look knackered. Those bags!” She reached out and patted the area under my eyes.
“Thanks, Cassandra. Always thinking of me, aren’t you?” I smiled, wiping water from my shins. I’m sure she used to say some nice things to me.
“I am, actually. I transferred another hundred pounds to you yesterday because I knew that if we went out to eat, you’d ask me for money.”
“I will pay you back, and soon,” I promised.
“It’s my dad’s money, really. He wouldn’t mind if he knew.”
“Thanks, Cassandra.” I wondered why I wasn’t lucky enough to have a father like Jacob. “I’ve got company,” I said quietly, leading her down the hallway. “Come into the kitchen, I don’t want to wake him up.”
“Oh my God, another one? How many is it now?” Cassandra snorted.
It was too early for this. “There you go with the judgment again!” I sighed. “That’s not a very feminist question. Besides, it’s not like that.” I poured Cassandra a glass of water. “It’s this inconsequential man that I used to sleep with loads, the Welsh one. I must have mentioned him?” I shrugged. “I actually got bored of sleeping with him because the sex was so rough, and unconnected. I mean, it was quite good, but just making me feel bad. Like everything else at the moment,” I confessed, hopeful that she’d pick up on it and ask what was wrong. She didn’t. “Anyway, last night he turned up off his face at two in the morning. He’d been at the White Horse and was so battered he didn’t know where he lived.”
“That’s a coincidence—” Cassandra started.
“Hold on, let me just run upstairs and get ready. I can’t stop thinking about croissants.”
I got dressed silently as Guy continued to sleep soundly, a gigantic human starfish stretched to all four corners of my entire bed now that I wasn’t occupying a sliver of it. I left him a note telling him to let himself out the minute he woke up; then Cassandra and I made our way to BE/AN, another of Brixton’s newest and more minimalist coffee shops. When we got there and I saw how full it was of white middle-class young people with MacBook Airs, I suggested that we go somewhere that was run by Brixton locals. “You mean black people, don’t you?” Cassandra asked flatly.
“I do, yes,” I said, leading her to the market. As we walked, she talked and I listened as she told me that she’d applied to do a master’s in psychiatry. I wondered if she’d use me as a case study. We found a coffee and cake stall run by an old Jamaican woman in a black, green, and yellow bandanna.
“Black enough for you?” Cassandra asked.
“Yes.” I flashed a mocking smile. “It is.”