“Why I’m being like this?” he said, his voice finally cracking. “These last few months have been awful. I’m still trying to forgive you for that shit you pulled at my mum’s birthday, for a start. But, Queenie, this whole relationship, you’ve refused to talk to me.”
My breath caught in my throat. I didn’t know he’d felt like this, and I certainly hadn’t expected him to vocalize it.
“You never tell me what’s wrong,” he continued. “Ever! And you’d close off, you’d cry and lock yourself in the bathroom while I sat on the floor outside telling you I was there if you wanted to talk, but you never did. You’ve pushed me away for so much of this relationship.”
“It’s my stuff!” I defended myself.
“We’ve all got stuff, Queenie,” Tom shouted. “And I’ve tried with yours, I really have.”
“Tom,” I said quietly. “However shit I’ve been, you’ve always forgiven me.”
“Yeah, I have.” He looked at his feet. “But I don’t know if I can do it anymore.”
* * *
That night, we fell asleep in the same bed, me nestled into Tom’s back. When I woke up at dawn, he was gone. There was a mug of cold tea next to me on the bedside table, the Q looking back at me cruelly.
chapter
TWO
INSTEAD OF HELPING with the move, I watched Leigh from work and Eardley, family friend and the world’s smallest mover, carry what looked like hundreds of boxes and IKEA bags full of books, trinkets, and clothes into my new house.
My new lodgings weren’t ideal. At ￡750 a month, it was the cheapest room I could find in Brixton, in a house built in the Victorian era and clearly never taken care of since then. When I’d arrived to see it, it was crumbling from the outside, with weeds and ivy creeping across the door and filling the front garden. I didn’t and still don’t know if some dead thing is dwelling in there, but there was definitely a smell emanating from some unknown and unseen object.
When I’d stepped into the house, there was another smell that hit me—unsurprisingly, not a good one. Although brown, beige, and outdated in design, the kitchen—apart from the damp patches—seemed perfectly fine, though I don’t imagine I’ll cook in it, as did the living room, though I know I can’t see myself sitting on the mustard-yellow velvet sofas.
“Only this to go,” Eardley said in a strong Yorkshire accent that seemed incongruous with his dark-brown skin and gold teeth as he thumped my mum’s old dressing table. The chipped, stained antique was the most awkward piece of furniture I’d ever owned and made moving house a bother, but I still lugged it around with me everywhere I went. I used to watch my mum getting ready in front of it for hours. I’d sit on the bed behind her and stare as she took rollers out of her hair and pinned it up expertly with small, delicate hands, and I’d move even closer to watch as she applied various lotions and potions that I was too young to understand, and still don’t really understand now.
Eardley’s bald head glistened with sweat as he put his hands on his hips and stretched from side to side. He wiped his forehead on the sleeve of his blue overalls.
“Just need a second, my back feels like it’s going to go!” Eardley was always so cheerful despite the extreme circumstances and short notices I threw at him, but small parts of me die every time I watch him bang that dressing table on all of the floor and wall surfaces he possibly can.
“Can we just get this bit over and done with, please?” Leigh said, running his hands through his dyed blond hair. He looked up to the sky, extending his neck to catch the passing breeze. The sun made his green eyes glisten. “My skin is the perfect color for my foundation and if I stay out in the sun I’ll get darker. It won’t match, Eardley,” Leigh pleaded.
“Okay, let’s get back to it!” Eardley said, stretching his wiry frame from side to side. “I’m sure my back’ll be fine.”
I left Eardley and Leigh to get on with the whole bother of carrying things into the house and made my way up to the bedroom. It was darker, dimmer, and smaller than I’d remembered. Patches of mold lurked in all four corners of the room; the garden-facing window was small and dirty; the carpets were cheap and beige, much like the rest of the house; and the yellow walls were stained and cracked.
Three seconds later, Leigh came into my new bedroom while I was observing one of the many damp patches. Had they grown since I first came here?
“Are you going to that party tomorrow?” Leigh asked, reclining on a pile of boxes.
“Oh God, which party?” I asked, standing on a box to get closer to the damp patch. I couldn’t retain any plans recently.
“James,” Leigh said. I stared back at him.
“Fran’s boyfriend? Darcy’s friend Fran from school? Invited us last week?”
“Oh, I hate those parties.” When Darcy first started inviting me to these parties, I’d thought it was for a social experiment or hidden-camera show, like “put a black person in Made in Chelsea and see what happens,” but ultimately these gatherings really are as simple as “posh people and me.”
“Nobody goes to parties because they like them,” Leigh said. “We go either because we want to show everyone else there that we’re better than them, or because we want to distract ourselves.”
“And which one are you?”
“The former. But you, dear heart, are the latter, and you need to take your mind off Tom and this breakup—sorry, break, whatever you’re calling it.” Leigh sighed impatiently.
“Fair,” I said, immediately rummaging through bags to find something to wear. “You’ll be there, though, right?” I asked, cringing at my neediness. I’d only been away from Tom a day.
“I’ll see if I can pop in after Don’s gig. I’m making no promises, though, I’ll probably be off my face,” Leigh said, standing up and winking at his reflection in the smudged window.
* * *
I was as surprised as the next person that I’d moved into a house with strangers from the Internet. The prospect itself filled me with dread, fear, and a healthy amount of disgust, but ￡21K a year wasn’t going to get me anything bigger than someone’s garage space.
The housemates themselves didn’t seem awful, but I felt very nervous at the prospect of living with white people, because I know that my standards of inherited Caribbean cleanliness are bordering on clinical OCD levels.
I grew up watching my grandmother wash bottles, cartons, everything, before they were allowed to go into the fridge, and she’d clothesline you if you walked your shoes through the house.
Living with Tom didn’t count because I’d trained him up and we’d had some clean-house trial runs when we stayed at his family holiday home in Turkey that almost, but didn’t quite, break us.
I’d been shown around my new house by my prospective housemates: a boy, Rupert, twenty-nine, a little shorter than me and markedly angry about it, didn’t make eye contact; in essence, little more than a posh boy with a beard and those deck shoes and no socks. Even at the end of October.
The girl, or woman, Nell, is thirty-five, works in a deli, and wears her short blond hair in high bunches. She is the nicer of the two, and has already admitted that she has a drinking problem, demonstrated when she opened the door to me with an XL glass of white wine in her hand at 11:30 a.m.
As bad as that was, it was the best of some very, very bad housing situations. How do seven people live together and share only two bathrooms? was my first question when I saw room number one in Stockwell, on the top floor of a narrow four-story house. All four stories were a mess, which I suppose is unavoidable when seven are squashed into a five-bedroom property that is shoddily converted into more rooms with, in one case, a sheet dividing one large room in two.
I had to step over at least ten bikes on the way in, and the kitchen was so cluttered that I could have sworn whoever lived there was playing crockery Jenga.