When she’s sure he’s gone, she walks a circuit of the lounge, turning off the lamps. To give him credit, he was stopped short by her flat – ‘Whoa, this is where you live?’ – but his interest was short-lived and he soon recommenced his monologue. Perhaps, now she comes to think of it, she slept with him to shut him up.
The walls of the lounge are Prussian blue. The shelving on which the television stands is Fifties G-Plan in walnut. Her sofa is a circular design in brown corduroy. Two olive-green velvet wing chairs sit to each side of it and beside one is a yellow domed Seventies floor lamp, which she has just switched off at the plug because the switch is bust. The décor is a homage to mid-century modern, like a film set, with every detail of a piece. The scene for a post-ironic East German comedy perhaps, or Abigail’s Party; a place absolutely bursting with taste of a charismatic kind, all of it chosen by the flat’s previous owners. Manon bought the lot – furniture, lamps, and all – together with the property itself, from a couple who were going abroad to ‘start afresh’. At least, that’s what the man had said. ‘We just want to shed, you know?’ To which Manon replied, ‘Shed away. I’ll take the lot.’ And his girlfriend looked around her, swallowing down her tears. She told Manon how she’d collected all of it, lovingly, on eBay. ‘Still, fresh start,’ she said.
Manon makes her way to the bedroom, which at the point of sale was even more starkly dramatic: dark navy walls with white-painted floorboards and shutters; a whole bank of white wardrobes, handle-less and disappearing into themselves. You had to do a Marcel Marceau impression to discover the pressure points at which to open them.
The previous owners had a minimalist mattress on the floor and a dishevelled white duvet. Under Manon’s tenure, however, this room has lost much of its allure: books stacked by the bed, covered with a film of dust; a cloudy glass of water; wires trailing the floor from her police radio to the plug, and among them grey fluff and human hair, coiling like DNA. Her motley collection of shoes makes opening the cupboards additionally tricky. She kicks at a discarded pair of pants on the floor, rolled about themselves like a croissant, throws off her dressing gown (100 per cent polyester, keep away from fire and flame) and retrieves, from under the bed-clothes in which he has incongruously lain, her flannelette nightie.
Up close he smelt musty. And vaguely sweet. But above all, foreign. Was this her experiment – bringing him close, out of the world of strangers? Was she trying him out? Or smelling him out, as if intimacy might transform him into something less ordinary? People who know her – well, Bryony mainly – disapprove of her emotional ‘immaturity’, but the fact is human beings are different up close. You find out more through smell and touch than any chat about newts or shopping trollies. She becomes her mammalian self, using her senses to choose a mate. She’s read somewhere that smell is the most efficient way of selecting from the gene pool to ensure the best immune system in offspring. So she puts out on the first date! She’s a scientist at the mating frontline.
In her darker moments – and she can feel their approach even now – she wonders if she is simply filling an awkward gap in the conversation. Instead of a ghastly shuffling of feet and ‘well, that was nice, but we should probably leave it there’, she forces the moment to its crisis. It’s like running yourself over to avoid shaking hands.
In the bathroom, she picks up her toothbrush and lays along it a slug of toothpaste, watching herself in the mirror as she brushes. Here is the flaw in her argument: the sex was pretty much a reflection of the night’s conversation: all newts and shopping trollies and a definite lack of tumultuous waterfalls or even babbling brooks, if you wanted to pursue the waterways analogy.