My Best Friend Has Issues

by Laura Marney

  ‘Alison,’ Chloe said quietly, ‘didn’t your mother tell you it’s rude to stare?’

  ‘Sorry. Excuse me,’ I said and went to the en suite bathroom to wash my face. I felt at ease with the naked man, and he wasn’t bothered, but I wasn’t so wasted I didn’t realise how bizarre this situation was. Even if Chloe was up for it, one of us should have our wits about us.

  I sluiced my face repeatedly with cold water and then spent time pushing my eyeliner and mascara back into a tidy line under my eye. I was engrossed in this for three or four minutes, maybe more. Dear Lisa and Lauren, in the poshest hotel on the planet. Why were you so horrible to me? Are you just cruel or do I deserve it? Maybe I do. Lauren, I have to be the one to tell you that your hair is quite nice and I’m sorry, but it’s just hair and doesn’t give you the right to bully people. Whoops, truth drug alert! There is a naked man in the room and the bath towels are unbelievably fluffy.

  ‘Hey!’ I yelled. ‘Have you checked out how fluffy these towels are?’ I asked as I stuck my head round the bathroom door.

  The Silver Fox was down on one bended knee, genuflecting between Chloe’s legs. Her top was pulled up and he was squeezing her right breast. Chloe was moaning. He had his back to me. I could see his brown sac hanging between his legs, dark against his white leg.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’ll wait downstairs.’

  I turned to leave the room and Chloe pushed the guy away.

  ‘No. Alison, don’t go.’

  ‘Oh but…’

  She pulled me into the bathroom, locked the door and whispered fiercely into my face.

  ‘What are you doing? I’m about to get fucked and I need you here.’

  ‘Why? D’you think he’s dangerous?’

  ‘No. Yes. He might be dangerous.’

  ‘Well come on, let’s just leave right now.’

  ‘I don’t want to leave, I want fucked.’

  ‘Chloe, why d’you sleep with all these guys? Did your boyfriend cheat? Are you a scorned woman, is that it?’

  Chloe shook her head and laughed. ‘You come out with the craziest things at the most inappropriate times. And no, he didn’t, and I’m not. I broke up with him.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  ‘He was cute. Now…’

  ‘So how come you broke up with him then?’

  ‘He was just a kid. He was only interested in partying with his stupid friends. I was bored. Now can we get back to this party, please? The guy’s naked, he’s gonna go off the boil. Come on, let’s have some fun. He’ll fuck you too, if you want. He knows what he’s doing.’

  I shook my head. ‘Nah, you’re all right, I’ll leave it. I’m not giving my virginity away to a stranger.’

  ‘Your virginity?’

  ‘Shit,’ I giggled.

  ‘You’re a fucking virgin?’

  ‘No. A fucking virgin would be an oxymoron.’

  ‘Say what?’

  Embarrassed, my response was a sheepish smirk. ‘I’m more of a non-fucking virgin. A virgin yet to be fucked.’

  ‘So that’s why you never get it on with anyone, Jeez!’ Chloe shook her head. ‘Now she tells me. Okay, whatever. But stay with me, please?’

  ‘How about if I wait here?’ I bargained. ‘Then I’d be on hand if anything kicks off but I wouldn’t be in your way.’

  ‘But I need someone to watch, you know it helps get me off.’

  Sometimes Chloe and I just went out to dinner and a quiet stroll around the city. On those nights we weren’t interested, but other times we went out on a specific mission: to find boys, and shag them.

  All those teenage years when I sat in the house watching telly and eating. All those wasted years when I was a sexless blob, a lump of a lassie no boy would look at, I was going to make up for it now, and then some. Here was the chance I’d always fantasised about, and I was going to grab it with both hands. My time had finally arrived, and I was about to get dirrrty.

  I always began the evening full of bravado, up for it, gagging for it, but once Chloe and I had located and contained our prey, it was a different story. Like the night with Ewan, my nerve deserted me. I couldn’t help it, as the night wore on my mindset gradually moved away from rampant reckless sex on the beach or hot horny humping in a hotel room. Instead, slowly but surely, my mindset drifted towards some unwashed migrant worker rubbing their pungent bits against mine. I wanted to be dirrrty, I really did, but I always ended up worrying about hygiene.

  It wasn’t fair to ruin Chloe’s night with my lacklustre lack of lust so every time we ended up in a group sex scenario I’d use avoidance tactics: I acted drunk and sneered aggressively, I blew thick smoke from joints to keep the poor confused boy away, once I even pretended to pass out.

  But now that Chloe knew my dark secret I didn’t have to pretend any more. Now I could relax, sit back and watch the show. While I watched her get jiggy with this sweaty, silver-haired stranger, I tried to observe with a scientific eye. This would be research for my own future encounters.

  There was something bestial about it. I stood over the bed watching them. The man was on top between her legs, her knees wide. He wasn’t lying on her, he was at arms length, the point of contact was where their groins met. Chloe dug her nails into his bum cheeks, he occasionally clutched her breasts in a way that looked painful. From where I was standing I couldn’t see much of the in and out, only his bum thrusting forward at her. Chloe kept her eyes closed and squealed and moaned. When the squealing increased in pitch and frequency she opened her eyes and reached her hand out for me.

  ‘You’re not going to put it anywhere warm and sweaty, are you?’ I asked.

  She shook her head. The Silver Fox ignored me. Tentatively I gave her my hand but she only held on and squeezed. She closed her eyes again and moaned. A pink blush flushed across her chest and travelled to her face. A second or two later the guy seemed to go into spasms, his face contorting as he pushed at her in dying waves, his damp grey hair falling over his face. I liked watching his arse pushing and grinding. It was beautiful.

  In refusing the undoubted skill and know-how of the Silver Fox I’d perhaps been a little hasty. Why deny myself such obvious pleasure? At the moment of their orgasm, I’d felt a fluttering. I wanted the Silver Fox to do to me what he’d just done to Chloe.

  It was a freezing cold night. My breath was steaming in front of my face. I tried to make smoke rings with my breath but it didn’t work with frozen breath. I heard the noise ahead and walked towards it. I wasn’t scared, it sounded cheerful and friendly, like a dog, a puppy.

  I could hardly see a thing in the thick mist. I walked with my hand out in front of me. I didn’t want to walk into a tree and give myself a black eye. ‘Here boy!’ I called. The noise got louder but no clearer. It sounded more and more like animals snuffling, and in a way it was.

  They were standing against a big tree. He had his hands on her fat white thighs. She had her arms round his neck. They had loads of clothes on, bunched up round their necks and piled round their ankles but their middle bits and bums were bare. They must have been cold.

  I stayed still. They hadn’t seen me.

  ‘C’mon baby.’

  His white backside was clenching and unclenching, pushing forward, pulling back, like he was dancing. His head was facing into the tree; it looked like he was speaking to the tree. They were both swearing.

  ‘Oh my love. Fuck me, my love, oof, fuck me.’

  ‘Oof, I’m fucking you, oof, oof, I’m fucking you.’

  One of her legs was hooked around him and the other was slightly bent out at the knee. Her breasts took up all of her chest, stretching down towards her waist. When he bumped forward his belly connected with them and made a slapping noise. They were grunting like pigs. That’s what they were, filthy pigs.

  They couldn’t see me.

  I took the long way round. Big soft steps. Silent breathing, until I was behind them, behind their tree, facing him. His eyes were shut, hi
s face squashed, ugly. He didn’t see me move towards him.

  ‘Oof.’

  I had a nobbly grey twig in my hand. It was sharp. He opened his eyes and saw me and closed them again quickly. But not quickly enough. He screamed. Surprised, frightened. And then he was pulling away from her, he was shoving her away and bending over. She was pulling her clothes up and around her, putting her hand on his shoulder, looking into his face, and screaming. He put his hand in front of his face.

  Chapter 26

  There were five dirty glasses on the bedside cabinet on Chloe’s side of the bed. I tried not to think about them or look too closely at the contents. Orange juice had crystallised up the sides on some of them or there were grey-green islands of mould floating in what would have been iced coffee. Luckily the one she’d knocked over only had water in it, but the glass smashed on the ceramic floor into jaggy peaks.

  ‘Jesus!’ Chloe yelled, and then stormed off and locked the bathroom door. I heard her run a bath.

  I shook my head and smiled. It was just like her to be so outraged. She was the one who’d left the glasses stacked up. She was the one who’d knocked it over. I said nothing but I was secretly satisfied, maybe now she’d clear the rest of them away. Although it was disgusting, I’d left them there to see how many accumulated before Chloe did something about it.

  Apart from hanging up my clothes the day I moved in, Chloe didn’t do housekeeping. She was not domesticated. I wasn’t much better but Chloe’s slobbishness was awe-inspiring.

  Neither of us had any interest in cooking. The most we did was open a packet. We snacked on cartons of gazpacho, bread, cheese, olives, chorizo, crunchy pickled garlic, freshly squeezed orange juice, yoghurt and crisps. When the munchies hit us around midnight I’d pop out and bring back falafel, kebabs or churros and chocolate. Some days we’d go out for a Menu Del Dia. We’d pick at the food and guzzle red wine, gaseosa and coffee. The one and only time I cooked, as a treat and to let Chloe try it, I made us both a crisps and fish finger sandwich. She didn’t like it. She said the weather was too hot for greasy food and complained that the fishy smell made her feel sick.

  She wasn’t much for cleaning either. I had taken over watering the maria, feeding the dogs, removing their poo, sweeping up the dead roaches and putting down new powder. It was a small step to take on the basic household chores. Unlike her I had a terror of cockroaches and made a point of keeping at least the floor and kitchen surfaces clean.

  Every day we saw more cockroaches in the flat. It was getting so that I wouldn’t get out of bed when it was dark. I had to put the light on and wait while they scuttled into their hiding places. Chloe said it was only temporary, because it was August. The café on the ground floor next door to Josep’s had closed for vacation for the whole month. The café’s resident cockroach population was being starved out and was having to move upwards in search of food.

  ‘I can hardly believe they’d climb five storeys,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ said Chloe with a laugh in her voice.

  Her attitude to the roaches was different from mine. While I preferred to try to keep the place clean and prevent them from crawling all over us, Chloe enjoyed the hunt. Sometimes, while she was in the middle of doing something: painting or talking, she’d freeze. She’d have seen movement under the couch or the cooker and would lie in wait, crouching uncomfortably for as long as it took, twenty minutes, half an hour, until the cockroach emerged. Then she’d lay into it with a hammer or the heel of her shoe, mashing it to a paste. Once, when she happened to have a pallet knife in her hand, she decapitated the cockroach and watched, fascinated, while the headless part continued to writhe for a few moments.

  Outside on the pavement yellow powder was laid to keep them out, like garlic to keep vampires away, but it didn’t work. They were already in the building, climbing up through the cracks in the walls. The old lady who lived downstairs, Señora Garcia, knocked the door and gave me another tin of powder, ‘para las cucarachas’. It was much stronger and more effective than the organic stuff we’d been using. Chloe said it was poison and refused to touch it. This left me with sole responsibility for our roach problem.

  I would’ve thought that someone who had so many expensive clothes might be fastidious about grooming but Chloe rarely bothered. She was forever in the bath, but more as a leisure activity than for hygiene. She’d happily pull on a top that needed ironed or a skirt with the hem hanging down. Amongst other things, I’d blagged a freebie sewing kit from the Hotel Museo and offered to fix her hem, but she didn’t care.

  I regularly washed my clothes and when I did I always asked if she wanted anything put in the wash. She had no regular laundry system. A week and half after she came back from Berlin her rucksack had still not been unpacked. It was only when she was looking for something that she eventually hauled the sour-smelling clothes out the rucksack and left them thrown around the bedroom.

  ‘You’re not going to wear that top, are you?’ I once asked her as we were getting dressed to go out, ‘Juegita’s been lying on it all week. It stinks of dog. You’ll never cop off smelling like that.’

  ‘Are you kidding me?’ she said, ‘Guys love it. They’re beasts anyway.’

  The best one of all was one day, a particularly hot and humid day, we came back to the flat and as soon as we got in Chloe lifted her skirt and wheeched her pants off. She rolled them down her thighs as though they were on fire. The pants came off damp with sweat and rolled in a croissant shape.

  ‘Oh man, that feels soooo good,’ she laughed.

  Chloe dropped the pants where they fell and strode out on to the terrace where she lifted her skirt and wafted. I could only follow and watch in stunned admiration. The pants lay there until bedtime, until my nervousness about the cockroaches got the better of me.

  And it was clear Chloe wasn’t going to clear away the broken glass either. She stayed in the bath, singing. The roaches wouldn’t be interested in the glass, it might even put them off but it was still a health hazard; one of us was going to cut our feet. Even if I swept up the glass, that still left the problem of the other dirty glasses. I shivered when I thought of cockroaches coming so close to our bed.

  ‘It’s okay, Chloe, you can come out now,’ I shouted at the bathroom door.

  I could hear the hard edge in my voice, I knew Chloe would hear it too but I was too angry to care. While I fiercely scrubbed at the crusted-on orange juice I realised that if we were going to college together this would be the way of it: me chasing round cleaning up after her.

  ‘I’ve swept up the glass that YOU BROKE. I’ve washed the other disgustingly manky glasses that YOU LEFT.’

  ‘Oh Alison, you didn’t have to do that,’ she called sweetly as she ran the hot water and topped up the bath.

  I stood at the door bawling over the noise of the running water.

  ‘Who the fuck else was going to do it? You?’

  Chloe turned off the tap but otherwise there was no reply.

  I was stumped for words. I didn’t know what to do, there was nothing I could do. I heard her settle back in the bath with a satisfied sigh. ‘Sorry,’ she said, ‘I couldn’t hear you there, Alison, the water was running; what did you say?’

  I had two choices: kick the door in and slap her about the head, or get out of the flat for a while.

  Chapter 27

  Lisa and Lauren got off the bus jiggling and giggling. Chloe insisted we met them at the station. It was polite, she said. I wanted them to be blown away by how amazingly thin and fabulous I looked and spent hours drying my hair straight and doing my make-up. I was hoping Chloe might do me another of her makeovers but she was too busy planning the evening.

  She couldn’t find the restaurant in the phone book so she went down there when the place opened just to be sure of getting a table. I thought she’d book Taxidermista, a place on Plaza Real. I’d seen the queues standing outside for hours but she said, ‘no, better than that.’ She went around the corner and booked
Caracol, an old-fashioned tourist trap restaurant. A place with a rotisserie full of flaming chickens for a window. You couldn’t pass by on the narrow street without getting your face scorched.

  By the time she’d come back she’d laid out a full itinerary. ‘I’m thinking: we’ll walk them down to Barceloneta for a couple bottles of fizz at Champaneria, back up to Gotic, bottle of panther’s milk at Josep’s, then the restaurant, then Plaza Real, then that sleazy drag queen disco, Cangrejo. And I think last stop, the beach. They’re gonna love it. Whaddaya think?’

  She was obviously very pleased with herself.

  ‘Good plan,’ I said without enthusiasm.

  ‘Look at you!’ Lisa and Lauren squealed in unison as they got off the bus and threw their arms around me.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Lauren, ‘but you look amazing!’

  Lisa agreed, giggling, ‘You’ve lost tons of weight, you used to be huge. I can’t believe it, you look amazing!’

  After this, the subject of my transformation was dropped. They hadn’t slimmed down, if anything they’d both put on more weight. My life and my body had changed almost beyond recognition but it wasn’t mentioned again. I was a one-minute wonder.

  Lisa and Lauren wasted no time bringing me up to speed with their love lives. Due to their acceptance into Clancy’s they’d both recently disposed of their hymens. Lauren, for three and a half weeks, even had a boyfriend. I prepared my sympathetic face, sure that she was about to tell us she’d been humped and dumped, but no. She had chucked him because she felt she was too young to get tied down.

  ‘It’s like this,’ Lauren sagely explained, ‘why run a car when there’s so many taxis?’

  She threw her head back and laughed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she added, ‘but I’ve been taking plenty of taxis!’

  I laughed too and said, ‘You’re right, Lauren, why run a car when you’ve become the town bike?’

  We all laughed, Lauren more than anyone. I wasn’t sure if she took it as an insult or a compliment. I didn’t care how she took it.