by Jenny Colgan
‘That’s OK, but you looked at me like I’d just handed you Cal’s snake.’
‘He doesn’t really have a snake,’ I said fiercely.
‘No, he doesn’t. And you don’t really have to cook, so put the broom down.’
‘What’s up?’
It was James, bounding into the kitchen too; he seemed to have loads of energy, like a puppy. He was in his army gear and covered in mud and camouflage.
‘Stay back!’ shouted Eck. ‘You can’t come in.’
‘Why not?’ asked James. ‘Enemy infiltration?’
‘Yes,’ said Eck. ‘Your muddy boots and our spotless floor.’
James retreated and instead posted his head around the door.
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Sophie, what an amazing woman you are.’
Great. I’m always waiting for someone to call me an amazing woman and when it comes it’s for my bloomin’ domestic goddess skills.
‘I’ll go have a shower,’ said James. ‘Can’t wait to see what you’ve done in the bath . . . Oh.’
‘I’ll get to that tomorrow,’ I said. ‘I’m not superwoman.’
‘Yes, you are,’ said Eck. Then he coughed and looked embarrassed. ‘Um. Anyway.’ He looked around. ‘So, no cooking . . .’
‘Fish and chips,’ came hollering from James’s direction. It sounded like he was hitting his boots together and letting the mud fall all over the floor in the hallway. ‘Let’s get fish and chips. I’ve been on manoeuvres and we can’t mess up the kitchen.’
‘So you’re just going to eat fish and chips every night for the rest of your life?’
James’s head reappeared. ‘I’ve heard worse plans. You want some?’
Well, this was a day of firsts. Actually, I had had fish and chips before, apparently, I just couldn’t remember them. Because my dad was American, he’d insisted we all try England’s national dish at least once. It seemed, even for a man used to the Herculean amounts of grease used in US cuisine, it was still too much. Since then I’d rather collapse in a faint than eat fried food (in fact, I had; Carena and I once went through a period of skipping lunch and getting stuck into the cocktails too early), and was quite happy to have let it all pass me by.
Now, however, I realised I was absolutely ravenous.
‘Sure,’ I said. I had twelve pounds left - would that cover it? I hoped so.
‘What about Cal and his baggage?’ said Eck. I was pleased to hear that.
‘Are they still at it?’ said James. ‘Christ. Either they’re starving or they’re dead, so we’d better check. And it’s not fair to leave Wolverine outside all day.’
James came back in fifteen minutes with a huge, steaming, fragrant blue bag. Ketchup, salt and vinegar were lined up and liberally sprinkled over the hot crackling fish and the tasty chips. It was completely and utterly delicious. Not only that, but I washed it down with a beer. I mentally apologised to my thighs and to my holistic nutritionist Fluffo Magenta (who I hated seeing anyway, she only wanted me to eat more stuff you pick in the woods) and wondered how many calories I’d burned scrubbing underneath the cooker. Loads, probably. And on my list of current worries it was way, way down there. So I tucked in merrily.
Cal emerged alone from his bedroom.
‘Don’t tell me - you’ve nobbed her to death,’ said James, cheerfully.
‘She’s gone home,’ said Cal. ‘Finally. Fantastic, it can be really difficult getting them out of the house.’
‘You have trouble getting girls to leave this house?’ I said, unable to keep the scepticism out of my voice.
‘Well, you’re still here,’ said Cal, popping open a beer and taking a long draught. ‘Save those pickled onions for Wolverine, he’s sulking.’
The four of us sat round the rickety table; James told us about his sergeant commander, who had a face like a Muppet and was always finding it difficult to scream commands without getting the piss taken out of him by people saying, ‘Gee, Kermie’ or singing the ‘Mahna Mahna’ song.
Eck talked about trying to liberate a large amount of scrap metal from a junk heap, only to come up against a terrifying gang of teenage scrap merchants, hell-bent on plundering his booty.
‘They were like pirates,’ he said. ‘Little mini-bitey pirates. With flick knives.’
‘Were you terrified and turned round and ran away?’ asked Cal.
‘Of course!’ said Eck, shooting me his lovely smile. ‘I’m an artist and thus meant to be soft and I don’t care about admitting it. There must be easier ways to steal sheet metal.’
‘Have you tried the roof of the art college?’
Eck rolled his eyes. ‘Durr! Of course!’
Then Cal turned his attention to me.
‘So, Miss Mop. Tell us about you. What do you do then?’ Keep calm, I told myself. Keep calm. They don’t need to know I’m coming into millions of pounds in a few months, it would only make everything weird. Plus they’d want to know everything and it wasn’t a story I felt ready to tell yet. Not to strangers, and as for my friends . . . well. The less said about them the better.
‘I’m into photography,’ I said, mouth crammed full of ketchup-covered chip. ‘I work for Julius Mandinski.’
I thought if they were arty they might have heard of him, but there wasn’t a flicker of recognition. And, as I hadn’t been into the studio for weeks and no one had bothered to ring or find out how I was or anything, I probably wasn’t working there any more anyway.
‘Who’s he? Some posh twat that takes pictures of women’s arses being bitten by crocodiles then sells them to idiots?’ said Cal, managing to make even chip eating look like a slightly more elegant activity than I’d ever imagined it could be before.
I took a breath to start a healthy defence of Julius, but it was true, crocodile arse-bitage was never entirely out of the question. I told them about the time he tried to bring a wolf into the studio for a shoot and six Polish teenagers had gone totally ape shit. They laughed gratifyingly.
‘So, come on then. Why are you here?’ said Cal. ‘Seriously. Slumming it for research? Fun?’
Eck gave Cal a look. ‘Shh.’
‘Can’t I ask a question?’ said Cal.
‘Well, I’m here,’ said James in his well-modulated tones.
‘You’re here because you don’t mind sleeping in a forest with twigs up your jacksie,’ said Cal. ‘Four walls are quite scary for you. If we had any furniture, you’d bolt. So, come on, Cinders. You’re clearly posh. What was it? Trust fund row? Been buying too much Louis Vuitton?’
I knew those bastards had watched me drag my luggage in.
‘Or are you doing research for some Britflick? Are you going to go back and report to all your friends what amazing squalor you found in SOUTH London? And you’ll all laugh your heads off and order in more Cristal?’
‘Leave it, Cal,’ said Eck, manfully. ‘You’re being a nosy, chippy bastard.’
I could feel myself going pink. I never blush.
‘I just have a reasonable interest in my fellow man - or woman,’ said Cal. ‘That’s the domain of the artist, you know.’
‘Or the domain of, you know, the arse,’ said Eck. But James and Cal were still looking at me expectantly.
‘It’s all fake,’ I said finally. ‘And my grandmother sent me to elocution lessons. She’s a terrible snob. We’re from . . .’ I cast around in my head. ‘Er, Hackney.’
The others nodded, except for Cal, who narrowed his eyes at me.
‘Whereabouts in Hackney?’
‘You wouldn’t know it.’
‘I might.’
‘Actually, we’re so poor our road didn’t have a name.’
‘Is that right? So you’re not bourgeois scum then?’
‘That’s terrible,’ said James. ‘You know, the army is a good way out of poverty too.’
‘That’s your answer to everything,’ said Cal. ‘Not everyone wants to catch ringworm on the Brecon Beacons, you know.’
‘It would do you
a bit of good,’ said James, slightly riled.
‘Get you out of doing nothing but sleeping, shagging and drinking beer.’
‘It’s true,’ said Cal. ‘I do so hate my life.’
He gave me another shrewd look. He really was a nosy bastard.
‘Didn’t you have any friends you could stay with?’
I shrugged and tried to make myself look harder than I felt.
‘I wanted to get away. Get in touch with my creative photographic soul. Wouldn’t want to get in anyone’s way.’
Eck grinned at me. ‘I’m sure you won’t be,’ he said.
‘Ooh, look at you,’ said Cal, sneering at Eck. Ugh, he really was unpleasant.
‘Sorry, princess,’ said Cal to me. ‘I’m a right old bastard sometimes.’
‘Sometimes?’ scoffed Eck, clearly pissed off.
The weird thing was, though, that despite the intrusive questions, I actually had a good time that evening. An actual good time. The conversation changed to other things, like James’s manoeuvres, and Cal and Eck kept taking the piss out of each other, and Wolverine came in and removed the pickled onions with a grunt and there was just a nice, relaxed atmosphere that I couldn’t remember since . . . since, well, for a while.
If I went out to eat with the girls, there was always hundreds of people, and lots of shouting and showing off, and competitive non-eating, and that wasn’t always that much fun either. This - just sitting round a table with a bunch of people, chatting over the day - well, it felt new, and it felt quite nice.
So I was in quite a good mood when I took myself off to Cell Block H, only slightly ruined by having to use the loo, which was by some way the grubbiest I’d ever seen, and was clearly going to make tomorrow even muckier than today. Then I lay in bed, in that strange room that I couldn’t imagine would ever feel like home; listening to the boys still playing music, rolling spliffs and talking, the huge lorries thundering down the Old Kent Road on their way to Dover, the rude boys in their low-slung Citroens banging out bass all the way up the road, and the regular screams of police sirens.
I was so exhausted, though, that even that couldn’t keep me awake. But in my dream, my dad was trying to call, but the phone wouldn’t ring. It just made the sound of sirens.
Chapter Eight
Cleaning. Not for everyone. Boy, oh boy. There are some people in this world who like nothing better than to line up the contents of their drawers in alphabetical order. Why couldn’t I have been one of those? Five hours in that tiny windowless bathroom - for all the noise the extractor fan gave out, there was no way I was getting enough oxygen in. I wondered if I was actually going to die, and if so, what would do for me first: bacterial disease or bleach fumes? Bit by bit things started to improve. Looking at the thirteen toothbrushes, in various states of hideousness, I decided the best thing to do was just to throw them all way and let the boys start afresh. Surely it was cleaner not to brush your teeth at all than to pick some dead hedgehog at random?
I also ventured out of doors to pick up a new toilet brush, the one there being a shade of brown I didn’t want to contemplate. Where does one buy a toilet brush? I was sure I’d seen something at Cath Kidston, but I couldn’t quite remember.
I wouldn’t like to say this part of London was grim but, oh God, it was so grim. It was like they’d wallpapered the whole place in grey and old fast-food wrappers. The traffic was horrid and relentless, it took half an hour to cross the road. There were lots of weird discount shops I hadn’t seen before. Normally I get excited by the sight of shops I’ve never seen before, but these turned out to sell old potatoes out of boxes like in old films of communist Russia. It would have made me shiver, until I noticed that they did champagne for six pounds a bottle. That could definitely come in handy some time, when I had a job again and could buy stuff, rather than exist on dry Weetabix from the back of the newly cleaned larder.
I bought a few bits and pieces that I thought were cleaning products - the words were in Cyrillic, but they looked like they’d do the job - and went back to queen drudgery.
If I’d thought the kitchen odds and ends were gross, I hadn’t seen anything yet. Hair - SO MUCH HAIR. I remembered reading somewhere that hair was the most germ-ridden substance in the human body. And it was everywhere! From a bunch of filthy strangers I didn’t know! I just closed my eyes and pretended I was in CSI and investigating a murder as a very clever highly trained forensic specialist. It was very unlike me to fantasise about having a job. I was amazed how much it helped. I’m sure this wasn’t what Daddy would have had in mind for me. He probably meant for me to get a job in a shop, share a mansion flat in a block. Or work in a nursery, like Princess Diana.
The toilet bowl was even worse. There was no way around this. Here I was. Not so long ago I’d been striding up the red carpet to the Fashion Rocks summer party, just behind Tamara Mellon and within spitting distance of Mischa Barton. What were Tamara and Mischa doing right now? E.g. did they have their head stuck down a stranger’s toilet bowl whilst scratching off poo with a toilet brush bought from the ninety-nine-pence shop? Perhaps they did. But somehow, I doubted it.
Crouching, I overheard Eck and Cal in the hall. They seemed to be having quite an intense conversation.
‘Just ask her,’ Cal was saying. ‘What can possibly go wrong?’
‘Well, she says no and we all have to live here for the next five years,’ said Eck. ‘Neh. Don’t think I will.’
‘Where are your balls, man?’ said Cal.
‘Where’s your brain?’ retorted Eck rudely. ‘This could be a very bad idea.’
There was a pause.
‘She’s pretty hot though,’ said Cal.
My heart started to pound. Could it be . . . could they be talking about me? They obviously didn’t know I was in here. Did Cal think I was hot? I squatted by the toilet bowl. God, my hair needed washing.
‘Try her room,’ said Cal.
It was me! Ooh! Oh my God! I couldn’t help feeling excited. But what was Eck going to do? Someone was going to ask me out! See, Rufus the Rat! I wasn’t just someone else’s old sewage . . . ugh, never think about old sewage whilst crouching by some stranger’s toilet bowl.
‘No,’ said Eck.
Oh, so, maybe not then.
‘Come on, don’t be a coward.’
‘It’s OK for you, you distract women by pointing to something and whipping her knickers off with the other hand,’ said Eck. Ooh, that sounded like fun. ‘I just like to think I’m a bit more—’
‘Of a coward?’ said Cal.
‘No!’
‘Chook . . . chook. Choook, chook, chook . . .’
‘Stop making chicken noises, it’s stupid.’
‘Bork . . . bork, bork, bork, bork.’
‘What’s that, a chicken being sick?’
‘It’s a party, Eck, not a marriage proposal.’
Eck sighed. This was wildly exciting - being talked about in a way that, for once, didn’t include the phrase, ‘Such a shame’.
Then he took a deep breath and I heard his tread down the corridor. Oh my God! He was going towards my room! I heard a knock, then there was a long pause.
‘Not in!’ he said finally. ‘Great! Fancy going out and getting a bacon sandwich?’
‘All right, Casanova,’ said Cal.
‘I’ll just have a slash,’ said Eck.
I stiffened. Oh God! A quick glance around confirmed that there was nowhere to hide, unless the shower curtain was loamy enough to disguise me completely. I could shout out that I was in here, but then they’d assume I’d been ensconced having a poo for about an hour, which wasn’t really the image I was seeking to convey. Maybe I’d just have to pretend I was so caught up in my life’s work - cleaning their shit off a toilet, obviously - that I couldn’t possibly have heard a word.
The door creaked open. Eck entered, flies already down, one hand fishing in his trousers. He couldn’t have been more surprised to see me if I’d been a dog doing a handstand
.
‘Urgg,’ he said, snatching his hands away from his fly. I averted my eyes, but it was plain he didn’t know whether to zip it up - thus drawing further attention to the area - or just leave it alone, with possible visible consequences. I studied my mop bucket as hard as I could.
‘Uh, hello!’ I said, in a voice that came out in a much higher pitch than I’d intended. ‘I didn’t hear you come in.’
‘Didn’t you?’ said Eck, in a voice that betrayed so much relief I wouldn’t have been surprised if pee had started gushing out right then. ‘Oh, good.’