Unsticky

by Sarah Manning

  Grace made it to the safety of the unheated, shared bathroom and its bilious green tiles, which no amount of Cillit Bang could ever buff up, set her wash bag down on the windowsill and mentally prepared herself for the ordeal ahead. When you lived in third-world conditions in a first-world country, a girl learned a few tricks. Like, if she ran the bath with only hot water, within minutes it would be warm enough to sit in for the time it took to soap up, rinse off and then be back shivering on the freezing cold lino.

  ‘This is good for your soul,’ Grace muttered under her breath. Her grandparents were very pro things that were good for the soul or character building. They were always things that Grace hadn’t wanted to do, like getting up at some ungodly hour to do a paper round or taking a GCSE in Physics. Grace’s soul had to be practically glowing with all the good she’d done in its name, she thought glumly as she grappled with the taps. The hot one was always a little stiff, unless you jiggled it slightly to the right. A sudden wrench, which nearly dislocated her wrist, and Grace was good to go.

  There was an ominous gurgle, followed by a rattling in the pipes, before a drip of rusty water trickled out of the taps. Grace stared at it transfixed, waiting for a hot gush to spill forth. Instead the pipes kept clanking like an ex’s of Lily’s who’d been really into body piercings.

  That was when Grace noticed that the water in the loo was frozen over. There was a solid block of ice in her toilet bowl. A solid block of yellow ice. Her life was not meant to be like this.

  There was nothing else to do but plonk herself down on the edge of the bath, the cold enamel chilling her skin even through the plush terry towelling, and burst into tears. She was all out of other ideas.

  Eventually the pity party in her head was penetrated by a loud ringing sound. Some thoughtless bastard was leaning on the doorbell, and if it was Anita or Ilonka who’d forgotten their keys again, they were going to get a high-pitched lecture about frozen pipes and not phoning Mrs Beattie, and peeing in iced-over toilets.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Grace yelped in surprise, when she yanked open the door to see Vaughn standing there. For a second her heart rallied - maybe he’d seen the error of his extremely conflicted ways.

  He held up her knitting tote. ‘You left this under the seat,’ he said, eyes everywhere all at once: on her tear-streaked face, her Uggs, and over her shoulder at stained wallpaper and torn carpet and oh God . . .

  ‘Thanks,’ she grunted, making a swipe for the bag, which he adroitly hoisted out of her reach.

  ‘What’s the matter? Have you been crying?’ he asked sharply, stepping past Grace into a building she’d vowed he’d never enter and striding towards the bathroom, where the pipes were still making clanging noises.

  ‘You can’t go in there,’ Grace squawked, catching hold of his sleeve, but Vaughn brushed her away as if she was made of air.

  When Grace caught up with him, he was staring at the toilet as if he’d never encountered modern plumbing before. Or plumbing that was modern sometime in the 1940s.

  ‘Good God,’ he whispered. ‘Why isn’t there a radiator in here? No wonder your pipes are frozen.’

  Grace flapped her hands but said nothing.

  ‘Why aren’t you using the bathroom in your flat anyway?’ Vaughn continued and it was hard to distinguish between the icy fingers of fear trailing down Grace’s spine and the onset of hypothermia.

  ‘I’m having it done up.’ The lamest lie ever came shooting out of Grace’s mouth at a rate of knots. ‘I should have told you. The whole place looks like a building site.’

  Vaughn was already turning. ‘What floor are you on?’

  ‘No, you can’t go up there,’ Grace pleaded, and panic was making her voice catch so Vaughn looked at her suspiciously. ‘There’s really no point in getting dust over your coat.’

  ‘I asked you what floor?’ It was the voice Vaughn had used when he was being spat at by Raoul; the voice that Grace had never wanted to hear when he was talking to her. ‘I can tell when you’re lying. You’re not very good at it and you’re turning into a block of ice in front of me so, again, what floor?’

  The tears rallied for an encore presentation, which just made Vaughn sniff contemptuously, his elegant, aquiline nose rosy red in the Arctic wastes of the bathroom. ‘It’s the first floor,’ she said, ‘but I don’t see why you need to go up . . .’

  Grace was talking to empty space, so all she could do was trail up the stairs after him as Vaughn took the steps two at a time. He really wouldn’t have been in such a hurry if he knew what lay in store for him.

  With mood lighting coming from a million little candles, Grace’s two rooms looked cosy, like a little country cottage kitted out in retro soft furnishings that she’d snagged from the bi-monthly Period House magazine sales at work. Shabby yes, but shabby chic. When there was actual electricity so the plug-in radiator was working and Grace could iron her sheets before she got into bed to warm them up, it was almost homely.

  But with harsh winter sunlight spilling in so she could watch Vaughn slowly take it all in, it looked like a dump. Because he made it look like a dump with his polished brogues on her threadbare rug and his beautifully cut Prada suit sharing space with the damp patches on the ceiling and the mould collected around the windowsills. Vaughn couldn’t take his eyes off the neatly stacked piles of plastic-wrapped clothes and magazines, sealed tight so the damp wouldn’t get at them.

  ‘This is a pit. Why do you live here?’

  Grace could have bluffed her way through some explanation. A trust fund that hadn’t quite come through yet, money needed to pay for her grandfather’s hospital bills because ‘actually didn’t I tell you he’s got some mysterious ailment that has the medical community completely foxed?’ She could have come up with something. But the way Vaughn was standing there, with his mouth clenched so he wouldn’t inhale the clotting whiffs of mildew, huddled into his coat so he didn’t brush against any contaminated surfaces, meant that all Grace could muster was a tight little voice, which made her throat hurt because the truth was always painful. ‘I earn fourteen thousand a year,’ she said dully. ‘Y’know, what you’d spend on a really good bottle of wine.’

  That made the mask slip off Vaughn’s face so he was flaring his nostrils and flushing with something that wasn’t guilt or shame or anything that Grace could properly identify.

  ‘No one earns fourteen thousand a year,’ he stated unequivocally. ‘Not in the media. What have you been spending your allowances on?’

  Grace shut her eyes but when she opened them again, she was still standing in her freezing cold flat with Vaughn staring at her like he was seeing her for the very first time.

  ‘I had a lot of clothes to buy,’ she started, but she could tell right away that a long, garbled explanation about how expensive it was to maintain a certain sartorial standard wouldn’t go down too well. That she was blaming Vaughn for not giving her enough money, when that wasn’t the case. But she couldn’t find anything else to say, so she simply shrugged and hoped that might say it for her.

  ‘If I were you’d I’d have worried less about shopping and more about finding somewhere else to live. Not to put too fine a point on it, this place is a shithole,’ Vaughn said crudely and deliberately.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Or maybe slumming it is what all the cool kids are doing this season.’

  It was hearing him drawl that out, as if her pitiful living conditions were actually a lifestyle choice, instead of a source of misery and frustration, that made Grace forget her shame. ‘You patronising bastard!’ she hissed, fists clenched at her side. ‘You have absolutely no fucking idea what it’s like to be born without a silver spoon rammed up your arse. You live in this little cocoon where nothing touches you and if it does, you throw money at it until it goes away. Well, I can’t do that - and how dare you fucking judge me for it!’

  ‘Grace, don’t talk to me like that,’ he clipped out, and usually that was enough to have her toeing
the party line again. But not this time.

  ‘Why the fuck shouldn’t I?’ She was shouting now, while her arms flailed helplessly. ‘Apparently I live in a shithole but it’s my shithole and I can say what I bloody well like.’

  ‘You’re getting hysterical,’ Vaughn noted, like that was any newsflash. Grace felt as if she’d done with hysterical and was quickly approaching a full-blown psychotic break as she dropped to her knees and began hauling out her collection of shoeboxes from the side of the sofa so she could hurl them at him.

  Vaughn stood there motionless, even when one of the boxes glanced off his shoulder, and watched the mess of final demands and bailiffs’ notices float around his feet. ‘You want to know the really funny thing?’ Grace screamed, and she knew she was screaming because she could hear herself screaming, but she didn’t know why or how to stop. ‘I’ve got no money, I never have any money but I’m really, really good at spending it. I spend hundreds of pounds on stuff I don’t even want but I can’t even afford to top up my fucking electricity meter. Go on! Try the light and see if it works. Put on the television that I’m not going to pay off until I’m eighty, and—’

  ‘Pull yourself together,’ Vaughn snapped at her, crunching over paper so he could take Grace’s shoulders and give her a good, old-fashioned, teeth-rattling shake. ‘Stop crying, stop screeching like a fishwife and get dressed. You’re absolutely freezing.’

  Vaughn gave Grace a little push in the direction of the pile of clothes she’d discarded half an hour ago while he crouched down and began picking up the debris from the floor, eyes scanning all those numbers and words that she always studiously avoided.

  There was nothing remotely sexy about the way he watched her pull on her clothes, though he’d once told her that watching her do a reverse striptease was far more seductive than when she was getting naked. This time he was already tutting with impatience. ‘Get me something to put all this in,’ he ordered.

  He snatched the Selfridges bags Grace offered him, and nudged the mobile phone that was on the floor with his foot. ‘What’s this?’

  Grace didn’t have the energy to come up with another lie. ‘I got a phone call from a debt collector before I left so I switched it off and shoved it under there,’ she admitted limply, all the fight gone out of her now as Vaughn tucked it into his coat pocket and hefted up two of her suitcases.

  ‘Get the rest of what you need,’ he barked over his shoulder. ‘I’ll be waiting in the car.’

  Grace sat in front of Vaughn’s tubular steel Marcel Breuer desk, its surface slowly being covered in neat stacks of financial documents, and watched as he pulled out a calculator from a drawer and started tapping away at the keys. Being dumped was now the least of her worries, as judging by the furious, skin-stripping looks Vaughn kept giving her, he was planning to pencil in a little light whipping before bed.

  A lot of the brown envelopes, and the white ones too come to that, hadn’t even been opened, and Vaughn handed her his letter-opener and told her to get to work. He ground his teeth as her fingers fumbled with the handle and she stuttered and stumbled over the numbers he wanted her to read out loud, until he sighed.

  ‘Give them to me,’ he ordered, and Grace was only too happy to hand over the mounds of paper, which hadn’t seemed quite so mountainous when they’d been hidden away out of sight.

  ‘Shall I make some tea?’ she offered hesitantly, because watching his fingers press down, again and again unrelentingly, and the piles of paper never getting any smaller, was torture.

  ‘Stay there,’ Vaughn said sharply, and Grace had no choice but to sit there on an uncomfortable chair and concentrate really hard on pretending she was somewhere else until Vaughn started talking.

  ‘You do know that when you go to - what is it? - the Co-Op and buy something for two pounds ninety-nine and get fifty pounds cashback on your credit card, they charge you at two point five per cent? And when you use the same credit card to get money out at an ATM, there are also another two separate charges?’

  ‘I didn’t know that,’ Grace finally mumbled, when Vaughn glared at her until she answered, because she’d thought they were rhetorical questions. Turned out they weren’t, and as he went back through five years of Grace’s bills, she was expected to fill in the blanks.

  ‘How did you manage to have absolutely no income coming in for a year after you graduated? What did you live on?’

  ‘I had to intern for six months before I got a staff job at Skirt, but I had some cash-in-hand bar work in the evenings, and on the weekends I worked in a vintage clothes shop. And I didn’t have to pay rent,’ Grace added, as Vaughn kept tapping her bank statements with his pen. It made her nervous, made her want to keep talking to ward off the silence that would mean he’d have time to think of more questions.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Lily let me stay in her spare room when her dad bought her flat, but then Dan her boyfriend moved in. She didn’t ask me to leave,’ Grace said, rushing to Lily’s defence as Vaughn’s top lip curled, ‘but I could tell they wanted their privacy, so I moved out.’

  Vaughn nodded and lowered his head and didn’t raise it again until he’d reached Grace: The College Years. He threw question after question at her about why she had had to buy her own dress-making materials and about student loans until Grace was wriggling on her chair because it was like being cross-examined under oath. She couldn’t lie, not because she’d sworn on the Bible, but because Vaughn seemed to have this sixth sense and knew immediately when she was getting seriously economical with the truth so Grace began to wonder if her eyelids were twitching or she was scratching her nose in a giveaway manner without even realising it.

  ‘I don’t know how your grandparents let you get into this mess,’ he announced censoriously, and for the second time that afternoon Grace felt herself getting angry, rather than intimidated.

  ‘They paid my tuition fees,’ she said hotly. ‘And FYI, they have four other grandchildren whose tuition fees they paid. And they gave me a thousand quid after St Martin’s to sort myself out.’

  Vaughn snorted just once and that single, inelegant exhalation said very plainly that they could have given her ten times that and she still wouldn’t have been sorted out.

  ‘Do they have any idea at all?’ Vaughn asked, and his voice was softer now, which strangely made Grace feel worse. She didn’t deserve his sympathy. She didn’t deserve anyone’s sympathy. Lots of people her age were in debt and they found a way to get out of it. Or at least not get themselves into an ever-increasing shame spiral of yet more debt.

  ‘My grandad made me a spreadsheet,’ Grace admitted unwillingly, ‘with a monthly budget so I could start paying back my student loan and the overdraft, but that kind of depended on going straight into full-time paid employment, and if I’d told them I was interning, then they’d have offered to fund me and I didn’t want them to.’

  ‘It’s only natural that they’d want to help you,’ Vaughn said.

  Grace shook her head. ‘They’re both retired and I know that some of their pensions or investments or whatever took a beating in the credit crunch, so I didn’t want them to worry about me too.’ It sounded a little too selfless and Grace winced, but Vaughn was nodding. He even threw in a head tilt like he understood where she was coming from.

  ‘I’m not surprised you’re in so much debt. Your salary is just enough for rent, utilities, travel and, let’s see . . .’ He ran his eyes down one of his neatly penned columns of figures. ‘Yes, twenty pounds a week for everything else, including food, entertainment and clothes. It really isn’t any surprise you’ve accumulated so much debt and haven’t been able to pay it off.’

  ‘But I started to, with the allowances . . .’

  ‘Yes, which was admirable if you’d spread the payments over several of your most outstanding creditors instead of continuing to make payments on a TopShop store card that you’d already cleared and a credit card that had already been taken over by a debt clearing agency.�
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  ‘Well, I just kind of grabbed the first pieces of paper I came across . . .’

  ‘I thought as much,’ Vaughn said, and he still sounded calm and had stopped with the filthy looks and Grace hoped that they were nearing the end of this - whatever ‘this’ was. ‘So as I said, it’s no wonder you owe so much, given the lack of funds coming in against the funds going out, which is why I don’t understand these particular statements. Maybe you could enlighten me.’

  He handed over a wad of papers that Grace took, then really wished she hadn’t. ‘What seems to be the problem?’ she choked out.

  ‘I can see you’ve been living off your Visa and Mastercard cards for the last three years, but as far as I can tell you’ve gone through ten other cards and managed to exceed your credit limit in one day on each of them. I’d like an explanation.’

  Grace stared at the numbers on the statements but didn’t see them. Like, they were those 3D Magic Eye pictures and she didn’t have the knack of getting through the swirly pattern to what was buried underneath. She looked a bit harder and saw one payment for an £800 Mulberry bag that she couldn’t even remember buying.