Kiss Me First Page 12

  So far I hadn’t needed his help, and I suspected that he was leaving me alone in order to demonstrate his trust in me. However, it would be good, I thought, if there was a line of communication open for if and when I should require it: after all, on the Heath that day he had stated that if I took the job on he would be there for me every step of the way, always on hand for advice and support.

  There was nothing until, one evening, sixteen days into the project, I checked my email expecting nothing more than the usual spam to find a message advising me that I had a Facebook Friend Request.

  This was not a common event. It had been several months since I’d received one and that had been a case of mistaken identity, from a man I didn’t know who addressed me as ‘babz’ and said I had been ‘looking fine’ the night before.

  This new request was similarly from someone I didn’t recognize: a woman called Ava Root. It was a distinctive name that I was sure I would have remembered, had I come across it before, and I was about to consign her to spam when I saw there was a message attached to the request: Hey there, how’s it going?

  It was an innocuous statement, but there was something about that hey there that struck a chord, and it was only a moment before I recalled that it was a phrase Adrian used at the start of each of his podcasts. It was, essentially, his catchphrase, and he would say the words differently each time – sometimes with a flourish, like a game-show host; at other times quickly and quietly, giving them hardly any emphasis at all.

  I hadn’t considered that he might contact me through Facebook but that was only because I hadn’t found him, Adrian Dervish, when I had searched for him before. It hadn’t crossed my mind that he might set up a fake account to communicate with me, even though it now made sense: after all, why would any hackers be interested in messages between me and my old friend Ava?

  My instincts were confirmed when I accepted the friend request and looked at Ava Root’s profile. It was blank, devoid of any information save her name, and I was her only friend. Even the choice of ‘Ava Root’, it now occurred to me, signalled that it was Adrian behind it: the name had the same amount of letters as, and sounded similar to, that of his heroine, Ayn Rand.

  I felt pleased and relieved he had finally initiated contact – even though, as I say, I felt I was handling the situation adequately on my own and had no specific questions or issues to bring up. I replied to his message with a brief summary of the progress of the project so far, using suitably elliptical terms just to be on the safe side. If someone somehow happened to chance upon the message, they wouldn’t have a clue what I was going on about. The subject’s journey to her destination went smoothly; she is settling in well and exploring the island. Mother: seven email exchanges so far and one request for a phone call, deferred by the subject – that sort of thing. At the end, I added: Just to confirm, we are now communicating through this channel, rather than RP?

  A reply came a day later: Good work. Yes, communicate through here.

  Then, the following week, came a less welcome intrusion from the wider world. Dozing on the sofa one afternoon, I was rudely awoken by the door buzzer. I couldn’t account for the caller: it was Thursday, and I had already received my money for that week. I answered the door to an Indian man in a stained white shirt, who explained that he was from the restaurant below.

  ‘There is a problem with water,’ he said.

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, so at his urging put my towelling robe on over my pyjamas and followed him down to the restaurant. It was the first time I had been inside. As it was only 3 p.m. and they hadn’t yet opened, there were no customers, the tables bare except for paper tablecloths. Christmas lights were gaffer-taped to the walls and there was a stale, yeasty smell in the air.

  The man gesticulated towards the bar area, where another waiter was mopping the counter with wads of kitchen roll. There was a leak coming from my flat, he said – and, indeed, I could see a large damp patch on the ceiling, which would have been beneath my bathroom. He explained that the water had got into the wiring and electronic equipment on the bar and now neither the phone nor the card-reader machine worked, without which they could not operate their business. It was clear they expected me to do something about it.

  I will spare you the details of what transpired, but in a nutshell: one of the waiters called a plumber, who revealed that the pipes under my bathroom were leaking. He would need to rip up the floor to fix them. Plus, the waiter told me, I would need to pay for the damage to the restaurant. All in all, it would cost in the region of £600.

  ‘You’ll be able to get it back on the insurance,’ said the plumber, an overly cheery man with a bumpy, shaven head.

  The problem was, I didn’t have any insurance. I hadn’t thought to get any when we bought the flat. I didn’t have any savings, either. The money I got for my Tess work was just enough to cover day to day living expenses; it hadn’t occurred to me that I might need extra for a contingency. I Googled how to get cash quick, and was directed to a number of companies offering private loans. I called the first number and a man agreed to lend me £600 at an absurdly high interest rate.

  It was clear that in order to pay off this loan, I would need some extra income. I emailed Damian asking for my job back, and received a curt reply saying that there was no work available for me and, by the way, he had found the manner of my resignation rude and unprofessional. So I searched online for another software-testing job I could do from the flat. But the few jobs on offer were all office-based: besides, they all seemed to require a degree, which I didn’t have, as well as references, which I doubted Damian would give me. I suppose I didn’t appreciate that, dull as it was working for Testers 4 U, it was unusual to be allowed to work from home and choose your own hours.

  Getting another, ‘normal’ job was not an option. For a start, I simply didn’t have the time. My work with Tess took up most of the night, and I had to sleep during the day. But even if time were not an issue, previous experiences had proven that I wasn’t suited to working with other people. First, in the summer after my A-levels, I had tried volunteering at the Cats’ Protection League charity shop on Kentish Town Road. One of the other volunteers was an obese man who smoked, and the smell when he came back into the shop after a cigarette, the nicotine mixed with musty old clothes, was so repulsive I couldn’t last longer than a morning.

  Then there was the week at Caffè Nero. I was given a hairnet and assigned to the pastries section. A customer would give their coffee order to my colleague on the till, a boy called Ashim, who would ask whether they wanted any pastries; and if they said yes, I had to pick up the specified item with a pair of tongs and put it in a bag or on a plate, depending on whether it was for takeaway or eat in. Sellotaped below the view of the customers was a laminated sheet showing photos of all the different products.

  After an hour I was about to tell the supervisor I wasn’t prepared to continue in such a role when she got in there first, telling me off for eating the bits of pastry that had flaked off the croissants – even though, as I pointed out, the flakes were a waste product that couldn’t be sold. She changed me to washing-up duties, which was better because I could have my back to the customers, but before long she found fault with me there, too. To alleviate the tedium I had decided to hum, seeing if I could hold the same note continuously for the time each item took to be washed up, and apparently it was disturbing the customers. I was determined to keep humming, though, and lowered the volume of the hum by degrees until she stopped coming over to complain.

  During our fifteen-minute breaks I sat in a back room on a box of paper towels, listening to the boom-boom-boom music coming from Ashim’s headphones as he texted his friends and watching Lucy, the barista, shaking the make-up samples she had just stolen from Superdrug out of the sleeves of her jacket.

  When I left, it wasn’t in a big, dramatic rage; I didn’t rip off my hairnet and storm out. One lunchtime, I went out to get my crisps and just didn’t go b
ack. It was a Friday and I was owed that week’s pay, but I didn’t ask for it. Mum understood about me leaving. I think she was pleased to have me back with her.

  Tess once used coffee shops to illustrate how her varying moods affected her behaviour. ‘It’s like, when I’m on a high I’ll haggle with the till guy at Starbucks, try and get 50p off my double espresso,’ she had explained. ‘Just for fun, to prove my charm. And when I’m low, I’ll feel like I’m not even worthy of accepting my change.’

  Anyway, to get back to my point: it wasn’t possible for me to get a ‘normal’ job. So that’s when I thought about getting a lodger.

  I probably needn’t add that the idea of someone else living in the flat was not an enticing one. It wasn’t the fact that I would have to move out of my bedroom and both work and sleep in the front room; I didn’t mind that. But I didn’t relish the thought of having to make idle chitchat and cater to a stranger’s demands. Everything was the way I liked it in the flat, but I acknowledged that the way I lived might not be to everyone’s taste, and that they might desire furniture and curtains and more than two teaspoons. It would also mean being much more careful about my Tess work. As mentioned, up until then I had openly displayed my notes on the wall above my desk. I would have to get a lock for my door for when I was out, and perhaps pin my large Lord of the Rings poster up over the notes, for added security, when I was at home.

  Nonetheless, a lodger seemed the most logical option – indeed, my only real option. I decided that the best thing to do was advertise the room for a low rent, the minimum I needed to pay off my loan, and make it clear that, in return, the lodger would have to accept certain rules.

  I posted an ad in the Room to Rent section on Gumtree.com.

  Small bedroom in shared flat in Rotherhithe. It’s essential you have a quiet nature and spend a lot of time out. When you’re in, we “keep out of each other’s hair”. Curry fans will be well catered for. £60 a week.

  Within ten minutes of the ad going up I received seven replies. By the end of the day, there were over a hundred. I didn’t realize that cheap accommodation was in such demand in London. I composed a random shortlist of candidates from every tenth email I received and invited them to come and view the flat. I arranged the meetings for 3 p.m., so that the onion smell from the restaurant would be at its peak, in order to avoid any later fuss when they discovered this factor. And indeed, some made their excuses within minutes. For others, the sticking point was the single bed.

  Most, though, were not so fussy, even trying to think of positive things to say about the flat. ‘Very minimal-istic!’ one middle-aged man said, and proceeded to tell me at great, unwanted length about how he too was in a ‘transitional phase’ of his life. He asked if it was all right if his four-year-old daughter came to stay every other weekend. I informed him that it was not. One girl from Poland tried to engage me in conversation, asking me what kind of music I liked and so forth, until I realized that she was in effect auditioning me to see whether we were going to get on. I had to make it clear to her that I had no need of a friend. I just wanted someone who would pay the rent and be out the majority of the time.

  Often I cut short the interviews myself, when it clearly wasn’t going to work. One applicant, an old man who was bald except for a band of hair around his head, like the rings of Saturn, and reeked of body odour, informed me that he was ‘into big girls’. Another, a young African man, had a Bible in the pocket of his corduroy jacket which meant he had to be excluded, although he otherwise fit the criteria; he barely said a word and just nodded and smiled.

  The majority of applicants were foreign, students from Africa or Eastern Europe. I couldn’t decide whether it would be better to have someone foreign, because their English would be more limited; or worse, because they would invariably be learning the language whilst they were over here and might want to practise on me. After some thought, I decided that foreign would be better: it would also work to my advantage for the person to be unfamiliar with British customs and habits, so they were more likely to accept mine.

  It is rather ironic, then, that I ended up with Jonty, who is not only English – well, Welsh – but possibly the most talkative person I have ever come across. But I didn’t know that when I agreed to him moving in. He gave a misleading first impression. During our interview he was uncharacteristically quiet: later I discovered that he was so hungover he was afraid he would be sick if he opened his mouth. His appearance was striking, but not unpleasant: short and square, with disproportionately broad shoulders under his duffel coat and spiky dark-blonde hair. Although he said he was twenty-five, his face looked much younger.

  He nodded yes when I asked him whether he would be out of the flat a lot, and nodded again when I explained that my work required a lot of concentration, and that I had to work at night and then sleep all day, so if he was looking for a ‘mate’ then he was in the wrong place. He shook his head when I asked whether he had many possessions. He seemed to genuinely like the flat, which was odd. He didn’t mind it was a single bed – ‘I never get lucky anyway’ was one of the few things he said – and expressed no surprise at the lack of curtains and other furniture. So I decided on the spot that he would do. I was tired of seeing all these people, it was taking up a lot of time that I should have been devoting to Tess, and I had run out of money.

  On the day he moved in, with a single sports bag – a lack of possessions was the one promise he kept – he was, to my dismay, much more chatty. He knocked on my door and barely waited for a reply before entering, as if a conversation in my bedroom had been part of a pre-arranged schedule. Thank goodness I had had the foresight to cover up my Tess notes with a poster. He sat on the sofa, which was now my bed, and – told me all about himself. Originally from Cardiff, where he had had a successful career working in sales at American Express but had decided to give it up and come to London to be an actor. He told me a long anecdote about his ‘moment of revelation’, when he had been persuading a woman to get another credit card and suddenly realized he had to do something more worthwhile with his life: ‘follow my dreams, all that bollocks’. He had enrolled with a drama school in King’s Cross and given himself a year to make it, which was how long his savings would last.

  Jonty didn’t seem to be able to do anything without informing me about it. On his first evening in the flat he knocked on my door to announce he was going to ‘explore the neighbourhood’. I told him, through the door, that that wouldn’t take long, that there was nothing to see in Rotherhithe. I heard him come in a few hours later, but when I left my room to go to the loo his door opened and he started babbling about his evening. ‘You didn’t tell me we were so close to the river!’ he said – I didn’t know that we were – and went on about this ‘amazing’ pub in the next street called the Queen Bee that was, I quote, ‘full of these crazy old dudes, seriously old school’. One of them had bought him a pickled egg from a jar beside the bar. I knew it would lead to further exhausting conversation if I told him I hadn’t ‘explored’ further than Tesco Extra.

  That’s the thing about Jonty. Any response you give, even a ‘Really?’ is like throwing a log on a fire. So when he’d come back home with all these stories of his adventures around London – finding a shop that sold taxidermied animals in Islington, swimming in an open-air pool in Brockwell Park – I nodded but didn’t respond. Even though he claimed not to know anyone in London, he seemed to make friends very quickly. One night, only a few weeks after he arrived, his new colleagues from drama school put him in a dustbin and rolled him down Primrose Hill. Apparently, this was a gesture of affection.

  Luckily, his desire to ‘suck the marrow out of London’ did mean that he was out most nights, but I still had to take precautions because I never knew when he would be coming back. I hid my Tess timeline behind three large Lord of the Rings posters and got a lock for my door. I also took up the carpet from the corridor, so that I would be able to hear him approaching on the bare boards. He would retur
n in the middle of the night, when I would be up doing Tess work. When I heard his footsteps I would freeze, and stop typing. I’d listen to his footsteps pause outside my door, and then retreat back to his room.

  Nevertheless, the day-to-day practicalities of communal living were a challenge. Luckily my Tess schedule meant I could use the kitchen at night, when he was asleep, but once or twice he was still up and, when he heard me in there, came through in his tracksuit bottoms for a ‘chat’. He would sometimes get a takeaway from the restaurant below and the waiters would bring it up to the flat; the first time the doorbell rang, I nearly fell off my chair. He quickly got to know all of them, and I would hear him on the street outside, chatting to them as they smoked. He would tell them about his auditions and ask them about themselves, as if they were his friends.

  Even when absent, his presence was felt. He liked to cook himself elaborate meals using strange ingredients from ethnic supermarkets, and I would often find a streak of his latest dish down the side of a kitchen cabinet and a jar of strongly smelling sauce in the fridge with its lid half off. In the bathroom, globules of his shaving foam, flecked with hair, hardened on the sink.

  After not really having any contact with men before, suddenly, there were two. Because it wasn’t long after Jonty arrived that I had my first email from Connor.

  This was six and a half weeks after Tess had checked out. In Sointula, all was going smoothly. Tess had moved into her flat and had started her job, teaching art to Natalie, who was being home schooled by her parents. She attended yoga lessons three times a week, and, much to her surprise, had developed an interest in fishing. She had also made some new friends and that day, the day Connor emailed, I had decided that she was going to take a day trip to the mainland with her new friend Leonora, an older woman who ran a quaint cafe on the island.