Beth O'Leary - The Flatshare

Mr Prior’s little, beady eyes look up at me. He shrugs. Smiles. It folds his papery, age-spotted face, shifting the tan lines like ink on his neck, left there from decades of shirt collars of precisely the same width.

He gives a slight shake of the head, like he’ll tell someone later how barmy these modern nurses are, but starts talking all the same.

Thursday morning. Ring Mam for short, difficult conversation on bus.

Mam, bleary: Is there news?

This has been customary greeting for months.

Leon: Sorry, Mam.

Mam: Shall I call Sal?

Leon: No, no. I’m dealing with it.

Long, miserable silence. We wallow in it. Then,

Mam, with effort: Sorry, sweetheart, how are you?

Return home afterwards to find pleasant surprise: home-baked flapjack on sideboard. It’s filled with colourful dried fruit and seeds, like Essex woman cannot resist clashing colours even in food, but this seems less objectionable when I see the note beside the tray.

Help yourself! Hope you had a good daynight. Tiffy x

An excellent development. Will definitely endure high levels of clutter and novelty lamps for three hundred and fifty pounds per month and free food. Help myself to large slice and settle down with it to write to Richie, filling him in on Holly’s condition. She’s ‘Knave Girl’ in my letters to him, and a bit of a caricature of herself — sharper, snarkier, cuter. I reach for more flapjack without looking, filling page two with descriptions of the stranger Essex-woman items, some of which are so ridiculous I think Richie won’t believe me. An iron in the shape of Iron Man. Actual clown shoes, hung on the wall like a work of art. Cowboy boots with spurs, which I can only conclude she wears regularly, looking at how worn they are.

Notice absently, as I fiddle with the stamp, that I have eaten four slices of flapjack. Hope she really meant ‘help yourself’. While biro is in hand, scribble on back of her note.

Thanks. So delicious I accidentally ate most of it.

Pause before finishing the note. Feel I need to repay her in something. There is really hardly any flapjack remaining in tray.

Thanks. So delicious I accidentally ate most of it. Leftover mushroom stroganoff in fridge if you need dinner (on account of having hardly any flapjack left). Leon

Better make mushroom stroganoff now.

That was not the only note left for me this morning. There’s this one on the bathroom door.

Hi Leon,

Would you mind putting the toilet seat down please?

I’m afraid I was unable to write this note in a way that didn’t sound passive-aggressive — seriously, it’s something about the note form, you pick up a pen and a Post-it and you immediately become a bitch — so I’m just styling it out. I might put some smiley faces to really hammer the thing home.

There are smiley faces all along the bottom of the note.

I snort with laughter. One of the smiley faces has a body and is pissing towards the corner of the Post-it. Wasn’t expecting that. Not sure why — I don’t know this woman — but hadn’t imagined she had much of a sense of humour. Maybe because all her books are about DIY.

‘That is ridiculous.’

‘I know,’ I say.

‘That was it ?’ Rachel yells. I flinch. Last night I drank a bottle of wine, panic-baked flapjack, and barely slept; I’m a little fragile for shouting.

We’re sitting in the ‘creative space’ at work — it’s like the other two Butterfingers Press meeting rooms, except annoyingly it doesn’t have a proper door (to convey a sense of openness), and there are whiteboards on the walls. Somebody used them once; now the notes from their creative session are ingrained in dried-out whiteboard marker, totally incomprehensible. Rachel has printed out the layouts we’re meeting to discuss, and they’re spread out across the table between us. It’s the bloody Make a Stir baking book, and you can really tell I was hungover and in a rush when I edited this the first-time around.

‘You’re telling me that you see Justin on a cruise ship and then he gives you an I want to fuck you stare and then you go on about your business and don’t see him again ?’

‘I know,’ I say again, positively miserable.

‘Ridiculous! Why didn’t you go looking for him?’

‘I was busy with Katherin! Who, by the way, gave me an actual injury,’ I tell her, yanking my poncho out of the way to show her the angry red mark where Katherin pretty much stabbed my arm mid-demonstration.

Rachel gives it a cursory look. ‘I hope you brought her manuscript delivery date forward for that,’ she says. ‘Are you sure it was Justin? Not some other white guy with brown hair? I mean, I imagine a cruise ship is—’

‘Rachel, I know what Justin looks like.’

‘Right, well,’ she says, throwing her arms out wide and sending layouts sliding across the table. ‘I can’t believe this. It’s such an anticlimax. I really thought your story was going to end with sex in a cabin bunk! Or on the deck! Or, or, or in the middle of the ocean, on a dinghy!’

What actually happened was that I spent the rest of the session in paralysed, panicky suspense, desperately trying to look like I was listening to Katherin’s instructions — ‘Arms up, Tiffy!’ ‘Watch your hair, Tiffy!’ — and simultaneously keep my eyes on the back of the crowd. I did start to wonder if I’d imagined it. What the hell were the chances? I mean, I know the man likes a cruise, but this is a very large country. There are many cruise ships floating around the edge of it.

‘Tell me again,’ Rachel says, ‘about the look.’

‘Ughh, I can’t explain it,’ I tell her, laying my forehead down on the pages in front of me. ‘I just . . . I know that look from when we were together.’ My stomach twists. ‘It was so inappropriate. I mean — God — his girlfriend — I mean, his fiancée . . .’

‘He saw you across a crowded room, semi-unclothed, being gloriously you-like and pissing about with a middle-aged eccentric author . . . and he remembered why he used to fancy the pants off you,’ Rachel concludes. ‘That’s what happened.’

‘That’s not . . .’ But what did happen? Something, definitely. That look wasn’t nothing. I feel a little flutter of anxiety at the base of my ribs. Even after a whole night of thinking about this, I still can’t work out how I feel. One minute Justin appearing on a cruise ship and catching my eye seems like the most romantic, fateful moment, and then the next I find myself feeling a bit shivery and sick. I was all jittery on the journey home from the docks, too — it’s been a while since I’ve travelled outside London on my own to anywhere other than my parents’. Justin had a real thing about how I always ended up on the wrong train, and he was sweet about taking journeys with me just in case; as I waited alone in the darkness of Southampton station I felt categorically certain I’d end up taking a train to the Outer Hebrides or something.

I reach to check my phone — this ‘meeting’ with Rachel is only in the diary for half an hour, and then I really do need to edit Katherin’s first three chapters.

I have one new message.

So good to see you yesterday. I was there for work, and when I saw ‘Katherin Rosen and assistant’ on the programme, I thought, hey, that’s got to be Tiffy.

Only you could laugh your way through someone reading out your measurements — most girls would hate that. But I guess that’s what makes you special. J xx

Hands shaking, I stretch the phone out to show Rachel. She gasps, hands to mouth.