Lindsey Kelk - What a Girl Wants

‘Home sweet home,’ I said with a sigh.

Even though it had only been three days since I’d left, the flat felt strange. The last time I’d left it, I’d been freaked out by the fact that nothing at all had changed in my absence. I wished I could say the same this time around. My keys always lived in the empty bowl by the door and I dropped them gently, listening to the familiar clatter before I stepped into the living room. Fuck. Me. Either Vanessa had started shagging the Tasmanian Devil or we’d been visited by seven very angry burglars. It was difficult to say which was more likely. The floor was covered in broken plates, broken glass and assorted empty bottles; picture frames had been pulled off the wall and dashed on the floor, which I figured explained the glass; and, most heartbreaking of all, my beloved Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs had been hurled around the room like mini Frisbees. She really knew how to hit a girl where it hurt. Picking my way through the debris, I grabbed handfuls of copper locks and tethered my hair back into a ponytail before I braved my bedroom, preparing myself for the inevitable devastation.

Pausing, I closed my eyes, pushed the door open and stepped inside.

‘Oh. Wow!’

If I’d walked in on a family of baby elephants having a tea party with Julia Roberts and the Queen, I couldn’t have been more surprised. My room was exactly as I had left it.

Closing my bedroom door behind me, I did a quick visual check. My suitcase was still sitting by the door, the bed sheets still rumpled from mine and Amy’s sleepover on Sunday night, the mug full of tea still on the nightstand, albeit a bit scummier than I had last seen it. My clothes were still in the wardrobe, unhung pictures still propped against the wall. Whatever madness had possessed Vanessa while she trashed the rest of the flat, she must have run out of steam before she could take my room apart.

Or she booby-trapped it … I froze for a second, taking another look around and searching specifically for anything explosive-looking.

Once I was satisfied there were no landmines hidden under my Ikea rug, I got down to business. Whatever had gone on while I’d been camped out in Shepherd’s Bush at Casa del Amy, all I wanted to do was get my things and go. Unzipping the still-full suitcase by the door and dumping the contents on my bed, I swapped out the dirty clothes for clean ones, mentally shaking my head at my wardrobe choices. To the left of my case, a sea of colourful silk lay on the bed – the clothes I’d borrowed from my friend Paige – and to the right, a regimented tumble of black trousers, white shirts and the odd navy jumper – my everyday outfits. I didn’t half love a V-neck. The wildest item of clothing in the right-hand pile was a houndstooth-check pencil skirt, and while I could try to pass that off as Mad Men chic, in reality it was something my mum had bought from the M&S outlet in Doncaster that didn’t fit her when she got home and she couldn’t be arsed to take it back. Surely there had to be some middle ground between a cropped neon unicorn T-shirt and the adult equivalent of a particularly crappy school uniform?

Once my suitcase was full of my depressingly few essentials, I sat myself down on the bed beside it and stared at my room for a moment. Now what was I supposed to do? Leave the rest of it and never return? I couldn’t stay with Amy much longer. Six people to one toilet was already madness and adding a seventh really seemed to have pushed a couple of her flatmates past their tentative grip on sanity, but moving into a new flat would mean finding the money for a deposit, furniture, toilet paper, washing-up liquid and Sky Plus, and I was completely broke.

I stared at the small rubber duck I had rescued from the bathroom and waited for a response. He usually had a lot to say for an inanimate object but in this instance he was uncharacteristically quiet.

‘Suppose I don’t have any choice,’ I said out loud, to break the eerie silence of the abandoned room. ‘Back to Amy’s it is.’

‘Or you could go to Milan,’ the duck pointed out. ‘That’s an option.’

‘Shut up, duck,’ I said, unzipping the suitcase and shoving him deep inside. That would teach me to look to a bathroom accessory for advice. ‘What do you know?’

Milan.

Sitting on the edge of my bed, swinging my legs back and forth, I pulled on the end of my ponytail. Milan, Milan, Milan.

And that was when I heard someone kicking the door open.

‘Shit bollocks bastard!’ I leapt to my feet, panicking at the sound of Vanessa’s voice right outside my bedroom. I looked left. A shoddily constructed wardrobe that would not hold an elf, let alone me. I looked right. Wall.

‘Yes, Daddy, I said I know.’

The front door slammed behind her and her keys clattered in the bowl beside the door: the bowl that I had dropped my keys into ten minutes earlier.

‘But I’m having a shitty week and I’m not in the mood for lunch,’ Vanessa whinged. ‘Why can’t you take me out for dinner instead?’

Without a better solution, I dropped to my knees and rolled underneath my bed, pulling my spare winter duvet over my head. Trying my best to splutter silently through many months of dust, single socks and poorly disposed of chocolate-bar wrappers, I shuffled backwards until my feet hit the wall. As I swiped loose strands of hair and dust bunnies away from my face, I felt something sharpish scratching against my skin. I grabbed at it, hoping that whatever it was, it had the power to grant wishes, only to discover it was, in fact, a condom – an out-of-date Durex condom, still in its shiny, promising wrapper.

And there we had it: I was twenty-eight years old, with my freezing cold tummy bared to my filthy bedroom floor in a two-sizes-too-small T-shirt, with a duvet over my head, being physically attacked by expired prophylactics.

There was no way to sink any further.

‘Somewhere nice …’ I listened while Vanessa continued to barter with her father, wondering whether or not I could pull the condom over my head like a stocking and charge out the front door without being recognized. ‘Nobu?’

I wanted to go to Nobu. Cow.

‘No, Daddy,’ she whined from the living room. It seemed the shithole she had created didn’t bother her nearly as much as it did me. ‘I have a headache. I need to stay home and rest this afternoon. I know, I’m probably working too hard.’

Well, that wasn’t brilliant news, was it? How was I supposed to get my case of clean knickers out of the flat if she wasn’t going to sod off back out for lunch? For the sake of my sanity, I forced myself to ignore the ‘working too hard’ comment.

‘OK, make it for eight. I’ll see you there.’

On the upside, it seemed as though she hadn’t seen my keys in the bowl by the door and so there was a chance I could get away with this if I stayed very quiet and didn’t attempt to move for the next seven hours. As unlikely as it sounded, that option did actually seem preferable to trying to get out of the flat while Vanessa was still in it, despite the fact I was suddenly desperate for a wee. My bladder had a terrible sense of humour. I imagined this was exactly how Anne Frank felt. Only worse.

I hated not being able to see what was going on. I hated lying underneath my filthy bed, clutching a broken phone in one hand and a condom that had gone off in 2012 in the other. I hated that this was how I found out that I was apparently claustrophobic. Hyperventilating ever so slightly and trying to ignore my as-yet-undiscovered claustrophobia, I concentrated on the sounds outside of my bedroom. A dustbin lorry in the street, high-heeled pacing in the other room, some muffled swearing. Then, after what felt like forever, I heard the shower running.