Queenie(9)

“Just need a second, my back feels like it’s going to go!” Eardley was always so cheerful despite the extreme circumstances and short notices I threw at him, but small parts of me die every time I watch him bang that dressing table on all of the floor and wall surfaces he possibly can.

“Can we just get this bit over and done with, please?” Leigh said, running his hands through his dyed blond hair. He looked up to the sky, extending his neck to catch the passing breeze. The sun made his green eyes glisten. “My skin is the perfect color for my foundation and if I stay out in the sun I’ll get darker. It won’t match, Eardley,” Leigh pleaded.

“Okay, let’s get back to it!” Eardley said, stretching his wiry frame from side to side. “I’m sure my back’ll be fine.”

I left Eardley and Leigh to get on with the whole bother of carrying things into the house and made my way up to the bedroom. It was darker, dimmer, and smaller than I’d remembered. Patches of mold lurked in all four corners of the room; the garden-facing window was small and dirty; the carpets were cheap and beige, much like the rest of the house; and the yellow walls were stained and cracked.

Three seconds later, Leigh came into my new bedroom while I was observing one of the many damp patches. Had they grown since I first came here?

“Are you going to that party tomorrow?” Leigh asked, reclining on a pile of boxes.

“Oh God, which party?” I asked, standing on a box to get closer to the damp patch. I couldn’t retain any plans recently.

“James,” Leigh said. I stared back at him.

“Fran’s boyfriend? Darcy’s friend Fran from school? Invited us last week?”

“Oh, I hate those parties.” When Darcy first started inviting me to these parties, I’d thought it was for a social experiment or hidden-camera show, like “put a black person in Made in Chelsea and see what happens,” but ultimately these gatherings really are as simple as “posh people and me.”

“Nobody goes to parties because they like them,” Leigh said. “We go either because we want to show everyone else there that we’re better than them, or because we want to distract ourselves.”

“And which one are you?”

“The former. But you, dear heart, are the latter, and you need to take your mind off Tom and this breakup—sorry, break, whatever you’re calling it.” Leigh sighed impatiently.

“Fair,” I said, immediately rummaging through bags to find something to wear. “You’ll be there, though, right?” I asked, cringing at my neediness. I’d only been away from Tom a day.

“I’ll see if I can pop in after Don’s gig. I’m making no promises, though, I’ll probably be off my face,” Leigh said, standing up and winking at his reflection in the smudged window.



* * *



I was as surprised as the next person that I’d moved into a house with strangers from the Internet. The prospect itself filled me with dread, fear, and a healthy amount of disgust, but ￡21K a year wasn’t going to get me anything bigger than someone’s garage space.

The housemates themselves didn’t seem awful, but I felt very nervous at the prospect of living with white people, because I know that my standards of inherited Caribbean cleanliness are bordering on clinical OCD levels.

I grew up watching my grandmother wash bottles, cartons, everything, before they were allowed to go into the fridge, and she’d clothesline you if you walked your shoes through the house.

Living with Tom didn’t count because I’d trained him up and we’d had some clean-house trial runs when we stayed at his family holiday home in Turkey that almost, but didn’t quite, break us.

I’d been shown around my new house by my prospective housemates: a boy, Rupert, twenty-nine, a little shorter than me and markedly angry about it, didn’t make eye contact; in essence, little more than a posh boy with a beard and those deck shoes and no socks. Even at the end of October.

The girl, or woman, Nell, is thirty-five, works in a deli, and wears her short blond hair in high bunches. She is the nicer of the two, and has already admitted that she has a drinking problem, demonstrated when she opened the door to me with an XL glass of white wine in her hand at 11:30 a.m.

As bad as that was, it was the best of some very, very bad housing situations. How do seven people live together and share only two bathrooms? was my first question when I saw room number one in Stockwell, on the top floor of a narrow four-story house. All four stories were a mess, which I suppose is unavoidable when seven are squashed into a five-bedroom property that is shoddily converted into more rooms with, in one case, a sheet dividing one large room in two.

I had to step over at least ten bikes on the way in, and the kitchen was so cluttered that I could have sworn whoever lived there was playing crockery Jenga.

The bedroom, a steal at ￡800 a month, was absolutely tiny. I’d barely be able to fit my bed in there, let alone the books I’m determined to carry through life with me.

When the tiny posh boy in a decorative dirty trench coat and flip-flops who showed me round let me out and told me he’d be in touch, we both knew that it wasn’t going to happen. The second place I went to see was a studio in Camberwell. Completely out of my price range, but I’d watched a YouTube tutorial on haggling that I was going to put into practice. I had to use Citymapper to find my way to it, so obviously I was sent on an urban scenic route all around the houses.