Mish's Quick Kisses

Walking

31 March, 2006 at 17:11 (Uncategorized) (prose)

Late. I’m always bloody late for these things.

The girls would be there, I know it and instead of being in the warm with a glass of something that’s probably alcoholic I’m here. Late. No buses at this time of night. I don’t want a night out, I’m not up for drinks with the girls tonight. I just want to curl up under my duvet and have the world go by without me watching for once.

My housemate walked out on me today. We’d only know each other a year…no two by now, I think. I don’t know, we had a fight, it was kind of about all the things I don’t know, all the things I never remember. All the things I should remember. But she’s only my housemate you know? It’s not like we’re married or anything.

Drinks with the girls tonight and there will be bloody Lulu with a glass in her hands telling us all about the super time her and her fiancé are having. Yeah super, somebody should look in his eyes sometime to find out how super a time he’s having. It’s as though he’s trapped, he’s spent his whole life trying to be this image and of course Lulu; Louise Katherine Smith, is part of this image and so is marriage and two point four children and a job in the city or in local government or something. And he’s got everything he ever imagined would complete this image and he’s just on the verge of being there and he’s realised the image was great when it was in his head but now it’s for real and he’s there in the middle of this picture in his head. He can’t get out or explain to anybody now who he really is because all they’re ever going to see is the picture he made. Lulu thinks they’re happy and he’ll be a banker or a salesman or something and she’ll have children and be an interior designer; eventually he’ll be a town councillor or a politician and they’ll probably wander all the way into retirement never knowing a thing about each other.

She says I think too much, my housemate I mean, Ellie, she says I spend too much time wondering and analysing and I never really get to know things. Or people, she’d tell you everything I just said about Lulu’s fiancé was based on the fact we used to go out in sixth form, then we lost touch, went away to different universities and did everything people do. I met him through Lulu, ‘here this is my fiance’, that little speech. Ellie thinks I don’t recognise that people change but I do, I know that people change, it’s just I also know that people carry around in their heads and hearts little parts of themselves how they used to be, small parts that are them when they were six or twelve or older. Somewhere in his head…well just look at his eyes that’s all I’m saying.

I hate walking through this part of town, especially when it’s raining. I’m cold, I’m wet and I’m fucking late. I hate being late. I can’t believe I’m going on a girly night out. I hate drinks with the girls, I only go because I don’t know anybody else in this city and I want to pretend that I’m still alive, that I still have friends. Ellie would say that I had her and I do but sometimes you need to socialise with somebody you don’t live with, Christ it’s not like we were married or anything.

Course there’ll be Nikki, looking at her watch, wishing the time on so she can get back home and snuggle under the covers with her boyfriend. I like having Nikki there to be honest. It makes me feel like I’m not the only person who has better things to do, and yet still we both come when Lulu calls. Do you suppose that Lulu considers us friends? She probably thinks we’re more than acquaintances, I don’t know, Lulu is someone who could convince herself that black was white. Nikki is kind of like that too to be honest.

She should have gone into academic research or something with a brain like that, wanted to too I think. She did her MA and got offered funding on a PhD and turned it down, I mean turned it down! I should explain, Nikki is very intelligent, scarily so; you know one of those people who answers every question on any quiz show you care to name spot on but can also tell you what the reporter in the Times got wrong on his specialist subject. But she has this thing about practicality and her parents influence her every decision. They always disapproved of her intelligence, like people shouldn’t just think for a living, you know, even though Nikki could so easily have done that. And Nikki agrees with them on some strange level, sometimes I feel as though I don’t really know her, I don’t, I mean I work in an office with her for Christ’s sake. But she’s told me everything about her parents and her boyfriend and her MA and everything. Not a lot to talk about on our Girls Nights Out except ourselves and our dull little lives.

So anyway, Nikki, she’s managed to convince herself that working in an office earning basic wages is somehow morally superior to earning the good sort of wage she was offered to do a PhD with. She’s so ashamed of everything she did up to this point, ashamed of her academic life, I mean people I know have been ashamed of university because of the tattoos, the piercings, the embarrassing relationships, but the qualifications? So she has nothing in her life to feel good talking about; she either gets pissed and rambles, and that’s not so much now, or sits there counting the minutes until she can run home to her boyfriend and not have to think anymore. She’s drowning in this ‘morality’ though. I don’t know what her boyfriend does, although I’m willing to bet it’s not academic in nature, but he’s all she has to hold on to, like he was the one thing she got right. She doesn’t even seem to exist outside of him, she’s slowly fading away, in a few years there’ll be nothing but a shell of Nikki left.

I’m going to miss telling Ellie this stuff, curled up in her duvet. Sometimes if it’s winter or cold in the apartment we have hot chocolates, curled up on her bed jut describing everything that we’ve seen and talking and talking. It’s cold out here, I mean I’m walking fairly fast and everything but it’s cold. Oh well ten more minutes and I reckon I’ll be at the main street, not too far from the bar.

Yeah I’m going to miss talking to Ellie, she was great to share with. Although recently whenever we talk we have rows. Lately she find my appraisals of people off, or wrong, or just annoying. She keeps telling me to start looking at my own life, says I can find the faults with everybody else but I can’t see the obvious in front of me. She’s so angry all the time. I know I haven’t got a great life, I mean I work in an office on a fairly menial wage, whenever I do anything it’s always with Ellie, or one of these things that Lulu has organised. I’m still alive though, I haven’t got a partner but it’s not like you need one to live and I’m still young, I’ll find somebody.

Barbara who is also at this moment going to be sat in the bar with a bottle, is probably not going to find someone, not that it’s not for want of trying. Sometimes Barbara and I get drunk on these jaunts of Lulu’s and we start eyeing up the bar as though we needed other people. Barbara never pull of course, mostly she just ends up crying. I don’t know why Lulu lets us start these things.

Barbara’s partner, Sue died a few years ago, Barb is in her forties now and not entirely unattractive but all the women she looks at, in bars, on buses, wherever, they’re always Sue’s doubles and yet they never measure up to Sue. Barb went on a date once, she spent the whole of it holding the poor woman up to Sue’s standards and somehow those standards got about twice as high when Sue died. In any case Barb was a wreck the next morning as she left the date on her own thinking about Sue. Then she spent the night alternately dreaming and crying about Sue, she had panda eyes when she came into work. She doesn’t know how to move on from love. See she gave Sue everything she had and then came some stupid car crash and Sue was killed and so was everything Barb ever gave her, including trust actually because it was Sue’s other woman driving the car. She walked away without a scratch on her says Ellie, but poor old Barb just keeps reliving her life with Sue inside her head. At first she was trying to pinpoint what she did wrong, and then it was her trying to work out if Sue really loved her. She kept questioning and questioning herself, like everything she’d lived had been a lie. And now she can’t bear to think about this other women, so she doesn’t, just thinks about Sue, and about how she thought everything had been, and of course nothing can ever be that perfect again so all Barb does is live inside her head, except when she gets drunk with me and we attempt to pull.

Ellie said that it was the worst thing she ever did, but then Ellie does guilt, I don’t think it’s such a good idea personally. But then neither is what Barbara’s doing, not acknowledging what’s real and moving on from it. She just keeps going over the same things again and again and imposing her perception of events on them.
Ellie would be so mad at me going through the bad parts of town this late on a rainy night. She always worries about me. I guess she won’t anymore. She shouted at me as she left this afternoon, shouted that she wanted me to let her worry about me, that she didn’t want me to push her away like I push away everyone else. She was only my housemate for God’s sake what did she want? Key to my diary? I’m going to miss her but at least she won’t be there nagging at me and hounding me and… worrying about me. Except I’m going to miss that, her telling me to watch out for murderers, rapists and muggers. Her hugging me for so long before I go away, her hugs were the longest of any woman I’ve known and when we got drunk we’d hold each other and promise to be housemates until we were little old ladies. Kind of like school girls I know but we were drunk.

Nearly at the main street now, God it’s wet, oh shit…

Permalink Leave a Comment