Talking to Addison

‘Hmm? Yes.’ Josh artfully splashed a measure of red wine into the sauce, crying out ‘Whoops!’ flamboyantly when he got a bit on his professional apron. I really could understand why women had a hard time taking him seriously.

He caught me watching him.

‘Am I being gay again?’

I smiled at him, colouring slightly. When we were at college, I used to tease him on a semi-continual basis when he’d bring his girl stories to me, but now I was his tenant, and it felt a bit uncomfortable.

‘That was a very masculine dash of wine. But I am definitely fascinated by my new invisible flatmate.’

‘Try taking the room next to his – it’ll wear off soon enough,’ growled Kate from the table, where she continued to do Very Hard Sums.

‘Oh, can I?!’ I yelped, before realizing the faux pas.

‘Sorry, darling,’ said Josh, ‘but you’re not – aha! – coffin up enough rent for that!’

Kate and I stared at him in disgust until he apologized.

Dinner was good. Josh liked to cook, and was good at it. He had a sinecure at his family’s ancient law firm near Chancery Lane, which required him to turn up at about ten thirty looking well groomed, take long lunches and impress foreign clients with his Englishness and hand-made shoes, before retiring to the senior partners’ offices at four thirty to partake of an early gin and tonic before heading home. Which was just as well, as he wasn’t the most academic of characters: you wouldn’t want him defending you in a murder trial whilst simultaneously admiring the court cornicing. The only thing preventing the absolute outbreak of class war was that he didn’t get paid that much for it. It just stunned me that such things still existed outside of the kind of stuff Rupert Graves does in all his films.

Kate ate about three bites, wiped her lips ostentatiously with a napkin then declared she had mounds to do and retreated to her room with the remainder of the wine. Her good night to me was curt, to say the least.

I looked at Josh.

‘What is with her?’ I asked. I mean, she’d always been uptight, but this was real carrot-up-the-bum stuff.

Josh toyed with his spaghetti.

‘Oh, it’s that stupid job of hers,’ he said. ‘She works fourteen-hour days, then comes home like a bear.’

‘What, pooing in the woods?’

‘Grizzly.’

‘Oh. Good spag bol.’

‘Thank you.’ Josh coloured prettily. ‘So, anyway, I keep saying she should change it, do something less stressful, but she just bares her teeth at me and hisses something about me being privileged and how I would never understand what it means to fight for something.’

‘Her dad’s a GP, isn’t he?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Hmm. But she must make an absolute fortune. Why does she live here?’

Josh looked faintly amused.

‘Charmingly direct as ever, darling.’

‘Oh, you know what I mean.’

‘I know. I’m not sure, really. She does make a stinking amount of money, though. Something like more in her bonus than I do in a year.’

Than I will in a decade, I thought to myself mournfully.

‘We moved in together when I came down,’ Josh went on, ‘and she’s been here ever since, so I suppose she likes it. It’s only four stops on the tube, and pretty cheap.’

I remembered a rather better reason though. Well well well, after all this time. But then, even if she didn’t still fancy him, I suppose if I was feeling stressed out, I wouldn’t mind coming back to a nice warm flat and spaghetti bolognese and someone nice like Josh you could be rude to. Well, she certainly wouldn’t get away with being rude to me.

‘Would you mind getting out of that shower!’ screeched Kate, banging her Clarins bottles on the door at five o’clock one morning (I was doing nights at the market). She carried them daily in and out of the bathroom, presumably in case I stole them.

‘I don’t know what can be keeping you in there that long. You can only smell of flowers, surely.’

She banged again.

‘OK, OK, I’m coming,’ I yelled back, frantically drying myself and wondering if I could stab her with a cotton bud.

‘I have got a plane to catch, Holly,’ she said. Because I have a career and you don’t, she might as well have added.

‘Oh no! The Euro will fall!’ I opened the bathroom door dishevelled, wrapped in two threadbare towels which almost but didn’t quite cover all my bits.

‘Will it?’ she said, instantly alert, then relaxed as her brain realized the context. She gave a tight smile, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and slipped past me, unbelting her Liberty robe.

Bitch, I thought to myself – one of my litany of dreaded ‘thought retorts’ – and headed for bed.

Over the next week or so I started to settle in. I was working part-time shifts at the New Covent Garden market, day and night, and as Kate went to work at 6.30 a.m. and returned at 9 p.m., I normally missed her, and steered well clear of the shower in the morning.

The house, though always untidy, was clean – for me, a perfect state of affairs. Kate paid someone to come in and ‘do’ once a week, which I disagreed with in principle but thoroughly enjoyed the benefits of. It began to feel like home, despite the coffin, which was nine foot by seven. Not the kind of place you’d let a cat visit, in case its brains got bashed to bits in a nasty swinging incident.

I was used to creeping in at odd times of night, and was always amazed to hear the faint tapping of fingers on a keyboard, random beeps and small buzzing noises from Addison’s room.

I never saw him, but fantasized wildly about him. A monster? Kate and Josh’s deformed lovechild, half man half robocop? Perhaps he was blind! That was why he crept around in the dark and didn’t go outside. I had a brief romantic reverie of my being his life partner, caring for him, being his lover and his guide; ‘Holly,’ he would say, ‘you, you are my eyes.’ And, plus it would be a double bonus when I got to forty and wouldn’t have to bother about how I looked.

Then, ping, I realized that the Internet is in fact an almost purely visual medium, and apologized in my head to all the blind people in the world.

Finally, after about a fortnight, I cracked.

It was about 3 a.m., and the house was completely still. I’d been unpacking tulips from 11 p.m., but the work had thinned out and Johnny, my gaffer, had sent me home. It took about ten minutes on Josh’s bicycle – in the very dead of night I would glide down hills, hands free, and have to restrain myself from shouting out loud to fill up the rare London silence.

I had crept into the house, exhilarated and pink-cheeked from the spring wind. My hair was tangled, and I didn’t feel sleepy. My hours were so topsy-turvy, I didn’t know when I slept. The television, however, was in the sitting room, which backed on to Kate’s room – so, no Channel 5 soft porn for me. I was about to head through to the chilly kitchen to make some tea when I saw the omnipresent blue glow underneath the door, the familiar tap tap tap.

Well, sod it, I thought to myself. Two weeks living in the same house as someone and not seeing them is simply freaky and unnatural. There could be nothing wrong with just popping in and introducing myself, for fuck’s sake. It was only … well, ten past three in the morning. I felt strangely excited, like playing ring-the-bell-and-run-away. If I got yelled at, I could always hide and say it was Kate.

I crept across the hall, instead of walking across it like I normally did when I came in late at night so everyone would know it was me and not a burglar; steeled myself and rapped gently on the door.

The typing noise stopped. Encouraged, I tapped again. ‘Hello?’

There was no response.

Feeling like an idiot, I repeated, ‘Hello?’ leaning slightly on the door.