‘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at it, hoping that whatever it was, it had the power to grant wishes, only to discover it was, in fact, a condom – an out-of-date Durex condom, still in its shiny, promising wrapper.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.
When you lived with someone for five years, you got pretty used to their bathroom habits and no matter how much of a rush Vanessa might be in, she was incapable of taking anything even approximating a quick shower. This was my chance. Scrambling out from under the bed, I tried to forget how badly I needed the toilet, grabbed my suitcase from the bed, and headed for the front door. Mere microseconds from freedom, my sweaty palm was on the door handle when a blurry silhouette appeared behind the pebbled glass and a sharp rap on the wood frightened me out of my skin.
‘Miss Kittler? It’s the police. Can you come to the door?’
The fucking police? Why were the police here? Although my curiosity had been well and truly piqued, I knew all too well what had happened to the curious cat and I didn’t have eight lives to spare.
I scuttled back into my bedroom as fast as my feet could carry me. As far as I could see, I had two choices. Either I went back under the bed with five years’ of filth and the saddest condom in existence, or I could climb out of my bedroom window. Which would be worse, having London’s finest find you hiding underneath your own bed or climbing out of a window and dropping twelve feet onto potentially spine-shattering concrete? Either way, I was very likely to wet myself. As a second knock rattled the door frame and the water stopped running in the bathroom, I made my decision. Spine-shattering concrete it was.
Pushing the window open, I pulled up the handle on my suitcase and dangled it down as far as it would go. When it was just a couple of feet off the floor, I let it drop, biting my lip to stop myself from screaming when it busted open in a silent explosion of M&S cotton pants, followed by a softened, but still sickening crack, as my camera made a mad dash for freedom across the courtyard.
‘Hold on, officers, I’m coming!’ Vanessa called out to the third rap on the door.
‘On the upside,’ I told myself as I hoisted myself up onto the windowsill and perched my bum right on the edge, ‘this isn’t even the second stupidest thing I’ve done this month.’
Peering down at the Rorschach test of underwear beneath me, I inched forwards, questioning more or less every choice I had ever made in my life. Well, at least if I fell and broke both my legs, that would answer the Milan question for me. There weren’t many fashion photographers jetting around the world in full-body casts. Peeping up at me from underneath next-door’s unbearably pretentious potted herb garden, the rubber duck raised a nonexistent eyebrow and waited, expectantly.
‘Oh God, I’m being so stupid.’ I no longer cared about being heard. I cared about not dying. ‘What am I doing? I’m not jumping out of my own bloody window!’
White knuckles wrapped around the window frame, I twisted around, ready to cock my leg over and in. Unfortunately, I seemed to have forgotten that unless a certain Nick Miller was the one positioning my legs over my head, I was one of the least flexible women on the face of the earth. Getting back inside the flat was going to be a damn sight harder than getting out of it. Somehow, I had managed to get my back up against the UPVC frame and my bum half on and half off the ledge when I realized the belt loop of my jeans was stuck somewhere on the lock. And it was while wriggling around in this impossibly ridiculous position, one leg in and one leg out, doing the hokey cokey twelve feet above the floor, that my door flew open and two uniformed policemen and one towel-clad former flatmate burst into the room.
‘Don’t move!’ shouted policeman number one.
‘Come back inside the house!’ yelled policeman number two.
‘Without wanting to be rude …’ My voice was awfully high. ‘Can you pick one? I can probably do the don’t move one but I’m not sure I can get back inside the house.’
‘Stay where you are, Ms Kittler,’ said policeman number one, who seemed far more interested in what Vanessa was barely covering with her towel than whatever crime they imagined I had committed, ‘we’ve got this.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, a whimper escaping her throat as she cowered behind policeman number two. ‘I was so scared. She must have broken in while I was in the shower.’
‘What?’ I squeaked as policeman number one began to move slowly towards me. ‘I didn’t break in. I used my keys – I live here!’
‘We’ll sort all this out down at the station.’ Policeman number two approached with his hands held out towards me. And in one of those hands was a pair of handcuffs. ‘Now just get down off the ledge.’
‘I’m not going down to the station,’ I said, one hand up in a surrender-friendly position, the other still clinging to the window frame for dear life. ‘I didn’t break in.’
I stared at the scene in front of