Ugh. She shuddered and attempted to distract herself by looking around the room.
While she’d moved her furniture in, she’d also kept some of her grandmother’s stuff, including a glazed bookcase and a bureau with a roll-top that stuck. The floral wallpaper was the one she remembered from her childhood, so old it had gone out of fashion and come back in again, but it matched Claire’s modern retro-inspired sofa and armchair perfectly.
She sighed.
God, she missed her gran. Her nose stung and a tear appeared at the corners of both eyes. She kept staring at the large cream peonies on the wall, watching them blur in and out of their pale sage background until the moisture evaporated and the urge to give in and just sob abated. She realised she’d stopped on some show with loud-mouthed people arguing over the contents of abandoned storage lockers and shook her head. Gran would have hated this programme. No class. No class at all.
With that thought in her mind, she aimed the remote squarely at the screen and turned the TV off, then rose and hauled herself to bed. Suddenly, she felt very, very tired.
*
Claire tossed and turned all night, partly because of the heat, despite the fact large sash windows in her bedroom were open both top and bottom, and partly because every time she woke, she realised she’d been having a conversation with her downstairs neighbour in her sleep, letting him know just how inconsiderate and selfish she found him.
She really wasn’t doing very well at this live-and-let-live, whatever-will-be stuff, was she? It was stupid that something so trivial was affecting her this way, but ever since Maggs had mentioned her father’s letter earlier that evening she’d felt as if everything was topsy-turvy.
It didn’t help that in her dream conversations her neighbour hadn’t had a face. On the rare occasions he’d returned from wherever he’d been overseas he seemed to live a nocturnal existence. She’d heard doors slam, been woken by his music at unearthly hours, had to haul his bin back from the path after bin day, because he’d already left and someone would probably nick it if it stayed there too long, but she’d never once laid eyes on him.
At four-fifteen she let out a growl of frustration, threw back the sheet and got out of bed. There was only one way she knew to deal with this kind of thing. She needed to do something concrete, something to get these words out of her head.
It had been so hot that she’d been sleeping naked, so she pulled on her white shortie PJs with the large red hearts on them – a Christmas gift from Gran two years ago. It had been a joke between them, seeing as they resembled the ones Doris wore at the end of The Pajama Game – and stumbled into the kitchen. She grabbed the reporter’s notebook and biro she often used for her shopping lists and started to scribble.
Halfway down the page she stopped. It looked terrible. The sort of thing a lazy school child would scrawl as a forgery explaining that the family pet had digested their homework. It carried just as much weight and looked just as convincing.
She stood up and put the kettle on, deciding a nice strong cup of tea might help bring her to her senses, then reached into the dresser she’d found in a local junk shop for her good writing paper and rummaged in her pen pot for her fountain pen.
Yes, she had writing paper. The proper kind. It was the colour of clotted cream with ridges that felt nice if you ran your fingertips over the surface. Gran had always stressed the importance of a good ‘thank you’ letter, especially after birthdays and Christmas, and Claire had found it was one convention in this day of emails, status updates and Tweets that she didn’t want to let go of.
She made her tea and then sat down again, her eyes feeling slightly less gritty and her hand slightly more steady. She decided to use the scribbled note as a starting point and began to both copy and edit as her indigo ink swept across the page.
When she was finished, she folded it neatly into three and pushed it into an envelope with a tissue lining. It was a thing of beauty, and it seemed a travesty to be using stationery like this on a philistine like Mr Arden, but she hoped it would help her get her point across. She meant business, and this letter certainly screamed it loud and clear. She was tired of letting men ride roughshod over her and, while this might not be much, it was a symbol of something bigger. It was a start.
She licked the envelope, pressed the flap closed and then stood up. No time like the present, she thought, as she nipped out of her flat, padded carefully down the stairs, now illuminated with greyish pre-dawn light, and carefully and noiselessly lifted her neighbour’s letterbox.
She paused just at the moment she prepared to let the envelope drop onto the varnished floorboards inside. Slowly, she eased the letter back out of the slot, and then, still gripping it lightly, she turned her head and looked at the sprawl of junk mail cluttering up her hallway.
If she posted it, it would probably just get buried under everything else. Better to put it somewhere he was bound to find it. Her eyes came to rest on the culprit of her sore knees, resting innocently against the wall.
Hmm. He’d used his bike yesterday, and even if he didn’t use it again before he left, he’d still probably pick it up and put it back inside his flat. She walked over and placed the letter strategically on the saddle, then stepped back and surveyed her handiwork. There. That should do.
However, as she turned to creep back up the stairs, she had one last flash of inspiration …
Quickly, and before she could talk herself out of it, she grabbed the bike and rolled it forwards so the front wheel was just sticking a centimetre or two past the edge of her neighbour’s front door. There. He wouldn’t be able to miss it now – just like she hadn’t been able to miss the stupid contraption last night.
She grinned naughtily as she tiptoed back up the stairs, thinking to herself that it was just as well Doris was still going strong in her nineties. Even though Miss Day was known to have a keen sense of fun, Claire wasn’t sure she’d have been proud of what she’d just done if she’d been peering down from heaven.
Dominic’s body clock was so screwed up he’d bypassed the sleepy stage of tiredness and now just felt a bit drunk. Reality swam in and out of focus when he opened his eyes. For a moment, he thought he was in yet another hostel or airport, but he soon realised the reason he didn’t recognise his own bedroom ceiling was two-fold—firstly, he stayed here so infrequently he’d forgotten what it looked like and, secondly, somehow he’d turned himself around in the night, and now he was lying with one foot on his pillow and his head in the opposite corner of the bed, one arm dangling towards the floor.
Food.
That was the thought that entered his head, a primal and desperate signal sent direct from his abdomen to his brain, but the rest of him was so exhausted he couldn’t decide whether he wanted to eat or throw up. Be that as it may, he still managed to flip himself off the bed and stumble into his kitchen.
Inspecting the fridge might be a risky manoeuvre. He’d gone straight out for a ‘welcome home’ drink with his mate Pete as soon as he’d dropped his rucksack inside his front door and hadn’t checked the contents yet. He couldn’t quite recall if he’d remembered to empty it before he’d left back in February.
To be honest, he was happy to leave that riddle unanswered for now.
He turned his attention to the cupboards. There wasn’t much tempting there, either. Packets of rice and pasta. A tin of