The Good Part(2)

‘Morning, Betty! What’s cooking?’ I ask brightly. One of my greatest qualities is that I can be polite and jovial even when I’m feeling grumpy and furious. Hiding how you really feel is an essential skill, especially when you live in a busy flat share. No one wants to live with a Moaning Mary. Before Betty can answer, I hear the bathroom door click open, and I dart back into the corridor to get in there before Em’s conquest. He’s still hovering outside Em’s door, but I manage to launch myself into the bathroom first. ‘Sorry, desperate,’ I say, crossing my legs and giving him an apologetic eye-roll.

As predicted, the sink looks like an army of miniature hedgehogs moulted in it, and there is no loo roll, again. Luckily, I have a secret tissue stash, hidden in my washbag for just such emergen— Oh. Someone found my secret tissue stash.

When I draw back the mouldy shower curtain, I find the bath full of very large, very real bones and stagger back in horror, thwacking my head on the towel rail. ‘Ow!’ What the hell? Is someone trying to dissolve a body in acid? As if this flat weren’t sordid enough.

‘You okay?’ a voice calls from the corridor. Backing out of the nightmare-inducing scene of death and decay, I hurry back to the kitchen.

‘Why is there a body in the bath?’ I demand. ‘Did you two murder someone?’

‘Oh, it’s not a body,’ Betty says with a tinkling laugh. ‘Julian and I are doing a broth fast this week. I needed to blanch the bones for the next batch, but I didn’t want to monopolise the kitchen sink. The butcher gave me a whole cow for next to nothing. Do you want to try some? Does wonders for a leaky gut.’ Betty holds a ladle towards me.

‘No, thank you,’ I say, swallowing my urge to gag. While I’m glad that no one has died, I’m perturbed that my first instinct was to think my flatmates might have killed someone. It’s possible I’ve been watching too much Poirot again. It’s my go-to comfort TV, but maybe it’s breeding a suspicious mindset. ‘How am I supposed to have a shower?’ I ask Betty as calmly as possible. ‘I can’t be late for work, not today.’

‘There’s no hot water anyway, we used it all blanching the bones,’ Julian yells from his bedroom.

‘I’ll move them in a mo,’ Betty says sweetly.

Em’s one-night stand has now taken ownership of the bathroom, and I’m vaguely concerned that I can hear the shower running. Is he standing in the bones to shower? Why am I the only one disturbed by this? Emily’s door is ajar, so I pop my head in to see if she’s awake.

‘Good night?’ I ask the mop of red dreadlocks emerging from beneath her duvet.

‘Oh Lucy, can you find out his name?’ she whispers at me. ‘I can’t remember.’

Before moving into the Vauxhall flat, Emily lived in a houseboat community in Shoreham. She abhors ‘the capitalist system’ and makes a point of trying to barter for things people expect her to pay for. Impressively, she got most of her bedroom furniture by swapping it online for homegrown cacti. On principle, she insists we ‘share everything’, which translates to her sharing my cereal, my bread and my face wash and moisturiser. When I first met her, I thought she was a hippie loon. Now, having lived with her for two years, I’ve decided my assumption was entirely correct.

‘It’s something biblical. Jeremiah? Zebadiah?’ I whisper. ‘Where did he come from?’

‘Poetry jam in Shoreditch,’ she says, slapping a palm to each cheek. ‘Hot, isn’t he?’

‘He’s certainly got a presence,’ I say, tactfully.

Emily and I do not have the same taste in men. I tend to gravitate towards men who prioritise wearing clean underwear every day, for instance. ‘My ceiling is leaking, again,’ I tell her.

‘How tedious,’ she says, then pulls her nice dry pillow back over her head. Sometimes it feels like I’m the only one here who cares about my ceiling issues. As if answering my self-pitying call, music starts to pulse from Zoya’s room at the far end of the corridor. Hopefully my best friend will be more sympathetic to my plight.

‘Hey,’ I say, knocking on her door frame. She’s dancing to the new Taylor Swift album in tights and a bra.

‘Morning, Lucy Lu,’ she says in a sing-song voice. I know Zoya was out partying until three a.m., and yet here she is, just five hours later, looking fresh and flawless, with her mane of glossy black hair, sparkling bright eyes, and enviably svelte figure. She’s the kind of person who falls out of bed wearing last night’s eye make-up but it looks like an effortless ‘smoky eye’. When that happens to me, I just look like a conjunctivitis-ridden badger.

I’ve known Zoya since we were twelve years old, though if I met her now, I’m not sure if we’d be friends – I’d be too intimidated. She grew up in India, then moved to England via America. When she arrived at our school, with her stylish American clothes and this glamorous east coast accent, it felt like a movie star was walking among us. But once I got to know Zoya, I discovered that underneath it all, she was just a geek like me. We bonded over our collections of Snoopy memorabilia and a mutual love of Stephenie Meyer novels.

‘Can I drag my mattress in here tonight?’ I ask her, sitting down on the end of her bed. ‘Stinkley flooded his bathroom again. My bed is soaked.’

‘Of course, poor you! Do you want me to help hairdryer your duvet?’ she asks.