The Good Part
Sophie Cousens
Chapter 1
Today
My bed is wet. Not damp, but properly soaked, as though my pillow has been used as a sandbag during a flood. Looking up, I see a small stream of water dripping through the yellow stain on my bedroom ceiling: the source of my current dampness. The bedside clock tells me it’s five a.m., which is the worst of all the a.m.s – not early enough to guarantee getting back to sleep, but not late enough to contemplate starting your day.
Jumping out of bed, I navigate the obstacle course that is my cluttered bedroom floor and run down the corridor, out of the front door and up the cold stone stairs to the top floor flat.
‘Mr Finkley! Mr Finkley! Your bathroom is leaking again,’ I shout while beating on the door with two fists. There’s no response. He’d better not have died in the bath with the tap running, because then the whole ceiling might fall in, and I’ll have his dead body to contend with on top of everything else. ‘Mr Finkley!’ I call again, with more urgency this time, trying to banish the mental image of my bed crushed beneath a pile of rubble and bubble bath. Finally, the door opens a crack, and Mr Finkley peers out at me. He’s in his sixties and has wispy blond hair that sticks out vertically on either side of his bald pate. His face is all angular features, and he wears brown-rimmed glasses permanently smeared with grease. Every time I see him, I need to remind myself not to call him Mr Stinkley, which is what my flatmates and I call him in private.
‘Bathwater is leaking through the ceiling again,’ I tell him sternly.
‘I was having a bath,’ he says, winding a wisp of wet hair around his index finger then removing the finger, leaving behind a hair horn.
‘It’s the middle of the night,’ I say wearily. ‘And remember the plumber saying you can’t have baths, not until you’ve sealed the floor tiles properly? Any overflow comes straight down into my bedroom.’ My voice is measured, as though I’m explaining this to a toddler.
‘I don’t like showers,’ he replies, twiddling a symmetrical horn of hair on the other side of his scalp.
‘Nor do I – especially when I’m asleep, in bed.’ I stomp down the stairs, calling back as I go, ‘Just put some towels down, please.’
There’s no point trying to reason with the bath-loving lunatic. I’ll have to call our landlord, Cynthia, again. All any of us knows about Cynthia is that she lives in Spain, is allergic to cat hair, and is a horribly negligent landlord. She often berates me for ‘vexing her with our domestic concerns’， but I am vexed, Cynthia, I am extremely vexed.
Back in my bedroom, I remove my beloved books from their plastic storage box, then place the box on the bed to catch any remaining drips. Surveying the books, I feel like a mother who’s failed to provide for her children. They deserve a decent bookcase, they deserve to be displayed, spine out, sorted by genre, not heaped in a pile on the floor of my damp room. One day, books, one day. After changing my sodden bed shirt, I crawl into the dry end of my bed, desperate for a couple more hours, but it’s hard to sleep when your mind is racing and your toes are damp. I must have drifted off, because I wake to my alarm, confused as to why I’m sleeping upside down.
My room looks completely different from this perspective. Out of the window I see the promise of another grey spring day, and the spider plant on my windowsill looks even browner and sicklier than it did yesterday. The plant was a gift from my dad, along with the now drooping yucca in the corner. He’s convinced that indoor plants help stave off depression and anxiety. Ironically, keeping them alive until his next visit has become a major source of anxiety for me. Dad assured me, ‘You can’t kill spider plants, they thrive on neglect,’ but I seem to have managed it. These plants feel like canaries in a coal mine, a litmus test for inhospitable living conditions.
Wrapping a towel around myself, I head to the bathroom, which I find occupied. It is always occupied.
I tap, then call through the door, ‘It’s Lucy. Are you going to be long?’ If it’s Emily or Zoya, they’ll be quick, but Julian might be hours. I want to know if it’s worth waiting or if I should go and make myself a cup of tea.
‘Just having a shave,’ Julian calls back. Great. That means the sink will be full of tiny bristles, and there’ll be shaving foam all over the hand towel.
‘The ceiling in my room is leaking again,’ I tell him.
‘That’s annoying,’ says Julian lightly, his tone failing to convey the true scale of quite how annoying it is, especially for the person who sleeps beneath said ceiling. As I’m standing in the corridor having a conversation with the bathroom door, a man emerges from Emily’s room. He’s tall, with peroxide-blond hair and a huge tattoo of an eagle in the middle of his chest.
‘Hi, I’m Ezekiel,’ he says, giving me a sheepish wave. ‘Friend of Em’s.’
‘Hi,’ I say, hurriedly pulling my towel up to make sure it’s adequately covering my chest.
‘Is the bathroom free?’ he asks with a yawn, slowly stretching his long, pale arms above his head. He has the languid manner of a man who is not in a rush to be anywhere – unlike me, who has a job to get to.
‘Bit of a queue, I’m afraid.’
Making small talk with one of Em’s random shags is not my favourite thing to do in the morning, so I head through to the kitchen, where I find Betty, Julian’s on-off girlfriend, boiling three saucepans on the stove. Whatever she’s making, it smells like a horse died in a ditch, then someone boiled up the ditch water with a few herbs. I have nothing against Betty as a person, but she’s always here, always batch-cooking, and the flat is hardly big enough for four of us, let alone Betty and all her mason jars.
‘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.