‘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.
‘No, don’t worry. I’ll do it later.’
‘What the hell is that smell?’ Zoya asks, grimacing and holding her nose.
‘Julian and Betty are batch-cooking bone broth. There’s a pile of bones in the bath.’ Zoya makes a suitably horrified face. ‘Of all the flat shares in all the towns in all the world, why did we have to walk into this one?’
‘Because it was the only one within budget that had two rooms available,’ says Zoya.
‘Emily’s got another random guy here.’
‘Hide your cash. I’m pretty sure the last guy she had over stole a twenty from my wallet and a pair of knickers from my drawer.’
‘Lucky I have nothing to steal then,’ I say. ‘Unless he wants a dying spider plant.’
‘I don’t know where she finds these sketchy men.’
Zoya turns down her music and sits at her dressing table to straighten her hair. Standing behind her in the mirror, I’m reminded how terrible my own hair looks – mousy brown and asymmetrical, the result of an online tutorial on how to cut your own hair. Maybe I didn’t have the right scissors. Maybe I didn’t have the right hair.
‘Look at this,’ I say, tugging at the shorter side.
‘It’s not that bad,’ says Zoya. ‘Come on, I’ll put it up for you.’ She stands up and motions for me to sit down, then sets to work, pinning it into a stylish messy bun. ‘You’ve got to look smart for your first day in the new job.’
‘Yes,’ I say, touched that she’s remembered today’s the day. ‘Finally, I’m going to get to do more than print scripts and clean up after everyone.’
‘I’m so proud of you, Luce,’ she says. ‘My best friend, the big-shot TV researcher.’
‘Junior researcher,’ I correct her, feeling myself flush at the compliment. ‘And I didn’t get a pay rise, just a new title, but I will have more responsibilities now. Hopefully I’ll be able to pitch ideas, maybe even brief the guests.’
‘You’ve worked your little butt off,’ Zoya says, picking up a sparkly hairband and laying it on my head like a crown. ‘You’ll be Queen of TV in no time. Which reminds me’ – Zoya reaches to pull a card out of a drawer and hands it to me. On the front is a sketch she’s drawn. It’s of me wearing a crown, holding a TV, surrounded by books and badgers. It says ‘Congratulations!’ in perfect calligraphy across the top.
‘This is amazing,’ I say, laughing. ‘A Zoya Khan original. This might be worth a fortune one day.’
‘It’s to put on your desk at work, to remind yourself where you’re headed.’
‘I love it. What’s with all the books and badgers?’
‘You like books and you like badgers,’ she says with a shrug.
I reach up to squeeze her hand, and mouth ‘thank you’ in the mirror.
Zoya has always been a stalwart supporter of my stuttering TV career. My parents were open-minded when I got my first job in production, but eighteen months later, when I was still a runner on minimum wage, they started to question what I was doing with my life. All my friends were moving up their respective career ladders, making good use of their degrees, while I was still languishing on the bottom rung, making coffee.
On the dressing table is a framed photo of our group of friends from school: me, Zoya, Faye and Roisin. The four of us talked about living together when we first moved to London, but then Faye’s parents bought her a studio flat, and Roisin, as a trainee lawyer, had a far bigger budget than Zoya and me.