The night Leah arrived April and Cora still weren’t talking, they’d spent a couple of days avoiding each other either holed up in their rooms or ghosting out of the house early in the morning and slipping back in quietly after it got dark. I saw them both, separately, as they ocassionally surfaced for food or a drink and, with me, they were pleasant enough, if a little guarded. I didn’t push it. I hoped with some time that things would settle down and we could all start again. Otherwise it was going to be a very long term.
I liked Leah immediately. She’d arrived at about nine having spent the whole day in transit. Some of it was the actual travel but most of it was the usual series of checks through health security at both borders. Apparently everyone on her flight had been held for an extra set of precautionary tests for a couple of hours after someone showed a slightly irregular temperature. I made a mental note not to bother sharing this detail with Cora. It was tense enough in the house already. Leah seemed to have registered that the atmosphere was a little strained, I guess she picked up my awkwardness when she asked where the others were, but she didn’t press it when I said that they were keeping themselves to themselves at the moment. I think that was why I liked her. She seemed to pick up a lot that was unsaid and had the grace to wait to understand more without being pushy. I guess I envied that in her because it was so unlike me.
She had short, dark, almost black, hair. Audrey Hepburn short. She didn’t look like Hepburn but her hair was kind of similar. I commented that I thought it suited her and made the comparison but she looked confused and said she didn’t know much about old movies. I found a picture online and showed her on my phone; she found it hilarious and just said: I wish. I thought she was being modest, she had high, narrow cheeks and beautiful, laughing eyes that I would’ve killed for. She caught me looking at her but didn’t seem bothered by it. She smiled and it was me that broke eye contact.
We opened the bottle of wine that I’d originally bought for all of us and talked. She teased me a little when I told her about my year travelling, pretended to be upset that I hadn’t visited Italy. I didn’t want to admit that I’d avoided the hotspots in Europe, too many people I’d known had been caught out in lockdown and lost any time they might have been travelling. Like earlier she seemed to silently clock that this was what had happened and let it pass. She told me about her home. I told her about mine. It wasn’t really a fair contest: after she’d played her sun-kissed-banks-of-Lake-Como card I was always holding a losing hand. It definitely trumped a commuter belt town in the Home Counties where the most controversial thing that had happened in my lifetime was when they gave Aldi planning permission to open on the old leisure centre site. Most controversial outside of the Viral Health Act provisions, obviously, but I tried to ignore all that stuff that I couldn’t control.
After we’d seen off two thirds of the bottle some music started playing, audible through the ceiling above. April’s room. It was the first time I’d heard anything like that since the incident with Cora but she’d almost always had a pair of headphones round her neck when I’d seen her. Maybe her bluetooth had dropped out or something. Maybe she wanted to hear something vibrating in the air instead of right there inside her ear. I always preferred music through speakers, I liked to feel it through my body. It didn’t matter what it was, I wasn’t a massive bass-head or anything, I just liked the physical sensation of it. My parents had shown me some old video of when they used to go to festivals, before the restrictions, and it looked like heaven. Looking at them, arm in arm, swaying in a crowd to some 90s band everyone had forgotten left me feeling, I don’t know, left me sad. It seemed strange to grieve for something that you’ve never had but that was how I felt.
Leah looked at me, tilted head, questioning. No sorrow tonight. It’s my first one here. That was all she said before she stood up and, slowly at first, began to move to the music filtering down from above. She closed her eyes, tipped her head back, and danced. After a moment she opened one eye, almost comically, fixed it on me and commanded me to join her. I got up a little unsteadily, it was a while since I’d drunk this much, and the pair of us shuffled in an uneven circle in the middle of the room. The song changed, it was one that I recognised. April must have liked it as she turned it up. I was pretty sure it was The Cure. Close To Me? Was that it? I was spinning now. Maybe the room was spinning.
Leah snatched up the wine and took a swig, passing it across to me. One of the last things I remember was how intimate that had felt, drinking from the same bottle. Intimate and trusting. I drank, tried to take a step back in time with the music, stumbled and fell over, upending the rest of the bottle on my face. Both of us started laughing, neither of us could stop and when Cora and April appeared in the room to see what all the noise was they found us lying on the floor, shaking, faces contorted in manic smiles. I think they were so surprised that neither of them realised they were standing right next to each other. There was something infectious about the laughter. They both cracked and all four of us were left helpless, howling and cackling with uncontrollable glee.
We’re housemates now, okay? Like I said, Leah seemed to know what to leave unsaid but she seemed to know when to find the right words too. That was the start of things being good. They didn’t go bad until much later.
42 @ 42 