Ménage Read Free Page B

with a corset built from a birdcage, with a live bird inside it!
    Bottles stuffed in bag, I snuck to the back and, before heading to the toilet, paused and stuck up an advert for the spare room. On looking up I noticed this girl was staring at me. Quite beautiful in a way, skinny-looking with long mousy hair, not dyed or cropped. Young, privileged, but not hip. Twenty-one was my guess. Flat sensible shoes, not retro heels or Doc Martens like the rest, and an Aran sweater. Something freakish but endearingly geekish about her, profoundly uncool, but still an elegance, the high cheekbones and large sky-blue eyes, a sign of good breeding, a trophy mother maybe. It was not my fault that Saul taught me to read class background from faces. He liked to joke that Dr Mengele was right. Eugenics would be on the pages of
Vogue
soon enough. I imagined her in time lapse, a hundred people buzzing around her in a soft blur of excitement about what’s hot and what’s not, and her standing so still, staring out at the arseholes.
    From across the gallery, Saul nodded to me to proceed with phase two. So I ducked away and headed to the toilet. The process was tricky as I’d made the mistake of swapping light bulbs before attempting to steal the toilet roll and so had to work in the dark with my penknife to open the big white metal thing. (Did they do that to stop toilet rolls being stolen? Were there others like me?) It was a real treasure, though, a whole new roll, about a foot in diameter. It was hard to stuff it into the shoulder sack with the two bottles and the bulb in there already, but the thought of actually cleaning my arse on something other than Saul’s stolen tabloids got me through the humiliating process. Then there were knocks at the door and posh voices laughing and I was crouching by the door, listening like a cat, trying to will the bodies away, feeling rather like Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment
.
    I was out and mumbling apologetically about the damned light bulb that had just blown, as a couple laughed past me and entered together. Coked up, obviously, going for a kinky shag. I searched through the bodies for Saul and the door.
    The girl was still there at the noticeboard, in front of my advert, and I realised what a stupid mistake I’d made. How easy it would be for anyone to work out that the guy loitering by the noticeboard had been the toilet thief. My name and address there for all to read. I feared she was maybe the daughter of the gallery owner and was about to have me arrested. She smiled as if with a look of pity, or embarrassment. Anxiety gripped me.
    I pushed through the thickening trendies to the exit. Outside and round the corner, I waited for Saul. As my breath calmed and I counted the minutes, I was suddenly crushed by the pettiness of what I had found so all-consuming just minutes before – the theft of a light bulb, toilet roll and two bottles of wine. As I had to pay for both our tickets on the late-night bus and as Saul would consume all the wine himself, I calculated that, even after such entrepreneurial exertions, I was left at a loss of something like forty-seven pence.
    As I rested my head against the cold wall and closed my eyes, her smile came to me. And a phrase – ‘Alone among the arseholes’. I thought that, as with most things of beauty, I would never see her again.
    Five flatmate interviews were scheduled for the day after next, but still the stand-off on the bin bags had not been resolved. To make matters worse Saul had dressed in his most offensive attire to greet the potentials: that wedding dress he’d torn in half to make into a T-shirt – grey with grime – his red rhinestone cowboy boots and a huge beauty spot over his stubble. — Try to have some common sense for once, I begged, to which he replied, — Sense is far too common for me! I decided it was best he stayed out of the proceedings and had dragged only the first of the stinking bags out of the door when they started