Sleepless Nights Read Free Page A

hours later, hair tied up in a high ponytail, working my way through six sizzling rashers of bacon and a large glass of wine—I felt guilty about Dave. He’d a perfect right to be upset with me. We’d been together for a whole year, now I was going away for four months to America to help my sister, leaving him in London all by himself to cope with his mum’s Alzheimer’s, his dad’s depression, his own job struggles. It was a lot to ask of a boyfriend, no question about it. Why shouldn’t he have a little goggle at Ellen now and again? I was getting to live in New York, he was getting an eyeful of Ellen’s plump thighs. In a sense, it seemed a fair exchange.
    My flatmate Una crashed in about eleven, which was early for her, accompanied by a very tall man called Holly or Solly or something. Three days before she’d had her dark hair cut razor short on a dare; now she looked a bit like an army recruit, although less so in a leather skirt that only just skimmed her ass. She let the strange man feel her up while I explained earnestly why half the kitchen was in pieces on the floor. “To be quite honest, I don’t give a shit,” she said at last, after a cursory examination of the shattered bits, helping herself to a slug of wine straight from my bottle and a rasher of dripping bacon from the grill pan. She was incredibly skinny and ate terribly, grazing most days on leftovers and fast food. “Smash the whole place up if you want. And as for Dave, I think you should just dump him,” she added, somewhat irrelevantly I felt. “Don’t content yourself with maiming the bastard. Kick him out.” The unknown man’s right hand was now inside her black lace top, and for a moment or two our conversation was halted by the fact that his tongue was sloshing around in her mouth. I waited patiently for her to come up for air.
    “That’s just because you don’t like Dave,” I said, when the unknown man paused for a gulp of beer from his bottle. “Because he doesn’t have the hots for you, most likely. I’m not going to dump him for that.”
    “Don’t be silly,” Una replied, irritably, investigating the fridge, carelessly exposing the leaf-green seat of her undies. “I don’t like him because he lectures me about recycling yoghurt pots. Because he’s boring. Because he thinks he’s better than me. Like that sister of yours. You should dump him and find yourself an American rock star, that’s what I think. Or a tortured actor. Or alternatively one of those enormously sexy, ve-ry hot” (this slowly and meaningfully) “ve-ry fuckable basketball players…” At this point, the unknown man of great tallness half-laughed, half-moaned, grabbed her from behind, and started dragging her out of the kitchen, down the corridor, and into the bedroom. Gales of giggling and some screaming ensued, plus a lot of furniture rearranging. I shoved my fingers deep in my ears as the noise crescendoed, discovered that that didn’thelp, then grabbed my bag and denim jacket, slipped my toes into bright orange flip-flops, and swung out of the door, down the steep stairs, and into the summer darkness.
    On the whole, I decided, as I flipped and flopped softly along the pavement beside the long row of tall Victorian terraced houses that peered loftily down at me, I regretted the decision to move in with Una a year ago. I answered an advertisement in Loot when I was accepted into my Master’s in Social Work at Kingsbury College, London: “fun chick needed for spacious two-bedroom.” I was a fun chick, I needed a spacious two-bedroom. Check! What could go wrong? What went wrong was that Una’s idea of “fun” turned out to be incompatible with even part-time, half-hearted studying. Every time I opened a book, or (heaven forfend) switched on my aged computer to do anything other than surf porn sites, she grumped furiously that I was “bringing her down.” She was technically enrolled in a fashion course in south London, but was enraged