Chloe. Freya North

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СКАЧАТЬ of renting! she cursed, desperate for Jocelyn to advise her to move, dear girl.

      Where to?

      Ha! Knowing Jocelyn, bloody Wales or Ireland, Scotland even.

      What to do. Where to go.

      And when.

      Why should Chloë procrastinate so? Shouldn’t she leap at such an opportunity? Not only is this the chance to rid herself of lousy job and awful boyfriend in one fell swoop, she is also being given the means to find her feet, her future and her fate. But the envelope marked ‘Wales’ remains unopened; Chloë has returned from another depleting day at work and Brett’s arrival is imminent.

      If her treasured godmother’s death less than a month before had fractured Chloë’s life, then her last will and testament had thrown her world into quandary. In Chloë’s twenty-six years, there had been few decisions to make yet here she was being guided and goaded by a dead woman to make two that were potentially momentous. Retrieving a framed photograph of Brett, Chloë tapped his chest sternly.

      ‘Jocelyn never liked you much,’ she told him while he grinned back at her, suave and vain. She pushed her thumb over his face until it was covered completely. ‘And I never actively sought her approval because deep down I think I knew there was little that warranted it.’

      Chloë kept her thumb over the photograph and drummed the fingers of her free hand against the armrest of the chair. Though now headless, Brett’s stance, with hands on hips and one knee cocked, spoke reams of his arrogance and vanity. She smacked her hand flat over the photograph so that only a palm tree and an innocuous tuft of hair peeped through. She ceased her finger thrumming and stared straight ahead at nothing at all and thereby deep into the very nub of the matter. Chloë placed the photograph frame face down on top of the television and flicked aimlessly through the channels. Santa Claus met her on every one and Chloë was thankful that she did not have satellite.

      Knowing that Brett could swagger in at any moment, brandishing his infuriating trademark ‘Ciao’, produced little spurts of adrenalin which made her pace about and fiddle with things that could well have been left just so.

      The curtains are hanging fine, Chloë; there is no fluff on that cushion. The pictures are dead straight.

      Poor girl, she’s tried twice before to sever her dealings with Brett. The first time, she located him on his mobile phone but fumbled over her words so badly that she ended up apologizing: ‘Oh nothing, it’s nothing, I’m just being daft.’ The second time, Brett beat her to it, yet while he was flourishing his final ‘ciao’s, Chloë found herself pleading for another go.

      ‘The thing to do,’ Chloë said to Mrs Andrews, ‘is not to mince my words.’

      ‘Precisely,’ her confidante encouraged, ‘straight to the point. Plain English. No beating about the bush. And no metaphors!’

      Brett has arrived and he fills the doorway with his frame, his bulky silhouette backlit from the light in the communal hall.

      ‘Ciao!’

      ‘Quick, close the door – it’s bitter!’ says Chloë a little too cheerily.

      ‘What a day, I’m so stressed out,’ he growls, slumping into the chair and up-ending the photograph frame so that he can admire himself, tanned and in Jamaica, in December and in Islington. ‘What a frig of a day.’

      He kicks off his shoes, stretching his legs out, imposing on Chloë’s space, spouting a soliloquy peppered, as usual, with ‘I’ and ‘me’.

      ‘What’s cookin’? I’m starvin’.’ Chloë hates the way he drops his ‘g’s. She fiddles with picture frames and finds fluff on cushions. He checks the messages on his mobile phone. Something inside Chloë is burning and welling. It’s Jocelyn. It’s Mrs Andrews. ‘Look at him,’ they seem to be spurring Chloë, ‘the repugnant lump!’

      ‘Brett,’ Chloë hears her voice suddenly escape the safety of things left unsaid, ‘I have something to tell you. There’s something I need to say.’

      ‘Yeah?’ he twists his toes and burps under his breath.

      ‘You know bread?’ Chloë starts, shaking down a few locks of her hair to hide behind.

      ‘Huh?’ He regards her suspiciously, curling his lip. ‘Bread?’

      ‘Mm!’ she agrees, tucking the curls temporarily behind her ears. ‘Once it’s stale, it can never truly be revived. Not even if it was once quite tasty.’

      ‘I’m bloody star-vin’,’ Brett snaps, caressing his belly which rumbles like the thunder slowly etching its way across his brow. ‘Are you tellin’ me that’s all there is? Bread that’s gone off?’

      ‘That’s what it is. Was,’ Chloë reasons, suddenly radiant, ‘and well past its sell-by date.’

      It was only when Chloë heard the communal door bang downstairs that she allowed herself to sink into the chair and shake uncontrollably. After a while she picked up the photograph frame and chuckled; laughing out loud until tears of mirth oozed from the corners of her eyes and her ribs creaked for mercy.

       I did it!

      ‘Mrs A, I did it! I really, actually, did.’

      ‘You did indeed, dear. Metaphors and all.’

      Carefully, Chloë removed the photograph and tore it methodically into strips which she then twisted and coaxed into an origami star – a skill she learnt many years before not knowing quite when it would have its use. She contemplated the spiky form and rotated it, catching a little bit of Brett’s hand here, a nose and half a mouth there; an elbow, part of a tennis shoe, a palm frond. Capped teeth.

       In the ball of my hand, let alone under my thumb!

      ‘Bye-bye,’ she sang, tipping the origami from hand to hand. ‘The first time I ever stood up to you was ultimately the last too!’ She listens to the silence and loves the peace it promises. ‘Were you that “awful”?’ she whispers at Brett’s faceted face. ‘Yes, I suppose you were.’ Chloë went over to the window, peering intensely up at the ink-navy sky wishing for a star. ‘Bossy,’ she clarified, holding the origami star aloft and catching a glance of Brett’s mouth; ‘tactless,’ she shuddered, ‘chauvinistic, too.’ She crossed to the mirror and sprung ringlets of her hair through her fingers, remembering how Brett had referred to it, when wet, as ‘positively pubic’. Well Chloë, he’s losing his!

      She settled snugly into the armchair and contemplated the fractured photograph once more. ‘You were but a cheap processed oaf,’ she said, proud of the pun, ‘and I think, actually, I’d rather enjoy something more wholesome and nourishing now.’ With that, she tossed the splintered, diminished image of Brett deftly into the waste-paper basket.

      Just the ‘lousy’ job now, Chloë; time to free yourself from the self-obsessed shackles of the lowly paid and not very good inner London Polyversity where you’ve shouldered the role of student-communication-liaison-welfare-officer for four thankless years. Think of it! No more students-in-need, the Sins that frequently run amok in the already cramped Islington studio you’ve been renting.

      Chloë’s flat was presently overrun by an eighteen-year-old СКАЧАТЬ