The Blueprint (7 page)

We were taking
it in turns to pick a ball of paper, going around in a clockwise
fashion. I’d been hoping for anti-clockwise, because I’d wanted to
be one of the first ones up. I’d made sure I wasn’t going to be
dead last, though, because I knew Tim was going to be the first to
go. Tim was always the first to go at anything, so I had squeezed
myself in between Daniel and Gavin, a couple places away from him,
despite there clearly being a space open for me to his immediate
left.

The first
piece of paper came out of the hat. House A. Mike took up a spot on
the left side of the room, looking relieved but anxious to see who
would be joining him next year, and in which building. No-one knew
which of the two houses was which yet except Tim, who had sealed a
picture of each house in separate envelopes, one of which was
marked ‘A’, and the other, ‘B’. The second ticket to come out of
the hat was another A. Jamie jumped into Mike’s arms and they had a
celebratory hug, then the next guy put his hand into the hat. B.
Then the next guy. A.

B.

B.

A.

B.

A.

A.

Then it was my
turn. I was very aware of my elevated breathing, but the more I
tried to control it the louder it sounded. I didn’t even bother
looking into the hat. I just thrust my hand in, grabbed one, yanked
it out, peeled it open. My pounding heart and my twisting stomach
told me what it was going to be before I even looked. When I
eventually did, I saw Tim’s skull winking at me. Maybe it had been
drawn it that way to rub it in, I don’t know.

‘Bad luck,
mate,’ said John, putting his hand on my shoulder. He did look as
though he genuinely felt pity on me.

‘Oh well,’ I
replied, in as monotone a voice as I could muster. ‘I said I’d be
at Liz’s half an hour ago, so I’ll leave you lads to it.’

I went to walk
out, but Tim started talking.

‘I’m sorry for
you, mate, but there was no way any of us could’ve afforded the
seven-bed place, and you agreed to do it this way, just like
everyone else.’

‘Yup,’ I said,
without turning to face him. ‘I did. So don’t worry about it.’

I can’t say
I’ve ever seen the appeal of smoking - I’m not even one of those
people who has a cheeky one when they’re drunk - but as I marched
angrily down the road towards Liz’s flat, I felt as though I needed
something,
otherwise I was going to start pulling my hair
out in clumps. Remembering that feeling helps me sympathise with
Charlie when he gets all twitchy in the mornings until he gets his
fix.
They fucking rigged it!
I was thinking, letting the
anger roll over me in pulsing waves.
They folded the skull and
crossbones in a special way, or put a mark on it, or something, and
they made the letting agent tell me seven-bedroom places cost too
much!

I told Liz
what had happened, holding back on the paranoid conspiracy theories
because, as with my graphing/charting habit, I didn’t want to share
that part of my personality with her quite yet. Or ever, to be
honest. Her response was, ‘I’m surprised you even put your name in
the hat in the first place.’

‘Technically
no-one put their
name
in the hat; there were six bits of
paper with the letter ‘A’ on them, and…’

She rolled her
eyes, and muttered something withering in French, as she is wont to
do when she’s saying a sentence that contains a swear word. Me and
Liz never really get into arguments, because if she ever says
anything in anger, she says it in a language that, to me, just
sounds like adorable nonsense.

‘…And, I mean,
why were you surprised?’ I adjust.

‘You weren’t
all that good friends with them, were you?’

‘I guess not.
It was more a case of convenience, though.’

‘You sound
like my parents just before they got divorced.’

‘I’m not
entirely sure whether I’m allowed to laugh at that.’

‘Your
call.’

‘I’m not
really in a laughing mood, to be honest.’

She rolled her
eyes again, more sympathetically this time.

‘Poor little
Dorian,’ She cooed. The whole whimsical, made-up name thing
predictably backfired on me; it took me so long to find a moment
where it wouldn’t be awkward to drop into conversation that
‘Dorian’ wasn’t my actual name - or anyone’s, for that matter,
because no well-meaning parent would give the other boys at primary
school such an easy source of ammunition - that Liz just kept on
calling me it afterwards. She said it suited me, since I was
going-on twenty and I still couldn’t grow facial hair.

‘Don’t suppose
you fancy shacking up together?’ I suggested. She smirked.

‘Romantic as
it is that I’m your third choice, behind two houses full of people
who you don’t particularly like, I’ve already paid my deposit.’

‘I was being
spontaneous,’ I replied, falling backwards onto her flowery duvet.
‘That’s super romantic.’

‘Indeed it
was,’ she grinned, resting her head on my stomach. ‘I can barely
catch my breath.’

‘If you can
come up with a solution to this housing pickle of mine, I might
even propose,’ I told her. She fanned her face in a sarcastic
manner. We laid there for a while, in silence, while I thought to
myself that I didn’t really care that Tim and the rest weren’t my
biggest fans. If I was the sort of person Liz liked – or, at least,
if the person I acted as when I was with her was - then I couldn’t
really have given a shit what anyone else in the world thought of
me; even what I thought of myself.

‘You remember
Johnny?’ she asked, when she was done with being sarcastic.

‘Brown haired
guy?’

‘There’s quite
a few of those knocking about.’

‘The one who
came out with that lunatic who fell behind the bar when he was
trying to steal drinks? The one whose mate got Jazzy-Jeffed out of
the back door by the bouncer?’

‘That’s the
one.’

‘Yeah, I
remember him. Nice bloke. Weird taste in friends, I guess...’

‘He’s got a
spare room going, apparently. You want me to put in a good word for
you?’

‘Yeah,
definitely!’

‘There’s one
small problem, though…’

‘And what’s
that?’

‘You don’t
mind living with three guys your girlfriend’s slept with,
right?’

‘Erm..’

‘Kidding…’ she
smirked. I laid back down.

‘Expect some
revenge to come your way in the near future.’

‘Can’t wait.
There is genuinely a small problem, though.’

‘Fool me once,
shame on me…’

‘No,
seriously. That guy you were just complaining about will be living
there, as well.’

I
shrugged.

‘I’d rather
live in a lunatic asylum than on my own in a one-bed flat.’

‘I guess I’d
better give Johnny a ring then, before someone else claims your
place in the nut-house.’

‘Cheers babe,’
I said. She raised her eyebrows.

‘I can’t pull
that off, can I?’ I added. She whispered something in French.

‘I’ll take
that as a “no”,’ I grinned. ‘When are we getting married, then? I
am a man of my word, after all.’

‘Who says I’d
accept?’ she called back as she fluttered out of the room with her
phone in hand. ‘I don’t know if a film and creative writing
graduate, such as yourself, will be able to keep me in the life of
luxury to which I’ve become accustomed.’

I’d forgotten
that I never got around to telling her that part was a lie, as
well. Suddenly I got the feeling that my graduation ceremony was
going to be an awkward moment for the two of us.

The whole time
me and my parents were lugging my possessions down the street I was
repeating over and over in my head:
Please, don’t let number
thirty-four be the house with the unconscious person lying on the
doormat.
It was mid-September, and I was moving into the place
that I’d - hard as it was to imagine at that moment - be calling
home for the next year and a half of my life. I could tell my
parents were thinking the same thing as me. I checked the number on
the next house we passed, then did a quick bit of mental maths to
estimate which door was the one I was supposed to be knocking on.
Shit
, I thought,
it is the one with the corpse on the
porch.
I prayed that my counting skills had failed me and it
was actually the one next-door, but of course they didn’t, and it
wasn’t.

The three of
us stood awkwardly with the sleeping teenager at our feet,
wondering what to do. At least the boy was definitely sleeping,
rather than dead. His snoring gave him away. One of his arms was
shoved through the letterbox, all the way past the elbow.

‘Should I
knock?’ I asked my dad. I didn’t know whether to laugh at the
innate ridiculousness of it all. It was certainly an interesting
choice of welcome party. My dad seemed torn as well; he just
shrugged in response, half of a smile and half of a grimace on his
face. My mum, on the other hand, looked like she wanted to throw me
over her shoulder and go sprinting back to the car.

Our collective
indecision was made irrelevant when the thing on the doormat began
to stir.

‘
ARGGH!!’
he yelped, all of a sudden, causing me and my
parents to jump backward in surprise, and maybe even a hint of
fear. The guy at our feet wheeled his neck around, squinting in the
sunlight. ‘Whass’gwan?!’ he asked. Dad and I looked at each other
for a second.

‘Erm…you tell
me,’ I replied, eventually, as what it appeared was my new
housemate attempted to tug his arm free of the letterbox. Soon,
though, he accepted failure and turned back to look at me. After
several minutes of staring, the fug of confusion lifted from his
features.

‘Oh, wait!’ he
exclaimed. ‘You must be, er…erm…the
new guy
, right?’

‘Yeah,’ I
said. ‘Do you, er, live here?’

‘Nah; I was
just doing a bit of breaking and entering, and it hasn’t gone
particularly well,’ he told us, nonchalantly.

‘Oh. Er…’

He laughed a
manic, barking laugh. ‘I’m only joking, man. I’m Charlie, by the
way. Nice to meet you.’

He offered his
free hand to me, my mum and my dad in turn. My mum allowed as
little of her fingertips as possible to come into contact with
him.

‘Now the
pleasantries are over, would one of you mind knocking on the door
for me?’ he asked, seemingly unashamed of his situation. ‘The ol’
digits are feeling a bit numb.’

My mum and I
just stood there, too dumbfounded to respond, so my dad leaned over
Charlie and rapped thrice upon the door. While we waited for a
response, Charlie explained how he’d got himself into such a
predicament. The breaking and entering comment was technically
true; he’d left his keys in his room by accident and, because the
other two members of the household were out for the count by the
time he’d got home, he’d hoped that he would be able to unlock the
latch from the inside by reaching through the letterbox. Apparently
the people who design doors were smarter than Charlie had given
them credit for.

A groaning
noise came wafting through the open letterbox, followed by slow,
thumping footsteps.
What in God’s name has Liz signed me up
for?
I wondered.

‘Johnny! Did
Charlie not make it back last night, or are we being robbed by the
world’s stupidest burglar?’ the voice inside hollered. There wasn’t
any answer forthcoming, so the voice that wasn’t Johnny muttered to
itself and the footsteps came a little closer.

Skrunch…Skrunch…Click!

The door
suddenly swung backwards and Charlie - after the briefest flash of
horrified realisation shot across his face - went with it,
clattering his shins against the doorframe and shouting, ‘Oi! Easy!
Easy! I’ve had a rough night, here!’ The tall, wide,
zombified-looking doorman shook his head in disdain, and then
looked up at me.

‘You Johnny’s
mate?’

I nodded
uncertainly. He went to offer his hand, then realised that he
couldn’t reach mine with Charlie huddled in between us. He paused
for a second, then concluded:

‘Can we do the
introductions later? I’m barely here right now.’

‘Err…okay…’ I
replied.

‘Cool. For
now, I’m Fred. Freddy if you’re feeling particularly jovial.
Johnny’s upstairs, somewhere, but you’ve no hope of getting
anything coherent out of him.’

‘Okay, thanks,
I’m-’

‘Tell me
later,’ he cut in. ‘I’ll only forget it, state I’m in right now,
and that will just result in an embarrassing moment for the both of
us.’

He looked down
at Charlie.

‘Another
embarassing moment, anyway.’

‘Pleasure to
meet you,’ he said to my parents. ‘Hopefully, the next time we
meet, you’ll be able to say the same about me.’ He then grinned, as
if to add: ‘I want to go back to bed now,’ and returned to the
living room.

I turned to my
parents.

‘It’ll
probably be easier for us to part ways here, won’t it?’ I said. My
mum nodded.

After the
formalities, I dragged my bag over Charlie, who was now asleep
again, up the stairs onto the landing, and called Johnny’s name. No
answer came back.

‘Erm, Johnny?
I repeated, slightly louder.

‘
Yeerrrreuuugggh!!’
Johnny replied, from behind the bathroom
door. His shout was quickly followed by the sound of half-digested
kebab and stomach acid splattering against porcelain. I decided
that I should follow Fred’s advice, and leave my introductions
until a bit later in the afternoon. When I got into my room, I sat
on the bare mattress and pulled my phone out.

This is
going to be an interesting year
, I typed, sticking a couple of
kisses on the end, and sent it to Liz.

FEMME FATALE

There’s a
knife poking through the crack in the door, jiggling against the
flimsy lock. This can only mean one thing, and that one thing
doesn’t bode well for me: Charlie is trying to break into the
bathroom while I’m in the shower.