I don’t know if wearing the same maroon woollen socks everyday for a week is considered hygienic.
The fact that they’re maroon is not relevant, of course. But the kind of maroon they are has changed. Last Friday they were a pleasant kind of maroon and they smelled of mothballs and they fit my feet perfectly. Now they’re a darker kind of maroon and they smell like my feet and they’re hanging off my ankles a bit. It’s Saturday today. It is seven forty-two on a Saturday night. It is the tenth day of June. It is the year 2006.
Mikaela has gone out. She left about an hour ago wearing sparkly black tights that rip across her smooth thighs and calves. She wore a dress so short I thought it was top over that. It had a picture of Jim Morrison on it but I don’t think she knows who he is. She asked me to pick between two pairs of stilettoes that looked the same except one was an electric blue that hurt my eyes and another was pink. I chose the pink one. But she wore the blue one anyway. I think she was just trying to ‘engage me in everyday activites’. Or at least that’s what my shrink told her to do. He’s a fraud anyway. I don’t think he’s completely right psychologically. I know he has a degree in it and all. It’s framed on his wall in his office, the wall behind his desk, the wall which also has a window that overlooks the park in the neighbourhood. Every time I go to see him there’s always some little kid swinging on the swings there and the sight is so goddamn depressing I feel like I’m in a Woody Allen film, the way he makes me lie down on a fucking sofa. I don’t like the sofa because it gets me thinking about all the other patients who also lay down there and put their greasy heads on the same goddamn fluffy pillow and it makes me feel disgusting, especially if I’ve washed my hair in the morning.
She asked me to come. Mikaela, I mean. I told her no and after the usual round of persistence, she left, grabbing her little tote from the one and only red bar stool we have in the kitchen, and announced that she’d be back by morning, don’t wait up. I wasn’t intending to wait up, but I called out what I hoped was an enthusiastic have fun. Then the door slammed in a very Mikaela kind of way; loud, but it didn’t know it was loud. It was a door, after all. I mean, it’s not like it could help how much noise it was making. It probably had other things to focus on.
I stood in my room for a while after Mikaela left. I drew the curtains so I didn’t have to see the pubs in town coming to life slowly. I can hear them all too clearly anyway. We live right above a filthy place called Jack’s Mausoleum. Every time I walk past their front door I can only smell that cheap rum the guys who loiter by the beach are swigging all the time. And they have a goddamn skull hanging right by the front door. Looks like a right fucking fun house to me. I guess that’s why the rent for this shit hole we live in was, and still is, fantastically low. Mikaela almost couldn’t believe it. It just so happened that the day we came to check out the apartment Jack’s Mausoleum was closed because the health inspector was doing rounds of the town.
After a while I got sick of just standing in the middle of my room. The big hand on the clock moved from two to eight and then I forced myself to do something else. There is a small lime-green Post-It stuck to the wall that my desk faces. I’m standing here now, staring at it. Mikaela has written something on it.
‘things to do! (for eve)’ she has written excitedly.
1. unpack books from cartons
2. organize closet and various others etc.
3. also locate grocery store????
4. call landlord about sink tonight if poss.
At the bottom it says JAKE 3 SAT. in huge capitals. I don’t know what that means. It looks like she wrote it in a hurry and then remembered that she was writing on the Post-It she meant to be for me. I take the Post-It down. I don’t know why she can’t call the landlord herself. I didn’t even know that the sink was broken. I still don’t know which one she’s talking about because mine is fine. It must be hers. Or the one in the kitchen. I haven’t used either since we moved in last week.
I look at the way she’s written ‘for eve’. My real name’s Evianna. I wonder if she knows that. Everyone just calls me Eve. Everyone who even calls me anything, that is. And that’s not a lot of people. Aunt Evelyn only ever calls me Evianna. Apparently my name was inspired by her. Fat load of shit. I hope I don’t turn out like her. But the rate I’m going at, I probably will.
Aunt Evelyn’s last e-mail to me was a curtly worded congratulations on my passing first in class and with honours. “Congratulations Evianna,” it said. “I’m proud of you. Hope to see you some time in the summer so we can catch up. Aunt Evelyn.”
She sent it the day after graduation. She couldn’t make it down because she had a meeting with a client in Aldona. Aunt Evelyn is a hotshot art dealer. Which means she sits around on her ass the whole year and sells the occasional rip-off painting for a couple million and lives off that for the next couple of years. Whatever. I still haven’t replied. I don’t know what to say to her because I don’t know if I want to see her sometime in the summer to catch up. So I just left the mail in my inbox. It bothers me though. So I put off calling our landlord, who is surprisingly not-so-unpleasant, and make my way to our living room. At the moment it resembles more a godown for a cheap fashion magazine than the scholarly living room you’d expect of two third-year English majors. Mikaela’s clothes are strewn everything, and spilling out of the cartons she’s stuffed them in. We have exactly two articles of furniture. There’s one sofa Mikaela bought at the flea market at the beach a couple weeks ago, a ratty grey three-seater. She’s attempted to spruce it up with bright yellow and pink square cushions and a blue throw but it isn’t working. I think it depresses the sofa, and me, even more. She’s trying to make it look happy when it’s not. I feel bad for it so before I sit I remove all the extra pillows and the blue thing. And I just sit on the plain grey sofa. It feels nice. I feel like I’ve helped it somehow.
The other article of furniture we have is a large wooden crate which is currently filled with our stock of Jaeger and Budweiser. Our fridge isn’t working so we just chucked everything in there. Thanks to me, the bottles of Jaeger have been steadily depleting. Mikaela’s supposed to be watching my alcohol intake. But she’s equally notorious. I think the only time we actually get along is when we’re high, which is quite often; I guess that’s why we’re friends; if sharing a crappy apartment on the outskirts of Benna Lui and drinking warm Jaeger out of paper cups and taking trips to the shrink together is defined as being friends, that is. I guess she doesn’t really have a choice when it comes to the shrink thing – she has to drive me because I have been deemed unfit to operate a vehicle on my own. Goddamn shrinks.
On top of our alcohol crate is our TV. We haven’t got a connection yet. I put it on and static flickers on the screen. I put the lights off. I sit on the sofa and prop my feet up in front of me. I’m wearing the socks still and it’s not even cold. I like sitting like this, just me. I feel like I’m in one of those B-grade Hollywood apocalypse films where I’m the last person left on earth and there’s only static on the TV and the radio and there’s no noise from the pubs in Benna Lui and there’s no screaming coming from the depths of Jack’s Mausoleum and there are no Post-Its telling me what to do and there are no shrinks to deem me unfit to drive. I don’t know how long I sit there, but I like it. And I like the fact that I like it, so I don’t move, not even to get my laptop, which is what I came here for in the first place.
*
