I COULD HEAR EVERYTHING Amelia did when she came back after a night out. The wall separating our rooms barely even qualified as plywood. At times the sounds ranged from the funny to the pitiful, from falling over everything in her shipwreck of a room to furious cursing in French as she failed, again and again, to plug her phone in.
Other times the sounds were distressing. Sometimes she cried a lot, and occasionally did things that went beyond emotional trauma. There were usually fair odds that she wouldn't come back alone. On those nights, I sandwiched my head between two pillows and pretended she hadn't come back. She'd tease me about those nights, accusing me of listening in.
"I know you can hear everything through these walls," she'd say, the sibilants buzzing off her tongue, eyes sultry. "I bet that's why you never go out."
When she'd been crying, she didn't say anything to me. I'd find her in the kitchen the morning after, piling hydrogenated vegetable spread onto the half-sized pieces of toast she bought at the craft bakery. I got the full glare the moment I stepped into the room as if somehow, I was violating her just by being there.
Long ago, I'd have greeted her, and the conversation might have gone something like this.
"Good morning Amelia, was it a good night?"
"Why the hell would you care?"
The final time I tried this strategy she told me exactly how I could help her in a way that used two f-bombs, and I didn't bother speaking to her after that.
But the silence didn't stop me from going to the kitchen. Initially, I persisted on principle: we were both paying rent for the place, so why shouldn't I use it? I wasn't innocent on the charge of odd habits anyway, tending to eat cereal straight from the packet, sometimes with a spoon and sometimes without. Perhaps by helping her to ease off the faux-butter, I might motivate myself to stop behaving like such a pig.
This time I started pouring the cereal into a bowl, and appropriated a plastic spoon as a concession to eating properly. It had come free with the cereal and changed colour when it was put in a hot drink, but since I never ate cereal with anything other than cold milk I hadn't noticed until Amelia had pointed out what a pink spoon said about me.
She was not a morning person. She would crawl out of bed with hair everywhere and bags under her eyes, possibly with some of last night's makeup still on her face. Gradually she got used to my impositions. She stopped telling me to f-off anymore (her favourite word that wasn't French), and instead sat glowering over her toast.
This became our routine. I'd callously impinge on her personal bubble once a day, and she'd tolerate it because, as I'm sure I must have mentioned before, she was in love with me.
"Do you ever wash things up?" I asked, looking over the multi-coloured strata of dishes next to the sink. There was spaghetti, two kinds of rice, and what looked like a half-chewed pancake crusted on the plate. Amelia could cook quite amazing food when she wanted, but a couple of days later the leftovers always looked as if they had run the full ten meters of intestine anyway.
"Do you ever shut the fuck up," she replied, not bothering with a question mark at the end. There wasn't malice behind her words, this was how she made conversation. The fact that she'd bothered to respond at all indicated that she was interested in talking.
"What is this?" I asked, picking at the second rice dish. It must have once been a soup or paella, but had congealed into something far more gelatinous. It reminded me of a brain.
"Why do you always have to clean it up? It's mine, alright? I'll take responsibility for it, and I will deal with it when I'm ready."
I fed the rest of the rice-brawn to the bin and slid the plate under the soapy water in the sink.
