Feeling like a lazy cunt, I decided to take the bus home. It’s easy enough to get a bus back to near where we live. We’re right near an intersection of a whole bunch of routes which, after grinding their sometimes-ponderous, sometimes-hectic way along roughly the same passage, explode outwards across the city in a variety of different-coloured lines and numbers because we live pretty much where Central becomes Points North, East and, more eventually, West.

You have your choice of vehicles and times.  Now all you have to do is decide the kind of company you wish to travel in.

I had an assignment in Ely once.  That was murder, actually – getting there, I mean. The cheapest option, I found luckily not too belatedly, was to buy a day pass; slightly cheaper than two returns for the two different bus routes and if you were feeling really fucking lazy it could take you out into town at night.

Goin out on the razz on the bus. How sixteen years old are we now?

Hell and all, they’re talking about getting night buses in Cardiff now – we be all like Lunnon folk now, baint?

Course, getting to Ely wasn’t the worst of it, I reflected as the bus slid its comfortably familiar route – take me home, take me ho-o-ome – so much so I could lean my head, eyes closed, against the window and let it rattle through my skull, secure in the knowledge of turns and pauses that I’d be able to open my eyes bang on the right point.

We’re passing the Castle and it’s one of those bright, scuddy, early April days – white fluffy clouds and gleaming daffs and a nice bit of sea breeze there, look at that.

Jesus, but I’m tired. Bloody daffs, anyway.

Back... well, where my brother lives, the daffs would be barely starting on their brief stay, whereas down here the tulips had been starting to make their presence known, and still bloody daffs everywhere.

And then, in a wave that curled from my belly and crashed over me, turning me helpless in the undertow, I remembered why I hated daffodils. When I had that all locked down again a bit better, I had to scramble for my stop, surf still echoing in my ears as I shook salt water from my face.

I reeled across the crossing onto my side of the road then, a few paces down it, stopped stock-still, unmindful of other pedestrians. I was staring across at the Park, the Park I saw every damned day.

“Bloody daffs...” I murmured, still staring. “Yellow bastards.” I found myself smiling. I’d realised finally what lay beind my many rationalisations for never wearing the colour.  “Stupid bastard.” I turned on my heel, and strode back to Wellfield Road and dived into, well, not the first shop selling clothes – I can’t afford their prices – and scooped up a rich, banana-coloured thing that was just slightly too big. Hah.

Anyway, I thought to my self, grinning, it’s not like P could object to me wearing a red teeshirt under my new voluminous yellow shirt, which would naturally be removed as the warmth of the evening progressed.

I felt a weird clench of fear through my odd victory – the fear of being surrounded by a bunch of artists, people who’d found their evolutionary niche and were blossoming in it. I tamped down on that.

Rubbish, I said to myself. You’re getting there, moving slowly and cautiously, exploring your own artistic wotsit. Simon’s even calling you now to give you stuff.

Hard, flickering into that thought was an image, slippery as a greased fish, a lightning-blue colour with a high-pitched crash of sound. I flailed mentally for purchase on it and came up with nothing but the smell of dry ice and a room of hard-working electrical equipment.

My slippery fish was dry and hot and inorganic, with a bright, nervous grin and sweaty knees.

That incredibly intimate place behind a woman’s knees. It’s merely a reasonably public body hinge, right? But hinges – wow. Hinges are a pivotal place between one state and another, A transitional point – pass that and you might not be coming back.  Only forward.

Oh, and talking of which – I’d overshot my house again. Yanno, only been living here, what – twenty months, eh?

I shook my head as I made my way up the front oath, shaking my keys free. What the hell was happening to my brain? It was getting so that it was just another thing to add to my list of things to be worried about, and I was reaching saturation point. There was a coldness in my throat and a sensation of metallic taste high up in my mouth that I thought I recognised and I suddenly longed for the oblivion of sleep. Dark, warm and weightless for a little – and the craving for that was a sudden, desperate thirst I was going to find hard to resist.

Tucked now into the familiar smells of the front hall I made my way as soundlessly as I could up the stairs.  Doris The Landlady has a habit of asking me to write stuff for her coz I “gorra way wi’ words, inneh – clever girl, clever girl.” I mostly put up with this because Doris is generally a good landlady when it comes to ignoring financial tardiness in exchange for cash in hand, and we have constant hot water as part of the deal coz the clanking beast in the cupboard next to my room serves the whole house, including Doris. This is because we live in what used to be the attic of this 1920s terraced house and is now, well, the attic with carpet, dodgy wallpaper, a tiny kitchen and some slightly eccentric plumbing. What it lacks in aesthetic joys, headroom, a shower, and adequate fire escape, it makes up in damp-free, solid old architecture, pitifully small rent and a good location.

It gets mercilessly hot in the summer.  However, it is fairly well burglar-proof, so we just keep the windows open. Apart from Pootle, my more-or-less faithful beast of burden, we’re pretty burglar-proof ourselves, our riches not being much counted in material possessions.

In other words, a 14" TV, some niceish knives, a couple of tatty stereos, a five-year-old computer and a cheap-as-arse mp3 player from Tesco on the top storey of a narrow-windowed house are more trouble than they’re worth.

Home insurance is for people who care.

I’d reached the flat without incident – except, of course, for the Smell outside #3. We joked for a bit that maybe he was dead. Then we stopped joking and probably both vaguely started wondering if we should call the police, (or at least persuade Doris to get in there with a key) and then we saw him shambling up the stairs . I’m sure he had no idea why we looked so embarrassed, though Mel said that we shouldn’t discount the possibility that he was actually a zombie. The waft through the door as he opened it made our eyes water.

No, literally it did.

Once in through the door I breathed a sigh of relief I didn’t know I was holding. I heard a muffled thump. Either Mel was home, we had burglars, or Mephistopheles had materialised. Or, y’know, all three. I heard faint swearing-type noises and music. I grinned. Bellowed:

“Yo! M’nigger!”

Thump. “Hey!” Door.  Clearer: “You ain’t no nigger to be calling no nigger a nigger!” Channel 4 film meets Channel 4 TV series in our flat. Regularly. Sweet.  Look, I’ll explain later.

“S’up?”

She raised pale brown hands.

“Ah.”

“Dude, if I don’t get this coursework done by next Monday, I’m doomed.”

“So you’re not coming out tonight?”

“Well, yes,” like d’uh, “hence doing this now?”

I frowned. “You in work tomorrow?”

She shook her head, plaits rustling together. “Nor the day after. What with it being Sunday and Bank Holiday and all.”

I shook my head. “Shit. I keep forgetting...”

Now it was Mel’s turn to frown.  “You? Forget? Dude, you ok?”

I rolled my eyes briefly. “It’s a longer story than you need right now.”

She looked at me consideringly for a bit, then said: “However, I do need a cup of tea right now, so you’re getting one too. Just wait a second while I...” she turned back into the room and slapped a couple of things “... wash this shit off...”

She made her way through to the bathroom, and I settled into a chair in the living room. Sounds of splashing accompanied me divesting myself of shoes and jacket and bunging them in their accustomed pile by the chair. I felt a pang of guilt – I’d promised myself, if not Mel, that I’d be more tidy. That was it – this afternoon I’d occupy myself with fixing the coathooks at the top of the stairwell.

Mel emerged, via a clicked-on kettle, hands, wrists and arms now a continuous, rich dark brown.

Before her lips and eyes could narrow, I said: “I thought I’d have that cup of tea and then put the coathooks up.”

She smiled, slightly lazily, and said “What with you being the butch one and all.”

“It is my drill.”

“Yeah, yeah...” floated back to me from the kitchen, through clinking of pottery.

Mel now knows exactly how (and when) to make my tea. It takes time and – more importantly – actually caring enough – to get that right.  We’ve got much closer over the last couple of years.

I have always stood by the maxim ‘Don’t live with your good friends.’ Coz here’s the thing – you’ll have exactly the same arguments and resentments with good friends as with those who are just housemates, but it’ll hurt more coz it means more.  I think I may have hurt some people in uni briefly over refusing to live with them in the third year, choosing instead essentially to go back into halls – into a uni-run house of ten unrelated people.But then they had far more fun taking the piss out of the rules we had to live by and the corporate décor, and I didn’t get rats, so everyone was happy in the end.

Mel comes under the category of ‘right level of friend to live with.’ Previous to moving in together, I knew her to go clubbing with and we still have only about three close friends in common, and a handful more acquaintances/peripheral friends.  She has in her favour that she’s queer, not a fundamentalist Christian, has a job, a reasonable taste in music, and can tolerate P. She’s also better at charming Doris than I am.

On the downside, she’s fanatically tidy and smokes, but she only does the latter in her room and I’m slowly learning about washing up in a matter of hours rather than weeks. I’m a slob. No-one I love should live with me unless I’m ameliorating matters with oral sex (at which I excel, by the way – whatever gender).

Despite years of shagging only women, my bisexuality has saved me from one thing – moving in with my honey in a matter of days, like most dykes. That or I’m a crotchety bugger who values her territory far too highly. Oh, and added to which I seem to have developed a pattern for distance relationships lately.

Though Greenland is pushing it, even by my standards.

Part 17

Part 19

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