City Girl in Training

‘Gorgeous George?’ I repeated as the door banged shut behind Kate and Sophie. Trying to get my head round the idea. Trying to work out quite why my heart was sinking like a stone.

Clearly it had nothing to do with the man who lived next door. It had to be because I was alone on a Friday night in a city where I had no friends. My parents were thirty thousand feet above terra firma in another time zone and the man in my life, if he wasn’t cosied up with his beloved car, was down the pub having a good time without me.

So I did what I always did when I felt down. I opened the fridge.

What I needed—and urgently—was food. But Sophie could relax; her cottage cheese was safe from me. I wanted comfort food.

A bacon and egg sandwich. Or sausages. Something warm, and satisfying and packed with heart-clogging cholesterol. If it was clogged, it wouldn’t feel so empty.

But no such luck. The fridge was a fat-free zone.

Then I opened the dairy drawer and hit the jackpot. Either Sophie had a secret vice, or Kate was a girl after my own heart.

There was a pack of expensive, unsalted butter—the kind that tasted like cream spread on bread—and a great big wedge of farmhouse Cheddar cheese from a shop near Covent Garden that I’d read about in the food section of the Sunday paper. I broke a piece off to taste. And drooled.

I passed on the butter. I didn’t need butter. Cheese on toast would do very nicely.

It wouldn’t be a hardship to take a trip to Covent Garden in the morning and replace it. I could buy my own supply at the same time and take a look around. Cheered at the idea, I turned on the grill and put the bread to toast on one side. Then I hunted through the cupboards until I found some chilli powder.

Excellent.

It was past its sell-by date—well, Kate had said they didn’t cook. From the state of the cupboards, she did not exaggerate. But I wasn’t going to get food poisoning from geriatric spice. I’d just have to use more.

I turned back to the stove to check the toast, but the grill hadn’t come on and, realising that the cooker was turned off at the main switch, I reached across the worktop and flipped it down.

Several things happened at once.

There was a blue flash, a loud bang and everything went dark. Then I screamed.

It was nothing really over the top as screams went.

It was loud, but nowhere near the ear-rending decibels expected of the heroine in a low-budget horror movie. I was startled—knee-tremblingly, heart-poundingly startled. Not scared witless.

It was also pointless since there was no one around to respond with sympathy for my plight.

I was on my own. Totally on my own. For the first time in my life, there wasn’t a soul I could call on for help. I stood there in total darkness, gripping the work surface as if my life depended on it, while my heart gradually slowed to its normal pace and I made a very determined effort not to feel sorry for myself.

I’d blown a fuse. It wasn’t the end of the world.

It just felt like it.

Beyond the windows, on the far side of the river, the lights of London twinkled back at me, mockingly. They knew I was out of my depth.

Back home all I’d have to do was pick up the phone and call Don. Not that I’d need him to mend the fuse, but his presence would have been a comfort. And how often did I have the perfect excuse to have him alone with me in a totally empty house? A dark empty house.

His mother might suspect me of planning to take unfair advantage of her precious son, but she wouldn’t be able to do a thing about it. Not in an emergency. Not without showing her true colours. And she was too clever for that.

But I wasn’t in Maybridge and Don didn’t live next door.

Next door lived a man who’d seen my underwear. Which was more than Don had managed in the best part of thirteen years.

That it was plain, serviceable, ordinary underwear should have made it marginally less embarrassing, but somehow the fact that he knew I wore boring knickers only made things worse.

Why, I had no idea. He was gay. He wasn’t in the slightest bit interested in my underwear, except perhaps aesthetically.

Why was I even thinking about him?

I didn’t need anybody. I could mend a fuse. All I had to do was find the fuse box.

The cloak cupboard by the door was the most likely place and, keeping hold of the work surfaces, I edged around the kitchen until I found the door. Then, feeling my way along the wall, I set off in what I hoped was the direction of the front door.

It would have been easier if there had been some light. At home we kept candles and matches under the kitchen sink for ‘emergencies’. I might have teased my mother about her obsession with ‘emergencies’, but, while I wasn’t about to admit that I really, really wanted her right now, in the thick blackness of the windowless hall I’d have warmly welcomed a little of her forward planning.

What I got was a shin-height table and the expensive sound of breaking porcelain as I flailed wildly to save myself from falling.

It had to be expensive. Everything about this flat was expensive, from its location to its smallest fitting. I was lucky to be living here, even temporarily, I knew—my mother had told me so. At that precise moment I didn’t feel lucky. I felt like screaming again.

I didn’t. Instead I rubbed my painful shins and considered my options.

I could pack and leave before Sophie and Kate got home.

I could hide the broken crocks—along with the evidence of my attempts at cooking—in my suitcase, go to bed and act surprised in the morning when nothing worked.

I could cry.

Actually, I was closer to tears than at any time since my grandmother had died. But all tears did was make your eyes and nose red, so I resisted the urge to sit on the horrible table and bawl my eyes out. Instead, I edged my way carefully past the broken china and made it to the cloak cupboard without further mishap.

I’d thought it was dark in the hall. In the cupboard it was black.

At home—and at this point I was beginning to realise that I’d seriously underrated my mother—there would have been a torch handily placed on top of the fuse-box, along with spare fuse wire.

‘Mum,’ I said, lifting my face in the darkness so that she could hear me better. ‘I swear I’ll never call you a fussy old bat ever again.’ Not that I ever had—well, not to her face. ‘I’ll wear warm underwear without being nagged, replace my attack alarm first thing tomorrow and never, ever go out without a clean handkerchief…just, please, please, let there be a torch with the fuse box.’ I groped in the darkness.

There was no torch.

I was released from the warm underwear promise—not that it mattered because the way my life was going no one was ever going to see it in situ—but I was still in the dark. Fortunately, the cloak cupboard was right by the front door and it occurred to me that, since I was now living in a luxury apartment, I could borrow some light from the well-lit communal hallway.

Pleased with myself, I opened the door and screamed again—this time with no holds barred—as a tall figure, silhouetted in black against the light, reached out for me.

Sound-blasted back by my scream, he retreated into the light and I belatedly recognised the neighbour I least wanted to meet. And he hadn’t been reaching out to grab my throat as my lurid imagination had suggested, but to ring the doorbell.

It was the first time I’d seen him in full light and there was nothing about him to suggest that my earlier assessment of him had been wrong. He was tall, he was dark. And the way my heart was pumping confirmed that he was, without doubt, dangerous. To my equilibrium, if nothing else.

But what really held my attention was the large flat carton balanced on the palm of his hand. He might be dangerous but he’d got pizza and my stomach—anticipating the promised cheese on toast—responded with an excited gurgle.

‘Yes?’ I demanded, to cover my embarrassment.

‘You screamed,’ he said.

‘You scared me,’ I snapped back as, for the second time in as many minutes, I waited for my heart to steady. Then, ‘What do you want?’

‘Not just now when you opened the door,’ he said, with the careful speech of a man who believed he was dealing with an idiot. ‘You screamed a minute or two ago—’

A minute or two? It seemed as if I’d been in the dark for hours…

‘—and since I saw your friends go out, I thought I’d better make sure you’re not just watching a scary video alone in the dark.’

‘Oh,’ I said. It was just as well I wasn’t trying to impress this man. He clearly thought I was a total ditz. ‘Sorry. I didn’t realise the walls were so thin.’

‘They’re not.’ He said this with the authority of a man who knew. ‘I was at my door when you—’

He seemed reluctant to use the word again and I could scarcely blame him. ‘Screamed,’ I said, rescuing him. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you. The fuses blew. That’s all.’ All! ‘I was just going to fix them.’

‘You know how?’ he said, without bothering to disguise his disbelief.

I tried to remember that he was being kind. A good neighbour. That he could have just shut his door. ‘They teach girls stuff like that in school these days,’ I assured him.

‘Really?’ He seemed unimpressed but he didn’t argue. Didn’t do that ‘I’m a big clever man and you’re just a girl’ thing that most men did. Instead he said, ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it.’ Which should have been more gratifying than it was. He took a step in the direction of his own front door, then hesitated, turned back. ‘You’ve got spare fuse wire?’

There had been none where I’d have expected it to be and it occurred to me that I might yet be grateful for his ‘good neighbour’ act.

‘I shouldn’t think so for a minute,’ I said. Keeping my smile to myself.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve only seen your flatmates from a distance. Very decorative, but they didn’t strike me as the practical type.’

I considered the fragile beauty of Sophie, the cool sophistication of Kate. ‘You may be right,’ I said. Women who looked like that would never need to be practical.

‘Why don’t you see if you can find the blown fuse while I fetch some wire?’ he suggested.

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