Her flatmate
Ren is struggling to sleep. It’s a hot night, and the noise of the city is pouring in through the tiny rectangle of a window flung open as far as it will go.
People melt together on balconies across the estate, mingle in the packed smoking areas of Brixton and beyond.
Here on her bed, Ren tosses and turns in a faded Talking Heads T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts.
She has no idea of the time, only that it’s no longer yesterday.
She is not Clara, happiest when pulling an all-nighter.
Ren values her sleep, does not see mornings as something to suffer through.
She likes getting up early, making things and growing things and doing things by herself.
There is no greater joy than spending time out on their cramped balcony with her budding collection of potted plants, tending to the closest thing she’s ever had to a garden.
She exists out there, more than anywhere else.
A creaking on the stairs. Ren cocks her head, fingertips grazing the rumpled sheet beneath her.
The sound of searching hands, an unsteady grasp.
A key turning in a lock, a latch sliding in a groove.
As the front door opens, someone shushes someone else.
Ren knows that one of these someones is Clara, because Ren knows all of Clara’s noises.
How couldn’t she, when they’ve lived together in so many flats with paper-thin walls?
She can discern the drone of a foreign film playing on Clara’s sticker-strewn laptop, or the scrape of a spoon that signals she is having cereal for dinner, again.
The tap-tap-tap of Clara typing away furiously at a treatment, or the crunch of a drawing she’s not happy with, screwed up and thrown across the room into the overflowing bin beneath her desk.
The sound that Clara makes when she’s touching herself and trying to keep it a secret. The sound of Clara smuggling a boy in.
The floorboards groan. Clara’s heavy boots make their way down the hallway.
Ren rolls on to her side and watches the crack of light beneath her doorway, split now by Clara’s legs.
Then, someone else’s. Two bodies coalesce in the sparse light, before the shadows disappear.
Ren closes her eyes. She thinks of the shared bathroom in their old uni halls, Ren cutting her fringe with kitchen scissors and Clara bleaching her hair in the shower.
She thinks of their movie nights in the house after that, sacred occasions when Clara would spend hours setting up the bedsheet and the projector and picking the film, before talking all the way through it about which shots she loved and why.
They’d met on the second day of the first year, had bonded over the fact that they were both ostracised at school and ignored at home.
Ren lives life with the volume down low.
When she talks on the phone, to her old friends or her brother, she does so quietly.
When she does what Clara is about to do, it’s a pantomime of bitten lips and clamped mouths, things whispered in ears rather than screamed at the top of lungs.
She barely spoke up at uni, ever the odd one out at CSM as the daughter of a cabbie, her overdraft a shameful secret.
Fashion didn’t work out for Ren, but uni had its upsides.
When she and Clara had kissed on that night out in Freshers’ Week, it had meant nothing to Clara and everything to Ren.
Ren, who has never been able to put herself into words.
Ren, who has no idea who she’s supposed to be.
A murmur. A giggle. Ren rolls on to her back again, arches her neck as if she might be able to see right through the wall and into the bedroom behind her.
It’s been six months since Clara broke it off with Jacob.
A record amount of time, but he always creeps back in.
If Ren has a prevailing image of Jacob, it’s him after the lights came up on the first short film he and Clara made together.
When all the RADA gang told Clara, with varying degrees of surprise, how talented she was, only Ren noticed Jacob’s face.
He was livid. Not because he disliked the film, but because no one was talking about him.
She hears Clara’s door clicking shut, now, and she imagines Jacob’s ironing-board torso, an American Psycho smirk directed at the mirror on Clara’s wardrobe.
Her stomach roils. Two voices mumble in the dark.
Her brow furrows. The voice is deep. Too deep.
The stride in the hallway should have been enough to give it away.
Jacob is touchy about his height. But if this isn’t Jacob, then who is on the other side of this wall?
A thump. A back against that wall, planted firmly enough to rattle the picture frame above Ren’s head.
Ren imagines muscular shoulders on the other side of it, a beast of a man looming over Clara, Clara standing on tiptoes to meet his open mouth.
Her mouth on a wide chest, his lips on her long neck.
Ren and Clara’s headboards are pressed up against the same wall.
From above, it might look like they shared one long bed, Clara’s face resting on a pillow only ever a few inches away from Ren’s.
Tonight, Ren on one side, on her back in her boxer shorts.
And Clara on the other, falling backwards now, pulling someone down on top of her.
A giggling whisper that is unmistakably Clara’s.
A low reply that belongs to someone new.
Ren imagines a man’s head behind her own.
She can’t picture a face. But she can picture Clara’s face, travelling down a man’s torso, and the thought is enough to make her own face hot.
She tries to identify the sounds on the other side of the wall.
The jingle of metal on metal is a belt buckle being unclasped.
The two dull thuds of Clara’s heavy boots, kicked off carelessly to reveal small feet in fishnet tights.
A groan, long and deep. Then, another, high and breathy, almost surprised.
A zipper, a wrapper. The night is so hot that it feels like a fever.
Close, you might say, and Ren can hear how close they are together, can imagine the sweat dripping from his chest on to Clara’s.
Pooling in places she cannot see. Ren indulges herself.
She imagines drawing a line from the balls of Clara’s feet over the delicate arches to her raised heels, from Clara’s straightened calves and all the way up.
Clara is pale and clumsy. When she wears her pyjama shorts in the kitchen, her white legs are covered in bruises.
What is Clara wearing now? And is she taking it off?
Ren realises that she’s been holding her breath.
Now she exhales, knocks her knees together.
She can hear bed springs straining, voices gasping for air.
She imagines elbows, torsos, the soft skin on the inside of a pale thigh.
His fingers. Her tongue. On the other side of the wall, Clara moans.
With her free hand, Ren covers her mouth.