CUT TO WILLIE in the kitchen in front of shiny white cupboards. The mould above the sink is no longer obviously visible.
OFF SCREEN: JEMMA pauses the show and scrutinises the scene. The mould has been painted over, but if you really look you can see the bubbles of it underneath the emulsion. It is still very much there.
The staircase is shown before, its bare floorboards exposed, and then as it is now, resplendent with grey carpet covering it. The living room and its woodchip walls have been plastered smooth and painted white; the grey carpet from the staircase used in here, too.
WILLIE
I went for a white and grey colour scheme because that’s what everyone seems to like these days.
The upstairs bedrooms are smaller versions of the living room. The same white paint, the same grey carpet.
MALCOLM (VO)
The bedrooms are now crisp and clean. And as for the back garden?
WILLIE
We’ve done an Astroturf lawn and it’s worked out nicely.
A variety of shots of the garden highlighting the new plastic lawn.
WILLIE
We really wanted to make this a modern, profitable home.
MALCOLM (VO)
But does the agent agree?
OFF SCREEN: JEMMA, having had enough of BRIAN for one day, skips past him until WILLIE reappears, low-key raging but pretending not to be.
WILLIE
That seems very low. I’ve had other valuations that are at least £100 a month more than that so that’s what I’ll be putting it on the market for.
OFF SCREEN: WILLIE’s paused irate face looks up at JEMMA from her phone screen. A growing hatred for him soothes her to sleep.
8
In the last wee while, waking alone and being alone had bummed me out. Before I lived with Nicol, I’d stayed at home with my parents. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I never felt lonely with them or when I moved in with Nicol, but even in those times there’d be the sound of the toilet refilling from someone else having flushed it, the dent in a couch pillow from another’s behind, the dirty pan in the sink from a meal I could smell the lingering scent of in the air. During that time, if anyone told me they lived alone I’d have to fight the urge to tell them how sorry I was, how difficult it must be not to have someone to come home to, how cold they must get without the heat of another body in bed beside them, how mad it must drive them to not have a person to chat with for a minute or two when they come home from work. If I’d been thinking about it, I’d also have been terrified, as I am now, about them being responsible for all of their expenses alone. In this economy. In this housing system. It’s no surprise, with all of that as my worldview, that singleness at this age, which is not old at all really, took on a tragic quality. I had come to believe being in the flat on my own was pathetic. That was until I woke up to the sound of Gavin groaning in my bedroom as the alarm on my phone chirped it’s time to get up. This was tragic.
‘Morning,’ I shout from my prone position. I kick off the throw and sit up. My neck stiff, I crick it this way and that, rolling my shoulders and assessing how much damage a night on the couch has done to my body. All the while there are no words from Gavin, no sounds of movement, until they ask, ‘Why am I in your bed?’
‘Because you got in it.’ My sleep was one of those where I’ve been dead, no dreams, fully out for the count since I put my phone down. My thoughts are fuzzy from having to be brought back from the afterlife.
‘Oh God,’ is all Gavin manages – heartwarming that this is their response. Well done me for not shagging them; my body would cringe to dust if they’d been inside me and then felt this way. Putting my phone on selfie mode, I check how I look. The skin around my mouth and chin is pink and raw from where Gavin’s tash and stubble were rubbing against it last night. I’ve slept in my makeup, which will be dreadful for my skin in the long term but for now is making me look more put-together than I usually do upon waking. Wiping away a stray bit of mascara gunk from the corner of my eye, I hear Gavin unwrap themself from the duvet; their feet clatter into the basin I left on the floor for them to vomit into. ‘Oh God,’ they say again, before taking tentative footsteps to the bathroom. I watch them in the hallway working out the lay of the land. Then they flick the switch for the bathroom light on and off, on and off, until it turns on. ‘Oh God,’ they say into the bathroom as they walk inside.
There’s the clunk of the lock and then, a split second afterwards, the sound of Gavin being sick. Shortly after that the extractor fan kicks in. Even with it whirring, Gavin’s retching is pretty clear. To cover the sound, for my sake more than theirs, I get up from the sofa and start doing chores. I strip the bed of the warm, boozy, flowery, sweat-scented sheets. The basin that Gavin overturned with their foot is returned to its rightful place in the kitchen sink, where I rinse it out to the dulcet tones of Malcolm on his podcast,The Property Pros,where he interviews property developers about their businesses.
As I fill the kettle, Malcolm takes this particular interview down a strange path of discussing the importance of sheds. ‘It’s something I always say, a home isn’t a home until it has a shed.’
‘What about flats?’ the interviewee asks.
‘In my experience, any good flat has some communal outdoor space and that should definitely include a shed – otherwise it’s subpar.’
Feeling the shadow of Gavin at the doorway, I pause it here. Turning around, I’m met with a sorry sight. The rims of their eyes are red, one side of their face is deeply creased from how they’ve slept on my pillow and their curls are flat and tangled. ‘You alright?’ I ask with the answer right in front of my face.
‘That depends. Is my memory of last night accurate?’
