The House Mate Read online

  I was drawn to an account called Mrs Clean. Her Instagram profile was hundreds of squares of simplicity, elegance and symmetry. I couldn’t get enough of it.

  I scrolled all the way back to her very first post, which showed an image of her standing next to her mop and bucket, with only her legs in shot and one pink-Marigold-cladded hand by her side. The background was blurred but I could see she was standing in a very bright and stark-white kitchen.

  Under the photo she had given a short introduction to herself. From then on every photo was exceptionally shot, accompanied by relevant content. Comparing her account to others, it appeared to me that Mrs Clean had gone into this Instagramming lark with a clear business head. Other accounts had clearly evolved from dodgy grainy photos with busy backgrounds to the polished images they were producing now. Mrs Clean’s were all professional-looking from the outset. Hers was the one I chose to follow.

  Filled with inspiration for the house, I wandered back inside to see what I could get started on.

  The back door led into the kitchen, and as I arrived inside, I could see the coast was clear. My body was saying, ‘Do it, do it,’ although words from another time told me, ‘Don’t.’ But still, I did it anyway. I closed and locked then unlocked the back door with the key six times.

  I heard a shuffle behind me as I locked the door for the final time. I turned around and there was Karen’s boyfriend, Steve. I stopped statue still as Steve’s eyes bore into me. Instantly, my palms felt clammy and I felt my chest go tight. My breath became laboured. I stole a look across the kitchen at the only other exit.

  Steve followed my look. ‘My cousin has OCD,’ he said flatly. I ignored his statement. From day one I had felt an eeriness in his presence; the way he launched into conversation without the general formalities of a greeting first.

  Steve had his hands in his pockets. He was the opposite of the type I would have gone for in the past. I had always gone for the big-built, tall men with strong hands that I had grown accustomed to being placed firmly on my waist and lifting me up over their shoulders. Hands that had once given me the security I had craved, but now I could only associate them with being wrapped tightly around my wrists, pulling me, dragging me.

  I couldn’t figure out what Karen saw in Steve. He was a short man with small hands that he perpetually kept in the pockets of any trousers he wore. Today, he was wearing jogging bottoms, his hands placed causally in the pockets as though he had been standing there for an age, perhaps observing me for longer than I would like to contemplate. His head was shaved very close to his scalp; he wore it this way as a homage to the army, which he was no longer a part of. Was it this resemblance to someone I didn’t wish to remember that made me recoil whenever Steve was around?

  Steve looked around the kitchen and not at me. I tried to follow his gaze to see what he was looking at.

  ‘Karen about?’ He sniffed. His voice was hollow and empty. For a moment, I considered if he cared at all if Karen was about.

  It occurred to me that if Steve was here alone, then he had made his own way into the house. He could only have come through the front door, which would have meant using a key. Surely Karen wouldn’t have handed out a key to her boyfriend of three weeks without discussing it with the rest of the house? I thought that a successful house share was about being respectful to your fellow house mates. This was the sort of scenario that I had envisioned would be worthy of a house meeting. My body gave an involuntary shudder as I considered the prospect of Steve having access to the house any time, day or night.

  I should by now, at my age, have the emotional energy to approach Karen and raise the issue with her, but for some reason I could not imagine myself doing that. Instead, I began to imagine how things would be from here on in, having to sneak around my own home, always in fear of the prospect of bumping into Steve. The thoughts began tumbling through my mind before I could stop them and rapid ruminating led to catastrophising, as I imagined a drunken Steve arriving here after the pub and trying to find his way into my bedroom.

  ‘I haven’t seen her today,’ I said breathlessly, and then finally, after what had felt like an age, I edged forward and began to make my way past Steve. We were both stood close to the pantry and the bins, leaving little space to manoeuvre, so as I passed him, he turned his body at the same time to walk past me, presumably to go to the garden to smoke a rolly. Suddenly, but only momentarily, we were almost nose to nose. All my senses heightened. Panic rose in my throat; it felt as though something was stuck there. I swallowed, but it felt forced and uncomfortable. He was so close to me I could smell his skin. Then casually, without uttering another word, he stepped to one side and let me past.

  I felt as though my instincts were lagging, but then some might say that my instincts weren’t properly sharpened beforehand, otherwise I would have foreseen the incident that changed my life forever.

  With a dry mouth and a pounding heart I found my way into my bedroom, locked and unlocked the door six times, ending on a lock. Then I stripped the one-day-old sheet from the mattress and pulled out clean, white, starched sheets from the ottoman at the end of the bed. I set about pulling the flat sheet over the mattress protector and finished up with perfectly tight hospital corners; a learned skill that transported me back to sleeping in a single bed in a six-by-eight-foot room a mere few weeks ago.

  After that experience, changing the sheets every day became an obsession. It evolved from when I was unable to sleep and would lie in bed feeling numb, thinking of things to do and jobs to keep my mind occupied. Anything to make me feel something. It had now become a compulsion, and if I didn’t do it each night, I would lie in the sheets thinking about the amount of dirt or hair that could have contaminated them in the last twenty-four hours, and then I just couldn’t rest; I knew something terrible was sure to happen if I slept in dirty sheets.

  I threw on the duvet cover and pulled on four clean pillowcases. Then I sat on the end of the newly made bed and thought about Mrs Clean’s Instagram that I followed earlier and what tips there might be for bedrooms. Mine was okay, but I needed more tasks to do each day, simply making a bed every night wasn’t time-consuming enough. Sure, I’d have a workload to contend with when the introductory course started on Monday, but that still left me with plenty of hours to fill each day with the other menial tasks.

  I pulled out my phone from my back pocket and found my way back to Mrs Clean’s page. As I entered her profile, I was presented with yet another new photo. It was an image of a kitchen, taken on an angle so it was lopsided; it was a technique I have seen done a few times already in just a few hours scrolling through different profiles.

  I could see why her account was so popular: over one million followers. I looked again at the kitchen, and I saw some sort of resemblance to the size and shape of our kitchen downstairs, which made me feel as though something similar could be created to modernise it. Mrs Clean’s kitchen was a mix of pastel-grey kitchen units and stark-white surfaces, gleaming and shining, with a deep, aluminium double sink.

  Without thinking, I hit the heart button and liked the photo along with 32,135 other people. Would Mrs Clean see my like out of everyone else’s?

  I began scrolling through some more of her other posts.

  I was drawn to an image of a hallway. The walls were bright white, the floor a light hardwood. On the wall were three large black-and-white prints in frames, but because the photo had been taken at an angle, I couldn’t see them properly. I noticed that there were two small grey circles underneath the photo, so I swiped across and another photo was revealed. This one showed the three monochrome prints straight on. One was of a volcano erupting, one was of a wave crashing against a cluster of rocks, the third was a series of waterfalls. I looked at the image of the photos for a long time and imagined myself standing in her hallway as though I was standing in an art gallery.

  I continued scrolling. I looked at the date of the first post and found it fascinating how one woman could go from
having zero followers to having over one million within a year. I thought about the summerhouse and how I could make it my project, upload some photos to my Instagram site and take some inspiration from Mrs Clean. I could already feel the satisfaction within me growing, overtaking the numb feeling I had been stuck with for years. Just looking at the glorious organised symmetry stirred up something within me. Things I hadn’t felt for a long time. And I wanted to feel more of them.

  But just as I was starting to believe I could immerse myself amongst these tiny squares as a way to escape the horrors of the past, my phone rang. Across the screen was a mobile number I knew, and suddenly I was being dragged right back there.

  5

  Then

  We had been together for three months when he asked me to move in with him. I was ecstatic. We had done everything that couples in the movies did. He took me shopping, bought me clothes and jewellery, we sat at the back of the cinema throwing popcorn in each other’s hair and drove to the seaside to ride the Ferris wheel and eat candyfloss.

  Once we were living together, all I could think about was those films I had watched over and over with Mum. How those couples existed next to one another, cooking together, brushing and flossing their teeth next to each other in the bathroom, then taking it in turns getting the kids to football practice. Families sitting around a table, having too loud conversations, but no one minding because the love was so fierce.

  I was scared to tell Mum I’d be moving out, then D encouraged me to just get it over with. I apologised profusely to her.

  Her response was, ‘You’re fine. Go and do what you need to do – don’t let me hold you back. God knows I let your father do enough of that to me.’ She looked up towards the heavens, something she would do every time she spoke of my dad, even though she wasn’t religious. I remember him, of course. I remember it all. But I choose to block it out. The only reminders were the episodes that Mum had. Too often for my liking. She said she could cope. I promised to visit every week.

  We didn’t move far. The flat we found was just on the outskirts of town, about a ten-minute drive from Mum’s. There were no bus routes that went back that way, and I still hadn’t learned to drive.

  ‘You can walk to the shops from here,’ he said. It was only later, my fifth time at the shops, that I realised I would always be making these trips alone.

  I never knew exactly what it was he did. He told me he worked in construction and that he had an office in the next town. I tried on occasion to dig a little deeper; I wanted to understand his job better so when I was speaking with other people, I could explain it in great detail with admiration and pride.

  ‘If I tell you, I’ll have to kill you,’ he joked. But by then I had not learned how quickly a joke could turn sour, so I laughed along as though it was the funniest thing anyone had ever said. It was fine, I thought. He works hard and supports us. I don’t need to know the ins and outs. Only the pit of my stomach was protesting; didn’t couples share everything? There weren’t supposed to be lies and secrets. That’s not how it played out on the screen in the hundreds of films I had watched growing up as a kid.

  Sometimes he would come home from wherever he had been and look at me sat on the sofa as though I was a leech. ‘You could have cleaned up.’ There was a sourness to his tone that I was starting to hear more regularly, but which I attributed to tiredness.

  The flat was spotless. I had nothing else to do with my days anyway. I had suggested I get a part-time job, but he had insisted that I didn’t need to, that everything was taken care of and that all I needed to do was be here for when he came home.

  ‘I need you, babes.’ He would put those strong arms around me, the harsh words he had said moments ago already evaporated and forgotten. He would draw me close, I would feel him press himself against me and I knew I was worth something.

  I thought about my mum often; I would call her from the flat when he was out. I don’t know how that became a pattern, but it did. Somehow a phone call with my own mother became something I felt I needed to hide from him because after one month of living together, I still hadn’t visited as I had promised. Whenever I mentioned her, he would wrinkle his nose and busy himself with anything to hand, a laptop or his phone usually. My suggestions of a day out and popping in to see my mum quickly evaporated around us.

  I began to wonder why it was becoming more difficult to get him to do things for me.

  ‘I could take a taxi?’ I said to him one day. ‘It would save me bothering you.’ I felt a nervous lump form in my throat.

  ‘But I like you bothering me.’ He wrapped me up in his arms. I felt the lump melt away.

  Then he pushed me back a couple of inches so I could see his face.

  ‘Babes, you really want to go back to that life? What is there for you now? This is your life, here, with me. Things are really starting to take off – soon we can move out of this place into somewhere spectacular, and, you know’ – he looked down and touched my stomach – ‘maybe have a little family of our own one day.’

  I felt my heart leap because I had already noticed that I was late. My cycles had been as regular as clockwork for over four years. So I knew. But something made me keep it a secret for a little while longer, perhaps the foresight that it was to be so short-lived.

  I enjoyed those few short weeks of just me knowing about my baby, each of us simply existing, one within the other. I cherished having something so precious that was dependent on only me. Even then, not knowing how soon it would be gone, I loved it so hard, so fiercely. When I told him he would soon be a dad, although he laughed and spun me around, telling me what a clever girl I was, he went very quiet for days afterwards. It wasn’t long after that something switched within him, as though he could sense there was a possibility I could love something or someone more than him.

  Just eleven weeks into the pregnancy, as I lay there bleeding, the baby falling out of me, I played the films out in my mind. I had watched them a hundred times: Dirty Dancing and When a Man Loves a Woman were particular favourites and reminded me that I could still be saved.

  It wasn’t his fault, I told myself over and over. Next time I would remain sullen; less conceited. I still loved him.

  Instagram post: 27th April 2019

  Hello, my little cleaners, how are you all doing on this bright spring morning? I have been busy buying cushions. They are my absolute favourite thing to buy because they really are one of the main statement pieces to each room. I get a little obsessed. I like to match them to each season, so I am busy adding some yellows and greens and pinks to my sofas now. It’s out with the winter accessories and in with some spring pieces. I hope you enjoy looking at my photos as much as I enjoy creating the looks for you all to enjoy.

  Have a great day.

  Mrs C x

  #ilovespring #MrsClean #cleanstagrammer #cleaning

  127,980 likes

  mrsj.r You are such an inspiration, Mrs Clean. I love the mix of the spring colours.

  carolineness17 I would never have put green and pink together like that, but it really works, doesn’t it?

  vinsta_gramma I’m getting these for my wife.

  lucybest65 It must be thrilling to sit around all day with nothing to do but fluff your cushions.

  vinsta_gramma I’ve been telling my wife that for years lol.

  6

  Now

  We were all sat in the lounge at the end of the weekend. There was a gardening programme on the TV that none of us were watching. Mini and Karen had been shooting a TikTok video, Sophie had a pile of crocheting material in her lap, halfway through a pink scarf that I had been eyeing up since she began.

  I had sensed an atmosphere forming about fifteen minutes ago, but I was trying to ignore it. I caught the girls looking at one another as though they were trying to find the right moment to say something.

  I had lots to do to prepare for my course that started the next day, and as I stood to leave, Sophia cleared her throat and spoke. />
  ‘Regi, we want to have a party next weekend for Mini’s birthday. We hope you don’t mind.’

  I looked around the room at the sombre faces, and then I had to stifle a laugh.

  ‘If it’s a party surely you should all look a little a happier?’

  Karen and Mini exchanged looks.

  ‘The girls – not me might I add – thought that it could be too much for you,’ Karen said impatiently, her eyes red from the hay fever, ‘and because this is your home too, we didn’t want to turf you out.’

  ‘We’re skint,’ Mini piped up. ‘And a house party is cheap and so much fun.’

  I thought back to the house parties I had attended when I was a younger, funnier version of myself. When friends would pop over at the drop of a hat. When life felt like it meant something and everything was just beginning, like a flower blooming. Only to be cruelly crushed as soon as it blossomed.

  ‘Well, of course, you do whatever suits,’ I said as I felt my stomach tighten and my grip increase on my thumbs.

  ‘So, you’ll be here?’ Karen asked. It sounded as though she didn’t want me to be, and that going out would have been the better option.

  ‘Of course,’ I said breezily. I stood up and picked up my empty mug from the coffee table. ‘I’m off to bed – big day tomorrow.’