Over twenty-five per cent of commuters, that’s one in four,
carry faecal matter on their hands. Think about it. Those commuters spread all
that filth among themselves, they shake hands with colleagues and friends, they
go to supermarkets and handle fruit and vegetables that you may later buy, take
home, and consume. This is why I am agitated. This is why I cannot settle down
to write.
It isn’t
something normal thirty-year-old women obsess about, and it’s always worse when
I’m waiting for Ade to come back with the shopping. I pace the room listening
to the low hum of the air filters sanitising the air and worry about germs attacking
Ade from all sides.
I go back
to my laptop and try to concentrate on the letter. It comes from a reader in
Huddersfield. He thinks that his girlfriend has given him chlamydia but he is
unsure whether to broach the subject because he might have contracted it during
a stag party in Amsterdam. He asks, Dear Isabelle, what should I do?
Dear Concerned of Huddersfield, each of us
carries on our bodies a thousand species of bacteria. A handbag might carry up
to ten thousand bacteria each square inch; a passionate kiss can prompt the
exchange of over five million bacteria. So what are a few extra bacteria
between friends? We are all mired in filth.
Even though I’ve scrubbed my hands under scalding water,
each tap of my fingertips on the keyboard transfers unseen residue. A computer
keyboard can harbour four hundred times more bacteria than a toilet seat. Think
about it.
I have to stop typing because I feel I’m going to retch. In
any case, Concerned of Huddersfield doesn’t fear the unseen enemy; his primary
concern is whether his girlfriend will notice the discharge, and whether this
might introduce a note of discord into the harmony of their relationship.
I lean back in the chair and try to focus on what practical advice
I can offer. Living as disconnected from the world as I do, it’s easy to see
people in the real world like soldier ants, struggling to haul crumbs over the
obstacle-laden terrain of life. This thought of crumb-carrying ants brings Ade
back to mind, struggling with carrier bags full of my germ-ridden shopping.
***
Okay, Isabelle Granger is bat-shit crazy. Example: I’m here
in Tesco’s measuring onions. Seriously. She won’t have onions bigger than
twenty-six centimetres round. And I have to clean every item with bleach wipes
before I take them into her apartment. God knows what her chef has to deal
with. I can’t tell because her staff never meet. That’s another rule. I’ve
never seen or spoken to her chef or housekeeper. We leave notes and shopping
lists, and that’s it. Before I finish each day, I have to count the
housekeeper’s wages, seal the cash in an envelope, and put it on a side table.
Why she pays the housekeeper daily and the rest of us monthly, who knows?
Anyway, I’m heading to the next aisle when I spot my friend
Jaye. I hate being seen. Shopping’s not really a guy-thing.
‘Hey, Ade,’
he says, ‘you shopping for that bat-shit crazy boss of yours?’
‘Don’t call
her that.’
‘What, like
it’s only you who can say it?’
Okay,
you’re thinking I shouldn’t have told Jaye about Ms Granger’s craziness, right?
But something that weird, it’s going to come up in conversation.
Jaye gives
me a sly look. ‘You getting friendly with her then?’
‘Strictly
professional. I can’t stop to chit-chat. I got to get a ton more stuff.’
‘I’m not
stopping you.’ He shrugs. ‘Later.’
We bump
knuckles. Ms Granger would approve—less surface contact.
Next stop
is the household cleaning aisle. You ask me, the germs left her apartment long
ago. Talking of which, that place is massive, seriously massive. Ms Granger
sits there typing away behind an inch-thick glass wall that separates a
corridor for staff from her living areas. There’s a sliding glass door between
the two sides that never slides.
The way I heard it, her mum—one of the richest bitches in
London—offered her a lifetime of sessions with a world famous shrink, or as
much money as she needed to move out and set up a place of her own. That’s mums
for you. I’m talking about real mums, biological mums. I can’t fault my
adoptive mum. Anyway, Ms Granger chose a place of her own instead of the shrink.
But here’s the craziest thing. Ms Granger writes an agony
column for some women’s magazine. You’re talking about a single woman of
thirty, a good-looking woman, living her life behind glass. And she dishes out
relationship advice. Is that mental or what? Being part of Ms Granger’s world,
things just get weird and weirder.
***
The correct term for my primary phobia is mysophobia, although
most people say germophobe. Of course, that’s only part of it. Believe me, I do know how ridiculous it seems. Thinking
back, I’d say it began when I was bullied at school. After my parents divorced,
and after the incident I prefer not to talk about, it grew progressively worse.
On my eighteenth birthday, my mother addressed the problem in the only way she
knew how.
‘Isabelle,
darling, you have a blank cheque,’ she said. ‘Ultimately, it’s your father’s
money, so I encourage you to spend it with as little restraint as you can
muster.’
‘What did
dad say? Did he wish me happy birthday?’
‘Oh,
probably.’ She gave a casual flick of her gloved hand. ‘I haven’t paid him any
attention since nineteen-eighty-six.’
As always, my mother was on her way out of the
door to somewhere. I could hear the Daimler’s engine idling outside, belching
pollutants into the summer afternoon. Perhaps it was a lunch date she had at
Fortnum’s, or a shopping trip to Bond Street. I’d hoped my father might speak
to me personally.
‘Well,
don’t look so disappointed.’ My mother arched an immaculate eyebrow. ‘I am not
your father’s keeper, not any more.’
I chose the apartment, because therapy—lying
on a couch befouled by the grievances of multimillionaires—no, I couldn’t. Sometimes
I wonder how different life might have been if I could have been cured. Perhaps
I might have been the girlfriend of Concerned of Huddersfield.
Dear Concerned of Huddersfield, when you are
alone in bed at night, if you ever are, do you hug your pillow and imagine
loving someone who could see you at your weakest and only love you more for it?
The buzz of
the intercom jolts me. I hit Alt–Tab on my laptop and a picture of Ade waiting
at the ground floor entrance flashes up on the screen. The CCTV distorts his
face, accentuating his features, making him look cartoonish. I love that.
I buzz him
in. The concierge downstairs, Mr Cosgrove, will stop Ade and ask him his
business even though Ade has visited me daily for nearly two years. Mr Cosgrove
is an officious busybody puffed up with his status as guardian of the lobby.
Ideal for the job, I suppose. Mother once slapped him hard across the face,
hard enough to send his lower dentures skittering across the waxed floor. He
received a substantial salary increase that year.
I get up,
slip the cover off the mirror that hangs on my living room wall, and do my best
to straighten my hair and smooth my lips together to distribute the remaining
lipstick evenly. For all these little touches, I look like a girl who has suffered
a makeover from a wronged friend.
***
Hauling the shopping bags through the apartment door I call
out, ‘Just me, Ms Granger. Yeah, I’ve disinfected everything.’
I could get
away with not bothering. It’s not like she’s going to know, right? Only time
she sees half this stuff is when it’s on a disposable dinner plate. One time, I
might have skipped the routine. Now, I like to do what I can to make her world
less scary.
I lug the
bags along the corridor. The plastic handles stretch thin, like piano wire
cutting my fingers. With the left-side wall being glass, sometimes it throws
you. You don’t know whether you’re on the inside looking out or outside looking
in. Ms Granger’s standing on the other side of the glass like someone
impersonating Hannibal Lecter. Except Lecter probably doesn’t list eight
different brands of maxi pads in his shopping.
She says, ‘Did
you get everything?’
‘Take a
look.’ I stagger past, towards the kitchen. ‘I got the whole freaking store
here.’
She laughs.
We worked out the boundaries early on. We can share jokes. She asked me to call
her Isabelle, but I have to keep a certain distance. I put the bags in the
kitchen and come back through to see her. She’s looking sadder than normal.
I say, ‘So
what’s up?’
‘Oh,
nothing.’ She turns away and goes to her desk. ‘You know, just people and their
problems.’
‘Okay,
shoot. What you got? Someone been cheating on her husband?’
‘I can’t
tell you that,’ she says. Her shocked face makes me laugh. ‘It would be
betraying a confidence.’
‘Like
writing to a national magazine about your private life is keeping things
confidential?’
She shakes
her head and sighs. ‘The whole idea of relationships, families,
friendships—life is so complicated.’
Too true.
Try being put up for adoption two months after you’re brought to a foreign
country. When you’re just old enough to remember but too young to understand
and all you got is your first name. Try growing up thinking what to say to your
real mum if you ever find her again. And when you do find her, all she can do
is cry, and all you can keep asking her is, ‘why, why, why?’
Look, I’m
not into self-pity. Life is sweet. Seriously. I’m just saying she’s right—it’s
complicated. It takes every kind of bravery.
Ms Granger
says, ‘Did you know, Ade, there are more germs on your body than there are
people in America?’
‘I’m cool
with that.’ I head back to the kitchen. ‘They know I’m president.’
***
I watch Ade slink back into the kitchen. He has a swagger in
the way he walks, you know, a natural confidence. I shouldn’t have mentioned
the germs. I can tell it makes him uncomfortable.
I listen to
the clatter of pans and the occasional profanity as he puts the shopping away
in the kitchen. I like it. I like having him in the apartment, taking up some
of the empty space with his big ebullient personality. After a while, he
saunters back through.
‘Okay,
that’s done,’ he says from the other side of the glass.
The recessed microphones and speakers allow us to hear each
other clearly, but it isn’t the same as in the flesh, not from what I remember.
It’s more like hearing a voice on a long-distance call, disengaged.
Ade says, ‘Anything else you need?’
I want to
say, yes, I’d like to talk. Tell me about your life, tell me about your family.
Let me tell you about this dream I have where I’m drowning, then I rise up and
break the surface into sunlight, and it’s like being born, it’s beautiful.
Instead, I
say, ‘No, thank you, Ade. Just the usual with the envelope, please.’
‘Sure,’ he says.
He picks up
the envelope from the side table, takes out the money—don’t get me started on
the germs carried on currency—and he counts it out.
‘Yep, it’s
all there, right on the nose.’
He looks at
me and grins . . . that wide, generous grin. Then he runs the gummed flap of
the envelope across the moistened tip of his tongue. He seals the flap down
with his finger. I can almost feel the grain of the paper under the slide of his
touch.
Did I mention that a passionate kiss can prompt the exchange
of over five million bacteria? I’m uncertain of the numbers when it comes to
sealing envelopes the old-fashioned way. It is an enormous health hazard, I’m
sure, and enough to give a germophobe like me a coronary, which probably makes
you wonder why I insist upon it.
***
I’m done for the day, but I hang back, waiting to see if Ms
Granger wants to talk. I get that feeling from her sometimes.
I check
again. ‘You sure?’
‘Positive.
Have a great evening.’
Then she
turns and goes back to her desk.
‘Catch you
tomorrow,’ I say as I leave.
My mind’s
already on stuff I need to do tomorrow as I get to the underground station.
It’s a seriously weird kind of job. Used to be just keeping the electrics and
IT running. Now it’s a bit of everything. I got no problem with that.
It’s already getting dark and the air is damp, threatening
rain. Then it hits me. Shit, I’ve left my house keys in Ms Granger’s kitchen. I
can see them, sitting on the worktop by the sink, next to the row of bleach
bottles. I do an about-turn and I’m back at the apartment block in five
minutes.
I’m getting
ready for the hassle of that asshole Cosgrove stopping me, but when I get there,
he’s standing in the doorway out of sight of the CCTV, puffing on a cancer
stick. He lets me slide by. Gives me a wink, as though it’s some massive favour.
‘I’ll let
you off, lad,’ he says, ‘just this once.’
I take the stairs two at a time.
I unlock
the apartment door and I’m about to call out that it’s only me when I get a
feeling something’s happened. Inside, it’s darker than usual, more shadows. And
quiet in a way that does something to your guts. Quiet as that run down church
in Kensal Rise where my real mum took me the morning before she gave me up. As
I come to the end of the corridor and turn the corner, what I see makes no
sense.
The glass
partition door is open.
Over by the
side table, Isabelle stands silhouetted by the golden glow from the
streetlights outside. She hasn’t heard me. Against the light she looks . . .
well, fragile is the only word. It’s like me, you, anyone, could break her just
by breathing. She’s holding the envelope with the housekeeper’s wages in both
hands.
I think
about making a sound, coughing, maybe, so she knows she’s not alone. Somehow
that feels wrong. Like I’d be interrupting a prayer. I take a step back into
the shadows, holding my breath, keeping my distance.
How I’m feeling right now is . . . Have you ever had that
feeling when something happens, maybe the smallest thing, and you know it’s
going to change everything forever? That’s how I’m feeling. As I watch,
Isabelle touches the envelope, the gummed side, to her lips and holds it there.
Her eyes are closed.
I close my eyes, too.
And it’s like I can feel the touch of her lips.
Connecting.
---
David is a
Londoner now living on the rural North East coast near Whitby. He studied
Advanced Creative Writing as an undergraduate and his short fiction has
featured in a number of online publications and in print. David shares his home
with two cats who are his toughest critics.
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