Seedling 16: A Very Short Chapter
I pushed the front door open and tried to hold it with my Apple shopping bag as it swung back and slammed into my right shoulder.
‘What the fuck?’
It wasn’t the door, it was the heat inside the flat. The air was stifling and seemed to back against me as I fumbled in.
I’d said it aloud, but it didn’t matter, there was nobody else downstairs. I could hear the gently pulsing club music from the DJ’s room filtering through to the lower floor.
I let the door slam behind me, set down my bags and went into the kitchen to grab some cold canned ravioli I had in the fridge, but stopped and went to the window, instead, pushing it open and letting some fresh air into the room. The heating has been on steroids in the past, but today it was harrowing. Yeah, I could simply adjust the thermostat, but since I was still the newbie in the flat, I was trying to be as amenable as possible. Considering I was spending most of my free time in bed, under the covers, I’d just turned off the bedroom radiator and called it a day.
With my tupperware of pasta, a bottle of cheap Dao under one arm and my extortionately-priced power cord in hand, I headed up the narrow stairs, the railings covered in the DJ’s wet laundry and a few items on wire hangers dangling from the eaves, as well, giving the flat a vaguely ‘souk’ vibe. I stopped and leaned over the edge. The radiators lining the downstairs hallway were similarly covered in his wet laundry, the piece-de-resistance being his hot pink half-shirt with the word ‘FAG’ emblazoned across the chest smack dab in the middle of one of the units.
This kinda explained the heating issue.
I stood for a moment trying to decide how irritated to be. That would take a bit more passion than I was feeling at the moment, so instead I climbed the remaining steps, fipped off Crackey’s room as I went by and locked my bedroom door behind me.
*
I’d nodded off somewhere during a high-speed pursuit near Kissimmee, Florida - which is a bummer, because you just had to know it had to have been a wild one, because it’s fucking Florida, after all. My eyes slowly blinked open with the screeching of the foxes below my window. Police brutality drifted blurrilly across my laptop monitor and the Dao rested on the night table with no more than half a glass left in it. I pushed my Mac to one side and climbed out of bed in my underpants, crossing to the far wall and gazing off across the green and playground. Two good size foxes were standing at attention. Then one would suddenly drop on its side, roll onto its back as a false invite to play and leap up at the last minute, dancing around the other. They’d wail for a bit, posture and then go back to sitting side-by-side like the jungle-gym sentinels of Stambourne House.
I know most Londoners consider foxes pests, but they always get a laugh out of me. Even when they wake me in the middle of the night, I’m always happy to see them.
I crawled back into bed, Googled “Seedling” for any new press, looked up my ex on Facebook(that beard is AWFUL) and plugged my old Barcelona address into maps - only to find the new tenants had put in cheap Venetian blinds and let my well-tended balcony flowerbox wither and die. I navigated over to Skyscanner, researching flights back to Catalonia. This flowerbox thing was going to put me over the edge.