10 April 2012
The doorbell pissed on my already sputtering creativity, and I thumped the desk. The bottle of cheap whiskey staggered and I steadied it, rubbed my burning eyes, and felt myself condense back into cold reality. Glancing resentfully at my sparse, scribbled notes, and my blank Word document, I ducked through the low doorway and hurried down to the hall. The cold of the flagstones sprouted through my thick socks and I remembered I hadn't switched the heating on. How long had I been up there? It was getting dark already and, automatically, my hand flicked the light switch. There was a voice from the other side of the door. A once familiar cry. Oh Christ. "Siii-mon Wendel!" the voice hooliganed tunelessly through the letterbox. "Siii-mon Wendel! Siii-mon Wendel is-a-horse's-arse!" I saw his spindly, yellowed fingers pushing the flap open, his rubbery, wet lips delivering his ridiculous call to arms. I felt as if he had opened a flap in my forehead and was yelling into my skull, rallying my sleeping memories. I heard him grumble something and through the mottled glass panel beside the door I saw his fragmented shape flapping as he beat his arms against his freezing torso. A miserable moment later the flap opened again: "Heeeeee... lookslikeahorse'sarse, heee smellslikeahorse'sarse, heee is aaaa horse's- Oh for God's sake, Si, hurry up. It's fucking freezing out here!" I opened the door. Cold swarmed in, and so did Gilbert. "Yey, y'big gay tosser!" he fog-horned as he gripped me in an icy bear hug and lifted me off the ground. "Shit, man, it's been... how long?" He ripped off his scarf and gloves and I pushed the door shut. "Hey, man. Good to see ya! Caught you in the middle of anyth- You dirty old bastard. What's her name, eh? Eh! Bit of a saucepot is she? Hey, nice place!" He led himself through to the kitchen leaving me to scoop his coat from the air or let it fall to the floor. "Sorry to just drop in on you unannounced, but- Wow, nice kitchen!" I took a deep breath, hoisted the heavy camel skin off the floor and hung it on one of the pegs. "No beers in the fridge?” he said, finding out for himself. “I'd've brought some if I'd known. Christ, man, it's colder in here than it is out side! Should've left the fridge open; warm the place up a bit." "I know," I said, wondering what to do with my ridiculous, fake smile which was beginning to ache. "Look at you, mate. You look like fucking shit!" He announced it as if he was telling me I'd just won a great prize. "Thanks." My cheek twitched. He was right though: with my ragged jumper and threadbare cords I must have looked like some sort of aging art student. At least I wasn't dressed in a cream suit and a pink flowery shirt like he was. "Got any skunk, mate?" He was a good friend once. We grew up together. I saygrew up, but I think that’s something he never really did. "No, I er... don't really... you know... any more." "What? Come on man, you’re a toker.” I shook my head apologetically. “Tea then?" He said, pulling out a chair and sitting at the table. "To drink, not to smoke, idiot." My frozen, inane grin hmmfed into a genuine smile.
*
Sophia Ricotta. Sex bomb. Journalist. Sophisticated, beautiful, desired by all men. That's about all I had. She wasn't going to be called 'Ricotta', of course, but something exotic,and possibly Italian. I don’t know why I was so drawn to this character. She wasn’t my usual type of subject. But she’d been swimming round my head all day, taking shape, becoming a personality. All I needed now was a story to put her in. That was the problem. I'd taken a six month sabbatical from teaching to write my second novel but I hadn't come up with a new story for about 2 years, and my agent, who was pretty much the antithesis of Sophia Ricotta, was getting twitchy. That wasn't the only reason I desperately wanted to write though. Writing took me away from myself. I became characters when I wrote; I felt their fears, their pain, their desires... Theirs, not mine. It was true escapism. But I couldn't seem to do it any more. It wasn't just writer's block. It was sort of... life block. I'd always had some vague idea there was something I was searching for, some kind of Nirvana. It had eluded me thus far. I'd tried all sorts of things over the years: casual sex, relocation, career changes... Surely the one thing I'd been seeking had to be the one thing I'd been shying away from: settling down. So I'd settled down. She was wonderful, Lisa. A truly beautiful person: balanced, thoughtful, witty, sexy; you name a positive attribute, she had it. She left me about 2 months ago. She took most of her stuff and went to live with a friend. Her beauty and warmth had gone right out of my life, and, insanely, I felt... relieved. "...So I thought I'd look you up, mate," Gilbert was saying as he sipped his tea. We were in the sitting room now and I was trying to get the fire to light. He'd been going on for a while about his adventures in Africa, South America and Australia, his last girlfriend, his yachting accident, his... God knows what else. I had a vague idea I knew some of it already, probably through the local grape vine. The story seemed to have culminated in his running out of money, returning home to England and to good ol M'maa and P'paa and his new found niche as an estate agent. "Truth is," he said, getting to the bit I'd been subconsciously both suspecting and dreading, "living with Mummy and Daddy's ok for a bit, y'know. I mean, don't get me wrong, 's great actually: meals on the table, no rent, y'know, but it's not... 'snot cool, man. What if I want to bring a girl back? Can't see old Pops taking very kindly to having scantily clad young- What am I saying? He'd fucking love it! Mum'd have his eyes out though, and his bollocks for gar- So..." He left it that, and it was only after a long silence that I realised he felt he'd actually asked me something. I prodded the fire a bit more, playing for time. "Y'know, mate," he went on, flicking a curtain of hair back dramatically, "it'd be like old times! Like the summer of '95! You look like you could do with having a rocket shoved up your social life. You supply the weed, I'll bring the girls..." He clapped his hands and lurched backwards in his chair as if it had just accelerated suddenly. He laughed in a hearty, knowing kind of way which waned awkwardly in the absence of my response. "Come on, mate, I hear you've got a spare room. It'd be a laugh, like old times." Christ, the last thing I needed was this maniac taking over my life. I had to get my head round my writing. "Oh!" I said as if I'd just got what he was on about. He gazed at me, his brown eyes glittering excitedly. "It would be great, but-" "Man, you're a mate. Think of it, the Dynamic Duo back in action!" "But I don't have a spare room." "You don- But my mum said your mum told her-" He was still grinning expectantly. He wasn't going to let go of hope that easily. "Sorry mate," I said, "but I just took on a lodger." "Really? Your mum know about this?" Even now, his look of excited anticipation didn't leave him. "Gilbert, not all of us have to report our every move back to Mummykins, you know." "Fuck off!" he laughed. "Well, who you got then? This happen recently? Anyone I know?" "You only know crack heads and sex addicts, and none of them made it past my rigorous interview process. No, just got it sorted out this morning, actually." The lie was coming easily to me now. If only I found it this easy to invent a story when it came to my writing. "Oh yes?" he said, adopting a sideways, conspiratorial expression. "A woman?" and he made one eyebrow bounce up and down slyly. "No, no. Ah..." I thought about it for a moment. He was going to want details, so I needed to come up with some pretty quick. Suddenly it came to me: someone exciting, even by Gilbert's standards; someone he definitely didn't know. "...Ah, yes actually. A friend from work. A girl. Her name's Sophia Ricotta."
*
Once upon a time we were inseparable. He was a laugh. Back then, being stupid was an essential part of life. He hadn't changed, hadn't moved on, hadn't settled down, or even triedto settle down. I envied him that though. Life was still an open book to him. A ridiculous farce of a novel, in fact. He hadn't yet reached the chapter where life becomes meaningless, or at least, where that meaninglessness becomes a problem rather than a bad behaviour licence. He still had the security of untapped possibility ahead of him. Even if he did develop that "what's it all about?" feeling, he could relax, safe in the knowledge that he hadn't tried everyet. Gilbert turning up had suddenly reminded me how complete I wasn't. "Christ, mate," he said when I'd finished extolling Sophia's virtues. "She sounds like a babe!" She did too. I'd described her vividly: her strong, curvaceous figure; her intelligent, subversive sense of humour; her healthy appetite for uncomplicated sex. "When the hell can I meet her?" Oh shit. "Well," I said, hoping to God my writer's block would not extend to every-day lies, "um... she... is hardly ever here. Or," I suddenly remembered she was only supposed to have moved in this morning, "I mean she will be. She does a lot of charity work in her spare time." I was kicking myself before he even began to respond. "Oh, ho, man. Charity work? This bird sounds unreal. A proper babe. If I don't get her into bed any time soon, I'll die!"
*
And that's how I inadvertently secured Gilbert as a permanent fixture in my life. Sophia, of course, was never there, but that didn't deter him. I thought he'd get bored, but he didn't. He was forever asking about her, peeking about, looking for signs of her. I started to worry he'd realise the truth, so I began dropping items around the place which I claimed were h
Sophia Ricotta by Antony Wootten • Opuss № I