The Breakfast Clubbing

Well, dinner didn’t happen, mostly because Freddie did another of his disappearing acts, resulting in neither sight nor sound of him until the very early hours of Wednesday morning.

I was woken by the sound of my bedroom door opening, and a male voice shouting something about it being the wrong room to some other unknown called Tommy. I sat up in bed, too confused to be frightened, and plaintively told the intruder to go away. At the sound of my voice, though, Loud Mouth took another (drunkenly unsteady) step towards my bed and bawled gleefully to ‘Tommy’ that ‘Ay ay, there’s a GIRL in here!’ Mortified, and newly scared, I made a squeaking noise and pulled the duvet over my head – a poor evasive action, in hindsight, but clearly all I was capable of at the time – and hoped Jamie would wake up and save me.

Thankfully, the period of heart-thumping suspense that followed was short-lived, because Freddie’s voice began shouting, too, from downstairs. ‘For fuck’s sake Jonny, just get out of her room. The bathroom’s next door, you cock. Get the fuck out of her room.’ Loud Mouth Jonny retreated and I bounced out of bed to slam the door behind him, to hear him remark (as he stumbled off to urinate on my toilet seat) ‘I’m leaving, but I bet she’d’ve liked me to stay’, and snigger revoltingly. I hesitated momentarily, staring at the back of the door, before adrenaline and anger got the better of me and I threw it open again and marched downstairs, wearing only knickers, a tank top and an aura of righteous outrage.

‘Hi Ally’, Freddie said uncertainly, scrambling up from the sofa. His eyes had the unnatural brightness of the drunkard, and he was staring at my knickers. (Maybe Becky had a point last week).‘Don’t you ‘hi Ally’ me,’ I retorted, intending to sound dignified in justifiable offence, but only managing a mixture of querulous and petulant. (No matter – right was on my side). ‘Firstly, my name is Alice, I hate being called Ally, and secondly, why did a strange man just walk into my bedroom?’ I paused, momentarily distracted by my own peevishness and by a glimpse of my underdressed self in the wall mirror. Then, since there was no one else in the room, ‘And why was he calling you Tommy?’

Freddie blinked at me and made an obvious effort to look at my face instead of my underwear. I thought smugly that it was a good thing that my skin has been behaving of late, and that the Yin Yang regime has left it with a healthier than usual glow. (Confrontation is easier when pretty.) ‘Sorry, Alice.’ He rubbed his face tiredly, which was, irritatingly, quite mollifying. ‘That’s my mate, Jonny, from university. He’s a bit drunk, I’m really sorry. Must’ve thought your room was the bathroom, s’my fault.’ He looked at me helplessly. ‘Well, then, I’ll just give thanks he didn’t unzip and wee all over me’, I replied grumpily, ‘but it was scary, especially because of the Tommy thing. I thought there were two strange men in my house.’

‘Oh God, Alice, I’m so sorry,’ he said, running his hand through his hair, ‘everyone at uni called me Tommy. I’ll make it up to you.’ He peered at me some more. ‘You look all cold and scared, you poor thing.’ ‘Well,’ I said in an annoyingly high-pitched voice, because it was the middle of the night and it WAS scary and I had expected Freddie belligerence, not an apology, ‘I was scared, it was horrid’. The results of this were also surprising. Freddie took a step forward and enveloped me in a Lynxy embrace, trapping my folded arms against his chest and filling my nose with deodorant and some form of alcohol. ‘Poor Ally’, he mumbled, causing my eyes to roll.

The strangeness of the moment, which was considerable, was broken when Loud Mouth Jonny descended the stairs and guffawed. ‘Bloody hell, Tom, I didn’t know you had a thing going on with one of your housemates. Thought you were seeing that girl from Shoreditch,’ he huffed out, between heavy, beery breaths. Mortified, both by this odious assumption and by my undressed state, I struggled free of Freddie and hurried back upstairs, mumbling goodnight to him and unable even to speak to the loathsome Jonny. ‘You tosser,’ I heard Freddie say as I shut my bedroom door.

If I’d expected his contrition to manifest itself in sober, daytime life, I was wrong. As usual, we saw little of each other beyond momentary crossings of our bathroom-bound paths in the morning (during one of which he angered me by raising his eyebrows at the state of my new toothbrush) but we were all at home yesterday. We were all at home, and so we all had brunch together. Freddie, annoyingly, behaved as though he was holding court, leaning back in his chair and talking endlessly, with Laura and Jamie hanging on his every word, Laura giggling wildly at his every (weak) joke, and occasionally hopping up and fussing around him with tea pots and toast racks and MY organic Grove Fresh orange juice.

‘Did you know, Jamie’, I remarked, eventually, unable to bear Freddie’s self-satisfaction any longer, ‘that Freddie brought a friend home on Tuesday night, and that he walked into my bedroom? It was horrible.’ The other two looked momentarily appalled, and then Freddie started laughing, which of course meant that his thralls had to as well. ‘Oh yeah, that was bloody funny, Ally, you have to admit. You were so frightened,’ he went on mockingly, grinning at the other two. ‘She came running downstairs in her night clothes looking like she was going to cry. I had to give her a cuddle to calm her down.’ Laura sighed disgustingly, Jamie smirked admiringly, Freddie laughed uproariously, and I just gaped disbelievingly. He has no shame.