fiction by natasha bonfield

Love at the Charles

Soon after I met my flatmate, I fell in love with her. Her name was Gemma, with a G, and she replaced Roisin, who lived in the flat’s other bedroom first. I might have fallen in love with Roisin, too, but she died before I had the chance.

I had only lived in the flat a week when I received an email from the inbox of Admin Agent. I suspected Admin Agent was not a real person, and also that he was male. When I electronically signed the lease a week before, I typed out an invitation for Admin Agent to have sex with me at the back of the Prince Charles Cinema:

Did you see the Time Out article titled Love at Prince Charles Cinema: why the iconic spot is Londoners favourite place for a cheeky shag (no penetration, clothes on)?

Admin Agent didn’t respond. I was convinced he was an automated email server or a coward. But then: Inbox (1). From: Admin Agent.

When I opened the email all I saw were lines and lines of Admin Agent’s most restrained contract yet. I was so overwhelmed by the text’s covert eroticism that it took me three reads to understand what he was trying to say: the tenancy agreement had changed, and it had changed because one half of the tenancy had died. Not died, perished. 

The word was padded with arousal. It made me think of the Prince Charles Cinema. Its wipeable pleather seats.

Death is shocking, so I was shocked. But the dead flatmate and I overlapped only a week in our living arrangements, and in that time we spoke once, in the shared kitchen. It was my first night there and I walked in on imminently-perishable flatmate Roisin eating oven chips straight from the bag.

I introduced myself and then asked what she was eating.

“Oven chips.” She sucked on one’s flaccid end. “Nothing special.”

I watched as the chip defrosted, slowly, between her lips. 

“Yum,” I said. And though I could see the bag, I asked, “McCain’s?”

Roisin swallowed, leaving a trail of white flakes around her mouth. 

“Aldi,” she said. “But I got my own seasoning.” Roisin’s palm curled open, like it held a secret, and revealed a small, crusted saltshaker.

I smiled at the saltshaker. It made me terribly sad. I could not meet Roisin’s eyes. But eyes have to meet something, and so mine met the balcony that waited, suspended, outside the kitchen window.

The balcony was why I moved into the flat. In one of our heated email exchanges Admin Agent assured me it was a communal balcony, shared between me and Roisin. Though access was difficult, requiring one to climb onto the counter to unhook an elevated latch, it was striking in summer. That was the word Admin Agent used: striking. 

That night in the kitchen my eyes met the balcony and the balcony introduced itself as a square slab of concrete streaked with frozen bird shit. 

“How is the balcony? In summer,” I asked Roisin. 

“Wouldn’t know.” Roisin used the back of her hand to wipe the flakes from her mouth. “Vertigo.”

Forty-eight hours later Admin Agent was in my inbox, telling me Roisin had perished, and I would be sharing the balcony with a new flatmate the following day. 

London property, babe. Things move fast. 

Admin Agent didn’t say that, but he might have, while nestled between my legs in the last row of seats at the Prince Charles Cinema. What he did say was: Could you please let Roisin’s son into the building so he can collect his dead mother’s belongings.

Oh, Admin Agent. He always knew just what to say. I typed back:

It would be my absolute pleasure.

The son arrived, panting, to the tenth floor, very sweaty, not unhandsome. He removed his coat and I caught a glimpse of stomach hair from where he’d misaligned two shirt buttons. This endeared him to me in the way only stomach hair can. I smiled at Roisin’s son and told him I was very sorry for his loss.

I had heard this phrase used in movies about funerals and thought it appropriate, but the son made a face that told me he disagreed. Then he said, “You, too.”

I was curious about this son. I couldn’t remember much about Roisin, even a few days after our one conversation. When I thought of her, all I saw were those flaking wet lips. Lips void of age or progeniture. I couldn’t believe those lips had initiated the kind of sex that would produce this sweaty, hairy man.

Once inside the flat I pressed on the faulty lock to make it shut all the way. The son stood very still in the entrance and I set myself to gauging his grief. The whites of his fingernails were too long, like he hadn’t had a chance to clip them. That and the missed shirt button were the only signs of distress.

“If you point me to the room,” he said. And I understood this son had not once visited his mother in her tiny flat with its shared balcony.

I led the son to Roisin’s bedroom and closed the door behind him. I waited in the hall, making my breath as nothing as possible. I listened for sobs or whimpers or weeping or any of the sounds people make on screens when confronted with death. All I heard was shuffling, though, and a few minutes later the door swung open.

The son asked, “These are all of Ms. Callaghan’s possessions?”

This is when I caught on. 

“You’re not her son?”

“No,” the not-son said. “I’m the solicitor.”

It was the sort of misunderstanding that would pause for laughter during a filmed television program. It would be written into the script: pause, for laughter. I had seen almost the exact scene play out in a film the other day, in fact, as the opening to a love story. The film was predictable, but I liked how ugly the actors were. It’s so rare to see a really ugly actor. 

I was pleased with the solicitor for not being a bad son and thought I could easily love him, might even invite him to the cinema, especially if he let me trim his fingernails.

Once the solicitor had inventoried all of Roisin’s belongings, he explained a courier would come by later to collect them. As he waited for me to unlatch the front door I asked,  

“Are you a good son?”

The solicitor told me again that he was not Ms. Callaghan’s son. He had never met Ms. Callaghan. To his knowledge she had no children at all.

He said these things to me slowly, and impersonally, and I saw the potential for misunderstanding stretch between us in infinite parallel. We were not ugly actors in a bad film; our pauses were ours alone, and we could spend the rest of our lives guessing what the other meant with that look, that touch, that use of the word unhandsome.

I released the solicitor and never saw him again.

Gemma moved into Roisin’s room the next day. I watched her unpack her shopping and did not say anything as she moved Roisin’s chip seasoning to make room for a six-pack of puce yoghurt. 

Gemma seemed like the kind of person who would mention if she knew she was taking the room of a dead person, and she didn’t, so I figured Admin Agent hadn’t told her. I didn’t either. Admin Agent had his reasons.

Gemma really was like an actress in a film. She lived in a perpetual state of reaction, with her face and her hands and small noises from her throat. She told me when she arrived that she kept to herself, and then asked about the balcony. Was it nice in the summer?

I told her yes, it was striking. And we agreed we would share a wine there, when it was nice enough. 

I waited impatiently for the weather to warm.

Meanwhile, Gemma and I began a passionate, silent courtship. I learned that keeping to herself meant Gemma would eat her yoghurt privately, in her room. We tiptoed around each other in the hall, never touching. Gemma always had a pair of white headphones dangling from her ears and jumped whenever I entered the kitchen behind her. Then she’d turn, press her fingers to her neck, and laugh. It happened every day, sometimes multiple times. Jump, turn, neck, laugh.

This ritual of ours wiped all thoughts of the Prince Charles from my mind. It was as good as. I almost told Admin Agent about it, but decided he wouldn’t understand. 

On the first warm day of the year, I was already on the balcony when Gemma tapped on the window. She asked if she could join me and I said yes, of course. It’s a shared balcony.

We sat in silence for a while, and then I asked, “Did you know that the woman who lived in your room before you died?”

Gemma reacted perfectly, just how I imagined she would. She breathed in very fast, and her thin eyebrows zoomed together so they touched. She apologised to me and asked if we had been close. I told her we weren’t, but I knew her son well.

Gemma breathed some more, lots of tiny gasps, and one short moan. Then she said, deliciously, 

“Did she jump?”

I had posed the same question to Admin Agent. He had refused to disclose any details in a bout of kinky power play, so I looked it up myself. Roisin didn’t jump. She hadn’t even died in the building, but at her office, of a stroke. 

I thought of telling Gemma this. But I loved how Gemma asked, like she was sorry to even think it, but also like she wanted nothing more than for the answer to be yes, of course she jumped, right from this very balcony. 

So that’s what I told her. Almost as soon as I opened my mouth Gemma was crying, right in front of me. Great, bulbous sobs. And she hadn’t even met the woman. 

It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.

Natasha Bonfield is a queer writer of short stories. Originally from the United States, Natasha is now based in London. Natasha's work has been shortlisted for the 2020 Grindstone Literary Short Story Prize and will appear in the upcoming Sapphic Writers Zine.