Brief Encounter

Got home from school today to find a bin liner with my stuff in it on the landing. That's mum's way of telling me there's some ANNOYING GUESTS using my room. Great. Livin for the weekend and all that.

Just as I was making my way up the twisty breakneck stairs to the attic, like Ann Frank sneaking back upstairs after a secretive night out, I catch the bloody bin bag on a nail in the wall and it splits open, turning the stairs into a sliding scree slope of school books down which the smaller and more breakable of my few personal possessions - like my iPod and my little laughing buddha - bounce and spin like a freefalling downhill skier. A couple of pairs of jeans and a t-shirt fall out, sprawling on the stairs like the victim of a bored serial killer. I stand there with the flaccid remains of the black bin bag in my hand, the sleeve of a sweatshirt spilling through the slit like a disembowelled body.

I was really worried that my iPod had got broken, so I jumped down the stairs to get it, which I should have done a bit more carefully, because I slipped on my bloody FRENCH book and clattered down the last few stairs on my kidneys, which was very painful. And as if that wasn't bad enough, as I'm lying there on the landing trying not to cry, the door of my bedroom door opens and this woman comes out. She's an expensive looking woman with blonde hair and long legs and white strappy high heel shoes, and I wonder how she's managed to get up our stairs without breaking her neck. She has those sorts of toenails with the rims painted white that my mum says are a sure sign of somebody who has nothing better to do with her time and whose husband has more money than sense. If my first thought was how she'd managed to get up stairs without breaking her neck, my second was what the hell was somebody whose husband had more money than sense doing in staying in our house?

She looked at me a bit taken aback. Are you all right? she says. She has a accent like a premiership footballer's girlfriend. No, I want to say, I think I've burst my kidneys and you're in the wrong house. But I just nod and bite my lip. And she smiles and picks up my i-Pod and says Is this yours? If I speak I know I'll cry, so I just reach up to take it off her, and then realise I've still got the eviscerated black bin bag in my hand and I must look like a twat, as if cannoning down the stairs like a Skeleton Bob hadn't already made me look like a twat. You must be Jed, she says. Your dad told us about you. Then she throws me her name, which I don't catch. It's one of those two syllable country and westernish names which is really just two vowels strung together with a hyphen, like Jo-Lee or Kay-Lee. She says it in one of those voices that sounds like a question. I nod like a spacker, and in my head I call her Mikey because although that's a boy's name that's what it sounds like, and having already made myself look like a twat I can't ask her to repeat it. She looks at me for a bit, gives me the i-Pod, and goes back into my room leaving me sitting on the landing surrounded by all my scattered belongings with a shredded bin bag in my hand.