Gone Girl Flat

A love letter to Oxford and to leaving it.

At 4 am on the last day of our tenancy, Em is celebrating her third anniversary in Krabi and I am lying motionless on the floor of our flat, wishing the living room would deep clean itself. The last time she was here, we sat foot to foot amongst takeaway detritus and her phone alerted us that “the luteal phase is over and a flood of happy hormones is heading your way!” I said my happy hormones look like the Irish rugby team getting ready for a scrum. She said, “Mine are like a crowd where everyone is you.”

Tonight my phone has been buzzing incessantly but it's a crowd where everyone is a colleague from the summer school, letting me know that there is a suspicious stain in the boarding house I’m responsible for. Apparently it looks like vomit. Two minutes later it smells like vomit. I eye up the skirting board wondering if they’ll have concluded that the stain tastes like vomit by the time my shift starts at 8 am.

I move anything left onto the dark pavement and write “Please Help Yourself” a few times until it stops looking pathetic. There are kettles, mirrors, saucepans, a toaster, a microwave, a printer, a table, a rack of half-used spices. When I shut the door and post the keys through the letterbox an hour later everything, including the sign, is gone. My morning commute is deserted, bar one crackhead on Bear Lane who's playing the xylophone on Em’s upturned ice trays.

On my way into college, I collect my boss Jerry who is sitting, wide-eyed and sleepless on the quad. As the only two people who ever want to be in the canteen at 7 am, it’s lucky we consider each other good news. He has a 22-year-old daughter who is moving into an apartment in Brooklyn today. Her first Girl Flat. We sit at parallel tables, and he commences the breakfast interview.

“Did you do some colleague matchmaking at the pub last night?” 
“I don’t care about other people enough to match-make.”
“I fear that may be true. Well, were there any inappropriate moments I should be aware of?”
“Zero. Also zero at the after party and zero at the staff orgy.” This gets a smile, which is a hard-won thing from Jerry, and means we'll eat in silence until there's a new line of questioning.
“As an Oxford graduate, would you still argue that seven plus eleven is six?” 
“Seven plus eleven is eighteen.”
“That’s a lot of clarity you’ve gained since we last spoke over eggs!" He stirs his tea but back and forth rather than in circles so it rings on each side. "Did this breakthrough require any trips to the witch doctor, shall we say?"
“Nuh uh!” but with a slow nod and four raised fingers. 

A lesser high school teacher would shut the laptop and tell me to get my act together in an earnest voice. Say, in so many words, that you are hardly a girl anymore and the shininess that fools most people won’t make up for the stuff that matters. Jerry just squints at my hand and returns to his emails. I pour filter coffee back and forth between two mass-produced teacups and think of my mugs, eaten by Cowley Road. If they weren’t all swept into a car boot at once, which was the last to go? Probably the pink one first and the stained one last and then the eggs are cold and Jerry is sitting at my table.

“Is that why you missed half your shift yesterday?” 
“Well, yesterday afternoon I had to revel in the space between who I was and who I’m yet to be.” This does not sound casual out loud.
“And did that hurt? - (and did you decide about the job yet, and did you tell her your news, and is that vomit stain in the staircase yours because if it is that's okay) - I just imagine all the answers you're not telling me must hurt. Particularly with your friend being away.”
“Not physically.” There is coffee all over the tray.
He nods. Then he says “You have the perfect personality to be a writer”, and knows I won’t misunderstand.

Les filles qui vivaient dans l'appartement des filles aiment: sweet and sour pork, Penang Hill, Canada, ‘acolyte’ being in the LinkedIn dropdown options, Anais Nin, tarot cards, Bishop’s ‘One Art’, HBO Girls, Space Oddity, Roberto Bolano’s financial strategy, Bluestocking magazine unironically recommending My Body by Emily Ratajkowski, intergenerational friendships, TikTok virality, everything about Role Model except his music, having the pick of the litter, female body hair, mother of pearl, remaining gentle, Melissa, the gong sound effect at the end of ‘On Melancholy Hill,’ and calling any combination of running, swimming and cycling an Ironchild.

Les filles qui vivaient dans l'appartement des filles n'aiment pas: Google translate, denial, bone tiredness, Unsaids, sliced bread, ‘Big Italy’, the NATO phonetic alphabet, shopping, cigarettes, crescent moons, magic 8 balls, mud, Jemima Jo Kirke, petals on a wet, black bough, tequila on a bleach wiped bar, Elizabeth Smart, having to lie in the bed you have made, and the In Our Time episode on Thoreau where one of the guests says that Walden has the highest concentration of urine of any body of water in the United States and Melvyn Bragg acts like this is a dull, nay superfluous fact.

Letter from the Editors regarding the 31/07/2024 publication of ‘Gone Girl Flat’

We are very grateful to our many new subscribers and wanted to give them a glib and breezy, Girl Flat welcome. However, somewhere around the first paragraph a young woman broke into our offices said “This is actual wank shit and you know it, let me try.” She sat down and took this post in an unexpected direction and then wrote two poems and a plan for a review and entered a short story competition. She was almost identical to our staff writer Eliza Tracey but better in every way. We think she said her name was Munda Neum. We will post more of her writing soon.