Carla's Got A Boyfriend; LitRPG
08/07/2024
You weren’t waiting until you felt serious about him, it just hadn’t happened yet. You kissed on the first date, you kissed a lot, and you decided to leave it at that because it gave you both something to look forward to. At the end of your second date (the pub had closed) it would have happened. You were draining your pints and growing self-conscious and the empty air between you started to draw attention to itself as you wondered inwardly whether you’d go back to his place or yours, but then you got a call from your friend Beth who was having a breakdown so you’d had to leave and go over there. You thought to yourself as you were getting ready for your third date, if it doesn’t happen today it won’t happen at all. The momentum would dissipate. You put on a thong.
You were supposed to go and see an exhibition near your flat, but it was too hot. The government had even issued a weather warning for the elderly and infirm. He suggested you move your date to the park. You drank Wray & Nephews with lemonade. You played with the dogs that came sniffing; you admired how he handled dogs, he was authoritative and they liked him, one after another turned over onto its belly to be scratched. You messed around together on the outdoor gym equipment. You got on pretty well. He was uniformly enthusiastic about the things you said, which you both liked and didn’t like. You found yourself losing respect for him the more he agreed with you - was he a bit stupid? Too earnest? The conversation had no friction to it, it was slippery even, never catching anywhere long enough to develop your opinions and leaving you with a subtle sense of having said something you didn’t mean. But it was lowish stakes, and you were having a good time. He asked you lots of questions; a notable improvement on other dates. He had a nice body, you saw when he did a handstand. It was so hot. You circled the pond, and watched a pair of swans pause to dig around between their wings, their black beaks swivelling around to push between greyish feathers. A jogger lapped you twice. You kissed a lot in the shade of a tree. It got heavy and you were drunk enough to consider having sex with him behind a bush somewhere, but you thought better of it, the grass was a bit itchy.
You left the park as the air had started to cool. Weak shadows were staining the concrete beneath the trees. But as you came out onto the street, black spots began to shiver around the corners of your vision. You felt dizzy. You knew exactly what it was; while you were going through puberty you’d had a lot of migraines, which passed as soon as your body settled into itself. You hadn’t had one since then but this was definitely one. You knew you didn’t have long until the pain really took off. You told him all this and he was kind and offered his arm to clutch all the way back to your flat. Everyone was out. You lay down and he went out again to buy some painkillers. While he was gone you ran to the bathroom and threw up, pain clutching at your eyeballs with each retch, and then went back to lie in bed, damp and limp. You put a pillow over your head, too weak to close the curtains. You heard him move into the room to place a glass of water on the bedside table with the painkillers and you asked him to close the curtains for you. He said he would hang out, just in case it got worse or something, and then left your bedroom.
The pain really closed in then. It was quite like having a recurring nightmare. At first the pain was immediate and disorienting. Then its contours began to feel familiar; not less painful, as a recurring nightmare is not less horrifying, but you recognised it. A big dark tunnel of pain you had been in before. You just had to sleep. For a while the throbbing in your head was too intense, and the nausea was making you shiver. You were too weak to go to the bathroom and you didn’t want to vomit in your bed. Through it all you stayed semi-conscious of his presence in your flat. Once the door opened and then closed. Then you passed into sleep.
You woke up because you heard voices next door. You didn’t know how much time had passed, but the light coming through a gap in the curtains had an orange tint so it was probably around 8 o’clock. So you had slept for only an hour or two. The room was still and dark and warm. You could think again, the worst of the pain had passed. You remembered when you had first had migraines and your mother, who was Polish, would cut a potato in half and place the halves over your eyes. You could smell the starch now just thinking about it. The coolness against your eyelids would have been nice you didn’t want to ask him to cut a potato in half for you, if he was still here.
Carla had come back; you could hear her voice through the door. You heard his tones in reply. Carla worked weird hours. She was one of those European cyber goths who got away with wearing only black and having loads of facial piercings because they were tanned. She had a ring in her lip and a bar between her eyebrows. Carla was Italian, from Milan. She made pretty good money in Bethnal Green inking shapes that looked like ninja stars onto other cyber goths. She smoked quite a lot of weed. In fact you could smell it right now. The smell was sickly. Was he smoking with Carla? You were surprised he was still here. You reached over and pushed some paracetamol out of the packet. They must have sat down on the sofa near your bedroom door because you could make out what they were saying now.
I make a really banging puttanesca, he said.
Oh yeah? said Carla. You make me one time, I tell you it’s good or no.
Communal living is weird, you thought. You’d found Carla and the flat through instagram. You liked Carla, although you found her way of being a bit alien. Carla gave you advice that was impossible to follow unless you were Carla, such as ‘when you like a guy, you fuck his best friend, then he become obsessed with you.’ Carla was also a little impassive - she met most things with a shrug or an ‘okay’, as if she’d seen it all before. Maybe it was the weed. Maybe she’d had a really intense life back in Milan. It was slightly annoying. When your date explained the situation to her, Carla probably said ‘okay’.
I’m really high, you heard him say through the door, and laugh. I don’t smoke that much weed.
You still felt very weak, and the dull ache in your temples persisted. There was a niggling part of you that wanted to reestablish the evening with him, to ask for his help in some way. But you weren’t lucid enough to do anything about that, you were still straddling realities.
I want to get very big dog, you heard Carla say. But the flat is too small.
Like a Doberman? he said.
He could stay if he wanted to, you thought, as sleep pulled you back. You turned over towards the window and folded your feet into the duvet. Maybe this would be the story the two of you told to friends. Gradually your chain of thoughts began to come apart and in its stead came strange and colourful and disparate images that transformed in and out of one other in unintelligible sequences and then you fell back asleep.
You wake up again a few hours later from a stressful dream. Its images fall away immediately, but the adrenalin remains. It feels as if there is some wild animal in the room. Strange, you think, how your body can react so strongly to things that are not really there. As you tune back into your surroundings, you notice the greenish light of the television flickering onto the floor beneath your door. It’s dark outside. You draw back a curtain and see that the sky is clear; you can even see one or two stars and a satellite, which is unusual for London. There are birds tweeting; they get confused because of the light pollution. You feel like them, all out of whack.
Carla is watching MMA. Carla loves watching MMA. Sometimes you watch it together. You can hear the cheers of the crowd and the grunts of the fighters. You can picture the oiled-up bodies twisting and kicking. You sit up in your bed, a little cold because of the open window, listening. Then you begin to hear a different noise, of a different quality to the noise of the television. Then you hear a little exclamation - a little, female ‘uh!’ It takes you a few moments to identify the sounds for what they are. The expansive logic of your dream is shrinking and hardening around each thump. There’s fucking going on next door. And that ‘uh’ - well, you don't know how an ‘uh’ could sound Italian, but it did. And Carla’s boyfriend is in Porto. So Carla is fucking your date in the room next door.
You feel hot and mad and bewildered. It’s definitely him, Carla said her boyfriend was going away for a month, and anyway they would have gone to Carla’s bedroom. When he was over you often didn’t see them for days. They just smoked weed and played music and ordered Deliveroo. Did Carla say they had opened their relationship when he’d gone to Porto? You can’t remember.
The tentative familiarity you had constructed over your three dates has crumbled away completely. Just like that he’s reverted back into some random guy who’s your house and fucking your housemate. You feel like you don’t know anyone in the world, embarrassed and conscious also that your breath smells like vomit. You hear Carla giggle, which is worse than anything. You want to go out there, and turn your embarrassment into something else. But you’re still so tired. It feels like your blood has been replaced with lead. You don’t remember this sensation from when you used to have migraines, but you were younger and more energetic then, and you didn’t drink over-proofed rum.
You have three choices. What do you do?
Option A. You pretend it’s not happening and go back to sleep.
Option B. You go out there to confront them.
Option C. You text him, telling him to fuck off, and then lock your bedroom door and wait for him to go away.
Option A:
The easiest thing to do is to go back to sleep and pretend it isn’t happening. If you were honest with yourself, you would admit that you were sexually intimidated by Carla. You envy the way she thinks about sex, you envy the slack and comfortable way she moves. So perhaps you’d just leapt to this interpretation. It’s easy, with the duvet pulled up around your chin and your eyelids this heavy, to offer yourself alternative explanations. It’s a cradle rocking. There are builders in the next door flat. Carla is playing Wii Tennis. Carla is nailing up a framed poster of The Holy Mountain. Your neighbour’s eleven year old is learning a dance routine in her bedroom. You wouldn’t know for sure unless you opened the door, and you’re not going to open the door. By tomorrow this will be a crazy story you can tell to friends. They’ll be outraged. And thinking of it like that, like an anecdote, makes you feel as if it is no longer happening to you. That is relaxing. This could happen to anyone, you think. And in a grander sense, it is happening to everyone. What divides you from Carla, really? What divides you from your date? As you turn this around in your mind the darkness of your bedroom begins to feel vast. The rhythmic thumping is lulling you into a kind of hypnosis, and the movement of your thought once again becomes fluid, unhindered. You lose all sense of proportion as the walls begin to speed away in every direction, while you, your body, your mind, all of your experiences, grew and grew to fill the ever-expanding space between them, until all of it had diffused into this huge dark endlessly unbroken field in which everything and everyone came together, nameless and borderless and one.
You fall asleep. You dream that someone is knocking on your door. They knock and knock but you do not have the strength to answer. You’re stuck in your bed. It feels as if you are being held down by something. You’re unable to pull the pillow away from your eyes. You don’t struggle, and it’s somehow not an unpleasant sensation, like a really heavy weighted blanket. All you can do is wait for it to pass, so you lie perfectly still and watch as blotches of colour move around behind your eyelids. They’re like living creatures. When at last the force that was holding you down subsides, you pull away the pillow to see that everything around you is suffused with a weird green light. The light is coming from no where in particular, it seems instead to be emanating from the room itself; your books, the mantelpiece lined with your clay pots, the landscape with the misshapen horse your brother painted when he was nine, the towels and the coat hanging off the hook on the door, the plastic sword you'd found on the street that is propped up by your wardrobe, all of it pulsing with this strange, blue-green colour, as if the whole room is deep underwater. You don’t know quite why, but you are reminded of a Polish fairytale your mother used to tell you when you were a child. You want to pull back the curtains but you have the sense that someone would be looking back at you through the glass when you do. So you prop yourself up against the headboard. Now you can see the floor beside your bed. And there, just as if it were a lake and not a slightly dirty pale pink carpet, you see a pair of swans, bright white, beautiful, gliding around and around one another in slow and fluent circles.
Option B:
You pull yourself out of the bed, moving quietly, and stand in front of the mirror. You’re very pale, almost green, but your cheeks and nose have a sunburnt sheen. Your mascara has smudged and your hair is matted at the back. You fix up your eyes with a cotton pad and quickly brush your hair. Then you step as softly as you can towards the door and pull it open.
They spring apart from one another at the swish of the door. Fuck fuck Shit, they both say. They haven’t sprung that far away from each other, just to either end of the sofa. He is pulling on his boxers on one end and Carla sits, naked and still, at the other. She has very nice brown nipples, one of which is pierced. A silent second passes as they look at you. You suddenly regret coming out of your room. It isn’t that bad, what they’re doing; you’re not catching your husband in flagrante. You feel a bit like you’ve been cast in a play against your will. A new MMA fight is about to begin; a girl in tiny shorts is sidling around the ring with an electronic board.
You wanna talk about it? says Carla.
How are you feeling? he says, almost at the same time.
Okay, you say. You sit down on a chair near your door. Actually no.
You are upset? Carla asks. You wish Carla would get dressed. A big tattooed snake ripples over her back as she leans forward and you think for a second she’s reaching for her clothes, but then she wraps her hand around the remote. She turns the volume down, then straightens up against the cushion and looks at you. When you say nothing, she says Actually, I go. She gets up nimbly, takes her dress, which is black, from where it had been slung over the coffee table, and walks to her room. Somehow she doesn’t look naked.
You look at him. He is evidently waiting for you to say something, to set the tone so he can adapt accordingly, be contrite or bashful or whatever, which is annoying, he’s put you in this position, and you don’t know what to say.
You say, I need to brush my teeth. You don’t have to stay anymore.
He doesn’t reply but follows you to the bathroom and looks at you through the mirror. In the glare of the strip light you see that his cheeks and nose are also burnt a deep pink.
You know Carla’s got a boyfriend? you say.
They’re open, he says, they opened their relationship when he went to Porto.
There isn’t really a precedent for this kind of situation, you think.
I’m not really upset, you say, I just feel a bit embarrassed. You squeeze some toothpaste out onto your brush and run it under the tap.
My ex-girlfriend cheated on me, he says. We were together for four years.
He’d mentioned the break-up in the park while he was hanging off a pull-up bar. The atmosphere got a bit dense after that, but the conversation quickly moved on.
Is that a reason? you say. I don’t need a reason.
Okay, he says.
He stands there while you brush your teeth, use your tongue scraper, wash your face, then sit down on the toilet to pee. Had he not fucked Carla, you probably would have asked him to step outside while you piss. When you’re done you walk back into the living room and sit down on the sofa. The MMA fight is still going on, or maybe this is a different one. He sits down next to you, still quiet. You check your phone and see that it’s after midnight. You don’t understand why he hasn’t gone home. Maybe he has different ideas about what is normal. Maybe that explains Carla. But you don't think so, you think he has the same ideas as most people. He is waiting for you to say something again, and there doesn’t seem to be much you can say, other than:
So what happened with your ex? Why do I do this, you think to yourself. You know he’ll launch into it after a half-hearted protest, and it will be one of those moments that makes the differences between men and women feel very apparent. Where did it come from, this assurance that if they leapt they would be caught? But then you’d asked, after all, you think.
He met Rachel during freshers week, he tells you. Everyone else spent those first months of university tripling their body counts, but he and Rachel were welded together, studying together, drinking together, sleeping in a single bed. They both did engineering. A friendship group formed around them, around he and Rachel, as if the mass of their serious feeling was enough to attract other people into orbit. We were really in love, he says. Really in love.
My parents have a really good marriage, he goes on, they’ve been together forever and they work through stuff, they stayed together even when my older brother died, they got stronger actually, he says, not pausing long enough to let you react to this new information, he evidently does not want to remain on the subject so you try to stay concentrated on what he is saying although your image of him, everything you had assumed or surmised or decided about him, has just swum out of focus, so with Rachel I just tried to do everything my parents do, he says. He made sure to close up the distances that appeared after arguments, never to sleep on it, to make allowances, to forgive easily and fully. The first three years with Rachel, he says, well I don’t think I’ll be that happy again. And then he found, halfway through their third year, that the distances just wouldn’t close up anymore, that it was harder and harder to forgive her, mostly because she wouldn’t forgive him, instead she’d just move on or pretend to, with this false cheerfulness that made him feel ill - his face is strained while he says this - made him feel as if they were on parallel tracks that were pulling slowly away from each other and however hard he tried he couldn’t straighten them out, and finally she told him she had slept with an old friend from school. He moved out and into a squat. It was just a total, total betrayal, he says. They haven’t spoken since, although she tried to reach him, with calls and texts and eventually a letter he didn’t open. When he finishes saying all of this he looks very young. He bounces his feet against the sofa, suddenly antsy, conscious that you’re scrutinising him because of what he said, not the Rachel stuff so much as his dead brother. You look at the TV screen. And you are revising your ideas of him. You’d known he was the youngest in his family, he’d mentioned an older sister before. You would have guessed it anyway, you're good at guessing and he has that boyishness that younger brothers retain all throughout their lives. But you’d been so unimaginative about his eagerness to please, you’d read it as shallow when in fact he was skimming, anxiously skimming over what might be said, over a big reservoir of misery.
That sounds really hard, you say. You’re both looking at the TV screen now, unwilling to meet the other’s gaze. The fight is between two men who ripple identically with muscle and sweat. One is bald, the other has dark hair scraped back from his high forehead into a bun. They are jostling each other against the mesh cage, both trying to land a punch. It looks to you like a passionate embrace. The opposing forces between their bodies must be monumental, although you can’t tell because neither man concedes more than an inch in any direction. Then, all at once, the bald fighter reaches down and locks his hands around the thigh of the other fighter, sinks at the knees and then lifts his opponent high into the air up by his crotch. An incredulous grimace twists across his opponent’s face as he rises, like a dancer in a lift, for half a second, before he is flipped over and slammed hard onto the ground.
Wow, you both say.
Option C:
You text him, saying “fuck off”, and then block him. You hear his phone ping. You get up quick and turn the lock on your door. It’s stiff, you’ve never locked it before. They must have heard the sound of the lock because the noises stop. You can hear murmuring. You get back into bed and load up some reality show. Then you unblock him and scroll through your texts with him. It’s not like they were super casual. They weren’t just to organise a time and a place. They were flirty, but not overtly sexual. He watched a film you recommended and texted you to tell you. You thought that was sweet - when was the last time anyone followed up a recommendation? You asked him between dates about some job interview he had mentioned. Whatever, you think. You don’t want him to knock, but if he doesn’t, he's a coward. Eventually you hear the front door close.
Eleven years later you meet again, by chance, at your cousin Maddy’s wedding. Maddy comes from your dad’s side of the family. They all live in Norfolk. She’s just turned 30 and is in the early stages of pregnancy. It isn’t at all a shotgun wedding; she’s been with Michael for ten years. They went to school together. It’s quite a big wedding; Maddy’s family is richer than yours. They’ve put up a big gazebo near the church and filled it with flowers. It turns out that your one-time date has known the family for ages because he used to go on holidays to Norfolk as a child. You don’t recognise him at first because he has gone bald, or has started going bald and then shaved the rest off. But he still looks trim and fit in his suit. You make eye contact with one another during the service, but it isn’t until the wedding party is properly underway that you speak.
It’s you, you say. He is sitting down at one of the circular tables, alone except for a toddler who is sleeping in his chair, slumped over on the table like a drunk.
It’s you, he says.
He looks smashed, you say, pointing at the toddler. Is he yours?
No, he replies, he’s Tom’s. Tom’s dancing.
You sit down next to him. It feels very private to be sitting there with only the sleeping toddler for an audience. You’ve drunk a bit, and the situation seems comical to you. You imagine telling your friends about it, closing up the anecdote you’ve told many times over the years when the conversation turns to criticising the State of Men or Dating in the 2020s. You are still single and so are the majority of your friends. None of you really know why. None of you feel like you made a choice. It’s weird to watch Maddy settle into her life before you do. She’s younger than you. It’s a relief that toddler isn’t his.
He asks you about your migraines. You tell him you’ve never had another one after that day. You ask him about Carla, half-joking, and he tells you quite seriously that they slept together a few more times after that, and he rolls up his sleeve to show you a tattoo shaped like a ninja star. Had Carla told you that they kept seeing each other? Probably not. You can’t remember; it’s so long ago now.
I had no idea what I was doing back then, he says. It took me ages to get over my ex. Almost a decade. I did lots of stuff I regret.
It wasn’t that bad, you say, what happened with us.
No, he says, it wasn’t. But this is, he says, pointing to where his tattoo is now hidden beneath his shirt. You laugh.
You watch the dancers. The oldies wiggle their stiff hips and twist their stiff legs with bemused, self-conscious expressions on their faces. A few young children are holding hands and spinning around in a circle. Pink and purple spotlights skim around the bruised grass floor. Maddy is crying behind the DJ decks and being consoled by three friends. Her dad continues to DJ enthusiastically, not seeing her.
He asks you what you do. You say you did a law conversion the year after you met, then abandoned it to do pottery, which is what you are doing now. He tries to reach for his glass of wine while maintaining eye contact with you and spills it. It blooms across the tablecloth towards the toddler, whose overlarge, unbothered head is still resting heavily on his tiny folded hands. You realise that he is nervous. Some uncle is gesticulating drunkenly at Maddy’s dad, asking him to turn the music up. He does, and suddenly it is too loud to ignore, too loud to talk. You say, Do you want to go outside?
The two of you bend to step through a flap in the tent. The night is cold. Norfolk is so flat, you say. Behind you, the translucent bulk of the tent pulses pink and purple, and behind that stands the church and the quiet stone barb of the spire.
He passes you a cigarette and lights it for you. You wonder if you will sleep together. You wonder if you even want to. Then you think that you probably will, regardless of whether or not you want to. The situation calls for it, doesn’t it? Like a loose thread.
The flap behind you opens again and casts a convulsing slice of light onto the grass between your feet. The drunk guy who asked Maddy’s dad to turn the music up emerges, jostling his way through the canvas as if it were animate. He looks at the two of you standing there and straightens up. His eyes are slightly unfocused.
Sorry, says the drunk guy, wavering backwards and forwards on thin legs, sorry, can I bum a smoke? He’s an apologetic drunk. Thanks, sorry, he says. You married? he asks, no, you both say, sorry, he says. Sorry.