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11 years after the chorizo
was so thoughtfully bought, Leroy lived in a cloud. It was not a candyfloss
cloud, nor a Botticelli cloud, nor even a pink and scarlet sex-on-the-beach
kind of cloud. It was a raincloud, grey and omnipresent and deeply irritating
in its needy and indecisive hovering. And the most irritating thing about this
particular breed of resolute cloud was that it had overstayed its welcome, and
extended from the metaphorical into the physical, so that Leroy’s life had been
flooded up to the knees with watery irony. Leroy did indeed live in The Cloud Apartment Block, where “luxury
accommodation meets instant trendiness”. The word ‘trendiness’ should have been
a warning to Leroy, who had undertaken two university degrees before finishing
high school. The sarcasm in “luxury accommodation” should have been apparent to
Leroy, who could explain – in detail –String Theory and Other Scienc-y Things. Regrettably, the only
thing that did strike Leroy was the gradual rain of paint flakes that fell from
the ceiling like pallid snow.
He had considered finding a
roommate when he initially rented the place. He had even put up ‘tear-here’
posters on lampposts and traffic lights, where time had managed to spitefully smudge
and slur the ink until each word was much longer than it was originally,
perhaps, Leroy worried, insinuating a more intimate and longitudinal
arrangement than intended. In had flown the Restless, the Righteous, first the
Rocking and then – gradually – the Rolling, the Coy, the Baby-faced, the
Undeniably Rude and the Imperturbably Perky, the Artistes With An ‘E’, the Call
Me Gavs and the I Prefer The Term ‘Natural Healer’s, all of whom were turned
away awkwardly and without finesse. It was Camden, after all.
Eventually he decided that
he would not have a roommate, not because, as you might think, he found them
unsavoury, but because his childhood had brought him, he felt, quite up to
speed with the caricaturish nature of life, and what he really needed was not
Greta with the dreadlocks and cactus collection, but his neglected and derelict
friends, Peace and Quiet.
So he retired to life as a
twenty-something, filled his three rooms with many bits and pieces and even
found himself a favourite café, which made coffee just the way he liked it,
even though he had not previously been aware that he liked it any particular
way. Milk to sugar ratio, it turned out, was the key.
It should be mentioned that
Leroy was not now the same man he once was. A turning point had come when he
was fifteen and he had realised, unceremoniously, that nobody liked him. It was
not necessarily his fault; if anyone was to blame, it was his mother, who
treated parenting like NASCAR driving, or perhaps his father, whose interest in
his son had receded with his hairline. Nevertheless, Leroy spent several
uncomfortable months in his mid-teenage years trying on different outfits and
personalities, as if he might suddenly find his true self, crouching sheepishly
behind a rack of studded shoelaces. This continued for about a year before a
girl named Delilah changed his world, and not in the way you’d think. Delilah
smelt of patchouli and played the clarinet. She had enormous eyes the colour of
the blue-green veins that spidered out beneath the skin of her wrists, and
harboured a collection of expressions that ranged from aloof-nonplussed to
aloof-bemused and somehow lassoed her a strange popularity. Leroy, who looked
uncomfortable in pyjamas, viewed her as some wild and mythical beast, and may
have even loved her if he’d ever found a way to forget that she was destined to
be rare and lesser-spotted, while he was doomed to be eternally
common-or-garden.
They had run into each
other at a garden warehouse, when Leroy had been carrying a large terracotta
flowerpot for his mother – which he promptly dropped – and Delilah a packet of
sunflower seeds. In his dreams, he would see the fall of the pot reflected in
her water lily eyes, and she, fearing reprimand from an irritable employee, would
grab his hand and drag him down the Pests & Insecticides aisle to hide
behind the 100kg bags of fertiliser. Then, with a wink (he had never been
winked at before), she would pull him away and they would run together,
laughing, away from the grouchy man who didn’t understand teenagers, until
Leroy knew he was in love and he didn’t need a personality anymore, he could
just be the boy who was in love with Delilah…
In reality, she blinked in
the second the pot hit the floor. It shattered, and they stood there for what
felt like a long time, before an apathetic nineteen-year-old in a red EMPLOYEE polo shirt shuffled over with
a sigh and a dustpan.
And while Leroy felt the colossal
pressure to say something weighing down his chest and squeezing his lungs,
Delilah felt no such obligation. This was what Leroy later reflected on, when
he was running through the day for the hundredth time: she didn’t have to say anything. She could have
just walked away, she could have been cruel, could have laughed or smirked or
even, if she was truly merciless, sighed, but she didn’t. Instead, she said:
“I like your hair.”
No one liked Leroy’s hair.
He had dyed it black the month before for no particular reason, and he didn’t
dislike it enough to remove the colour yet, didn’t like it enough to blacken
the mousey roots that sprouted unkindly from his scalp. It was, to use his
mother’s words, thoroughly offensive. It was, to use his father’s words, a
train wreck of a hairstyle.
The apparition addressed
him again, without blinking her winter-sky eyes.
“It looks, like, good.”
Leroy finally spoke, his
tongue like rusty metal.
“It doesn’t look like
anything.”
“Yeah,” she breathed.
“That’s the point, like … you look… totally unique, just out there… like,
lonely”.
“I am, thanks.”
“Noooo, it’s cool. It
means you don’t ... like … listen to
anybody else, you’re just a person and …”
The bewilderment in his
face must have annoyed her; her delicate eyebrows drew together menacingly.
“Oh just figure it out.”
And she left him in the
centre of a terracotta skeleton.
