I looked up at him, feeling a little irritated this time, but I took a deep breath and looked back down at the check. “How much?”
“Twenty thousand, three hundred and fifty Rand.”
I scribbled the numbers down, wrote my name and signed. And then I pulled it out and handed it over to him. He took it like he had never seen one before.
“This is for twenty-two thousand,” he said.
“I added extra. For the inconvenience. Your lights, and anything else Rex might need, or for anything you might need, and . . . and . . .” Eugene turned around and my throat tightened so much that I don’t think I was able to talk anymore. Without a thank you or a smile or anything, he just walked back in and closed the door loudly. I stared at the door in front of me.
No one liked me. In fact, it was clear that some people vehemently disliked me, and why wouldn’t they, I guess. I was unfriendly, I scared animals—I probably scared babies and children too! I was a monster of a person that no one knew or cared about and that realization was so painful I felt like I needed to get as far away from it as I possibly could. I hurried down the staircase. The tears came in buckets now, and my shoulders were shaking by the time I got to my floor. In fact, I could hardly see through the veil of water covering my eyes as I raced in the direction of my door. I bumped into something and, when I saw what it was, I cried even more.
CHAPTER 40
“I’m so sorry . . .” I bent down and tried to pick up the groceries that I’d just knocked out of my neighbor’s hands. “I didn’t see you there.” I reached for a tin of baked beans, an onion, a packet of crisps and a loose chocolate, pulling them towards me, trying to balance them in my arms but dropping them all because my arms were shaking too much. Or was it my shoulders that were shaking? Or all of me?
“Don’t worry. I can get them,” I heard my neighbor say from above me.
“No! No! I will.” I could barely see a thing through the veil of water dripping down my face.
“Stop. Please,” my neighbor said, but I kept on going, unable to stop, crawling around the floor, reaching for things I could no longer find and see and hold.
“PLEASE!” she said firmly, and I felt a hand grip my shoulder.
I stopped what I was doing and sat down, pulling my knees towards me and leaning my back against the wall. I wrapped my arms around my knees and lowered my face into them and hung on for dear life. Hung on while all the emotions pulled at me so strongly and from so many different directions I wasn’t sure gravity would hold me in place.
“Are you okay?” my neighbor asked, in a voice filled with genuine concern. I could hear it, and it made me want to cry even more.
“No!” I said.
“Would you like to come inside for some tea?”
I whipped my head up and looked at her. “Me? Tea?”
“Yes.”
“But you hate me. Like Eugene hates me. You sent me food that I threw away and invitations that I turned down, and apparently, I ignore you in the corridors and scare your cat. I seem to scare everyone.”
“That’s true. You do scare my cat,” she said. “But I don’t hate you.”
“You don’t?” I asked, wiping my face with the collar of my shirt, not really caring what it looked like. “Why? Everyone else seems to hate me. God, I think I hate me.”
“I don’t know you well enough to hate you. I don’t know you at all. I can’t hate someone that I don’t know.”
She looked down at me and smiled. It seemed like the kind you give someone you actually care about. The kind of smile that I hadn’t seen in days, not since I’d kicked Noah out my apartment.
“So, what say we get to know each other a little? I could do with a cup of tea, and it looks like you could do with an ear to listen.”
We walked inside together. Her flat was a mirror image of mine in shape and size, but that was the only thing it mirrored. While mine was spartan and beige, hers was full and bursting with color. Porcelain dogs and swans and printer’s tray displays chock-a-block with trinkets. Spoons and thimbles and tiny jugs and miniature things and bright plates hanging on the walls. Coffee tables full of old tea sets and tins and just about every single bright thing a human could collect.
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” I said, reaching out and running a finger over the slippery head of a bright pink porcelain dog.
“Thank you, dear,” she said from the open-plan kitchen, pulling down equally bright mugs and turning on the kettle.
“It’s so bright.” I wiped my hand over the floral couch before I sat down on it, moving one of the lace pink embroidered cushions out of the way.
“Oh, don’t sit there, dear. That’s where the cat sits, and since she’s not that fond of you—”
“Ppprrrr.” With a strange sound, the cat jumped up onto the couch next to me, as if she knew we were talking about her, and just as I was about to get up, the cat jumped onto my lap. I froze, and didn’t move again until she looked like she’d settled.
