It went up on a Sunday. Which is rude, if you ask me. Sundays are for recovery and a very slow reapplication of mascara, not for laminated domestic policy.
I came out of my room in last night’s shirt and the kind of hangover that makes the hallway look longer than it is. Sophie was already dressed. Of course she was. Blouse. Clean hair. That little frown she saves for invoices and for me. Behind her, stuck to the fridge with a magnet we nicked from a holiday cottage in Devon, there it was. A chart. Columns. Initials. A heading written in her neat work handwriting like we were a small and failing company.
HOUSE RULES / ROTATION / PLEASE JUST DO IT
I stood there with one contact lens in and said, very calmly, “You laminated it.”
She said, “I had to. You keep wiping things off with your thumb.”
Fair.
What is actually on the thing
Bins. Bathroom. Surfaces. The usual adult misery. Then the extras, which is where she stopped pretending this was about bleach.
Remove strange men before 9am.
Buy more loo roll after weekends.
No shoes on the sofa, Chels, I am begging you.
That last one is not even a chore. That is a personal attack formatted as stationery.
Mia drifted in wearing my dressing gown, looked at the fridge, and went, “Oh she did it. She actually did it.” Then she put the kettle on like this was a museum exhibit and not a list of our crimes.
I initialled it. In lip gloss. Charlotte Tilbury, Pillow Talk, because if you are going to submit to bureaucracy you may as well leave a stain.
Sophie stared at the smear. “That is going to go tacky.”
I said, “So will I, give it an hour.”
How we got here, if we are being honest
It was not one incident. That is the annoying part. If it had been one night she could have done the usual Sophie thing, the raised eyebrow, the “we need to talk about noise”, the little speech about the neighbours and their baby who I have never seen and am starting to think is a rumour.
It was a pattern. She used that word. Pattern. Like I am a rash.
There was the Thursday where I brought home a boy from a bar in Soho who thought it was charming to make eggs at 4:40. In a pan. With the extractor fan off. Sophie has a 7am call with New York some weeks. She does fashion PR. She says “deck” and “circle back” without flinching. She does not want to smell browned butter while she is putting on a blazer.
There was the Saturday Mia and I thought we were being quiet and were not. The headboard is cheap. The wall is thin. Physics is not on my side in this flat.
There was the morning Sophie found a tie on the toaster. I still do not have a clean explanation for the toaster. He said he was looking for the bread. I said the bread lives in a cupboard like a normal object. He looked at me as if I had invented storage.
And the loo roll. Look. I know. I do know. Weekends eat it. Three women, plus whoever stays, plus the fact I take my makeup off like I am removing evidence. We run out. Every time. Sophie has started keeping a secret pack in her wardrobe, which is the most Sophie thing I have ever witnessed. Private toilet paper. As a personality.
Last Sunday she held up an empty cardboard tube at breakfast. Just held it. No words. Very courtroom.
I said, “I was going to Tesco.”
She said, “You said that last week. You came back with Prosecco and a bag of ice.”
Which is a shop. Technically.
The 9am rule is the one that stings
Not because I disagree. I don’t, not really. Morning light is unkind and so is a stranger in your kitchen asking where you keep the “nice mugs”. We do not have nice mugs. We have a chipped one that says World’s Best Auntie and none of us is an auntie. We have two from IKEA and one Mia stole from a hotel in Lisbon.
The sting is the wording. Strange men. As if I am collecting them like Tesco Clubcard points.
I told her that. She did not blink.
“Chels. On Tuesday there was a man in our hallway putting his socks on next to the recycling. It was 8:12. I had a client breakfast.”
I said he was not strange. I had met him. We had spoken. He works in “something with brands”, which in London means he has a LinkedIn and a theory about culture.
Sophie said, “What is his name?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Opened my notes app. There was an entry that said “brands? tall. good mouth.”
She watched me scroll. She already knew.
Mia, traitor, added, “The 9am thing is actually kind. She could have written 8.”
I made a face at both of them and put more gloss on in the microwave door. It is the best mirror in the kitchen. Do not argue with me. The big one in the hall makes me look tired on purpose.
A house meeting that was not called a house meeting
She sat us down with tea, which is how you know you are in trouble in Britain. Nobody gets assembled for tea if the news is fun.
Sophie had bullet points. I am not joking. On her phone. She read them out like we were late on a campaign.
Shared spaces are shared.
Overnight guests are fine if they are quiet and gone.
If you finish the last roll, you replace the last roll. This is not ideology. This is paper.
Mia nodded in the way she does when she is hungover and wants the conversation to end so she can go back to bed and text someone she should not text.
I said, “You could have just asked me.”
Sophie said, “I have asked you. I have asked you in the kitchen, in the group chat, and once while you were putting concealer on in a moving Uber. You said ‘noted’ and then you brought home a DJ.”
He was not a DJ. He had played a playlist. There is a difference and also there is not.
I wanted to be annoyed. I was, a bit. I also knew she was right, which is worse. Sophie is usually right in the boring ways. Bills. Keys. The fact the landlord notices when the hallway smells like a nightclub at noon.
Our landlord is a man named Graham who emails in lower case and once asked if we were “having a lot of friends over”. I told him we were very popular. He said “righto”. I think he is afraid of us.
The night that finished her off
Fine. I will say it, because this is the job and also because she will read this and sigh in that precise way.
Friday. We started in Parsons Green, which already sounds responsible, and then we were not in Parsons Green. Mia had a location. Someone’s friend’s warehouse thing in Hackney Wick that was pretending not to be a party and was absolutely a party. Fairy lights. A folding table with warm wine. A boy with a film camera who was not filming anything useful.
I kissed someone by the bins because the bins were where the quiet was. Then the quiet was not quiet. Then we came home, because my bed is better than a stranger’s sofa and I am spoilt, I know, I have said it before.
He was sweet. That is the problem with the sweet ones. They want to stay. They want a glass of water. They want to talk about whether I “do this a lot”, which is a question that is never really about curiosity.
I said, “I write about my life. Draw your own conclusions.”
He laughed. Then he fell asleep diagonally, which is a talent.
At 8:51 Sophie opened my door because she thought the smoke alarm was beeping. It was not. It was his phone. An alarm labelled GYM. The optimism.
She saw a foot that was not mine. She saw my good pillow on the floor. She saw me, half awake, whispering “five minutes” like five minutes has ever meant five minutes in the history of this flat.
She closed the door very gently. That was the bit that got me. The gentleness. Like she had already written the chart in her head and was just waiting for stationery hours.
He left at 10:20. I made him tea. I did not walk him all the way to the door because I am not his mum. Sophie was in the kitchen pretending to rinse a mug that was already clean.
“Morning,” she said, to both of us, which is an art form.
After he went I said, “I know.”
She said, “I am buying a laminator.”
I thought she was joking.
Living with people who have seen you
That is the real subject, I think. Not bins. Not men. The fact Sophie has heard me through a wall and still buys oat milk I like. The fact Mia steals my heels and then defends me when Sophie does the voice.
Flat life is so unglamorous when you write it down. Someone’s wet towel. Someone’s date in your bathroom at an hour that has no business existing. The group chat called who’s coming home tonight, which started as a joke and is now a logistics tool. I put “maybe” once and Sophie replied with a screenshot of the TfL night bus map. She is unwell. I love her.
People online think sharing a flat at 27 is failure. They can think that. My name is on a nice door in a nice postcode and I still have to negotiate loo roll with two other women. That is London. You can have a journalism degree and a maths brain and a father who pays for things without being asked and you will still argue about the recycling because the recycling is where character shows.
I am not good at the boring caretaking. I will say that before Sophie can. I will spend forty minutes on a lip and forget the dishwasher. I will remember a stranger’s joke and forget his name. I will buy flowers and not bin liners. It is not a cute quirk when you live with it. It is just work someone else has to pick up.
So the chart exists. I initialled it. I will even do the bathroom week, though I want it noted that I already clean the mirror more than both of them combined, because I live there. The mirror is my office.
Did I follow it the next morning
Sort of.
There was a boy. Not strange, exactly. We had been circling each other for two weeks in the way you do when the texts are good and the timing is sloppy. He came back with me after a late one in Shoreditch. I had the chart in my head like a song you hate and cannot stop humming.
At 8:47 I made coffee loudly. At 8:52 I said, “So Sophie has a whole system.” At 8:59 he was putting his shoes on, laughing, calling me “military”. I said I was a diplomat. I walked him out. I even pointed at the fridge as we passed, like look, we are a serious household, we have columns.
Sophie came out of her room at 9:03, saw the empty hall, and actually smiled. A small one. Then she saw the lip gloss initials again and touched them with one finger.
“You are unbelievable.”
“I am house trained,” I said. “Ish.”
Mia shouted from her bed, “Did we have loo roll?”
I had bought some. Two packs. And a bottle of something fizzy because I am still me. I held up the bags like a peace offering and a punchline at the same time.
Sophie put the loo roll in the cupboard herself, lined up, labels forward. Then she added a new line to the bottom of the chart, very small.
Chels buys the paper. Sophie does not want to talk about why.
I leaned in and dotted the i with gloss. She did not stop me.
Anyway. If you live with your friends, you already know. Love looks like nagging. It looks like a fridge magnet from Devon and a rule about 9am and someone who has seen your worst morning face and still puts your post on the side instead of leaving it on the floor.
I am going out later. I told the group chat. Sophie sent back a single clock emoji. Mia sent a photo of my heels with a question mark.
I will be home. Or I will be home adjacent. Either way I know the terms now. He leaves before she has to put her blazer on. I replace what we use. I try, in the sloppy way I try most things, and I write it down after, because that is the bit I am actually good at.
The chart is still tacky where I signed it. Good. Evidence.
