Someone's Been Sleeping In My Bed Read online

eye now caused her to squint at the cracked frame the windscreen was making. Movement brought her back to reality. She cocked her head at the outline of a small Italian man trudging towards her. He walked with the grace of a heavy jar of pickles.

  “You okay, girl?” His moustache framed the few English words he had access to.

  Am I ok? She didn’t know. She had never been in an automobile accident before. Was she a victim? Oh. My. God. I am a victim.

  Hands shaped by pasta-sauce pots shook her into the present.

  “Girl.” Skye’s well-kept ponytail had come undone and her hair was now flailing wildly into her face. “Girl.”

  “Stop shaking me, I am fine.”

  “Ah, that, is good then.” And he turned around to walk away.

  “Wait! Where are you going? I am hurt!”

  He looked at her with genuine confusion.

  “You said you okay? I need make delivery.”

  Skye was honestly hurt, but not in the way he had meant. She was hurt in the same way a child is the first time they skin their knee and their mother isn’t home, and their father looks at the pain and says “Oh, it’s nothing.” This man had abandoned her, and as she adjusted the rear-vision mirror to see her reflection, she had understood why. She was the type of mess she vowed never to be. Her perfect hair had taken on the shape of a cat that had just been electrocuted, her lipstick was smudged in such a way that it looked like she had been affectionate with the side of a seven-storey building, and her eye was now the result of a one title round with her steering wheel that hadn’t gone in her favour. No rematch had been scheduled. Skye reluctantly reached for her mobile which was mocking her with its polished beveled edges.

  An hour and a new tire later, the Roadside Service Technician, whose name was cursively scripted on the front of his overalls as ‘Dwayne’, informed Skye that the car was fine to drive, once they removed the side panel, but that she would need to replace the windscreen as soon as possible. The side panel was no side project, and under the cover of now mostly set sun, Skye limped her right-sided car down the freeway, whilst looking mainly out of her left eye.

  Breaking and entering. Eventually.

  Skye’s right eye began to weep as the drops of rain committed glorious suicide on her windscreen. She willed her car forward for the last few kilometres and, as she pulled up, a flash from the storm overhead illuminated the front porch of her grandmother’s house. She stared hard at it with her good eye. Was this the house from her fuzzy childhood memories? She flicked her finger around the screen of the GPS app on her phone, attempting to search through the area, but it merely taunted her by showing the last time it had been within a range of service. It was definitely saying she had arrived at her destination but she wanted to double, and possibly triple, check it for detail. She was denied her obsessive-compulsive pleasure and had to leave the comfort of the car.

  The rain wasn’t intentionally assaulting her but Skye was not fond of anything that messed with her precisely measured appearance. And this weather was doing just that. It had been a wonderfully warm winter’s day when she had left the city, and now, as the heavy drops came down, her semi-skimpy outfit served her little besides a runner-up place in a wet t-shirt contest. Skye exited the car, walked around to the boot and unloaded her overnight bags. Her expensive, brand-name, overnight bags. Not a brand most people would know, of course. You’d have to be a luggage connoisseur to really respect the craftsmanship, but that was part of the beauty. It wasn’t about bragging, because you’d have to know, and to know, would be bragging in itself. And the luggage was paying for itself, as the waterproof lining meant, after a relaxing hot shower, she could slip into her dry pyjamas and forget about the trip entirely.

  Skye skirted the outside of the building, trying to avoid the big puddles, and made her way around to the rear of the house. As she got to the backdoor she lowered her bag onto a dry patch beneath the awning and delved into her tiny, short-shorts pockets for the note on how to get into grandma’s house. And came back with nothing but lint. She hadn’t put it in her overnight bags, that would be nonsensical. She stuck her hand through her meticulously managed purse, knowing it was futile, and finally settled on some lip gloss, which always settled her, if even momentarily. Skye peered around the side of the house and back at the broken little black car. And with a huff, trudged back down the side of the house.

  The rain was heavier now, and it definitely felt as though it was trying to assault her, as several drops made her genuinely flinch. She got to the car and opened the driver’s side door. Or at least tried to. On the bright side, it looked as though the central locking to the car was still working and wouldn’t need replacing after the accident. On the down side, Skye was making her way back to the house without the directions on how to get in, and would be making her way back to her car for a third time.

  By the time she finally got into her car Skye could be easily confused for someone who had just done a conservative amount of laps in an olympic-sized swimming pool. Fully clothed. The hand picked italian-leather interior of her once pristine car squelched as Skye begun to create a puddle underneath her. But she wasn’t even aware of it. She was now singularly focused. She would find the note, get into the house without a fuss, have a steaming hot shower and quietly retire for the night. She had had enough, she thought as she pocketed the note. She slammed the car door slightly harder than normal and stormed back alongside the house.

  As Skye stood at the back door, she pulled the note from her pocket but strained to make out any of her writing in the cover of the overhanging trees. She peered at her bag, knowing exactly where she stored her mobile, delved her hand and retrieved it. She pressed the solitary button at the base of the face so the brightness of the screen would allow her to see, but when she did, the darkness of the Lock Screen made her sigh. She turned the phone in her hand and thumbed-in the numbers three one eight two, which also happened to be her pin number and the code to her My First Diary. Both contained a wealth of deposits but little investment besides self-indulgence. She illuminated the note and her mood turned dark. The repeated trips to the car had soaked her through and the paper was now more ink than words.

  Skye swore, scrunched up the paper and launched it into the black night. But endurance through obstacles was her calling card and she would get into this house, one way or another. She compartmentalised severals thoughts that didn’t warrant any direct attention and looked around the outside of the house. It would be best to stay at the back of the property just in case someone was passing by and wouldn’t entertain the sob story of a drowned, car-accident-faced thief. There were several large, older windows along the sides but it was the small window that was right next to the backdoor that would be the best to breach. It would only take one pane and it could be easily replaced. And with that, Skye picked up a small branch that had fallen from a nearby tree. She covered her face and shoved the wood through the small bit of glass. It smashed easily and Skye used the branch to clear the rest of the pane of shards. She knelt down and peered inside the dark house. The interior was almost pitch black. She reached her arm through the newly created hole and unlocked the door.

  Once inside she carefully stepped over the shards from the window pane and closed the door behind her. The relief from being inside out of the rain was immediate, like sitting in your favourite chair after a long day. She had planned on cleaning up her break-in before doing anything else, but it could wait until morning, and now even a shower felt like too much of a chore, so she made her way to the couch, dragging her bag behind her, and flicking her shoes off she reached for the blanket that was draped over its back. Sleep nestled itself into Skye. Deep. Welcome. Sleep.

  Me. Want. Food.

  Waking without the buzz of an alarm clock, or a passing car, or your neighbours deciding 6am was the correct time to be mowing their lawns, is a pleasure most people can barely remember. Skye was happily reminded of this pleasure and woke slowly, like the sunrise that morning.
She knew she had slept well because she was hungry. Famished actually. The kind of hunger that turns off parts of your brain and shifts you back into being an animal. You automatically stalk your way through rooms, shoulders hunched, head and neck slightly forward and your hands out in front of you, curled, just in case a passing bird made the mistake of flying too low. She scanned around the kitchen and saw little that would sate her appetite so, with a slight snarl, resigned herself and ventured out into the world for supplies.

  Her sleep must have had more of an effect than just an empty stomach because it took half the walk for her realise she wasn’t wearing makeup, and the wrinkles on her shirt were in the shape of couch cushions. There isn’t anyone here who matters anyway, she quickly convinced herself. The few houses Skye passed were all in the style of rushed, slapped-together cottages that could count their better days on one hand. She wondered what kind of people actually chose to call these places home. Her own home was high up in an apartment building just outside of the Central Business District and the heart of the city. It was all about location. You don’t want to reside in the city itself because that made you