"an early night" part 7

I looked around the flat.
'Adam's not staying tonight?' I asked. Gen shook her head.
'No, he said he had to go home or his flatmates would drink his soy milk,' she explained. 'But he is coming over on Saturday, he's going to take me out to dinner to celebrate our first month of being together!' She grinned, proudly. I laughed.
'Cute.' Gen had acted this way about boys before, it was hard to tell when she was really serious about a person. The only time I knew for certain how she felt about somebody was when we were still and school and she dated a boy named Jorge. She loved him so much that I rarely got to see her, she was always with him and he hated me so she could never be with both of us at one time.
Even when she wasn't with Jorge she was thinking about him, or talking about him, or on the phone to him. I didn't say anything, of course. Jorge made Gennie happy, and that made me happy.
I remember when she had been dating him for five months and I was upset about something so I called her up, hoping she would understand and give me her shoulder to cry on, and she promised me that I could see her that day. But she never called me back. She and Jorge spent the day together that day.
I couldn't count the amount of times I cried myself blind while they were going out. I was secretly happy when they broke up, I went straight to her bedroom with bottles of wine and she blotted out her misery while I celebrated - on the sly.
I know that sounds horrible and selfish. Quite frankly I wanted Gennie all to myself. I was miserable without her, and it was inevitable that she and Jorge would split. Even she knew it.



photo credit - gelchy

"an early night" part 6

When I got home I found Gen sitting cross-legged on the floor, she had a cigarette in one hand a glass of wine in the other.
'Gennie! You know you're not meant to smoke inside, balcony please!' I said, in my best scolding tone. I could never, never be angry at Gen but the landlady complained about the smell. She drained her wine, flicked her cigarette over the balcony and disappeared into the kitchen.
'How was work?' she asked.
'It was okay. Guess who I saw just before?' I called back to her. She emerged from the kitchen with two glasses of white wine.
'Who?' she asked, passing me a glass.
'Tommy Piercy.' Gen rolled her eyes at his name.
'What did he want?'
'Long macchiato, I believe,' I told her, she rolled her eyes again. 'And to show off to his hipster friends that he's tight with the staff.'
'He's such an arse,' she said, dryly. She would have said that, no matter what Tommy had wanted.
'Ugh, I know. It's so ridiculous. We're not in school anymore, being 'cool' isn't important in the real world,' I said, pausing to take a sip of wine. 'Mandy's studying in France.'
'Oh, really? I bet she's still perfect. Bitch.'
'Probably. I don't know what she's studying though, I'd say something artistic - unless she's had her soul sucked out and she's now into accounting.'
'Hmm, no, even without a soul she'd probably do something alternative. Like owning a vintage store or something,' Gen suggested. I laughed.
'Remember that time she bought a skirt from Cotton On and tried to tell everybody it was from an op shop?'
'Yes!' said Gen, waving her hands around. Gen talked with her hands all the time. Nobody knew why, it was just something she always did. 'Of course, I mean Amanda could never hurt her poor image by shopping at-' she gasped '-a chain store...' Gen was right. People like Tommy and Mandy didn't shop at chain stores, or grow up to be accountants.



photo credit - fabian

"an early night" part 3

I work from nine to three-thirty. Gennie doesn't start her shift at the video store until four, so she usually mooches around in her underwear at home, drinking coffee and writing. She had another job with an art magazine that went around monthly, it didn't earn much but writing was Gen's passion. During my lunch break I would come upstairs to find music blasting from the stereo and Gen either writing furiously or staring at a page full of doodles. We'd share a cigarette, eat half a bagel each and then I'd go back downstairs to work.
I have to say, it's convenient beyond convenient to live above the cafe. Not to mention this had been my dream job since I was 16. Before that I'd wanted to be a musician. But it was just a crazy dream. Most Saturdays Gen and I went down to The Cement Lounge (which was neither made of cement nor an actual lounge, it was an old brick building with wooden floors and a big stage against the far wall) because it was all ages and our younger friends, like Ally, could come with is. Sometimes big names played there, it filled up pretty quickly so that you could barely move without bumping into somebody. We knew some of the people in the bands and sometimes I'd write songs for them and play with them, but lately I'd been stuck in a rut. Writing music wasn't coming to me like it used to. Everything I wrote was tired and dull, or worse - generic. I guess it was just writers block but it felt more like a writers black-out.
Sometimes Gennie would help, by dropping one of her poems into my lap (she loved writing poetry but never knew what to do with the poems, she considered them a waste of paper) and I'd put music to them.



photo credit - mluotio

"an early night" part 5

Speaking of Tommy Piercy, he came into Intes sometimes (it was one of the "trendiest" cafes in the inner city) and ordered a big mug of pretentious. I mean, a long macchatio. The last time he came in it was almost closing time, I was working late to cover for Chelsie who was in hospital getting an abortion. He sat at my favourite table with his loud group of friends and when I brought over their drinks they actually spoke to me.
'Hey, Edith!' he half shouted.
'Hi, Tommy,' I said, politely. 'It's Edie, by the way,' I reminded him. I hadn't been called Edith since I was fifteen. He smiled, flashing his white-as-white rich-boy teeth at me.
'Sorry, Edie. So how have you been?' I thought about apologising, going back to the espresso machine and ignoring him, but the cafe was empty except for Tommy and his friends. I leaned against the wall.
'Oh, you know,' I waved my hand at him. 'Good, how about you?'
'Good! Man, I haven't spoken to you since last November!' he said. I could tell he wasn't that interested in speaking to me again, either. Tommy would talk to you, but I was just a girl in a coffee shop. I didn't twinkle enough to pass as friend material.
'Yeah, I know. That was at Mandy's party, right?' Mandy was yet another oh-so-cool person. She was ridiculously gorgeous, with white pale skin and long dark hair, just a bit shorter than me but with a much bigger bum. Tommy laughed.
'Oh, Mandy's party! That was such a good night! She's in Paris right now,' he told me. I almost couldn't stop myself from scoffing, I managed to turn it into a cough. Luckily one of Tommy's friends, a cute blond girl in a knitted jersey, said exactly what I was thinking.
'Of course Mandy's in France. That's where all the hipsters are going to study.' Tommy roared with laughter. It was then that I politely excused myself and went back to the counter.



photo credit - kevin mccauley

"an early night" part 4

Gen was my best friend. She'd been my best friend since the middle of high school, when we bonded over a love of chai tea and cheap chardonnay. We'd had other friends over the years, which came and went, but Gen was the one constant thing that I could be sure of. We loved all the same music, all the same food, all the same books and - very important - we had the same shoe size so we could wear each others two and a half inch heeled brogues. We'd always predicted that when we lived together our flat would be full of shoes. We were right. Most of them were impulse buys but we loved them all dearly. Such as my black court shoes, with the patent toe. I'd worn them twice but if somebody threatened to take them away I'd be upset.
I'm a nice five foot four, and Gen is just a fraction taller, so we treasure high heels as a defense against short comments. People found them funny. We didn't. All through high school people had made fun of me for my height. Or for pretty much anything, like Tommy Piercy who liked to make fun of my teeth (I didn't get braces until I was seventeen). Tommy was interested in one thing and one thing alone: social status. In high school we'd hung out a bit, we both went to different schools - mine was a state funded public school, his was an expensive and exclusive private school - but he hung out in the city centre often and we had mutual friends. Gen and I were never cool, not cool enough for Tommy anyway, but at one point he'd deemed us socially accepted and we used to sort of be friends.



photo credit - magicwandcd

"an early night" part 2

I looked up when I heard Adam put his cup in the sink. Gennie was standing with him, wearing nothing but his white shirt, with only two of the buttons done up. She kissed Adam on the lips and he stroked her hair with one hand, before he shrugged on his black coat and disappeared through the door. Gennie poured herself a cup of coffee and joined me by the balcony.
It was then that I realised I had been staring at an empty mug for quite a while, so I pulled myself up and tiptoed into the kitchen. There was a dull thunk as I set my mug down in the sink, and then silence, or as silent as it gets in the city. Even if you stopped breathing and were as still as a statue you could hear the white noise of the cars below, a world waking up, that that filled the flat so comfortably.
My jacket was hanging over the back of a chair so I leaned over the table and felt in the pocket for the slim, silver cigarette case I got for my eighteenth birthday. I pulled out two Benson & Hedges and handed one to Gennie. We both leaned out over the balcony and stared at the city. It wasn't a blanket of grey, or a colourless maze. The flat was in the old part of town, above Intes (the coffee shop I worked at), where all the shops were in restored historical buildings. Like the flat, it used to be a city council office block. It wasn't a bad flat, although sometimes the other tenants made a bit too much noice. It was mostly penniless students living up there since the university was only a block away. At one point there had been seven people living in the two-bedroom flat next door, and from the constant arguments you could hear through the thin walls you could tell it wasn't comfortable in there. That was the smallest out of the twelve flats that had been squished into the old council office block, our flat had three bedrooms even though there was only the two of us living there full time, occasionally - if money was tight - we'd board some desperate person in the spare room, but mostly we used it as a studio.

photo credit - chrissie white

"an early night" part 1

"Oh my god!" she shouted, for the fifteenth time that morning. I rolled over in my bed, glancing up at the alarm clock - the bright green digits informed me that it was 6:13 - before pushing the covers away and dragging myself out of bed. I could still hear Gennie and Adam in the room next door, but I'd learned to ignore it. It was the fourth night in a row that Adam had stayed over and I was almost getting used to their morning routine. Adam was a chef, he worked long hours from seven until closing at a diner a few blocks away so Gennie cherished their mornings as Adam rarely had the energy at night.
I flicked on the kettle and listened to the rush of the heating water. The louder the kettle got, the louder and faster Gen and Adam got. Until... click! the water was boiled and all that I could hear from Gen's room was an exhausted gasp. Not long after, as the coffee brewed, Adam stumbled out into the kitchen wearing nothing but the black silk boxer shorts I'd seen far too many times.
His dark hair was tousled, the front almost sticking straight up, and his cheeks were flushed. He was a very attractive man, I could see why Gennie was so fond of him. She had a thing for skinny men - especially men with prominent collarbones and well defined ribs. He stood there in the kitchen as I plunged the press filter down through the French press. Without a word I poured a cup of coffee and passed it to him.
'Thanks, Edith...' he mumbled, returning to Gen's room with a pack of cigarettes in his hand.
I settled myself into my favourite chair, the one that faced the balcony, and sipped my coffee in an unthinking stupor. It was far too early.



photo credit - kelsey reckling