Odd Numbers

She glimpses her reflection in the shine off the kettle, subconsciously flicks her hair. Wipes down the counter top, once, twice, three times, four. Odd numbers make her uncomfortable. As she waits for the water to boil, she taps her heel of her shoe. It isn’t an impatient gesture, simply that she dislikes the whining noise of the water as it boils. She centres the teabag in the cup, and counts down the seconds until she can pour. She knows it takes 123 seconds to boil a cup of water, and this irks her no end. Odd numbers make her uncomfortable. Chipping at one perfectly lacquered nail, she pours out the hot water into the cup, measures out her milk, and watches it blossom briefly in the amber liquid, stirring it four times, clockwise.
She remembers, with a sudden and painful clarity, that she is in a stranger’s house. For her, not knowing where everything is, no precise locations in her usual domestic territory, fills her with a churning sense of unease. This is the first time she has slept with a stranger since she left. She is a sly fox in the headlights, waiting for the tread of tyres to roll over her, crush her lungs and mat her glossy hair with a hot and lusty blood. Tracing patterns on the side of a foreign cup, she begins to think, cordoning off certain thoughts, delegating their order of priority in sets of two. She pauses, muscles taut, her eyes darting to corners. A muffled thumping is in the other room, and she knows it is the stranger. The paralysis of panic tightens her limbs and her breaths quicken when a lewd voices carries through the hallway.
‘Hello, love.’
And, for a minute, it wasn’t the stranger talking, it was him, and she drops the foreign cup, where it shatters on tacky lino. 17 shards, an odd number.
She makes no move to clean up the mess, but instead stares at it like it has deeply offended her, her face a comical depiction of horror. ‘Only a cup. It’s not the end of the world, love,’ the stranger tells her. He smiles awkwardly, and shuffles, ungainly, to the cupboard under the sink. She winces as his bottom sticks out, looking for a dustpan and brush. This stance unnerves her, so she busies herself picking up the pieces of broken china. Her movements are rigid and gauche, and the shards nip at her fingers. ‘Careful, those’ll be sharp,’ the stranger warns her. She feels humiliated. He is the security guard, escorting a lost kid in the supermarket, except she has no mummy to go to, and she is still clutching his hand.
‘I must go,’ she says, over-enunciating the words that are clipped, tipped over too-white veneers. ‘D’you want a lift home?’ the stranger offers, nervous. ‘That would be convenient,’ she replies. She looks down at the mess on the floor, and bites her lip in two places.
She and the stranger are inside the stranger’s car. His seats are heated, make her legs prickle, and she picks absently at a twist of tissue. The windows are steamed with a thick saccharine. She swallows down bile that strips raw throat. The stranger doesn’t say anything, and apart from terse directions, quiet swells, sick and fleshed, straining against the doors. And for a minute, it’s not the stranger’s hot breathing that is too close; it’s his. His hands and the wheel, his grey-green, too-wide eyes staring down the wing mirror.
And so she returns to the house they bought together, that she polished, arranged, and made right. She stands alone on the doorstep, swaying slightly.
Stares at the front door, painted a glossy purple (Mulberry burst, shade 222, chosen, by number, for obvious reasons) She turns to put the key in the lock, and a flickering shadow of doubt crosses her face. She resents returning like a glamorous bandit to her own home, but it is not this she is unsettled by at this moment. The door is already open, slightly, ajar, the gap between the door and the frame goading her, challenging her, and rapping on the window of her lonely place. She touches her fingertips to the second panel, and eases it open so as not to force the hinges. Everything, at first glance, is perfectly normal, perfectly usual and comfortingly average. She knows that something is awry, though, and it is a weeping sore behind her eyes.
There is always a bowl of oranges on the left-hand table as you enter the hall, under the mirror. Last Thursday, she’d put 6 oranges in the bowl (this did irk her, though, as 6 divided by two was three). A small copper penny spun wildly on a skewed axis and clattered home. There are 3 oranges in her bowl.
Her eyes widen slightly, curled lashes stretched tight, swivel to focus on the mantelpiece in the next room, where the previous week she’d placed two candlesticks either end. Except now, he’d placed 3 of his Mison plates in the middle. She’d always hated his collection. She takes a slow, measured swallow and blinks twice. Gifted with excellent peripheral vision, she notes flowers. There is a vase of flowers, tulips, gaudy bells in a cheap container. 5 of them. And then she hears a barely perceptible noise, the hot patter of a shower, and a woman’s voice. She seizes, still body, flickering eyes. There waits for her, upstairs, an unmade bed, and one sad used condom, limp and wet on her new cream carpet.