Unconcerned Housemates

TUE
'Helloo!'
The lack of response could have meant anything from
‘no one’s in’ to
‘no one who wants to talk to you is in’ and from
‘go away we’re having sex’ to
‘eh? What’s that? Speak up I can’t hear you!’
Paul stepped with the ease of long practice around the still-growing pile of mail addressed to previous inhabitants and a mysterious being known only as ‘the occupier’, and hurried into the living room, dropped his bag and walked with some haste to the toilet. Simon, he reflected, was wrong; the house didn’t always smell of food; it was cold and still and empty, and smelt of nothing at all. That was better. He walked back into the kitchen, boot heels knocking hollowly on the temporary floor, and made tea amongst the clutter of old fuses, discarded newspapers and Tony’s tie-dye, careful not to disturb the heaps - while they were quiescent they weren’t his problem. Carrying the mug, he went back into the living room to poke the central heating and put an obscure CD into the jumbled wires of the player. Maybe turning the lights on would help. At least it would be easier to avoid tripping on Nat’s shoes, which had lain there since Sunday
By the time Simon and Nat arrived, the house was warming up, and smelt, as it often did, of cooking.

WED
Meri was happy enough that she’d offered Tony a lift home on her shiny new bike, but it was still with some relief that she dropped him off at the door. He was quite amazing - most pillion passengers simply leaned the wrong way, against bends, and made it harder to steer. Tony, she gathered from those few moments that were quiet enough to hear him, had tried to explain that there was no ‘right’ way to drive a motorbike, only various different techniques… Fortunately the wind had taken away the rest of his words.
He invited her in for pancakes, but she sensed that more time in his company was going to be, at best, extremely irritating, and declined, then grinned as he stumbled walking down the path.
Closing the door jerkily behind himself, Tony stepped backwards into the heap of junk mail, and then went to make himself pancakes anyway. With the exquisite grace of a Samurai arranging flowers, and the elegance of someone who's made a lot of pancakes making pancakes, Tony cooked, absentmindedly borrowing Paul’s butter and Jane’s eggs. The hiss of batter hitting hot oil was the only sound in the cold house. As Tony turned the floor creaked. He flipped and there was a skittering in the walls. Mice? Certainly not the slugs, which left slime-trails on the carpet most mornings. Maybe whatever it was would eat them?
Having finished the last pancake. Tony turned off the heat, put the pan in the sink and looked down as he felt something nudge against his foot.
The floor was black and in constant motion which he couldn’t quite make out. The hissing, he’d thought it was the batter, but he could still hear it, the gentle susurration of a million, million insect bodies rubbing past and climbing over each other filled his ears. They poured in through the gaps beneath the cupboards, they swarmed up from the gaps in the walls; they swarmed up his leg; he dropped his last meal as he felt the first bite in his ankle. Brushing at his legs, Tony made for the door, each step accompanied by the crackle of snapping chitin. It didn’t help - they bit into his hands, but it let him see that they were tiny; each bug was smaller than his little toe nail, and each bite no worse than a pinprick. Then, following on the spots of pain he felt a wave of coldness that scared him worse than anything. The room swam, or was it just the restless motion of the floor? Still aware of the pain, he toppled slowly to the floor, and felt it spread to engulf his body, followed by the coldness then nothing at all.
The horde climbed over Tony's recumbent body in their thousands, each took a minute portion and carried it away, tiny sections of human flesh along with their own scavenged dead. Within five minutes they retreated through the holes in the walls, leaving behind only a perfectly ordered, fully dressed skeleton picked clean on the floor.

***

Nat got home first which was just as well - Simon had 'misplaced' his keys again and wouldn't be able to get in. As it was she spent a couple of seconds during which she dropped her cute rabbit bag trying to find her keys.
"Hello?!" her voice sounded thin and alone in the newly emptied house. She stuck her head round the door into Tony's room, no one there. No great surprise but it would be nice not to be alone. She walked through into the kitchen. There was a skeleton on the floor; she blanked it and made tea. For Natalie the sun always shone, the flowers always bloomed. The others had speculated about what she'd experienced the time they'd gone to see '1984' at the theatre, and had decided it probably had to do with what they'd seen - her description being 'well that was mean, but at least everyone was happy’
Maybe it was Paul's. He liked things like that, but she hoped he'd asked Tony before dressing it in his suit - he'd be so upset. Even Nat noticed that the two of them occasionally annoyed each other; she wished that they’d just get along. Simon described them as getting ‘grumpy’ but that was because he liked the sound of the word.

THURS
Too early. Always too early. After some early experimentation Jane had concluded that mumbling and rolling over didn't help, so she flailed at the light switch for a couple of seconds, and finally made contact, turning it on and knocking the bedside lamp to the floor in one smoothly choreographed motion. Then she sat up, swung her legs out of bed shuffled into slippers, paused to straighten out the bed and the lamp, then wrapped herself in a selection of towels and went downstairs for a shower
The place was a tip. She'd have to shout at people to tidy up during reading week; maybe even let Simon steam-clean things, although that was probably an obsession best not encouraged. There was still flour on the floor from the trick-or-treaters that had startled Simon so badly. Bugger. That was new. A skull grinned up at her from the kitchen floor. Laid out behind it was Tony's tie-dyed suit, filled, it seemed, by the rest of the skeleton. Jane, always the biology student, took a certain studious pride in noting that the visible parts were in perfect order, before resolving to shout at Paul over it, then stepping carefully over it to get to the bathroom.

THURS WEEK
Simon had gleefully named their new housemate ‘T’ney’ after their absentee housemate’s godawful first character, and propped him up in an armchair. In the process, the head and feet had fallen off and had to be stuck back on again. The skull, despite copious duct tape still took every opportunity to roll off - it was only a matter of time before it got lost down the back to the sofa. It had already been used as an ashtray at their house warming party.
Jane had finally cornered Paul and was cross-questioning him regarding the life-sized memento mori in the living room.
‘It’s not mine,’ He protested ‘I promise …anyway I wouldn’t do that to Tony’s stuff. Remember, I’m trying to prove that I’m a better human being than him, ‘coz of that time he asked me how I could care about other people without believing that god wanted me to.’
‘Well, I’ve already asked Simon and Nat, they say that except for Simon naming him Randy its nothing to do with them’
‘Maybe its Tony’s’ Paul made a habit of leaping to the worst possible conclusion without really believing it and the habit again came to the surface ‘…May be its Tony’s‘ he repeated with emphasis and a grin ‘'has anyone seen him recently?’
Natalie and Simon came down the stairs accompanied by Simon’s usual bizarre animalistic howls and fell into the lounge.
‘Oh hi Nat, we were just discussing how Tony’s been killed, had all the flesh flayed from his body, been renamed Randolph and kept as a pet.’
‘Oh. Cool. Well, we were going to cook food’ Simon was very hard to distract from his mission once the controlling force of pie had been invoked.

1st DEC
Nat put down the phone and shouted ‘Hey guys!’ before trying to herd her cohabitants into the kitchen. It was time to sort out finances again. It wasn’t a problem - it was just that no one had any motivation when it came to money and it usually took something like a final demand before they could be bothered to do anything. This time it was quite serious.
‘That was Ivy. She hasn’t had Tony’s rent cheque’
Paul was about to start declaiming this hassle when he thought, and then vocalised:
‘Actually I haven’t seen Tony recently.’
‘I haven’t noticed him for at least a week’ agreed Jane.
‘My food’s been lasting longer than usual,’ contributed Simon. ‘Maybe he’s been brutally killed by some psychopath?’ There was something about Paul’s way of speaking that had rubbed off on him.
‘In Bath? More likely he’s lost in Oldfield Park, wandering the quaint, ever-turning streets for the rest of eternity.’ Paul had access to vast reserves of silliness.
‘We should still report him missing, or Ivy will want his money off us.’
‘I’ll do that after lectures tomorrow,’ offered Jane ‘Other than that, we may as well sort out what we owe each other for.’