24 Hours
Rachel (07:00 - 08:00)
When I woke up, he was gone. Thankfully. Who knows what he would have looked like in the harsh light of day. At night, in the dark bar, he had been a dark-haired guy with a nice smile and a t-shirt depicting a tiger riding a penny farthing. That much I could remember. Everything else was kind of hazy. Which in my experience is not such a terrible thing.
The only reason I was awake at this hour is because somebody was knocking on my bedroom door. Aware that I was stark-bollock naked beneath my bedsheets, though not terribly concerned about it, I murmured an incomprehensive groan which was apparently translated as ‘oh, please, do come in’.
You know those mornings when you wake up and you just know it’s going to be a strange day? It was one of those. And I knew straight away because I had been conscious for no more than a couple of seconds before I heard the elusive words: “Did you move the bacon?”
I squinted at my best friend as she hovered by my bedroom door. “Why the fuckery badger would I have moved the bacon?” I countered, somewhat defensively.
Cassie frowned and shook her head. At this point she took it upon herself to tiptoe through the various piles of clothes, shoes and books lining my bedroom floor, and perched herself at the foot of my bed, still looking rather perplexed. “It’s just,” she said thoughtfully, “it was definitely in the fridge last night. But I’ve just looked and it’s not in the fridge anymore.”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. This is a lot to be dealing with when you’ve been up all night drinking and fucking. “Let me get dressed,” I said through my hands, “and I’ll have a look.”
It’s something of a quirk of human nature to not truly believe what you are told. It doesn’t matter how much you trust that person; you just have to see it for yourself. Cassie and I have been friends for 15 years, and have lived together for the last two, and yet when she tells me the bacon isn’t in the fridge, I simply don’t believe her.
But, a minute and a half later, here I am, standing in my dressing gown and looking into the fridge for the damned bacon. And fuck me sideways if she isn’t right. It just isn’t in there. There are several bottles of wine, in various levels of volume. There is a shelf devoted entirely to jars which never get used; jam, curry sauce, pesto, salad cream and so on. There is the remnants of last night’s lemonade, along with a tub of moulding cream cheese and half a lettuce. But there is no bacon. None.
My memories of last night might be hazy, but if I’m sure about something, it’s that I didn’t move the bacon. Before heading out, we drank a couple of vodka and lemonades at home. Once the taxi had been called, I went to put the lemonade back into the fridge. Upon spotting that the bacon had already been taken out of the freezer to defrost overnight, I made a comment to myself that I had the best flatmate in the entire world.
We fell back into the apartment at around 3am, each with our respective conquests. We made them engage in awkward hallway conversation as the two of us stumbled into the kitchen to pour ourselves a glass of water. After that, we each made our way into our bedrooms with our playthings.
Those are the facts. From these, we can deduce two things:
1) The bacon went missing at some point between the hours of 11pm and 7am.
2) Nobody was in the flat to remove the bacon from the fridge prior to us returning home at 3am.
And this leaves us with one obvious answer:
Between the hours of 3am and 7am, one of the boys that we brought home must have stolen the bacon.
We more or less reached this conclusion at the exact same time, and turned to face one another in horror.
“Mother fucker,” I said. I really was far too hungover for this shit.
“Who fucking steals bacon?!” Cassie asked with outrage. “I mean really?” She looked back into the fridge just once more before slamming it purposefully shut. “Of all the things in this fucking house. He could have stolen your laptop, or my iPhone, or the fucking TV but no, he took our breakfast. Seriously. What the fuck.”
I couldn’t help myself. I had to laugh. There is really very little else you can do when you’re faced with a situation such as this one. It’s quite bizarre, to realise that one of the two of you has slept with the pettiest thief ever known to man, and there is no way of finding out who it was because they both of them slipped away in the dead of night while we were pretending to be asleep just so we wouldn’t have to look them in the eyes.
"Alright," I sighed, still with a faint smile. "Let's go get some more bacon."
Reluctantly, I returned to my bedroom and threw some clothes on. No bra today, thank you very much. Just a t-shirt, shorts and a pair of flip-flops should suffice for this rather unconventional walk of shame. I took a moment to marvel at the shit-show staring back at me from the mirror. If you can’t do this sort of shit when you’re 19, then you really never can.
Cassie was still ranting as we left the flat and descended the steps. Why on Earth we chose to live on the top floor of an apartment block that doesn’t have an elevator is completely beyond me. Getting downstairs is fine. What hurts the most is knowing that at some point, you’ll have to climb right back up. And I am in no fit state for that this morning.
“I mean, the fucking nerve of it,” she was saying, shaking her head. Dark wisps of hair unravelled from her hairband to frame her face. She’s beautiful, my Cassie. Angry and slutty and with a mouth like a sailor, but beautiful all the same. Sometimes I truly feel that Cassie is my soulmate. Often times I am certain of it. It would in no way surprise me if we ended up living together for the rest of our days, neither one of us ever getting married or wanting kids or getting proper jobs. Just doing shifts at the supermarket and watching Bridezillas and having casual sex with criminals until one of us dies, in which case I can only assume the other would follow suit soon if not immediately after.
The truth is that the bacon incident is not particularly extraordinary to us. It is merely one of the hundreds of ridiculous things that happen to us all the fucking time. We’ve been through a lot together: Tequila shots at my father’s funeral, befriending a middle-aged taxi driver, learning to drive a tractor, finding unconscious girls on bathroom floors, bomb scares, dead neighbours, having sex with Scottish soldiers (separately), the lot. But all of these are different stories for another time. Basically what I’m trying to say here is that Cassie and I are faced with these bizarre situations more or less every day, and I know that when I am grey and old, whether I’m still with her or not, I will be able to reflect on the years when I lived with my best friend, and we had the most fun of our entire lives. These are the stories that will age with me; with us. The stories that we will tell over and over until they stop being funny, or we die.
This is love, to know that no matter what else happens, you will always have these stories, these moments where nothing makes any sense but it was all so wonderful, just for a while, before life got in the way.
“And the thing is that if they had stuck around, we would have even made them a bacon sandwich,” Cassie said, with a hint of a smile in her voice. We stepped out of the building and into the sunlight. It was brighter than I could ever remember it.
I, just like the best friend walking beside me, was angry about the grave injustice that we had been dealt this Thursday morning. Mostly for nothing more than the fact that I had had to drag my arse out of bed with a raging hangover at stupid o’clock just to wander to the shop to buy more bacon.
But, as I said, there is really nothing you can do about it. When stupid shit like this happens to you, all you can do is take it and refine it into an hilarious anecdote for the amusement of the friends that you know won’t judge you for being whores.
And, as birds tweeted and joggers jogged in the glorious summer morning that surrounded us, I couldn’t help but think that maybe it wasn’t all that bad because I was with my best friend and we were laughing and even my headache was fading with every breath of fresh air I took.
And this is love, too; to know that even if you invite a breakfast thief into your home, your best friend will never once consider blaming you for it. She will simply shake her head and smile and walk with you to the shop to buy some more. She won’t even question it.
You may not believe me when I say this, but there are worse things in life than having your bacon stolen.
The only reason I was awake at this hour is because somebody was knocking on my bedroom door. Aware that I was stark-bollock naked beneath my bedsheets, though not terribly concerned about it, I murmured an incomprehensive groan which was apparently translated as ‘oh, please, do come in’.
You know those mornings when you wake up and you just know it’s going to be a strange day? It was one of those. And I knew straight away because I had been conscious for no more than a couple of seconds before I heard the elusive words: “Did you move the bacon?”
I squinted at my best friend as she hovered by my bedroom door. “Why the fuckery badger would I have moved the bacon?” I countered, somewhat defensively.
Cassie frowned and shook her head. At this point she took it upon herself to tiptoe through the various piles of clothes, shoes and books lining my bedroom floor, and perched herself at the foot of my bed, still looking rather perplexed. “It’s just,” she said thoughtfully, “it was definitely in the fridge last night. But I’ve just looked and it’s not in the fridge anymore.”
I sighed and rubbed my eyes. This is a lot to be dealing with when you’ve been up all night drinking and fucking. “Let me get dressed,” I said through my hands, “and I’ll have a look.”
It’s something of a quirk of human nature to not truly believe what you are told. It doesn’t matter how much you trust that person; you just have to see it for yourself. Cassie and I have been friends for 15 years, and have lived together for the last two, and yet when she tells me the bacon isn’t in the fridge, I simply don’t believe her.
But, a minute and a half later, here I am, standing in my dressing gown and looking into the fridge for the damned bacon. And fuck me sideways if she isn’t right. It just isn’t in there. There are several bottles of wine, in various levels of volume. There is a shelf devoted entirely to jars which never get used; jam, curry sauce, pesto, salad cream and so on. There is the remnants of last night’s lemonade, along with a tub of moulding cream cheese and half a lettuce. But there is no bacon. None.
My memories of last night might be hazy, but if I’m sure about something, it’s that I didn’t move the bacon. Before heading out, we drank a couple of vodka and lemonades at home. Once the taxi had been called, I went to put the lemonade back into the fridge. Upon spotting that the bacon had already been taken out of the freezer to defrost overnight, I made a comment to myself that I had the best flatmate in the entire world.
We fell back into the apartment at around 3am, each with our respective conquests. We made them engage in awkward hallway conversation as the two of us stumbled into the kitchen to pour ourselves a glass of water. After that, we each made our way into our bedrooms with our playthings.
Those are the facts. From these, we can deduce two things:
1) The bacon went missing at some point between the hours of 11pm and 7am.
2) Nobody was in the flat to remove the bacon from the fridge prior to us returning home at 3am.
And this leaves us with one obvious answer:
Between the hours of 3am and 7am, one of the boys that we brought home must have stolen the bacon.
We more or less reached this conclusion at the exact same time, and turned to face one another in horror.
“Mother fucker,” I said. I really was far too hungover for this shit.
“Who fucking steals bacon?!” Cassie asked with outrage. “I mean really?” She looked back into the fridge just once more before slamming it purposefully shut. “Of all the things in this fucking house. He could have stolen your laptop, or my iPhone, or the fucking TV but no, he took our breakfast. Seriously. What the fuck.”
I couldn’t help myself. I had to laugh. There is really very little else you can do when you’re faced with a situation such as this one. It’s quite bizarre, to realise that one of the two of you has slept with the pettiest thief ever known to man, and there is no way of finding out who it was because they both of them slipped away in the dead of night while we were pretending to be asleep just so we wouldn’t have to look them in the eyes.
"Alright," I sighed, still with a faint smile. "Let's go get some more bacon."
Reluctantly, I returned to my bedroom and threw some clothes on. No bra today, thank you very much. Just a t-shirt, shorts and a pair of flip-flops should suffice for this rather unconventional walk of shame. I took a moment to marvel at the shit-show staring back at me from the mirror. If you can’t do this sort of shit when you’re 19, then you really never can.
Cassie was still ranting as we left the flat and descended the steps. Why on Earth we chose to live on the top floor of an apartment block that doesn’t have an elevator is completely beyond me. Getting downstairs is fine. What hurts the most is knowing that at some point, you’ll have to climb right back up. And I am in no fit state for that this morning.
“I mean, the fucking nerve of it,” she was saying, shaking her head. Dark wisps of hair unravelled from her hairband to frame her face. She’s beautiful, my Cassie. Angry and slutty and with a mouth like a sailor, but beautiful all the same. Sometimes I truly feel that Cassie is my soulmate. Often times I am certain of it. It would in no way surprise me if we ended up living together for the rest of our days, neither one of us ever getting married or wanting kids or getting proper jobs. Just doing shifts at the supermarket and watching Bridezillas and having casual sex with criminals until one of us dies, in which case I can only assume the other would follow suit soon if not immediately after.
The truth is that the bacon incident is not particularly extraordinary to us. It is merely one of the hundreds of ridiculous things that happen to us all the fucking time. We’ve been through a lot together: Tequila shots at my father’s funeral, befriending a middle-aged taxi driver, learning to drive a tractor, finding unconscious girls on bathroom floors, bomb scares, dead neighbours, having sex with Scottish soldiers (separately), the lot. But all of these are different stories for another time. Basically what I’m trying to say here is that Cassie and I are faced with these bizarre situations more or less every day, and I know that when I am grey and old, whether I’m still with her or not, I will be able to reflect on the years when I lived with my best friend, and we had the most fun of our entire lives. These are the stories that will age with me; with us. The stories that we will tell over and over until they stop being funny, or we die.
This is love, to know that no matter what else happens, you will always have these stories, these moments where nothing makes any sense but it was all so wonderful, just for a while, before life got in the way.
“And the thing is that if they had stuck around, we would have even made them a bacon sandwich,” Cassie said, with a hint of a smile in her voice. We stepped out of the building and into the sunlight. It was brighter than I could ever remember it.
I, just like the best friend walking beside me, was angry about the grave injustice that we had been dealt this Thursday morning. Mostly for nothing more than the fact that I had had to drag my arse out of bed with a raging hangover at stupid o’clock just to wander to the shop to buy more bacon.
But, as I said, there is really nothing you can do about it. When stupid shit like this happens to you, all you can do is take it and refine it into an hilarious anecdote for the amusement of the friends that you know won’t judge you for being whores.
And, as birds tweeted and joggers jogged in the glorious summer morning that surrounded us, I couldn’t help but think that maybe it wasn’t all that bad because I was with my best friend and we were laughing and even my headache was fading with every breath of fresh air I took.
And this is love, too; to know that even if you invite a breakfast thief into your home, your best friend will never once consider blaming you for it. She will simply shake her head and smile and walk with you to the shop to buy some more. She won’t even question it.
You may not believe me when I say this, but there are worse things in life than having your bacon stolen.