I was lonely.
That’s how this all started.
I was working at a fulfilment centre, a skinny, short-sighted cog in a large, endlessly turning machine.
My job was beyond mundane and involved staring at a screen for hour after hour. Sometimes, I’d get to press a key.
I did not have any friends at work. Talking on company time was not allowed. Not unless one of the managers was criticising you.
I was entitled to go to the restroom for fifteen minutes twice in every ten-hour shift. The nearest restroom was ten minutes’ walk away.
I had two warnings on my personnel file, all for arriving back at my workstation late. Two more warnings of any kind and my contract would be terminated.
I hated it and I was trying for a better job but I wasn’t even getting any replies to my applications.
So, I worked at the fulfilment centre six days a week.
I spent some of the rest of the time at my apartment, which I rented.
I had three cramped rooms, with surround-sound noisy neighbours. I had a choice of shouting, loud TV, louder music or a crying baby.
The place was filthy, despite my attempts to clean it. There was this black mould which could not be shifted, among other things. And the lock on my front door was broken. My landlord would not fix it no matter how many times I asked him to. I had to leave it unlocked otherwise I would not have been able to get in or out.
Which also meant anyone could have walked in. On the plus side, I had nothing worth stealing.
It was a lousy set up, and to get away from the apartment, I went for a lot of walks in my spare time.
I haven’t mentioned this yet, but it probably won’t come as a surprise: my job was minimum wage.
I could not afford to do nice things.
Instead, I walked for miles. I sat on park benches to rest, until it got too cold. I walked some more until the rain got too heavy. Then I went home and sat on a hard couch.
Always on my own.
I desperately didn’t want to be like this. I sometimes sat there hugging myself wishing that there was someone in my life. Someone I could talk to and who would maybe hold me now and then.
Other people had. So why not me?
One night, about three weeks ago, I was cleaning my teeth and getting ready to go to bed when I heard a noise in the living room.
It was a funny scratching sound. Great, I thought, I’ve got something in my apartment. Mice or rats or something.
Just when I figured life couldn’t get any worse, it had.
Sighing, wiping away toothpaste, I went to investigate.
Apart from the TV which still flickered away, the room was in darkness.
I heard the sound again. A scraping, clacking noise.
It made my skin crawl.
Whatever it was, it was big.
I was trying to think what was larger than a rat, when it appeared from behind the couch.
It wasn’t a rodent. It was kind of human looking but it was wrong.
It was small but it didn’t look like a child. It didn’t look like an adult either.
Its face was twisted and its skin was wrinkled in places and smooth in others.
It was crawling on all fours, its long, twisted filthy fingernails and toenails dragging across the floor making the noise that had creeped me out. It was dressed in rags. In-between the rips in the fabric, I could see skin that was covered in scabs. Some had been freshly picked at and were bleeding.
I was so thrown by all this, that I didn’t even flinch at first. I just stood there, struck dumb, and watched as it made its way from the sofa to one corner of the room, where it sat on its backside and stared up at me.
Its eyes had no pupils and the iris were incredibly faint.
It blinked slowly, and a bead of sweat trickled down the back of my neck. This wasn’t OK. There was something strange in my home. Something that should not have been there.
My skin started to tingle, a cold, horrible feeling.
I was confused and scared.
“Wha… what are you doing in my apartment?” I asked.
Its mouth opened and slowly smiled. It had no teeth.
“Friend,” it said.
A sad expression settled on its strange face after it said this.
“Friend,” it said again, quietly.
I was still freaked out, but pity also started to trickle through me.
This thing – and I can’t tell you what I thought it was, because I had never seen anything like it – was so sad looking. It was pathetic – there, I’ve said it.
The fear I’d been feeling – the fear of the unknown, the fear of the intruder – started to fade.
“Friend,” it said again, its voice heavy with hope.
I struggled to think what to say to this and finally managed: “But I don’t know you.”
“Don’t know me, no,” it replied. “But we are the same. No one likes us. We always feel alone. But don’t need to be like that anymore. We can be friends now. Now I have found you.”
Which was crazy, I thought. This wasn’t how friendships started.
Then a question occurred to me:
How would I know?
I had no friends. I had not for a long time.
I was wondering once again what to say when I noticed its eyelids were flickering, closing. Moments later it started to snore.
Outside, rain struck the window.
I couldn’t wake it up and ask it to leave, I decided. Not on a night like this. And weird as this whole situation was I did not feel frightened anymore.
I left it sleeping and went to bed.
I slept well apart from waking once. In the next room, my houseguest’s snores had risen in volume. Enough to jolt me from sleep.
My alarm woke me as usual the following morning and I showered and cleaned my teeth. I avoided the living room. I would have to ask it to leave but was putting that off.
When I left, that seemed a natural and not too awkward moment to tell it to go.
I couldn’t leave it alone in the apartment.
My apartment.
Surely it would understand.
I put my coat on and opened the living room door. The room was empty. It must have gone during the night, of its own accord.
I was relieved, but also weirdly sad.
The living room felt even emptier that usual.
When I closed the front door behind me I promised myself I’d phone the landlord again and tell him he really needed to get the lock fixed, so I did not have any more uninvited, unsettling visitors.
Work was dire. Even worse than normal Half a dozen people were off sick – they would not get paid so they must have been too ill to drag themselves in – and two more people had been fired the day before.
Those of us who were left had to pick up the slack and I was reassigned from my sedentary workstation to standing by a conveyor manually removing packages which had got stuck and would have caused a blockage.
I held off going to the restroom as long as I could and literally ran there and back when I had no choice. I returned to find alarms going off and packages piling up and falling onto the ground.
I was given a warning by a manager.
I think he would have fired me on the spot if there had been anyone else there available to replace me.
He walked away muttering and pressing his work Tablet, adding my latest failure to my file.
One more strike and I was out.
I stood there, my cheeks burning with frustration.
This was what my life had come down to. And when the day was over, what did I have waiting for me?
Nothing.
When the buzzer sounded for the end of my shift, I traipsed towards the exit. We had to go through a body scanner in case we had stolen anything and put it in our pockets, and this always caused a queue to build up.
The people around me kept their eyes on their feet or the screens of their mobile phones. We had to keep them turned off while we were working and all around me new messages were buzzing and trilling.
I turned my phone on. There was a news alert and an email from a credit card company saying my payment was overdue.
I walked through the body scanner and was waved on.
I stepped outside and a gust threw rain in my face.
I was absolutely soaked by the time I got back to the apartment.
The door was slightly ajar and I knew in my guts why.
I walked into the living room and there it was. It was sitting in the same corner.
A smile lit up its bizarre face.
“Hey Bestie,” it said brightly.
I shook my head and said, “What?” But I was smiling as well. I couldn’t help it.
“Best friends,” it answered. “Best friends forever, that’s what we can be.”
I wasn’t a teenager. Hadn’t been for a while so this made laugh out loud.
“Sure,” I said. “Why not.” I was dripping water onto the floor and standing in a little puddle.
“I’m going to go and get dry,” I told it and left it clapping its hands together in what I guess was happiness.
At least someone likes me, I thought, as I towelled my hair.
And that was us. We were friends.
Me and it, the weird thing that now lived in a corner of my living room.
For the first time, I started to look forward to returning to the apartment. The place was still cramped and dirty and besieged by noisy neighbours but now I wasn’t alone.
We talked – its language was pretty limited and it seemed to have no idea about what was happening in the outside world, with politicians and disasters and sports and the rest that my news alerts told me about – but it seemed to understand when I complained about the management at the fulfilment centre and the wet weather and about my dire finances.
It certainly never appeared to mind, sitting in its corner, listening while I talked.
I tried not to make things all about me and asked it about its past – where it was from and did it have a family, things like that – but it just looked puzzled and asked me which of my managers was the ugliest or smelliest or some daft question like that.
This made me laugh and I would pretend to consider the question seriously before making up an outrageous answer.
I’d lived off junk food before it arrived and continued to do so. It didn’t have much of an appetite but would spear a French fry with one of its elongated nails and sit nibbling on it for ages, apparently quite content.
Our evenings passed like this, and my one day off a week. I stopped going for walks and only thought about this after it had happened.
My only quibble was the way it snored every night and always woke me up at least once.
But apart from this, things were good.
My apartment felt like a home and where I hung out with my best friend forever.
Work continued to be garbage – I was still treated like dirt, and always would be, I knew – but the edge had been taken off.
At the end of one shift, I was queuing up for the body scanner, waiting for it to prove I hadn’t stolen anything. The queue stretched for an age behind me. There was only one person in front of me, a woman. Her long blond hair was tied up in some way that seemed to be me both complicated and effortless. She wore jeans, a t-shirt and shiny brown boots.
And she was glancing back at me and smiling. Then turning away and walking through the body scanner.
What was going on?
I wasn’t attractive. My clothes were cheap and faded from years of weekly washes in launderettes. My hair was scruffy, and the lenses of my glasses were permanently greasy. My shoes were scuffed and smelt so bad that even I could smell them.
So why had she smiled at me?
I was worrying about this when someone prodded me in the back and said in an angry voice, “Get a move on.”
I stopped holding the line up and hurried through the body scanner.
The woman who had smiled at me was looking at her phone.
She was pretty and my skin was tingling.
I wanted to say something to her. Something funny or cool. But I couldn’t.
I couldn’t even say something stupid. I was totally tongue-tied.
I kept walking, hoping that I did not trip over my own two feet. That would have been so like me.
As I passed her, she amazed me again.
She said, “Hey.”
“Er…” I replied.
She didn’t look at me like I was something stuck on the bottom of her boots.
She smiled, again, and said, “I’ve seen you around. You always used to look kind of sad and lost. But recently, I don’t know, you seem happier. There’s a spark about you.”
My mouth was probably hanging open at this point. I have no idea.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just I love watching people and trying to work out what makes them tick.” Then she held out her hand. “I’m Danni,” she said.
From somewhere I found the ability to reply: “Martin.”
We shook hands. It felt very old fashioned and absolutely right.
“It’s a nice evening for a change,” she said. “I was going to walk home. I don’t know if you live in the same direction as me, but we can maybe go some of the way together.”
“Sure,” I managed.
Danni was so different to me. She seemed confident and vibrant. She told me how she was working at the fulfilment centre while she studied part time to get the credits she needed to go to university.
She was five years younger than me but seemed more experienced in every way from the little stories she told me about the things she had done.
I stumbled over my words when she asked me about me.
I had lost track of time when she stopped outside a low-rise apartment block bookended by a bar and a pizza place. “Well, this is me,” she said. “I’m top floor. That’s my cactus in the window. He’s called Jake.”
Then she held her hand out. “It was nice to meet you, Martin. Maybe we could catch up again some time?”
I re-used my best line. “Sure,” I said.
“Do you want me to phone you, so you’ve got my mobile number?” she asked.
“Great,” I replied and stood there until she asked me what my number was so she could phone me.
Thankfully, somehow, I could still remember my number and told her. She phoned me and we both saved the new contact.
That done, she smiled and turned and let herself in.
Most clichés have a grounding in reality and, as I continued on the way to my apartment, I felt lighter and kind of disconnected in a good way. I was, as they say in cliché-land, floating on air.
I got home to find it sitting in the corner – and I straight away told it what had happened.
How Danni had smiled at me and spoken to me and showed me where she lived and said maybe we could catch up again some time.
I was so happy and I wanted it to know everything.
I was breathless by time I’d finished.
I stood there grinning and waiting for it to say something.
It looked away from me. Looked at its gnarled, ugly toenails.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
There was an uncomfortable pause before it answered: “I thought we were best friends forever.” And when it spoke, it sounded on the verge of tears.
I wasn’t expecting that. Seemed an over-the-top response, to be honest.
Still, I didn’t want it to feel hurt or down, so I said, “We’re still friends. And that won’t change.”
Then I looked the bar and pizza place up online. Wondered about going for a drink or ordering a pizza for collection so I could go to one of them that evening. Perhaps I would accidentally bump into Danni.
It sat watching me.
In the end, I didn’t have the courage to go out again and ended up just going to bed as usual. I fell asleep with a smile on my face, thinking about Danni and about seeing her again, hopefully the next day.
I slept straight through and wasn’t even woken by the sound of it snoring.
In the morning, I went into the living room to say, See you later, before I left for work, but it was curled up in its corner, so I just let myself out.
Work dragged. The hours passed painfully slowly. I daydreamed endlessly about seeing Danni when the shift ended.
Maybe she would ask me if I wanted a drink in the bar next to her apartment?
Or maybe suggest we get a pizza to go and eat at hers while we watched a movie on TV?
Maybe we’d kiss?
By the time the shift ended my pulse was racing.
I dashed to join the queue at the body scanner. She wasn’t already there. And no matter how many times I looked back, she hadn’t joined the queue.
Not to worry, I told myself, I could always wait outside till she appeared.
I’d need to act nonchalant so she did not realise I was waiting for her.
I persuaded myself I could do that.
After an hour of waiting, long after everyone had left, I had to admit she wasn’t coming.
I must have missed her. She’d left early and, unlike me, hadn’t been pathetic enough to wait around so we could meet up again.
I felt very sad as I finally walked away from the fulfilment centre.
I wasn’t going to – and I told myself on the way again and again that I shouldn’t – but I did end up walking past her apartment.
The cactus sat in the window and there was a light on.
I wanted so badly to see her again.
I knew I was being stupid. That I was blowing everything out of proportion. But I couldn’t help it.
I didn’t have the nerve to press the intercom button for her apartment. Instead, I crossed the road and moved out of sight. Then, feeling sick, I phoned her.
She answered on the fourth ring: “Hello.”
She sounded subdued.
“Oh, hey,” I said. “It’s Martin.” I immediately felt stupid because my name would have come up as she had me as a contact on her phone.
I took a deep breath before continuing. “Sorry to trouble you, but I’m just heading home from work and wondered if you fancied a quick drink?”
The pause that followed can’t have been longer than a couple of seconds, but it felt like forever.
“That’s sweet of you to ask,” she said. “But I’m going to pass. Something really horrible happened last night. There was some kind of animal in my room. I couldn’t make it out in the darkness, but it attacked me. My face is scratched all over. I couldn’t face leaving the apartment to go to work and, I’m sorry, but I don’t want to go for a drink. Perhaps some other time.”
She said goodbye. I did the same, but by the time I spoke she’d already ended the call.
I walked for a while before drifting back to the apartment.
It was sitting in its corner. I burst into tears and told it what had happened.
It just looked at me for a moment. And then anger flared on its face.
“You phoned her. I don’t like it when you speak to other people,” it yelled, then it raised its fingernails and slashed.
That was last week.
I hope Danni’s face is better. I want to phone her to ask, but I don’t dare.
I don’t want it to hurt her again.
The wound on my face from the first time it slashed me with its fingernails has almost healed. Other wounds are scabbing over.
A new wound from an hour ago, on my forearm, stings like hell.
But at least it is sleeping.
That’s giving me the chance to do this.
I need to tell someone what’s happening, and I don’t have anyone apart from strangers, out there, online.
I know you’re not my friends. You don’t even know my name.
But this is me.
I’m afraid and I don’t know what to do.
And my best friend forever is awake. I hadn’t realised. It is sitting looking at me with its empty eyes. Its fingernails are twitching, and its toothless scowl is a line of darkness in the corner of the room.
I have to go now.