Adelaide V.2

A revised version of my final for my climate fiction course this fall! Happy December to all who celebrate various things. I'm working on a final and quitting sugar.

“He gets into town tonight.”

“Really?”

“‘S what I heard.”

The butchershop is hot and stinks of meat. Adelaide waits uncomfortably at the counter, tapping the toe of her left loafer on the tile floor. It seems whoever controls the heating has overcompensated for England’s false winters, and everything—the hanging fat, the glass display case, even the two men by the salami—are painted with a thin layer of sheen. Maybe butchers don’t know about the urban heat island effect. The cashier mutters something about the failures of technology and tries to insert Adelaide’s card in their archaic machine for the fourth time.

The salami men are chatting loudly and without much purpose. The man who gets into town—could one call London a town?—tonight seems to be infamous, and while they both express disapproval of him, their tone suggests a secret desire for a glimpse. They keep glancing over at Adelaide appreciatively, and she keeps pretending like she doesn’t notice. Her ochre curls (dyed and fried) have finally been let loose after a long day of restraint in the office, and are itching the back of her neck—wash day should’ve been yesterday. A 2027 calendar hangs limply behind the counter, almost fully checked off. The payment finally goes through.

When she gets home the kettle screams.

Tomorrow is Christmas, and her flat smells like sweet air freshener and sex. The man from Tinder who was here last night, Oliver, has long since left, but his cologne is still curled up in her bedsheets. After kicking off her boots and putting down the packet of bacon—all of that just for local organic bacon—she buries her face into the pillow. His smell conjures up ghosts of the day before, her essence positioned at the door, Oliver’s in the liminal space between hallway and home.

“Did I do something wrong?” he had asked, frozen in the doorway, so that he looked like a painting with a cream-coated frame. That was his introduction. He was holding biscuits and his wallet. Uber was 20 pounds, split it? On the way, he had texted, and Adelaide had watched the little car icons on the app, like board game tokens, and tried to guess which one was him. Was splitting the Uber normal for a hookup? This was all so new.

“No?” she was trying to beckon him into the apartment, away from the prying gaze of her coming-and-going neighbors, but his concern seemed to have rooted him to the grey patterned carpet. The old woman from 438 was at the end of the hall, key and plastic bags in hand, peering. She gave up and flattened her skirt. If he insisted on doing this out there, she could at least look decent.

“I can—I mean I can go, if you’d like. I don’t mean to make you upset.”

“Oh, that’s just—um. That’s just…how I look.” Great lie.

“Are you sure? Do you want to talk about it? Did something happen?”

It was true that less than an hour ago her mum had called once again to make sure she wasn’t coming home for the holidays. Adelaide’s mouth had been gritty with baking soda toothpaste as she insisted that no, being there for her therapy clients was really important, lots of people were struggling in the city with health (mental and otherwise) effects of the summer’s heatwave and she had at least four clients she was managing right now and another could be added any day. That was how it happened—she would get to work one day and someone else’s whole life would have been ruined. How ironic, then, that a BP employee like Oliver was now thumbing at her shirt hem with such caring, inquiring eyes. When she looked at him, all she could see was the face of a father whose son had died of heatstroke over the summer. A mother whose finances had been decimated by the cost of AC. A little one with pigtails and asthma, her family unprepared for the winter’s flooding and anxious about their anxiety’s effect on their girl. Adelaide always leaves those last appointments with the girl, Sameera, a little out of breath. It is so painful to see her future so clearly in this family, and know that she will not, ethically cannot, bring a new life into this world. Sometimes she judges them. Other times she cries. Her true adult life should be starting. Where is it?

Adelaide had shook her head to clear this spiral, which liked to eat at her brain. For her, her whole moral compass was hinging on her next words, hanging over the abyss of modern ambivalence. For him, this conversation was only the difference between getting laid and not. And he really was so hot—that, if nothing else, had led her to swipe right.

“...The bedroom is this way,” she said finally, and let their bodies lead them inside to where they needed to be.

Today, after remembering this, Adelaide feels disgusted with her compromising position in her lilac sheets. She retreats to the kitchen, sticks on the radio, and begins to wash her golden beets. A couple weeks ago she thought of a grand meal to eat on Christmas day: chocolate chip Eggo waffles, beef bacon and golden eggs. Extraordinarily expensive shades of taupe and dark mahogany circling her plate. When she bought the eggs she almost fainted—6£?

In a bit the beets will be wrapped in foil and stuck in the stove and she will peer in periodically, nose just a little too close to the shimmering orange glass that separates them from her chapped lips. Then she can think about Reed.

Reed works in the same practice as Adelaide, though his office is four doors down. During their lunch break he’ll often come and splay himself across her orange loveseat and blabber about a client. It’s terribly unprofessional to do that, Adelaide always tells him. Not to mention illegal. But Reed seems to be unable to hold others’ pain all on his own—he must pass it off to Adelaide, GDPR be damned. She’s ashamed to admit it to herself, but most times when she kicks him out, it’s just so he’ll ruffle her hair up in fake irritation on his way out. Can joy persevere, in a time and place with so much sadness? Should it?

A couple months ago they went for a drink together and stood outside in the pouring rain afterwards waiting for their respective Ubers. They were under the overhang of the bar’s awning and she was only a little tipsy. Reed was wearing his tortoiseshell glasses that hammered home that he was newly thirty.

“Hmm,” he had hummed softly, holding the neck of his beer bottle with a loose grip and tapping it against the brick. The sound was harsh on her ears. It was clearly an invitation for conversation.

“Huh?” Adelaide was most focused on the delight of the rain, having had such a lack of it over the summer. It seemed she could never get enough of water, and that there was never quite the right amount to go around. But soon there would be so much rain; too much. She pulled herself back to the world of Under The Awning.

“This beer is bad,” he’d said, like it was some profound notion, and she glanced over in time to watch him loosen his neck back and dribble the remaining drops into his open mouth. He was so fluid—drapped over her couch, curled into his little Prius, or dwarfing a barstool.

“Should’ve gotten a mule, like me,” she told him. He knocked the bottle against the wall again. It was sharper now.

“That’s a girl thing,” he had teased, and she had smiled and looked down at her new wellie rain boots and imagined doing something rash and brave like clutching his sleeve. A crisp black Tesla pulled up, and Reed reached over for an awkward one-armed hug. The street smelled like piss and because of the embrace she ended up half out from under the awning, rain dusting the front of her hair and guiding her mascara into her eyes.

Tonight, Adelaide’s makeup is crisp. She finishes her beets and checks her mobile. The clubs will open soon. She eats a strawberry yogurt and drags the spoon across her lip while she stares at the hours, as if pondering, as if she will not go. In her closet hangs a silky green dress and she puts it on, frowning about its short length in the mirror. She almost wears a stupid Santa hat from the back of a kitchen drawer but leaves it on the counter at the last moment. In the reflection of the lift doors, her legs seem to go on forever.

By 3:05 AM, the familiar club bathroom smells of a mixture of bleach and vomit, a vile combination she is adding to in the fifth stall. When she is finished Adelaide stands up and wipes her mouth, then moves her tongue around as if to confirm her body is hers again. At the bar a nameless man is waiting, her mule in his hand. He probably talks to his friends about the heatwave as if it was isolated and definite. As if all of it is over.

When she wakes up the next morning the sky is dim, as if it has not quite realized itself to be awake yet. She makes herself a cup of coffee and looks out the window. The streets are uncharacteristically empty, and there is a steady drizzle that is starting to pick up. It does not snow on Christmas. Not anymore.

“Merry Christmas,” she imagines texting Reed. “Happy holidays.”

She has his number. She could do it.

Instead her mother calls. She plays cards by herself and eats Oliver’s biscuits by herself and throws out the wretched beets by herself, the ones that cost her four pounds. The bacon and Eggos sit at attention on the counter. Emails announce themselves with a little chime: “Hey Adelaide! Two new clients available if you’re willing to take them on.”

And the rain pours on.