Friday 26th Jan 2018

In hindsight, a frozen death might have been preferable to the awkwardness that ensued.

I got into the apartment building using the age-old technique of hovering outside until someone was coming out and then walking purposefully towards the door so they held it open for me. I tried Shane’s door, which was obviously locked (he’s not a complete idiot), but I found a spare key under his doormat (I’m afraid that makes him three-quarters idiot). Once inside his flat, I began the defrosting process. However, it wasn’t long before I heard a key in the front door, signalling his return. Going on the assumption that an unexpected guest (technically I was expected, but I was also expected to wait outside) is better discovered straight away — rather than after the host has stripped down to his underwear and gone to use the toilet without bothering to close the door –- I went into the hall to greet Shane.

Big mistake. It turned out there was a good reason for Shane’s lack of response to my texts. A reason that had nothing to do with being kidnapped, and had everything to do with the short blonde girl he was currently sucking the face off. My instinct was to dart back into the kitchen, but it was too late, I was already spotted.

“Oh!” Shane visibly started in surprise. “Sophie! How did you get in?”

The blond girl in his arms turned around to gape at me, before shooting him a nasty ‘you-said-you-were-single’ look.

“Someone was coming out and held the door open for me,” I said, as if that explained everything.

“Oh right.” He blinked for a moment and was elbowed in the ribs by the blonde girl. “Oh yeah, this is Jade. Jade, this is my friend, Sophie. She’s been kicked out of uni and is sleeping on the couch tonight.”

Jade’s glare transformed into a wide-eyed stare. “How did you get kicked out?”

Before I could answer such an impossible question, Shane rescued the situation by kissing Jade again, and then shuffling her off to his bedroom. On the way he called to me that I should help myself to anything I wanted from the fridge, which might have seemed like a generous gesture, but I’ve been in Shane’s apartment before and I know his fridge generally contains nothing but beer and miscellaneous jars of half-used jams and pickles.

Sure enough…

Note to self: buy groceries

After digging around a little, I settled down on the couch with a few crackers and “Mrs Potter’s Rhubarb & Spinach Chutney” (wtf Shane?), which I chose because it was the only jar without visible mould cultures. I believe in probiotics, but there are limits. I’d love to report that this hearty meal was followed by an undisturbed night of beautiful sleep, but the fact is my slumber was disturbed several times by Jade stumbling through the living room in various states of undress. I’ve always thought it was a fatal flaw in the design of Shane’s apartment that you have to go through the living room to get to the bathroom. He argues it’s convenient because he can nip to the loo without missing important moments in the footie. Maybe I should have insisted that, in that case, he should have offered me his bed and taken the couch. Except he had Jade-of-the-tiny-bladder with him, which means any toilet trips on my part would have included walking past them and whatever they were doing…

Sorry, Dear Diary, I didn’t mean to inflict such a disturbing image on you. Let’s both think about a field of sunflowers for a moment…

Anyway, once it was light enough to signify morning, I gave up on sleep and took a quick shower, borrowing Shane’s shampoo since my things are still packed up god-knows-where. Wrapped in my new aura of man-scent, I sat in the kitchen with a cup of hot water (no point looking for tea-bags in Shane’s kitchen - yes, Dear Diary, it’s really that bad.) and tried to close my ears to the prolonged goodbye scene I could hear going on in the hall.

The front door slammed and Shane slunk into the kitchen a few seconds later and I was obliged to fulfil my obligation as a dutiful friend and tease the hell out of him about his conquest. This was followed by a congratulatory toast on his having secured Jade’s phone number and, thereby, the prospect of a second date. Liaison. Whatever.

With that done, we got down to discussing my own situation. Shane wanted to hear the whole story and after commiserating me over the rudeness of the invading witch and her posse of stealing pigs, he suggested paying a visit to the university admin office to see whether they had been unleashed due to some vast administrative mistake. I agreed it was the most obvious first step. He then had some important sports update to watch, so after a bit more rhubarb & spinach chutney (it’s actually not bad if you force yourself to just eat it without thinking about how horrible it should taste) I headed out.

Later…

Complete failure at the admin office. Apparently there is no computer record of me whatsoever. The fact that I could reel off my student number and a list of classes, complete with professors and other participants counted for nothing in the face of such digital denial. The woman I spoke to made no attempt to hide the fact that she thought I was a wastrel who had fabricated a tale of woe for the sole purpose of wasting her time and she threatened to call security if I couldn’t offer some proof of having been a student. I argued that the woman from yesterday had confiscated my student ID. She asked me which woman, but I couldn’t see the evil culprit there in the office, and the response to my description of “an evil witchy-looking hag” was less than positive.

I was nearly ready to give up but was hit by a brainwave and asked where they might be keeping my stuff. This finally got us somewhere. She checked the system and sure enough there’s a storage cupboard hired out in my name. The woman handed over the key with admonishments to remove my stuff within the month because anything found on the premises after 30 days would be disposed of without warning, since THERE IS NO RECORD OF ME BEING A STUDENT. She was on the verge of carrying out her threat to call security and I had no desire for such a swift reunion with dear old Dave, Jeff and Joe, so I took the key and left. She was rude and unhelpful and I would have liked to have complained to someone about her, except apparently you need a plastic card with your photo next to the university logo to be taken seriously on campus.

Possible future project: Acquire fake uni ID for complaints purposes.

This might seem like a random thing to include, Dear Diary, but a strange thing happened as I was coming out of the admin office. The office door opens straight into the ground floor of the entrance hall in the students’ union building. It’s a massive space with shops and cafes - a bit like a shopping mall. There’s a glass ceiling several stories above and there are galleries on all floors circling the lobby space. I had paused outside the office door wondering what to do next when something caught my eye. A guy was standing on the second floor gallery, leaning on the rail and grinning down at me.

Yes really. Grinning. As if he knew me (I’d never seen him before in my life. Believe me, I’d have remembered). Or as if he knew exactly why I looked so pissed off and frustrated. He was probably a couple of years older than me, could have been a third year student, or even a graduate. Oh, and he was really, amazingly, super hot. Like ridiculously good-looking. He had dark hair, an athletic build and was wearing a casual pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It was all topped off with the kind of stubble that makes a man look dangerous, rather than scruffy. And his grin… No wait, it was really more of smirk. He was staring directly at me and smirking in the kind of way that someone does when they know that you’re about to walk directly into a practical joke that they’ve set up for you. Sounds creepy, doesn’t it? And it probably would have been, except he was one of those annoyingly good-looking people who just seem sexy and mysterious, even when smirking.

I could think of a question or two I wanted to ask him, but before I had recovered from the shock of noticing him, he had straightened up and sauntered off through a doorway. He was on the second floor and there was no way I could have made it to the stairs and climbed two floors in time to catch him. So instead I did what any girl would have done. I shrugged nonchalantly, congratulated myself on the fact that a hot guy noticed me, and moved on.

It was probably nothing. I don’t want to get paranoid. Being thrown out of university has already caused me to start holding entire conversations with inanimate notebooks. And let’s face it. If I started thinking that a guy like that knew something about my situation, it would be because I desperately wanted that to be the case. For now it’s just another piece of the puzzle.

Grocery list:

- Tea bags,

- Milk,

- Bread,

- Everything else…

- Spinach & Rhubarb Chutney