The Doris Day Vintage Film Club: A hilarious, feel-good romantic comedy. Fiona Harper
discovering her body slipping through the cool water, there was something more akin to a boing and she bounced right off it. It was as if the whole surface of the sea had turned into a stretchy, rubbery, see-through skin and as hard as she tried she couldn’t break through. It was most frustrating.
Eventually, she sat down, cross-legged on the undulating surface and folded her arms. The waves ran under her, making her bob up and down, just as if she’d been on a trampoline and someone else was jumping on the other end.
The only sounds were the gentle rustle of her hair in the breeze and the slap of the waves against the hull of the boat. She wasn’t sure how the boat didn’t just sit on the water like she did, rolling over onto one side, but it didn’t. Apparently, it was just her having this strange problem.
As she sat there, wondering what to do next, she started to think she could hear music. At first it was just a tickle at the corner of her consciousness, and she wasn’t even sure if it was coming from inside or outside her head, but then it grew louder.
Outside. Definitely outside.
She got excited again. Perhaps it was mermaids. Anything seemed possible in this strange place she’d found herself in.
The music grew steadily in volume, a bass beat thrumming through the rubbery sea surface and vibrating on her bare legs. Maybe not mermaids after all. Not unless they were the kind that didn’t like operatic arpeggios, but pounding metal verging on the edge of goth …
That was when Claire woke up. The boat, the sun, the strange waves were all sucked back into her subconscious. The music, however, remained.
She sat up and pushed the hair out of her face, trying to make sense of it all, waiting for the music to disappear with the rest of the dream. It didn’t. It just carried on thumping, like the beginning of one of those headaches she got sometimes that sat right behind her left eye. She put one foot on the floor and felt the vibration of it through the polished boards.
It became crystal clear that this had nothing to do with the dream and everything to do with the nightmare who lived downstairs.
Okay. This was it. She’d just about had enough.
Not only had there been the whole bike incident, and the letterbox that ever-spouted pizza delivery leaflets. She’d also had to deal with his bins again. He hadn’t pulled them forward on rubbish collection day, so she’d had to do it. She’d have left them, and rejoiced at the thought of him rotting away in his own mess, if it hadn’t been for the very real possibility of attracting rats. Or foxes. It was bad enough pulling his stinky dustbin to the kerb, but she wasn’t about to gather up the contents once they’d been strewn halfway down the street by a vixen looking for a nice juicy chicken carcass.
Of course that had meant yet another note. And yet another cheeky reply.
She knew she should have left it at that, but for some reason letting him have the last word didn’t sit well with her. Her pile of posh stationery in the kitchen was diminishing rapidly, along with her live-and-let-live, que sera, sera philosophy. She was doing her best to ignore everything but the troubles each day brought; it just seemed that each day brought a new batch from Mr Dominic flipping Arden.
She stood up and marched across the bedroom. No more notes. This was it. It was about time the pair of them had some face-to-face communication. And, if her palm met the side of his face during that communication, so much the better.
She stomped down the stairs, growing angrier with each step, because she knew the volume of her neighbour’s music was robbing her of the satisfaction of knowing he’d heard them too.
When she got to his front door, she knocked on it. Sharply, but loudly.
Nothing. At least, nothing but that infernal music. What was he? Seventeen?
She tried again, this time pounding with her fist. Still nothing. She waited again. Five minutes she stayed there, alternately knocking then folding her arms and staring at the door, her toes tapping in impatience. Once or twice she found she’d accidentally fallen in with the rhythm of the music and that just infuriated her further.
Eventually, she stormed off back upstairs and slammed her front door as hard as she could. So he wasn’t just an inconsiderate, lazy, pasty-faced technology geek, but a coward too. She should have known.
She went back to bed and rummaged through the drawer in her bedside table until she found the earplugs she always took on long plane journeys. She squished them into her ears and lay there, shoulders tense, armed folded across the top of the sheet and stared at the ceiling.
It was no good. She could still hear it.
At least she thought she could. It might just be the memory of all that noise echoing off the inside of her skull, like hearing an extra chime after the church bells had stopped ringing. She turned over and shoved her head underneath her pillow.
Please let him leave soon, she prayed fervently, as she waited for her blood pressure to drop back down to normal. She didn’t know when, but it had to be soon, didn’t it? And she’d be crossing the days off her calendar with a fat red squeaky marker until he did.
*
Dominic woke with a start. He was lying on his sofa in his living room and had no memory of how he’d got there. For some reason, he could hear the end of the last song on one of his favourite albums playing in his head, but all around him everything was completely silent.
He looked up and noticed his iPod, still lit up, sitting in its dock.
Ah. Now he remembered.
He’d been feeling particularly restless this evening. Probably because now he’d been back in the UK for more than a week, he was noticing that his days were kind of empty. He’d decided to listen to some good music to get this feeling of being trapped, grounded, out of his system. Somewhere in the middle of it, he must have fallen asleep.
Now, for most people that might have been impossible, but not for Dominic. He’d always been able to drop off anywhere, even when he’d been a teenager, and it had served him well on his travels most of the time. When he’d gone backpacking with uni buddies, they’d always complained about noise and hard beds and strange smells, but none of it had bothered him. He just closed his eyes and he was away.
Even staying in some of the really dodgy places his work took him to hadn’t been that bad. If he ever did have problems sleeping, he stuck his earphones in his ears and played music, sometimes quite loud, reasoning that it was often silence punctuated by unexpected noises that woke him up. If he could choose something with a consistent volume level it became white noise, lulling him to sleep. It was the sudden quiet at the end of an album that often roused him these days.
The iPod blinked off and he sat up, stretched and yawned. At least he was feeling sleepy now. And it was dark. Finally, his body clock was returning to some sort of normal pattern. About time too. He stumbled off into his bedroom where he ripped off his clothes and fell into bed. A few seconds after he hit the mattress, he was sleeping the sleep of the innocent.
*
He was still in a pretty good mood when he emerged from his flat to go for a run at eleven o’clock the next morning. He looked out for a little white rectangle on his doormat and wasn’t disappointed. Somewhere along the line, the war of notes between him and his upstairs neighbour had become a source of entertainment.
Hmm. A signal that he definitely needed to get out more. He had the research for a new documentary he wanted to do on free divers – the particular kind of mental discipline required, the tight-knit community of enthusiasts, the dangers – but it was desk work, his least favourite kind, and would hardly get him out the flat much. Pete had texted him a couple of times and he’d texted back, but they hadn’t seen each other since that incident at his house last week.
Which meant he needed an alternative social life. One involving female company would be good, no matter what Pete said.
Just thinking about how his best friend had summed him up still made