Page 5 of Not That Complicated

Two hours, one curry, an enormous coconut naan and three pints of beer later, I was feeling better. I’d given up on my ambitious plan to eat the whole curry, defeated halfway through even though I’d quickly abandoned the rice and prioritised the good stuff. I wallowed in bed, replete and rotund as a manatee, my stomach full with Tandoori Tiffins’ award-winning chicken tikka masala and my heart full of wistfulness and defiance.

Fraser? He was no Mr Darcy. He wasn’t even a Wickham. He wishes he was a Wickham. No, he was a total Mr Collins. He might be a tall and handsome version of Mr Collins, but inside, he had the soul of the status-grubbing little weasel.

If I’d stayed with Fraser, I’d have been poor Charlotte Lucas, married to the wretched Mr Collins and squeezing what joy she could out of barricading herself in her own private parlour, worrying about her pig, and sucking up to Lady Catherine de Bourgh.

No one wants to be Charlotte.

Everyone wants to be Elizabeth Bennet.

Iwanted to be Elizabeth Bennet.

Happily sated and more than a little tipsy, I heaved my tray of half-eaten food and empty bottles onto the floor by the bed, tossed my iPad overboard, and snuggled under my beloved fluffy duvet (replaced since Fraser, the bastard).

I should send Paulina flowers, I thought as I drifted off to sleep. This pity party really hit the spot.

You know what’s a disgustingthing to do?

Forget that you’re a slob of the first degree, get out of bed for the bathroom in the middle of the night, already hungover, and step in a plate of cold curry.

I had no idea what was happening to me. I could not comprehend why,how, the floor was cold and squishing under my bed-socked feet.

By the time I’d stopped shrieking and dancing around, and had made it over to the light switch, there was a three-foot blast zone of left-over curry and rice, flung all over the middle of the room, and well ground-in by my panicked gyrations.

Fuck.

The carpet was a light beige. Or, it had been.

Now it was a light beige turning bright, turmeric yellow.

Head pounding and eyes watering in the bright overhead light, I resentfully got onto my hands and knees and did my best to scrape it all up. I sprinkled the remaining soggy patch with the dregs of a sodium bicarbonate tub I dug up from the back of the kitchen cupboard, called it good for the night, and crawled back into bed.

As it turns out, there’sa fairly tight window for getting curry stains out of your carpet.

Your best bet is to treat it like the emergency it is. Go fast and go hard.

In other words, I’d half-arsed it, and by the time I gave it the attention it deserved, the turmeric had dyed my beige carpet yellow-orange, and I’d learned a valuable lesson. I could absolutely eat in bed if I wanted, but I had to take the dishes downstairs or pay the price.

I bought some supposedly magical carpet cleaner from Amazon, dutifully followed the instructions, and managed to get the stain out. It was so effective that it also managed to get the original dye out, bleaching the carpet to a crispy white.

Not the result I was looking for.

I called my stepmother, Giselle. Once she’d stopped laughing at me for calling her for domestic advice, she passed me to my father. He told me to dump a bag of cat litter on it to soak up all the wet stuff, and when I told him we were way past that stage, he said get creative with rearranging the furniture or buy a rug to put on top.

Rearranging the furniture was out: I couldn’t drop a chest of drawers or a chair right in the middle of the room, it’d look ridiculous. I liked the rug idea, but it wouldn’t work, either. The rug would have to be practically as big as the room. The stain wasn’t a tidy, contained patch. It was a giant, jellyfish-like patch of wrongness. It had a halo of tentacular splatters around it. It was the Portuguese Man O’War of stains.

And whatever was in the special cleaner was vicious.

After two days, all the bleached fibres started to disintegrate into ashy piles. I hoovered it up. It kept coming. I had a suspicion that the patch was growing.

Worse than looking bad, every time it caught my eye, it reminded me of Fraser, and my pity party, and the reason for my pity party.

Adam Blake.

Wet. Naked.

In the shower, saying,Yeah. Now suck it. Good.

My hyperfixation on the last bit was truly tragic, because he hadn’t even been saying it to me, and every time I replayed it in my head…he was saying it to me.

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