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Melissa Munro is a Scottish writer living in Wales. She was longlisted for the Yeovil Literary Prize 2024 for her short story, Broken Bird. Having previously worked as a curator of contemporary art she is now studying full-time for an MA in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.

“You’re feartie!”

“I am not,” I said, but standing in front of Reverend MacIver’s house a sense of dread crept up on me. I sucked in my breath and added, “I’ll knock. It is my turn.”

Torquil ducked down below the MacIver’s wall and dragged me by the wrist to kneel in the sharp grass.   

“I’m not talking about chickenelly.” Torquil raked his fingers over the gravel road and handed me a pile of stones. “I dare you to throw these at the window.”

“What?! The MacIver already hates me and he’s a demon enough. He’ll be casting me to Hell on the Sabbath if I do that.”

“Fine. Well, if you’re too scared, I’ll just have to have the last sweet.”  

Torquil pulled a crumpled paper bag from the pocket of his shorts and showed me the tantalising round lemon hard-boiled gem of a sweet. My parents rarely bought me or my brother sweets. It’s not that they didn’t care. Their minds were just always elsewhere; the croft, the animals and the babies. How could I forget?

“Alright,” I said and took the handful of stones.  

As I stood and drew in breath, I caught the sweet smell of burning peats on the air. It was summer and the evenings drew long, but the sharp wind still thundered down off the Atlantic pushing families round the hearth.

Torquil sniggered at my feet. “You’re feartie,” he whispered.

He was the older brother I didn’t have. Our families lived next door to each other, and we had been friends our entire life. When I say next door, I mean our houses were still separated by a lane and a field, but there are no trees on this island, save for the ones the English plant, so you can see for miles.  

From the moment we were cubs, Torquil and I scrapped, but in a friendly way. My parents didn’t mind. He was company for me, even when Donny came along. By then I was older, and Donny was too little to play with. Torquil had a smile that lay crooked on his face. Mischievous and I loved it. I didn’t want to lose face in front of him now.  

Although the wall would be the best cover, I was too far away for my aim to hit a front window. I thought of the glistening sweet waiting for me and snuck round the wall, knees bent and took up position a few feet away from the house, among the grass.  

The MacIver had taken against me years before. I was still only nine, but when I was four years old, he told me that I was the cause of my mother’s grief and my father’s pain. I did not know what he meant by this. I believed I had done a great wrong which is why my parents were always so distant. Taking his words to be truth, I took off one night and ran with a bag of clothes and my peg dolly to Torquil’s house. His mother brought me straight home where I explained through shameful tears MacIver’s words to me. My mother held me all night and my father made us all skip service for almost six weeks until Ma begged Athair to reconsider.  

Rage ran through me as I thought of MacIver’s cruel words. I hurled the stones with such a force. They clattered against the windowpane. I waited.

“Man alive Lissie! I didn’t think you’d actually do it. Why are you just standing there?  Come on!”  

My feet, stock still, sunk into the sandy ground. I watched as the sash window flew up with gusto and Mrs MacIver who was round and old appeared. She caught sight of me and her eyes flashed. Her great fleshy arm shook in a balled fist.

“Lissie Maclennan, I ought to have known. Your father will hear about this!”

Torquil snatched my hand and pulled me from my spot.  

“Come on! Let’s get out of here.”

“Torquil, you little demon! You haven’t heard the end of this!”

We ran and ran, all the way to the end of the village, down the hill towards Traigh Mhòr beach. The salt wind scoured my lungs. Chest tightened.  

“Slow down will you,” I shouted, but a gust of wind carried the words out to sea.  

Torquil dragged me, tripping over my feet down the steep, narrow path that was carved from the land by thousands of feet before. Sheep grazed idly all down the cliffs. They skittered out of the way as we ran past. At the bottom of the cliff, we fell in a heap and laughed our lungs out. The sheep bleated at us.  

Once I had calmed, I lay in the sand lulled by the rush of the tide. Torquil though was busy. He got up and retrieved his rusted bucket from behind the jetty.  

“Torquil! Just come and sit a minute.”  

“I can’t,” he threw over his shoulder. “I promised Graham I would catch some crabs.” 

I blew out my cheeks. “Do you really have to? We could play a game.”

“Playing’s for babies,” he said even though we had only just been playing a game, but sometimes Torquil liked to stake out the wisdom of his years. He was ten which put him far beyond my mere nine-year-old self.  

“What about my sweet?”

Torquil reached into his pocket and tossed me the paper bag. I pulled out the sweet. Sharp corners nicked the tips of my fingers and stuck fast for a moment as I tried to fling it into my mouth.  The taste was at once sour and sweet. The tang filled me up and produced a sensation of joy, right behind the eyes. My trophy.  

“Are you going to help me, Lissie?”

I said nothing but looked at my bare outstretched feet and attempted to rub the sand from one sole upon the top of the other foot. It only made them sandier.  

“Well, if you aren’t going to help, maybe you should go home!”

I flinched at his sharp tone. “I can’t,” I said and after a pause added, “Ma is birthing.”  

Torquil turned to look at me. His eyes rounded like a seal pup, sorrowful and scared. “I’m sorry,” he said and set himself back to his task.  

He tiptoed along the beach, close to the cliffs, looking intently at the points where the cliff met the sand. Suddenly, he stopped. Without a sound he crouched on all fours, his muscles tensed to spring. His right hand hovered and fingers wavered as though he were playing some tune on a piano that only he could hear in his head. Then it darted. A flash of bony flesh. His hand disappeared under the cliff into a tiny opening. It shot out again. Splayed in his tight grip was the body of a crab. Six legs flailed around, hoping for an escape. Without a word Torquil tossed it into his bucket and resumed his position.  

I had watched Torquil perform this ritual of hunting for years. His father taught him. When fish stocks were low, it was a good way to shore up supplies for the broth. Sometimes, Torquil even caught enough to share some with us.  

“I’m bored,” I complained.  

Torquil only slipped me a sideways look but was kind enough not to tell me to go home. “Go and explore,” he suggested.

I didn’t really want to get up, but I knew that if I stayed lying there too long with nothing to do, I would eventually think only of Ma and the baby that was coming and that was not a place I wanted to be.  

I pulled myself up and brushed the sand from my skirt. The waves crashed hard against the shore, broken only by the sucking sound of the retreating water and the building before another crash.  

The light was beginning to fade, but there was still more than enough to see by. I skipped along the beach then slowed to a patter. My eyes were glued to my feet. I liked to look for unusual shells, sea glass and the empty bodies of starfish or sea anemones. If there had been a storm, I was sure to come across some, but it had been a calm summer.  

In the distance something glimmered, spherical and long. I squinted at it. I turned towards Torquil. He was still crouched by the cliffs, engrossed in the crab hunt. I looked back at the form on the beach. The incoming tide nudged at it.  

I quickened my pace. When I was only a few feet away, I stopped. Its rounded body glistened in the descending sunlight, flecks of purple and blue emitting as if through a glass paperweight. It was crested with a spectacular diamond-like fin, dipped in pink, that ran the length of its back. Beneath its head the body frilled out in deep purple. Its coiled tentacles, some of which resembled a string of pearls, splayed out along the sand and even reached yards back into the foaming waters. I stood gawking at its beauty and otherworldliness.  

“Torquil!” I called out. “Torquil come quick!”

He loped over, clutching the rusted bucket in his hands. “Jesus, what’s that?” he said as he approached. Torquil walked straight up to the creature and bent low next to it.  

“No, don’t! Don’t touch it.”

 “Why not?”

 “It’s a Man O’War.” I said these words with as much seriousness as I could muster.

 “A what?” said Torquil, contorting his face.

 “It’s a Man O’War. Portuguese.”

He continued to stare at me with a blank look.

“A jellyfish!”

“A jellyfish. Well, that cannae hurt me,” said Torquil as he puffed up his chest and cheeks. He reached out his fingers to touch it.

“Stop!” I screamed. “It’s dangerous. It can sting you even when it’s dead.”

“How do you know?”

“My Athair found one when he was little. He has a book at home with pictures of sea creatures in it. He showed it to me once. Told me if you ever see this washed up on shore, don’t go near it. Don’t touch it.”  

“Pppfff. Seems pretty stupid to me.” Torquil put down his bucket and headed over to a cluster of rocks.  

“What are you doing?” I watched as he picked up a long stick of seaweed, the kind that is dried as hard as wood, and brought it over. 

He jabbed at the jellyfish with the end of the stick. I watched it wobble. As it stilled, I wondered if it might suddenly come to life and attack us.  

Torquil grew more confident and jabbed repeatedly at it. A smile of tantalising delight stretched upon his face.  

“Stop. Just leave it alone.”

He would not. He ignored me and continued to poke away at the creature. Eventually, he became so embroiled in his game that he lifted the stick of hardened seaweed and began to thwack the jellyfish again and again. I begged him to stop but he was too enraptured. The creature itself split apart. Its blue interior spilled forth and pieces of jelly matter flew in all directions. Within a few minutes it was a mess, all beauty destroyed. Finally, Torquil hiked it up on the end of the stick and threw it with force into the raging sea.  

“Why did you do that?” I cried at him.  

Torquil frowned at me. He frowned at my tears and reddened face. He frowned at my look of disapproval. “You said it was dangerous, so I got rid of it. I did it for you.” 

“No, you didn’t,” I replied.  

As though moving from a dream into waking, I heard a voice calling on the wind.  

“Lissie! Lissie!”  

I could see Torquil’s older brother, Graham, scaling the path. His hands were cupped about his mouth as he called out my name. 

The pair of us ran over, forgetting the Man O’War in the meantime.  

Graham was fifteen, tall and almost grown into his man’s body. Though he filled his clothes, he still did not fill his skin. Recently, he had changed from the softness of a boy into the angled contours of a man. Sometimes I looked at him in fascination.  

“Lissie, you’re wanted at the house,” Graham said.  

“Is it Ma?” 

“You’re wanted,” is all he replied.  

He flicked his gaze to Torquil and gave his little brother a nod. “You’d better come away home too. How many did you get?” Graham asked.

Torquil had forgotten the crabs. He squinted into the bucket. “Five.”

Graham nodded.  

“Let’s go,” he said and turned to lead the way.  

Each step I took felt heavy and forced. I could not think about what would be waiting for me. I did not want to. Ma had lost so many babies before me and after me. To think that this one would be alive would be like expecting the sun not to rise in the morning.  

As we approached home I stopped in the middle of the road.  

Graham turned to me and said, “Are you going to be alright?”

I looked up at a faint glow of candlelight in Ma’s bedroom window. My gaze faltered and laced its way to Torquil’s croft; a long, low traditional blackhouse huddled in a hollow scrap of land. Our whitehouse was grand by comparison, but I longed to follow them and crouch around the peat fire and listen to Torquil’s Ma cheerily scold the seven children running amok.  

“Your Ma’ll be needing you,” said Torquil. He shot me a look that said I’ll be here for you. 

I nodded and took myself off.

Inside, the house was dark. The sun slipped below the horizon. In front of me were the steep set of stairs. A dirge of voices drew me up each cloaked step. My hands trembled as they felt their way up the wall, fingertips knocking into the corners of the picture frames that held my grandparents unsmiling faces.  

I reached the middle landing and turned to carry myself up the final flight of stairs. I could hear a Gaelic Psalm emitting from Ma’s room. I flinched to hear MacIver’s cavernous timbre. In the pauses there came a tortured moan. Surely Ma could not be birthing with MacIver looming over her.  

The doorway was open a foot. I reached my hand in and nudged it to slip inside. It smelled raw like the slaughterhouse. The stench of an animal. Ma was curled in a ball on a bed of blood. Athair knelt by the bed, one arm locked around Ma. The other covered his eyes, like when we played hide and seek, but this could not be unseen. On the other side of the bed was the thick dark figure of MacIver. The candlelight was behind him so that his whole face was shrouded in the night. He towered so high above me, like a figure of Death. In his hand he clutched the leather-bound Gaelic Bible but he did not have it open at the page. Oh no, MacIver knew every word by heart, especially the Psalms that spoke of the sinners.

Not one of them noticed me. I crept to the corner of the room where the baby’s cradle sat upon the crooked floorboards. It was huddled next to a dying peat fire which cast an unearthly glow upon the shrouded bundle.  

I knelt down. Stretched out a hand. My fingers pulled at the blanket. My little brother or sister was so tightly swaddled. I unbound them. The skin was grey. Blue around the lips. The surface of it was covered in blood and a congealed jelly-like substance. Around its neck a tentacle was wrapped, tight and knotted. I flinched, just as I did with the Man O’War. It was not unlike it. Purple and blue, almost translucent in places. The congealed substance had the appearance of the jellyfish, right after Torquil had smashed it. It was the ninth baby. Ninth. Only me and Donny had survived.  

Suddenly, strong hands were on my shoulders and wrenched me up from the floor.  

“Lissie,” said Athair, “your Ma needs you.”  

I did not want to follow him. I wanted to run from the misery, the pain and the grief that MacIver told me was my fault. But I obeyed.

Pushing past the MacIver, I climbed in next to Ma with the stains of dried blood pooled beneath me. She reached out and clawed at me. Pulled me into her. Her grip was so tight, so desperate. Her guttural moans flowed into my ear and her tear-soaked cheeks rubbed against mine.  

MacIver cleared his throat before launching into song. It was sad. A Psalm sung out in a cold, clear voice and Athair joined in echoing the Gaelic words.  

He heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds. 

He determines the number of stars and calls them each by name.  

Aisling Lee hails from County Longford in the midlands of Ireland, and is a graduate of NUI Galway’s M.A. in Writing (2021). Since then, in addition to being longlisted for a small number of competitions, her work has been published by The Letter Review and New Word Order.

Jasper’s default expression was sullen – a sort of resigned curiosity which seemed to convey the disappointment, but also acceptance, of being unable to answer life’s greatest questions. His eyes poured forth the darkest blue I had ever beheld in a human iris – they were cobalt, almost royal blue, and behind them lay that peculiar sadness. He had rather a pale face, endowed with angles; his chin, brow, jawline, cheekbones – everything seemed to be straight, with sharp corners. I suppose he was attractive in an unassuming kind of way. He was thin, and he had this shiny yet uncared-for head of straw-coloured hair down to his shoulders, where it curled slightly at the ends. I thought he looked like he should be on a skateboard, wearing high-tops, an oversized hoodie, and a cool beanie hat pulled only loosely below his hairline. But when I first met him, he was wearing next to nothing.

Two days before the start of the new academic year, my parents helped me to haul a load of my stuff from home to the new flat, the flat I would be sharing with Jasper. He didn’t even blink when the three of us piled in and found him on the couch in the living room, one leg crossed over the other with a guitar in his lap, apparently unclothed from head to toe.

My mum’s voice went all high-pitched as she exclaimed her apologies and backed out into the hall with Dad behind her, but I stood still in the doorway.

‘I am wearing undies,’ Jasper declared coolly, as he momentarily lifted the guitar to expose a pair of tighty-whities.

There was something strikingly commanding about his deep, crisp voice; it seemed to slice through the air and dramatically dwarf all other sounds.

I smiled carefully, genuinely amused by the delivery of his ‘undies’ remark, but struggling to assess what kind of response might be welcomed by Jasper. He remained deadpan.

‘Jasper, I presume?’ I said eventually, opting to keep it polite and not over-familiar.

I stepped forward a couple of paces, anticipating that he would rise from his seat and offer a handshake, but when it became clear that he was about to do no such thing, I settled for standing awkwardly in the middle of the room.

Hesitant autumn sunshine streamed in through the window and faintly illuminated an imperfect rectangle on the beige carpet. Two suites of burgundy furniture formed an L shape opposite a medium-sized television – one was the three-seater sofa on which Jasper was sitting, the other a homely armchair with a bulbous back and arms. To the back of the armchair was a small wooden dining table with four chairs.

Jasper played a couple of notes on his guitar, his eyes fixed on his fingers as he tickled the strings. ‘Be weird if I wasn’t, wouldn’t it?’

This time I laughed, albeit sedately. ‘Yeah. I’m Adam. … Obviously.’

‘Great to meet you, Adam,’ Jasper said, pleasantly but unsmilingly. ‘And here commenceth our journey together.’ He slapped the top of his guitar and for the first time, made direct eye contact.

About two weeks before that, we had found each other in a student-led accommodation search Facebook group. Jasper Reeves had advertised a room in an apartment in Finglas, and posted several pictures of a perfectly attractive interior. The single bedroom was going for €650 per month, which my parents and I could just about stretch to afford. I had two weeks left to find something – I was getting desperate, and this looked just fine.

I sent him a message expressing my interest and in the same vein we continued to communicate to discuss the finer details. Until I moved in, I had no idea what he looked or sounded like; even his profile picture showed nothing more than a silhouette in the distance posing with arms up like an exaggerated shrug. It could have been anyone.

In all the time we spent living together, I learnt very little about him. He was older than me, at twenty-three, and entering his final year of studies; I was twenty, commencing my second year. He was from Limerick but seldom travelled home, and was studying history and politics. Initially, that surprised me. He struck me as the type who might be better suited to something like art or graphic design or indeed music – clearly he had an interest. But I soon came to understand that history and politics made perfect sense because Jasper was characterised by the unlikely. The only surprising things about him were the things that weren’t surprising, like the fact that he drank tea – just like every other Irish person – and spoke to his parents on the phone at least fortnightly – just like most students living away from home.

Apart from what I observed first-hand, I learnt virtually nothing about him. He proved himself not much of a talker but then, neither was I. It seemed certain by our third or fourth week together that while we got on fine as flatmates, we weren’t going to become friends, in the truest sense of the word. We made small talk and addressed practicalities like rent and chore rotation, but never anything more meaningful than that.

Through September and October, whenever people asked me about my new flatmate, I smiled through my teeth and described him as being rather eccentric. ‘But he’s grand. We’re not close or anything but we get on fine,’ I usually said.

Inevitably, people wanted to know exactly what made him eccentric, and I found it hard to explain. Sometimes I felt like his taciturnity was not as much due to shyness as it was to a fear of letting slip something shameful or incriminating. Gracing the living room or kitchen with his nearly-naked presence remained a habit. Frequently he favoured this particular pastime over going to class, and seemed utterly unconcerned about the impact such skipping might have on his final assignments and exams.

He produced artwork using paint or pencil or sometimes both together, often reproductions of the most mundane objects around the flat like a single arm of the sofa, the four rings of the hob or the drain in our small bath. Sometimes they were abstract works, representing what appeared to me to be nothing in particular – squiggles and random shapes – but he unfailingly labelled such pieces as constructs, such as indifference, fame, despair, mortality. They were consistently very good, and more than once I returned from college to find about a dozen drawings stuck with Blu Tack to the walls in the hallway. Jasper responded impassively to my compliments and within a couple of days he’d have taken them all down again.

He wrote songs too, and his lyrics never failed to amaze or unnerve me, whenever I found sheets of them lying around on the coffee table in the living room.

Tonguing rum and raisin through blood-soaked rags / And scoring oxide from waxy skulls / Rally the vixens and massacre hags / Bloodbath birthday with horns of bulls.

The bard’s aerial on the wind / Breathed to them, for I have sinned / Blow me, father, make me good / Food for worms, stuck in the mud.

The same patterns continued through November and December, only by then I was frowning when people asked me about him, and describing him not as eccentric, but odd.

One Wednesday evening I returned to the flat and found that Jasper wasn’t home, which was a relative rarity. If he had a girlfriend or boyfriend or indeed friends of any description, I had heard nothing about them; but on the odd occasion when I had the place to myself in the evening time, I assumed he must be with her or him or them. I couldn’t possibly be his only social contact outside of his family, could I? But then, I asked myself, would that not explain why he had needed a stranger to fill his spare room?

That evening, I prepared my dinner as usual in the kitchen, and took it to the living room to eat in front of the TV. Setting my plate of stir-fried chicken and veg down on the coffee table for a moment while I fiddled with the remote control, I found myself taking pleasure in the fact that Jasper wasn’t in.

Contented with my choice of Impractical Jokers, I turned to place the remote on the arm of the chair, only to have my gaze drawn to the curtains either side of the window straight ahead. Or rather, what was left of them – the bottom half of the left curtain had been hacked away.

At first my heart leapt with inexplicable fear, like I thought there might be a burglar still in the flat. But I quickly shook away that notion, concluding that it was highly improbable we had been burgled; the TV was still in front of me, Jasper’s guitar was in the corner, the place was no untidier than we had left it. And what on earth could a burglar want with half a curtain?

So then for a moment I felt merely confused, until finally the exasperation kicked in. Jasper. What reason he might have had I wouldn’t dare to guess but it must have been him. On some whim or other, I decided, he had taken a pair of scissors to our landlord’s living room curtains.

I was about to pick up my phone and call him or send an angry message but I realised that no quickness of action on my part would put the curtain back together, so I turned back to my dinner and ate while it was still hot. But most of the impractical jokers’ antics went over my head and I ingested the food without much pleasure, distracted as I was by how Jasper’s flighty behaviour had come to a head like this.

When I had finished eating, I sat in the armchair for several minutes staring at our curtain and a half. They were made of a robust velvety material, cream-coloured with delicate spiral patterns in mauve, which complimented the aubergine tinge in the burgundy furniture. I was no interior designer but to me they looked too nice to have been cheap.

I had only met our landlord, Gerald, once. He wasn’t one to swing by to carry out spot-checks or ask if everything was alright, so at least that would work in our favour; we would probably have some time on our hands to replace the curtains. I noticed how my inner voice was using the pronoun we. This was Jasper’s doing, nothing to do with me. But I knew, without a single doubt, that he wasn’t going to fix the mess he had made without – at the very least – some prompting from me. Guilty or not, the responsibility would be partially mine.

I could, of course, have sat back and let Jasper take a beating, be heavily fined or threatened with eviction if Gerald came round and found what he’d done. But he and Gerald had known each other two years and must have had some kind of rapport. If Jasper decided to pin the blame on me for the damage to Gerald’s property, what could I do except deny it? And what could Gerald do except choose who to believe – the guy he knew, who had caused (apparently) no trouble before, or the new guy about whom he knew not much at all? Although annoyingly enigmatic and whimsical, Jasper seemed like a decent human being, so I realised it wasn’t particularly likely that he would try to blame me. But there was only one thing about Jasper I would testify to knowing for certain – he was unpredictable as hell. So I wasn’t about to take any chances.

I stayed up late that night, hoping I might get to air my concerns before the day was out. But midnight came and went, the knowledge that I had a tutorial first thing in the morning got heavier and heavier on my mind, and Jasper still hadn’t come home. So I accepted that our first confrontational conversation would have to wait.

In the morning I had time to do nothing except shower, dress and have breakfast before leaving for college. I did notice, though, that Jasper’s bedroom door was closed. So he had come home last night. Even if I wanted to wake him up violently and demand that he put ‘replace curtains’ at the top of his to-do list (which I didn’t), there wasn’t enough time. I had to get to class.

At the end of the hallway, as I was leaving, I made a startling discovery. To the right of the door, a square-shaped canvas the size of a small television screen had been mounted on the wall. But instead of paint, it was decorated with an abstract collage of chopped velvety fabric, cream and mauve in colour.

I felt strangely relieved that Jasper had put the curtain to some use and not just vandalised our flat for the sake of vandalism itself. Although, of course, I didn’t exactly consider artistic vision to be a pardonable excuse either. On the bus ride to college, I found myself hoping he had used Velcro strips or Blu Tack to secure his canvas to the wall – anything easily removable. And I realised I was like a parent whose restless toddler spends most of his time unsupervised.

We eventually got to speak the following morning, which was Friday. I never knew what his class schedule was like because he attended so erratically, but I was free until noon. Wanting to catch him as soon as possible and hoping he wouldn’t move straight from his bed to the front door, I rose at eight and hid out in my room, thoughtlessly consuming social media content while I waited for any sound of him moving about.

I heard his door opening soon after ten, and practically pounced on him as I opened mine and landed in the hall. Dressed, unsurprisingly, in just his underwear, he jumped when I appeared and clutched his chest with fright.

‘Holy shit, man, what are you doing?’

‘Sorry, but can we talk?’

‘Talk, sure. Yeah.’ He kept his eyes on the floor as he walked slowly towards the kitchen.

‘OK.’ I shadowed him. ‘So, the curtain in the living room…’

‘Oh, that.’

‘Yeah, that.’ Hoping he might offer some apology or explanation of his own accord, I paused. But he didn’t. He silently proceeded to prepare a bowl of Weetabix while I eyed the minutiae of his movements, my mind whirring with half-formed thoughts on what I should say next. ‘Um… to be honest, Jasper, what were you thinking? Like, it’d be strange at the best of times but this isn’t our property.’

‘Yeah, I know that. But Gerald’ll be cool about it, seriously.’ He began eating while he progressed towards the living room. ‘He’s like… He gets the arts, you know? You saw the piece, right?’

‘The… The canvas in the hall? Yeah, I saw it.’

‘Right, so you know what I wanted the curtain for. And Gerald has that kind of appreciation. You know, for the arts and that. Plus he’s just sound, so don’t worry about it,’ Jasper said, as he took a seat on the end of the couch nearest the window.

Frankly, I was amazed by what he was saying; not because I was surprised or relieved to learn of Gerald’s laid-back disposition, but because of how Jasper described it as if it were perfectly natural. No, he won’t mind that I’ve butchered his property. Why would he? I couldn’t figure out whether he was just trying to placate me, was kidding himself or genuinely believed it, or if there was a tiny chance it was actually true.

‘OK,’ I said cautiously. ‘So… what? You don’t think he’ll bat an eyelid? Or ask us to pay for new curtains?’

‘Well,’ Jasper replied slowly. ‘Yeah. I guess maybe he’d ask us for that.’ He placed heavy emphasis on the word ‘maybe’ as if he reckoned this scenario would be seriously unlikely. ‘But he’d be nice about it, and I’d pay obviously. You had nothing to do with it.’

‘Right, yeah. Sure. Thanks.’ As I shot words at him, hesitantly and disjointedly, I considered his claims. It was true that he must have known Gerald better than I did. Jasper had been living here two years already, and all I had discerned about Gerald from our sole meeting was that he seemed friendly and respectful; I had no sense of his appreciation for the arts or inclination towards generous forgiveness.

‘Sure,’ Jasper said, still spooning little heaps of Weetabix into his mouth.

‘Right, so… it’s all on you?’

‘Yup. Totally fine.’

‘OK then. … I’ll, um… I’ll see you later.’

‘Cool. Have a good day.’

A few more weeks passed without any major drama. The usual stuff continued – the almost-nudity, the artwork, the alarming lyrics – but on the whole, life with Jasper motored along pretty smoothly. We were still down half a curtain, but no other furnishings were removed or disordered or ridiculously repurposed. Gerald remained none the wiser and I had quickly accepted Jasper’s acceptance of full responsibility on that front, so the prospect of Gerald finding out didn’t even worry me that much. Eventually, in fact, it became the least of my worries.

One evening in late November, I came home to discover that Jasper had bought (or otherwise acquired – with Jasper, one could never presume to know such things) a bird. A blue budgie, flecked with black and white on the wings, which he named George.

Jasper was fully clothed – in a sweatshirt and tracksuit bottoms – that cold winter’s evening when I found him lolling about in the living room, the mutilated curtain behind him, the bird hopping from his finger to his shoulder, from there to his head and onto the back of the sofa. And Jasper was smiling.

‘What… the hell,’ I said, omitting the question mark from my intonation.

‘Oh, hey Adam. Meet George.’

George flew towards me suddenly and I flinched, raising my arms in front of my face. When I lowered them again, I noticed a sizeable cage on the small dining table.

Jasper laughed and George proceeded to circle the room before returning to perch on his master’s shoulder. ‘Isn’t he smart? He went to say hello! Who’s a clever lil’ birdie?’ He pronounced it boydee. ‘Boydee, boydee.’

And again he reminded me of a toddler.

‘Yeah, sure. Smart. But what the hell are you doing with a bird?’

‘He’s our new pet. Don’t you love him?’

I ran my fingers through my hair and exhaled loudly. ‘No, not really. Say what you will about Gerald’s appreciation for the arts but I know for a fact that we’re not allowed to have pets!’

The smile fell flatly away from Jasper’s face.

I sighed. ‘Look, Jasper, believe it or not, I actually like you.’ It was kind of true. ‘By and large, you’re a cool, chill person to live with, so I don’t want to fall out with you but you can’t keep doing insane stuff like this!’

‘Is it so insane to buy a bird? It’s not like it’s a python.’

This was a fair point. If he had been so inclined, or knew where to get one, Jasper may well have bought a reptile.

‘We’re not allowed to have pets!’ I repeated.

‘Who’s going to know? Gerald hasn’t been round since September.’

George had now settled atop Jasper’s head, which made it doubly difficult to take his arguments seriously.

‘Well, our neighbours will know, when he starts squealing and squawking at all hours. They could make a complaint. And Gerald may yet show up. It’s his property, he has a key, in case you forgot that. He can come by unannounced whenever he wants.’

‘Whatever, man, I’ll explain it to him. He’ll be cool.’

‘No, no, sorry! That’s not going to work this time.’ I had never heard myself sound more like a parent. ‘He won’t be cool, it will not be fine. You have to fix this.’

‘Well, how? A budgie is not just for Christmas.’ He raised his eyes as far as they would go, as if he expected to be able to see the top of his own head. ‘Isn’t that right, George?’

You’d think I’d have been used to it by now, but still I could barely comprehend his unceasing calmness.

‘How?! Put ads on social media, posters around campus. Sell him back to the pet shop or wherever the hell you got him! Your options are endless!’

Jasper lowered his eyes morosely and agreed that he would try to get George a new home, bringing our argument to an end.

But our discord didn’t end there. For as long as George remained with us, I remained vexed and restless. He wasn’t quite as verbal as I might have expected, but all the same every little tweet or chirp made my ears burn and I wanted to scream at Jasper why on earth isn’t he gone yet? I had deadlines and exams looming, and could ill afford such distractions. I don’t know how Jasper managed his workload because if his attendance had been poor before, he seemed now always to be at home. Sometimes I even wondered if he was enrolled in college at all, or did he just pretend that that’s where he spent his time when he was out of the house? He was (allegedly) in final year. How could he be so laid-back about the studies he had managed to so nearly finish?

I spent a lot of time in my room and even more time in college, every day before I left making sure to close my bedroom door. Jasper allowed George far too much time out of his cage, and since his arrival a pack of baby wipes had made a permanent home on the coffee table in the living room, like Jasper thought cleaning shit off the furniture and carpet was a completely normal thing. At least he did clean it.

But on the odd occasion when our paths couldn’t help but cross, I badgered him about getting rid of George. The more time that passed, the more worried I became that he would never sort it out because naturally, with every passing day, Jasper and George’s bond grew stronger. It was maddening.

He claimed to have messaged several friends and relatives, asking them to ask their friends and relatives if anyone would be interested in adopting a bird. I couldn’t blame them for saying no, but was I just supposed to take Jasper’s word for it that he had sent these messages at all?

Of course I considered posting ads and sending messages of my own. The fact that Jasper had never suggested I do so increased my suspicions that he had taken no action. But frustrated as I was, I felt morally prohibited from taking the sale of Jasper’s bird into my own hands. I had no right; the bird belonged to him. For me to remove it from his possession like that would be crossing an unacceptable line and I felt sure that the guilt, if I did it, would eat me up just as much, if not more, than George’s presence was driving me up the wall.

Jasper retained his infuriating nonchalance every time I confronted him. Most evenings I ate in my room because Jasper was hanging out and whispering sweet nothings to George in the living room, and I couldn’t abide the thought of him flapping from perch to perch and possibly soiling the food on my plate. I once briefly entertained the thought that a python might have been less trouble.

Normally I made an effort to feed myself properly, but as my patience with Jasper and George wore thin, my good habits started to slip; and as the need to study became increasingly great, I had little time to spare, either, to cook wholesome meals. So when I returned to the flat at around 8p.m. on Thursday the 8^th of December, I prepared for myself the lowly student dinner of pasta, with carbonara sauce from a tub.

As I rattled about in the kitchen with pots and utensils, I could hear the TV in the living room but I had no intention of even sticking my head around the corner to say hello to Jasper. Going out of our way to exchange niceties simply wasn’t something we did anymore.

Although I heard the television, I didn’t notice the absence of bird sounds and Jasper’s childish giggles – both consistent characteristics of the time he and George spent together. I didn’t realise that I hadn’t heard them that evening until I encountered the evidence that I mustn’t have.

Surrounded by the sounds of the murmuring TV and my pasta gently bubbling on the hob, I contemplated my profound desire for sleep. I barely gave a thought to Jasper and George in the next room. I didn’t have the energy.

After draining the pasta and adding the shop-bought sauce, I brought the empty tub to the waist-high pedal bin; and when the lid flipped open, I froze with shock and – quite frankly – fear. I stared at the pile of rubbish beneath me. A banana skin, a crisp packet, a couple of tissues – just a few of the everyday items I observed there next to a slender, blue, drop-shaped article. They were beautiful actually, now that I saw them up close – the cerulean blue feathers. George lay face down, little legs and beak invisible amidst a mess of household waste.

I placed the sauce pot on the counter behind me, gently removed my foot from the pedal and let the lid of the bin shelter George once again.

In the gravest, most bizarre state of shock I had ever experienced, I left the kitchen. Just three short paces down the hall to the living room, and I felt sick as I crossed the threshold. Jasper was sitting in his usual spot on the couch. George’s cage remained on the table. The window was still framed by one and a half cream-and-purple curtains.

Jasper’s eyes were fixed on the television but he didn’t appear to be absorbing much of what he was seeing. I couldn’t tell whether he hadn’t noticed me coming in or was choosing to ignore me. The look on his face, as I viewed it in profile, reminded me of the time I had first laid eyes on him. It was the same expression which I had come to define as his default – sullenness. There was less indifference in it now, though, more sadness. Still, he was perfectly composed.

‘Jasper?’ My voice rose from my throat as little more than a croak.

He turned. ‘Oh, hey man.’ Then he paused. ‘You wanna watch something?’

‘George,’ I said quietly, sensing the disbelief in my voice but unsure whether it came across so plainly to Jasper.

‘Oh! Yeah, I got rid of him at last, you’ll be pleased to hear.’

His tone was neither light nor bitter. It was chillingly neutral, unaffected. He didn’t smile or grimace.

‘He’s… He’s in the bin,’ I said through tight lips and narrowed eyes.

‘Yeah. … I mean, it’s nearly full. I can take it out tomorrow.’

‘Jasper, what the hell is wrong with you?!’

He blinked. He looked like a man confused but unwilling to admit it. ‘What?’

‘What do you mean what? What the hell happened to George?’

‘Oh, I just…’ He held up two fists side by side and rotated them in opposite directions just once, quickly, with a jerking motion. ‘You know. He won’t have felt a thing.’

I was speechless. This man was certifiable. I wondered all sorts of things in the space of a few seconds; had I driven him to kill his pet, through my repeated requests that he rehome him? Had he bought a pet for the very purpose of destroying it because he derived pleasure from such sick deeds? Once again, was he attending college at all? How much of what little I knew about him was actually true? Had he been diagnosed with something and was off his meds? Could I be living with an out-and-out psychopath?

‘Hey, Adam.’

I snapped back into the here and now and regarded him carefully.

‘Your dinner will be getting cold.’

With wide eyes and parted lips, I held his gaze for a few seconds. Then I turned and left the room as if in a daze, harbouring a feeling of sheer horror. I walked straight past the kitchen. Every last iota of my appetite had dissipated, and I was not about to dispose of the slimy pasta mix by dumping it on top of George. It could sit there until Jasper emptied the bin or threw it out for me, or I got the hell out of this apartment.

As I retreated to my room like a snail into its shell, a series of staccato images reeled through my mind – the emotional evening I had spent in my bedroom at home, despairing over the fact that I still had nowhere to live for the coming year; Jasper’s Facebook post, timestamped ‘16 mins’ and how lucky I felt to have seen it so soon, the message I sent to him straight away; my signature on our 12-month contract, my handshake with Gerald.

I couldn’t move. Even if, miraculously, I found a new place before the beginning of next term, I couldn’t afford two rents. Couch-surfing, commuting – the mere thought of either one both disheartened and exhausted me.

But I had to get out. No pathetic living arrangement filled me with dread as did the thought of setting foot back here in January, under the same roof as Jasper Reeves.