Tuesday 31 January 2006

A key turned in the lock, and the door swung open with a creak. Vincent stiffened, and just managed to stop himself from looking up. Instead, he deliberately made himself relax and focused even more determinedly on the tutorial exercise in front of him.

The door banged shut, then came the sound of a pair of sneakers being thrown negligently into a corner. Once again, Vincent willed himself not to look up.

David appeared in his field of vision. He was humming a tune, not quite under his breath. As Vincent watched – or, rather, could not help but see – he flopped down on his bed, reached up and flicked on the radio perched precariously on the headboard. Inane radio chatter filled the room. Vincent did his best to ignore that, too.

They hadn't spoken a word to each other since that fateful Thursday, not even the usual 'How was class?' 'Usual. Lousy.' exchanges. Vincent didn't consider himself the unforgiving sort – quite the opposite, in fact. But clearly David should have apologised for last Thursday, although if pressed Vincent had to admit he couldn't say exactly what David should apologise for. But something had definitely gone wrong that day. He hadn't heard from Ching Juan since. Of course, it had been less than a week ago and it wasn't as though he and Ching Juan were in the habit of calling or SMS-ing each other every other day. In fact, they generally saw each other and spoke only on Business Correspondence days, but still –

It wasn't just about last Thursday either. Lately, David had been... well, to put it bluntly, David had been getting out of hand. Vincent liked to think of himself as pretty tolerant – he preferred making excuses for people, giving them the benefit of the doubt, instead of thinking the worst of them. But sometimes excuses wore thin, especially when he'd been making them for the same person over and over. He would put up with a lot for his friends, but David seemed keen on stretching the boundaries of that to breaking point.

Vincent sometimes got the feeling – more and more these days – that David thought of him as a pushover. Well, he'd just have to show David he wasn't, that was all.

Not that the message was getting through. David hardly seemed to notice Vincent wasn't speaking to him. In fact, he acted as though this was a perfectly normal state of things, so much so that Vincent sometimes caught himself wondering whether there had ever been a time when he and David so much as said 'Hi' and 'Bye' to each other, much less chatted, complained and commiserated together.

No, it was Vincent himself who found it difficult. He kept having to remind himself, for one thing. And there were times when it struck him as more than a little absurd, trying to treat David as though he didn't exist, when all the time he was clearly there – in the room, taking up more than his share of space, playing his radio too loud –

As if to underscore his presence even more blatantly, David reached up again and changed the channel. The radio chatter, already scraping gently away at Vincent's nerves, gave way to a sustained blast of – of something that sounded like guitars and drums being tortured together, with an incoherent, possibly-human wail on top. It didn't just scrape at Vincent's nerves – it ripped them to shreds and stomped on the pieces.

Vincent, a reflexive exclamation on his lips, just managed to bite it back. That was one of the things he meant, when he thought of David as getting out of hand. David had been making more noise and mess lately, playing music even more loudly than he usually did, tossing his things about even more carelessly, and letting them overflow into Vincent's side of the room even more than usual. As if trying to provoke some kind of vocal reaction...

Vincent pushed his chair back with more force than was strictly necessary, and started gathering his notes and textbooks together. If that was the way David thought, well, David wasn't getting any. There was a common room downstairs, a fairly peaceful spot if you sat far enough from the chattering bunch of students who always seemed to be crowding round the TV. He'd finish his work there, and come back to his room only when he was ready to go to bed, though the prospect of trying to fall asleep to the tortured strains of David's radio presented yet another hurdle. Deal with that later, he told himself.

His mobile phone rang, though it took him a few moments to realise that over the sound. In an effort to get as far away from it as possible, he stuck his head out of the window before answering. 'Yes?' he shouted into the phone. 'Yes, Ching Juan?'

The noise flooding the room was suddenly cut off. The sudden silence made Vincent almost light-headed. He half-turned in David's direction before he remembered, and deliberately turned back to the window again. 'Um, sorry about that. You were saying?'

'Just wanted to ask if you knew how to get to this place,' came Ching Juan's voice over the phone, and she named an address. 'Some new videogames magazine set up shop here just a couple of months ago – I thought I'd go and have a look, you know, ask them if they have any vacancies. Yeah, I know, pretty desperate, huh? But there's not much choice when you're that close to graduation and the job offers haven't exactly been pouring in.'

'I'm not sure how much help I can be,' said Vincent, trying to conjure up a map of the city in his head. 'I mean, I've heard of that street, but actually getting there is a bit – '

There was movemnt behind him, then the phone was snatched unceremoniously from his hand. He made a grab for it, but David was already turning away. 'Ching Juan? David here. No, I haven't knocked Vincent unconscious or clubbed him or anything. What?' a chuckle. 'No, not that either. There's somewhere you want to get to, from the sound of it? Right. How do you spell that? K-E-L – okay, got it. It's not that far, really. Get there before five? No trouble. No, no need to bother with buses – you know they're never reliable anyway. I'll pick you up from the station in... twenty minutes? Sweet. Vincent?' he glanced down at Vincent for a moment. 'Yeah, I'll tell him bye for you.'

But he didn't, and he was out of the room before Vincent could blink twice, leaving Vincent with a dead phone in his hand.