Fruit Fly

As I start up my sixth game of Candy Crush while sat on the closed toilet seat, I have a very clear and rational realisation. I, too, am a piece of exploding computerised fruit.

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That is the extent of me. Here one moment, only to be pulverised into a spray of sweet nothing the very next. Obliterated. Forgotten. Outside, I can hear the voices of my guests and the music droning on. Why won’t they leave?

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The truth is, if I did explode, I don’t think they’d notice. At least not at first. They would pretend that they cared – at my funeral. That I was important to them. That I had made a mark on their lives in some beautiful and profound way. But they would lie.

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One of them lied earlier. A woman I have met only once.

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‘Mallory is basically Clarissa Dalloway,’ she proclaimed loudly to my kitchen full of arty (pretentious) intellectual types, pointing in my direction with a mouthful of hummus. Hummus I had bought from Tesco and put in the poshest-looking bowl I could find. I’d sprinkled some coriander on top and pretended I’d made it. (I suppose I lie too. But it’s different.) ‘Clarissa Fucking Dalloway,’ she repeated, whilst pulling a face like the mouthful was precipitating an orgasm. I swallowed my jealousy. I haven’t had an orgasm in years, let alone one triggered by Tesco’s own-brand hummus. ‘Mallory throws the best parties in North London.’

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Today is the first time this woman has stepped foot inside my house.

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But I laughed obligingly. And the guests all agreed, crowded round my kitchen island, nodding, a bobbing sea of wire-rimmed glasses, trilbies, rolled up cigarettes tucked behind ears (lobes studded with hoops and dangling crosses). Every one defying the vape trend because they are too real, too hardcore and altogether too brilliant to care about lung cancer, like their Tate Modern memberships and Birkenstocks somehow make them immune.