V

I come back to the apartment and find the worst thing in the world. A yellow postcard has been shoved between the door and its frame. This is not a postcard that says something like I wish you were here with me on the Costa del Sol or Why didn’t you tell me the Camino de Santiago is full of slow-moving retirees? This is a postcard that says CARD TO CALL. It means that someone has arrived at my apartment with a package after driving through the narrow city streets, probably double-parking, and walking up six flights of stairs, and then, seeing as I wasn’t there, because it was the middle of the day on a Wednesday and I do have some semblance of a life, has taken the package away again. Now I will have to go through the stress of relocating this product in whatever mystery location it happens to be in. I hope it’s not Penrose because I don’t have a car.

I pull the card out, and while I’m thinking of a way that I could pass this burden on to someone else, it occurs to me that I haven’t ordered anything. Maybe Greta ordered something? She orders a lot of books online and then shouts at me when they arrive. She shouts that she knows it’s unethical to buy books from big conglomerates but it’s the government’s fault that she can’t afford to be an ethical consumer because they took away allowances for postgraduate students in 2012. That’s her official statement, but I know she just doesn’t like the girl who works at the bookshop near our house.

Greta and I were at our uncle’s birthday recently, and she had too many Bacardi and lemonades and announced that the girl who works in the bookshop near our house thinks she’s better than everyone because she works in a bookshop and has a stupid nightingale tattoo and, well, Greta has also read Oscar Wilde, so this girl can fuck right off. I said I think the people at the bookshop are fine, and she told me to go and fuck the Happy Prince with them, then. I don’t like them enough to suggest we have an orgy with a fictional French statue. Not at this stage, anyway. When I turn the card over and read it properly, I see that it isn’t for Greta. It says VALADDIN VLADISAV J in big Sharpie letters. This isn’t how I usually spell my name, but I can’t prove beyond reasonable doubt that they meant someone else.

I painstakingly enter the twelve-digit reference code into the courier website. The package is at the depot on Victoria Street West, which isn’t far away, but it’s hot and I want to go inside. I walk back down all the stairs, groaning. I want to sit on my nice new turquoise couch, drink the sparkling apple juice that’s in the fridge, and read my book of Spanish poems. I don’t like reading about pain and trauma, I have the Al Jazeera app for that. And at the moment, for personal reasons, I don’t like reading things about people being in love with each other either. Greta studies comparative literature, and I can hear her exclaiming things in her room all the time, like, Oh, god, this man’s just bloody jumped out the window because of hyperinflation! Oh, Jesus Christ, everyone’s got cholera because the warning posters are all in Italian! A book about the beauty of the desert and sea and mountains and other Spanish landscape features avoids such things, for the most part.