When she falls asleep in the furniture showroom she sleeps like a hog. She’s wedged between two untraversable rolls of carpet; their textures the same as the Kerry Blue Terrier she gropes in the park sometimes. One carpet is maroon, the other fawn, and she feels held and nuzzled, like a popcorn kernel between a flap of gum and a half-erupted wisdom tooth. She wakes to a finger booping her on the nose and a child staring at her, its nose wet. She crawls out of the cavity into the halogen light.
She didn’t mean to fall asleep here; she’d come to the showroom in search of a lampshade. She can’t much see the point of lampshades – why does a lamp need a hat? It’s like when you see a drawing of the sun with sunglasses on. Who’s keeping the umbrella dry? Who’s dusting the vacuum cleaner? Her mother said she needed one. ‘You need a lampshade,’ she said. ‘It’s unseemly, the way you’re living,’ she said.
All the lampshades were terminally ugly, she’d thought. She picked up one that looked like the eggshell-coloured cone she once saw the Kerry Blue wearing. ‘It’s to keep his teeth away from his balls,’ the dog’s owner said. ‘What balls?’ she said. ‘Right enough,’ he said. She’d held the narrower end of lampshade to her eyes like a telescope and turned the world into an evolving disc. The fatigue of being in the furniture shop was insurmountable. Then she saw the carpets. They were in rows and columns: upright sentinels and horizontal Swiss rolls. She’d stroked their curly hides and shorn bellies. She could feel them loving her, so when nobody was around she squeezed her way between two. She settled herself into incubating vacuum at the centre of the storage rack. She slept.
The next morning, she has coffee with Miles. Miles orders a piece of carrot cake, takes a bite, returns to the counter and asks for a refund. She can’t even be embarrassed: Miles’s dad is dead, which makes him not accountable for all sorts of things. Sometimes when they go the cinema, she lets him put his tongue in her ear; she doesn’t say anything when he shoplifts.
‘You look amazing,’ he says, now.
‘Oh, thanks,’ she says. She prides herself on being good at accepting compliments, but nobody ever praises her for being good at accepting compliments.
‘Did you get the silk pillowcases I was talking about?’
‘What?’
