Perfect Day

knee is tight and sore as she gets out of bed. She grabs her keys, a Dettox spray, and a roll of toilet paper from the shelf by the door. The toilet, on the next floor down, is shared by three of the bedsits. Each has a key. The girls keep it pretty clean, but Kate always uses disinfectant before she sits. The coldness of the seat against the back of her thighs makes her feel real again. Right. Now, on with life. She flushes the toilet with resolve.
    Back in the flat, she pulls off her T-shirt and knickers and stands in the bath scrubbing away her fantasies. The draught from the window puckers her skin into goosebumps . She wraps herself in a towel and throws back the duvet, denying herself the temptation of a quick five minutes to get warm again. Then she crouches over the side of the bed, pulls out her suitcase and takes out her A-Z.
    She has found that the only way to deal with London is methodically. She makes herself do something educational each day in the same way that she makes herself eat a piece of fruit. If you don’t have rules then you forget, and a week can fly by without vitamin C or culture, and that’s a waste. She walks her fingers along the streets from Soho to Bloomsbury wondering if there’s time to make a start on the British Museum before her shift begins. She’s been saving the British Museum , and the longer she puts it off, the more daunting its huge sooty columns seem to become.
    The art galleries are taking longer than she expected. She’d allocated a week for the National, but it’s different when you’re a paintbrush’s length away from a picture, standing where Vincent Van Gogh stood, thinking about what was going on in his head. She wonders why he was so angry with everyday things, even sunflowers. Marie says it’s just a bunch of flowers in a pot, but they worry Kate with their mad spikes.
    She can’t concentrate on more than two paintings before work, and sometimes she goes back to the same ones again. There are still vast dark rooms where she has not even set foot.
    She’s got the weird feeling that she might step through the forbidding portals of the British Museum and never come out.
    As Kate kneels on the floor to put back the A-Z, a searing soreness straightens her up: the scab has split and is oozing watery blood. She grabs the toilet roll and tries to pull off a sheet with one hand, but it will not break and she ends up with a roughly torn streamer of tissue. She’s annoyed with herself: her wound was healing fine and now she’s going to have to get a plaster because she tore her trousers yesterday and her only alternative, since Tony doesn’t like them to wear jeans to work, is a skirt, and, as Marie would say, you can’t accessorize that with a wodge of pink toilet paper. A packet of plasters will cost over a pound of her budget, which means that she’s going to have to swap her usual strong cappuccino at Marco’s for a cup of Marie’s Nescafé . That hit of caffeine is the only expensive addiction she’s managed to develop since arriving in London .
    Kate fills the electric kettle angrily, plugs it in angrily, and angrily waits for it to boil. Then she thinks of Vincent Van Gogh. If he were alive today, perhaps he’d paint a furious toaster or a bad-tempered kettle. She’ll have to tell Marie. And Marie will say, as she always does, ‘Isn’t he the one who cut off his ear? No bloody wonder he was angry.’
    Kate sniffs the T-shirt she was wearing last night. The armpits are fine, but it smells like a pub. She bends down again and pulls out a clean black T-shirt, then fumbles around in the suitcase for clean underwear, but there isn’t any and there’s nothing she hates more than keeping on last night’s knickers. She wonders if Marie would mind, just this once, if she borrowed something. They don’t usually share clothes, even though they’re the same height.
    She approaches Marie’s chest of drawers slightly apprehensively.
    The top drawer contains a pair of handcuffs, a blindfold, a feather boa and a stripy school tie. Kate remembers Marie asking her to send down the tie a year or so ago, telling some lie about fancy dress. She wonders why Marie didn’t buy herself a school tie in London . Did she want to make some sort of statement, the ultimate two-fingered salute to the convent? Underneath, swathed in a soft plastic dry cleaners’ film, there’s a very short black puff-sleeved dress with a frilly white apron attached. It’s a maid’s