Life (Part 1)

I woke up this morning and fell out of bed. Well, if we’re being pedantic, I fell out of bed this morning and woke up; these two occurrences are, unfortunately, relative.

The mirror I have haphazardly balanced on the chest of drawers opposite my bed informs me that I am wearing my 40-year-old-gin-drinker’s mask. Yes, my life is starting to resemble an episode of "Sex and the City", only without any sex, well, none I’d like anyway. A friend of mine once sent me a text; ‘some people see finalities in every qualification they achieve, and they think like that their whole lives and never enjoy life- remember, life is a journey, not a pub crawl.’ Well at the moment I have no qualifications achieved and the pub-crawl has become a pub pilgrimage. I smell like a pack of Marlboro Lights and my mouth tastes like an ashtray- this is interesting considering I don’t smoke. For some reason I’m still fully dressed, in last night’s clothes, and my hair seems to be stuck together by something sticky (probably Malibu). I can’t quite remember the face of the bloke who woke me up when the bus terminated. I’m fucking grateful to the guy. Last time I fell asleep on a bus terminating outside my house I woke up on the A10; all the bus lights switched off and the driver singing along to "total eclipse of the heart." God I hate Magic FM.

So this is Sunday morning. The sun is shining and so is my skin. Sophia is looking at me through slanted eyes cocky little puss, she’s like my mother, only thankfully she only speaks when she wants food. My mother on the other hand only seems to speak to me to offer it. "Would anyone like more? Rebecca?" I mean, I’m twenty three-I bloody hope I’m not still ‘a growing girl.’

Sunday, day of rest; not like I have many days of anything but at the moment. My nights are filled with the joys of the theatre, and my days are a messy blur of coffee meetings, cooking lunch, and watching bad television off my newly acquired digi-box. Thanks to abc1 I can watch American sitcoms twenty-four seven and eat dry cereal, with a spoon, off any piece of washed crockery that might be festering around the sink; short of which there’s always the plastic trays from empty chocolate boxes. Sometimes I go to the gym, sometimes I have a jog, but mostly I just piss around. I’m just waiting for my life to start.

The bathroom looks like a bombsite. My flatmate’s managed to pull down the shower curtain, again, and displace the toilet seat. This means that when I sit on the pot I slide off - though this may also have something to do with my confused sense of balance. Janie’s ‘on,’ so to speak, and so there are pad wrappers in many colours round the sides of the bog. I don’t know how she manages to deposit of the actual towels without chucking these pretty wastes of plastic, maybe it’s an attempt to brighten up the room. They look like something a child might make a collage out of.

I haven’t done any washing in days and consequently the laundry bin is over-flowing and I have no clean socks, so I pull on a pair of bright red slipper socks. The grips on the soles are shaped like bones and there’s a picture of a rabid looking dog on the sides in a tasteful navy and the word FIDO all over them...hmm stylish.

I should really get undressed, but then I would just have to get dressed again, so instead I stumble downstairs wiping off my smudged war paint with what I initially thought was a face wipe and am now discovering to in fact be a surface cleaning wipe - so now my skin is lemon fresh and bacteria free, hell I could eat my lunch off it; chances are, I probably will.

There’s a missed call on my Motorola and its squeaking at me every five seconds. I forgot to plug it in last night and so intermittently it makes a sort of gloopy blumping noise, which is equally irritating. Sophia is tying herself round my ankles, and Alex is lying on my sofa with his left hand dangling into the ashtray and drool slipping down his chin. Christ, what have we become?

The call was from my agent. OK, so I lied when I said I had no qualifications, I do have my BA from Mountview Theatre School, and an agent to prove it. Amanda, completely crap - bless her heart - but the best I’m going to get. The missed call, however, is promising, and as soon as I feel up to stringing together a coherent sentence I’ll try and get hold of her on her mobile. The last audition I had was an interesting experience. It was for a music video for a Killers track. I had to lie on a bed with a guy and have really natural sweet looking couply sex with him under the duvet. Well, he was a minger, I was awkward, neither of us got the job. C’est la vie!

Food food food, food, hmmmm. Cold pizza. Pick off the meat, especially processed ham, can’t stand that bloody stuff, and voila, breakfast. There’s a bottle of diet coke out as well and I can’t be arsed to boil the kettle so that, the remainder of the Pringles, and this congealed delight will have to suffice. My mother would be ashamed. It’s not that I can’t cook, or even that I dislike cooking; it’s just that anything remotely creative seems beyond me at the moment. The world’s just spinning with me on it and nothing changes. I’m living in Groundhog Day. A mushy grunting noise comes from the sofa. Alex pulls himself up looks around, dazed and a little confused, realises he’s neither in his bed, nor his house, looks at me pulling the crust off my pizza, seems to comprehend, shakes his head, rubs away the drool and promptly lies down to sleep again. Last night will come back to him in all sorts of shades of crap soon. He hit on way too many men, and by hitting on one girl, one too many of them as well. There’s a possibility him and the barman from the local did something rather messy in the toilets at GAY, perhaps I won’t remind him. There are sometimes when it’s good to lose a few hours of your life and not retrieve them. It means you can start the day with a fuzzy head but a clear conscience. I swing Alex’s legs off my sofa and sit down. Remote in hand I settle me down for a good morning with ‘Good Morning.’ Life is far from beautiful.