Jarrod
The sound of pummelling water provoked an awkward
reaction. Intentional or otherwise, it was impossible to conceal the
realisation that the shower signified that she was duly unconcealed, exposed,
revealed – a mere metre from where he sat. The invention of the wall, however,
certainly diminished the intimacy of the moment.
Good fences make
good neighbours.
He smiled as Robert Frost’s words wormed their way to the
forefront of his thoughts, striving to be applied to his situation, but
contented himself with a well-visited reflection on his fortune at ‘Mending
Wall’ unexpectedly appearing on his Literature paper. Although never admitted
aloud, it was the only one Jarrod had felt confident to write about and there
was something mischievously shocking in the realisation that, had he been
forced to reflect on snowy woods or diverging roads, he may have been faced
with the prospect of treading quite a different path.
The water stopped.
Towelling was easier to cope with. He could read again.
Austen. The restoration of propriety. He had needed to escape Milton’s hell and
where better to turn than Austen’s heaven?
The sound of various bottles, tubes or canisters tumbling
into the bath as Dawn’s rigorous towelling continued confirmed, for Jarrod,
that their placement had indeed been too precarious. He listened carefully to
each being repositioned as before, sure that he would soon discover at least
one overlooked cylinder lying forlorn amidst the hair that had yet to find its
way down the plug hole. Jane Austen would have kept everything within a
well-ordered cabinet, he was sure.
Jarrod returned to the page, unimpressively impressing
himself at his ability to immediately return to the exact word he was on before
Dawn’s latest intrusion. He was convinced that not everyone was capable of
resuming their reading so swiftly, with only a cursory glance at the previous
sentence to check that it wasn’t actually about the ordering of items within a
cabinet. And, indeed, it turned out that Austen was in fact more concerned
about emphasising just how ‘good-looking’ and ‘gentlemanlike’ Mr Bingley was –
the exact same words no-one had ever used to describe him.
The bathroom door opened with ease, accompanied by a
surprised ‘ooh’ and ‘oops’. Jarrod rolled his eyes up-left, striving to explain
to himself exactly what such an outburst must indicate. He heard her shuffle
rapidly across to her room – clearly still towel-clad – and open and close her
door in a smooth single movement, before clicking the lock firmly into place
(twice). A loud, repeated creaking-noise, accompanied by a slight rattle of
wood, signalled the testing and re-testing of the door-handle and served to
confirm his suspicions surrounding the source of the ‘oops’.
It was about half five but it was still unlike Dawn to be
so forgetful. Yet, the notion of her consciously leaving the door unlocked was
considerably more troublesome.
He
would return to Austen. A reliable door-locker.
---------
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