Brand New Friend by Mike Gayle Page A

arrangement. It was Commitment. She had not spent the last five years investing in their relationship to give up on it just like that. She was determined to make him stay. So, no matter what he did in his continuing strategy to make her stop loving him, he would lose. She wasn’t going to abandon herself to a life of loneliness without a fight.
    With a heavy heart, Jo headed upstairs. She could hear music coming from behind the door to the spare room so she rapped on it twice – even though this was her house and Sean had contributed nothing to the mortgage payments: it was her way of signalling that she was sorry. She opened the door and peered in. Sean was lying on the bed with his hands folded behind his head. He didn’t look at her when she entered the room.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ said Jo. ‘You’re right. I should stop hassling you.’
    She waited eagerly, but Sean said nothing, just lay there, lips pursed, and stared at the ceiling.
    Two
    ‘Look,’ spat Mr Clarkson, menacingly, ‘I’m only going to say this one more time. Are you going to replace the broken toilet in my bathroom or am I going to have to take matters into my own hands?’
    It was Monday afternoon, a month after Jo’s argument with Sean. She was at her place of work, the Cresta Community Housing Association (South Manchester), being shouted at by one of her tenants.
    It was without doubt her greatest regret that she had ever accepted the temporary post as housing officer ten years ago when she had been a new graduate – greater than having allowed her brother to ‘shoot’ an apple off her head with a dart when she was twelve, greater than walking out of the exam room ten minutes into her second A-level history paper because it was too hard, thereby ensuring that she got a U, greater than selling half of her record collection for a hundred pounds to raise funds when she was a student for a week in Turkey with her mates.
    As she gazed at Mr Clarkson it dawned on her how much she hated this job. She hated it with a passion – with everything she had to give and a little more. The only thing that stopped her getting up and walking out was that she had nowhere else to go.
    ‘Mr Clarkson—’ said Jo, patiently.
    ‘What?’ he snapped.
    ‘I don’t understand why you’re telling me this again because, as I said to you when you arrived this morning and the last eleven times that you’ve called, I can’t send anyone out to repair your broken toilet until the requisite paperwork has been filled in. Since you refuse to tell me how your toilet was damaged, my hands are tied.’
    ‘What does it matter how it got broken?’
    ‘It matters to the paperwork.’
    ‘It’s your paperwork,’ he said, ‘you fill it out. But let me warn you, if someone from Housing doesn’t get themselves round to my place and fix my toilet soon there’s going to be trouble.’
    Jo didn’t doubt this for a second. Nine months ago when the Benefits Agency had threatened to stop Mr Clarkson’s income support, on the grounds that he’d been spotted working on a market stall in the city centre, he had come to the conclusion that someone at the housing-association office had ‘grassed’ him up and come into the office screaming about how he was going to ‘get’ everyone. Three days later a masked man, who was clearly Mr Clarkson in a bright orange balaclava, had thrown a large chunk of masonry through the association’s office window, then hurled a barrage of expletives at the staff before making his escape. The police couldn’t do anything because Mr Clarkson persuaded a few of his friends to give him a watertight alibi. With no forensic evidence to tie him to the scene, and only association staff’s eye-witness reports that the man responsible ‘looked, acted, dressed and sounded like Mr Clarkson in a ski mask’, it was depressingly inevitable that he would get away with it.
    ‘This is pathetic!’ snarled Mr Clarkson.
    Jo stared at him blankly. She knew that