Sat Mar 22 2025

Thursday, afternoon

Eddy was the only one bold enough to call it to her attention: her problem. Though he’d only been in her life for six months, he had developed a platonic authority over her, the kind that friends wield once things start feeling safe and predictable. While they were eating ice cream on a blue wooden bench near Battersea Power Station – Sheila nervously scraping the paint with her long unclipped fingernails – Eddy pointed out her evasive actions and her sickeningly passive demeanour.

'You’re like a soggy piece of toast right now' he said, brushing ice-cream cone crumbs off his lap. ‘Why don’t you, I don’t know, stop peeling the bloody bench and deal with your actual life?’

Sheila blinked at him, her scoop of mint-chocolate chip dripping onto her wrist. Eddy had a way of making the truth feel like a slap, but she couldn’t argue with him. 

'This is disgusting,' she said while avoiding eye contact and checking her phone. Eddy’s eyes could make your heart split in two. ‘It tastes like toothpaste and chocolate.’ Sheila had already checked her inbox three times that morning, knowing full well nothing had changed in the last three hours. It was the act of checking that soothed her, not the result. Did Hetty and Eddy talk about her? Of course they did. Why wouldn’t they? But what did they say? What exact words did they use? Did Hetty call her ‘unstable’? Did Eddy agree? Had he laughed about it? Sheila replayed this imaginary conversation over in her head, each one worse than the last.  A long silence, stabbed the entity that was the space between them.

Sheila, though numbed from all living things, was fond of Eddy – his loosely-defined perspective on things and people and how this enabled him to sail through the waters of life with such coolness and simplicity. This distanced view on matters kept him in line, it helped him to not go mad, to keep an eye on the silver lining of things, rather than on the weaknesses of mankind. Yet, it never made him seem arrogant, or indifferent to things. To Sheila, Eddy was always affable and no stranger to sensibility. In fact, Sheila felt that he possessed a profound quality of tailoring himself to people’s needs, showing up exactly in the right way – reacting in speech or body language with such pertinence, almost as if he could read her thoughts.

If Hetty – Sheila’s yoga instructor, a well-spirited woman in her fifties – had known that her son and Sheila wouldn't hit it off romantically, she wouldn’t have gone to such lengths to present herself as the perfect mother in law. There would’ve been no free yoga classes, no expensive incense from her trip to India. In fact, if Hetty had known anything about Sheila – beyond her aptitude for executing kākāsanas (crow poses) and śīrṣāsanas (headstands), her fresh, yet fleeting career in feminist activism, or her freckled, plump face and utkāṭasana (chair pose)-sculpted butt – she wouldn’t have entertained the idea of introducing this walking red flag to her son. Far away from the blue bench, Hetty thought what was I thinking, while resting in the final downward facing dog of the class she was teaching, her cohort of lunch-break yogis soon to be dismissed. 

Word about Sheila had spread through the petit bourgeois circles of East London, and Hetty quickly realised why Sheila had stopped attending her classes.

The burnout. The hate campaign. Hetty had indulged in that gossip, but she was also concerned for her son, who was now spending much time around  Sheila. Reflecting on her failed matchmaking attempt, Hetty rolled up her indigo yoga mat and muttered ‘Better friends than lovers, that girl.’ 

She greeted her students with a rushed namaste, feeling a twinge of regret. The absence of romantic sparks had left room for a solid, if less virtuous friendship between Sheila and Eddy. She kept telling Eddy that Sheila would steal his prāṇa (life force) just by being a part of her unnecessarily complicated life. 

Three days ago, Hetty had run into Sheila at Planet Organic, where she spotted Sheila selecting beans in agitating doubt, as if she were choosing a pregnancy test. Hetty, who liked to believe that the almighty had stitched the label “wise old woman” onto her chest, instructed herself not to look away. As she slid a bottle of kefir into her basket, Sheila looked up, met Hetty’s gaze, and offered a stingy smile, as if a full one was too costly. 

Where Hetty had once seen a promising match for her son, she now saw Sheila’s crimson ponytail–dangling from the crown of her head..like..well, a red flag–repelling all the good from  her barren existence. And yet, she couldn’t help but feel sorry for the girl. 

Neither Hetty nor Sheila understood why Eddy had decided to stick around. Sheila had no capacity to invest in friendships; she was her own handful. He wasn’t getting anything out of this relationship, at any rate, that’s what both Sheila and Hetty thought.

What Eddy could never tell a living soul, was that he had secretly committed himself to a personal project; he’d conduct a spiritual make-over on Sheila; his charity cause. He’d magically alter the pathetic misery that Sheila’s life had become–chronically online, espousing lipstick feminism while being utterly incapable of washing a dish. ‘A woman’s right to drive’, she’d once argued, ‘was paramount to escaping patriarchy’, yet now she couldn’t even escape the apathy pinning her to her couch — as it crowns him with honour and, strangely, arouses a sexual feeling by this behavioural pattern of “doing good”. On Saturday mornings, when he wasn’t serving overpriced lattes or scolding homeless people for rearranging the bookshelves in the cafe, he’d show up at Sheila’s house to help her clean, feed Roger, her perpetually bored cat, and drag her outside for fresh air. He noticed that this Saturday ritual had become a little too important to him. Witnessing Sheila’s negligent, but sternly beautiful appearance – her unnatural red hair, wild like the manes of an untamed horse, her shabby harem hippie pants…. she had become a little too important to him. 

On Saturdays, he decided he’d smile for both of them. Sometimes he’d ring the doorbell with no one answering. In these moments, the only sound echoing through the mold-clothed hallway was the crack of Eddy’s pride, dissolving into the grounds of shame. Once, in the elevator, he’d caught his own reflection. His ‘Bored & Enlightened’ T-shirt reminded him of his past creative endeavours. The ones he had birthed during his lunch breaks at the coffee shop, scribbling ideas in a hurry, the paper stained with coffee and milk. Would he go travelling again? This time, further away. How far could one really go from himself? Maybe Indonesia. Maybe Australia. Maybe further: a person, their heart, the most obscure hiding place of all. He could give the urban sound baths another try. Charge people forty-five pounds per session. Find cheap, empty spaces. All he would need were his own Tibetan singing bowls and a gong. He could get those second-hand. But Sheila preoccupied his mind. Sheila might’ve been a prisoner to her own inertia, but Eddy was a prisoner of his own ego. 

Saturday, late morning

Today was a lucky Saturday. A saxophonist played on the tube, the radio weatherman sneezed in between reports and Sheila had decided to open her door, looking more helpless than ever.

 'As one does, I’ll make you a cup of coffee. In your house. Using your coffee maker,' Eddy announced as he inspected the packaging of the beans for the expiration date. 

Sheila forced a smile in quiet gratitude for Eddy’s loyalty. At this point, she didn’t care much about his intentions anymore. She jabbed the bin bag by the door with the mop Eddy had once picked up from Poundland, her right eye secretly tracing  his tall figure in her kitchen. Eddy was like a sinister angel–with coal-licked wings, hair black as night (just like Hetty’s), and Siberian-blue eyes like a snowstorm covering you from head to toe. And, of course, there were always those ghastly Chelsea boots. A year ago, Eddy had tried to launch a zine: The Detachment Diaries. He’d reckoned the name sounded sharp, sharp enough to build a small cult following. But the mix of rambling essays and grainy film photos, all loosely themed around post-irony, hadn’t been nearly as cool as Eddy imagined.

Hadn’t she been cool once? What had happened to that Sheila? She took out her phone and opened her mailbox: 20 messages; X: 273 hate tweets, 300 Supportive tweets; Instagram:48 dm’s and 1000 likes to her last post. She did all this counting, while the coffee brewed, its aroma curling through the room, threading itself into Sheila’s senses. And for just a second, she felt dignified. Crisp faith, appetizing aspiration. Am I really feeling this? she wondered, just for a second.

'Pour me a cup of ambition, will you?' Sheila said, eyeing her, weirdly incentivized friend.

After five everlasting minutes, she did another round: number of Instagram followers? A modest five thousand. What did she fight for? Women's right to move; at work, at home, in the streets. Over the years Sheila had made herself the face of tackling workplace discrimination, of lobbying local councils to make public spaces safer and writing fiery op-eds on reproductive rights. Her latest project? Revolution on wheels. They understood, didn’t they? The fucking Gulf States. 'It’s the vehicle for freedom, literally and figuratively,' Sheila had declared at her latest rally, just before it went to shit. 'One day we’ll be driving our way out of patriarchy.'

Her therapist said she’d been 'blocking out' her 'memories of the recent traumatic events that had taken place'.

Wasn’t it all a joke? The imposter syndrome throbbed in her chest. She thought back to when she was ten, her father standing out on the balcony of their tiny flat, a fag between his fingers, her younger brother outside with him, while she lingered in the doorway. He’d pretend to be a train conductor, just like their dad. "Doors closing,” her brother would announce, right as Sheila tried to step onto his imaginary train. Closing doors would haunt her for the rest of her life: her brother being visibly favoured by her dad; teachers labeling her mediocre and not fit for engineering nor law-school (‘try marketing’); getting scolded for not being formally dressed– not wearing a skirt– to the oral exam; feeling forced to laugh with the sexist jokes of your boss, shaking hands with his partners, accepting their compliments and shoulder touches. Closing doors would inevitably lead to her battle for opening one. But did she really think she could change the world? Now, glued to her couch, Sheila wondered if it might be better to just live one’s life in simplicity, instead of doom-scrolling her way into political and social awareness. Fuck intellectualism. 

​​By the time thoughts of doors had faded and the caffeine had seeped into their bloodstreams, Eddy had already pulled on his shoes. Spring had demanded an early birth, the sun looking for crevices in the clouds, new life seeking home in barren things. Oh no, Sheila thought, the Chelsea boots are taking me out for a walk again.

'Watch out' Eddy said while they walked along Regent’s canal. His hands were tied to his lower back, his steps philanthropic.

'For what? Letting Roger starve? Or working my way into the epicenter of collective hate?'

'That too: maybe let the women in The Gulf States sit in the passenger's seat. Perhaps they don’t mind it as much as you. Oh and let the bobbies do their job at protests. But also you, watch out for yourself. If you don’t stop isolating and alienating yourself like this, you’ll die like those lonely people in Sweden'

'Which people in Sweden?'

'Those people that are so lonely, they die, and when they die no one finds out about it until months after; their bodies just rotting away in their apartments. You’d be eaten by rats. Do you want to be eaten by rats?'

Sheila felt her cheeks flushing to hot pink, like the knickers she used to wear when she was fifteen. The occupation of full-time laziness had become her way of maintaining momentum. Sometimes she questioned whether it all had really happened. The event had diminished to a mind-bending blur of uncanny memories: the protest in Bethnal Green—led and coordinated by Sheila— turning violent in the blink of an eye, as women of all shapes, colours and ages, vindictively challenged a lineage of stuck up police officers. On Columbia Road, the market had become a massacre, leaving behind a trail of trampled flowers and protest signs. Afterwards, the media framed the protest as ‘pathetic’ and ‘mere vandalisation’. To make matters worse, some Romanian teenager from Elephant & Castle launched an online hate campaign against Sheila: ‘Silence this bitch now #BoyswillbeBoys’ went the campaign slogan on Facebook. Why Facebook? What was a sixteen year old doing on Facebook? Sheila thought to herself, as if that mattered. The hate came fast and hard. 

'Don’t be silly. There are no rats in my apartment,' she said with an air of arrogance, as she pulled the sides of her coat tighter around her waist.

'Yea, because I clean it every Saturday, you daft cow.'

Regent’s Canal was Regent’s Canal. Charming and dirty, with traces of industrial pinpoints discolouring the serene waterway. 

'So, when are you going to make your return?' Eddy asked. Sheila stopped biting her thumbnail to look at his face.

'Don’t know…..but I will, you know? Make a comeback.'

He knew full well that his time with Sheila, an idle pursuit of an unattainable version of himself–one who could rescue broken people and emerge whole in the process–would eventually run its course. Sheila would be fine, ultimately, regardless of how much time he had invested. If this was the deepest she’d ever break, how much higher could she rise? Eddy cleared his throat the way people do when they feel uncomfortable. What books would he pick up then? What man or woman would be sleeping in his bed? The scenarios of loneliness flashed before him in an instant. After Sheila’s comeback posts, after her post-demise, what would become of him? Did one person’s renaissance always spell another’s downfall? 

As Sheila checked her socials for the third time that day, Eddy’s steps were halted by what looked like a crime scene: a street lantern struck down, lifeless. It lay there on the pavement, beheaded. Eddy felt the slow rise of tears, traveling from his heart to his eyes. Where was the light supposed to come from now? There was no sun on this godforsaken island, and—Eddy’s poignant realisation pressed against his chest with the weight of all things ending; a feeling as dark as night, curling like smoke through his ribs. This, here—or down some other dim-lit street—another broken thing would call him. For there would always be something to fix, the wounded other, the closest he could get to himself.

Naomi Ronner