48 Shades of Brown

Well, the first hour of my new life has been pretty awful, I'm thinking as I unzip my suitcase. Does no-one do anything for reasons any more? French? Psychology degrees?

And when Naomi said home, before you got home, it made me think. I don't know if, in her mind, she was referring to her home or ours, or even to me arriving back in Australia. Not that it matters, but I have to start thinking of this place as home for now. The wrap-around verandahs, the big mango tree in the backyard, the overgrown garden ? my home for this year. The blue table with its uneven legs. My mother would hate that table. She'd look at it as though it had somehow been rude to her. There's so much not right with it, she'd call it junk and throw it out.

My second hour is, perhaps, marginally worse than my first.

I'm hanging things that need it in my wardrobe, lining up my balled-up socks in drawers, when I hear Naomi's voice again on the verandah. Relaxed this time, talking as though it's easy. There's a man's laugh, and she and the man, who looks like another uni student, walk down the hallway, past my room and into hers.

The door clicks shut, but the murmur of close conversation comes easily through the wall. Not the words, but the closeness of it. And, soon, I'm thinking that Naomi must have the squeakiest bed I've ever heard. And for about one second I wonder if it's so squeaky, so famously squeaky, that she's demonstrating it by bouncing up and down, and then I work out what's really going on.

There's something strangely isolating about folding your underpants just metres away from the action, arranging socks systematically in a drawer as though it might be useful. Looking at them sitting there in rows, needlessly colour-coded (although it won't last), which seems to symbolise some very unchosen kind of aloneness. It makes me think of the 'my weekend' stories we had to write at primary school. On the weekend there was lots of sex in my house. Me? My socks, they're totally organised.

In Naomi's room, the mattress picks up the pace. If lungs were made of chicken wire, this is the noise asthma would make, I'm sure of it.

I open one of the boxes we left here a few weeks ago, but somehow I can't unpack my school uniform while this is going on. Already, I think I'm going to disappoint my room. As though it's had a few lonely weeks, unoccupied, waiting for things to pick up, but I'm only going to make them worse. A whole year of organising socks, study, single-bed occupancy. Why does being this close to the action make me feel so far from it?

And they're making noises now.

I want to go outside, but the floorboards squeak, so they'd know. They'd hear me going. I think about sticking my fingers in my ears and humming, but if they heard that it'd be far worse. Somehow any option I think of just makes me feel like more of a loser.

I can hear Naomi's voice, making noises but not words, and I wish I could stop listening, but I can't. The pace of it picks up and I can hear his voice too, deeper. Like bad, urgent karaoke, two people trying hard but not quite remembering the words to the same song, singing along with the chicken-wire voice of the mattress. Then like weight-lifters, straining between the clean and the jerk. I wish I hadn't thought that. I wish I hadn't thought of Naomi's face doing the weight-lifter thing right now.

And then it's over ? sighing like a deflated balloon and then stillness. I can't even move now. If I did, it'd be as though I'd stayed here specifically to listen, and that'd be almost worse than being found with my fingers in my ears, humming. Is there an etiquette to this? Being in the room next to housemates having sex? There's so much I don't know.

I sit on the edge of my bed, telling myself not to sleep yet. Why is the bed next to the wall, right next to this particular wall, the thinnest thickness of wood away from Naomi and the love trampoline? It makes me wonder about this room's last occupant. What's wrong with the opposite wall, backing onto the kitchen? Or under the window? Of course, I can't change now, since I'm sure they'd know why. I'll just have to be cool about this, all year.