6 Armand Notices His Surroundings

July 16th - Thirty days until the convention

I woke slowly, my eyelids unsticking in sections and my body lying numb and inaccessible. Eventually, feeling returned to my extremities, beginning, unfortunately, with a cramp in my left calf. I surged to my feet and tried walking it out, cursing and whimpering under my breath.

The muscles finally eased into a nonexcruciating position, and I stood leaning against the door of the cupboard and shaking my leg angrily. I'd kicked off my shoes and jeans the night before. Or, come to think of it, the early afternoon before ...

I glanced hazily at my watch: only 2 p.m.—that was quite early for me, most days. I dug the heels of my hands into my eye sockets in an attempt to force my brain to wake up. There was work to be done. Pages that needed to be penciled cried out from the depth of my carry-on. After all, Deconstructionist Monochrome Blah Blah Something Comics didn't draw themselves.

I was meant to have sent in these pages before fleeing the commonwealth, but I wasn't yet used to deadlines being handed down from on-high.

Surrogate Goosehad been a passion project for so long that the idea that an international publisher like Drake House had picked up the bloody mindless drivel that was my brainchild felt like an elaborate prank. There were times, usually between two and six in the morning, when I convinced myself that I had fabricated the entire success of my comic. That I was still working my old soul-sucking dancing job to finance the self-publishing, and this was all a sad, drug-fueled dream.

As if she could sense the aquifers of my self-pity threatening to swell, Lakshmi chose that moment to send me a series of vaguely threatening emojis: an airplane, a small fire, and a question mark.

I answered with a voice message: "I live. Unfortunately."

Lakshmi: Yes you do

This was immediately followed by a sleepy voice message, the murmur of late-night television in the background. "Are you ready to take America by storm, pet?"

That was an easy question. "No."

Her response was just as fast: "Do it anyway, you wonk. Night."

That was her answer to everything: Do it anyway. And the worst part was that it often worked. Lakshmi was the one who'd somehow reorganized the known universe into a place where Surrogate Goose was something I could live on. She'd sent me to indie publishers at first, then booked me for conventions and comic shop signings. I'd even appeared briefly on a morning program and been recognized in a pub once. It had been three grueling years before Drake House noticed us, and like the anonymous, newly vehicular gourd plucked from obscurity that I was, Lakshmi had every intention of riding me to the ball.

This was our chance. My chance.

I was already hobbling myself by refusing to sell the rights to Surrogate Goose, to let some team of wankers turn it into a film or breakfast cereal or whatever.

"We've got to prove you're worth the investment,"Lakshmi'd told me. "Not me, not the comic, you."

"But Lakshmi, what if this goes the way of Leeds?"

Early during our Drake House run, I'd been interviewed for some nerdy radio segment. I'd been my terrified, monosyllabic self and had spent the whole time fighting the urge to hang up or pretend I was going through a tunnel.

"It won't,"she'd said with entirely unearned confidence.

The House had signed us for a year, and it was nearly up. Contract renegotiations and all manner of things which I would not, could not understand, were making Lakshmi nervous. As she'd explained it to me, Drake House was ready to make a larger commitment to the comic and myself. But they needed me to prove I was worth it. The big test was going to be the Drawn Quartered Comic Convention at the end of the summer. They wanted me to speak, show my face, be ... marketable on a global scale. I needed to be a brand: not just the creator of Surrogate Goose, but its avatar.

Being somewhat known in Great Britain or even Europe was uncomfortable and I was wholly unsuited to it.

The concept of American Celebrity all but caused me to lose control of my bowels.

But if I didn't show Drake House that I was capable of human interaction, of being a personality, they'd drop us. They wouldn't renew my contract, Lakshmi would lose the biggest deal of her career, and for me it would be back to the indie cons, soul-sucking day jobs, and life as a pumpkin.

A shower would help. A shower was necessary and probably mandatory for inclusion in the species at this point.

I yanked my shirt over my head, remembering to check the coast for flatmates before wandering out in my pants. Confident that I was indeed alone, I padded down the hall and into the toilet, and only once I was standing under the warm torrent of water did I realize that I'd forgotten the tiny bottle of shampoo in my travel bag.

Across from me, however, appeared to be an impressive selection of hair products, all nestled in a wire holder that adhered to the shower wall through the ingenious use of suction cups. There were three shampoos, two conditioners, and a variety of other things far surpassing my comprehension.

I wrestled with my conscience for a moment, then stole a small dollop of the most generic shampoo I could identify. As I kneaded it into my scalp, my brain informed me that the bathroom products were not the only additions to the décor I had missed. I tried to visualize the walk from my bedroom, and sure enough, the memory was suffused with a sense of ... pink. Nothing had actually been pink, I was quite certain, but there had been enough pink-like things to produce the effect. And a smell ... lilac?

I rinsed the soap out of my hair and off my body with the intent to dry off and investigate, when it turned out that along with my shampoo, I'd forgotten to grab a towel. I stifled a groan and then checked to see if the disturbingly well-prepared flatmate had provided, which indeed they had. There were two hand towels hanging in their little plastic rings by the sink.

With some difficulty, I dried myself off and even managed to wrap the larger of the two slightly more than three quarters of the way around my waist. Clutching it in place with one hand, hair still dripping, I set out to explore the transformation the flat had undergone while I slept.

There were pictures on the walls and flowers in the windows. Surfaces gleamed, and there was a small tree growing out of a wicker basket by the door. The pictures were mainly of horses: grazing, rearing, leaping, or simply posing in the sunlight.

Waking up inside a House Garden was doing a number on my head. I was troubled by the terrible accoutrements of bourgeoisie that surrounded me, but I was more troubled by their source. Although the temperature was quite comfortable, I shivered, trying to imagine the sort of person who would be quite so fond of horses and feel the need for this many flower vases.

I made my way over to the fridge—it was already adorned with a whiteboard, what appeared to be several postcards from Paris, and three different magnets in the shapes of, yes, horses. One of them was a unicorn. I shook my head to try to clear it and opened the fridge.

It was even scarier in there.

Nothing but green leaves, fruit, and what I could only call ingredients. As opposed to food.

Whoever they were, they didn't just clean—they cooked as well. I was rooming with the ghost of Martha Stewart. A health-conscious Martha Stewart. A terrifyingly domestic creature of unknown origin. My mind was immediately filled with the image of a large white rabbit in an apron. Without being fully aware of what I was doing, I began sketching that image onto the whiteboard.

Somewhere in the kilo or so of paperwork I'd been handed there was surely information to be had regarding this person, but I'd barely reconciled with the idea of having a flatmate, let alone allowing them to transcend the abstract and become an individual.

It had been one thing to travel. One thing to carry my personal bubble of solitude across an ocean, brushing up with the personal bulles de solitude of others in a public space. However, it had been some time since I'd had to share a living space with anyone. There'd been a period when circumstances had me sleeping on my mates' couch, but then Lakshmi and success had happened, and with the exception of events, I'd spent the past couple of years holed up in my little burrow of a flat, allowing the refuse of my own existence to slowly pile around me—like the low, mysterious, and load-bearing walls of an ancient civilization—in a warm, inevitable smother of an embrace.

I was in no state to be living in close proximity with another human being.

Especially one so invested in an intentional living space.

There wasn't a single thing about me that was intentional. There was never a more passive bit of flotsam in the grand river of fate than Yours Truly. The thought of meeting this conscientious person thrummed across my shoulders as a swath of gooseflesh and rose in my throat as a burgeoning lump.

An unfavorable chemical reaction would likely take place should our intensely different lifestyles collide. I wasn't fit for human consumption and I hadn't been for nearly a year now, since my newfound teetotaling existence. I'd set some specific sobriety-related lines for myself, at the start of my torrid romance with Drake House, and so far had managed to abide by them. I was much healthier now, allegedly, but also much less pleasant to be around.

Participating in the outside world without a hearty dose of social lubricant was not exactly my forte. A few get-togethers a month with my couch-owning mates Sam and Craig, and the occasional check-in from my agent Lakshmi, my sponsor Karim, or my father The Arsehole—this had been the extent of my human interaction over the past year. The world had been nicely split in two: inside my bubble of solitude and outside of it. How was I supposed to adapt to an entire person inside my—

"Knock knock!"

I jumped. "What!"

"It's me, Robin, out on the porch! Luncheon, remember?"

What sort of person said knock knock instead of knocking? I smoothed damp strands of hair back and out of my face, then barked at the door, "A mo, Titch!"

"A what, who?"

I ignored him and hurried into the other room to dress. Potentially judgmental flatmate or no, there was still outside to worry about.