Although I really did not want to leave Elly and live alone, I knew it was something I had to do. We had tried to look for a house together that was closer to my work, but it had just never happened, with one thing or another. The weekend before I moved out, Elly and I decided to celebrate our time living together with a high tea on the Friday after work. I met her at a very lovely hotel in the city at 4pm, both wearing beautiful cocktail dresses, for scones, sandwiches and champagne. At 4am the next morning, we both fell asleep on the floor in our apartment. As far as I remember, we had a very lovely, classy, sophisticated high tea, followed by three bottles of champagne, numerous cocktails and a lot of shots. We then ended up drinking, chatting and flirting with some men we met at the hotel until 3.30am.
By 4am, we had arrived home. I recall crawling in the front door on all fours with Elly crawling behind me. I don’t remember everything but we were laughing so hard my stomach hurt for days afterwards. Apparently we agreed to let one of the men we had been flirting with come home with us. Now that really does not sound like something either Elly or I would suggest or agree to, after all we had an unwritten rule that we didn’t let men we had known for less than three months anywhere near our cats, but somehow this random man got the impression he was going home with us. We jumped into the first taxi we found, hoping we were too quick for the man, but it was to no avail. He jumped in the back seat alongside us, and I guess neither of us were rude enough to tell him to get out.
After realising what was happening, Elly told the taxi driver our street name but divulged the wrong number, which was in fact three doors up from our apartment building. She is smart like that! As the taxi driver pulled up to the incorrect address, Elly, obviously completely overreacting, pushed me out of the taxi and screamed at me to run! I was so shocked I didn’t really know what to do, but when she started running along the path behind the apartment building where the taxi had pulled up, I instinctively followed her. As we both ran alongside the building and into the pitch black back garden, I heard the taxi driver and this random man screaming at us in disbelief to come back. Elly, apparently unaware at my horror took off her high heels and started to climb over the fence into the next garden. At that point there really was no going back and so I too took off my heels and joined her in climbing over the fence, albeit a lot less elegantly than she managed to do it. As I half fell, half climbed down the other side of the fence I could hear the random man behind us screaming ‘wait for me; I just paid your cab.’ He then started climbing the fence!
We assumed the taxi had been paid and driven off by that point and so we continued our get away by running straight for the next fence, which would take us into our own building’s garden. Thankfully, the random man seemed a little tipsy and struggled with climbing the fence as much as I did, so when I fell / climbed over the second fence I could no longer hear him behind us. As we made a dash to enter our building, I caught a glimpse of the random man appearing over the second fence. Although I was somewhat frantic at that point, mainly due to my own imagination not anything to do with anything the man had actually done, Elly stayed calm and opened the communal door. As the door closed I heard the poor man scream ‘Wait for me, I don’t know which number it is.’
Our apartment was on the ground floor and so we had thankfully opened the door and were in the apartment before the man even made it to the communal door. However, because we were on the ground floor we couldn’t risk him looking through the window and seeing what apartment we lived in. So, still in complete darkness, we crawled along the floor until we found a safe place in the lounge room where we knew he could not see from the windows. At that point, we both broke into fits of uncontrolled giggles for being so melodramatic, but when the man calmly shouted at us that he would just wait outside until we were ready, apparently completely unaware that we were actually running away from him, we decided to sleep on the floor where we were hiding.
To this day, I still don’t really know why we didn’t just say no to the poor random man in the first place, but one thing was for sure; I was going to miss Elly so very much. Despite our crazy get away, I had such a great time that night, but once again I woke up with a huge hangover which might have been considered alcohol poisoning. So Elly and I spent our very last weekend together taking turns throwing up in the bathroom. How anyone could go from a classy high tea to alcohol poisoning, I will never know, but the two of us seemed to manage it just fine. I can only think that’s why we were such good friends.
‘There are some people in life that make you laugh a little louder, smile a little bigger and live a little better.’ — Unknown.