Will Harris on the subtleties of relationship status

And so to the Land of the Lesbians, and the comedy of errors that is my friend H’s love life at any given point in time. At this particular point in time, H jerks into consciousness to find herself wedged halfway beneath the reassuring bulk of a certain lady friend, who she has been dating on and off for two months. And when I say dating, what I really mean is having occasional bouts of sex while simultaneously lusting after someone entirely different and wholly unobtainable.
“Happy Valentine’s Day!” the girl beams. She is large and coffee-coloured, with one of the most beautiful faces ever to have graced H’s poly-blend sheets.

H, who had been reaching for an ashtray, stiffens. “Um, but it’s not Valentine’s Day, is it? Valentine’s Day’s Tuesday. It’s Sunday.”
“I know,” says the girl, “but I won’t get to see you on Tuesday, will I? Or will I?”
“No,” says H, quickly swinging herself upright and out of the danger zone. “No, busy Tuesday. You know me; always busy. Busy, busy me.”
The girl subsides into silence. “Well, it’s not like we’re going out or anything,” she says, finally.
“What?” shouts H, from behind the wardrobe door.
“I said we’re not in a relationship.” The girl rolls onto her side, one hand resting on the opposite pillow. “Or are we?”
H pauses, scanning the rails of clothes in front of her desperately. “S***,” she mouths silently at Iggy Pop, who is gurning out at her from the front of a T-shirt. When she emerges, the girl has started picking up her clothes in short, rapid movements. “I’m going to go,” she says, without meeting H’s eyes. “It’s a ridiculous situation. You don’t want me, and I don’t want anyone else.”

H, normally a stranger to ordinary human emotion, is surprised to discover the unfamiliar twinges of a guilty conscience. She suppresses a grimace. “Look,” she says, “you don’t have to go. You could… stay for breakfast? Or something.”
As the girl looks at H, a victorious grin breaks out across her face. And it’s on seeing this that H means to say: “Well, don’t you look like the cat that’s got the cream.”
That is what she means to say. What comes careering out of her mouth instead like a troupe of circus monkeys in waistcoats and propeller-hats is this: “Well, don’t you look like the fat that’s got the… no! I mean black… NO! Cat that got the cream! CAT! CAT!”

Moments after the front door slams, H calls me. “Awful,” she says. “Just awful. I made a weight, then a race reference. There’s no coming back from that.”
“There really isn’t,” I say. “Still, you’ve got to laugh, haven’t you?”
“That’s what I tried to tell her,” says H, “but if anything it just made her angrier.”