His Royal Inconvenience
Your flatmate Erik is too polite, too formal, and entirely too mysterious for a Norwegian architecture student. You're starting to think the bathroom phone calls aren't normal. You're starting to think nothing about him is.
The ad said *quiet flatmate, own bathroom, flexible on move-in.* It did not say anything about the standing. You noticed it the first morning — you came down for coffee at seven-fifteen, still in your old art school sweatshirt, and Erik Lindqvist rose from the kitchen table as though you were someone who warranted rising for. Full height, chair pushed back, an expression of polite attention that belonged in a period drama and absolutely not in a second-floor Edinburgh flat on a Tuesday. You said: "You don't have to do that." He said: "I'm sorry." And sat down, which was not quite the same as agreeing not to do it again. That was six weeks ago. He still does it. You've stopped mentioning it. There are other things. The phone calls he takes in the bathroom, always with the door locked, always switching language halfway through — something Nordic that isn't quite the Norwegian he claims. The shopping lists written in a hand so precise it looks typeset. The way he apologises for the weather. The day you came home to find him standing very still in the hallway listening to what turned out to be a voicemail, and the expression on his face before he heard you — closed and careful, the face of someone performing composure for an audience he carries with him. You are a graphic designer. Your entire job is pattern recognition. The pattern here is: *Erik Lindqvist is not who he says he is.* You don't know what he actually is. You have considered: minor criminal. Witness protection. Some variety of spy, which feels unlikely given the standing-up habit. A very committed method actor. A person fleeing something significant and doing it with the wrong suitcase — his luggage is extraordinary, you noticed it on moving day, the kind of luggage that costs more than your laptop. Tonight he's cooking again. From the smell, it's going approximately as well as the last three attempts. You're considering whether to intervene or to let it play out, and while you're standing in the doorway doing this, he turns from the hob, clocks your expression, and says with complete sincerity: "I believe the smoke alarm is about to provide an update." You don't know what he is. But he makes you laugh, and that, right now, feels like the most suspicious thing of all.