About a Girl
About a Girl
Lindsey Kelk
The summer bestseller from the immensely popular Lindsey KelkTess Brookes has always been a Girl with a Plan. But when the Plan goes belly up, she’s forced to reconsider.After accidently answering her flatmate Vanessa’s phone, she decides that since being Tess isn’t going so well, she might try being Vanessa. With nothing left to lose, she accepts Vanessa’s photography assignment to Hawaii – she used to be an amateur snapper, how hard can it be? Right?But Tess is soon in big trouble. And the gorgeous journalist on the shoot with her, who is making it very clear he’d like to get into her pants, is an egotistical monster. Far from home and in someone else’s shoes, Tess must decide whether to fight on through, or ‘fess up and run…
ABOUT A GIRL
Lindsey Kelk
Copyright (#ulink_ddaf708b-737b-593a-ac8e-dd45e2376bf9)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Harper 2013
Copyright © Lindsey Kelk 2013
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Lindsey Kelk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007591411
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780007591428
Version: 2017-05-24
Praise for Lindsey Kelk (#ulink_5b4e8a32-22fc-5ee3-8610-2c7959db7734)
‘Outrageous, witty, exciting and romantic, we simply adored this sparkling read’
Closer
‘Leaves you feeling all warm and fuzzy inside’
Company
‘Kelk has a hilarious turn of phrase and a sparkling writing style … A frothy and fun read’
Daily Express
‘Perfect for those wishing to escape from the reality of cold winter nights. ****’
Heat
About my girls, Della, Beth, Emma and Terri.
Contents
Cover (#u189278b4-bcc4-56d4-a262-bd0edc281e5a)
Title Page (#ud3eb3d56-f162-51e9-a8c7-193b4122d3ce)
Copyright (#u6aa92d1f-8337-5919-b4aa-26d42b6600a5)
Praise (#u16e22b30-9709-546c-924a-4a53b4fc8d04)
Dedication (#uac17a74f-f3fb-50ef-93c4-3ccb8506c4ed)
Prologue (#u25ea2773-7e92-527b-8241-8d98f65347c5)
Chapter One (#u47acadde-d313-5c44-aa1f-43eef7f197d0)
Chapter Two (#ue3858590-87f3-5445-ab1e-00f19b4ace9c)
Chapter Three (#u719f28e5-aa38-59d2-b0a8-c7f7855b3e18)
Chapter Four (#udb8d2e95-0f25-57ce-88a8-8f1154d09c6f)
Chapter Five (#ubea0d9ba-de43-5045-b8ad-5bc2d9545c78)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Q & A with Lindsey Kelk (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Lindsey Kelk (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_86dffef4-9df9-5b17-812f-df4e5286faac)
I never meant for things to get so out of hand.
I’d lost my job. I’d lost the love of my life. My mum wasn’t talking to me. My best friend was epically pissed off. My flatmate probably had a hit out on me by now, and in twenty-four hours I would likely be homeless.
But, you know, swings and roundabouts.
Considering how incredibly cocked up my life was, I felt surprisingly chipper. Happy even. Stretching out as far as I could, I curled the tips of my fingers around the headboard and scrunched my toes up in the crisp white cotton sheets that had found their way to the foot of the bed. Everything was still, everything was calm, and I was smiling. Somewhere across the room, I heard a phone beep. Instead of jumping up to see who needed what and just how quickly I could get it for them, I concentrated on the sound of the shower running in the bathroom and pressed my lips together to refresh the tingling sensation before it faded away. The stubble burn that tickled my cheeks was altogether more stubborn. I was so happy.
My best friend had been wrong. Everything was going to be OK. Probably. Not that there hadn’t been some sketchy moments over the past week. Not that I hadn’t considered having myself committed. More than once. But now it was almost over. I’d survived. This afternoon I would get on a plane back home. I would call everyone who needed calling, and instead of behaving like a jabbering shell of a human, I would be cool, calm and collected and make things right. If I could get through this past week, I could get through anything.
Seven days ago, if anyone had even given me a hint of what was ahead, I would have crawled underneath my desk and refused to come out. But as I had learned from every television show I had ever watched and every book I had thought about reading, you never knew how strong you were until you had to find out. I was definitely stronger than anyone had reckoned. Either that or I was clinically insane. It was a fine line.
The phone beeped again.
It was all going to work out. The photos were taken; the photos were great. Paige was going to be very happy. Mr Bennett was happy. Kekipi didn’t seem too bothered either way, but you can’t have everything. All I had to do now was spend the rest of the morning lying in this bed reliving all the terrible things I had just done with a terrible man, and by this time tomorrow I’d be practically home.
Rolling onto my stomach, I was very, very glad I couldn’t see the state of myself. My too long hair was all tangles, my carefully applied make-up was now carefully applied all over the pillowcases, and, let’s face it, post-orgasmic smugness isn’t a good look on anyone. If I had seen me right now, I might have wanted to punch me. Not that post-orgasmic anything was a look I was terribly familiar with. Well, the bad hair and terrible make-up, yes, but the smug ‘I just got shagged rotten by a very handsome man’ part? Not so much. There had to be a way to do post-coital with an air of class, surely. This was something they really did need to start teaching in schools. Maybe at the same time the nurse took the girls away to explain all about the wonderful world of tampons she could give you a rundown on what to pack in the morning-after kit. If there was one thing women needed to know, it was how to get thoroughly seen to without your gentleman friend sandpapering the top three layers of your skin completely off your face in the process.
Three more beeps.
No matter how hard I tried to ignore it, my phone wasn’t giving up. With a tiny, sad sniff I realized I was going to have to answer the bloody thing. Only it wasn’t on the nightstand where I always left it. Because this wasn’t my nightstand. And I had no idea where it was hiding. My beautiful red silk Valentino dress was on one side of the room, my bra on the other. Somewhere in the middle, there was a white shirt and a beach towel. And from deep inside a pile of carelessly discarded man clothes, another iPhone started chiming along in time with mine. It was a veritable chorus of communication. Together, they sounded a bit like a One Direction song. I gave up. Screw you, Vodafone.
‘Vanessa?’
I watched the huge bamboo fan on the ceiling spinning round and round and round and tapped out the rhythm of the phones, making no effort to answer either them or the man in the bathroom.
‘Vanessa?’
Oh, right. That was me. Sort of.
‘Yeah?’ I called back, scanning the room for my knickers. The biggest problem with crazy, tear-your-clothes-off sex was that once you’d torn off your clothes and had the crazy sex, the clothes were hard to locate in a dignified fashion. It was impossible not to feel a bit slutty scrabbling around on the floor looking for your pants. It was all well and good if you were one of those girls who slinks around starkers after sexytimes, but I wasn’t really a naked person. I was very much an ‘always sleep in a nightie in case the house burns down’ person. I mean, I still called it ‘sexytimes’, for God’s sake, and as we all know, if you can’t say it, you shouldn’t be doing it.
‘Is that me? Can you answer it?’
‘It is. I can.’
And I could, in theory. Although I was very upset at having to get out of bed. Shuffling down the mattress and trying to ignore the streaks of mascara all down the backs of both my hands, I anchored my hair behind my ears and hung over the edge of the bed to comb through the pile of cast-off cotton and silk like a hungry badger. A slutty hungry badger.
The slinky black iPhone was peeking out of my bra, flashing up a private number. I slid off the bed and dived into the middle of the pile of clothes. Classy. ‘Nick Miller’s phone,’ I answered as I clambered back onto the bed. ‘Not Nick speaking, obviously.’
‘Who is this?’
An unfamiliar and unpleasantly accusatory female voice echoed down the line. Hawaii might be beautiful, but the mobile phone reception was shit.
‘This is Tess. I mean Vanessa. Um, yeah, Vanessa.’ Damn it, I couldn’t even think straight when I was tired, let alone lie straight.
‘I’m trying to reach Nick Miller?’
‘This is Nick’s phone,’ I yawned. ‘Can I ask who’s calling?’
‘Sorry, who am I speaking to? And why do you have Nick’s phone?’
‘He’s in the shower.’ I couldn’t help feeling that I might be talking myself into a very deep hole. ‘I’m Tess. Vanessa! Shit, I’m Vanessa.’
‘Put Nick on the phone,’ the woman demanded. ‘Right now.’
I did not put Nick on the phone. Instead, I did the only thing I could think to do. I pressed the end call button and dropped the very expensive piece of technology into a glass of water at the side of the bed. Because that was bound to help matters. Launching myself off the bed, I scuttled around on the floor searching for my phone. Maybe there was something I could do. Maybe there was still time. Maybe—
‘Hey, who was it?’
A very handsome, very naked man appeared in the doorway, rubbing his ash-blond hair with a white towel. I silently begged him to cover up. It was very difficult to concentrate on digging yourself out of the world’s biggest metaphorical hole when there was a visible penis in the room.
‘No one,’ I chirped. ‘Wrong number.’
‘No one has had a wrong number since 1997.’ Nick strode across the room, dropping the towel as he went. I couldn’t help but feel this was disrespectful to both the housekeeping staff and the environment. That was a fresh towel. ‘Pass me the phone.’
‘Um, I dropped it.’ I looked up from my slovenly spot on the floor and hoped my naked charms would distract him from the extreme act of iPhone violence I had ‘accidentally’ committed.
They didn’t.
‘What the fuck, Vanessa?’ He grabbed the glass and choked back a sob, staring at the phone as if it was a tony Damian Hirst exhibit. iPhone in Water, a dead cert for the Turner Prize. ‘My fucking phone. It’s broken. What am I supposed to do without a phone?’
Hot or not, whining was never attractive. After finding them hiding inside one of Nick’s shoes, I pulled on my knickers, hoping that the less naked I was, the clearer I’d be able to think.
‘It slipped.’ I held my hands up in defence, attempting to squish my boobs together at the same time. Misdirection was a magician’s best weapon and I was definitely going to need a magic trick to get out of this one. Possibly a miracle. Where was Jesus when you needed him? Or at least Derren Brown. But preferably Jesus. ‘I’m sorry.’
Nick carried on pawing his waterlogged lifeline and making heartbroken chuntering noises under his breath, while I continued my search for my ever-beeping, completely annoying phone. I still couldn’t believe I’d broken the screen. Maybe it was in my bag? I spotted the slouchy, pretty black silk clutch bag that had come with my dress over by the door where I’d tossed it as soon as we had crashed through it last night. MAC make-up, Chanel perfume, spare batteries and dozens upon dozens of pens spilled out all over the floor. I was a strange creature sometimes. Didn’t like to be without a pen.
‘Hello?’ I answered after finally retrieving it from inside Nick’s abandoned boxer shorts. Eww. I fought the urge to hang up and give it a rub down with a wet wipe. This was not the time to relapse into my OCD issues.
‘Tess, it’s Paige. Where are you? I’ve called, like, ten times. I’ve been looking all over for you.’
Brilliant. Paige. Couldn’t a girl get five minutes, post-shag peace and quiet?
‘I’m in my cottage,’ I hedged. ‘What’s up?’
‘No, you aren’t. I’ve just been there.’ She paused for a second. ‘Are you with Nick?’
‘God, yeah, that’s what I meant. Nick’s cottage,’ I looked up at Nick, who seemed to have got over the untimely death of his iPhone thanks to the comforting charms of my tits. ‘We were just going over the photos.’
Nick raised an eyebrow and tossed his phone onto the floor. It was amazing how quickly a man could recover from a painful loss if he thought there was even a tiny chance he could put his penis in someone.
‘OK, I’m coming over. You need to do something. Stephanie called – she’s mega, mega pissed off. I’m going to get fired. What the fuck, Tess – what do we do?’
‘OK, don’t panic, but don’t come here,’ I said, trapping the phone between my cheek and my shoulder while slapping Nick’s hands away from my newly acquired knickers. ‘I’ve got loads of stuff to show you from yesterday – I left you messages. Seriously, calm down. I’ll come to you. Nick’s busy, but—’
‘Nick is busy,’ he said, thumbs hooking around the delicate silk I’d only just managed to get halfway round my arse. ‘And so are you.’
He snatched the phone and threw it across the room. I watched it skitter across the shiny wooden floor and vanish underneath the bed, taking Paige’s panic attack with it.
‘You know, you are an incredibly sexy woman,’ he said, running his fingertips up and down my spine and pressing his face against my neck. ‘You cannot even begin to know how much I want you right now.’
‘I really want to play along with this,’ I whispered with my eyes closed and brow furrowed. I wasn’t used to being called sexy. Or a woman. Most men didn’t actually seem to notice I had a discernible gender at all and so hearing these things from such a ridiculously attractive man was very difficult to resist. ‘But this is just about the worst timing ever.’
‘Vanessa.’ He took my tiny fists and covered them with his huge hands. ‘You broke my phone. You owe me. Now shut up and do as you’re told.’
Just as it had been since I’d first laid eyes on him, every word out of Nick’s mouth went straight to my vagina, but this time I had to resist. I could be strong. As long as I kept my knickers on.
‘I’m sorry, but I’ve really, really got to go,’ I insisted, swooping out of his arms and grabbing my bra from the floor in one surprisingly graceful move. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry.’ He gave me a dark look and grabbed my wrist. ‘Just don’t go.’
Before I could come back with an intelligent argument, there was a very loud knock at the door.
‘I am sorry and I do have to go.’ I shook off his hand and tried to discern what bits, in the tangled pile of material on the floor, had started out last night as my outfit. ‘Don’t answer it. It’s Paige.’
Really, I was impossibly stupid. I had just told Nick Miller not to do something and then expected him not to do it.
‘What if it is?’ he asked, eyebrows raised. ‘We’re adults.’
‘Oh, don’t start!’ I had no time for this. He could be such a cock sometimes. Most of the time. In fact, any time when he wasn’t actually using his penis, he was behaving like one. ‘Just please don’t open that door.’
And so, naked as the day he was born, Nick strode over to the door and flung it wide open. A very shocked blonde girl stood on the step and gaped.
‘Paige,’ Nick nodded. ‘Vanessa and I were just going over the plans for tomorrow.’
The tiny blonde girl tried desperately to avert her eyes from Nick in all his naked glory. As it was, the only other thing for her to concentrate on was me in my knickers, and that was doing nothing to improve the situation.
As she recovered herself and put two and two together to make a filthy four, Paige’s face fell. I took an ill-advised step forward and got my foot caught in Nick’s boxer shorts.
‘Paige.’ I looked at her.
‘Nick?’ She looked at him.
Nick just looked very pleased with himself.
‘Oh, Tess.’ Paige started to laugh and it wasn’t very nice. ‘Tess, Tess, Tess.’
‘Paige, don’t,’ I begged. I was fully aware that pleading with women didn’t usually go very well when they caught you hanging out in your underwear with the man they had designs on. Especially when that man was naked. ‘Please.’
‘Tess?’ Despite how very clever he claimed to be, Nick wasn’t always the sharpest knife in the drawer. ‘Who’s Tess?’
‘She is,’ Paige said, nodding towards me. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘Vanessa?’ Nick placed a hand over his manparts, not looking nearly as smug as he had five minutes ago. If I hadn’t been ready for the ground to open up and swallow me whole, it might have been funny. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nick, I can explain,’ I started, entirely unsure how I was going to do that. ‘It’s a long story. It’s a funny story. It’s, um, well. I don’t know where to start.’
‘I do,’ Paige chipped in. ‘This is Tess. She’s an irresponsible, selfish, evil, lying bitchface who’s been faking everything to everyone, and I didn’t grass her up because I’m an idiot.’
Bit harsh, I thought. A bit harsh, but ultimately accurate. All of a sudden, my knees weren’t feeling terribly steady. Nick looked very confused. And also still very naked. Unfortunately, his supreme manliness wasn’t enough to slow Paige down now she’d started.
‘Long story short, her name isn’t Vanessa,’ my friend, mentor and confidante stated. She was on a roll. ‘Her name is Tess Brookes and she’s full of shit.’
Well.
It was a much more concise version of events than I had to offer.
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_47dfc4aa-5e19-5fc0-8746-aed51189330b)
Two Weeks Earlier
It was more or less a day like any other when it all went wrong.
My alarm went off, I got up, showered in silence and watched fifteen minutes of breakfast news with stuttering subtitles so as not to wake my flatmate. I got dressed, I checked my bag to make sure I had an adequate number of tampons even though my period was a good three weeks away, and after checking I’d turned my hair straighteners off twice, I left for the office. As usual, I was the first in. No one else made it in before ten on Mondays, but I was the kind of irritating person who got a lot more done without the clacking of everyone else’s keyboards to distract me. Early mornings and late nights were my friends. And given the frequency with which they occurred, they were pretty much my only friends. But on this particular Monday, I had good reason to be so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. After seven years’ hard slog, I was getting the promotion I’d been dreaming of. I, Tess Brookes, was about to become the youngest creative director in the history of Donovan & Dunning.
Obviously no one was quite as excited about this as me, so it wasn’t exactly a shock that I was sitting outside the HR manager’s office before she’d even got off the Tube. It was fair to say I was dead giddy.
‘Morning, Raquel.’ I gave her a cheek-achingly massive smile when she finally appeared at the top of the stairs. It couldn’t hurt, I reasoned; after all, today was my day. Some girls had weddings, some had babies, I had my promotion. And that was only sad if you let it be.
‘Tess.’ Raquel, short, bleach blonde and dead-eyed, motioned for me to follow her into her office. She didn’t look surprised to see me. And why would she? We’d been discussing this promotion for the past six months; I figured she’d be glad to see the back of me. All that was left was for me to sign my new contract and then I’d be out of her way. For six months. I was ambitious.
‘OK, so let’s just get straight to this.’ She sat down behind a too big desk and smiled. ‘I’ve got some difficult news.’
‘Right.’ I sat up straight and put on my ‘I’m listening’ face. Difficult news? Was she leaving? Maybe she was leaving. I really hoped she was leaving.
‘As you know, the company has gone through quite a lot of changes in the past twelve months,’ Raquel said, folding her hands in front of her and leaning her head to one side. Such a serious soul was Raquel. Probably because she fired people for a living and everyone hated her. ‘And as such, we are having to undertake some necessary measures to ensure a successful restructure.’
‘OK,’ I nodded. This was a very funny way of giving me a big hug and a key to the executive bathroom. Of course I knew there was a restructure. They were restructuring me into a corner office and a big fat pay rise. Which was much needed to pay for the ridiculously expensive Promotion Shoes that were currently rubbing the fuck out of my feet.
‘As you know,’ she repeated, ‘the original plan for the business was to move you into a creative director role, with the copy and design teams reporting directly to you.’
‘The original plan?’ I was starting to feel a fraction less giddy.
‘The original plan,’ she confirmed, never taking her eyes off me.
This didn’t sound wonderful. Why wasn’t she squealing and giving me a present? And why was she smiling? Raquel never smiled.
‘Unfortunately, due to the new restructure, we will not be moving ahead with the original plan. The creative director role you were moving into is no longer part of the planned downsizing of the company.’
Words I officially did not enjoy. Unfortunately. Restructure. Downsizing.
‘And as such, your role has been restructured out of the business.’
I was definitely ready for the hug and the present.
‘The creative director role –’ my voice did not sound nearly as steady as I would like – ‘has been restructured out of the business?’
After seven years of overtime, evenings and weekends, I was being stiffed out of my promotion by an HR demon with a gob full of business jargon and clichés.
‘Yes.’ Raquel gave me the same look you might give a small child who has just successfully worked out that cows go moo.
‘So I’m not going to be the new creative director?’
‘You are not.’
Poof. There it went. Bye bye, promotion. Hello, God knows how many more years back at my old desk. Hello, shit-ton of overtime I was going to have to do to pay for my new shoes. I stared at an Oxford University mug sitting right on the edge of her desk and fought the urge to move it out of harm’s way. Who went to Oxford and then ended up doing HR for an advertising company?
‘As you’ll see, we’ve put together a very fair redundancy package,’ Raquel continued, switching gears so fast I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. She pushed a stiff cardboard envelope across the desk towards me and tapped it twice. ‘Given the circumstances, we understand if you would like to leave immediately. I can forward your personal effects. If you could just leave your phone and security pass with me, I’ll take care of all of that.’
I looked down at the envelope and then back up at Satan’s minion.
‘I’m afraid I’m not following,’ I said as politely as possible. ‘Redundancy package?’
‘The company no longer has a position available for you.’ Raquel scratched her nose delicately. I resisted the urge to slap it. Only just. ‘At all.’
‘So when you say the creative director role has been restructured out of the business …’ I took a deep breath and tried very hard not to vomit. ‘What you are actually saying is that I have been restructured out of the business?’
‘The creative director role,’ she repeated with a nod, ‘is no longer viable in the current business plan. You are the creative director.’
‘But I haven’t even started the job. How can I have been restructured out of it?’ I was aware that my voice was starting to get uncomfortably high. I was even more aware of the fact that I was going to cry. I blinked twice and stared hard at the Oxford mug, trying to regain my composure.
‘I understand you are bound to have some questions.’ Raquel’s shark eyes had already glazed over. ‘Perhaps you’d like to schedule some time to go over them on the phone tomorrow.’
‘Or perhaps I’d like you to stop being a dick and tell me why I’m being fired?’ I shouted.
There was no stopping the tears. Between the blisters on my heels and my blind rage, there was nothing I could do to stem the sobbing. It was neither ladylike nor professional, but apparently I no longer had a profession, so who gave a toss whether or not I was being ladylike?
‘Perhaps you could explain to me why I’m being “let go” when you’re supposed to be promoting me? Perhaps you could explain to me who exactly is going to lead the creative team? Perhaps you could tell me who is going to win all of your business and lead all of your campaigns and who is going to work on New Year’s Eve so you don’t lose an account for a toilet cleaner?’ I grabbed the cardboard envelope and bashed it against the desk to punctuate my every word before flinging it across the room. ‘And it was crappy toilet cleaner.’
‘No one is disputing your commitment to the job,’ Raquel said without even flinching. ‘And we will be very happy to give you a reference when you find a new situation.’
‘A new situation?’ There was a chance I was screeching. ‘This isn’t Downton fucking Abbey. I’m not a scullery maid. I’m the best creative you have here and you know it. Where’s Michael? Where is bloody Michael?’
Michael was my boss. Michael was a cock. When Michael spilled a glass of wine down my top at the Christmas party every year, I laughed it off. When Michael referred to me and my breasts as ‘his three favourite employees’ in front of a new client last summer, I let it go. When Michael tried to cop a feel under the pretence of performing the Heimlich manoeuvre when I had hiccups every time I had hiccups for seven years, I kept my mouth shut. And now where was he?
‘Mr Donovan isn’t in the office this morning,’ Raquel replied, actually sounding bored. ‘I do understand you’re upset, but really, this isn’t a personal issue. It’s just a matter of corporate restructuring.’
‘Well, I think you need to restructure your face,’ I yelled. Not my best comeback ever. ‘This is ridiculous. I run that creative team. All of the accounts are working on my ideas. All of them.’
‘This conversation really isn’t relevant to the decision that has been made.’ She stood up and opened her office door. I took this to mean I was supposed to fuck off through it. ‘Your role no longer exists within the company. I will forward all your personal belongings and the details of our very generous package to your home address and include my direct line. I’d be very happy to discuss any questions you might have once you’ve had some time to reflect. We should probably do it over the phone.’
For the want of something else to do, I grabbed the Oxford University mug from her desk and threw it, as hard as I could, onto the floor. It bounced once on the beige carpet and then sat there sadly, a tiny trickle of coffee pooling beside it.
‘Feel better for that?’ Raquel asked, one eyebrow raised.
‘Not really,’ I admitted, my chin up high and arm stretched out to knock a stack of files off her desk. Stamping a sore foot, I swiped a Pritt Stick off the shelf and brazenly stuck it in my pocket.
‘I’m taking that,’ I explained with added petulance. ‘You can knock it off my generous package.’
It was strange where your mind went when you were in shock.
Seven years of work and my boss hadn’t even had the decency to come in on time to fire me himself. I’d missed weddings and birthdays and dates to meet deadlines, deliver projects, give presentations, and I’d done it all with a smile. While all my friends were out puking in the street and snogging strangers, I’d spent last New Year’s Eve sat in the meeting room, throwing a stress ball at a wall for three straight hours while I attempted to come up with an innovative campaign for knock-off Toilet Duck. And I bloody well did it. My flat was full of books I’d bought but never read, DVDs that had gone unwatched and CDs I hadn’t got round to listening to. Good God, it had been so long since I’d listened to music, I still had CDs. But it hadn’t mattered before. Because this was the plan. No matter how often my two remaining friends had told me to ease up, that work wasn’t everything, I hadn’t listened. I was happy. I wasn’t missing out on my life; my job was my life. And now I had neither.
But what really stung, I realized as I rode down to my floor for the last time in the lift that always smelled ever so slightly of cat food, what really stung wasn’t the loss of the actual job, it was everything that went with it. Most importantly, it was the dream of moving into my own place and leaving my demonic flatmate behind. Because once I was in my own flat, living would really start. I’d buy fancy dinnerware and nice curtains and learn how to make sushi and buy a cool TV with an amazing audio system. And then I’d invite Charlie round for dinner and we’d end up drinking a little too much and watching a movie which would almost certainly be something starring Emma Stone, and just when she was being her most endearing for the ladies and sexy for the men, I would rest my head on his shoulder and he would realize that I was his Emma Stone and we would kiss and then we would be together for ever. But no. That couldn’t happen now. Because I didn’t have my job. So there wouldn’t be a flat. And there wouldn’t be a dinner or an Emma Stone movie night or a kiss or any happiness ever again. Poof, it was all gone.
Having never been fired, let go or otherwise excused before in my life, I wasn’t sure what the correct protocol was. For the first time, I was thankful everyone else in the office were such lazy bastards. There was no one to see me snivelling and shoving my belongings into a reusable Tesco shopper, except for a terrified-looking intern and the graphic designer who everyone knew sniffed Bostick in the toilets. The company was going under and I was being let go, but the glue-sniffer kept his job. It was perfect.
I picked up my stapler and stared at it for a moment. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t have a plan. Whether it was setting up the girl’s football team in junior school because I had declared the PE teacher sexist, turning a profit on the refreshment stand at the village panto, or making sure I was sitting next to Jason Hutchins on the year ten bus trip to Alton Towers, I always had a plan. And the Cloverhill Panthers had come third from last in our local division, watering down the Ribena at the panto until it was basically pink piss had made exactly four pounds and seventeen pence, and for two precious hours and thirteen minutes, Jason Hutchins had been all mine. I always had a plan and that plan always worked. I dropped the stapler in my bag and walked out the door.
After a ten-minute wander down Theobalds Road, I found myself in Bloomsbury Square, shopping bag in one hand, dignity in the other. Hobbling over to an empty bench, I kicked off my new shoes without worrying what the British summertime mud would do to the gorgeous nude suede and stared vacantly at two dogs running up and down the park. They always looked happy, I thought, as I pulled all the pins out of my elaborate updo one by one. Dogs were always happy. Dogs didn’t have a plan. Dogs hadn’t been climbing up a career ladder for the last seven years. Dogs hadn’t been hopelessly in love with their best friend for the last ten. Well, I couldn’t hand on heart say that was definitely true, but it seemed unlikely.
I rifled around in my Tesco bag looking for something to spur on an emotion that wasn’t pathetic. All that was in there was my stolen stapler, three framed photos, a brand-new box of Special K cereal bars and about seventeen different pens. (Lots of highlighters. I liked a highlighter.) That was it. Seven years and I’d erased all evidence of my very existence from the office in one half-full environmentally-friendly shopping bag.
I pulled the photos out, one by one, and laid them on my black-clad knee. The first was of me and Amy, little-girl versions of me and my best friend, dressed up as princesses and hugging desperately for the camera. The next one was a more formal shot of me, my sisters, my mum and my grandmother, looking considerably less chipper. We weren’t huggers, the Brookeses. Someone basically had to die to convince my mother to go further than a stern pat on the shoulder. When my first granddad had passed away, she had ruffled my hair. It was intense. The third and final photo was of me and Amy again, this time all grown-up and joined by Charlie, my co-worker, best boy friend and the man I had been in love with for the past decade. The three of us were slouched on a sofa in some random Parisian hotel in front of a huge mirror with another one behind us. My face was obscured by the camera that had gone everywhere with me that summer, but my denim cut-offs and stripy T-shirt echoed endlessly in the reflections of the two mirrors. Charlie and Amy’s reflected faces smiled back at me. Amy was on my left, deep in her Amélie phase, black hair cropped close to her head and legs stretched out, draped across me and Charlie. To my right, the love of my life rested his head on my shoulder and held a lit cigarette off to the side, so as not to drop the ash on my bare skin. Even though you couldn’t tell by the photo, I remembered I was smiling. We were the three musketeers. Rock, paper, scissors. Amy was the scissors, Charlie was the paper and I was the rock. I was always the rock.
Slowly but surely, I felt my breathing return to normal and the tension in my shoulders ease ever so slightly. Just in time for me to realize someone was sitting beside me on the bench.
‘Morning.’ An incredibly average-looking man with a shaved head and a black bomber jacket gave me a sideways nod.
‘Morning,’ I replied, carefully placing the photographs back in my bag. No reason not to be polite. This was my life now, after all. Just sitting around, talking to the other non-workers-slash-vagrants in London’s parks while I lived vicariously through the dog ownership of others. I wondered if the Tesco near Russell Square sold White Lightning. It felt like the day was missing a bottle of White Lightning.
‘Don’t make a scene,’ the man said, moving down the bench towards me and looking straight ahead. ‘Give me your wallet and your phone.’
‘Sorry?’ I wasn’t quite sure I’d heard him properly. Was I being mugged? After seven years in London, was I actually being mugged? Not bloody likely.
‘Phone and wallet. Now.’ He pulled a small Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and gave me as scary a look as he could muster. ‘Don’t make me make you.’
Still not quite with it, I tilted my head to one side and stared. I couldn’t help but think he’d be scarier with hair. He looked like an overgrown baby.
‘I haven’t got a phone,’ I replied. This was actually happening. I was being mugged by a giant baby in a bomber jacket. ‘And you can’t have my wallet. There’s nothing in it anyway and it was a present.’
‘Everyone’s got a phone.’ He sounded a bit taken aback. ‘Give it to me now.’
‘No, really.’ I opened up my handbag and tipped it upside down, emptying the contents out onto the bench between us. Three lipsticks, a powder compact, my keys, more tampons than anyone could ever feasibly need and even more pens clattered against the wooden slats. I picked up my wallet and stuck it between my knees. I meant what I said – I’d already told him he couldn’t have that and I wasn’t about to go back on my word to a criminal. ‘See? No phone. I just got fired. They took my phone. Have not got one.’
‘You haven’t got a phone at all?’ The would-be mugger was visibly shocked. ‘That’s bollocks, that is.’
‘It really, really is,’ I agreed.
We sat in silence for a moment.
‘Haven’t got a job either,’ I said as I started scooping up my belongings and dropping them back in the bag. It seemed he wasn’t nearly as interested in highlighters as I was. Probably didn’t have much call for them in his game. ‘Phone’s not such a problem.’
‘Me neither,’ he replied, grabbing a couple of tampons and popping them into my handbag for me. ‘Had one. Lost it. Fucking Tories, innit?’
‘I suppose the recession has been hard for everyone,’ I sympathized. ‘It’s a tough time.’
‘Do you need to call anyone?’ the big baby asked. The man dug his hand into his non-knifey pocket and produced a brand-new iPhone. ‘You can use my phone if you want.’
‘Actually, that would be amazing,’ I said, readily accepting the handset but ignoring the controversial cover design. Pretty sure they didn’t sell Swastika iPhone cases in Carphone Warehouse. This was definitely home-made. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you a bit of privacy.’ He nodded curtly, stood up and wandered a couple of feet away. I watched as a worried-looking middle-aged lady in a waxed jacket and an Alice band took a very sharp and sudden detour. I looked away as he followed her.
‘Hello?’
‘Amy.’ I would never answer the phone to an unknown number. Amy always would. ‘It’s me.’
‘What phone are you on? What’s going on? Did they give you a new phone. Did you get an iPhone? Have you got Siri? Can I ask him a question?’
‘It’s not my phone.’ I cut her off before she could come up with anything filthy to ask the omniscient Siri. ‘Are you at work?’
‘Yeah.’ She didn’t sound convinced. ‘Until five.’
‘Oh. I got the sack and I thought you might want to get very, very drunk.’
‘STELLA!’ I snapped my head away from the handset as Amy bellowed at her boss without moving the phone away from her mouth. ‘I’ve got a migraine. I’m going home. All right?’
‘I don’t think you can shout that loudly if you’ve got a migraine,’ I pointed out.
‘Be at yours in half an hour,’ Amy replied, ignoring me. ‘Don’t kill yourself before then, OK?’
‘OK,’ I said. It hadn’t actually occurred to me before she brought it up, but the Thames was awfully close by and it would save me from having to sign on. I didn’t actually know where the job centre was. Maybe my new friend could tell me. Or maybe I should just kill myself. Amy had hung up before I could ask her opinion and I noticed the phone’s owner hovering nearby. I hung up, smiled and held it out to him.
‘You know what?’ He waved my hand away. ‘Have it. I can always get another one.’
‘Oh no.’ I tried to press it back into his tattooed hand. ‘I couldn’t possibly. Really, I couldn’t.’
‘No, take it.’ He pressed it back into my hand and stood up. ‘How are you going to get another job without a phone? Just have it.’
‘Well, thank you very much.’ I gave him my cheeriest smile. ‘That’s really lovely of you.’
‘No worries.’ He held up his arm in a salute I vaguely recognized, and not from Brownies. ‘And don’t worry yourself. Fit bird like you? You’ll be fine. Just remember, fuck ’em all.’
‘Yeah, fuck ’em all,’ I repeated, trying to reconcile the fact that his compliment made me happy with the fact that it came from a man who was clearly some sort of neo-Nazi.
I watched my fairy godmugger wander off across the park, the edges of my stolen, swastika-emblazoned phone cutting into my palm, and just as it started to rain, I started to cry. And I did not know how I was going to stop.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_6cc4c87d-c464-52e8-bbb7-6ebb05a6905d)
The girl I met in the mirror at home was not the same girl who had left my flat three hours earlier. Her smart chignon had turned into a tangled mess of sodden curls, and the carefully applied but terribly subtle make-up was all gone, either cried or rained away. The brown eyes that had been so sparkly when they left the house were dull and rimmed with red. My simple black shift dress was wet through, now considerably less office chic – more black-latex-condom-frock with a Pritt Stick still in the pocket. At least now I understood why that little boy had burst into tears when I’d smiled at him outside Superdrug. I was still staring at my reflection, willing what I believed to be three new wrinkles on my forehead to go away, when the front door flew open and a tiny black-haired woman blew inside, hurling herself at me before I could even draw breath.
‘Oh my God! What happened? What did you do?’ Amy leapt up onto her tiptoes and crushed me in a bear hug. ‘Did you punch someone? Did you photocopy your arse? Did you embezzle them for millions?’
‘Downsizing,’ I choked, disengaging my soggy self from her arms. ‘There was a “restructure”.’
‘You know I hate when you use air quotes,’ Amy said, slapping my hands down by my side. ‘And that’s really, really disappointing. You didn’t punch anyone? Not even Charlie?’
Amy and I had been best friends since we could speak. Before that, I’m assured that we got on very well. Born six weeks apart, our mums had been besties ever since they’d bonded at an aerobics class in the village hall. We had marked every major milestone together – from first words and first steps right through to most recent snogs and latest hangovers. We were always there for each other in times of need, whether that need was me running out of teabags before there was such a thing as a twenty-four-hour Tesco in East London, or Amy walking out on her fiancé, Dave, three days before her wedding. She never had been good at making a decision and sticking to it. In the past two years she’d had three jobs and four zero percent credit cards, but when it came to me, she was as dependable as Ken Barlow and fiercely loyal. I couldn’t fault her.
‘I didn’t get a chance to punch anyone.’ I still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. I was redundant. I’d been called a lot of things in my time, but the ‘R’ word was the worst. ‘HR called me in. I thought it was just paperwork stuff for the promotion, and then they told me they were letting me go.’
The words stuck in my throat.
‘Nothing dramatic. Nothing exciting. Just restructuring.’
‘Are you OK?’ She eyed me cautiously, as though I might suddenly lose my tiny mind and bust up the entire apartment. It was fair. If I had been capable of feeling anything at all, there was a chance I might have. ‘Your job is, like, your everything.’
Just what I needed to hear.
‘I’m not anything,’ I said carefully. My mouth felt thick and the words weren’t coming out quite right. ‘I don’t feel anything.’
‘Nothing?’ Clearly I’d given the wrong answer. ‘Not angry or sad or confused or, I don’t know, stabby? Sometimes I feel stabby when I get the sack.’
Amy got the sack a lot.
‘Nothing,’ I repeated. ‘Just … a bit blank. A bit cold.’
‘Emotionally cold?’ She was far too eager for my liking. ‘Do you feel dead inside?’
‘Physically cold.’ Maybe calling her had been a bad idea. ‘And like I need a wee.’
‘Yet more disappointment.’ Amy dragged me through the tiny living room and into the kitchen to pop open one of the three bottles of cheap fizzy wine that were clinking together merrily inside a Sainsbury’s bag. ‘I don’t get it. Surely they can’t fire you. Everyone knows you’re the only one who does anything at that place. Have you gone mad? Did they fire you because you’re mad? What did Charlie say?’
‘He wasn’t in when I left.’ I accepted a Snoopy mug full of cava and gulped it down. Cheap fizz burned. Burning was good. ‘I don’t know if he knows.’
Of course Charlie would know. Everyone would know. Everyone would know that I had been fired. Every. One.
‘He hasn’t called?’ Amy topped me up before helping herself to a packet of Pop Tarts from my flatmate’s cupboard and sticking them in the toaster. I didn’t have the energy or inclination to stop her.
‘HR took my phone,’ I said, rummaging around in my handbag for my new-to-me iPhone. ‘Happily, I was the victim of a reverse mugging in the park and someone gave me this.’
My tiny bestie snatched the phone out of my hand and examined it carefully without asking me to elaborate. ‘Ooh, it’s a new one. Good result. Weird case.’
I took it from her, removed the offending cover and handed it back. ‘I can’t keep it. It’s stolen.’
‘Swapsies, then? You can have mine.’ She pressed several buttons and coughed before speaking. ‘Siri, why are Donovan & Dunning a bunch of wankers?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by that,’ he replied. Very diplomatic for an inanimate object.
I leaned against the kitchen wall, sipping my second, surreptitiously refilled mug of cava and staring out over the East London rooftops. They were exactly how I’d left them this morning. As I concentrated on the unchanging chimney pots, stupid things kept popping into my mind, like what was my mum going to say? What was I supposed to do when my alarm went off tomorrow morning? Would I end up homeless? I didn’t know how to go about getting a job. I’d been at Donovan & Dunning since I’d left uni. Before I left uni even – I’d interned there my entire final year. I was going to have to write a CV. Did people still have CVs? Was there something I was supposed to tweet? Maybe there was an unemployment app on my new phone. Most upsettingly, all of the unfinished jobs I’d been doing at work were bothering me. Someone needed to proofread the final air freshener presentation. And who else would take care of the copy for the new baked beans advert? Maybe they’d just lift it from an episode of Mad Men, save some time.
For the want of something better to do, I pressed my back against the cold kitchen wall and slid down to the floor. Ahh. That was better. Amy sat on the kitchen top, phone in one hand, Pop Tart in the other, gazing down at me with concern. It didn’t feel right. I was supposed to be the one who looked after her.
‘Tess,’ she said. I peered at her over the edge of my Snoopy mug with wide eyes. ‘You’re sitting on the kitchen floor in a piss-wet-through dress.’
‘I am.’ She was not wrong.
‘Your head is on the bin. And the bin smells.’
‘It is.’ Again, stellar observational skills. ‘And it does.’
‘Do you think you should maybe go and get changed?’
I didn’t think I should get changed. I was scared that if I took off my work dress I wouldn’t have anything to put on but my pyjamas, and if I put on my pyjamas I might never, ever take them off again. Had Michael remembered about lunch with that awful man from the car company? Eventually, Amy took my silence as a no.
‘How about a bath? You must be freezing?’
A bath sounded equally depressing. There was nothing to do in a bath that didn’t involve sobbing or razor blades. I wondered if Sandra the designer had remembered to change the colour of the squirrel in that paper towel concept.
‘Tess, I’m going to need some verbal feedback from you.’ Amy put down her breakfast long enough to snap her fingers in front of me. ‘What do you want to do?’
I looked up, pushed my scummy hair out of my face and shook my head.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t know. I don’t know anything.’
For the second time that day, I started to cry. My mother would be mortified.
With a sad sigh, Amy hopped down off the worktop and curled up beside me and the bin. ‘I know it must feel like shit,’ she said, sliding her arm between me and the wall and forcing a hug. ‘But you’re better than this. You know you’re amazing at your job. Whatever reason they have for whatever they’ve done, it’s going to be their loss. That place was killing you. You’ll have another job, a better job, at a better agency, this time next Monday. You know I’m right.’
Ignoring the fact that, despite having a first class degree in English and Media Studies, Amy’s longest career commitment to date had been as a ticket taker at the local Odeon, I decided to believe her. What choice did I have? I was good at my job. Charlie had once told me I was so good, I couldn’t just sell ice to Eskimos, I could convince them that my ice had been hand-carved by pixies and contained the frozen tears of unicorns and that they should thank me for giving them the opportunity to even think about buying it. I just needed a new plan. And some more crappy wine.
‘First things first – if you’re not going to have a bath, you at least need a shower.’ Amy kissed my cheek and jumped up to her feet. ‘You’re going to catch your death, and, quite honestly, I can’t look at your hair like that for one more second. You’re pretty rank.’
‘OK.’ I let her hoist me up to my full five feet and nine inches and wiped my cheeks with the backs of my hands. Sometimes she made me feel like a complete beast, her being all pixie-like and adorable and me being, well, five foot nine. My nan always told me I was statuesque, but really, who wanted to be a statue?
‘So you get in the shower and I’ll go out and get some proper food – you’ve got nothing in,’ Amy said, slapping me on the arse and pointing me towards the shower. ‘Hitler’s not due back any time soon, is she?’
‘Please don’t call her Hitler,’ I groaned. It was fair to say that Amy and my flatmate did not get along. Luckily, said flatmate was away all week. ‘She’s not home till the weekend.’
‘Thank. Fuck,’ Amy declared with exaggerated relief on her face. ‘She’s the last thing we need.’
‘Agreed.’ I hated to encourage the two of them when they went at it, but it was true, my flatmate was not the most supportive human in existence. If I could get through this week, get things back on track before she came home, life would be easier.
‘Right.’ Amy pulled her keys to my flat out of her pocket and used them as a tiny, shiny pointer. ‘So, shower and hair wash for you, Sainsbury’s and seven chocolate oranges for me, and we’ll meet in front of the TV for a Buffy marathon in fifteen minutes. And I’m only giving you one day off because tomorrow, every ad agency in the country is going to be fighting over you, and there’ll be no time for vampire-slaying then.’
I nodded, hugged her and shut myself in the bathroom, suddenly desperate to strip off my wet outer layer. Flinging the soggy shift against the bathroom tiles, it hit with a satisfying slap and I stepped under the shower with almost a smile. My skin was cold and clammy and the hot water stung in the best way possible. I could feel myself warming up right through to my bones, which at least meant I could still feel something. Seriously, someone needed to let London know that it was summer. We’d had about three days of legitimate sunshine since May and it was almost July.
‘Maybe I’ll go travelling,’ I told the rubber duck who lived in the corner of the shower. ‘Maybe I’ll go somewhere warm.’
‘With what money?’ he asked. That duck was so cynical. ‘You haven’t got any savings.’
Cynical he might be, but he was also right. Bloody duck. I’d spent the first half of my twenties getting into a really quite impressive amount of debt of both the student loan and credit card variety. Interning and assisting were not well-paid professions, and without the Bank of Mum and Dad to help me through the first few years, I’d had to rely on the kindness of strangers. That is, the graduate loans officer at HSBC. He’d been very ready to help and even more ready to take every penny of interest back. So no, I didn’t have any savings, but I didn’t really have any debt left either, so that was something. Sort of.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I told the judgemental duck as I lathered up. ‘Tomorrow I’ll email everyone I know at the other agencies. How many references have I written in the last year?’
The duck didn’t answer. He was cynical and rude.
‘So many. I have written so many. I must have all the emails for the HR people somewhere.’
And I had. Aside from being amazing at my job, I was also one of the longest servers at D&D. They had a pretty high staff turnover, and for reasons I’d never really been able to understand before today, no one liked asking HR for a reference.
‘I don’t need to panic about this,’ I carried on. ‘It’s a hiccup. I’ll be in a new job by Monday. A better job. The best job ever.’
Well, maybe not the best job ever. I was really going to struggle to get the job of Alexander Skarsgård’s fang fluffer on the next season of True Blood. But still, never say never. I would go and work for a better agency. I would work on bigger accounts. I would manage a team who didn’t sniff the permanent markers when I wasn’t looking. It was time to dream the big dreams. Maybe I could even leave London. I knew a couple of girls who had got transfers over to New York. Maybe I could go and work in the States for a couple of years, do the whole Sex and the City thing. Or maybe even Australia. I’d heard there were a lot of opportunities in Australia. I hoped I’d be able to convince Charlie and Amy to come with me without too much violence.
I stayed in the bathroom, scrubbing away shame and disappointment and the top two layers of my skin until I heard the front door go and the TV come on. Wrapping myself up in the biggest, fluffiest towels I could find, towels that obviously weren’t mine, I emerged from the bathroom ready to tell Amy all about my plans. Much to the duck’s dismay, I was totally smiling.
For all of three seconds.
‘Are those my towels?’ My flatmate, Vanessa, stood in the middle of the living room with a very unimpressed look on her face. ‘Because if they are, you’re going to need to replace them.’
Oh. Fuck.
‘Can’t I just wash them?’ I asked, my fragile positive attitude shattering all around me.
‘No. You can’t.’ She looked so disappointed in me. ‘They’re towels. You don’t share towels. That’s disgusting.’
There weren’t many people in this world who were genuinely awful. Yes, there were the arseholes like Raquel in HR who got a kick out of making other people’s lives difficult, but it wasn’t like she went home and kicked puppies for fun. And as I’d learned already that day, even white supremacists could have a heart if you caught them on the right day. But Vanessa Kittler was a genuinely awful human being. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out she had an entire pile of puppies in her room just for kicking around. No one would have been surprised to see her in a Dalmatian fur coat. In fact, if I’d found out she was a member of the BNP, I wouldn’t have been shocked. If I’d found out she was the secret underground leader of a fascist group planning the genocide of everyone with an undesirable body mass index or home-dyed hair, I might have raised an eyebrow. Just one, though. She was literally the worst person I’d ever met.
Resplendent in skintight black jeans, an obscenely low-cut white T-shirt and a black leather biker jacket, Vanessa looked me up and down, a small silver suitcase resting by her high-heeled feet.
‘Why are you at home using my towels in the middle of the day?’ she asked with an expression that suggested she’d just caught me doing lines of coke off the PM while my mum watched. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’
‘I thought you were away all week?’ I stalled, really wanting not to be standing in the middle of the living room in a towel. In Vanessa’s towel. ‘Didn’t you book a shoot or something?’
‘I cancelled,’ she replied with a single flip of her shiny blonde hair. ‘I got to the airport and they had me booked on easyJet. Fuck that. Why are you in my flat?’
To someone who was so conscientious and sickeningly loyal that they were still fighting the urge to call the office that had just fired her and make sure someone had changed the colour of the squirrel in the paper towel concept, this news caused me near physical pain. Vanessa was a photographer. And by that I mean that once every couple of months one of Vanessa’s friends booked her for a job that she occasionally accepted, and she vanished from the flat for a couple of days with the camera I’d had to trade her one month four years ago when I couldn’t afford my rent, which she had subsequently refused to sell back to me. I ignored the part where she referred to my home of five years as ‘her flat’. I knew for a fact that my rent paid more than two thirds of the actual mortgage, but never having paid a penny herself towards the roof over our heads made absolutely no difference to Vanessa whose house this was. Admittedly, her dad did legally pay the mortgage and had done ever since she had been accepted onto a fine arts programme at Central Saint Martins an undisclosed number of years ago. The deal was that he’d pay until she graduated. She never graduated. He was still paying. As far as Van was concerned, a deal’s a deal.
I took a deep breath and started my favourite conversation again. ‘I sort of got made redundant this morning.’
‘You what?’ She blinked and smiled.
‘I got made redundant.’
It did not get easier the more often I said it.
‘Oh my God.’ Vanessa laughed. Actually laughed. ‘You lost your job?’
I nodded and rested one wet foot on top of the other, dripping quietly.
‘But what are you going to do?’ she said as she slowly sat down on the sofa, eyes fixed on me. ‘I mean, like, all you do is work.’
‘It’s OK, it was just restructuring,’ I said, reminding myself as much as telling her. ‘I’ll be in a new job by next week.’
‘Are you high?’ she asked. ‘Where exactly? If a company that has had you working twelve hours a day for five years doesn’t want to keep you around, what makes you think anyone else is going to want to touch you? How are you going to explain getting the sack?’
‘I didn’t get the sack,’ I reiterated, trying not to panic. ‘I was made redundant. No one’s going to care. I’ve got loads of experience.’
‘Loads of experience in getting fired,’ Vanessa replied. ‘You know what they say – it’s easier to find a job when you’re in a job. Who is going to believe you were kicked out for nothing?’
These were not the things I needed to hear.
‘If I were interviewing for whatever it is you do, who would I hire? The person who’d applied but still had a job because they were good enough for their company to want to keep them, or the person who’d got the sack for being surplus to requirements?’
Damn her evil logic.
‘Honestly, I’m amazed you haven’t already killed yourself,’ she said, stretching out on the cream settee without taking off her boots. She was truly evil. ‘Now you haven’t got a job, it must bring all the other tragic parts of your life into focus.’
‘All the other tragic parts?’
‘No job, no boyfriend, no friends …’ She ticked off my faults on her fingers. ‘That hair.’
I shook the towel turban from my head and grabbed a damp strand. ‘What’s wrong with my hair?’
‘Maybe you could go off on one of those Eat, Pray, Love self-exploratory adventures,’ she carried on, clearly enjoying herself. ‘Although that would actually require some imagination. Can you put the kettle on? I have had the worst morning.’
I pressed my lips together in a grim line. Vanessa had had the worst morning. Of course.
Vanessa and I had come across each other five years ago. I’d been looking for a new flat closer to the office and she was looking for a new flatmate who wouldn’t walk out after three months because she was a living nightmare. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. We were introduced by a ‘mutual friend’, aka a friend of Charlie’s who was trying to get into Vanessa’s knickers, and even though it was hardly love at first sight, her flat was beautiful, right in the middle of Clerkenwell and only a twenty-minute walk from work. She told me she was a photographer, and I’d been a keen amateur photographer until work had completely taken over my life, so I thought that was nice. We made small talk about our mutual love of Bradley Cooper, Kinder eggs and wearing shorts over tights, and within fifteen minutes I’d signed the lease. The day I moved in, Charlie, Amy and I were treated to the sight of Vanessa and Charlie’s friend shagging over the back of the settee. I never saw him again. Vanessa I was stuck with.
Within weeks, Vanessa had broken every rule in the flatmate book. She drank my booze, my tea and my milk; she never bought toilet paper; she played music so loudly that I had to sleep with earplugs in. Inside a year, she overtook Angelina Jolie on my list of most evil women alive. She fought with my female friends, she slept with my male friends, she took my clothes without asking, and I was fairly certain that on at least one occasion she had stolen money out of my purse. On my twenty-fifth birthday, she performed an impromptu striptease on the bar of the restaurant we were eating at because she was ‘considering a career as a burlesque dancer’ and called me a boring twat when I asked her to get down. Suffice to say my visiting grandparents were not impressed. The day my second granddad died (not related to the burlesque performance as far as I was aware), she punched me in the arm so hard that I had a bruise for a week and told me to cheer up, it wasn’t like I had died. Her favourite term of endearment for Amy was ‘Tweedle Twat’, and she’d been openly trying to shag Charlie since the day he’d moved my stuff into the flat, despite the fact that she knew how I felt about him. And despite the fact that she was actually being penetrated by one of his best friends the moment they met.
Of course there were reasons why I’d stayed. I hated moving and I hated living with strangers even more. Amy refused to leave her shared house in Shepherd’s Bush and I refused to share one bathroom with five nursing students, so that was off the table. And given that Vanessa’s dad was paying the mortgage, the rent was so ridiculously cheap that I’d been able to pay off all my student loans without bankrupting myself. And once in a blue moon she would do something human and I’d think she wasn’t so bad. We’d spend an evening on the sofa watching bad romcoms and slagging off every man who’d ever walked the earth, or she’d suggest ordering a Chinese takeaway and manage not to insult me more than twice the whole time we ate. And every year, without fail, she bought me a new vibrator for my birthday. Which, for Vanessa, was a Nice Thing To Do. Plus I was very busy and she she was away a lot. Somehow, until now, it had worked.
But when the doorbell went again, I was still standing in the living room wrapped in a towel that was not my own, and I really, really wished I lived in a six-to-a-toilet bedsit in West London.
‘Hey, sorry it took so long. I got chatting to this random—’
‘Oh, fucking hell, tell me it’s not the muffbumper?’ Vanessa groaned. ‘I can’t. I just can’t. It’s bad enough that you’re here without that psycho hanging around.’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ, she’s home.’ Amy froze in the living room doorway, the look on her face switching from impending chocolate binge giddiness to an expression Medusa might find ‘a bit cold’.
The second time my best friend and flatmate met, Vanessa had asked Amy if it was hard being a lesbian. As far as we could tell, this question was based exclusively on Amy’s choice of shoe and hairstyle. The fact that Vanessa chose to ask the question while Amy was sitting in her fiancé Dave’s lap at her own engagement party didn’t seem to matter. Ever since, she had filed Amy away in a lovely little box in her brain labelled ‘lesbian’. Even though she wasn’t even a little bit gay. Did not matter in the slightest.
‘Yes, I’m home,’ Vanessa replied without taking her eyes off the TV. ‘Because I live here. You don’t. So you can fuck off.’
‘Fairly certain Tess lives here as well, so I’m probably not going to do that.’ Amy’s voice was laden with faux politeness. ‘I thought you were away?’
‘Stalking me?’ Vanessa asked. ‘I’ve told you before, you’re not my type.’
‘No, I know. You prefer someone with a cock. Or, you know, anyone with a cock. How is the chlamydia?’
Vanessa sat up sharply. ‘Oh my God, you told her?’
Good to know what could get her attention. Obviously I shouldn’t have told Amy that my flatmate had caught the clap from, well, we didn’t know who exactly, but she had and I had. And in my defence, she didn’t need to tell me, but of course she had to. And as the only functioning adult in the flat, I had been charged with reminding her to take her antibiotics every day. It was always nice to be included in things, even your flatmate’s venereal diseases.
‘It’s not Tess’s fault you’re a dirty skank,’ Amy said, dropping the bag full of chocolatey goodness on the side table and rolling up her sleeves. Uh-oh, were we going to have a rumble? Finally? ‘Maybe if you kept your mouth and your legs closed for fifteen minutes out of every day, this wouldn’t happen.’
Inside the plastic bag, I saw the screen of Amy’s mobile flashing. On average she went through one handset every two months – honestly, I’d never known anyone so careless. I wondered how many of her phones my friend from the park had happened upon in the past. But rather than give her a lecture on proper care and management of electronic equipment, I slipped the phone out of the bag and left the two of them at it. They wouldn’t notice if I wasn’t there; they never did. And I had to answer Amy’s phone for her. It was Charlie.
‘Amy’s phone,’ I answered, ever so slightly breathless. Yes, I’d known him for ten years. Yes, I’d worked in the same office as him for the past three. No, it didn’t change anything. Worst. Crush. Ever. ‘It’s Tess.’
‘Tess? It’s Charlie, are – are you OK?’
Oh, Charlie. So concerned.
‘I’m fine,’ I lied, closing my bedroom door on the outbreak of World War III in the living room. ‘Amy’s here.’
‘What happened?’ He sounded so worried. Bless. ‘We just got an email a minute ago saying you’re no longer with the company. What is going on? You quit without telling me?’
You had to laugh, didn’t you?
‘They sent an email saying I’m no longer with the company?’ I laid back against my fat marshmallow pillows and closed my eyes. ‘That’s all it said?’
‘Yeah. I emailed you this morning but it kept bouncing back, and then you didn’t answer my texts so I phoned HR to see if you’d called in sick. Then they sent this. Tess, what happened?’
‘Restructuring?’ I suggested. ‘Downsizing? Redundancies?’
‘Oh. Fuuuuuuck.’
‘Yeah.’ I felt the first tear in a while trickle down my cheek.
I heard Charlie sighing on the other end of the phone and imagined him sitting at his desk three over and two across from where I used to sit. His hair, almost the exact same shade of dark coppery brown as mine, would be all rumpled as usual. His tie would be loose, as though it were four fifteen on a Friday instead of twelve twenty on a Monday, and he’d be wearing the glasses with clear lenses that he’d bought at Urban Outfitters to try to look a bit cleverer because he had a big client meeting this afternoon.
‘Shit, Tess,’ he said after the pause. ‘I’m sorry. That’s bollocks. What a load of wank.’
And that magical way with words was why I was the creative director and he was an account manager. Or at least that’s why he was an account manager.
I had been in love with Charlie Wilder for ten long years but it felt longer. Ever since I’d spotted him sitting outside our halls of residence playing a guitar covered in Smiths stickers, a battered copy of Catcher in the Rye by his side, I just knew he was the one. OK, so I hadn’t actually read Catcher in the Rye and I only knew one or two Smiths songs from films or TV, but regardless, I was smitten. Because these two things meant that Charlie Wilder, unlike every boy I had gone to school with, was Terribly Deep. When you added that observation to the fact that he was six three and therefore taller than me, even in heels, it was hard to fight fate. Unfortunately, it was fair to say that Charlie wasn’t hit quite so squarely by Cupid’s arrow. It took almost nine months for me to work up the courage (i.e. get drunk enough) to talk to him, and by that time he had a girlfriend. Eventually, after I’d spent two years reading every book I heard him so much as allude to and learning every lyric Morrissey had ever written, we somehow became friends. And once we were friends, I was terrified of scaring Charlie out of my life by confessing my all-encompassing, soul-crushing love for him. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t exactly struggling to suppress his feelings for me. There hadn’t been so much as a drunken semi-song, and, as Amy routinely liked to tell me, every girl accidentally snogs her boy best friend at some point. Or if you were Vanessa, gave them an STD. Everywhere we went, people assumed we were a couple. When they worked out that we weren’t, they wanted to know why not. Charlie always laughed and said I was too good for him. I always laughed and agreed. And then died inside.
But no. So we were the very definition of ‘just good friends’. Every Sunday, we went to the pub and ate too many Yorkshire puddings. He killed my spiders; I bought his socks. He was dreadful at remembering to buy socks. But every single time we spoke, whether it was about work, football or the seasonal special at Starbucks, all I wanted was for him to grab hold of me, spin me around and tell me he loved me. It was, admittedly, a little bit sad. As far as I was concerned, there were two kinds of men in the world – Charlie and the Not-Charlies. The Not-Charlies didn’t get a look in.
So you can understand why I was a bit slow to process exactly what he’d said.
‘Hang on – no one else got laid off? No other redundancies?’
‘No. No one. And Michael just announced that we won that air freshener account. Everyone was asking where you were. It’s mental. What exactly did he tell you?’
Reluctantly I went over the whole story, my heart sinking through the floor as reality set in. Donovan & Dunning weren’t restructuring. The only person being downsized was me, and it was working. I’d never felt smaller in my entire life. I just couldn’t understand why. What could I possibly have done wrong?
‘I’ll try to find out what’s going on,’ he promised when I’d finished. ‘Do you want to come over later? We could get very, very drunk and watch Top Gun?’
I did like Top Gun.
‘And I’ll buy all that girl shit you like? You know – wine, those massive cookies, chocolate that isn’t a Mars Bar?’
I also liked girl shit.
‘Come on, Tess, you’ll feel better. You know you want to.’
And I did want to. But the idea of curling up on Charlie’s sofa eating chocolates that weren’t Mars Bars while he sat there feeling sorry for me was too much to bear. The only thing worse than being in love with someone who didn’t love you was being in love with someone who pitied you.
‘I think I just want to go to sleep. I’m really tired,’ I said, rolling out of my towel and into the nightshirt underneath my pillow. So what if it was only midday. I was unemployed. ‘Call you tomorrow?’
‘Make sure you do,’ he said sternly. ‘It’ll be all right, you know. Love you.’
‘Love you too,’ I replied, wincing with every word. Not because he didn’t mean it, but because he did. Just not in the same way. ‘Oh, and Charlie – I know what you’re going to say, but could you make sure Sandra changes the colour on the squirrel?’
‘You’re hopeless,’ he sighed. ‘Will do.’
Hanging up, I shuffled my bum up the bed until I could kick my feet under the covers and pulled them up over my head. Vanessa and Amy were still going at it in the living room. I couldn’t even make out what they were arguing about at this point – it was just high-pitched squealing. It sounded like dolphins re-enacting Toy Story 3. And I hadn’t lied – I really was exhausted. Tomorrow I would get up and I would draft my CV. Charlie would have found out exactly what had gone down at work and I’d call all the lovely recruitment agencies and ad agencies and let them know that I was ready for a new challenge. Maybe if I just went to sleep, everything would be better when I woke up. That always seemed to work in the movies, after all.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_52125ea1-bdf9-557b-91d5-7aafc6f94d4b)
In the four days that had passed since I’d been fired I had learned the following lessons. One: what worked in the movies did not work in real life. Two: advertising was the creative industry equivalent of the movie Mean Girls. Three: four days wasn’t long enough for your hair to start washing itself. Four: if, however, you just didn’t get out of bed, you stopped noticing that your hair smelled disgusting after two and a half days, so that didn’t really matter.
I had woken up on Tuesday strong, confident and fully committed to writing a new chapter in The Story of Tess. Amy called in sick with another migraine and played cheerleader, DJing a motivational mix of music from my largely unplayed music library. By midday, I had an amazing CV, I’d called and left voicemails with every advertising agency in London, and I’d drunk five and a half cups of coffee. Big cups. By four p.m., my CV had gone out to eight recruitment agencies, I’d been to the toilet six times and Charlie had reported back at least a dozen different rumours about my ‘no longer being with the company’. The three favourites seemed to be that I had been leaking information to a competitor, that I had blackmailed the company into promoting me, and, my personal favourite, that I’d been sleeping with Michael and that he’d sent me to France to have his baby. Because clearly it was 1852 and that’s what we did when we got knocked up by the boss.
At six p.m., after Amy had left for the bar job she occasionally bothered with, after Charlie had emailed me the fifteenth different rumour (that I was completing a sex change and would be coming back in the New Year as Terence), and after I had received the fifth phone call of the day explaining no one was hiring at the moment, that things were really tough right now and asking if I had considered retraining as a teacher, I gave up. As in, I took off my people clothes and put on my most disgusting threadbare flannel pyjamas, ate everything in the fridge and turned off my stolen phone. And when I turned it back on twenty-four hours later, the only people who had tried to contact me were Amy and Charlie. So I turned it back off again. The only bright spot was that when I left my room at EastEnders o’clock, Vanessa had mysteriously disappeared and taken her suitcase and toxic personality with her.
For the past seventy-two hours I had only got out of bed to pee, take something out of the fridge or fetch another Sex and the City boxset from the living room. No one ever got laid off in Sex and the City. And they all got the men they wanted in the end. Even if one of them was Steve. It did not make me feel better. I did not turn it off.
But three days later, the universe and Amy had decided enough was enough.
‘Get up, get up, get up!’ She started slapping at either side of my head and bouncing up and down on top of my bed. ‘It’s Saturday. You’ve got to get up. We’re staging an intervention.’
‘I don’t want to be intervened,’ I croaked, pushing Amy away and throwing myself face first into my pile of pillows. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘No, you’re not Anne Frank, you’re not hiding from the Nazis. It’s time for you to get your arse up and out,’ she said, jumping on my back and wrapping her legs around my waist. She was very strong for such a little girl. ‘You need to get in the shower. We’ve got places to go, people to see.’
‘Not possible,’ I remonstrated, pushing up onto all fours and trying to shake her off, but Amy clung to me as though she was riding a scabby horse. ‘Let me go back to sleep.’
‘We haven’t got time – I’m double-parked. Get dressed, you filthy mare.’
Of course the other person in Amy’s intervention was Charlie. I shook Amy loose and tried to push the dead cat on top of my head into something resembling a ponytail. It wasn’t like he hadn’t spent more than one night on my bathroom floor holding my hair back while I brought up half of the student union bar, but still, I tried to avoid looking like utter scum in front of him when I could. If I could.
‘How are you double-parked? You haven’t got a car.’ I blinked at the daylight and the very tall, very lovely man silhouetted by my window.
‘It’s mental, Tess. You just go on the Internet and ask a man if you can borrow one, and then you give him your credit card details and, fuck me, you’ve got a car,’ he replied. Sarcasm was not one of Charlie’s strong points. As opposed to his beautiful, floppy hair and wonderful eyes. And his long, long legs. And broad chest. I was going off topic.
‘If you hadn’t gone the complete Howard Hughes, you’d remember that this afternoon is my niece’s christening and we are attending,’ Amy said, releasing her kung fu grip and rolling across the bed as she wrinkled her tiny nose. Her black bob was ruffled from over-exertion and her cheeks were flushed. She looked the very picture of health. She looked like my complete opposite. ‘So get up and get in the shower because we are on our way up north whether you like it or not.’
Those karma gods were not playing fair.
‘Tess! Amy!’
As was tradition, my mum leapt up from the kitchen table as though I was returning from the war and we hadn’t called seventeen minutes ago to say we were getting off the M1 and would be there in seventeen minutes. No hugs, though. We didn’t hug.
‘And Charlie.’
As was tradition, my boy best friend was met with a wildly inappropriate growl of a hello, as he had been ever since the first time I’d brought him home. The only person on earth who loved Charlie more than I did was my mum. I wasn’t sure if she wanted him to marry me or marry her. Of course she was already married and my stepdad was possibly the best man on earth, but that didn’t stop her from giving him a squeeze that was just half a heartbeat too long. They hugged. They always hugged.
‘Nice to see you, Julie,’ he squeaked as she copped a sneaky feel. ‘You look well.’
‘Isn’t it a lovely weekend?’ Once she had put Charlie down, Mum sat back at the table while Amy helped herself to everything in our fridge. ‘It’s going to be a lovely christening. Amy, you must be so proud of your sister.’
‘Yes, getting accidentally knocked up is quite the achievement these days,’ Amy replied, popping the top off a beer. ‘And two kids to two different men. She’s a living miracle.’
‘So proud,’ Mum beamed, stone cold smile on her face. ‘And what are you doing for work now? Are you still seeing that lovely coloured man?’
I shook my head and planted my face on the cool kitchen table. It smelled of disinfectant wipes and shame.
‘No, that was really just a sex thing,’ Amy said. She did love going toe to toe with my mum. And the worst part was that she was really only warming up for her own mother. ‘But you know what they say – once you go black—’
‘I haven’t, but that’s very interesting.’ Mum always got bored before Amy did and so she turned her attention to Charlie. ‘And what about you, love? How’s work? Tess still acting the slave driver?’
Because the atmosphere wasn’t tense enough already.
During the two-hour drive up into the seventh circle of hell, Amy and Charlie had been thoroughly briefed on the situation. They knew that I had not told my mother about my newly unemployed status, and they knew I was not planning to do so. Originally I just hadn’t been able to face it. And then I had convinced myself I’d be able to get a new job so quickly that there wasn’t any point in telling her. And then I’d spent three days under the duvet eating packet after packet of Hobnobs.
Charlie thought I should tell her. Charlie thought my mum was nicer than Mary Poppins on Xanax. Charlie loved my mum because my mum loved Charlie. Amy did not think I should tell her. Amy thought my mum was a word I’d only ever said out loud twice in my entire life. Amy did not love my mum because my mum did not love Amy. And while no one wants to think badly of their parents, Amy’s opinion of my mum was probably closer to the truth than Charlie’s. It was comforting to know there was someone out there who knew everything about me and wasn’t genetically or legally required to love me but did so anyway. Unfortunately, it also meant that Amy had witnessed all the rows, all the shouting and all the tears, and, as was right and proper for a best friend, she held all the grudges I was biologically denied.
I loved my mum and I knew that she loved me. I also knew that she loved me more when I was doing well. If I got ninety-eight percent in a test, she wanted to know what had happened to the other two percent. If I got a pay rise, she wanted to know why it wasn’t a promotion. If I got a promotion, she wanted to see a business card to verify it. She was a pusher. She was a pushy mother. Whenever I got upset about it, I tried to remind myself I should be happy that she focused her efforts on shoving me up the academic and professional ladders, and even happier that reality TV didn’t exist when I was a kid. I would almost certainly have ended up on X Factor, dancing to Kelis’s Milkshake in a diamante bra-and-knicker set at the age of six. It wasn’t her fault, I reminded myself for the thousandth time that year; she just wanted the best for me. She just wanted me to have the things that she didn’t. And she’d watched Working Girl too many times in the eighties. It wasn’t a coincidence that I was called Tess.
‘Oh, you know Tess doesn’t work in my team,’ Charlie replied with careful diplomacy. ‘And thank goodness. She’s so good at her job, she’d just show me up.’
He always knew the right thing to say. Mum and I sat across from each other and smiled in tandem. Her hair was shorter than mine and starting to go grey, but we had the same colour eyes and identical gigantic rack. I’d got my Big Bird height, overanalytical mind and physical inability to hold a tune from Dad, but the rest of me was pure Julie.
‘So what’s the news?’ she asked, eventually turning to me. ‘How’s that fancy office? Have you got your new business cards yet?’
‘Not yet,’ I said, trying very hard not to tell any lies. ‘And really, the creative director job isn’t that different from what I was doing before. It’s just a different title.’
I actually assumed that was true. Everyone knew you ended up doing the new job for at least a year before you actually got the title.
‘Everyone’s been very impressed – they can’t wait to see you and hear all about it.’ Mum wore my achievements like a badge. ‘Your sisters will be at the christening.’
Joy.
‘Where’s Brian?’ I asked, looking around the house I grew up in for signs of my stepdad, aka the only sane member of my family. It made perfect sense that he wasn’t genetically related to me in anyway. ‘Hiding?’
‘Hiding,’ Mum confirmed. ‘He’s playing golf. He’ll be back by two.’
I nodded and tried not to worry. It seemed like Brian was playing a lot of golf lately.
‘Oh, Tess, Amy’s mum dropped by earlier and asked if you could take some pictures this afternoon?’
‘I would, but I didn’t bring my camera,’ I said, biting my lip and hoping she wouldn’t ask where it was.
It was last summer, when I’d been short on money due to a ridiculous last-minute weekend away with Charlie that I couldn’t afford and which had ended in him copping off with a twenty-two-year-old blonde girl while I sat in the B&B sulking, that I’d traded my camera to Vanessa for a month’s rent. The camera I’d begged my mother to buy me. The camera I had taken with me everywhere until work had got in the way. The camera that sat on my ‘photographer’ roommate’s desk and never moved.
‘She’ll just have to manage without, then, won’t she,’ Mum shrugged. ‘I told her it wasn’t fair to ask anyway. You’ve been working all week and then she expects you to take photos of her bloody granddaughter’s christening? I mean, you’re a bloody director now, for Christ’s sake. And it’s not like there won’t be another one, the way she goes on. No offence, Amy.’
‘None taken,’ Amy replied. ‘My sister is a bigger slag than I am, I know.’
‘Hadn’t we better go and get changed?’ I stood up and grabbed my hastily packed weekend bag, wondering what sartorial treats Amy had shoved in there while I was showering. ‘We don’t want to be fighting for the bathroom.’
‘Fine.’ Mum feigned disappointment that we were trying to escape so quickly, but I knew she was relieved. ‘Be down here by quarter to three. We’ll walk down to the church together.’
I just prayed I wouldn’t burn up on entry.
The christening went as well as a small village christening could go. Babies cried, mums cooed and the twenty-something children who had run away at the age of eighteen stood awkwardly at the back fielding questions from their former Brownie leaders about why they weren’t married yet.
‘We can’t get married,’ Amy was explaining to our septuagenarian Brown Owl. ‘Because we’re a triad. Me, Tess and Charlie. Society doesn’t understand our love. It’s a polyamory thing.’
‘Pollyanna-y?’ Mrs Rogers looked very confused. ‘I don’t quite follow, Amy, love.’
‘Just what we need,’ Charlie whispered in my ear as he fell into the seat next to me. The post-baptismal celebrations were taking place in the pub, ‘the true church of the village’, as it was written. Almost everyone I’d gone to school with was crammed into the conservatory of The Millhouse, putting back pints and taking pictures of Amy’s new niece, Katniss, with their phones and posting them straight to her Facebook page. I had assumed Amy was taking the piss when she’d told me the baby’s name, but no. I should have known. Her big sister was called Bella, after all.
‘What’s that?’ I clinked my Diet Coke against his pint of bitter and took a sip. As predicted, Amy had struggled with my wardrobe of sensible work separates, so I was sitting in a Yorkshire pub at my best friend’s sister’s baby’s christening in July wearing black leather knee boots, a gold sequinned miniskirt I’d worn one New Year at uni, and a white cotton shirt that really needed ironing. It was quite the outfit.
‘Amy is going round telling everyone that the three of us are a couple,’ he said, undoing his already loose tie. ‘I think she got bored of people asking about Dave.’
‘Amy was bored of people asking about Dave seven seconds after she broke up with him,’ I replied, imagining the fun conversation I’d be having with Lorraine from the library and Donna from the post office before the night was out. ‘Now she’s just bored. Why did she even make us come to this?’
‘I’m fairly certain it was to remind you why you left in the first place. Is it working?’ Charlie drained his pint and nodded towards my half-empty glass. ‘What are you drinking? I’m going to the bar.’
Reaching over, I wiped a frothy moustache from his top lip and smiled. ‘Just Diet Coke. I’m not in the mood to drink.’
‘God forbid you should make a scene.’ He looked over to where Amy was performing a jazz tap routine for the pensioners who lived in the bungalows near her mum.
‘I’m not nearly so entertaining,’ I replied. ‘Thanks for coming with us, anyway. I know it’s a ball-ache.’
‘Yeah, whatever.’ He stood up and stretched. ‘Any family is better than no family, remember?’
‘And the grass is always greener,’ I said. ‘Remember?’
Charlie half laughed as he walked away, towering over everyone else in the bar while I watched. It was Christmas in the third year of uni when he first came home with me. His parents were getting divorced, and since I’d been there, done that, I’d told him to come home with me. Never in a million years did I think he’d say yes. Now, eight Noels on, he had a stocking embroidered with his name and a permanent spot at our Christmas dinner table. Just like me, he didn’t really see his dad, and his mum had moved to Malta with his stepdad a couple of years ago. Without any grandparents or siblings, as soon as the Boots Christmas catalogue dropped, he was an honorary Brookes.
‘Tess! You came! We were worried you might be too busy!’
Only a full-blooded Brookes could be that passive-aggressive. I tore my eyes away from Charlie’s arse to the far less pleasant sight of my two younger sisters standing before me, arms full of babies and faces full of judgement.
‘Are those new boots?’ Melanie asked.
‘Your hair is so long,’ Liz said.
‘And you both look well,’ I said, looking down at my niece and nephew and giving them each a curt nod. ‘Hello, babies.’
‘Here, hold her.’ Melanie, twenty-six, married, mother of two, handed me baby Tallulah. ‘She doesn’t even know who you are. Isn’t that funny?’
I bit my lip to avoid pointing out that Tallulah was only nine months old and barely even knew who she was and took the baby with a strained smile.
‘Please don’t be sick on this shirt,’ I whispered to my niece. ‘It was a present.’
‘Look, you’re a natural!’ Liz, twenty-two, engaged, mother of one but desperately trying for another by all accounts, thrust out a second baby. ‘Take Harry while I get us a drink.’
‘I can’t hold two babies,’ I squealed, taking the even tinier bundle in my other arm and looking around in desperation. ‘What if I need a wee?’
‘You’re not allowed to have a wee,’ Mel said, smoothing out her wrinkled-to-buggery dress and sitting down beside me. She picked up a glass of wine that did not belong to her and swigged it back. ‘Welcome to my world.’
‘I think I read something on the way in about overpopulation, so I can’t stay,’ I said. I really wanted to give her one of the babies back, but with my arms full, I had no idea how to offload one. They smelled weird. ‘Are they OK? I can’t see their faces. How do you do this?’
‘Don’t overthink it, you’ll drop one,’ she advised. Her hair, identical to mine, sprang all around her face. While I kept my copper mess carefully tethered in a long ponytail, Mel had clearly decided to embrace the curls for the christening. It was a controversial gamble that had not paid off. ‘Although I realize that telling you not to overthink something is like telling Liz no.’
Mel was the poor put-upon middle sister. While Mum was busy forcing me up an imaginary ladder of success and our stepdad was spoiling little Lizzie with his unwavering attention, the true child of divorce and official Band-Aid baby Mel sat quietly in the middle of it all, shaking her head and counting down the days until she could get out, get married and fuck up a family all of her own. So far, so good. She had a house, a husband, a Rav 4 and two kids. As far as she was concerned, she was winning. And despite her open disapproval of me, I actually liked Mel. She was funny, dry and desperately honest. We didn’t see each other terribly often, mainly because I avoided the village like the plague and she couldn’t exactly come gallivanting down to London with two babies under three. It might seem like a strange thing to say about your sister, but if we weren’t related, I’d want to be her friend.
‘Wiiiiiine.’ Liz returned from the bar and handed Mel a glass bucket of suspiciously green-tinged white wine. ‘So, Tess, tell me everything. You never update Facebook. Have you got a boyfriend?’
Liz, on the other hand, not so much.
‘Me and Jamie are moving at the end of the month, has Mel told you? Right around the corner from her. Isn’t it brilliant? All our babies will get to grow up together. Well, all our babies apart from your babies. You really need to get a move on, you know – you’re not getting any younger.’
There was nothing like being reminded about your tick-tick-ticking biological clock by your six-years-younger half-sister to put the icing on this shitty cake of a week. And cake should never be shitty.
‘Is Charlie going out with anyone?’ she asked, tightening her blonde ponytail. Liz was the only one of the three of us who had escaped Mum’s dark-hair-big-boob genes. ‘He might be up for it now if he’s getting desperate. I could talk to him for you?’
‘Or I could kill you,’ I offered, desperate to offload one of these babies. Preferably whichever one was starting to smell like poop. ‘Charlie isn’t desperate.’
Liz and Mel shared a not-very-furtive glance.
‘And neither am I,’ I added.
‘You know there’s a rumour going round that you and Amy are lezzers.’ Liz sipped her wine and narrowed her eyes. ‘But I told Karen you weren’t. Because you’re not. Are you?’
‘No, Liz, Amy and I are not lesbians. We’re very busy career women who have other things to worry about than babies and boyfriends.’ Didn’t matter how true that was, it still sounded like an excuse. ‘And I think you’ll find Amy probably started that rumour to make Karen look stupid.’
‘So the new job’s going well?’ Mel took over the interrogation and one of the babies. Unfortunately, it was not the smelly one. I gave Tallulah the filthiest look I could muster but she just blew a raspberry back at me. No respect, that girl.
‘Yes?’ I was the worst liar.
‘Because I emailed you and it bounced back.’
Bloody email. She couldn’t have sent flowers?
‘Uh, there was a problem with the server.’
‘But not on Charlie’s email? Because I emailed Charlie and that was fine.’
So much for her being the nice sister. Along with her hair and boobs, Mel had also inherited our mum’s ability to sniff out blood, and once she got a whiff of something not right, she did not let go.
‘I didn’t want to say anything at the christening’ – Amy always told me it was good to start a lie by making yourself look good – ‘but I’m not actually working there any more.’
‘Then where are you working?’ The two of them stared at me as though they already knew the answer but just really, really needed to hear me say it.
‘I’m not working anywhere,’ I said quietly. ‘I got made redundant.’
Mel gasped. Liz reached out and snatched Tallulah from my arms in case unemployment was catching.
‘You know that one isn’t yours, don’t you?’ I asked.
‘Mum!’ Liz grabbed our passing mother’s arm, her face completely white. ‘Tess lost her job!’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ I pressed my hand against my forehead and prayed to whoever might be listening to strike me dead on the spot. I could not handle this right now. Silently I cursed Amy for dragging me up here and wished a plague on Charlie’s house for driving the car. My mother stopped dead in her tracks, her face frozen in horror, and just in case people hadn’t heard Liz, she dropped a full glass of red wine onto the tiled floor. It shattered into not really that many pieces (definitely not crystal) and splattered everyone around us with cheap red plonk.
‘Tess, what is she talking about?’ Ignoring the fact that she’d just ruined about seven people’s tights, my mum looked as though she’d just had a stroke. I really hoped she hadn’t. ‘What does she mean you lost your job?’
‘I was going to tell you after …’ I waved my hand around the very quiet room. ‘I got made redundant.’
And with that, the whispering began. Everyone knew someone who had been made redundant, but Tess Brookes? Her who had moved away to That London? With her fancy job? Scandalous.
‘But your promotion?’ Mum’s face was still a very worrying shade of grey.
‘No promotion,’ I replied. Thank goodness I hadn’t overreacted. This was exactly as horrible as I had thought it would be.
‘I cannot believe you would embarrass me like this,’ she said through gritted teeth as she looked around at anyone but me. ‘I cannot believe you would come here and announce that like it’s nothing. I cannot believe you wanted to embarrass me in front of all my friends.’
I dipped my head, pretending my eyes weren’t stinging, and watched the puddle of her spilled wine bleed across the floor towards a white paper napkin and slowly stain it a dark ruby red. There were so many things I wanted to say. I hadn’t planned to tell her like this. I hadn’t wanted to embarrass anyone. Liz told her! It was just like being fifteen again; Liz was such a grass. But just like when I was fifteen, I knew there was no point answering back. She wasn’t finished.
‘Don’t just sit there crying. What did you do?’
Damage done, Liz got up, switched babies with Mel and flounced away, muttering something about needing to change Harry. Mel gave me a quick supportive squeeze on the shoulder and followed. Just like being fifteen. Where was Amy when I needed her?
‘I didn’t do anything – they were just laying people off,’ I explained. It didn’t help that I didn’t actually know what had happened myself. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘Well, people don’t just lose their jobs for no reason, Tess,’ she carried on while a random sixteen-year-old who probably went to my old school started mopping up the mess around us. ‘I should have known something was wrong when you came out dressed like that.’
She had a point there. She should have known.
‘I can’t believe this. After all I’ve done for you.’
‘What? After all you’ve done what?’
Ahh. There was Amy. And as my best friend stepped up to my mother, the whispering was replaced by a low clinking of glasses, occasionally punctuated by the popping open of packets of McCoy’s.
‘What exactly have you done?’ she asked, forcing her way in between me and my mother, hands on skinny hips, and stamping a very little foot. ‘Aside from bully your daughter for the last twenty years?’
Amy and my mum were exactly the same height. For years I’d wondered who would win in a fight, and at last it looked like I might find out.
‘I know this is going to be hard for you, Amy, but please don’t involve yourself where you’re not wanted,’ she replied. Ahh, interesting. She was playing the responsible mother card.
‘Can we not do this?’ I asked as calmly as possible. ‘We can talk about this at home. This is … Katniss’s day?’
Nope, that just did not sound right.
‘Oh, we will talk about this at home,’ Mum replied, giving Amy the frowning of a lifetime. ‘We’ll talk about when you decided it was all right to start lying to your mother. And Amy, I think it would be a good idea if you stayed at your house tonight.’
Before Amy could reply, my mum turned on her sensible heel and marched away. As the door to the pub slammed, the silence broke and the party went back to full volume with a new lease of life now they had something scandalous to talk about. Thank goodness me losing my job had served a purpose.
‘Sorry.’ Amy dropped into my lap and rested her head on my shoulder. Because that would quiet those lesbian rumours. ‘I couldn’t listen to her going on at you.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you only made it marginally worse,’ I said, patting her on the head. ‘She was going to find out sooner or later.’
‘I suppose. Sorry I made you come in the first place, then,’ she sniffed. ‘I thought coming back and checking out all the losers would remind you how awesome our lives are.’
I looked at her in disbelief. She shrugged. ‘How awesome my life is?’
‘OK.’ I groaned and stood up straight, ignoring the looks and smirks around the room. ‘I’m going to go out for a walk. Get some fresh air. Are you all right? I saw you dancing for Mrs Rogers earlier. Nice moves.’
‘Can you stop worrying about me for one minute and worry about yourself?’ she said, brushing down her in-appropriately tiny red dress and straightening out her glossy black bob. ‘When am I not fine?’
It was true. She was always fine. So I gave her a smile and, ignoring all my Cloverhill classmates, I pushed my way over to the fire escape and escaped.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_8050e9fa-f63c-5f9a-b9ad-309e6765db2d)
Behind the Millhouse was the mill pond, a tiny body of water just big enough to have a good side and a bad side. Naturally, the bad side was where all the cool kids hung out and drank cheap, rank booze, while the good side was where the nanas brought their grandchildren to throw bits of old Hovis at the scabby ducks. I had spent so many hours throwing Hovis at those ducks, with and without my nana. After a slow and steady lap of the pond, I found a bench somewhere in between the two poles, my confused ensemble not really fitting in with either crew. The kids had clearly clocked me as too old to hang out with them and too uncool to buy them more bargain vodka, and the grandparents did not want their precious children talking to a lady dressed as a stripper on her way to work in a call centre. I didn’t care. I didn’t really feel anything. My brain was so full of so much, I couldn’t do anything but sit on the bench, try to ignore the splinters in the backs of my thighs and make occasional squeaking noises. I wondered if there was some terrifying astrological event I didn’t know about, if all Capricorns were going through something equally traumatic, but it just wasn’t possible. Kate Middleton was a Capricorn – there would have been something on the news if her life was turning as all-encompassingly shitty as mine. There would have been a tweet.
Stretching out my fingers, I stared at the backs of my hands as though I had a laptop in front of me and tried to switch into work mode. I was best in work mode. If I were still an employed, functioning member of society and my shambles of a life was a campaign, how would I pitch it?
The biggest problem was the sheer number of problems. I didn’t have a job, I hated my flatmate, my mum hated me, I was in love with my best friend, my best friend was not in love with me, and on top of everything else, even when you peeled away those key issues, I had absolutely no life. Not a single quirky characteristic that could be spun into an adorable side project. As a brand, I was less desirable than Skoda; even I would struggle to spin me. But it wasn’t impossible – I needed rebranding. All the successful companies struggled at some point. Even Apple nearly went bankrupt once. And if someone could make Old Spice cool again, I could certainly save myself.
But what was the Tess Brookes brand?
This was why I’d never had an online dating profile – it was too hard to describe yourself. I was loyal, conscientious, creative and logical. I could always see the solution to a problem; I always knew how to make a client happy. Unless the client was me, apparently. Visually, I didn’t have a signature look unless you counted bad hair and massive boobs. (Hopefully no one did.) There was no one thing that would make someone sit back and go, ‘Oh, that’s so Tess.’ I didn’t have a favourite band, a favourite book; I dipped in and out of whatever was on the TV when I turned it on. I could describe every single demographic out there, I could tell you what made someone buy Coke over Pepsi and then switch back again, but I couldn’t tell you whether or not I preferred polka dots over stripes. I knew too much about everyone else and nothing at all about myself. How could I convince someone to buy me when there was nothing to buy?
‘There you are.’
I looked up to see Charlie striding along the edge of the pond, a frown on his face. His pretty, pretty face.
‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
‘To be fair, I didn’t get that far.’ I glanced around. I wasn’t more than five minutes away from the pub. I was sad, but I was also very lazy. ‘You missed an awesome scene.’
‘I know, I heard. I was in the gents.’ He sat down beside me, took off his jumper and draped it round my shoulders. ‘But afterwards you missed Amy grabbing hold of the baby and singing “Circle of Life”, so I think we’re square.’
‘Jesus, I’ve only been out here half an hour,’ I laughed, trying not to be upset that I’d missed what sounded like an incredible Lion King homage. I did love a Disney movie. There! That was something I knew about myself. I was a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed single woman who loved animated movies made for children. If we were at work, I’d be trying to sell me some cat food and a lovely cardigan about now. Maybe I should just change my name and run away – that would be a pretty decent rebrand.
‘Well, I was worried about you,’ he said, nudging me with his shoulder. ‘Been a shit week, Brookes. How are you still sober?’
‘Didn’t bring any booze.’ I waved my empty hands at him. ‘Schoolboy error.’
‘Thankfully’ – Charlie produced a half-bottle of vodka from behind his back – ‘I am not a schoolboy.’
‘Oh, you clever man,’ I said, gratefully accepting the bottle and taking a deep drink. I had never been a very good drinker. I loved a drink, but drinks did not love me. The two mugs of wine I’d enjoyed on Monday, post-sacking, were the first alcoholic drinks I’d had in a month, but while we were rebranding, I had to consider all my options. Maybe the new Tess would be a drinker. Maybe she’d learn how to make elaborate cocktails and have her friends over for parties. Maybe she’d be a whisky drinker and keep a decanter on her desk like Don Draper. Or maybe she’d do a shot of cheap supermarket vodka by the duck pond and retch in her own mouth.
‘Keep it down.’ Charlie rubbed my back and took the bottle from me. ‘Keep it down.’
‘Oh, bugger me, that’s disgusting,’ I coughed, feeling the burn in the back of my throat. Maybe if I was going to be a drinker, I shouldn’t start with four-quid cava and vodka that cost less than a Tube ticket. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re very welcome.’ Charlie took a shot without wincing and passed the bottle back. The sun was already setting across the pond, and the bad side was getting considerably more traffic than the good. ‘So, what are we going to do with you?’
‘I have no idea,’ I replied, turning to give him my best attempt at a smile. ‘I was just trying to work that out myself.’
‘Well, if you were a client and I was trying to sort you out, I’d start with what you wanted out of your campaign,’ he reasoned while I took a second shot. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him rubbing the centre of his left eyebrow. That meant he was thinking. Rubbing his chin meant he was confused. Nodding and scratching the back of his neck meant he was listening but not really paying attention. There wasn’t a thing about this man I didn’t know. ‘What do you want?’
This was why we were soulmates. He was trying to solve my problems in exactly the same way I was trying to solve my problems.
‘My job,’ I replied.
‘You can’t have your job.’ He slapped my bare thigh and I had to remember to be offended and not turned on. ‘As account manager, it’s my role to give you honest feedback and tell you what is and isn’t possible. Your old job, off the table. What else do you want?’
‘I really do just want my job,’ I said, clutching the warm bottle between my knees. ‘If I had my job back, I could just put everything back how it was and carry on. That would be perfect.’
‘If this week has taught us nothing else, it’s that things were not perfect for you,’ Charlie said. He turned on the bench until his knee was pressing against mine. ‘People lose their jobs every day, Tess. They don’t take to their beds for four days and fall apart. They turn to their friends, they go on holiday, they – I don’t fucking know – read the great novels or something. Write a great novel. Start a blog. Tell me what makes you happy, aside from work.’
I tried to think about something other than his knee on mine.
‘You?’ I said as quietly as humanly possible.
‘Me?’
‘You and Amy?’ I wanted to slap myself.
Charlie nodded for a moment and took the bottle back from me without words. The ducks on the pond, full of stale bread, started to make their way over to the rushes looking for their beds.
‘I think the problem is, you’re so used to being in your head and solving the problem that you don’t know how to present it back to the client. That’s my job,’ Charlie took hold of my hand. His were almost as soft as mine, but so much bigger. I turned, flushed with vodka, proximity and my ridiculous outfit, and looked into his big brown eyes. He was adorable. ‘So here’s what I see. You are a beautiful, clever, funny woman. You work too hard, you take on too much, and you’re far too concerned with other people’s expectations. You worry too much about your friends and you live with a mentalist, but aside from that, the basic elements are all there.’
Beautiful. He said I was beautiful.
‘Basic elements for what?’ I asked.
‘A life,’ Charlie replied. ‘You’re amazing, you know?’ He knew me well enough to recognize my near-tears whimper and started talking fast. ‘You have so much drive and ambition; you’re so dedicated to achieving your goals. All you need to do is redirect that energy to a new goal. I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about your job – you should. It’s just that it can’t be the only thing you care about. There can’t only be one thing that makes you happy.’
‘Are you happy?’ I asked him, not letting go of his hand. I was a bit worried I might never let go. ‘In general, I mean, are you happy?’
‘Yeah,’ he nodded slowly. ‘I’m happy. I like my job, I’ve got good mates, I like my flat. There are things I’d change, but overall I’m not complaining. Are you happy?’
‘Am I happy?’ I repeated. ‘I don’t think I’m really anything.’
It was hard to say out loud, but as soon as I did, I knew it was true.
‘What would you change?’ I asked him, waiting to start feeling drunk. I really wanted to be drunk. ‘You said there are things you’d change.’
‘Oh, obvious stuff.’ He squeezed my hand and scuffed the toe of his shoe in the dirt under the bench. ‘I’d like my own place. I’d like Arsenal to be doing better in the league. A smoking-hot girlfriend who would do my washing so I didn’t keep running out of socks would be nice.’
‘I am so sick of buying you more socks. What do you do, eat them?’ I asked with the closest thing to a laugh I could muster. Bravely, I rested my head on his shoulder and breathed in. He was wearing the aftershave I’d bought him for Christmas. He smelled cool, spicy and familiar. It made my stomach melt, my fingertips tingle. ‘You’ve got loads going for you. You could get a hot girlfriend if you really wanted one. You’ve got everything.’
‘And so have you.’ He dropped his head on top of mine, our coppery curls meshing together, and put his arm around my shoulders. ‘You just haven’t realized yet.’
‘I’ve got sod all,’ I said, trying to pretend that the teenagers weren’t totally eyeing up the bottle in my hand. ‘As you have quite rightly pointed out.’
‘You’ve got me.’ Charlie said. ‘And I’m all right.’
‘Oh, don’t.’ I laughed out loud. ‘Don’t even.’
This wasn’t the first time Charlie and I had got drunk on a bench. This was not the first time one of us had talked the other through a crisis. But it was the first time he’d looked at me with such dark eyes. The first time I’d felt his thumb gently running back and forth over the back of the hand he was holding. And the first time that I had ever felt his heart beating as fast as mine.
‘I’m all right, aren’t I?’ he asked. ‘Tess?’
I felt goosebumps on my bare legs and twisted round to get a better look at him. His dark, gingerish five o’clock shadow was starting to come through and his dark, dilated eyes were ever so slightly bloodshot from getting up so early, driving so far and drinking so much. He leaned his forehead against mine and repeated himself in a whisper.
‘Tess?’
Words were my thing. Words were my actual job. I used them every day, manipulated them, moulded them, made them dance around in circles, but at that moment there wasn’t a word in the world that would help me. And so instead of trying to say something funny or clever, I took a deep breath and kissed him. For a moment, I couldn’t tell who was more shocked. Neither of us moved – we just sat there, frozen, Tess pressed against Charlie. My cold, vodka-burned lips against his cold, vodka-burned lips.
And then he kissed me back.
It was slow at first and I wasn’t quite sure it was happening but I was too scared to pull away. And then I felt the slightest movement against my face, the tickle of warm breath on my wet lips. For ten years I had wondered what it would feel like to kiss Charlie Wilder on the mouth, and now I knew. It felt spectacular. The arm around my shoulders tightened and his other hand crept up to my face, cradling my cheek in his palm while our lips became better acquainted. I wrapped my arms around his back and ignored the little voice in my head that was shouting, ‘And now we’ll never, ever let go!’ As well as the vodka, I could taste the beer on his breath. I hated beer but I didn’t care. I was kissing Charlie Wilder and Charlie Wilder was kissing me.
‘Wait.’ Unable to stop myself, I pulled away with a pained expression. ‘You’re not kissing me because I’m sad, are you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he replied, his voice broken and just short of breath enough to make my heart pound.
‘And you’re not kissing me because you’ve been drinking?’ I just could not stop myself from asking these ridiculous questions. Who gave a shit if he was kissing me because he’d been drinking? I hated myself so much sometimes.
‘Maybe? A little bit,’ he admitted, leaning back in for another kiss. ‘Can you stop overthinking this now, please?’
‘No,’ I replied, pressing a smile against his lips. ‘Have you met me?’
The teenagers across the way started whooping at us approximately four seconds into the second kiss, and although the sun setting across the mill pond was as close as my village ever came to beautiful and romantic, they were very, very off-putting.
‘Back to yours?’ Charlie asked. I took a deep breath and held it in for a moment. He wasn’t just suggesting we go home, he was suggesting we Go Home Together. ‘Tess?’
‘Where else are we going to go?’ I asked lightly, pretending I wasn’t absolutely bricking myself. I hadn’t had sex in almost two years, and while we were being entirely honest, it had not been a good experience. This wasn’t just a casual shag after a rubbish party to check I still knew how to do it. This was Charlie. I was going to have sex with Charlie.
‘There’s always the back seat of my car.’
I pulled away to look at him, not sure whether he was joking or not. Nor sure whether I wanted him to be joking or not.
‘But while I know that would continue the dodgy teenage theme of the evening, I think I’d rather take you to bed,’ he said, his voice was all low and rough. I’d never heard it like that before. ‘If it’s not too weird?’
It was weird. This whole thing was weird. I was sitting on a bench wearing a gold sequinned miniskirt, kissing a boy I’d been dreaming about kissing ever since the first night I’d lain on my plastic-covered mattress in my hall of residence. I should have said it could wait. I should have said no, we couldn’t sneak into my parents’ house and have sex on my bottom bunk. But where was the fun in that? Besides, I’d had a third of a half-bottle of own-brand vodka and Charlie Wilder wanted to have sex with me. I was eighteen again. Whatever happened next, I blamed the sequins.
‘It’s not weird at all,’ I said, practically jumping off the bench and dragging him down the street. ‘Let’s go.’
And just like that, we were together.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_bd6d7476-9721-5561-9511-26318977f33f)
The next morning, I woke up wrapped in the same pale blue duvet cover I’d left behind when I’d moved to uni and a pair of arms that were brand new. Too scared to move, I tried to keep my breathing slow and even. I was in bed with Charlie. I was in bed with Charlie and neither of us was wearing any clothes. And the reason we weren’t wearing any clothes was because for the last twelve hours we had been at it.
I closed my eyes on my childhood room, my exam certificates hanging on the walls, my favourite photos lining the shelves, and tried to commit as much of the night to memory as possible. It was hard to keep the events straight, not because I’d been drunk but because I was suffering from a distinct case of what Amy always referred to as Boink Brain. Nothing fogged up your memory like a good shag. I was completely overloaded with happiness, and, given how long it was since I’d last had sex, every part of me was aching. Happily, like everyone said, it was just like riding a bike. A really, really fun bike. I remembered sneaking into the dark, empty house, checking for my parents and then kissing in the kitchen, fumbling with buttons and zips, taking far too long to get up the stairs, eventually finding my room. It was strange to know someone so well, to know everything about them, and then find yourself in a situation where you knew nothing. I had never seen Charlie naked. I had no idea what to expect in the trouser department. I had no idea how it would be.
More than once, Amy had tried to counsel me out of my Charlie crush by telling me that he was too nice to be any good in bed, that it would be like shagging my brother. As it was, I didn’t have a brother, but if that was how incest went down, I could see why it was so popular in the Deep South. Amy had been wrong. The sex was wonderful. Beautiful. It was like film sex, all deep and meaningful and very, very nice. I pressed my hand into Charlie’s, smiling lazily as his fingers instinctively curled around mine. Mine. He was mine.
‘Hey.’
I felt him rather than heard him, his words tickling my ear.
‘So.’ He snuggled up closer to me and I silently congratulated myself on having bothered to shave my legs the day before. ‘That happened.’
‘That did happen,’ I replied, too nervous to turn round and face him. Naked in the dark was one thing. Naked the next day with slept-in make-up and morning breath? Quite another. ‘Couple of times, actually.’
We lay quietly and I was glad he couldn’t see my smile. I looked like the cat that had got all of the canaries and quite possibly a parrot. I’d only been awake for a couple of minutes, but already it was like I’d woken in a whole new world. A new fantastic point of view. Aladdin and his magic carpet could piss off. I didn’t have a job and I lived with a psycho, but it didn’t matter. I had Charlie. My best friend, and now my – well, whatever he was, he was the best at something else too.
With a quick kiss to my shoulder, he rolled away, leaving my back cold and bereft. Since he was stuck on the wall side of a single lower bunk bed, there wasn’t really anywhere for him to go. Awkward.
‘Amy is going to laugh and laugh,’ he said after a moment. ‘And then laugh.’
I pulled the covers up over my boobs, ran a finger under each eye to minimize any mascara fall-out and rolled over to look at my conquest.
‘She is?’ I tried to sound as innocent as possible. ‘You think?’
‘Oh God, yeah.’ Charlie did not look changed. There was no beatific glow about his face. He was not gazing at me with a love so powerful it dared not speak its name. He was pretty much just laughing. Ha ha ha. ‘We will never hear the end of it. I feel like she’s been expecting this for ever.’
‘You do? She has?’
In his defence, I had a lot more evidence to draw on than Charlie did. For the past ten years, Amy had watched me pine and swoon and sulk and had routinely slapped me around the back of the head whenever I’d so much as mentioned the elephant in the room that was Me and Charlie. Or ‘Chess’ as I may or may not have named us. In public, when it was the three of us, it was different. She did make fun of us. She mocked our in-jokes and routinely told us to get a room whenever we indulged in some platonic snuggling. From Charlie’s perspective, Amy had been scoffing at this non-relationship for ever. He had no idea that she was counselling me behind closed doors. He had no idea how I was feeling. Which meant there was a chance he didn’t feel the same. Gulp. Puke. Gulp.
Raking a hand through his beautifully fucked-up hair, Charlie shrugged and yawned.
‘Maybe we just, you know, don’t tell her,’ he said, looking so terribly casual as he went about breaking my heart. ‘Just until we’ve worked this all out.’
‘Hmm, that’s one idea.’ I edged ever so slightly away. ‘But actually, it would really help if you could clear something up for me. What is “this”?’
There. My life was complete. I had made air quotes in bed with Charlie Wilder. Amy would actually have had a stroke if she could have seen what had just happened.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, easy as anything.
A very big part of me just wanted to nod, smile and shut up. I had Charlie in my bed. We had spent a good part of the night making love – not shagging but definitely, one hundred percent gazing into each other’s eyes, holding hands, Barry White in the background making love, with an emphasis on the ‘lurve’. That part of me did not like to make waves and was fairly certain that if I just lay there quietly, he would remember he had a penis, that he had put it in me fairly recently and would possibly put it in me again. Everyone knew that was the path to true love. But there was another very tiny part of me that really didn’t like the sound of this ‘I don’t know’ and ‘Maybe we shouldn’t tell your best friend in the entire world that we boned.’
‘You don’t know?’
It just came out. Honestly, I had no control over it.
‘I’m not trying to be a dickhead, Tess.’ Charlie sat up, hit his head on the top bunk and promptly lay back down. ‘I’m not pretending it didn’t happen, but we need to be realistic about this. We’ve been mates for years. We can’t just shag once and go back to being friends like nothing happened. That’ll just get weird.’
‘I didn’t say I wanted to,’ I said, trying to keep my voice down, but since I was me, it was hard. ‘I don’t want to pretend it never happened.’
‘Good. Because it was amazing.’ He reached over to stroke my arm and gave me a silly half-smile that I half recognized. ‘We just need to work it all out and I’d rather do that without Amy getting involved. She’ll be marching us down the aisle and getting ordained online or something.’
Wedding jokes. He was making wedding jokes. How to send a girl from bad pukey sick feeling in her stomach to good pukey sick feeling in her stomach in one easy step. And, little did he know, Amy was already ordained online. Handy.
‘Yeah, you’re right.’ I threw in a light laugh and a toss of the head for good measure, sort of a cross between a total sex goddess and a smallish pony. ‘I get it.’
‘It’s just tricky, the whole friends with benefits thing,’ he said with a smile, combing his fingers through my hair. Or at least he tried to comb his fingers through my hair. Long curly hair plus an all-night sex session equals many, many tangles. ‘It never seems to work, and you’re my best mate. I don’t want you to get hurt in this.’
Ohhh.
It was amazing how much damage you could do with so few words. Friends with benefits. Best mate. And thank goodness he didn’t want me to get hurt. THANK GOODNESS.
‘I think I need a shower,’ I said, grabbing a towel off the radiator and holding it against myself as I clambered out of bed. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Wait, you’re not pissed off, are you?’
I span on my heel and stared down at the man in my bed. Tall, cute and, as it turned out, a bloody good shag. And weirdly, it felt like that was all I knew about him.
‘Why did we, you know …’ I started, not sure where I was going. ‘Last night. Why did you have sex with me?’
‘Because you kissed me.’ Charlie was doing a much better job of keeping his voice down than I was and looked as though he would really like me to try harder.
‘And if I hadn’t kissed you, we would never have …’ I just couldn’t bring myself to say it again.
‘I don’t know, because you did.’ He was talking to me, but his eyes were definitely scanning the room for his boxers. ‘Is this just regular post-sex crazy girl behaviour or what?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ I snatched up his pants and threw them in his face. M&S cotton boxers, definitely bought by his mother. ‘Because I don’t have enough casual sex to know whether or not it turns me into a crazy girl.’
‘Can you not shout?’ he mumbled, pulling the boxers off his face. ‘Your mum is going to hear.’
‘And we wouldn’t want that, would we?’ I bellowed. Not shouting, bellowing. ‘We wouldn’t want anyone to know that I forced myself on you.’
‘Bloody hell, can you calm down?’ Charlie hissed, shuffling out of the bed and trying to put his giant hands on my shoulders. ‘What is wrong with you? All I said was I didn’t want to tell Amy that we slept together until we’d had time to work out what was going on. What’s not OK about that?’
‘Everything,’ I replied. I would not cry. I would not cry. I would not cry.
I didn’t want a shower any more. I just wanted to leave. Shaking his hands off my shoulders, I pulled on my knickers, my skinny jeans and a baggy black jumper Amy had the foresight to include in my packing. While crying.
‘Don’t, please.’ His voice had changed from confused and angry to confused, angry and a little bit scared. ‘Just sit down and talk to me.’
‘I don’t want to sit down,’ I said, my eyes burning bright red. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to work out what’s going on. I already know what’s going on. You’re a wanker.’
‘Why am I a wanker?’ Charlie asked, incredulous, as I grabbed my handbag and checked for all the essentials. It felt like it would really ruin the moment if I had to manhandle myself into my massive bra, so I picked it up and threw it in my handbag instead. ‘What have I done that you didn’t want me to do?’
‘Nothing,’ I said as I curled my hair around itself and fastened it in a topknot. ‘I did want to kiss you and I did want to sleep with you but I do not want to be your fuck-buddy, Charlie.’
There wasn’t a lot of point pretending I wasn’t crying now, and so I turned to face him, tears streaming, nose running, the whole ugly crying extravaganza.
‘I have been in love with you for so long, and I had no idea how not to be. I didn’t think actually sleeping with you would be the way to sort it out, but apparently it was. So thanks.’
Before I could launch into legitimate sobs, I opened the bedroom door, slammed it shut behind me and ran downstairs. Mum and Brian were drinking Sunday morning coffee in the kitchen in complete silence.
‘I think me and you need to have a talk, young lady,’ Mum said, cool as a cucumber.
‘I do not agree,’ I replied, slipping my feet into my Primark ballet pumps. ‘Brian, can you please run me to the station?’
‘Course I can, love,’ he said, coffee on the table, car keys appearing from his jeans pocket. ‘Come on.’
‘Don’t you dare walk out of this house, madam.’ Mum sounded shocked. It was fair. It was, after all, the first time in my entire life that I’d answered her back or not done as I was told. Fairly impressive at twenty-eight. ‘You sit down at this table and tell me what exactly is going on with you or you don’t come back to this house ever again.’
‘I’ll leave my keys with Brian then,’ I shouted as I passed through the front door. Probably a bit rash. I probably wasn’t thinking entirely straight. Or walking straight just yet.
‘Oh dear God, it’s drugs, isn’t it? I knew it. All those late nights in the office, never having any money, fired for “no reason”. What is it? Heroin? Are you doing the heroin?’ She was shouting just loud enough for the neighbours to have that on Facebook in the next ten minutes.
‘Yes, Mum,’ I replied as calm as you like. ‘I’m doing all of the heroin. Track marks up and down my arms, can’t get enough of the stuff. It’s aces.’
Marching towards the door, all I wanted was to be out of that house.
‘Tess Sigourney Brookes, you come back here this instant.’ My mum did not sound amused.
I didn’t turn round. I didn’t reply. I just got in the car.
‘Sorry to be a pain in the arse, Brian.’ I gave my lovely stepdad an apologetic smile as I buckled my seatbelt. ‘Just not having a very good week.’
‘Happens to the best of us, love,’ he said as he started the engine and backed out of the driveway. ‘Happens to the best of us.’
When I finally arrived back home, the flat was gloriously empty. The battery was flat on my phone and I’d left the charger at my mum’s, so there was very little to do but have a bath, wash away every trace of Charlie Wilder and collapse on the settee with a big bag of Wotsits. Or four big bags of Wotsits.
A week ago, I’d been prepping for my first day in my big new job. Seven days on, I had no job, I had no prospects, I’d shagged Charlie, I’d fallen out with Charlie, and I was relatively certain my mum had a bit of a bag on with me. I had excelled myself. An entire decade’s worth of drama in one week.
‘Sometimes things need shaking up,’ I’d told the rubber duck in the bath. ‘You’ve got to test the limits sometimes.’
He didn’t reply. He was getting a real attitude.
I was deep into my third episode of Come Dine With Me when I heard someone hammering on the front door.
‘Yay, Vanessa,’ I whispered, pulling my stripy blanket up under my chin.
‘Tess, are you in there?’
Not Vanessa. Charlie.
It was too late to run into my room and hide under the bed, so I did the next best thing I could think of. Pull the blanket over my head and shout, ‘No.’
But when I pulled the blanket down over my eyes, I saw a tall, creased-looking boy in the corner of my living room. All six feet three inches looking sad and stooped. My ovaries wanted to leap out of my body and never let him go.
‘Your mum gave me your spare key.’ He held it up before tossing it to me. ‘I didn’t think you’d let me in.’
‘I wouldn’t have,’ I replied, wishing I was wearing anything other than a giant Eeyore sleep shirt and a scrunchie. ‘So you can go now.’
‘I need to talk to you.’ He stepped towards the sofa with caution, staying as far away from me as it was possible to be, and rubbed at his eyebrow as he sat down. I curled up into a not-so-tiny ball and pouted. ‘I need to say I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, you do,’ I acknowledged. ‘So say it and then piss off.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘And you’re still here.’
Charlie took a deep breath in and stared at his feet. I pulled my knees up over my nose and peered at him over my blanket. This was horrible.
‘Do you remember the first time you talked to me?’ he asked. ‘Not in a seminar or anything, but the first time we properly had a conversation?’
‘Yes.’ Of course I bloody remembered, arsehole.
‘It was the Christmas party in the union, and you and Amy were wearing those stupid matching fairy outfits and all of the lads from my floor had a bet on which of them could get off with the two of you first.’
Oh, university. Hallowed halls of learning.
‘And then we were at the bar at the same time and you were not sober,’ he said with a smile. ‘And you asked if I’d done the reading for our media studies class, and I said I never did the reading for the media studies class, and you looked horrified.’
‘I was a very straight student,’ I muttered.
‘And then we were just chatting, and that girl I was seeing came up and kissed me.’
‘Sarah Luffman.’ Sarah bloody Luffman. I still wouldn’t accept her Facebook friend request to this day.
‘Sarah, yeah. Of course you remember.’ He rested his hands on his knees as though he was bracing himself. ‘Anyway, she came up and kissed me and I saw your face fall. You looked, like, properly heartbroken. And I didn’t know why, but it made me so sad because all night, all I’d been thinking about was kissing you.’
‘Because of the bet?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘Because I thought you were beautiful.’
Oh.
I wondered if it would be appropriate to ask him to wait while I went and changed. This conversation could not take place while I was wearing something I had bought for a tenner from the Disney store in the January sale.
‘But when I looked again, you were gone. And the next time I saw you, my flatmate told me you were going out with that bloke off the PE course. So I didn’t make a move. But we had so much in common and we were in all the same classes and, you know, that was that.’
‘And you never thought to bother again?’ I said, shuffling my feet a little bit closer to him. ‘In ten years?’
‘I know your mum and dad got divorced, Tess, but if you’d lived through what I’ve lived through, you wouldn’t be so quick to swap a friend for a shag. By the time we were both single, we were such good friends. We had so much in common – the books and the music and everything – and I didn’t want to ruin that. I was twenty. I couldn’t even think about anything long-term. But you were long-term to me.’
‘You do know the only reason I read all those books and listened to all that music was so that I’d have something to talk to you about in the first place, don’t you?’ I asked, looking at a knot in the floorboards. ‘Because I liked you.’
‘Sneaky cow.’ He pulled the sleeves of his jumper over his hands and smiled. ‘Anyway, I just wanted you to know why I might have freaked out a little bit this morning.’
‘I’m not quite sure I do know,’ I said, my heart pounding. I really needed to hear him say it. ‘You might want to clarify.’
That’s when I saw the full trademarked and copyright Charlie Wilder grin break out across his face. ‘I freaked out because I didn’t know what it was. Or what you wanted it to be. I could never just do the friends with benefits thing with you because you’re my Tess. I love you.’
‘You love me?’
They were words I’d heard a thousand times before, they were words I’d said a thousand times before, but they’d never, ever mattered until he said them now. It felt like Cupid, the Andrex puppy and a selection of assorted kittens had taken up residence in my stomach. There was far too much fluffy fluttering going on in there for my organs to work properly.
‘You love me?’ I said it again just to make sure.
‘Of course I love you,’ he repeated, taking hold of my hand. ‘You’re my best friend.’
And with that, Cupid, the anonymous Labrador and assorted kittens froze and turned around to look at me very, very slowly.
‘I’m your best friend?’
My French teacher had always told me the best way to understand something was to repeat it until you’d really drilled everything into your brain, but I was just not getting this.
‘My best, best friend.’ Charlie squeezed my fingers so tightly I thought they might snap, and I inched back ever so slightly on the sofa. ‘And we both know how important that is.’
‘We do?’
‘How many times have you seen me ruin a relationship?’ He let go of my hand and threw his arms up in the air. The arms that had been around me all night long. ‘I’m the worst! I can’t keep it together with a girl, you know that.’
I did know that. Charlie had a different girlfriend approximately once every five months. And once every five months I absolutely did not spend (on average) two hours online stalking the shit out of her and praying to a god I didn’t believe in that she would just go away without me having to resort to violence. So far, those prayers had been answered. I probably owed every major religion at least a fiver: the girlfriends never lasted more than a couple of months. One did almost six, but Charlie was travelling around Australia for three of them and I knew for a fact that he’d cheated. Not that he was a cheater. Most of the time.
‘There’s a reason we’ve never got together.’ Charlie seemed to be choosing his words very carefully. I hoped they were the right ones. ‘What if it doesn’t work out and we end up hating each other? I’ll let you down, Tess, I will. I don’t want you to hate me; I want you to be checking the football scores for me in the old people’s home when I’m too old and blind to read the screen. I want you to be in my life for ever.’
One by one, Cupid, the puppy and the kittens limped away, whispering awkwardly between themselves. I assumed they were uncomfortable with tears because dear God was I about to bring out some pretty impressive crying. The tears I’d busted out that morning were nothing compared with the biblical flood that was about to drown everyone in the room.
‘Ah, fucking hell – this is what I’m talking about. We’re not even going out and I’ve made you cry.’ Charlie dived across the sofa and pulled me into a hug, trying to stem the sobs. ‘See? It would never work.’
‘But … but we did it?’ As the words came out of my mouth, I wondered if I’d actually gone mad and we had, in fact, not ‘done it’ at all.
‘I know.’
‘After ten years? After never doing it at all?’
‘I know.’
To his credit, he looked terribly guilty. Not that it mattered in the slightest. My heart hurt. My everything hurt.
‘Why?’
‘I honestly don’t know,’ he replied.
We sat locked in silence on the sofa, half disengaged from the least sexy embrace in the history of embraces. I was staring at Charlie’s messy hair, his pale face, his sad eyes. He was staring at my Eeyore nightie. All I wanted to do was hug him again and tell him it was all going to be all right, that it didn’t matter and that we could just pretend it had never happened. We would just go back to being best friends and I’d go back to waiting for him to work out that I was the one. Even though I could still feel the red-hot tears spilling over my cheeks, every single part of me just wanted to make him feel better. Somewhere in the corner of the room, my self-respect shook her head in disgust. He didn’t say anything else. I couldn’t say anything else. Luckily, someone else didn’t have quite the same struggle.
‘Oh Jesus Christ, what’s going on now?’
In the midst of all our emodrama, I hadn’t heard the front door open. And I hadn’t seen Vanessa loitering in the hallway. But I heard her.
‘Don’t tell me you two are shagging?’ She hung her keys on my hook next to the door and inspected her nails. ‘Don’t bother, Tess, he’s shit in bed.’
‘What did you just say?’ I couldn’t possibly have heard her right.
‘I said don’t bother, he’s shit in bed,’ Vanessa repeated slowly, disappearing into her bedroom. ‘And between me, you and Mr Wilder, he’s not exactly packing down their either. Not. Worth. The effort.’
I let go of Charlie at exactly the same time he let go of me, and slid off the sofa into a graceless pile of too long limbs and donkey T-shirt at his feet.
‘You?’ I pointed at him. ‘And her?’ I pointed to Vanessa.
‘OK, don’t go mental, but—’
‘Oh my God, you and her.’
It was too late; I was freaking out. The Andrex puppy had morphed into a Rottweiler and Cupid had traded his bow and arrow for an AK-47.
‘It was nothing,’ he said insistently, grabbing hold of my wrists a fraction too tightly. ‘It was just one of those things. I don’t even know. It was nothing.’
‘It was several times,’ Vanessa called from behind her closed bedroom door. ‘Your place, this place, that hotel for the weekend in Wales.’
‘You went to Wales?’ I breathed. ‘You went on a mini-break?’
Truly this was the last straw. Everyone knew that a mini-break was the universally accepted sign of true love. Bridget Jones said so.
‘Remember you asked me not to tell Tess until you “knew what we were”?’ she called. Exactly what he had said to me that morning. ‘And because she’d probably have a nervous breakdown.’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Charlie squeezed my wrists until they hurt. ‘I didn’t. Tess, it wasn’t anything. It wasn’t worth upsetting you.’
‘I didn’t say anything because, really, it wasn’t worth upsetting you,’ she agreed from her bedroom. ‘It wasn’t worth upsetting my yeast infection either.’
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ I whispered to Eeyore. From the look on his face, he really got it.
‘And after all the effort he put into getting into my knickers, I never even came. I’ve had more fun with an electric toothbrush,’ Vanessa said as she reemerged, holding her passport aloft. ‘And he was such a whiner afterwards. I’d let you listen to the messages, but I deleted them after that time I played them at the comedy phone messages open mike night. Anyway, Tess, are you even listening? I’m going to be away for at least a week, longer if I can help it. Honestly, I know you don’t care, but I have had such a stressful few days. Council tax is due next week – pay it, yeah?’
Of course she didn’t bother to lock the door behind her, which made it all the easier to grab hold of Charlie and bundle him out of it. By his face.
‘Get out,’ I shouted, grabbing hold of a handful of hair and physically pushing him away from me. I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. My skin was crawling at the thought of Charlie and Vanessa. Him kissing her. Her touching him. ‘Get out of my flat.’
‘Tess, I love you,’ he said, desperately clinging to the door frame.
‘Please fuck off!’ I slammed the door, really not giving two shits whether his fingers were still inside or not. I sort of hoped that they were. Eeyore approved. ‘Go away, Charlie. Don’t come back.’
I counted to ten, panting hard and waiting for the pleading to stop and the crying to start. Eventually, all that was left was silence. He was gone. Charlie had said he loved me. Charlie had had an affair with Vanessa. The council tax was due. So this was what heartbreak felt like? Bollocks to that. Having never actually been in love with any of my boyfriends before, I’d never actually had my heart broken before. I waited to feel the urge to consume large quantities of ice cream and cry. But I didn’t want to cry, and I certainly didn’t want dairy products. I felt sick. I felt angry. I wanted to break something. I couldn’t break Vanessa, but I could break some of her things.
With my hands curled into tight little fists, I kicked Vanessa’s door open (entirely unnecessary but it felt right) and looked for something to destroy. Her room was, as usual, a complete shithole. My room was generally a bit of a mess, but it was a clean, white-walled, cream-carpeted, orderly mess. A teetering stack of unread magazines here, a collection of credit card statements there. Vanessa’s room was disgusting. My room was more of a disappointment. In all the years I’d been here, I hadn’t got as far as putting up a single picture or photo on the wall – they all lived on my desk at work, my first home. There was a framed print of a Warhol I’d seen at the Tate Modern with Charlie sitting on the floor by my chest of drawers. He’d been coming over to hang it every Sunday for the last six months, but he’d never quite made it. And so on the floor it had stayed. My room looked like a corporate crash pad rather than somewhere a real person lived. It was where I crawled under the covers at midnight on a Wednesday after a client dinner and where I hung all of my smart separates, still in their bags from the dry-cleaner’s.
Staring at Vanessa’s overflowing wardrobe, I suddenly hated all of my clothes. It felt like everything I owned was black, blue or white, unless Amy had picked it, and then it was sequinned, short and generally unwearable. Even my jeans were ‘casual Friday’ appropriate. The toes on my Converse were bright white. My heels, aside from my Promotion Shoes, were all sensible. I hated everything. I hated myself.
Vanessa’s wardrobe was a tumble of colour and texture. I barely touched the door and the entire contents burst on to the floor, making a desperate bid for freedom. Red strapless dresses, printed palazzo pants, skintight liquid leggings, silk and satin and velvet and leather, all pooling around my feet and begging to be rescued. I stomped on a particularly ridiculous pair of leather hot pants I remembered seeing her swan around in and sulked. Her room was just so her. Two of her walls were painted deep red and the other two hot pink. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. It clashed, it was too bright, too bold and a little bit gross, but it looked amazing. Just like Vanessa. If Vanessa’s room was her, was my room me? Was my sad little white-walled, devoid-of-personality shell of a bedroom really me?
There was no discernible carpet under my feet, just a collage of dirty clothes, open mail and magazines. Dirty mug upon dirty mug upon dirty mug sat everywhere you looked, and half-empty takeaway boxes, plates and forks were balanced precariously on every available surface. No knives, though. Vanessa never used a knife and I found it infuriating. Even more infuriating was the lack of things available to break. The dirty pots looked like they were about to get up and crawl to the kitchen themselves so I wasn’t touching them, and I wasn’t rock and roll enough to put the telly through the window. The only other things I could see that were legitimately worth money and fuck-up-able were her dead ‘work’ BlackBerry and my old camera. I couldn’t bear to do it. I let out a little frustrated scream through my gritted teeth and punched a pillow, shaking from head to toe.
I was a rubbish woman scorned. Hell totally hath seen fury like me. I’d seen waitresses in Pizza Hut with more fury. I was a complete failure. Back in the living room, I heard the landline ring. There wasn’t a single person on earth I wanted to talk to. But of course I answered it anyway.
‘Hello?’ I steeled myself for the worst. Charlie. Vanessa. My mother.
‘Ohmygodareyouokay?’ garbled Amy.
‘What?’
‘Are. You. OK?’ she repeated. ‘I’ve been going mental up here. Why isn’t your phone on?’
‘I left my charger at my mum’s,’ I answered. ‘Amy, did you know that Charlie has been sleeping with Vanessa?’
‘Um, no?’
‘AMY.’
‘He’s such a cockwomble!’ she shouted down the line. ‘Don’t be angry. I only know because he said something about being in Wales and she said something about being in Wales and I asked him about being in Wales and he admitted it, but I didn’t tell you because he said it wasn’t really a thing and I didn’t want to upset you and—’
‘No, no, no!’ I banged the receiver against my forehead, trying to bash the reality of this into my brain. ‘You knew? And you didn’t say anything?’
‘Look at it from my point of view,’ Amy replied with a whine. ‘You were working, like, a billion hours a day on that pitch for those rank organic lollipops you made me eat loads of.’
I mentally pegged this as six months ago. Those lollipops were rank.
‘Plus you were sort of showing an interest in that bloke you met at Floridita and I didn’t want to distract you, and then by the time I’d got Charlie’s balls in a Vulcan death grip, he swore it was over, that it was only one time and that it was done but he didn’t want to upset you, and—’
‘Only one time?’ I interrupted.
‘Yes.’
‘Even though you knew they’d both been in Wales together. Having sex.’
What was that taste in my mouth? Oh yes, bile. That was bile.
‘Oh. Yeah. Well, I didn’t find out about that until ages after.’
‘Amy. I can’t believe it.’
‘I just couldn’t bear to tell you,’ she said softly. ‘He said it wasn’t anything. I knew it would break your heart, and I thought you were going to move out soon, and … Oh fuck. I fucked up. Fuck fuck fuck.’
It was confusing. I was mad at Amy. She knew about this and she hadn’t told me, but I was so mad at Vanessa and even more so at Charlie that all my reserves of rage were accounted for. After a few beats of silence I found my voice.
‘I slept with him.’
‘You did?’
I had no idea precisely where in the country Amy was, but I was fairly certain there were now some deaf Highland cattle up in Scotland. She could be awfully loud when she wanted to be.
‘Is that why you left? Are you in Gretna Green? Are you married already? Was it amazing? Tell me everything. I always knew this would happen if the two of you got together …’ She was on a roll – there was no way I’d be able to interrupt her successfully a third time. ‘I’ll just cease to exist. It’ll just be like, oh, ha ha ha, let’s have some wine and a dinner party, and, ooh, do you remember that funny little dark-haired girl who used to hang around? I wonder where she is now? Except you won’t even wonder because I’ll be dead and you won’t care.’
‘Are you done?’ I asked.
‘Are you married?’ She countered.
‘No.’ I replied.
‘Then, yes. Hang on, did you sleep with him before or after you found out about Vanessa?’
‘Before.’
‘Ohhh. Shit.’
‘Yeah.’
I held the phone to my ear and we shared a comfortable silence. There really wasn’t anything else to say.
‘Are you OK?’ Amy broke first. As always.
‘Not really.’ I wasn’t any more. I was too tired.
‘Are you mad?’ she asked.
‘I am mad,’ I confirmed.
‘With me?’
‘With everyone alive,’ I said. ‘Except maybe Ryan Gosling.’ Who could be mad at Ryan Gosling?
‘Shall I come over when my train gets in?’ she asked. ‘We can burn pictures of the two of them? Or we could just break loads of her stuff?’
That best friend of mine, what a mind reader. We’d done a lot of picture burning when Amy had ended her engagement. Even though she had been the one to break it off, she was not one to leave that relationship without some righteous anger. It had been a fun time for everyone who wasn’t her ex-fiancé. I imagined he missed his twenty-year-old comic collection almost as much as he missed Amy. Possibly more so.
‘Yeah, I might be asleep, so let yourself in,’ I said. The exhaustion was overwhelming. My limbs felt so heavy I didn’t even know how I was holding up the phone. ‘See you in a bit.’
‘OK. I love you,’ she said, making kissing noises down the phone. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’
‘I’ve never done anything stupid in my life,’ I replied. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
Collapsing on the closest soft surface, Vanessa’s bed, I exhaled loudly and tried to have a Feeling, the phone still in my hand. But there was nothing there. My brain felt like a clown car, crammed full to overflowing with rainbow wigs, red noses and tutu-wearing bears. I should get out of Vanessa’s room. I should get dressed. I should call my mum and apologize for my behaviour. But I didn’t actually want to. At some point, I was going to have to speak to Charlie. And, must not forget, the council tax needed playing. Priorities, Tess.
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Lindsey Kelk
The summer bestseller from the immensely popular Lindsey KelkTess Brookes has always been a Girl with a Plan. But when the Plan goes belly up, she’s forced to reconsider.After accidently answering her flatmate Vanessa’s phone, she decides that since being Tess isn’t going so well, she might try being Vanessa. With nothing left to lose, she accepts Vanessa’s photography assignment to Hawaii – she used to be an amateur snapper, how hard can it be? Right?But Tess is soon in big trouble. And the gorgeous journalist on the shoot with her, who is making it very clear he’d like to get into her pants, is an egotistical monster. Far from home and in someone else’s shoes, Tess must decide whether to fight on through, or ‘fess up and run…
ABOUT A GIRL
Lindsey Kelk
Copyright (#ulink_ddaf708b-737b-593a-ac8e-dd45e2376bf9)
Published by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)
First published in Great Britain by Harper 2013
Copyright © Lindsey Kelk 2013
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com (http://Shutterstock.com)
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2014
Lindsey Kelk asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780007591411
Ebook Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9780007591428
Version: 2017-05-24
Praise for Lindsey Kelk (#ulink_5b4e8a32-22fc-5ee3-8610-2c7959db7734)
‘Outrageous, witty, exciting and romantic, we simply adored this sparkling read’
Closer
‘Leaves you feeling all warm and fuzzy inside’
Company
‘Kelk has a hilarious turn of phrase and a sparkling writing style … A frothy and fun read’
Daily Express
‘Perfect for those wishing to escape from the reality of cold winter nights. ****’
Heat
About my girls, Della, Beth, Emma and Terri.
Contents
Cover (#u189278b4-bcc4-56d4-a262-bd0edc281e5a)
Title Page (#ud3eb3d56-f162-51e9-a8c7-193b4122d3ce)
Copyright (#u6aa92d1f-8337-5919-b4aa-26d42b6600a5)
Praise (#u16e22b30-9709-546c-924a-4a53b4fc8d04)
Dedication (#uac17a74f-f3fb-50ef-93c4-3ccb8506c4ed)
Prologue (#u25ea2773-7e92-527b-8241-8d98f65347c5)
Chapter One (#u47acadde-d313-5c44-aa1f-43eef7f197d0)
Chapter Two (#ue3858590-87f3-5445-ab1e-00f19b4ace9c)
Chapter Three (#u719f28e5-aa38-59d2-b0a8-c7f7855b3e18)
Chapter Four (#udb8d2e95-0f25-57ce-88a8-8f1154d09c6f)
Chapter Five (#ubea0d9ba-de43-5045-b8ad-5bc2d9545c78)
Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Chapter Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Q & A with Lindsey Kelk (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by Lindsey Kelk (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE (#ulink_86dffef4-9df9-5b17-812f-df4e5286faac)
I never meant for things to get so out of hand.
I’d lost my job. I’d lost the love of my life. My mum wasn’t talking to me. My best friend was epically pissed off. My flatmate probably had a hit out on me by now, and in twenty-four hours I would likely be homeless.
But, you know, swings and roundabouts.
Considering how incredibly cocked up my life was, I felt surprisingly chipper. Happy even. Stretching out as far as I could, I curled the tips of my fingers around the headboard and scrunched my toes up in the crisp white cotton sheets that had found their way to the foot of the bed. Everything was still, everything was calm, and I was smiling. Somewhere across the room, I heard a phone beep. Instead of jumping up to see who needed what and just how quickly I could get it for them, I concentrated on the sound of the shower running in the bathroom and pressed my lips together to refresh the tingling sensation before it faded away. The stubble burn that tickled my cheeks was altogether more stubborn. I was so happy.
My best friend had been wrong. Everything was going to be OK. Probably. Not that there hadn’t been some sketchy moments over the past week. Not that I hadn’t considered having myself committed. More than once. But now it was almost over. I’d survived. This afternoon I would get on a plane back home. I would call everyone who needed calling, and instead of behaving like a jabbering shell of a human, I would be cool, calm and collected and make things right. If I could get through this past week, I could get through anything.
Seven days ago, if anyone had even given me a hint of what was ahead, I would have crawled underneath my desk and refused to come out. But as I had learned from every television show I had ever watched and every book I had thought about reading, you never knew how strong you were until you had to find out. I was definitely stronger than anyone had reckoned. Either that or I was clinically insane. It was a fine line.
The phone beeped again.
It was all going to work out. The photos were taken; the photos were great. Paige was going to be very happy. Mr Bennett was happy. Kekipi didn’t seem too bothered either way, but you can’t have everything. All I had to do now was spend the rest of the morning lying in this bed reliving all the terrible things I had just done with a terrible man, and by this time tomorrow I’d be practically home.
Rolling onto my stomach, I was very, very glad I couldn’t see the state of myself. My too long hair was all tangles, my carefully applied make-up was now carefully applied all over the pillowcases, and, let’s face it, post-orgasmic smugness isn’t a good look on anyone. If I had seen me right now, I might have wanted to punch me. Not that post-orgasmic anything was a look I was terribly familiar with. Well, the bad hair and terrible make-up, yes, but the smug ‘I just got shagged rotten by a very handsome man’ part? Not so much. There had to be a way to do post-coital with an air of class, surely. This was something they really did need to start teaching in schools. Maybe at the same time the nurse took the girls away to explain all about the wonderful world of tampons she could give you a rundown on what to pack in the morning-after kit. If there was one thing women needed to know, it was how to get thoroughly seen to without your gentleman friend sandpapering the top three layers of your skin completely off your face in the process.
Three more beeps.
No matter how hard I tried to ignore it, my phone wasn’t giving up. With a tiny, sad sniff I realized I was going to have to answer the bloody thing. Only it wasn’t on the nightstand where I always left it. Because this wasn’t my nightstand. And I had no idea where it was hiding. My beautiful red silk Valentino dress was on one side of the room, my bra on the other. Somewhere in the middle, there was a white shirt and a beach towel. And from deep inside a pile of carelessly discarded man clothes, another iPhone started chiming along in time with mine. It was a veritable chorus of communication. Together, they sounded a bit like a One Direction song. I gave up. Screw you, Vodafone.
‘Vanessa?’
I watched the huge bamboo fan on the ceiling spinning round and round and round and tapped out the rhythm of the phones, making no effort to answer either them or the man in the bathroom.
‘Vanessa?’
Oh, right. That was me. Sort of.
‘Yeah?’ I called back, scanning the room for my knickers. The biggest problem with crazy, tear-your-clothes-off sex was that once you’d torn off your clothes and had the crazy sex, the clothes were hard to locate in a dignified fashion. It was impossible not to feel a bit slutty scrabbling around on the floor looking for your pants. It was all well and good if you were one of those girls who slinks around starkers after sexytimes, but I wasn’t really a naked person. I was very much an ‘always sleep in a nightie in case the house burns down’ person. I mean, I still called it ‘sexytimes’, for God’s sake, and as we all know, if you can’t say it, you shouldn’t be doing it.
‘Is that me? Can you answer it?’
‘It is. I can.’
And I could, in theory. Although I was very upset at having to get out of bed. Shuffling down the mattress and trying to ignore the streaks of mascara all down the backs of both my hands, I anchored my hair behind my ears and hung over the edge of the bed to comb through the pile of cast-off cotton and silk like a hungry badger. A slutty hungry badger.
The slinky black iPhone was peeking out of my bra, flashing up a private number. I slid off the bed and dived into the middle of the pile of clothes. Classy. ‘Nick Miller’s phone,’ I answered as I clambered back onto the bed. ‘Not Nick speaking, obviously.’
‘Who is this?’
An unfamiliar and unpleasantly accusatory female voice echoed down the line. Hawaii might be beautiful, but the mobile phone reception was shit.
‘This is Tess. I mean Vanessa. Um, yeah, Vanessa.’ Damn it, I couldn’t even think straight when I was tired, let alone lie straight.
‘I’m trying to reach Nick Miller?’
‘This is Nick’s phone,’ I yawned. ‘Can I ask who’s calling?’
‘Sorry, who am I speaking to? And why do you have Nick’s phone?’
‘He’s in the shower.’ I couldn’t help feeling that I might be talking myself into a very deep hole. ‘I’m Tess. Vanessa! Shit, I’m Vanessa.’
‘Put Nick on the phone,’ the woman demanded. ‘Right now.’
I did not put Nick on the phone. Instead, I did the only thing I could think to do. I pressed the end call button and dropped the very expensive piece of technology into a glass of water at the side of the bed. Because that was bound to help matters. Launching myself off the bed, I scuttled around on the floor searching for my phone. Maybe there was something I could do. Maybe there was still time. Maybe—
‘Hey, who was it?’
A very handsome, very naked man appeared in the doorway, rubbing his ash-blond hair with a white towel. I silently begged him to cover up. It was very difficult to concentrate on digging yourself out of the world’s biggest metaphorical hole when there was a visible penis in the room.
‘No one,’ I chirped. ‘Wrong number.’
‘No one has had a wrong number since 1997.’ Nick strode across the room, dropping the towel as he went. I couldn’t help but feel this was disrespectful to both the housekeeping staff and the environment. That was a fresh towel. ‘Pass me the phone.’
‘Um, I dropped it.’ I looked up from my slovenly spot on the floor and hoped my naked charms would distract him from the extreme act of iPhone violence I had ‘accidentally’ committed.
They didn’t.
‘What the fuck, Vanessa?’ He grabbed the glass and choked back a sob, staring at the phone as if it was a tony Damian Hirst exhibit. iPhone in Water, a dead cert for the Turner Prize. ‘My fucking phone. It’s broken. What am I supposed to do without a phone?’
Hot or not, whining was never attractive. After finding them hiding inside one of Nick’s shoes, I pulled on my knickers, hoping that the less naked I was, the clearer I’d be able to think.
‘It slipped.’ I held my hands up in defence, attempting to squish my boobs together at the same time. Misdirection was a magician’s best weapon and I was definitely going to need a magic trick to get out of this one. Possibly a miracle. Where was Jesus when you needed him? Or at least Derren Brown. But preferably Jesus. ‘I’m sorry.’
Nick carried on pawing his waterlogged lifeline and making heartbroken chuntering noises under his breath, while I continued my search for my ever-beeping, completely annoying phone. I still couldn’t believe I’d broken the screen. Maybe it was in my bag? I spotted the slouchy, pretty black silk clutch bag that had come with my dress over by the door where I’d tossed it as soon as we had crashed through it last night. MAC make-up, Chanel perfume, spare batteries and dozens upon dozens of pens spilled out all over the floor. I was a strange creature sometimes. Didn’t like to be without a pen.
‘Hello?’ I answered after finally retrieving it from inside Nick’s abandoned boxer shorts. Eww. I fought the urge to hang up and give it a rub down with a wet wipe. This was not the time to relapse into my OCD issues.
‘Tess, it’s Paige. Where are you? I’ve called, like, ten times. I’ve been looking all over for you.’
Brilliant. Paige. Couldn’t a girl get five minutes, post-shag peace and quiet?
‘I’m in my cottage,’ I hedged. ‘What’s up?’
‘No, you aren’t. I’ve just been there.’ She paused for a second. ‘Are you with Nick?’
‘God, yeah, that’s what I meant. Nick’s cottage,’ I looked up at Nick, who seemed to have got over the untimely death of his iPhone thanks to the comforting charms of my tits. ‘We were just going over the photos.’
Nick raised an eyebrow and tossed his phone onto the floor. It was amazing how quickly a man could recover from a painful loss if he thought there was even a tiny chance he could put his penis in someone.
‘OK, I’m coming over. You need to do something. Stephanie called – she’s mega, mega pissed off. I’m going to get fired. What the fuck, Tess – what do we do?’
‘OK, don’t panic, but don’t come here,’ I said, trapping the phone between my cheek and my shoulder while slapping Nick’s hands away from my newly acquired knickers. ‘I’ve got loads of stuff to show you from yesterday – I left you messages. Seriously, calm down. I’ll come to you. Nick’s busy, but—’
‘Nick is busy,’ he said, thumbs hooking around the delicate silk I’d only just managed to get halfway round my arse. ‘And so are you.’
He snatched the phone and threw it across the room. I watched it skitter across the shiny wooden floor and vanish underneath the bed, taking Paige’s panic attack with it.
‘You know, you are an incredibly sexy woman,’ he said, running his fingertips up and down my spine and pressing his face against my neck. ‘You cannot even begin to know how much I want you right now.’
‘I really want to play along with this,’ I whispered with my eyes closed and brow furrowed. I wasn’t used to being called sexy. Or a woman. Most men didn’t actually seem to notice I had a discernible gender at all and so hearing these things from such a ridiculously attractive man was very difficult to resist. ‘But this is just about the worst timing ever.’
‘Vanessa.’ He took my tiny fists and covered them with his huge hands. ‘You broke my phone. You owe me. Now shut up and do as you’re told.’
Just as it had been since I’d first laid eyes on him, every word out of Nick’s mouth went straight to my vagina, but this time I had to resist. I could be strong. As long as I kept my knickers on.
‘I’m sorry, but I’ve really, really got to go,’ I insisted, swooping out of his arms and grabbing my bra from the floor in one surprisingly graceful move. ‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry.’ He gave me a dark look and grabbed my wrist. ‘Just don’t go.’
Before I could come back with an intelligent argument, there was a very loud knock at the door.
‘I am sorry and I do have to go.’ I shook off his hand and tried to discern what bits, in the tangled pile of material on the floor, had started out last night as my outfit. ‘Don’t answer it. It’s Paige.’
Really, I was impossibly stupid. I had just told Nick Miller not to do something and then expected him not to do it.
‘What if it is?’ he asked, eyebrows raised. ‘We’re adults.’
‘Oh, don’t start!’ I had no time for this. He could be such a cock sometimes. Most of the time. In fact, any time when he wasn’t actually using his penis, he was behaving like one. ‘Just please don’t open that door.’
And so, naked as the day he was born, Nick strode over to the door and flung it wide open. A very shocked blonde girl stood on the step and gaped.
‘Paige,’ Nick nodded. ‘Vanessa and I were just going over the plans for tomorrow.’
The tiny blonde girl tried desperately to avert her eyes from Nick in all his naked glory. As it was, the only other thing for her to concentrate on was me in my knickers, and that was doing nothing to improve the situation.
As she recovered herself and put two and two together to make a filthy four, Paige’s face fell. I took an ill-advised step forward and got my foot caught in Nick’s boxer shorts.
‘Paige.’ I looked at her.
‘Nick?’ She looked at him.
Nick just looked very pleased with himself.
‘Oh, Tess.’ Paige started to laugh and it wasn’t very nice. ‘Tess, Tess, Tess.’
‘Paige, don’t,’ I begged. I was fully aware that pleading with women didn’t usually go very well when they caught you hanging out in your underwear with the man they had designs on. Especially when that man was naked. ‘Please.’
‘Tess?’ Despite how very clever he claimed to be, Nick wasn’t always the sharpest knife in the drawer. ‘Who’s Tess?’
‘She is,’ Paige said, nodding towards me. ‘Aren’t you?’
‘Vanessa?’ Nick placed a hand over his manparts, not looking nearly as smug as he had five minutes ago. If I hadn’t been ready for the ground to open up and swallow me whole, it might have been funny. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Nick, I can explain,’ I started, entirely unsure how I was going to do that. ‘It’s a long story. It’s a funny story. It’s, um, well. I don’t know where to start.’
‘I do,’ Paige chipped in. ‘This is Tess. She’s an irresponsible, selfish, evil, lying bitchface who’s been faking everything to everyone, and I didn’t grass her up because I’m an idiot.’
Bit harsh, I thought. A bit harsh, but ultimately accurate. All of a sudden, my knees weren’t feeling terribly steady. Nick looked very confused. And also still very naked. Unfortunately, his supreme manliness wasn’t enough to slow Paige down now she’d started.
‘Long story short, her name isn’t Vanessa,’ my friend, mentor and confidante stated. She was on a roll. ‘Her name is Tess Brookes and she’s full of shit.’
Well.
It was a much more concise version of events than I had to offer.
CHAPTER ONE (#ulink_47dfc4aa-5e19-5fc0-8746-aed51189330b)
Two Weeks Earlier
It was more or less a day like any other when it all went wrong.
My alarm went off, I got up, showered in silence and watched fifteen minutes of breakfast news with stuttering subtitles so as not to wake my flatmate. I got dressed, I checked my bag to make sure I had an adequate number of tampons even though my period was a good three weeks away, and after checking I’d turned my hair straighteners off twice, I left for the office. As usual, I was the first in. No one else made it in before ten on Mondays, but I was the kind of irritating person who got a lot more done without the clacking of everyone else’s keyboards to distract me. Early mornings and late nights were my friends. And given the frequency with which they occurred, they were pretty much my only friends. But on this particular Monday, I had good reason to be so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. After seven years’ hard slog, I was getting the promotion I’d been dreaming of. I, Tess Brookes, was about to become the youngest creative director in the history of Donovan & Dunning.
Obviously no one was quite as excited about this as me, so it wasn’t exactly a shock that I was sitting outside the HR manager’s office before she’d even got off the Tube. It was fair to say I was dead giddy.
‘Morning, Raquel.’ I gave her a cheek-achingly massive smile when she finally appeared at the top of the stairs. It couldn’t hurt, I reasoned; after all, today was my day. Some girls had weddings, some had babies, I had my promotion. And that was only sad if you let it be.
‘Tess.’ Raquel, short, bleach blonde and dead-eyed, motioned for me to follow her into her office. She didn’t look surprised to see me. And why would she? We’d been discussing this promotion for the past six months; I figured she’d be glad to see the back of me. All that was left was for me to sign my new contract and then I’d be out of her way. For six months. I was ambitious.
‘OK, so let’s just get straight to this.’ She sat down behind a too big desk and smiled. ‘I’ve got some difficult news.’
‘Right.’ I sat up straight and put on my ‘I’m listening’ face. Difficult news? Was she leaving? Maybe she was leaving. I really hoped she was leaving.
‘As you know, the company has gone through quite a lot of changes in the past twelve months,’ Raquel said, folding her hands in front of her and leaning her head to one side. Such a serious soul was Raquel. Probably because she fired people for a living and everyone hated her. ‘And as such, we are having to undertake some necessary measures to ensure a successful restructure.’
‘OK,’ I nodded. This was a very funny way of giving me a big hug and a key to the executive bathroom. Of course I knew there was a restructure. They were restructuring me into a corner office and a big fat pay rise. Which was much needed to pay for the ridiculously expensive Promotion Shoes that were currently rubbing the fuck out of my feet.
‘As you know,’ she repeated, ‘the original plan for the business was to move you into a creative director role, with the copy and design teams reporting directly to you.’
‘The original plan?’ I was starting to feel a fraction less giddy.
‘The original plan,’ she confirmed, never taking her eyes off me.
This didn’t sound wonderful. Why wasn’t she squealing and giving me a present? And why was she smiling? Raquel never smiled.
‘Unfortunately, due to the new restructure, we will not be moving ahead with the original plan. The creative director role you were moving into is no longer part of the planned downsizing of the company.’
Words I officially did not enjoy. Unfortunately. Restructure. Downsizing.
‘And as such, your role has been restructured out of the business.’
I was definitely ready for the hug and the present.
‘The creative director role –’ my voice did not sound nearly as steady as I would like – ‘has been restructured out of the business?’
After seven years of overtime, evenings and weekends, I was being stiffed out of my promotion by an HR demon with a gob full of business jargon and clichés.
‘Yes.’ Raquel gave me the same look you might give a small child who has just successfully worked out that cows go moo.
‘So I’m not going to be the new creative director?’
‘You are not.’
Poof. There it went. Bye bye, promotion. Hello, God knows how many more years back at my old desk. Hello, shit-ton of overtime I was going to have to do to pay for my new shoes. I stared at an Oxford University mug sitting right on the edge of her desk and fought the urge to move it out of harm’s way. Who went to Oxford and then ended up doing HR for an advertising company?
‘As you’ll see, we’ve put together a very fair redundancy package,’ Raquel continued, switching gears so fast I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. She pushed a stiff cardboard envelope across the desk towards me and tapped it twice. ‘Given the circumstances, we understand if you would like to leave immediately. I can forward your personal effects. If you could just leave your phone and security pass with me, I’ll take care of all of that.’
I looked down at the envelope and then back up at Satan’s minion.
‘I’m afraid I’m not following,’ I said as politely as possible. ‘Redundancy package?’
‘The company no longer has a position available for you.’ Raquel scratched her nose delicately. I resisted the urge to slap it. Only just. ‘At all.’
‘So when you say the creative director role has been restructured out of the business …’ I took a deep breath and tried very hard not to vomit. ‘What you are actually saying is that I have been restructured out of the business?’
‘The creative director role,’ she repeated with a nod, ‘is no longer viable in the current business plan. You are the creative director.’
‘But I haven’t even started the job. How can I have been restructured out of it?’ I was aware that my voice was starting to get uncomfortably high. I was even more aware of the fact that I was going to cry. I blinked twice and stared hard at the Oxford mug, trying to regain my composure.
‘I understand you are bound to have some questions.’ Raquel’s shark eyes had already glazed over. ‘Perhaps you’d like to schedule some time to go over them on the phone tomorrow.’
‘Or perhaps I’d like you to stop being a dick and tell me why I’m being fired?’ I shouted.
There was no stopping the tears. Between the blisters on my heels and my blind rage, there was nothing I could do to stem the sobbing. It was neither ladylike nor professional, but apparently I no longer had a profession, so who gave a toss whether or not I was being ladylike?
‘Perhaps you could explain to me why I’m being “let go” when you’re supposed to be promoting me? Perhaps you could explain to me who exactly is going to lead the creative team? Perhaps you could tell me who is going to win all of your business and lead all of your campaigns and who is going to work on New Year’s Eve so you don’t lose an account for a toilet cleaner?’ I grabbed the cardboard envelope and bashed it against the desk to punctuate my every word before flinging it across the room. ‘And it was crappy toilet cleaner.’
‘No one is disputing your commitment to the job,’ Raquel said without even flinching. ‘And we will be very happy to give you a reference when you find a new situation.’
‘A new situation?’ There was a chance I was screeching. ‘This isn’t Downton fucking Abbey. I’m not a scullery maid. I’m the best creative you have here and you know it. Where’s Michael? Where is bloody Michael?’
Michael was my boss. Michael was a cock. When Michael spilled a glass of wine down my top at the Christmas party every year, I laughed it off. When Michael referred to me and my breasts as ‘his three favourite employees’ in front of a new client last summer, I let it go. When Michael tried to cop a feel under the pretence of performing the Heimlich manoeuvre when I had hiccups every time I had hiccups for seven years, I kept my mouth shut. And now where was he?
‘Mr Donovan isn’t in the office this morning,’ Raquel replied, actually sounding bored. ‘I do understand you’re upset, but really, this isn’t a personal issue. It’s just a matter of corporate restructuring.’
‘Well, I think you need to restructure your face,’ I yelled. Not my best comeback ever. ‘This is ridiculous. I run that creative team. All of the accounts are working on my ideas. All of them.’
‘This conversation really isn’t relevant to the decision that has been made.’ She stood up and opened her office door. I took this to mean I was supposed to fuck off through it. ‘Your role no longer exists within the company. I will forward all your personal belongings and the details of our very generous package to your home address and include my direct line. I’d be very happy to discuss any questions you might have once you’ve had some time to reflect. We should probably do it over the phone.’
For the want of something else to do, I grabbed the Oxford University mug from her desk and threw it, as hard as I could, onto the floor. It bounced once on the beige carpet and then sat there sadly, a tiny trickle of coffee pooling beside it.
‘Feel better for that?’ Raquel asked, one eyebrow raised.
‘Not really,’ I admitted, my chin up high and arm stretched out to knock a stack of files off her desk. Stamping a sore foot, I swiped a Pritt Stick off the shelf and brazenly stuck it in my pocket.
‘I’m taking that,’ I explained with added petulance. ‘You can knock it off my generous package.’
It was strange where your mind went when you were in shock.
Seven years of work and my boss hadn’t even had the decency to come in on time to fire me himself. I’d missed weddings and birthdays and dates to meet deadlines, deliver projects, give presentations, and I’d done it all with a smile. While all my friends were out puking in the street and snogging strangers, I’d spent last New Year’s Eve sat in the meeting room, throwing a stress ball at a wall for three straight hours while I attempted to come up with an innovative campaign for knock-off Toilet Duck. And I bloody well did it. My flat was full of books I’d bought but never read, DVDs that had gone unwatched and CDs I hadn’t got round to listening to. Good God, it had been so long since I’d listened to music, I still had CDs. But it hadn’t mattered before. Because this was the plan. No matter how often my two remaining friends had told me to ease up, that work wasn’t everything, I hadn’t listened. I was happy. I wasn’t missing out on my life; my job was my life. And now I had neither.
But what really stung, I realized as I rode down to my floor for the last time in the lift that always smelled ever so slightly of cat food, what really stung wasn’t the loss of the actual job, it was everything that went with it. Most importantly, it was the dream of moving into my own place and leaving my demonic flatmate behind. Because once I was in my own flat, living would really start. I’d buy fancy dinnerware and nice curtains and learn how to make sushi and buy a cool TV with an amazing audio system. And then I’d invite Charlie round for dinner and we’d end up drinking a little too much and watching a movie which would almost certainly be something starring Emma Stone, and just when she was being her most endearing for the ladies and sexy for the men, I would rest my head on his shoulder and he would realize that I was his Emma Stone and we would kiss and then we would be together for ever. But no. That couldn’t happen now. Because I didn’t have my job. So there wouldn’t be a flat. And there wouldn’t be a dinner or an Emma Stone movie night or a kiss or any happiness ever again. Poof, it was all gone.
Having never been fired, let go or otherwise excused before in my life, I wasn’t sure what the correct protocol was. For the first time, I was thankful everyone else in the office were such lazy bastards. There was no one to see me snivelling and shoving my belongings into a reusable Tesco shopper, except for a terrified-looking intern and the graphic designer who everyone knew sniffed Bostick in the toilets. The company was going under and I was being let go, but the glue-sniffer kept his job. It was perfect.
I picked up my stapler and stared at it for a moment. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t have a plan. Whether it was setting up the girl’s football team in junior school because I had declared the PE teacher sexist, turning a profit on the refreshment stand at the village panto, or making sure I was sitting next to Jason Hutchins on the year ten bus trip to Alton Towers, I always had a plan. And the Cloverhill Panthers had come third from last in our local division, watering down the Ribena at the panto until it was basically pink piss had made exactly four pounds and seventeen pence, and for two precious hours and thirteen minutes, Jason Hutchins had been all mine. I always had a plan and that plan always worked. I dropped the stapler in my bag and walked out the door.
After a ten-minute wander down Theobalds Road, I found myself in Bloomsbury Square, shopping bag in one hand, dignity in the other. Hobbling over to an empty bench, I kicked off my new shoes without worrying what the British summertime mud would do to the gorgeous nude suede and stared vacantly at two dogs running up and down the park. They always looked happy, I thought, as I pulled all the pins out of my elaborate updo one by one. Dogs were always happy. Dogs didn’t have a plan. Dogs hadn’t been climbing up a career ladder for the last seven years. Dogs hadn’t been hopelessly in love with their best friend for the last ten. Well, I couldn’t hand on heart say that was definitely true, but it seemed unlikely.
I rifled around in my Tesco bag looking for something to spur on an emotion that wasn’t pathetic. All that was in there was my stolen stapler, three framed photos, a brand-new box of Special K cereal bars and about seventeen different pens. (Lots of highlighters. I liked a highlighter.) That was it. Seven years and I’d erased all evidence of my very existence from the office in one half-full environmentally-friendly shopping bag.
I pulled the photos out, one by one, and laid them on my black-clad knee. The first was of me and Amy, little-girl versions of me and my best friend, dressed up as princesses and hugging desperately for the camera. The next one was a more formal shot of me, my sisters, my mum and my grandmother, looking considerably less chipper. We weren’t huggers, the Brookeses. Someone basically had to die to convince my mother to go further than a stern pat on the shoulder. When my first granddad had passed away, she had ruffled my hair. It was intense. The third and final photo was of me and Amy again, this time all grown-up and joined by Charlie, my co-worker, best boy friend and the man I had been in love with for the past decade. The three of us were slouched on a sofa in some random Parisian hotel in front of a huge mirror with another one behind us. My face was obscured by the camera that had gone everywhere with me that summer, but my denim cut-offs and stripy T-shirt echoed endlessly in the reflections of the two mirrors. Charlie and Amy’s reflected faces smiled back at me. Amy was on my left, deep in her Amélie phase, black hair cropped close to her head and legs stretched out, draped across me and Charlie. To my right, the love of my life rested his head on my shoulder and held a lit cigarette off to the side, so as not to drop the ash on my bare skin. Even though you couldn’t tell by the photo, I remembered I was smiling. We were the three musketeers. Rock, paper, scissors. Amy was the scissors, Charlie was the paper and I was the rock. I was always the rock.
Slowly but surely, I felt my breathing return to normal and the tension in my shoulders ease ever so slightly. Just in time for me to realize someone was sitting beside me on the bench.
‘Morning.’ An incredibly average-looking man with a shaved head and a black bomber jacket gave me a sideways nod.
‘Morning,’ I replied, carefully placing the photographs back in my bag. No reason not to be polite. This was my life now, after all. Just sitting around, talking to the other non-workers-slash-vagrants in London’s parks while I lived vicariously through the dog ownership of others. I wondered if the Tesco near Russell Square sold White Lightning. It felt like the day was missing a bottle of White Lightning.
‘Don’t make a scene,’ the man said, moving down the bench towards me and looking straight ahead. ‘Give me your wallet and your phone.’
‘Sorry?’ I wasn’t quite sure I’d heard him properly. Was I being mugged? After seven years in London, was I actually being mugged? Not bloody likely.
‘Phone and wallet. Now.’ He pulled a small Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and gave me as scary a look as he could muster. ‘Don’t make me make you.’
Still not quite with it, I tilted my head to one side and stared. I couldn’t help but think he’d be scarier with hair. He looked like an overgrown baby.
‘I haven’t got a phone,’ I replied. This was actually happening. I was being mugged by a giant baby in a bomber jacket. ‘And you can’t have my wallet. There’s nothing in it anyway and it was a present.’
‘Everyone’s got a phone.’ He sounded a bit taken aback. ‘Give it to me now.’
‘No, really.’ I opened up my handbag and tipped it upside down, emptying the contents out onto the bench between us. Three lipsticks, a powder compact, my keys, more tampons than anyone could ever feasibly need and even more pens clattered against the wooden slats. I picked up my wallet and stuck it between my knees. I meant what I said – I’d already told him he couldn’t have that and I wasn’t about to go back on my word to a criminal. ‘See? No phone. I just got fired. They took my phone. Have not got one.’
‘You haven’t got a phone at all?’ The would-be mugger was visibly shocked. ‘That’s bollocks, that is.’
‘It really, really is,’ I agreed.
We sat in silence for a moment.
‘Haven’t got a job either,’ I said as I started scooping up my belongings and dropping them back in the bag. It seemed he wasn’t nearly as interested in highlighters as I was. Probably didn’t have much call for them in his game. ‘Phone’s not such a problem.’
‘Me neither,’ he replied, grabbing a couple of tampons and popping them into my handbag for me. ‘Had one. Lost it. Fucking Tories, innit?’
‘I suppose the recession has been hard for everyone,’ I sympathized. ‘It’s a tough time.’
‘Do you need to call anyone?’ the big baby asked. The man dug his hand into his non-knifey pocket and produced a brand-new iPhone. ‘You can use my phone if you want.’
‘Actually, that would be amazing,’ I said, readily accepting the handset but ignoring the controversial cover design. Pretty sure they didn’t sell Swastika iPhone cases in Carphone Warehouse. This was definitely home-made. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you a bit of privacy.’ He nodded curtly, stood up and wandered a couple of feet away. I watched as a worried-looking middle-aged lady in a waxed jacket and an Alice band took a very sharp and sudden detour. I looked away as he followed her.
‘Hello?’
‘Amy.’ I would never answer the phone to an unknown number. Amy always would. ‘It’s me.’
‘What phone are you on? What’s going on? Did they give you a new phone. Did you get an iPhone? Have you got Siri? Can I ask him a question?’
‘It’s not my phone.’ I cut her off before she could come up with anything filthy to ask the omniscient Siri. ‘Are you at work?’
‘Yeah.’ She didn’t sound convinced. ‘Until five.’
‘Oh. I got the sack and I thought you might want to get very, very drunk.’
‘STELLA!’ I snapped my head away from the handset as Amy bellowed at her boss without moving the phone away from her mouth. ‘I’ve got a migraine. I’m going home. All right?’
‘I don’t think you can shout that loudly if you’ve got a migraine,’ I pointed out.
‘Be at yours in half an hour,’ Amy replied, ignoring me. ‘Don’t kill yourself before then, OK?’
‘OK,’ I said. It hadn’t actually occurred to me before she brought it up, but the Thames was awfully close by and it would save me from having to sign on. I didn’t actually know where the job centre was. Maybe my new friend could tell me. Or maybe I should just kill myself. Amy had hung up before I could ask her opinion and I noticed the phone’s owner hovering nearby. I hung up, smiled and held it out to him.
‘You know what?’ He waved my hand away. ‘Have it. I can always get another one.’
‘Oh no.’ I tried to press it back into his tattooed hand. ‘I couldn’t possibly. Really, I couldn’t.’
‘No, take it.’ He pressed it back into my hand and stood up. ‘How are you going to get another job without a phone? Just have it.’
‘Well, thank you very much.’ I gave him my cheeriest smile. ‘That’s really lovely of you.’
‘No worries.’ He held up his arm in a salute I vaguely recognized, and not from Brownies. ‘And don’t worry yourself. Fit bird like you? You’ll be fine. Just remember, fuck ’em all.’
‘Yeah, fuck ’em all,’ I repeated, trying to reconcile the fact that his compliment made me happy with the fact that it came from a man who was clearly some sort of neo-Nazi.
I watched my fairy godmugger wander off across the park, the edges of my stolen, swastika-emblazoned phone cutting into my palm, and just as it started to rain, I started to cry. And I did not know how I was going to stop.
CHAPTER TWO (#ulink_6cc4c87d-c464-52e8-bbb7-6ebb05a6905d)
The girl I met in the mirror at home was not the same girl who had left my flat three hours earlier. Her smart chignon had turned into a tangled mess of sodden curls, and the carefully applied but terribly subtle make-up was all gone, either cried or rained away. The brown eyes that had been so sparkly when they left the house were dull and rimmed with red. My simple black shift dress was wet through, now considerably less office chic – more black-latex-condom-frock with a Pritt Stick still in the pocket. At least now I understood why that little boy had burst into tears when I’d smiled at him outside Superdrug. I was still staring at my reflection, willing what I believed to be three new wrinkles on my forehead to go away, when the front door flew open and a tiny black-haired woman blew inside, hurling herself at me before I could even draw breath.
‘Oh my God! What happened? What did you do?’ Amy leapt up onto her tiptoes and crushed me in a bear hug. ‘Did you punch someone? Did you photocopy your arse? Did you embezzle them for millions?’
‘Downsizing,’ I choked, disengaging my soggy self from her arms. ‘There was a “restructure”.’
‘You know I hate when you use air quotes,’ Amy said, slapping my hands down by my side. ‘And that’s really, really disappointing. You didn’t punch anyone? Not even Charlie?’
Amy and I had been best friends since we could speak. Before that, I’m assured that we got on very well. Born six weeks apart, our mums had been besties ever since they’d bonded at an aerobics class in the village hall. We had marked every major milestone together – from first words and first steps right through to most recent snogs and latest hangovers. We were always there for each other in times of need, whether that need was me running out of teabags before there was such a thing as a twenty-four-hour Tesco in East London, or Amy walking out on her fiancé, Dave, three days before her wedding. She never had been good at making a decision and sticking to it. In the past two years she’d had three jobs and four zero percent credit cards, but when it came to me, she was as dependable as Ken Barlow and fiercely loyal. I couldn’t fault her.
‘I didn’t get a chance to punch anyone.’ I still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. I was redundant. I’d been called a lot of things in my time, but the ‘R’ word was the worst. ‘HR called me in. I thought it was just paperwork stuff for the promotion, and then they told me they were letting me go.’
The words stuck in my throat.
‘Nothing dramatic. Nothing exciting. Just restructuring.’
‘Are you OK?’ She eyed me cautiously, as though I might suddenly lose my tiny mind and bust up the entire apartment. It was fair. If I had been capable of feeling anything at all, there was a chance I might have. ‘Your job is, like, your everything.’
Just what I needed to hear.
‘I’m not anything,’ I said carefully. My mouth felt thick and the words weren’t coming out quite right. ‘I don’t feel anything.’
‘Nothing?’ Clearly I’d given the wrong answer. ‘Not angry or sad or confused or, I don’t know, stabby? Sometimes I feel stabby when I get the sack.’
Amy got the sack a lot.
‘Nothing,’ I repeated. ‘Just … a bit blank. A bit cold.’
‘Emotionally cold?’ She was far too eager for my liking. ‘Do you feel dead inside?’
‘Physically cold.’ Maybe calling her had been a bad idea. ‘And like I need a wee.’
‘Yet more disappointment.’ Amy dragged me through the tiny living room and into the kitchen to pop open one of the three bottles of cheap fizzy wine that were clinking together merrily inside a Sainsbury’s bag. ‘I don’t get it. Surely they can’t fire you. Everyone knows you’re the only one who does anything at that place. Have you gone mad? Did they fire you because you’re mad? What did Charlie say?’
‘He wasn’t in when I left.’ I accepted a Snoopy mug full of cava and gulped it down. Cheap fizz burned. Burning was good. ‘I don’t know if he knows.’
Of course Charlie would know. Everyone would know. Everyone would know that I had been fired. Every. One.
‘He hasn’t called?’ Amy topped me up before helping herself to a packet of Pop Tarts from my flatmate’s cupboard and sticking them in the toaster. I didn’t have the energy or inclination to stop her.
‘HR took my phone,’ I said, rummaging around in my handbag for my new-to-me iPhone. ‘Happily, I was the victim of a reverse mugging in the park and someone gave me this.’
My tiny bestie snatched the phone out of my hand and examined it carefully without asking me to elaborate. ‘Ooh, it’s a new one. Good result. Weird case.’
I took it from her, removed the offending cover and handed it back. ‘I can’t keep it. It’s stolen.’
‘Swapsies, then? You can have mine.’ She pressed several buttons and coughed before speaking. ‘Siri, why are Donovan & Dunning a bunch of wankers?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by that,’ he replied. Very diplomatic for an inanimate object.
I leaned against the kitchen wall, sipping my second, surreptitiously refilled mug of cava and staring out over the East London rooftops. They were exactly how I’d left them this morning. As I concentrated on the unchanging chimney pots, stupid things kept popping into my mind, like what was my mum going to say? What was I supposed to do when my alarm went off tomorrow morning? Would I end up homeless? I didn’t know how to go about getting a job. I’d been at Donovan & Dunning since I’d left uni. Before I left uni even – I’d interned there my entire final year. I was going to have to write a CV. Did people still have CVs? Was there something I was supposed to tweet? Maybe there was an unemployment app on my new phone. Most upsettingly, all of the unfinished jobs I’d been doing at work were bothering me. Someone needed to proofread the final air freshener presentation. And who else would take care of the copy for the new baked beans advert? Maybe they’d just lift it from an episode of Mad Men, save some time.
For the want of something better to do, I pressed my back against the cold kitchen wall and slid down to the floor. Ahh. That was better. Amy sat on the kitchen top, phone in one hand, Pop Tart in the other, gazing down at me with concern. It didn’t feel right. I was supposed to be the one who looked after her.
‘Tess,’ she said. I peered at her over the edge of my Snoopy mug with wide eyes. ‘You’re sitting on the kitchen floor in a piss-wet-through dress.’
‘I am.’ She was not wrong.
‘Your head is on the bin. And the bin smells.’
‘It is.’ Again, stellar observational skills. ‘And it does.’
‘Do you think you should maybe go and get changed?’
I didn’t think I should get changed. I was scared that if I took off my work dress I wouldn’t have anything to put on but my pyjamas, and if I put on my pyjamas I might never, ever take them off again. Had Michael remembered about lunch with that awful man from the car company? Eventually, Amy took my silence as a no.
‘How about a bath? You must be freezing?’
A bath sounded equally depressing. There was nothing to do in a bath that didn’t involve sobbing or razor blades. I wondered if Sandra the designer had remembered to change the colour of the squirrel in that paper towel concept.
‘Tess, I’m going to need some verbal feedback from you.’ Amy put down her breakfast long enough to snap her fingers in front of me. ‘What do you want to do?’
I looked up, pushed my scummy hair out of my face and shook my head.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t know. I don’t know anything.’
For the second time that day, I started to cry. My mother would be mortified.
With a sad sigh, Amy hopped down off the worktop and curled up beside me and the bin. ‘I know it must feel like shit,’ she said, sliding her arm between me and the wall and forcing a hug. ‘But you’re better than this. You know you’re amazing at your job. Whatever reason they have for whatever they’ve done, it’s going to be their loss. That place was killing you. You’ll have another job, a better job, at a better agency, this time next Monday. You know I’m right.’
Ignoring the fact that, despite having a first class degree in English and Media Studies, Amy’s longest career commitment to date had been as a ticket taker at the local Odeon, I decided to believe her. What choice did I have? I was good at my job. Charlie had once told me I was so good, I couldn’t just sell ice to Eskimos, I could convince them that my ice had been hand-carved by pixies and contained the frozen tears of unicorns and that they should thank me for giving them the opportunity to even think about buying it. I just needed a new plan. And some more crappy wine.
‘First things first – if you’re not going to have a bath, you at least need a shower.’ Amy kissed my cheek and jumped up to her feet. ‘You’re going to catch your death, and, quite honestly, I can’t look at your hair like that for one more second. You’re pretty rank.’
‘OK.’ I let her hoist me up to my full five feet and nine inches and wiped my cheeks with the backs of my hands. Sometimes she made me feel like a complete beast, her being all pixie-like and adorable and me being, well, five foot nine. My nan always told me I was statuesque, but really, who wanted to be a statue?
‘So you get in the shower and I’ll go out and get some proper food – you’ve got nothing in,’ Amy said, slapping me on the arse and pointing me towards the shower. ‘Hitler’s not due back any time soon, is she?’
‘Please don’t call her Hitler,’ I groaned. It was fair to say that Amy and my flatmate did not get along. Luckily, said flatmate was away all week. ‘She’s not home till the weekend.’
‘Thank. Fuck,’ Amy declared with exaggerated relief on her face. ‘She’s the last thing we need.’
‘Agreed.’ I hated to encourage the two of them when they went at it, but it was true, my flatmate was not the most supportive human in existence. If I could get through this week, get things back on track before she came home, life would be easier.
‘Right.’ Amy pulled her keys to my flat out of her pocket and used them as a tiny, shiny pointer. ‘So, shower and hair wash for you, Sainsbury’s and seven chocolate oranges for me, and we’ll meet in front of the TV for a Buffy marathon in fifteen minutes. And I’m only giving you one day off because tomorrow, every ad agency in the country is going to be fighting over you, and there’ll be no time for vampire-slaying then.’
I nodded, hugged her and shut myself in the bathroom, suddenly desperate to strip off my wet outer layer. Flinging the soggy shift against the bathroom tiles, it hit with a satisfying slap and I stepped under the shower with almost a smile. My skin was cold and clammy and the hot water stung in the best way possible. I could feel myself warming up right through to my bones, which at least meant I could still feel something. Seriously, someone needed to let London know that it was summer. We’d had about three days of legitimate sunshine since May and it was almost July.
‘Maybe I’ll go travelling,’ I told the rubber duck who lived in the corner of the shower. ‘Maybe I’ll go somewhere warm.’
‘With what money?’ he asked. That duck was so cynical. ‘You haven’t got any savings.’
Cynical he might be, but he was also right. Bloody duck. I’d spent the first half of my twenties getting into a really quite impressive amount of debt of both the student loan and credit card variety. Interning and assisting were not well-paid professions, and without the Bank of Mum and Dad to help me through the first few years, I’d had to rely on the kindness of strangers. That is, the graduate loans officer at HSBC. He’d been very ready to help and even more ready to take every penny of interest back. So no, I didn’t have any savings, but I didn’t really have any debt left either, so that was something. Sort of.
‘It’ll be fine,’ I told the judgemental duck as I lathered up. ‘Tomorrow I’ll email everyone I know at the other agencies. How many references have I written in the last year?’
The duck didn’t answer. He was cynical and rude.
‘So many. I have written so many. I must have all the emails for the HR people somewhere.’
And I had. Aside from being amazing at my job, I was also one of the longest servers at D&D. They had a pretty high staff turnover, and for reasons I’d never really been able to understand before today, no one liked asking HR for a reference.
‘I don’t need to panic about this,’ I carried on. ‘It’s a hiccup. I’ll be in a new job by Monday. A better job. The best job ever.’
Well, maybe not the best job ever. I was really going to struggle to get the job of Alexander Skarsgård’s fang fluffer on the next season of True Blood. But still, never say never. I would go and work for a better agency. I would work on bigger accounts. I would manage a team who didn’t sniff the permanent markers when I wasn’t looking. It was time to dream the big dreams. Maybe I could even leave London. I knew a couple of girls who had got transfers over to New York. Maybe I could go and work in the States for a couple of years, do the whole Sex and the City thing. Or maybe even Australia. I’d heard there were a lot of opportunities in Australia. I hoped I’d be able to convince Charlie and Amy to come with me without too much violence.
I stayed in the bathroom, scrubbing away shame and disappointment and the top two layers of my skin until I heard the front door go and the TV come on. Wrapping myself up in the biggest, fluffiest towels I could find, towels that obviously weren’t mine, I emerged from the bathroom ready to tell Amy all about my plans. Much to the duck’s dismay, I was totally smiling.
For all of three seconds.
‘Are those my towels?’ My flatmate, Vanessa, stood in the middle of the living room with a very unimpressed look on her face. ‘Because if they are, you’re going to need to replace them.’
Oh. Fuck.
‘Can’t I just wash them?’ I asked, my fragile positive attitude shattering all around me.
‘No. You can’t.’ She looked so disappointed in me. ‘They’re towels. You don’t share towels. That’s disgusting.’
There weren’t many people in this world who were genuinely awful. Yes, there were the arseholes like Raquel in HR who got a kick out of making other people’s lives difficult, but it wasn’t like she went home and kicked puppies for fun. And as I’d learned already that day, even white supremacists could have a heart if you caught them on the right day. But Vanessa Kittler was a genuinely awful human being. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out she had an entire pile of puppies in her room just for kicking around. No one would have been surprised to see her in a Dalmatian fur coat. In fact, if I’d found out she was a member of the BNP, I wouldn’t have been shocked. If I’d found out she was the secret underground leader of a fascist group planning the genocide of everyone with an undesirable body mass index or home-dyed hair, I might have raised an eyebrow. Just one, though. She was literally the worst person I’d ever met.
Resplendent in skintight black jeans, an obscenely low-cut white T-shirt and a black leather biker jacket, Vanessa looked me up and down, a small silver suitcase resting by her high-heeled feet.
‘Why are you at home using my towels in the middle of the day?’ she asked with an expression that suggested she’d just caught me doing lines of coke off the PM while my mum watched. ‘Shouldn’t you be at work?’
‘I thought you were away all week?’ I stalled, really wanting not to be standing in the middle of the living room in a towel. In Vanessa’s towel. ‘Didn’t you book a shoot or something?’
‘I cancelled,’ she replied with a single flip of her shiny blonde hair. ‘I got to the airport and they had me booked on easyJet. Fuck that. Why are you in my flat?’
To someone who was so conscientious and sickeningly loyal that they were still fighting the urge to call the office that had just fired her and make sure someone had changed the colour of the squirrel in the paper towel concept, this news caused me near physical pain. Vanessa was a photographer. And by that I mean that once every couple of months one of Vanessa’s friends booked her for a job that she occasionally accepted, and she vanished from the flat for a couple of days with the camera I’d had to trade her one month four years ago when I couldn’t afford my rent, which she had subsequently refused to sell back to me. I ignored the part where she referred to my home of five years as ‘her flat’. I knew for a fact that my rent paid more than two thirds of the actual mortgage, but never having paid a penny herself towards the roof over our heads made absolutely no difference to Vanessa whose house this was. Admittedly, her dad did legally pay the mortgage and had done ever since she had been accepted onto a fine arts programme at Central Saint Martins an undisclosed number of years ago. The deal was that he’d pay until she graduated. She never graduated. He was still paying. As far as Van was concerned, a deal’s a deal.
I took a deep breath and started my favourite conversation again. ‘I sort of got made redundant this morning.’
‘You what?’ She blinked and smiled.
‘I got made redundant.’
It did not get easier the more often I said it.
‘Oh my God.’ Vanessa laughed. Actually laughed. ‘You lost your job?’
I nodded and rested one wet foot on top of the other, dripping quietly.
‘But what are you going to do?’ she said as she slowly sat down on the sofa, eyes fixed on me. ‘I mean, like, all you do is work.’
‘It’s OK, it was just restructuring,’ I said, reminding myself as much as telling her. ‘I’ll be in a new job by next week.’
‘Are you high?’ she asked. ‘Where exactly? If a company that has had you working twelve hours a day for five years doesn’t want to keep you around, what makes you think anyone else is going to want to touch you? How are you going to explain getting the sack?’
‘I didn’t get the sack,’ I reiterated, trying not to panic. ‘I was made redundant. No one’s going to care. I’ve got loads of experience.’
‘Loads of experience in getting fired,’ Vanessa replied. ‘You know what they say – it’s easier to find a job when you’re in a job. Who is going to believe you were kicked out for nothing?’
These were not the things I needed to hear.
‘If I were interviewing for whatever it is you do, who would I hire? The person who’d applied but still had a job because they were good enough for their company to want to keep them, or the person who’d got the sack for being surplus to requirements?’
Damn her evil logic.
‘Honestly, I’m amazed you haven’t already killed yourself,’ she said, stretching out on the cream settee without taking off her boots. She was truly evil. ‘Now you haven’t got a job, it must bring all the other tragic parts of your life into focus.’
‘All the other tragic parts?’
‘No job, no boyfriend, no friends …’ She ticked off my faults on her fingers. ‘That hair.’
I shook the towel turban from my head and grabbed a damp strand. ‘What’s wrong with my hair?’
‘Maybe you could go off on one of those Eat, Pray, Love self-exploratory adventures,’ she carried on, clearly enjoying herself. ‘Although that would actually require some imagination. Can you put the kettle on? I have had the worst morning.’
I pressed my lips together in a grim line. Vanessa had had the worst morning. Of course.
Vanessa and I had come across each other five years ago. I’d been looking for a new flat closer to the office and she was looking for a new flatmate who wouldn’t walk out after three months because she was a living nightmare. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. We were introduced by a ‘mutual friend’, aka a friend of Charlie’s who was trying to get into Vanessa’s knickers, and even though it was hardly love at first sight, her flat was beautiful, right in the middle of Clerkenwell and only a twenty-minute walk from work. She told me she was a photographer, and I’d been a keen amateur photographer until work had completely taken over my life, so I thought that was nice. We made small talk about our mutual love of Bradley Cooper, Kinder eggs and wearing shorts over tights, and within fifteen minutes I’d signed the lease. The day I moved in, Charlie, Amy and I were treated to the sight of Vanessa and Charlie’s friend shagging over the back of the settee. I never saw him again. Vanessa I was stuck with.
Within weeks, Vanessa had broken every rule in the flatmate book. She drank my booze, my tea and my milk; she never bought toilet paper; she played music so loudly that I had to sleep with earplugs in. Inside a year, she overtook Angelina Jolie on my list of most evil women alive. She fought with my female friends, she slept with my male friends, she took my clothes without asking, and I was fairly certain that on at least one occasion she had stolen money out of my purse. On my twenty-fifth birthday, she performed an impromptu striptease on the bar of the restaurant we were eating at because she was ‘considering a career as a burlesque dancer’ and called me a boring twat when I asked her to get down. Suffice to say my visiting grandparents were not impressed. The day my second granddad died (not related to the burlesque performance as far as I was aware), she punched me in the arm so hard that I had a bruise for a week and told me to cheer up, it wasn’t like I had died. Her favourite term of endearment for Amy was ‘Tweedle Twat’, and she’d been openly trying to shag Charlie since the day he’d moved my stuff into the flat, despite the fact that she knew how I felt about him. And despite the fact that she was actually being penetrated by one of his best friends the moment they met.
Of course there were reasons why I’d stayed. I hated moving and I hated living with strangers even more. Amy refused to leave her shared house in Shepherd’s Bush and I refused to share one bathroom with five nursing students, so that was off the table. And given that Vanessa’s dad was paying the mortgage, the rent was so ridiculously cheap that I’d been able to pay off all my student loans without bankrupting myself. And once in a blue moon she would do something human and I’d think she wasn’t so bad. We’d spend an evening on the sofa watching bad romcoms and slagging off every man who’d ever walked the earth, or she’d suggest ordering a Chinese takeaway and manage not to insult me more than twice the whole time we ate. And every year, without fail, she bought me a new vibrator for my birthday. Which, for Vanessa, was a Nice Thing To Do. Plus I was very busy and she she was away a lot. Somehow, until now, it had worked.
But when the doorbell went again, I was still standing in the living room wrapped in a towel that was not my own, and I really, really wished I lived in a six-to-a-toilet bedsit in West London.
‘Hey, sorry it took so long. I got chatting to this random—’
‘Oh, fucking hell, tell me it’s not the muffbumper?’ Vanessa groaned. ‘I can’t. I just can’t. It’s bad enough that you’re here without that psycho hanging around.’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ, she’s home.’ Amy froze in the living room doorway, the look on her face switching from impending chocolate binge giddiness to an expression Medusa might find ‘a bit cold’.
The second time my best friend and flatmate met, Vanessa had asked Amy if it was hard being a lesbian. As far as we could tell, this question was based exclusively on Amy’s choice of shoe and hairstyle. The fact that Vanessa chose to ask the question while Amy was sitting in her fiancé Dave’s lap at her own engagement party didn’t seem to matter. Ever since, she had filed Amy away in a lovely little box in her brain labelled ‘lesbian’. Even though she wasn’t even a little bit gay. Did not matter in the slightest.
‘Yes, I’m home,’ Vanessa replied without taking her eyes off the TV. ‘Because I live here. You don’t. So you can fuck off.’
‘Fairly certain Tess lives here as well, so I’m probably not going to do that.’ Amy’s voice was laden with faux politeness. ‘I thought you were away?’
‘Stalking me?’ Vanessa asked. ‘I’ve told you before, you’re not my type.’
‘No, I know. You prefer someone with a cock. Or, you know, anyone with a cock. How is the chlamydia?’
Vanessa sat up sharply. ‘Oh my God, you told her?’
Good to know what could get her attention. Obviously I shouldn’t have told Amy that my flatmate had caught the clap from, well, we didn’t know who exactly, but she had and I had. And in my defence, she didn’t need to tell me, but of course she had to. And as the only functioning adult in the flat, I had been charged with reminding her to take her antibiotics every day. It was always nice to be included in things, even your flatmate’s venereal diseases.
‘It’s not Tess’s fault you’re a dirty skank,’ Amy said, dropping the bag full of chocolatey goodness on the side table and rolling up her sleeves. Uh-oh, were we going to have a rumble? Finally? ‘Maybe if you kept your mouth and your legs closed for fifteen minutes out of every day, this wouldn’t happen.’
Inside the plastic bag, I saw the screen of Amy’s mobile flashing. On average she went through one handset every two months – honestly, I’d never known anyone so careless. I wondered how many of her phones my friend from the park had happened upon in the past. But rather than give her a lecture on proper care and management of electronic equipment, I slipped the phone out of the bag and left the two of them at it. They wouldn’t notice if I wasn’t there; they never did. And I had to answer Amy’s phone for her. It was Charlie.
‘Amy’s phone,’ I answered, ever so slightly breathless. Yes, I’d known him for ten years. Yes, I’d worked in the same office as him for the past three. No, it didn’t change anything. Worst. Crush. Ever. ‘It’s Tess.’
‘Tess? It’s Charlie, are – are you OK?’
Oh, Charlie. So concerned.
‘I’m fine,’ I lied, closing my bedroom door on the outbreak of World War III in the living room. ‘Amy’s here.’
‘What happened?’ He sounded so worried. Bless. ‘We just got an email a minute ago saying you’re no longer with the company. What is going on? You quit without telling me?’
You had to laugh, didn’t you?
‘They sent an email saying I’m no longer with the company?’ I laid back against my fat marshmallow pillows and closed my eyes. ‘That’s all it said?’
‘Yeah. I emailed you this morning but it kept bouncing back, and then you didn’t answer my texts so I phoned HR to see if you’d called in sick. Then they sent this. Tess, what happened?’
‘Restructuring?’ I suggested. ‘Downsizing? Redundancies?’
‘Oh. Fuuuuuuck.’
‘Yeah.’ I felt the first tear in a while trickle down my cheek.
I heard Charlie sighing on the other end of the phone and imagined him sitting at his desk three over and two across from where I used to sit. His hair, almost the exact same shade of dark coppery brown as mine, would be all rumpled as usual. His tie would be loose, as though it were four fifteen on a Friday instead of twelve twenty on a Monday, and he’d be wearing the glasses with clear lenses that he’d bought at Urban Outfitters to try to look a bit cleverer because he had a big client meeting this afternoon.
‘Shit, Tess,’ he said after the pause. ‘I’m sorry. That’s bollocks. What a load of wank.’
And that magical way with words was why I was the creative director and he was an account manager. Or at least that’s why he was an account manager.
I had been in love with Charlie Wilder for ten long years but it felt longer. Ever since I’d spotted him sitting outside our halls of residence playing a guitar covered in Smiths stickers, a battered copy of Catcher in the Rye by his side, I just knew he was the one. OK, so I hadn’t actually read Catcher in the Rye and I only knew one or two Smiths songs from films or TV, but regardless, I was smitten. Because these two things meant that Charlie Wilder, unlike every boy I had gone to school with, was Terribly Deep. When you added that observation to the fact that he was six three and therefore taller than me, even in heels, it was hard to fight fate. Unfortunately, it was fair to say that Charlie wasn’t hit quite so squarely by Cupid’s arrow. It took almost nine months for me to work up the courage (i.e. get drunk enough) to talk to him, and by that time he had a girlfriend. Eventually, after I’d spent two years reading every book I heard him so much as allude to and learning every lyric Morrissey had ever written, we somehow became friends. And once we were friends, I was terrified of scaring Charlie out of my life by confessing my all-encompassing, soul-crushing love for him. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t exactly struggling to suppress his feelings for me. There hadn’t been so much as a drunken semi-song, and, as Amy routinely liked to tell me, every girl accidentally snogs her boy best friend at some point. Or if you were Vanessa, gave them an STD. Everywhere we went, people assumed we were a couple. When they worked out that we weren’t, they wanted to know why not. Charlie always laughed and said I was too good for him. I always laughed and agreed. And then died inside.
But no. So we were the very definition of ‘just good friends’. Every Sunday, we went to the pub and ate too many Yorkshire puddings. He killed my spiders; I bought his socks. He was dreadful at remembering to buy socks. But every single time we spoke, whether it was about work, football or the seasonal special at Starbucks, all I wanted was for him to grab hold of me, spin me around and tell me he loved me. It was, admittedly, a little bit sad. As far as I was concerned, there were two kinds of men in the world – Charlie and the Not-Charlies. The Not-Charlies didn’t get a look in.
So you can understand why I was a bit slow to process exactly what he’d said.
‘Hang on – no one else got laid off? No other redundancies?’
‘No. No one. And Michael just announced that we won that air freshener account. Everyone was asking where you were. It’s mental. What exactly did he tell you?’
Reluctantly I went over the whole story, my heart sinking through the floor as reality set in. Donovan & Dunning weren’t restructuring. The only person being downsized was me, and it was working. I’d never felt smaller in my entire life. I just couldn’t understand why. What could I possibly have done wrong?
‘I’ll try to find out what’s going on,’ he promised when I’d finished. ‘Do you want to come over later? We could get very, very drunk and watch Top Gun?’
I did like Top Gun.
‘And I’ll buy all that girl shit you like? You know – wine, those massive cookies, chocolate that isn’t a Mars Bar?’
I also liked girl shit.
‘Come on, Tess, you’ll feel better. You know you want to.’
And I did want to. But the idea of curling up on Charlie’s sofa eating chocolates that weren’t Mars Bars while he sat there feeling sorry for me was too much to bear. The only thing worse than being in love with someone who didn’t love you was being in love with someone who pitied you.
‘I think I just want to go to sleep. I’m really tired,’ I said, rolling out of my towel and into the nightshirt underneath my pillow. So what if it was only midday. I was unemployed. ‘Call you tomorrow?’
‘Make sure you do,’ he said sternly. ‘It’ll be all right, you know. Love you.’
‘Love you too,’ I replied, wincing with every word. Not because he didn’t mean it, but because he did. Just not in the same way. ‘Oh, and Charlie – I know what you’re going to say, but could you make sure Sandra changes the colour on the squirrel?’
‘You’re hopeless,’ he sighed. ‘Will do.’
Hanging up, I shuffled my bum up the bed until I could kick my feet under the covers and pulled them up over my head. Vanessa and Amy were still going at it in the living room. I couldn’t even make out what they were arguing about at this point – it was just high-pitched squealing. It sounded like dolphins re-enacting Toy Story 3. And I hadn’t lied – I really was exhausted. Tomorrow I would get up and I would draft my CV. Charlie would have found out exactly what had gone down at work and I’d call all the lovely recruitment agencies and ad agencies and let them know that I was ready for a new challenge. Maybe if I just went to sleep, everything would be better when I woke up. That always seemed to work in the movies, after all.
CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_52125ea1-bdf9-557b-91d5-7aafc6f94d4b)
In the four days that had passed since I’d been fired I had learned the following lessons. One: what worked in the movies did not work in real life. Two: advertising was the creative industry equivalent of the movie Mean Girls. Three: four days wasn’t long enough for your hair to start washing itself. Four: if, however, you just didn’t get out of bed, you stopped noticing that your hair smelled disgusting after two and a half days, so that didn’t really matter.
I had woken up on Tuesday strong, confident and fully committed to writing a new chapter in The Story of Tess. Amy called in sick with another migraine and played cheerleader, DJing a motivational mix of music from my largely unplayed music library. By midday, I had an amazing CV, I’d called and left voicemails with every advertising agency in London, and I’d drunk five and a half cups of coffee. Big cups. By four p.m., my CV had gone out to eight recruitment agencies, I’d been to the toilet six times and Charlie had reported back at least a dozen different rumours about my ‘no longer being with the company’. The three favourites seemed to be that I had been leaking information to a competitor, that I had blackmailed the company into promoting me, and, my personal favourite, that I’d been sleeping with Michael and that he’d sent me to France to have his baby. Because clearly it was 1852 and that’s what we did when we got knocked up by the boss.
At six p.m., after Amy had left for the bar job she occasionally bothered with, after Charlie had emailed me the fifteenth different rumour (that I was completing a sex change and would be coming back in the New Year as Terence), and after I had received the fifth phone call of the day explaining no one was hiring at the moment, that things were really tough right now and asking if I had considered retraining as a teacher, I gave up. As in, I took off my people clothes and put on my most disgusting threadbare flannel pyjamas, ate everything in the fridge and turned off my stolen phone. And when I turned it back on twenty-four hours later, the only people who had tried to contact me were Amy and Charlie. So I turned it back off again. The only bright spot was that when I left my room at EastEnders o’clock, Vanessa had mysteriously disappeared and taken her suitcase and toxic personality with her.
For the past seventy-two hours I had only got out of bed to pee, take something out of the fridge or fetch another Sex and the City boxset from the living room. No one ever got laid off in Sex and the City. And they all got the men they wanted in the end. Even if one of them was Steve. It did not make me feel better. I did not turn it off.
But three days later, the universe and Amy had decided enough was enough.
‘Get up, get up, get up!’ She started slapping at either side of my head and bouncing up and down on top of my bed. ‘It’s Saturday. You’ve got to get up. We’re staging an intervention.’
‘I don’t want to be intervened,’ I croaked, pushing Amy away and throwing myself face first into my pile of pillows. ‘Leave me alone.’
‘No, you’re not Anne Frank, you’re not hiding from the Nazis. It’s time for you to get your arse up and out,’ she said, jumping on my back and wrapping her legs around my waist. She was very strong for such a little girl. ‘You need to get in the shower. We’ve got places to go, people to see.’
‘Not possible,’ I remonstrated, pushing up onto all fours and trying to shake her off, but Amy clung to me as though she was riding a scabby horse. ‘Let me go back to sleep.’
‘We haven’t got time – I’m double-parked. Get dressed, you filthy mare.’
Of course the other person in Amy’s intervention was Charlie. I shook Amy loose and tried to push the dead cat on top of my head into something resembling a ponytail. It wasn’t like he hadn’t spent more than one night on my bathroom floor holding my hair back while I brought up half of the student union bar, but still, I tried to avoid looking like utter scum in front of him when I could. If I could.
‘How are you double-parked? You haven’t got a car.’ I blinked at the daylight and the very tall, very lovely man silhouetted by my window.
‘It’s mental, Tess. You just go on the Internet and ask a man if you can borrow one, and then you give him your credit card details and, fuck me, you’ve got a car,’ he replied. Sarcasm was not one of Charlie’s strong points. As opposed to his beautiful, floppy hair and wonderful eyes. And his long, long legs. And broad chest. I was going off topic.
‘If you hadn’t gone the complete Howard Hughes, you’d remember that this afternoon is my niece’s christening and we are attending,’ Amy said, releasing her kung fu grip and rolling across the bed as she wrinkled her tiny nose. Her black bob was ruffled from over-exertion and her cheeks were flushed. She looked the very picture of health. She looked like my complete opposite. ‘So get up and get in the shower because we are on our way up north whether you like it or not.’
Those karma gods were not playing fair.
‘Tess! Amy!’
As was tradition, my mum leapt up from the kitchen table as though I was returning from the war and we hadn’t called seventeen minutes ago to say we were getting off the M1 and would be there in seventeen minutes. No hugs, though. We didn’t hug.
‘And Charlie.’
As was tradition, my boy best friend was met with a wildly inappropriate growl of a hello, as he had been ever since the first time I’d brought him home. The only person on earth who loved Charlie more than I did was my mum. I wasn’t sure if she wanted him to marry me or marry her. Of course she was already married and my stepdad was possibly the best man on earth, but that didn’t stop her from giving him a squeeze that was just half a heartbeat too long. They hugged. They always hugged.
‘Nice to see you, Julie,’ he squeaked as she copped a sneaky feel. ‘You look well.’
‘Isn’t it a lovely weekend?’ Once she had put Charlie down, Mum sat back at the table while Amy helped herself to everything in our fridge. ‘It’s going to be a lovely christening. Amy, you must be so proud of your sister.’
‘Yes, getting accidentally knocked up is quite the achievement these days,’ Amy replied, popping the top off a beer. ‘And two kids to two different men. She’s a living miracle.’
‘So proud,’ Mum beamed, stone cold smile on her face. ‘And what are you doing for work now? Are you still seeing that lovely coloured man?’
I shook my head and planted my face on the cool kitchen table. It smelled of disinfectant wipes and shame.
‘No, that was really just a sex thing,’ Amy said. She did love going toe to toe with my mum. And the worst part was that she was really only warming up for her own mother. ‘But you know what they say – once you go black—’
‘I haven’t, but that’s very interesting.’ Mum always got bored before Amy did and so she turned her attention to Charlie. ‘And what about you, love? How’s work? Tess still acting the slave driver?’
Because the atmosphere wasn’t tense enough already.
During the two-hour drive up into the seventh circle of hell, Amy and Charlie had been thoroughly briefed on the situation. They knew that I had not told my mother about my newly unemployed status, and they knew I was not planning to do so. Originally I just hadn’t been able to face it. And then I had convinced myself I’d be able to get a new job so quickly that there wasn’t any point in telling her. And then I’d spent three days under the duvet eating packet after packet of Hobnobs.
Charlie thought I should tell her. Charlie thought my mum was nicer than Mary Poppins on Xanax. Charlie loved my mum because my mum loved Charlie. Amy did not think I should tell her. Amy thought my mum was a word I’d only ever said out loud twice in my entire life. Amy did not love my mum because my mum did not love Amy. And while no one wants to think badly of their parents, Amy’s opinion of my mum was probably closer to the truth than Charlie’s. It was comforting to know there was someone out there who knew everything about me and wasn’t genetically or legally required to love me but did so anyway. Unfortunately, it also meant that Amy had witnessed all the rows, all the shouting and all the tears, and, as was right and proper for a best friend, she held all the grudges I was biologically denied.
I loved my mum and I knew that she loved me. I also knew that she loved me more when I was doing well. If I got ninety-eight percent in a test, she wanted to know what had happened to the other two percent. If I got a pay rise, she wanted to know why it wasn’t a promotion. If I got a promotion, she wanted to see a business card to verify it. She was a pusher. She was a pushy mother. Whenever I got upset about it, I tried to remind myself I should be happy that she focused her efforts on shoving me up the academic and professional ladders, and even happier that reality TV didn’t exist when I was a kid. I would almost certainly have ended up on X Factor, dancing to Kelis’s Milkshake in a diamante bra-and-knicker set at the age of six. It wasn’t her fault, I reminded myself for the thousandth time that year; she just wanted the best for me. She just wanted me to have the things that she didn’t. And she’d watched Working Girl too many times in the eighties. It wasn’t a coincidence that I was called Tess.
‘Oh, you know Tess doesn’t work in my team,’ Charlie replied with careful diplomacy. ‘And thank goodness. She’s so good at her job, she’d just show me up.’
He always knew the right thing to say. Mum and I sat across from each other and smiled in tandem. Her hair was shorter than mine and starting to go grey, but we had the same colour eyes and identical gigantic rack. I’d got my Big Bird height, overanalytical mind and physical inability to hold a tune from Dad, but the rest of me was pure Julie.
‘So what’s the news?’ she asked, eventually turning to me. ‘How’s that fancy office? Have you got your new business cards yet?’
‘Not yet,’ I said, trying very hard not to tell any lies. ‘And really, the creative director job isn’t that different from what I was doing before. It’s just a different title.’
I actually assumed that was true. Everyone knew you ended up doing the new job for at least a year before you actually got the title.
‘Everyone’s been very impressed – they can’t wait to see you and hear all about it.’ Mum wore my achievements like a badge. ‘Your sisters will be at the christening.’
Joy.
‘Where’s Brian?’ I asked, looking around the house I grew up in for signs of my stepdad, aka the only sane member of my family. It made perfect sense that he wasn’t genetically related to me in anyway. ‘Hiding?’
‘Hiding,’ Mum confirmed. ‘He’s playing golf. He’ll be back by two.’
I nodded and tried not to worry. It seemed like Brian was playing a lot of golf lately.
‘Oh, Tess, Amy’s mum dropped by earlier and asked if you could take some pictures this afternoon?’
‘I would, but I didn’t bring my camera,’ I said, biting my lip and hoping she wouldn’t ask where it was.
It was last summer, when I’d been short on money due to a ridiculous last-minute weekend away with Charlie that I couldn’t afford and which had ended in him copping off with a twenty-two-year-old blonde girl while I sat in the B&B sulking, that I’d traded my camera to Vanessa for a month’s rent. The camera I’d begged my mother to buy me. The camera I had taken with me everywhere until work had got in the way. The camera that sat on my ‘photographer’ roommate’s desk and never moved.
‘She’ll just have to manage without, then, won’t she,’ Mum shrugged. ‘I told her it wasn’t fair to ask anyway. You’ve been working all week and then she expects you to take photos of her bloody granddaughter’s christening? I mean, you’re a bloody director now, for Christ’s sake. And it’s not like there won’t be another one, the way she goes on. No offence, Amy.’
‘None taken,’ Amy replied. ‘My sister is a bigger slag than I am, I know.’
‘Hadn’t we better go and get changed?’ I stood up and grabbed my hastily packed weekend bag, wondering what sartorial treats Amy had shoved in there while I was showering. ‘We don’t want to be fighting for the bathroom.’
‘Fine.’ Mum feigned disappointment that we were trying to escape so quickly, but I knew she was relieved. ‘Be down here by quarter to three. We’ll walk down to the church together.’
I just prayed I wouldn’t burn up on entry.
The christening went as well as a small village christening could go. Babies cried, mums cooed and the twenty-something children who had run away at the age of eighteen stood awkwardly at the back fielding questions from their former Brownie leaders about why they weren’t married yet.
‘We can’t get married,’ Amy was explaining to our septuagenarian Brown Owl. ‘Because we’re a triad. Me, Tess and Charlie. Society doesn’t understand our love. It’s a polyamory thing.’
‘Pollyanna-y?’ Mrs Rogers looked very confused. ‘I don’t quite follow, Amy, love.’
‘Just what we need,’ Charlie whispered in my ear as he fell into the seat next to me. The post-baptismal celebrations were taking place in the pub, ‘the true church of the village’, as it was written. Almost everyone I’d gone to school with was crammed into the conservatory of The Millhouse, putting back pints and taking pictures of Amy’s new niece, Katniss, with their phones and posting them straight to her Facebook page. I had assumed Amy was taking the piss when she’d told me the baby’s name, but no. I should have known. Her big sister was called Bella, after all.
‘What’s that?’ I clinked my Diet Coke against his pint of bitter and took a sip. As predicted, Amy had struggled with my wardrobe of sensible work separates, so I was sitting in a Yorkshire pub at my best friend’s sister’s baby’s christening in July wearing black leather knee boots, a gold sequinned miniskirt I’d worn one New Year at uni, and a white cotton shirt that really needed ironing. It was quite the outfit.
‘Amy is going round telling everyone that the three of us are a couple,’ he said, undoing his already loose tie. ‘I think she got bored of people asking about Dave.’
‘Amy was bored of people asking about Dave seven seconds after she broke up with him,’ I replied, imagining the fun conversation I’d be having with Lorraine from the library and Donna from the post office before the night was out. ‘Now she’s just bored. Why did she even make us come to this?’
‘I’m fairly certain it was to remind you why you left in the first place. Is it working?’ Charlie drained his pint and nodded towards my half-empty glass. ‘What are you drinking? I’m going to the bar.’
Reaching over, I wiped a frothy moustache from his top lip and smiled. ‘Just Diet Coke. I’m not in the mood to drink.’
‘God forbid you should make a scene.’ He looked over to where Amy was performing a jazz tap routine for the pensioners who lived in the bungalows near her mum.
‘I’m not nearly so entertaining,’ I replied. ‘Thanks for coming with us, anyway. I know it’s a ball-ache.’
‘Yeah, whatever.’ He stood up and stretched. ‘Any family is better than no family, remember?’
‘And the grass is always greener,’ I said. ‘Remember?’
Charlie half laughed as he walked away, towering over everyone else in the bar while I watched. It was Christmas in the third year of uni when he first came home with me. His parents were getting divorced, and since I’d been there, done that, I’d told him to come home with me. Never in a million years did I think he’d say yes. Now, eight Noels on, he had a stocking embroidered with his name and a permanent spot at our Christmas dinner table. Just like me, he didn’t really see his dad, and his mum had moved to Malta with his stepdad a couple of years ago. Without any grandparents or siblings, as soon as the Boots Christmas catalogue dropped, he was an honorary Brookes.
‘Tess! You came! We were worried you might be too busy!’
Only a full-blooded Brookes could be that passive-aggressive. I tore my eyes away from Charlie’s arse to the far less pleasant sight of my two younger sisters standing before me, arms full of babies and faces full of judgement.
‘Are those new boots?’ Melanie asked.
‘Your hair is so long,’ Liz said.
‘And you both look well,’ I said, looking down at my niece and nephew and giving them each a curt nod. ‘Hello, babies.’
‘Here, hold her.’ Melanie, twenty-six, married, mother of two, handed me baby Tallulah. ‘She doesn’t even know who you are. Isn’t that funny?’
I bit my lip to avoid pointing out that Tallulah was only nine months old and barely even knew who she was and took the baby with a strained smile.
‘Please don’t be sick on this shirt,’ I whispered to my niece. ‘It was a present.’
‘Look, you’re a natural!’ Liz, twenty-two, engaged, mother of one but desperately trying for another by all accounts, thrust out a second baby. ‘Take Harry while I get us a drink.’
‘I can’t hold two babies,’ I squealed, taking the even tinier bundle in my other arm and looking around in desperation. ‘What if I need a wee?’
‘You’re not allowed to have a wee,’ Mel said, smoothing out her wrinkled-to-buggery dress and sitting down beside me. She picked up a glass of wine that did not belong to her and swigged it back. ‘Welcome to my world.’
‘I think I read something on the way in about overpopulation, so I can’t stay,’ I said. I really wanted to give her one of the babies back, but with my arms full, I had no idea how to offload one. They smelled weird. ‘Are they OK? I can’t see their faces. How do you do this?’
‘Don’t overthink it, you’ll drop one,’ she advised. Her hair, identical to mine, sprang all around her face. While I kept my copper mess carefully tethered in a long ponytail, Mel had clearly decided to embrace the curls for the christening. It was a controversial gamble that had not paid off. ‘Although I realize that telling you not to overthink something is like telling Liz no.’
Mel was the poor put-upon middle sister. While Mum was busy forcing me up an imaginary ladder of success and our stepdad was spoiling little Lizzie with his unwavering attention, the true child of divorce and official Band-Aid baby Mel sat quietly in the middle of it all, shaking her head and counting down the days until she could get out, get married and fuck up a family all of her own. So far, so good. She had a house, a husband, a Rav 4 and two kids. As far as she was concerned, she was winning. And despite her open disapproval of me, I actually liked Mel. She was funny, dry and desperately honest. We didn’t see each other terribly often, mainly because I avoided the village like the plague and she couldn’t exactly come gallivanting down to London with two babies under three. It might seem like a strange thing to say about your sister, but if we weren’t related, I’d want to be her friend.
‘Wiiiiiine.’ Liz returned from the bar and handed Mel a glass bucket of suspiciously green-tinged white wine. ‘So, Tess, tell me everything. You never update Facebook. Have you got a boyfriend?’
Liz, on the other hand, not so much.
‘Me and Jamie are moving at the end of the month, has Mel told you? Right around the corner from her. Isn’t it brilliant? All our babies will get to grow up together. Well, all our babies apart from your babies. You really need to get a move on, you know – you’re not getting any younger.’
There was nothing like being reminded about your tick-tick-ticking biological clock by your six-years-younger half-sister to put the icing on this shitty cake of a week. And cake should never be shitty.
‘Is Charlie going out with anyone?’ she asked, tightening her blonde ponytail. Liz was the only one of the three of us who had escaped Mum’s dark-hair-big-boob genes. ‘He might be up for it now if he’s getting desperate. I could talk to him for you?’
‘Or I could kill you,’ I offered, desperate to offload one of these babies. Preferably whichever one was starting to smell like poop. ‘Charlie isn’t desperate.’
Liz and Mel shared a not-very-furtive glance.
‘And neither am I,’ I added.
‘You know there’s a rumour going round that you and Amy are lezzers.’ Liz sipped her wine and narrowed her eyes. ‘But I told Karen you weren’t. Because you’re not. Are you?’
‘No, Liz, Amy and I are not lesbians. We’re very busy career women who have other things to worry about than babies and boyfriends.’ Didn’t matter how true that was, it still sounded like an excuse. ‘And I think you’ll find Amy probably started that rumour to make Karen look stupid.’
‘So the new job’s going well?’ Mel took over the interrogation and one of the babies. Unfortunately, it was not the smelly one. I gave Tallulah the filthiest look I could muster but she just blew a raspberry back at me. No respect, that girl.
‘Yes?’ I was the worst liar.
‘Because I emailed you and it bounced back.’
Bloody email. She couldn’t have sent flowers?
‘Uh, there was a problem with the server.’
‘But not on Charlie’s email? Because I emailed Charlie and that was fine.’
So much for her being the nice sister. Along with her hair and boobs, Mel had also inherited our mum’s ability to sniff out blood, and once she got a whiff of something not right, she did not let go.
‘I didn’t want to say anything at the christening’ – Amy always told me it was good to start a lie by making yourself look good – ‘but I’m not actually working there any more.’
‘Then where are you working?’ The two of them stared at me as though they already knew the answer but just really, really needed to hear me say it.
‘I’m not working anywhere,’ I said quietly. ‘I got made redundant.’
Mel gasped. Liz reached out and snatched Tallulah from my arms in case unemployment was catching.
‘You know that one isn’t yours, don’t you?’ I asked.
‘Mum!’ Liz grabbed our passing mother’s arm, her face completely white. ‘Tess lost her job!’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ I pressed my hand against my forehead and prayed to whoever might be listening to strike me dead on the spot. I could not handle this right now. Silently I cursed Amy for dragging me up here and wished a plague on Charlie’s house for driving the car. My mother stopped dead in her tracks, her face frozen in horror, and just in case people hadn’t heard Liz, she dropped a full glass of red wine onto the tiled floor. It shattered into not really that many pieces (definitely not crystal) and splattered everyone around us with cheap red plonk.
‘Tess, what is she talking about?’ Ignoring the fact that she’d just ruined about seven people’s tights, my mum looked as though she’d just had a stroke. I really hoped she hadn’t. ‘What does she mean you lost your job?’
‘I was going to tell you after …’ I waved my hand around the very quiet room. ‘I got made redundant.’
And with that, the whispering began. Everyone knew someone who had been made redundant, but Tess Brookes? Her who had moved away to That London? With her fancy job? Scandalous.
‘But your promotion?’ Mum’s face was still a very worrying shade of grey.
‘No promotion,’ I replied. Thank goodness I hadn’t overreacted. This was exactly as horrible as I had thought it would be.
‘I cannot believe you would embarrass me like this,’ she said through gritted teeth as she looked around at anyone but me. ‘I cannot believe you would come here and announce that like it’s nothing. I cannot believe you wanted to embarrass me in front of all my friends.’
I dipped my head, pretending my eyes weren’t stinging, and watched the puddle of her spilled wine bleed across the floor towards a white paper napkin and slowly stain it a dark ruby red. There were so many things I wanted to say. I hadn’t planned to tell her like this. I hadn’t wanted to embarrass anyone. Liz told her! It was just like being fifteen again; Liz was such a grass. But just like when I was fifteen, I knew there was no point answering back. She wasn’t finished.
‘Don’t just sit there crying. What did you do?’
Damage done, Liz got up, switched babies with Mel and flounced away, muttering something about needing to change Harry. Mel gave me a quick supportive squeeze on the shoulder and followed. Just like being fifteen. Where was Amy when I needed her?
‘I didn’t do anything – they were just laying people off,’ I explained. It didn’t help that I didn’t actually know what had happened myself. ‘I didn’t do anything wrong.’
‘Well, people don’t just lose their jobs for no reason, Tess,’ she carried on while a random sixteen-year-old who probably went to my old school started mopping up the mess around us. ‘I should have known something was wrong when you came out dressed like that.’
She had a point there. She should have known.
‘I can’t believe this. After all I’ve done for you.’
‘What? After all you’ve done what?’
Ahh. There was Amy. And as my best friend stepped up to my mother, the whispering was replaced by a low clinking of glasses, occasionally punctuated by the popping open of packets of McCoy’s.
‘What exactly have you done?’ she asked, forcing her way in between me and my mother, hands on skinny hips, and stamping a very little foot. ‘Aside from bully your daughter for the last twenty years?’
Amy and my mum were exactly the same height. For years I’d wondered who would win in a fight, and at last it looked like I might find out.
‘I know this is going to be hard for you, Amy, but please don’t involve yourself where you’re not wanted,’ she replied. Ahh, interesting. She was playing the responsible mother card.
‘Can we not do this?’ I asked as calmly as possible. ‘We can talk about this at home. This is … Katniss’s day?’
Nope, that just did not sound right.
‘Oh, we will talk about this at home,’ Mum replied, giving Amy the frowning of a lifetime. ‘We’ll talk about when you decided it was all right to start lying to your mother. And Amy, I think it would be a good idea if you stayed at your house tonight.’
Before Amy could reply, my mum turned on her sensible heel and marched away. As the door to the pub slammed, the silence broke and the party went back to full volume with a new lease of life now they had something scandalous to talk about. Thank goodness me losing my job had served a purpose.
‘Sorry.’ Amy dropped into my lap and rested her head on my shoulder. Because that would quiet those lesbian rumours. ‘I couldn’t listen to her going on at you.’
‘Oh, I’m sure you only made it marginally worse,’ I said, patting her on the head. ‘She was going to find out sooner or later.’
‘I suppose. Sorry I made you come in the first place, then,’ she sniffed. ‘I thought coming back and checking out all the losers would remind you how awesome our lives are.’
I looked at her in disbelief. She shrugged. ‘How awesome my life is?’
‘OK.’ I groaned and stood up straight, ignoring the looks and smirks around the room. ‘I’m going to go out for a walk. Get some fresh air. Are you all right? I saw you dancing for Mrs Rogers earlier. Nice moves.’
‘Can you stop worrying about me for one minute and worry about yourself?’ she said, brushing down her in-appropriately tiny red dress and straightening out her glossy black bob. ‘When am I not fine?’
It was true. She was always fine. So I gave her a smile and, ignoring all my Cloverhill classmates, I pushed my way over to the fire escape and escaped.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_8050e9fa-f63c-5f9a-b9ad-309e6765db2d)
Behind the Millhouse was the mill pond, a tiny body of water just big enough to have a good side and a bad side. Naturally, the bad side was where all the cool kids hung out and drank cheap, rank booze, while the good side was where the nanas brought their grandchildren to throw bits of old Hovis at the scabby ducks. I had spent so many hours throwing Hovis at those ducks, with and without my nana. After a slow and steady lap of the pond, I found a bench somewhere in between the two poles, my confused ensemble not really fitting in with either crew. The kids had clearly clocked me as too old to hang out with them and too uncool to buy them more bargain vodka, and the grandparents did not want their precious children talking to a lady dressed as a stripper on her way to work in a call centre. I didn’t care. I didn’t really feel anything. My brain was so full of so much, I couldn’t do anything but sit on the bench, try to ignore the splinters in the backs of my thighs and make occasional squeaking noises. I wondered if there was some terrifying astrological event I didn’t know about, if all Capricorns were going through something equally traumatic, but it just wasn’t possible. Kate Middleton was a Capricorn – there would have been something on the news if her life was turning as all-encompassingly shitty as mine. There would have been a tweet.
Stretching out my fingers, I stared at the backs of my hands as though I had a laptop in front of me and tried to switch into work mode. I was best in work mode. If I were still an employed, functioning member of society and my shambles of a life was a campaign, how would I pitch it?
The biggest problem was the sheer number of problems. I didn’t have a job, I hated my flatmate, my mum hated me, I was in love with my best friend, my best friend was not in love with me, and on top of everything else, even when you peeled away those key issues, I had absolutely no life. Not a single quirky characteristic that could be spun into an adorable side project. As a brand, I was less desirable than Skoda; even I would struggle to spin me. But it wasn’t impossible – I needed rebranding. All the successful companies struggled at some point. Even Apple nearly went bankrupt once. And if someone could make Old Spice cool again, I could certainly save myself.
But what was the Tess Brookes brand?
This was why I’d never had an online dating profile – it was too hard to describe yourself. I was loyal, conscientious, creative and logical. I could always see the solution to a problem; I always knew how to make a client happy. Unless the client was me, apparently. Visually, I didn’t have a signature look unless you counted bad hair and massive boobs. (Hopefully no one did.) There was no one thing that would make someone sit back and go, ‘Oh, that’s so Tess.’ I didn’t have a favourite band, a favourite book; I dipped in and out of whatever was on the TV when I turned it on. I could describe every single demographic out there, I could tell you what made someone buy Coke over Pepsi and then switch back again, but I couldn’t tell you whether or not I preferred polka dots over stripes. I knew too much about everyone else and nothing at all about myself. How could I convince someone to buy me when there was nothing to buy?
‘There you are.’
I looked up to see Charlie striding along the edge of the pond, a frown on his face. His pretty, pretty face.
‘I’ve been looking for you everywhere.’
‘To be fair, I didn’t get that far.’ I glanced around. I wasn’t more than five minutes away from the pub. I was sad, but I was also very lazy. ‘You missed an awesome scene.’
‘I know, I heard. I was in the gents.’ He sat down beside me, took off his jumper and draped it round my shoulders. ‘But afterwards you missed Amy grabbing hold of the baby and singing “Circle of Life”, so I think we’re square.’
‘Jesus, I’ve only been out here half an hour,’ I laughed, trying not to be upset that I’d missed what sounded like an incredible Lion King homage. I did love a Disney movie. There! That was something I knew about myself. I was a twenty-eight-year-old unemployed single woman who loved animated movies made for children. If we were at work, I’d be trying to sell me some cat food and a lovely cardigan about now. Maybe I should just change my name and run away – that would be a pretty decent rebrand.
‘Well, I was worried about you,’ he said, nudging me with his shoulder. ‘Been a shit week, Brookes. How are you still sober?’
‘Didn’t bring any booze.’ I waved my empty hands at him. ‘Schoolboy error.’
‘Thankfully’ – Charlie produced a half-bottle of vodka from behind his back – ‘I am not a schoolboy.’
‘Oh, you clever man,’ I said, gratefully accepting the bottle and taking a deep drink. I had never been a very good drinker. I loved a drink, but drinks did not love me. The two mugs of wine I’d enjoyed on Monday, post-sacking, were the first alcoholic drinks I’d had in a month, but while we were rebranding, I had to consider all my options. Maybe the new Tess would be a drinker. Maybe she’d learn how to make elaborate cocktails and have her friends over for parties. Maybe she’d be a whisky drinker and keep a decanter on her desk like Don Draper. Or maybe she’d do a shot of cheap supermarket vodka by the duck pond and retch in her own mouth.
‘Keep it down.’ Charlie rubbed my back and took the bottle from me. ‘Keep it down.’
‘Oh, bugger me, that’s disgusting,’ I coughed, feeling the burn in the back of my throat. Maybe if I was going to be a drinker, I shouldn’t start with four-quid cava and vodka that cost less than a Tube ticket. ‘Thank you.’
‘You’re very welcome.’ Charlie took a shot without wincing and passed the bottle back. The sun was already setting across the pond, and the bad side was getting considerably more traffic than the good. ‘So, what are we going to do with you?’
‘I have no idea,’ I replied, turning to give him my best attempt at a smile. ‘I was just trying to work that out myself.’
‘Well, if you were a client and I was trying to sort you out, I’d start with what you wanted out of your campaign,’ he reasoned while I took a second shot. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him rubbing the centre of his left eyebrow. That meant he was thinking. Rubbing his chin meant he was confused. Nodding and scratching the back of his neck meant he was listening but not really paying attention. There wasn’t a thing about this man I didn’t know. ‘What do you want?’
This was why we were soulmates. He was trying to solve my problems in exactly the same way I was trying to solve my problems.
‘My job,’ I replied.
‘You can’t have your job.’ He slapped my bare thigh and I had to remember to be offended and not turned on. ‘As account manager, it’s my role to give you honest feedback and tell you what is and isn’t possible. Your old job, off the table. What else do you want?’
‘I really do just want my job,’ I said, clutching the warm bottle between my knees. ‘If I had my job back, I could just put everything back how it was and carry on. That would be perfect.’
‘If this week has taught us nothing else, it’s that things were not perfect for you,’ Charlie said. He turned on the bench until his knee was pressing against mine. ‘People lose their jobs every day, Tess. They don’t take to their beds for four days and fall apart. They turn to their friends, they go on holiday, they – I don’t fucking know – read the great novels or something. Write a great novel. Start a blog. Tell me what makes you happy, aside from work.’
I tried to think about something other than his knee on mine.
‘You?’ I said as quietly as humanly possible.
‘Me?’
‘You and Amy?’ I wanted to slap myself.
Charlie nodded for a moment and took the bottle back from me without words. The ducks on the pond, full of stale bread, started to make their way over to the rushes looking for their beds.
‘I think the problem is, you’re so used to being in your head and solving the problem that you don’t know how to present it back to the client. That’s my job,’ Charlie took hold of my hand. His were almost as soft as mine, but so much bigger. I turned, flushed with vodka, proximity and my ridiculous outfit, and looked into his big brown eyes. He was adorable. ‘So here’s what I see. You are a beautiful, clever, funny woman. You work too hard, you take on too much, and you’re far too concerned with other people’s expectations. You worry too much about your friends and you live with a mentalist, but aside from that, the basic elements are all there.’
Beautiful. He said I was beautiful.
‘Basic elements for what?’ I asked.
‘A life,’ Charlie replied. ‘You’re amazing, you know?’ He knew me well enough to recognize my near-tears whimper and started talking fast. ‘You have so much drive and ambition; you’re so dedicated to achieving your goals. All you need to do is redirect that energy to a new goal. I’m not saying you shouldn’t care about your job – you should. It’s just that it can’t be the only thing you care about. There can’t only be one thing that makes you happy.’
‘Are you happy?’ I asked him, not letting go of his hand. I was a bit worried I might never let go. ‘In general, I mean, are you happy?’
‘Yeah,’ he nodded slowly. ‘I’m happy. I like my job, I’ve got good mates, I like my flat. There are things I’d change, but overall I’m not complaining. Are you happy?’
‘Am I happy?’ I repeated. ‘I don’t think I’m really anything.’
It was hard to say out loud, but as soon as I did, I knew it was true.
‘What would you change?’ I asked him, waiting to start feeling drunk. I really wanted to be drunk. ‘You said there are things you’d change.’
‘Oh, obvious stuff.’ He squeezed my hand and scuffed the toe of his shoe in the dirt under the bench. ‘I’d like my own place. I’d like Arsenal to be doing better in the league. A smoking-hot girlfriend who would do my washing so I didn’t keep running out of socks would be nice.’
‘I am so sick of buying you more socks. What do you do, eat them?’ I asked with the closest thing to a laugh I could muster. Bravely, I rested my head on his shoulder and breathed in. He was wearing the aftershave I’d bought him for Christmas. He smelled cool, spicy and familiar. It made my stomach melt, my fingertips tingle. ‘You’ve got loads going for you. You could get a hot girlfriend if you really wanted one. You’ve got everything.’
‘And so have you.’ He dropped his head on top of mine, our coppery curls meshing together, and put his arm around my shoulders. ‘You just haven’t realized yet.’
‘I’ve got sod all,’ I said, trying to pretend that the teenagers weren’t totally eyeing up the bottle in my hand. ‘As you have quite rightly pointed out.’
‘You’ve got me.’ Charlie said. ‘And I’m all right.’
‘Oh, don’t.’ I laughed out loud. ‘Don’t even.’
This wasn’t the first time Charlie and I had got drunk on a bench. This was not the first time one of us had talked the other through a crisis. But it was the first time he’d looked at me with such dark eyes. The first time I’d felt his thumb gently running back and forth over the back of the hand he was holding. And the first time that I had ever felt his heart beating as fast as mine.
‘I’m all right, aren’t I?’ he asked. ‘Tess?’
I felt goosebumps on my bare legs and twisted round to get a better look at him. His dark, gingerish five o’clock shadow was starting to come through and his dark, dilated eyes were ever so slightly bloodshot from getting up so early, driving so far and drinking so much. He leaned his forehead against mine and repeated himself in a whisper.
‘Tess?’
Words were my thing. Words were my actual job. I used them every day, manipulated them, moulded them, made them dance around in circles, but at that moment there wasn’t a word in the world that would help me. And so instead of trying to say something funny or clever, I took a deep breath and kissed him. For a moment, I couldn’t tell who was more shocked. Neither of us moved – we just sat there, frozen, Tess pressed against Charlie. My cold, vodka-burned lips against his cold, vodka-burned lips.
And then he kissed me back.
It was slow at first and I wasn’t quite sure it was happening but I was too scared to pull away. And then I felt the slightest movement against my face, the tickle of warm breath on my wet lips. For ten years I had wondered what it would feel like to kiss Charlie Wilder on the mouth, and now I knew. It felt spectacular. The arm around my shoulders tightened and his other hand crept up to my face, cradling my cheek in his palm while our lips became better acquainted. I wrapped my arms around his back and ignored the little voice in my head that was shouting, ‘And now we’ll never, ever let go!’ As well as the vodka, I could taste the beer on his breath. I hated beer but I didn’t care. I was kissing Charlie Wilder and Charlie Wilder was kissing me.
‘Wait.’ Unable to stop myself, I pulled away with a pained expression. ‘You’re not kissing me because I’m sad, are you?’
‘I don’t think so,’ he replied, his voice broken and just short of breath enough to make my heart pound.
‘And you’re not kissing me because you’ve been drinking?’ I just could not stop myself from asking these ridiculous questions. Who gave a shit if he was kissing me because he’d been drinking? I hated myself so much sometimes.
‘Maybe? A little bit,’ he admitted, leaning back in for another kiss. ‘Can you stop overthinking this now, please?’
‘No,’ I replied, pressing a smile against his lips. ‘Have you met me?’
The teenagers across the way started whooping at us approximately four seconds into the second kiss, and although the sun setting across the mill pond was as close as my village ever came to beautiful and romantic, they were very, very off-putting.
‘Back to yours?’ Charlie asked. I took a deep breath and held it in for a moment. He wasn’t just suggesting we go home, he was suggesting we Go Home Together. ‘Tess?’
‘Where else are we going to go?’ I asked lightly, pretending I wasn’t absolutely bricking myself. I hadn’t had sex in almost two years, and while we were being entirely honest, it had not been a good experience. This wasn’t just a casual shag after a rubbish party to check I still knew how to do it. This was Charlie. I was going to have sex with Charlie.
‘There’s always the back seat of my car.’
I pulled away to look at him, not sure whether he was joking or not. Nor sure whether I wanted him to be joking or not.
‘But while I know that would continue the dodgy teenage theme of the evening, I think I’d rather take you to bed,’ he said, his voice was all low and rough. I’d never heard it like that before. ‘If it’s not too weird?’
It was weird. This whole thing was weird. I was sitting on a bench wearing a gold sequinned miniskirt, kissing a boy I’d been dreaming about kissing ever since the first night I’d lain on my plastic-covered mattress in my hall of residence. I should have said it could wait. I should have said no, we couldn’t sneak into my parents’ house and have sex on my bottom bunk. But where was the fun in that? Besides, I’d had a third of a half-bottle of own-brand vodka and Charlie Wilder wanted to have sex with me. I was eighteen again. Whatever happened next, I blamed the sequins.
‘It’s not weird at all,’ I said, practically jumping off the bench and dragging him down the street. ‘Let’s go.’
And just like that, we were together.
CHAPTER FIVE (#ulink_bd6d7476-9721-5561-9511-26318977f33f)
The next morning, I woke up wrapped in the same pale blue duvet cover I’d left behind when I’d moved to uni and a pair of arms that were brand new. Too scared to move, I tried to keep my breathing slow and even. I was in bed with Charlie. I was in bed with Charlie and neither of us was wearing any clothes. And the reason we weren’t wearing any clothes was because for the last twelve hours we had been at it.
I closed my eyes on my childhood room, my exam certificates hanging on the walls, my favourite photos lining the shelves, and tried to commit as much of the night to memory as possible. It was hard to keep the events straight, not because I’d been drunk but because I was suffering from a distinct case of what Amy always referred to as Boink Brain. Nothing fogged up your memory like a good shag. I was completely overloaded with happiness, and, given how long it was since I’d last had sex, every part of me was aching. Happily, like everyone said, it was just like riding a bike. A really, really fun bike. I remembered sneaking into the dark, empty house, checking for my parents and then kissing in the kitchen, fumbling with buttons and zips, taking far too long to get up the stairs, eventually finding my room. It was strange to know someone so well, to know everything about them, and then find yourself in a situation where you knew nothing. I had never seen Charlie naked. I had no idea what to expect in the trouser department. I had no idea how it would be.
More than once, Amy had tried to counsel me out of my Charlie crush by telling me that he was too nice to be any good in bed, that it would be like shagging my brother. As it was, I didn’t have a brother, but if that was how incest went down, I could see why it was so popular in the Deep South. Amy had been wrong. The sex was wonderful. Beautiful. It was like film sex, all deep and meaningful and very, very nice. I pressed my hand into Charlie’s, smiling lazily as his fingers instinctively curled around mine. Mine. He was mine.
‘Hey.’
I felt him rather than heard him, his words tickling my ear.
‘So.’ He snuggled up closer to me and I silently congratulated myself on having bothered to shave my legs the day before. ‘That happened.’
‘That did happen,’ I replied, too nervous to turn round and face him. Naked in the dark was one thing. Naked the next day with slept-in make-up and morning breath? Quite another. ‘Couple of times, actually.’
We lay quietly and I was glad he couldn’t see my smile. I looked like the cat that had got all of the canaries and quite possibly a parrot. I’d only been awake for a couple of minutes, but already it was like I’d woken in a whole new world. A new fantastic point of view. Aladdin and his magic carpet could piss off. I didn’t have a job and I lived with a psycho, but it didn’t matter. I had Charlie. My best friend, and now my – well, whatever he was, he was the best at something else too.
With a quick kiss to my shoulder, he rolled away, leaving my back cold and bereft. Since he was stuck on the wall side of a single lower bunk bed, there wasn’t really anywhere for him to go. Awkward.
‘Amy is going to laugh and laugh,’ he said after a moment. ‘And then laugh.’
I pulled the covers up over my boobs, ran a finger under each eye to minimize any mascara fall-out and rolled over to look at my conquest.
‘She is?’ I tried to sound as innocent as possible. ‘You think?’
‘Oh God, yeah.’ Charlie did not look changed. There was no beatific glow about his face. He was not gazing at me with a love so powerful it dared not speak its name. He was pretty much just laughing. Ha ha ha. ‘We will never hear the end of it. I feel like she’s been expecting this for ever.’
‘You do? She has?’
In his defence, I had a lot more evidence to draw on than Charlie did. For the past ten years, Amy had watched me pine and swoon and sulk and had routinely slapped me around the back of the head whenever I’d so much as mentioned the elephant in the room that was Me and Charlie. Or ‘Chess’ as I may or may not have named us. In public, when it was the three of us, it was different. She did make fun of us. She mocked our in-jokes and routinely told us to get a room whenever we indulged in some platonic snuggling. From Charlie’s perspective, Amy had been scoffing at this non-relationship for ever. He had no idea that she was counselling me behind closed doors. He had no idea how I was feeling. Which meant there was a chance he didn’t feel the same. Gulp. Puke. Gulp.
Raking a hand through his beautifully fucked-up hair, Charlie shrugged and yawned.
‘Maybe we just, you know, don’t tell her,’ he said, looking so terribly casual as he went about breaking my heart. ‘Just until we’ve worked this all out.’
‘Hmm, that’s one idea.’ I edged ever so slightly away. ‘But actually, it would really help if you could clear something up for me. What is “this”?’
There. My life was complete. I had made air quotes in bed with Charlie Wilder. Amy would actually have had a stroke if she could have seen what had just happened.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, easy as anything.
A very big part of me just wanted to nod, smile and shut up. I had Charlie in my bed. We had spent a good part of the night making love – not shagging but definitely, one hundred percent gazing into each other’s eyes, holding hands, Barry White in the background making love, with an emphasis on the ‘lurve’. That part of me did not like to make waves and was fairly certain that if I just lay there quietly, he would remember he had a penis, that he had put it in me fairly recently and would possibly put it in me again. Everyone knew that was the path to true love. But there was another very tiny part of me that really didn’t like the sound of this ‘I don’t know’ and ‘Maybe we shouldn’t tell your best friend in the entire world that we boned.’
‘You don’t know?’
It just came out. Honestly, I had no control over it.
‘I’m not trying to be a dickhead, Tess.’ Charlie sat up, hit his head on the top bunk and promptly lay back down. ‘I’m not pretending it didn’t happen, but we need to be realistic about this. We’ve been mates for years. We can’t just shag once and go back to being friends like nothing happened. That’ll just get weird.’
‘I didn’t say I wanted to,’ I said, trying to keep my voice down, but since I was me, it was hard. ‘I don’t want to pretend it never happened.’
‘Good. Because it was amazing.’ He reached over to stroke my arm and gave me a silly half-smile that I half recognized. ‘We just need to work it all out and I’d rather do that without Amy getting involved. She’ll be marching us down the aisle and getting ordained online or something.’
Wedding jokes. He was making wedding jokes. How to send a girl from bad pukey sick feeling in her stomach to good pukey sick feeling in her stomach in one easy step. And, little did he know, Amy was already ordained online. Handy.
‘Yeah, you’re right.’ I threw in a light laugh and a toss of the head for good measure, sort of a cross between a total sex goddess and a smallish pony. ‘I get it.’
‘It’s just tricky, the whole friends with benefits thing,’ he said with a smile, combing his fingers through my hair. Or at least he tried to comb his fingers through my hair. Long curly hair plus an all-night sex session equals many, many tangles. ‘It never seems to work, and you’re my best mate. I don’t want you to get hurt in this.’
Ohhh.
It was amazing how much damage you could do with so few words. Friends with benefits. Best mate. And thank goodness he didn’t want me to get hurt. THANK GOODNESS.
‘I think I need a shower,’ I said, grabbing a towel off the radiator and holding it against myself as I clambered out of bed. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Wait, you’re not pissed off, are you?’
I span on my heel and stared down at the man in my bed. Tall, cute and, as it turned out, a bloody good shag. And weirdly, it felt like that was all I knew about him.
‘Why did we, you know …’ I started, not sure where I was going. ‘Last night. Why did you have sex with me?’
‘Because you kissed me.’ Charlie was doing a much better job of keeping his voice down than I was and looked as though he would really like me to try harder.
‘And if I hadn’t kissed you, we would never have …’ I just couldn’t bring myself to say it again.
‘I don’t know, because you did.’ He was talking to me, but his eyes were definitely scanning the room for his boxers. ‘Is this just regular post-sex crazy girl behaviour or what?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ I snatched up his pants and threw them in his face. M&S cotton boxers, definitely bought by his mother. ‘Because I don’t have enough casual sex to know whether or not it turns me into a crazy girl.’
‘Can you not shout?’ he mumbled, pulling the boxers off his face. ‘Your mum is going to hear.’
‘And we wouldn’t want that, would we?’ I bellowed. Not shouting, bellowing. ‘We wouldn’t want anyone to know that I forced myself on you.’
‘Bloody hell, can you calm down?’ Charlie hissed, shuffling out of the bed and trying to put his giant hands on my shoulders. ‘What is wrong with you? All I said was I didn’t want to tell Amy that we slept together until we’d had time to work out what was going on. What’s not OK about that?’
‘Everything,’ I replied. I would not cry. I would not cry. I would not cry.
I didn’t want a shower any more. I just wanted to leave. Shaking his hands off my shoulders, I pulled on my knickers, my skinny jeans and a baggy black jumper Amy had the foresight to include in my packing. While crying.
‘Don’t, please.’ His voice had changed from confused and angry to confused, angry and a little bit scared. ‘Just sit down and talk to me.’
‘I don’t want to sit down,’ I said, my eyes burning bright red. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to work out what’s going on. I already know what’s going on. You’re a wanker.’
‘Why am I a wanker?’ Charlie asked, incredulous, as I grabbed my handbag and checked for all the essentials. It felt like it would really ruin the moment if I had to manhandle myself into my massive bra, so I picked it up and threw it in my handbag instead. ‘What have I done that you didn’t want me to do?’
‘Nothing,’ I said as I curled my hair around itself and fastened it in a topknot. ‘I did want to kiss you and I did want to sleep with you but I do not want to be your fuck-buddy, Charlie.’
There wasn’t a lot of point pretending I wasn’t crying now, and so I turned to face him, tears streaming, nose running, the whole ugly crying extravaganza.
‘I have been in love with you for so long, and I had no idea how not to be. I didn’t think actually sleeping with you would be the way to sort it out, but apparently it was. So thanks.’
Before I could launch into legitimate sobs, I opened the bedroom door, slammed it shut behind me and ran downstairs. Mum and Brian were drinking Sunday morning coffee in the kitchen in complete silence.
‘I think me and you need to have a talk, young lady,’ Mum said, cool as a cucumber.
‘I do not agree,’ I replied, slipping my feet into my Primark ballet pumps. ‘Brian, can you please run me to the station?’
‘Course I can, love,’ he said, coffee on the table, car keys appearing from his jeans pocket. ‘Come on.’
‘Don’t you dare walk out of this house, madam.’ Mum sounded shocked. It was fair. It was, after all, the first time in my entire life that I’d answered her back or not done as I was told. Fairly impressive at twenty-eight. ‘You sit down at this table and tell me what exactly is going on with you or you don’t come back to this house ever again.’
‘I’ll leave my keys with Brian then,’ I shouted as I passed through the front door. Probably a bit rash. I probably wasn’t thinking entirely straight. Or walking straight just yet.
‘Oh dear God, it’s drugs, isn’t it? I knew it. All those late nights in the office, never having any money, fired for “no reason”. What is it? Heroin? Are you doing the heroin?’ She was shouting just loud enough for the neighbours to have that on Facebook in the next ten minutes.
‘Yes, Mum,’ I replied as calm as you like. ‘I’m doing all of the heroin. Track marks up and down my arms, can’t get enough of the stuff. It’s aces.’
Marching towards the door, all I wanted was to be out of that house.
‘Tess Sigourney Brookes, you come back here this instant.’ My mum did not sound amused.
I didn’t turn round. I didn’t reply. I just got in the car.
‘Sorry to be a pain in the arse, Brian.’ I gave my lovely stepdad an apologetic smile as I buckled my seatbelt. ‘Just not having a very good week.’
‘Happens to the best of us, love,’ he said as he started the engine and backed out of the driveway. ‘Happens to the best of us.’
When I finally arrived back home, the flat was gloriously empty. The battery was flat on my phone and I’d left the charger at my mum’s, so there was very little to do but have a bath, wash away every trace of Charlie Wilder and collapse on the settee with a big bag of Wotsits. Or four big bags of Wotsits.
A week ago, I’d been prepping for my first day in my big new job. Seven days on, I had no job, I had no prospects, I’d shagged Charlie, I’d fallen out with Charlie, and I was relatively certain my mum had a bit of a bag on with me. I had excelled myself. An entire decade’s worth of drama in one week.
‘Sometimes things need shaking up,’ I’d told the rubber duck in the bath. ‘You’ve got to test the limits sometimes.’
He didn’t reply. He was getting a real attitude.
I was deep into my third episode of Come Dine With Me when I heard someone hammering on the front door.
‘Yay, Vanessa,’ I whispered, pulling my stripy blanket up under my chin.
‘Tess, are you in there?’
Not Vanessa. Charlie.
It was too late to run into my room and hide under the bed, so I did the next best thing I could think of. Pull the blanket over my head and shout, ‘No.’
But when I pulled the blanket down over my eyes, I saw a tall, creased-looking boy in the corner of my living room. All six feet three inches looking sad and stooped. My ovaries wanted to leap out of my body and never let him go.
‘Your mum gave me your spare key.’ He held it up before tossing it to me. ‘I didn’t think you’d let me in.’
‘I wouldn’t have,’ I replied, wishing I was wearing anything other than a giant Eeyore sleep shirt and a scrunchie. ‘So you can go now.’
‘I need to talk to you.’ He stepped towards the sofa with caution, staying as far away from me as it was possible to be, and rubbed at his eyebrow as he sat down. I curled up into a not-so-tiny ball and pouted. ‘I need to say I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, you do,’ I acknowledged. ‘So say it and then piss off.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘And you’re still here.’
Charlie took a deep breath in and stared at his feet. I pulled my knees up over my nose and peered at him over my blanket. This was horrible.
‘Do you remember the first time you talked to me?’ he asked. ‘Not in a seminar or anything, but the first time we properly had a conversation?’
‘Yes.’ Of course I bloody remembered, arsehole.
‘It was the Christmas party in the union, and you and Amy were wearing those stupid matching fairy outfits and all of the lads from my floor had a bet on which of them could get off with the two of you first.’
Oh, university. Hallowed halls of learning.
‘And then we were at the bar at the same time and you were not sober,’ he said with a smile. ‘And you asked if I’d done the reading for our media studies class, and I said I never did the reading for the media studies class, and you looked horrified.’
‘I was a very straight student,’ I muttered.
‘And then we were just chatting, and that girl I was seeing came up and kissed me.’
‘Sarah Luffman.’ Sarah bloody Luffman. I still wouldn’t accept her Facebook friend request to this day.
‘Sarah, yeah. Of course you remember.’ He rested his hands on his knees as though he was bracing himself. ‘Anyway, she came up and kissed me and I saw your face fall. You looked, like, properly heartbroken. And I didn’t know why, but it made me so sad because all night, all I’d been thinking about was kissing you.’
‘Because of the bet?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘Because I thought you were beautiful.’
Oh.
I wondered if it would be appropriate to ask him to wait while I went and changed. This conversation could not take place while I was wearing something I had bought for a tenner from the Disney store in the January sale.
‘But when I looked again, you were gone. And the next time I saw you, my flatmate told me you were going out with that bloke off the PE course. So I didn’t make a move. But we had so much in common and we were in all the same classes and, you know, that was that.’
‘And you never thought to bother again?’ I said, shuffling my feet a little bit closer to him. ‘In ten years?’
‘I know your mum and dad got divorced, Tess, but if you’d lived through what I’ve lived through, you wouldn’t be so quick to swap a friend for a shag. By the time we were both single, we were such good friends. We had so much in common – the books and the music and everything – and I didn’t want to ruin that. I was twenty. I couldn’t even think about anything long-term. But you were long-term to me.’
‘You do know the only reason I read all those books and listened to all that music was so that I’d have something to talk to you about in the first place, don’t you?’ I asked, looking at a knot in the floorboards. ‘Because I liked you.’
‘Sneaky cow.’ He pulled the sleeves of his jumper over his hands and smiled. ‘Anyway, I just wanted you to know why I might have freaked out a little bit this morning.’
‘I’m not quite sure I do know,’ I said, my heart pounding. I really needed to hear him say it. ‘You might want to clarify.’
That’s when I saw the full trademarked and copyright Charlie Wilder grin break out across his face. ‘I freaked out because I didn’t know what it was. Or what you wanted it to be. I could never just do the friends with benefits thing with you because you’re my Tess. I love you.’
‘You love me?’
They were words I’d heard a thousand times before, they were words I’d said a thousand times before, but they’d never, ever mattered until he said them now. It felt like Cupid, the Andrex puppy and a selection of assorted kittens had taken up residence in my stomach. There was far too much fluffy fluttering going on in there for my organs to work properly.
‘You love me?’ I said it again just to make sure.
‘Of course I love you,’ he repeated, taking hold of my hand. ‘You’re my best friend.’
And with that, Cupid, the anonymous Labrador and assorted kittens froze and turned around to look at me very, very slowly.
‘I’m your best friend?’
My French teacher had always told me the best way to understand something was to repeat it until you’d really drilled everything into your brain, but I was just not getting this.
‘My best, best friend.’ Charlie squeezed my fingers so tightly I thought they might snap, and I inched back ever so slightly on the sofa. ‘And we both know how important that is.’
‘We do?’
‘How many times have you seen me ruin a relationship?’ He let go of my hand and threw his arms up in the air. The arms that had been around me all night long. ‘I’m the worst! I can’t keep it together with a girl, you know that.’
I did know that. Charlie had a different girlfriend approximately once every five months. And once every five months I absolutely did not spend (on average) two hours online stalking the shit out of her and praying to a god I didn’t believe in that she would just go away without me having to resort to violence. So far, those prayers had been answered. I probably owed every major religion at least a fiver: the girlfriends never lasted more than a couple of months. One did almost six, but Charlie was travelling around Australia for three of them and I knew for a fact that he’d cheated. Not that he was a cheater. Most of the time.
‘There’s a reason we’ve never got together.’ Charlie seemed to be choosing his words very carefully. I hoped they were the right ones. ‘What if it doesn’t work out and we end up hating each other? I’ll let you down, Tess, I will. I don’t want you to hate me; I want you to be checking the football scores for me in the old people’s home when I’m too old and blind to read the screen. I want you to be in my life for ever.’
One by one, Cupid, the puppy and the kittens limped away, whispering awkwardly between themselves. I assumed they were uncomfortable with tears because dear God was I about to bring out some pretty impressive crying. The tears I’d busted out that morning were nothing compared with the biblical flood that was about to drown everyone in the room.
‘Ah, fucking hell – this is what I’m talking about. We’re not even going out and I’ve made you cry.’ Charlie dived across the sofa and pulled me into a hug, trying to stem the sobs. ‘See? It would never work.’
‘But … but we did it?’ As the words came out of my mouth, I wondered if I’d actually gone mad and we had, in fact, not ‘done it’ at all.
‘I know.’
‘After ten years? After never doing it at all?’
‘I know.’
To his credit, he looked terribly guilty. Not that it mattered in the slightest. My heart hurt. My everything hurt.
‘Why?’
‘I honestly don’t know,’ he replied.
We sat locked in silence on the sofa, half disengaged from the least sexy embrace in the history of embraces. I was staring at Charlie’s messy hair, his pale face, his sad eyes. He was staring at my Eeyore nightie. All I wanted to do was hug him again and tell him it was all going to be all right, that it didn’t matter and that we could just pretend it had never happened. We would just go back to being best friends and I’d go back to waiting for him to work out that I was the one. Even though I could still feel the red-hot tears spilling over my cheeks, every single part of me just wanted to make him feel better. Somewhere in the corner of the room, my self-respect shook her head in disgust. He didn’t say anything else. I couldn’t say anything else. Luckily, someone else didn’t have quite the same struggle.
‘Oh Jesus Christ, what’s going on now?’
In the midst of all our emodrama, I hadn’t heard the front door open. And I hadn’t seen Vanessa loitering in the hallway. But I heard her.
‘Don’t tell me you two are shagging?’ She hung her keys on my hook next to the door and inspected her nails. ‘Don’t bother, Tess, he’s shit in bed.’
‘What did you just say?’ I couldn’t possibly have heard her right.
‘I said don’t bother, he’s shit in bed,’ Vanessa repeated slowly, disappearing into her bedroom. ‘And between me, you and Mr Wilder, he’s not exactly packing down their either. Not. Worth. The effort.’
I let go of Charlie at exactly the same time he let go of me, and slid off the sofa into a graceless pile of too long limbs and donkey T-shirt at his feet.
‘You?’ I pointed at him. ‘And her?’ I pointed to Vanessa.
‘OK, don’t go mental, but—’
‘Oh my God, you and her.’
It was too late; I was freaking out. The Andrex puppy had morphed into a Rottweiler and Cupid had traded his bow and arrow for an AK-47.
‘It was nothing,’ he said insistently, grabbing hold of my wrists a fraction too tightly. ‘It was just one of those things. I don’t even know. It was nothing.’
‘It was several times,’ Vanessa called from behind her closed bedroom door. ‘Your place, this place, that hotel for the weekend in Wales.’
‘You went to Wales?’ I breathed. ‘You went on a mini-break?’
Truly this was the last straw. Everyone knew that a mini-break was the universally accepted sign of true love. Bridget Jones said so.
‘Remember you asked me not to tell Tess until you “knew what we were”?’ she called. Exactly what he had said to me that morning. ‘And because she’d probably have a nervous breakdown.’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Charlie squeezed my wrists until they hurt. ‘I didn’t. Tess, it wasn’t anything. It wasn’t worth upsetting you.’
‘I didn’t say anything because, really, it wasn’t worth upsetting you,’ she agreed from her bedroom. ‘It wasn’t worth upsetting my yeast infection either.’
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ I whispered to Eeyore. From the look on his face, he really got it.
‘And after all the effort he put into getting into my knickers, I never even came. I’ve had more fun with an electric toothbrush,’ Vanessa said as she reemerged, holding her passport aloft. ‘And he was such a whiner afterwards. I’d let you listen to the messages, but I deleted them after that time I played them at the comedy phone messages open mike night. Anyway, Tess, are you even listening? I’m going to be away for at least a week, longer if I can help it. Honestly, I know you don’t care, but I have had such a stressful few days. Council tax is due next week – pay it, yeah?’
Of course she didn’t bother to lock the door behind her, which made it all the easier to grab hold of Charlie and bundle him out of it. By his face.
‘Get out,’ I shouted, grabbing hold of a handful of hair and physically pushing him away from me. I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. My skin was crawling at the thought of Charlie and Vanessa. Him kissing her. Her touching him. ‘Get out of my flat.’
‘Tess, I love you,’ he said, desperately clinging to the door frame.
‘Please fuck off!’ I slammed the door, really not giving two shits whether his fingers were still inside or not. I sort of hoped that they were. Eeyore approved. ‘Go away, Charlie. Don’t come back.’
I counted to ten, panting hard and waiting for the pleading to stop and the crying to start. Eventually, all that was left was silence. He was gone. Charlie had said he loved me. Charlie had had an affair with Vanessa. The council tax was due. So this was what heartbreak felt like? Bollocks to that. Having never actually been in love with any of my boyfriends before, I’d never actually had my heart broken before. I waited to feel the urge to consume large quantities of ice cream and cry. But I didn’t want to cry, and I certainly didn’t want dairy products. I felt sick. I felt angry. I wanted to break something. I couldn’t break Vanessa, but I could break some of her things.
With my hands curled into tight little fists, I kicked Vanessa’s door open (entirely unnecessary but it felt right) and looked for something to destroy. Her room was, as usual, a complete shithole. My room was generally a bit of a mess, but it was a clean, white-walled, cream-carpeted, orderly mess. A teetering stack of unread magazines here, a collection of credit card statements there. Vanessa’s room was disgusting. My room was more of a disappointment. In all the years I’d been here, I hadn’t got as far as putting up a single picture or photo on the wall – they all lived on my desk at work, my first home. There was a framed print of a Warhol I’d seen at the Tate Modern with Charlie sitting on the floor by my chest of drawers. He’d been coming over to hang it every Sunday for the last six months, but he’d never quite made it. And so on the floor it had stayed. My room looked like a corporate crash pad rather than somewhere a real person lived. It was where I crawled under the covers at midnight on a Wednesday after a client dinner and where I hung all of my smart separates, still in their bags from the dry-cleaner’s.
Staring at Vanessa’s overflowing wardrobe, I suddenly hated all of my clothes. It felt like everything I owned was black, blue or white, unless Amy had picked it, and then it was sequinned, short and generally unwearable. Even my jeans were ‘casual Friday’ appropriate. The toes on my Converse were bright white. My heels, aside from my Promotion Shoes, were all sensible. I hated everything. I hated myself.
Vanessa’s wardrobe was a tumble of colour and texture. I barely touched the door and the entire contents burst on to the floor, making a desperate bid for freedom. Red strapless dresses, printed palazzo pants, skintight liquid leggings, silk and satin and velvet and leather, all pooling around my feet and begging to be rescued. I stomped on a particularly ridiculous pair of leather hot pants I remembered seeing her swan around in and sulked. Her room was just so her. Two of her walls were painted deep red and the other two hot pink. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. It clashed, it was too bright, too bold and a little bit gross, but it looked amazing. Just like Vanessa. If Vanessa’s room was her, was my room me? Was my sad little white-walled, devoid-of-personality shell of a bedroom really me?
There was no discernible carpet under my feet, just a collage of dirty clothes, open mail and magazines. Dirty mug upon dirty mug upon dirty mug sat everywhere you looked, and half-empty takeaway boxes, plates and forks were balanced precariously on every available surface. No knives, though. Vanessa never used a knife and I found it infuriating. Even more infuriating was the lack of things available to break. The dirty pots looked like they were about to get up and crawl to the kitchen themselves so I wasn’t touching them, and I wasn’t rock and roll enough to put the telly through the window. The only other things I could see that were legitimately worth money and fuck-up-able were her dead ‘work’ BlackBerry and my old camera. I couldn’t bear to do it. I let out a little frustrated scream through my gritted teeth and punched a pillow, shaking from head to toe.
I was a rubbish woman scorned. Hell totally hath seen fury like me. I’d seen waitresses in Pizza Hut with more fury. I was a complete failure. Back in the living room, I heard the landline ring. There wasn’t a single person on earth I wanted to talk to. But of course I answered it anyway.
‘Hello?’ I steeled myself for the worst. Charlie. Vanessa. My mother.
‘Ohmygodareyouokay?’ garbled Amy.
‘What?’
‘Are. You. OK?’ she repeated. ‘I’ve been going mental up here. Why isn’t your phone on?’
‘I left my charger at my mum’s,’ I answered. ‘Amy, did you know that Charlie has been sleeping with Vanessa?’
‘Um, no?’
‘AMY.’
‘He’s such a cockwomble!’ she shouted down the line. ‘Don’t be angry. I only know because he said something about being in Wales and she said something about being in Wales and I asked him about being in Wales and he admitted it, but I didn’t tell you because he said it wasn’t really a thing and I didn’t want to upset you and—’
‘No, no, no!’ I banged the receiver against my forehead, trying to bash the reality of this into my brain. ‘You knew? And you didn’t say anything?’
‘Look at it from my point of view,’ Amy replied with a whine. ‘You were working, like, a billion hours a day on that pitch for those rank organic lollipops you made me eat loads of.’
I mentally pegged this as six months ago. Those lollipops were rank.
‘Plus you were sort of showing an interest in that bloke you met at Floridita and I didn’t want to distract you, and then by the time I’d got Charlie’s balls in a Vulcan death grip, he swore it was over, that it was only one time and that it was done but he didn’t want to upset you, and—’
‘Only one time?’ I interrupted.
‘Yes.’
‘Even though you knew they’d both been in Wales together. Having sex.’
What was that taste in my mouth? Oh yes, bile. That was bile.
‘Oh. Yeah. Well, I didn’t find out about that until ages after.’
‘Amy. I can’t believe it.’
‘I just couldn’t bear to tell you,’ she said softly. ‘He said it wasn’t anything. I knew it would break your heart, and I thought you were going to move out soon, and … Oh fuck. I fucked up. Fuck fuck fuck.’
It was confusing. I was mad at Amy. She knew about this and she hadn’t told me, but I was so mad at Vanessa and even more so at Charlie that all my reserves of rage were accounted for. After a few beats of silence I found my voice.
‘I slept with him.’
‘You did?’
I had no idea precisely where in the country Amy was, but I was fairly certain there were now some deaf Highland cattle up in Scotland. She could be awfully loud when she wanted to be.
‘Is that why you left? Are you in Gretna Green? Are you married already? Was it amazing? Tell me everything. I always knew this would happen if the two of you got together …’ She was on a roll – there was no way I’d be able to interrupt her successfully a third time. ‘I’ll just cease to exist. It’ll just be like, oh, ha ha ha, let’s have some wine and a dinner party, and, ooh, do you remember that funny little dark-haired girl who used to hang around? I wonder where she is now? Except you won’t even wonder because I’ll be dead and you won’t care.’
‘Are you done?’ I asked.
‘Are you married?’ She countered.
‘No.’ I replied.
‘Then, yes. Hang on, did you sleep with him before or after you found out about Vanessa?’
‘Before.’
‘Ohhh. Shit.’
‘Yeah.’
I held the phone to my ear and we shared a comfortable silence. There really wasn’t anything else to say.
‘Are you OK?’ Amy broke first. As always.
‘Not really.’ I wasn’t any more. I was too tired.
‘Are you mad?’ she asked.
‘I am mad,’ I confirmed.
‘With me?’
‘With everyone alive,’ I said. ‘Except maybe Ryan Gosling.’ Who could be mad at Ryan Gosling?
‘Shall I come over when my train gets in?’ she asked. ‘We can burn pictures of the two of them? Or we could just break loads of her stuff?’
That best friend of mine, what a mind reader. We’d done a lot of picture burning when Amy had ended her engagement. Even though she had been the one to break it off, she was not one to leave that relationship without some righteous anger. It had been a fun time for everyone who wasn’t her ex-fiancé. I imagined he missed his twenty-year-old comic collection almost as much as he missed Amy. Possibly more so.
‘Yeah, I might be asleep, so let yourself in,’ I said. The exhaustion was overwhelming. My limbs felt so heavy I didn’t even know how I was holding up the phone. ‘See you in a bit.’
‘OK. I love you,’ she said, making kissing noises down the phone. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’
‘I’ve never done anything stupid in my life,’ I replied. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
Collapsing on the closest soft surface, Vanessa’s bed, I exhaled loudly and tried to have a Feeling, the phone still in my hand. But there was nothing there. My brain felt like a clown car, crammed full to overflowing with rainbow wigs, red noses and tutu-wearing bears. I should get out of Vanessa’s room. I should get dressed. I should call my mum and apologize for my behaviour. But I didn’t actually want to. At some point, I was going to have to speak to Charlie. And, must not forget, the council tax needed playing. Priorities, Tess.
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Lindsey Kelk
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Эротические романы
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 17.04.2024
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О книге: The summer bestseller from the immensely popular Lindsey KelkTess Brookes has always been a Girl with a Plan. But when the Plan goes belly up, she’s forced to reconsider.After accidently answering her flatmate Vanessa’s phone, she decides that since being Tess isn’t going so well, she might try being Vanessa. With nothing left to lose, she accepts Vanessa’s photography assignment to Hawaii – she used to be an amateur snapper, how hard can it be? Right?But Tess is soon in big trouble. And the gorgeous journalist on the shoot with her, who is making it very clear he’d like to get into her pants, is an egotistical monster. Far from home and in someone else’s shoes, Tess must decide whether to fight on through, or ‘fess up and run…