About a Girl (5 page)

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

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.