Brand New Friend (11 page)

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ barked the man, standing up. ‘I’m sick of this and I’m sick of you. It’s over between us and there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘Just go,’ shrieked the woman, her face still obscured, ‘like you did before. I’m getting used to you walking away from me now – and while you’re at it take this with you!’ She picked up her now ex-boyfriend’s pint glass and threw the contents into his face.

Without saying a word, or for that matter wiping the beer off his face, the man stormed out of the room, staring at Rob with a mixture of anger and acute embarrassment. Rob shrugged:
Well, where was I supposed to look
? The woman slumped on to the padded seat that he had just vacated and said to herself, ‘I feel so stupid.’ It was at this point that Rob realised he had encountered her before. It was Jo, the girl he had met at the party and, once again, she was in tears.

‘If you’re going to be like this,’ said Sean, ‘I’m going upstairs.’

‘Go!’ yelled Jo. ‘Just don’t slam the door.’

It was one o’clock in the morning and thirty-two-year-old Jo Richards fumed silently as her boyfriend stormed into the hallway, pausing only to slam the door behind him. Jo sank into the sofa and wanted to cry so much that the effort involved in holding back the tears was almost a good enough excuse to give in to them. As far as she was concerned, she wasn’t being ‘like’ anything. What did it mean anyway? What was she being ‘like’? The only thing she was being was a nice, proper girlfriend. She wasn’t – and never had been while they had been together – the type of girlfriend to nag (more than moderately), whine (more than the basic amount needed when she was talking about her problems) or be clingy (she’d not once moaned about him spending more time with his friends than with her).

All she’d asked Sean was whether he would be around the following weekend because she was thinking of booking somewhere for them to go. They were both quite broke and although she would have preferred to stay in a hotel or a bed-and-breakfast in the countryside, she had been considering Wales under canvas. That was how much she wanted to spend quality time with Sean: she was prepared to go camping. Jo hated camping. She’d never seen the point of exchanging a perfectly good bed for a tent, some plastic sheeting and the hard, damp ground.

When Sean had replied that he didn’t know what he was up to that weekend, Jo had pointed out that therefore he lacked an excuse not to spend it with her. He had lost his temper and told her that this was ‘typical’ of the way things had been between them recently. Then Jo had said, as forcefully as she could, that spending the weekend away with your partner was not meant to be a form of punishment.

Under normal circumstances she would have gone after him and made him talk to her. She’d never understood the male propensity to yell when they were winning an argument, then shut down when they were losing (or, in this case, remove themselves from the scene). Left to his own devices, she was sure, he would stay upstairs sulking under the guise of listening to music or playing on the computer without wondering how she was feeling. How could he just leave the room in the middle of an argument? If it had been Jo who had stormed out she wouldn’t have been able to settle in a million years. She couldn’t sulk to save her life. She could brood, but that was different. She could sit and dissect the argument until she arrived at the usual conclusion that everything was her fault. This time, however, she didn’t. Who was at fault wasn’t the point any more. The point was this: was Sean being deliberately vile to her in the hope that she would get sick of him and kick him out? No one could get as irate about nothing as Sean had without having an ulterior motive. Things hadn’t been right between them since they had had that argument at the party and she’d locked herself into the bathroom for more than half an hour. It was obvious he had a plan: he’d been staying out late with his friends, drinking too much, smoking too much and generally being a slob for weeks. Suddenly it all fell into place: he was trying to goad her into ending their relationship because he was too much of a coward to do it himself. What he’d failed to factor into his plan was that when Jo had agreed to let him move in with her, it had not been a casual arrangement. It was Commitment. She had not spent the last five years investing in their relationship to give up on it just like that. She was determined to make him stay. So, no matter what he did in his continuing strategy to make her stop loving him, he would lose. She wasn’t going to abandon herself to a life of loneliness without a fight.

With a heavy heart, Jo headed upstairs. She could hear music coming from behind the door to the spare room so she rapped on it twice – even though this was her house and Sean had contributed nothing to the mortgage payments: it was her way of signalling that she was sorry. She opened the door and peered in. Sean was lying on the bed with his hands folded behind his head. He didn’t look at her when she entered the room.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Jo. ‘You’re right. I should stop hassling you.’

She waited eagerly, but Sean said nothing, just lay there, lips pursed, and stared at the ceiling.

‘Look,’ spat Mr Clarkson, menacingly, ‘I’m only going to say this one more time. Are you going to replace the broken toilet in my bathroom or am I going to have to take matters into my own hands?’

It was Monday afternoon, a month after Jo’s argument with Sean. She was at her place of work, the Cresta Community Housing Association (South Manchester), being shouted at by one of her tenants.

It was without doubt her greatest regret that she had ever accepted the temporary post as housing officer ten years ago when she had been a new graduate – greater than having allowed her brother to ‘shoot’ an apple off her head with a dart when she was twelve, greater than walking out of the exam room ten minutes into her second A-level history paper because it was too hard, thereby ensuring that she got a U, greater than selling half of her record collection for a hundred pounds to raise funds when she was a student for a week in Turkey with her mates.

As she gazed at Mr Clarkson it dawned on her how much she hated this job. She hated it with a passion – with everything she had to give and a little more. The only thing that stopped her getting up and walking out was that she had nowhere else to go.

‘Mr Clarkson—’ said Jo, patiently.

‘What?’ he snapped.

‘I don’t understand why you’re telling me this again because, as I said to you when you arrived this morning and the last eleven times that you’ve called, I can’t send anyone out to repair your broken toilet until the requisite paperwork has been filled in. Since you refuse to tell me how your toilet was damaged, my hands are tied.’

‘What does it matter how it got broken?’

‘It matters to the paperwork.’

‘It’s your paperwork,’ he said, ‘you fill it out. But let me warn you, if someone from Housing doesn’t get themselves round to my place and fix my toilet soon there’s going to be trouble.’

Jo didn’t doubt this for a second. Nine months ago when the Benefits Agency had threatened to stop Mr Clarkson’s income support, on the grounds that he’d been spotted working on a market stall in the city centre, he had come to the conclusion that someone at the housing-association office had ‘grassed’ him up and come into the office screaming about how he was going to ‘get’ everyone. Three days later a masked man, who was clearly Mr Clarkson in a bright orange balaclava, had thrown a large chunk of masonry through the association’s office window, then hurled a barrage of expletives at the staff before making his escape. The police couldn’t do anything because Mr Clarkson persuaded a few of his friends to give him a watertight alibi. With no forensic evidence to tie him to the scene, and only association staff’s eye-witness reports that the man responsible ‘looked, acted, dressed and sounded like Mr Clarkson in a ski mask’, it was depressingly inevitable that he would get away with it.

‘This is pathetic!’ snarled Mr Clarkson.

Jo stared at him blankly. She knew that Mr Clarkson had smashed his own toilet on purpose because it had happened several times before. No one could break toilets quite like Mr Clarkson, who had had two new ones in the last year alone. She was aware that he knew that she knew he’d smashed up his own toilet. She couldn’t understand why he insisted on continuing this charade. Perhaps it gave him something to do.

‘Is that all, Mr Clarkson?’ she asked.

‘You’ll be hearing from my solicitor,’ he barked, then kicked one of the grey plastic waiting-room chairs against the wall. He picked it up by the back rest as if he was going to throw it at the security screens, but snorted and let it go. It tumbled across the floor and came to rest under Jo’s window. When he left the office Jo, and the queue of people waiting to see her, breathed a sigh of relief.

Today can’t get any worse
, she thought.

Then the phone rang.

‘Cresta Community Housing Association,’ said Jo, robotically.

‘It’s me,’ said a voice she recognised as Sean’s. ‘You ought to know that I’ve sort of moved out.’

Jo couldn’t believe what she was hearing. How could somebody ‘sort of move out? When she’d gone to work that morning she’d been cohabiting with her boyfriend and now he was telling her that some time during the day he had taken it upon himself to de-habit or un-habit, or whatever the word was for a boyfriend moving his stuff out without telling his significant other. What was worse was that he hadn’t even cleared his throat before he made the announcement. He’d just said it.

‘Did you hear me?’ asked Sean, when Jo didn’t reply. ‘I said I’ve moved out.’

‘What do you mean? I don’t understand.’

‘I mean exactly what I’ve said. I’ve moved my things out of the house.’

‘You’re leaving me?’

‘Things aren’t working between us, are they? We need to take time out from the relationship to find out what we really want from life, don’t you think? Surely you must see that.’

Jo knew that Sean was trying to persuade her to agree that their relationship was over. But she didn’t want it to be over.

‘I don’t see it like that,’ she countered. ‘Not at all. I can’t believe that after all the time we’ve been together you’ve got so little respect for me that you’re telling me our relationship is finished over the
phone . . .
when you’ve
already moved your stuff out.
’ Tears welled in her eyes. ‘This is so typical of you.’

‘I didn’t want a scene.’

‘You wouldn’t, would you?’ she snapped. ‘You’d like everything to be clean and clinical. Well, you can’t just slip out of my life like that. You can’t do it to me!’

‘It might not be permanent. I just think we need to get our heads round what’s going on between us. We need to get some perspective because if we don’t we’re dead in the water.’

‘Where will you go?’

‘Davey’s going to put me up.’

‘I hope the two of you will be very happy together.’

‘There’s no need to be like that,’ said Sean. ‘It’s for the best.’

‘If it’s for the best,’ she said, ‘then why am
I
so upset and why are
you
so relieved?’

Sean remained silent.

‘Don’t move out,’ said Jo, desperately, as tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘Please don’t. I know things haven’t been very good for a while and it’s all my fault, but I promise you I’ll change. I really will. But don’t move out! Not even for a night!’ She was clutching at straws now. ‘You’ll hate it at Davey’s. He’s never got any food in and his place is a pig-sty. Stay with me and we’ll work everything out, okay?’

‘No,’ said Sean. ‘It’s not okay. I’ll speak to you in a few weeks.’

And then he put down the phone.

Jo had spent the last two days crying and was now scrolling through the numbers in her mobile phone’s address book, looking for a friend in whom she might confide. Forty-seven numbers were stored on the memory. When she had discounted those relating to parents or relatives (seven), she did the same for those relating to Sean (four), his friends (five) and his friends’ girlfriends, with whom she spent most of her time (three), friends from school she hadn’t seen in years (three), people from work (eight). Domino’s Pizza (one), and Rail Enquiries (one). The remaining fifteen (home, work, and the occasional mobile) belonged to Liza, Vicky, Sonia, Karen, Gina and Kerry – friends from Jo’s days at what had been Manchester Polytechnic. The six had been the centre of her social life for a long time but once she had got together with Sean they had faded away. Jo hadn’t been in touch with five of them for nearly a year, and when she removed them that left her with just one friend in the world: Kerry Morrison. And Jo wasn’t sure that Kerry even liked her any more.

‘Hello?’ said Kerry, croakily. ‘Who is it?’

‘Kerry, it’s me,’ said Jo.

‘Oh, don’t tell me,’ said Kerry, abruptly, ‘let me guess. This is about you and Sean, isn’t it?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘You’ve split up, haven’t you?’

‘You’re right. I’m that predictable, aren’t I? I don’t call you for weeks on end –’

‘More like months.’

‘– and now that Sean’s gone the first person I call is you. I know I’ve been the worst friend in the world over the past few months—’

‘More like years.’

‘Okay, years—’

‘In fact you’ve been the worst friend ever since you started going out with Sean.’

‘I know—’

‘No,’ snapped Kerry, ‘you don’t know at all. And you certainly don’t know anything about me. Were you aware that Sammy had died?’

‘No,’ said Jo, recalling the tortoiseshell cat that Kerry had owned for as long as Jo had known her.

‘I’m really sorry to hear that, but—’