Twenty Something (3 page)

The girl who arrived at work today, however, succeeded. She was a walking vision of everyone's perfect girl. Petite without being fragile, slim but curvy, blonde but natural, and a sweet angelic face which said, ‘I'm the loveliest person in the world but if you were ever lucky enough to get me into bed I would go like
The Flying Scotsman
.' I caught the gaze of at least twenty guilty pairs of eyes belonging to twenty dirty minds who all, like me, had been imagining what it would be like to spend five minutes alone with her in the stationery cupboard. The death of gentlemanly capitalism? Rubbish.

I watch her as she moves about the room being introduced to her new colleagues by her ‘buddy' — ironically, an American called Buddy who looks like the cat who's just frotted itself in the cream. Nervous, geeky analysts, who haven't spoken to anyone outside their team for years, wipe their messy Prêt hands on their polyester suits and shuffle to their feet to greet her. Confident M&A bankers swagger over to introduce
themselves. Managing directors and vice presidents hitch up their red braces as if girding their loins for action and try to hold in their paunches. The secretaries all eye her warily.

But she never makes it as far as my corner of the room, settling instead in the Financial Institutes Group, the Basingstoke of the banking world. I watch as she makes herself comfortable, shuffling and shifting in her chair, her dark trouser suit pressed against the leather folds. Oh to be a
£
500 swivel chair now that January is here.

‘Pssst.' I grab Buddy as he returns from his lap of honour. ‘What's the fittie's name?'

‘Leila — and don't even think about it, Jack. She's fifteen leagues out of your league.'

Leila
.
Lovely little Leila
. There are a number of names which guarantee attractiveness — Lucys, Amys, Sarahs, Nikkys and Amelias are nearly always fine-looking fillies. But ‘Leila' has an ethereal etymological beauty in a league of its own. It soars with the iambic Greek gods, it dances on Mount Olympus, it erupts with Mount Vesuvius. (Jack, you're talking crap.)

Tomorrow I'll find out her surname, look her up on the email database and send her some witty banter. In a month's time I'll give her a Valentine's card, pull her on 20th February, sleep with her on the 24th and go out with her by 3rd March.

In Arabic,
Leila
means ‘night'; in English, it means ‘Jack's'. I am delightedly, desperately, dribblingly in love-lust.

After all, I'm on a trial separation, aren't I? And I've been with Lucy for three years — I must be due a loyalty scheme upgrade by now.

I've just Googled Leila. She was a wing defence for her school's under-16 netball team (no photos, unfortunately), spent a year doing charity work in South America and once proposed a motion at her university's union (Newcastle) in favour of more
varieties of chocolate in the vending machines. Put it another way: she combines sufficient intelligence, compassion, sporting ability and endearing girliness to be crowned Jack's Number One Target. Google never lies.

More worryingly, her surname is Sidebottom. Her dad should be in The Hague on a war crimes trial for passing on that name to someone as beautiful as her. Leila Sidebottom.
Voilà la chute du sublime au ridicule.
I'd like to know which pig-arse idiot of an ancestor came up with that name.

‘Can you tell me where I can barter my mule for some chariot wheels?'

‘Ah yes, you want to go and see old Harold. He lives on the bottom side of the creek.'

‘Ah, Harold Sidebottom — of course.'

I have to marry her to save her from herself.

Lads' night out.

At 7pm Buddy and I headed straight out after work for a couple of rounds and then met up with Flatmate Fred, Jasper and Rick in a pub in Fulham. We were an unlikely combination — two bankers, one freeloading freelancer, an actor and Rick, who never stays in a job long enough to have a job title. His current contribution to civilisation is to perform the ultra-quick voiceovers at the end of radio adverts — the gabbled disclaimers that end with ‘terms and conditions apply'. This amuses just about everyone apart from Rick's dad, who is a QC and therefore has a proper job.

By the time we left the pub, we were completely slaughtered. Jasper suggested going somewhere to sweat off our alcohol intake and we all piled into a taxi.

‘Drive on, James,' cried Flatmate Fred, banging the roof of the cab, ‘and don't spare the horses.'

‘Where are the horses?' asked Buddy.

I made a mental note that I was going to have no difficulty outshining him in front of Leila next week.

We pulled up in front of Mad Barry's and Buddy took charge. This was his domain. No clever little quips. This was business. He marched up to the bouncer and demanded that he let us all straight in.

‘No, I won't. You'll go to the back of queue like everyone else.'

‘But you don't understand. We're not everyone else. We have significantly more money than everyone else.'

‘If you carry on like that, you're not coming in at all.'

‘It's a simple economic choice. We have superior purchasing power to the rest of the people in this queue. If you let us in now, you'll be maximising shareholder value.'

Jasper at this point wisely intervened and led Buddy to the back of a queue, which only consisted of a few fifteen-year-olds, in any case. They all glowered at him with as much intimidation as four public schoolboys in pink shirts with upturned collars could muster.

Flatmate Fred, less wise, used this diversion to try and leap over the cord and walk in without paying. About six paces in, a Neanderthal hand descended on his shoulder.

‘And what do you think you're doing?'

‘Er, I don't know.'

‘You're a dickhead, aren't you?'

‘Er, yes.'

‘Say it.'

‘What?'

‘Tell me that you're a dickhead.'

‘Er, I'm a dickhead. I think I'll go home now.'

‘No, you won't. You're coming in, and you're paying double.'

At which point the brute of a bouncer marched Flatmate Fred up to the vapid Sloane behind the counter and forced him to hand over
£
3 instead of
£
1.50. All of which shenanigans meant that it took us twenty minutes to get from queue to girls, instead of five.

Unfortunately, the path from queue to girls rarely runs smooth and we had no joy on the dance floor. By 2am we were all alone in an exhausted, sweaty, blokes-only circle, loving angels instead. We decided to head back to my place.

‘Drive on, Sam, and don't keep the horses,' yelled Buddy with fire (and four bottles of champagne) in his belly.

‘Buddy Oh, never mind.'

The taxi dropped us several streets away, as Flatmate Fred was too drunk to remember whether we lived in a place, a street or a mews.

On the short walk home we passed a beautiful winter-flowering cherry tree in one of the private residents' gardens near our flat. The only sensible thing seemed to be to take it back with us. We were five drunk guys who hadn't scored. If we couldn't get a trophy pull, we could at least take a beer trophy home with us.

‘Can't we just snap off a branch?' said Jasper.

‘Bollocks to that,' I said, flushed with the scent of victory. ‘We're taking the whole thing.'

Flatmate Fred was dispatched inside and came back with a saw. Feeling a bit like Hugh Grant (minus Julia Roberts, but plus metal blade) I climbed into the garden with the weapon of choice and did the dirty work on the trunk. Fifty panting minutes later we were sitting triumphantly in our kitchen with a sixty-kilo, two-metre mass of foliage. Buddy laid his weary head down in its soft leaves and passed out.

‘There's fucking stolen property in our goddamn fucking kitchen,' Flatmate Fred croaks as he walks into my room at ten the next morning.

‘Huh?' The footballing buffalo are back in my head.

‘There's a dense mass of fucking foliage in our motherfucking flat and I want to know how the fuck it got there.'

I feel like I'm in a Tarantino film. Next Flatmate Fred will be calling in Mr Big to help us get rid of the ‘body' without trace.

I tell Flatmate Fred that it got there because he couldn't remember where we lived, caught sight of a
Prunus subhirtella
(aka winter-flowing cherry) on the walk home and then dashed inside to get a saw to help cut it down. He denies everything.

We go through to the kitchen to examine the damage and find Buddy surfacing from his soily slumbers. We take a photo so that we can frame him if things get nasty.

‘Oh, hey, you guys,' he drawls, a flower lodged behind his left ear. ‘I've just realised why the doorman didn't buy my line about maximising shareholder value. Mad Barry's isn't publicly listed; it's a limited company. I'm such a jerk.'

Buddy is indeed a jerk, but if I were compiling the top ten reasons as to why he is a jerk (which I might just do at work on Monday), his ignorance of Mad Barry's' corporate governance structure wouldn't feature highly.

By the time hangover TV drew to a close at 3pm, everyone had decided that the tree theft was someone else's fault. Buddy claimed exoneration on some obscure point of international law as he had used the tree as a pillow. Flatmate Fred, whose memory loss had evaporated, argued that he was using the episode as a research project for his book (Rick: ‘Which book now?
101 Greatest Horticultural Thefts
?') and Jasper kindly pointed out in dramatic thespy tones that I had wielded the saw and was therefore the ringleader. At which point Rick added in the moronically slow voice he uses when he's not doing radio ads that the final buck lay with Flatmate Fred and me as the stolen property had come to rest in our flat. The others swiftly agreed and sidled off home.

Bastards.

Came back from work to find Flatmate Fred waving a piece of paper excitedly in my face.

‘What are you doing, you mad freak? And why are you wearing my dressing gown at eight in the evening?'

‘Because mine's in the wash. But listen, Jack, I've cracked it. I've worked out how to save ourselves from going to prison.'

‘Why would we be going to prison?'

‘For stealing the Prunus subhirtella. They'd bang us up, and then we'd get banged up the bum by big black men called Ron.'

I briefly wonder whether Flatmate Fred might quite enjoy meeting big black Ron. He'd just have to remember not to pick up the soap in the shower — given his current hygiene regime, it wouldn't be too much of a problem.

‘No, seriously,' he continued. ‘Read this: it's an anonymous letter to the local residents' association. It will put us in the clear.'

Here is Flatmate Fred's epistle in full:

Dear Flower People,

In a moment of madness last Friday evening, we cut down one of the winter-flowering cherries in the private garden in Onslow Mews. Like the forbidden fruit, it is an item of great beauty. We should have left it well alone.

In a spirit of utter remorse and shame, we now return the item to you. While it may have temporarily brightened our lives, it has blackened our souls for ever.

To ease this process, we are enclosing some money. We shall also be donating a small sum to a suitable charity. Alcoholics Anonymous would seem an appropriate choice under the circumstances.

Yours sincerely,
Stupid White Men

‘Fred,' I said, after rereading the
chef-d'oeuvre
that has taken him four days to compose, ‘that's lovely. But we're not at school any more. You can't just write an apology note to Matron and hope it's all going to be OK. And how exactly do you intend to hand over the
Prunus subhirtella
and the cash anonymously?'

‘It's simple. What comes down goes up. Swings and roundabouts. Circle of life. We'll take it back down to the gate and leave an envelope full of cash.'

‘Like bollocks we will. It weighs a ton and some tramp will nick the cash.'

‘Some South Kensington tramp?'

‘Yep, or a bunch of filthy-rich yuppies on their way home from a night out.'

It's staying in our kitchen and that's that. Sod the flower people. There are better anonymous gestures than a mouldy tree and a lump of cash. I think I'll pluck some of the rose-pink flowers and leave them on Leila's desk.

Felt like a prize plonker stepping on to the underground in the morning with a bunch of stolen flowers tucked under my suit. I think the person sitting opposite was sniggering at me over his copy of
Metro.

He would have sniggered even more if he'd known what was going to happen later. By some nasty quirk of fate I walk into the lift at exactly the same time as Leila. There are just the three of us: Leila, me and the drooping
Prunus subhirtella
.

‘Are you going down?' she asks.

Don't say, ‘Only if you press the right buttons.' Don't say, ‘Only if you press the right buttons. Don't say, ‘Only if you press the right buttons.'

‘Only if you press the right buttons.'

‘I'm sorry?'

‘Sorry?'

‘I didn't hear what you said.' Her voice is a Galaxy bar advert of pure silk.

She genuinely didn't hear.

‘Erm Yep, free breakfast in the basement for me, too.'

Free breakfast. Pure bloody Noël Coward
.

She smiles. It's like someone has turned up a wattage dial in her back. She glows. I'm glowing, too — with sweat. I try to smile back, wrinkling up my forehead so she can't see the beginnings of my receding hairline.

‘Flowers for the canteen ladies?' She motions to the dripping bunch, which is forming a small puddle between us on the lift floor, a little love loch of my awkwardness.