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‘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_2152397f-35f1-5078-8445-2cc3f3823858)
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.
