About a Girl

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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?’