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‘What’s wrong with my dress? It’s not that bad,’ I protest, glancing down at the black pencil dress I wore to work.
‘Yeah, not that bad if you’re going to a funeral,’ my friend (who is wearing a white cheesecloth gypsy top as a dress, might I add) says harshly, ‘or you’re still trying to turn yourself into a weird clone of your boss’s wife.’
I stare at my friend for a moment. She hasn’t been back to the flat for a while, and she’s been so busy with wedding stuff that we haven’t spent much time together – not to have a proper chat – but it’s clear that she still doesn’t approve of my situation with Will. She can’t even say his name.
‘This isn’t for anyone’s benefit, I just like dressing a bit smarter,’ I lie. ‘And maybe I have made this place a bit more neutral, but if Will is going to move in here with me eventually then it needs to be less girly.’
‘Ergh, listen to yourself.’ Amy rolls her eyes theatrically. ‘All you go on about is him. You dress for him. You decorate for him. What does he do for you? He won’t even be with you publicly.’
I feel my face fall, and my friend reacts.
‘Candice, I’m sorry, it just upsets me to see him treat you like this. You deserve better.’
Amy carelessly places the dirty spoon down on the chest of drawers next to her and grabs me for a hug.
‘I know I deserve better,’ I tell her honestly. ‘But that’s what this week away is all about. It’s going to be our first anniversary so we’re just going to concentrate on being normal together, seeing how it goes and then working out what we’re going to do about our future.’
‘Remind me again how we’re spinning this little holiday-slash-business trip?’ Amy asks, pulling a face.
‘As managing director, Will needs to visit all branches of the company. He’ll make sure things are running smoothly and put in a bit of face time with the other employees. It’s good for his image.’
‘It’s good for an excuse to nail you in a hotel bed instead of a supply cupboard,’ she tells me.
‘That was one time.’ I laugh.
‘And this explains why you’re away for the weekend too, because…’
‘There’s always someone working day and night, seven days a week, to keep things moving,’ I tell her. ‘Haulage never sleeps.’
‘That might be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.’ Amy laughs.
Before I met Amy, I was so so shy. Somehow, she brought me out of myself and for that brief moment between meeting Aims and meeting Will, I felt like a whole new person, like a normal girl in her early twenties. I will admit that since I started seeing Will, I have gone back into my shell a little. I worry about keeping in shape. I worry about coming across as the scrappy, foul-mouthed, party girl I turned into when it was just Amy and me against the world. I know that Will wouldn’t be into that kind of girl, and I hid her from him well until I got out of those bad habits. Will is a smart, educated, well-respected man. He comes from a good family. He’s so well-spoken his accent is almost neutral, despite being born and raised in Manchester. Guys like that don’t wind up with girls like the one I had become, so I cleaned up my act. I know that Amy holds Will responsible for this regression in personality (that’s what she calls it) but I do feel like a better person for being with him.
‘Right, go get your comfies on,’ Amy insists. ‘Dinner will be ready in ten. I’ve made steaks, chips and my own special secret sauce,’ she sings. ‘I know you’ve been missing it so you better be off your silly diet.’
As I head for the bathroom, a sick feeling washes over me. I don’t know what exactly is in Amy’s special sauce, but I know that it’s full of calories. As are steaks and chips. The thing about being on a diet is that as soon as you have a little slip-up, it undoes your progress for the past few days and it feels like it was all for nothing. And if that bagel yesterday made my tummy blow up like a balloon today, then tomorrow, after Amy’s cooking, I’ll look like I’m expecting one hell of a food baby, and that will have Will worried.
I close the bathroom door behind me, slip off my dress (and my underwear, because an underwired bra will easily add one pound to my weight), pull out the scales from behind the sink as quietly as possible and place them on the bathroom floor. As I am about to step on them, a bang on the bathroom door causes me to jump out of my skin.
‘Bitch, are you weighing yourself?’ my friend yells through the closed door. ‘Seriously, you’ve gotta stop with this shit. You are a perfectly normal and healthy weight. Stop trying to be a stick for a man and come and get some chips into you.’
‘I’m not weighing myself,’ I lie, although it’s pointless. Amy knows I’m on a quest to lose a bit more weight, but I’m just trying to get healthier with Will, that’s all. I don’t have a problem or anything – actually, I do have a problem, it’s that I want to eat brownies near-constantly, but I try my hardest not to. The urge never goes away though. ‘I’ll be out in a minute.’
I flush the toilet before returning the scales as quietly as possible. I slip on a pair of joggers and a vest top and open the door to find Amy waiting for me.
‘Stop weighing yourself,’ she ticks me off, hitting me on the nose with a CD.
‘Stop leaving the pans unattended,’ I tell her off in return.
‘OK, I was just bringing you this.’
Amy presents me with a CD called ‘Anything you want is yours’.
‘Cool, what genre do they play?’ I ask, knowing full well it isn’t music.
‘Very funny. It’s that cosmic ordering I was telling you about. This one teams it with meditation; it’s bound to sort your life out.’
‘Oh, thanks,’ I reply, unsure what to say to that. ‘I’ll put it in my room.’
As Amy heads back to the kitchen, which hopefully isn’t on fire, I frisbee the CD into my bedroom. I’ll need to be pretty desperate before I resort to asking thin air to fix my problems for me.
Chapter 3 (#ulink_2e519043-ec72-5fab-8d7f-781f7c40dd9e)
I tap the step counter on my wrist to check my progress for the day. After inputting my calories consumed into my health app, I can see that my usual target of a calorie deficit is unsurprisingly a calorie surplus after my epic dinner (and too much wine) with Amy, but after her catching me out with the scales, I felt like I had to clear my plate to prove a point. At least, that’s what I’m telling myself, because it’s a more flattering excuse than me being a piggy.
With just ten minutes to go until midnight, I walk laps around my bedroom to try and get my steps up for the day, because more steps equals more calories burned. The fact that I am tipsy from all the wine is only making this more difficult, but that’s all the more reason for me to do it. I don’t have much floor space in my room, which makes this even trickier, but Amy had decided to stay the night and she just doesn’t get why I want to lose weight. That’s because she’s so happy in her skin. If she caught me exercising at this time, she’d flip.
I pace back and forth a few more times before stumbling over nothing – possible the thick fumes of alcohol in the air – and hit the deck. Unhurt (or just too tipsy to feel it) I laugh at myself. That’s when I notice the CD Amy gave me and curiosity gets the better of me. I pop it in my CD player before hitting play (making sure the volume is low enough not to be heard) and getting in bed.
As I listen to what the voice on the CD has to say, I frown. This is silly. I’m supposed to just repeat a few chants and tell the universe what I want and it will just hand it over? If only life were that simple.
The voice talks about deciding what you want, and asserting yourself.
‘Repeat after me,’ the voice instructs. ‘I am in charge of my own destiny, and I deserve a better life.’
‘I am in charge of my own destiny, and I deserve a better life,’ I replying, mockingly.
‘It doesn’t work if you take the piss,’ I hear a voice say softly from behind the door. ‘Can I come in?’
‘Sure,’ I reply, embarrassed, although I’m not sure why – at first because she caught me listening to it, but then because I was taking the piss just a bit. The thing is, after the shitty cards life has dealt me, it annoys me that the voice on the CD is implying that all I had to do was ask it not to.
Amy turns off the CD player before climbing in my bed next to me.
‘So, what are you asking for?’ Amy enquires.
‘Hmm, let’s see… How about that I fall in love with Mr Right, ASAP?’
‘Beats the Mr Wrong you’re with now,’ she teases, before changing her tone to a more serious, concerned one. ‘You’re not yourself, babe.’
‘I’m fine, just a bad day,’ I tell her and leave it at that. I won’t tell her about Will pushing me underneath a desk because she’d hit the ceiling.
‘Not just today – generally. You’re like a different person. He quashes your spirit.’
I laugh it off. ‘Just a bad day,’ I tell her again, but I feel my eyes filling up. Stupid alcohol, letting my emotions get the better of me. Suddenly, it’s all flowing out.
‘My life is passing me by,’ I admit. ‘With each second that ticks by, my death gets that little bit closer. I watch the seconds turn into minutes, then hours, days, weeks, months and eventually years. I see the so-called “best years of my life” vanishing before my eyes. And I hate my job so frigging much.’
‘So quit,’ Amy suggests.
‘I can’t, because I need the money, and it’s the only time I get to see Will. But it’s just so boring, and all the women in the office hate me – I don’t know if it’s because they have suspicions about Will and me, but it only pushes me closer to him, because he’s the only person there who cares about me, which only fuels their suspicions,’ I babble. ‘Argh, I am miserable.’
And drunk, apparently.
‘So do something about it,’ Amy insists, wrapping her arm around me.
‘I am,’ I sob. ‘That’s why Will is taking me away, so we can sort out what we’re going to do. I don’t want to lose him, but I told him that I can’t go on like this. He says we’ll figure it out.’
‘Well, there you go,’ Amy replies, although she sounds unconvinced.
Despite telling Will that I cannot go on like this, the truth is that I would rather go on like this than call it a day. Sometimes I worry that he’s only organised this trip to appease me, and then when we return things will just go back to normal, except it will be worse because I will have had a taste of what life would be like as a proper couple. It has appeased me, whether it was intended to or not. The mere suggestion of us spending a few days alone together was enough to drag my mood from my impending death to filling me with hope that one day we will be a proper couple, when he can finally go public about the fact he’s separated from his wife. But with enough alcohol in my bloodstream to kill an elephant, all my worries are at the forefront of my mind. If all goes well I’ll feel on top of the world, but if not then it’s back to reality, back to our hopeless situation.
‘Look, you know that I think you can do much better, but if you want him to get serious then you need to show him that you’re not just this thing that will wait around until he’s ready to love you.’
‘Tried that before – remember?’ I remind her.
‘I’m not saying you should get with someone else, but show him that other people do want you. Is that Geordie guy at work still bugging you for a date?’
‘He asked me out during his first day on the job last week. That was when Will saw and told him off. Since then he hasn’t asked again. He does sit on my desk every day and chat to me though.’
‘Good. Let your boss see.’
I nod thoughtfully, but the truth is I couldn’t do that to Will. In fact, despite the new guy being nothing but friendly with me (and ridiculously gorgeous – probably way out of my league), I am borderline rude to him. The thing is, I don’t want Will to be upset by seeing the two of us together, and the new guy just won’t take the hint and leave me alone.
‘Try and get some sleep,’ Amy insists, climbing out of my bed. ‘Things won’t seem so bad in the morning.’
‘Thanks for everything. Dinner was great,’ I call after her.
‘You’re welcome,’ she calls back. ‘I’ll be listening out for you throwing it back up.’
Chapter 4 (#ulink_a3c79363-a31b-51ad-9618-1d82e198a4f7)
Megan McLaughlin isn’t just my childhood best friend. Despite us not really keeping in touch, she means so much more to me now. Megan is an idea, a gauge that shows me just how far off track my life is, a living example of what my life should probably be like right now, as I approach the big 3-0 (just six short years away).
Thanks to Megan, I am fast realising that my life isn’t taking the same route as the chicks I grew up with. School is like a massive competition where everyone – your friends especially – are your competitors, your life rivals. Who got the best Christmas present this year? Who has the best trainers? Who can get the hottest boyfriend? Who is doing the best in English? And you think that you’ll turn sixteen, grab your GCSE certificates and leg it into adulthood, and that all of that crap will be behind you. While that might have been true once upon a time, we millennials have things so much tougher now that social networks are a thing. Everyone from your school days is going to want to keep in touch with you on Facebook – even the bullies, bizarrely – and we all know that Facebook is nothing but a platform for boasting. So now these childhood rivals follow you into your grown-up years, and serve as a reminder of how badly you’re doing at life compared to them.
Take my secondary school bestie, Megan, for example. Megan and I met in nursery and our lives pretty much mirrored one another until one day, suddenly, they didn’t. We both lived on pretty little cul-de-sacs with our happily married parents, we were both into the same hobbies and the same music, and we were even both on the chubby side all the way through school.
Both tomboys through middle school before going all-out punk in secondary school. Both ash blondes. We were one and the same until sometime during sixth form when Megan got her first boyfriend. She’d had boyfriends throughout her teens but this was different because Megan’s new boyfriend was older – much older – we were seventeen and he was about to turn thirty. He had a job, his own house and the social life of a grown-up. When Megan started going out with him, not only did she abandon being my fun friend, but it aged her like a fifty-a-day smoking habit too – which is incidentally a habit she took up because he did. Over the past ten years I have watched my friend fly through the motions of growing up, not unlike the way I do when I get bored playing The Sims while I’m trying to kill time on the computer at work. Megan left school, moved in with him, got engaged, got married and had a couple of kids.
So Megan isn’t just my former bestie, she is symbolic of the life goals someone at some point decided that we, as women, are supposed to be achieving as adults. Find a man, settle down, put whatever kind of career you have on hold and pop out some babies. I am doing terribly on all counts, and there Megan is, every time I log on to Facebook, posting photos of her newest smiling baby or the latest addition to the work she’s having done to her kitchen that never seems to be finished. She’s like an alternative reality version of myself, if I’d made different (better?) life choices. I don’t own my own home; I am in the weird position of both having never been in a traditional serious relationship while at the same time not being truly single. And as for kids, well, in the presence of the truly annoying ones you often find splashing in puddles next to you while you’re wearing a white dress or yelling in your ear on a train, if you listen carefully, you can sometimes hear my tubes attempting to tie themselves.
My work day today has so far consisted of aimlessly scrolling through Facebook – breaking only to answer the occasional phone call while Caroline is away from her desk – looking at everyone post all their stupid shit. Photos from nights out, their kids doing cute stuff, discussing their wedding plans and even taking those stupid quizzes – you know the ones: Which Friends character would you be? What’s your spirit animal? Are you probably going to die single and alone? I don’t need to take a silly quiz to answer those questions for me. I’d be perennially single, early series Chandler, with nothing but my sense of humour to keep me warm at night. My spirit animal would be a mouse, a timid, lonely, little mouse. And the mood I’m in today, I can confidently predict that I will in fact die alone. Still, without all the fun life events to populate my profile, a few annoying quiz result posts would at least remind people that I’m alive. My online presence is fading, fast.
‘Do you need a licence to ride a forklift, Candy?’
I am snapped from my increasingly depressive thoughts by a Geordie accent.
‘Do you need a licence to drive a forklift?’ I correct him as I repeat his question in an attempt to remind him that a forklift isn’t in fact a ride he can put 20p in to ‘have a go’ on. ‘I’d imagine you need some kind of certificate of competency before they’ll let you zip around the warehouse on one.’
‘Crap. That’s what Rick said,’ he replies with a disappointed sigh.
Rick is the warehouse manager. The new guy is here working in the IT department; there’s no need for him to even be in the warehouse, let alone ‘riding’ one of the forklifts.
I avert my eyes, look back at my screen and begin typing an email that I won’t in fact send to anyone, but I want Geordie Shore here to think that I am hard at work and leave me alone. He’s only been here a little over a week, and on his very first day he actually asked me out on a date. He’s that sure of himself, because he’s gorgeous and he knows it. So far he’s managed to make time to sit on my desk and annoy me every single day. I try to ignore him, the way the school swot blocks out the annoying antics of the class clown, and I’m not doing too badly. To be honest, I couldn’t even tell you his name – in my head, I’ve been calling him Geordie Shore. Everyone gets an unflattering nickname in my head. I do try to keep all of this stuff locked away in my head, though, never to be uttered out loud.
When I met Will’s wife, Stephanie, for the first time, I was blown away by how perfect she was. She was effortlessly classy, ladylike, and she always looked flawless. I decided then that I needed to be more like her so I made a real effort to be as close to perfection as possible. This only fuels the need for my eternal diet, my religious exercise routine and the real effort I make to be this wonderfully behaved, reserved little lady – because clearly that’s Will’s type – and I’ve even managed to master keeping a lid on the casual swearing habit that I’d picked up from Amy. Even when no one is watching, I strive to be as ladylike as possible, in the hope that one day it will truly be second nature. I do still feel like I’m forcing it – just a little. Inside my head is a different story, however. Even my thoughts are peppered with expletives, and some of the terrible things I think about people are far from ladylike.
I wouldn’t say that Stephanie had let herself go – Will would, though. After having a couple of kids, Stephanie has put a little bit of weight on. She’s still classy and beautiful, but when I hear Will talking about her like she’s a mess, it makes me even more careful to keep in good shape.
The new guy is still standing in front of me, his hands in his pockets, squirming and twisting his ankles like a fidgety child who has been called to see the headmaster.
‘Did you want something?’ I ask in an attempt to make him go away quicker.
‘I had a message to pop up, something about some changes to the…’ he begins to explain before stopping abruptly. Perhaps the look on my face is representative of how boring that sounded.
‘That wasn’t me, it’ll have been Sweet Caroline,’ I tell him. ‘She’s just gone for her lunch.’
‘Why do you call her Sweet Caroline?’ He laughs.
Oh shit, did I say that out loud? That’s never happened to me before.
‘Erm, because she isn’t,’ I admit truthfully, my mind blank of any other logical explanation.
New guy cracks up laughing.
‘I thought it might because she puts those doughnuts out in the staffroom every morning,’ he replies.
‘Yes, that would have been a better explanation, wouldn’t it?’ I reply, almost for my own benefit.
‘Do you mind if I wait around for her?’
‘Knock yourself out,’ I reply.
He takes a seat at her desk and twirls in her chair.
I continue to type nothing in particular so he doesn’t speak to me, and so that I can get on with all my non-existent work.
I try not to give it too much thought, because I don’t want to admit it, not even to myself, but it sometimes feels like the only reason Will didn’t fire me was because he wanted to keep me around. On paper I am his assistant. The thing is, he already has Caroline working as his secretary, and she seems to tick all the boxes an assistant would too. I think Caroline thinks I am useless to the company and massively overpaid for the work I do. Caroline is probably right in thinking this. Still, that’s no reason for her to be as rude to me as she is. Sometimes I think it’s because she knows about Will and me. I suppose that, if she is wrongly under the impression that he and his wife are still together – like everyone else is – then it’s no wonder she dislikes me.
‘So, Candy – ’ new guy starts, but I cut him off.
‘Candice,’ I correct him. ‘I hate being called Candy.’
I instantly feel bad for correcting him. Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve been very nice to him since the day he started. On his very first day he just breezed in here, all fun and freelance and I couldn’t believe it when he asked me out, in front of Will, before we’d even exchanged pleasantries, before Will had even shown him to his office. His confidence left me dumbstruck, but before I had a chance to say anything I clocked the unimpressed look on Will’s face. He couldn’t hide his jealousy, and gave Geordie Shore a telling-off for flirting with me.
I would have been mortified but the new guy just laughed it off, like it was no big deal. I’d have been in tears in the toilets, just like I am every time Sweet Caroline gives me a dressing-down, but not new guy; he still comes and sits on my desk, chatting to me like we’re old friends, even though I give nothing back. Well, I don’t want to upset Will, do I? So I figure if I’m not too pally with the new guy then maybe he’ll stop trying to be my friend. The thing is, it’s like the more I try to ignore him, the harder he tries with me. This really winds me up.
‘You need to lighten up,’ he tells me. ‘All the cool kids shorten their names.’
