About a Girl

Ignoring the fact that, despite having a first class degree in English and Media Studies, Amy’s longest career commitment to date had been as a ticket taker at the local Odeon, I decided to believe her. What choice did I have? I was good at my job. Charlie had once told me I was so good, I couldn’t just sell ice to Eskimos, I could convince them that my ice had been hand-carved by pixies and contained the frozen tears of unicorns and that they should thank me for giving them the opportunity to even think about buying it. I just needed a new plan. And some more crappy wine.

‘First things first – if you’re not going to have a bath, you at least need a shower.’ Amy kissed my cheek and jumped up to her feet. ‘You’re going to catch your death, and, quite honestly, I can’t look at your hair like that for one more second. You’re pretty rank.’

‘OK.’ I let her hoist me up to my full five feet and nine inches and wiped my cheeks with the backs of my hands. Sometimes she made me feel like a complete beast, her being all pixie-like and adorable and me being, well, five foot nine. My nan always told me I was statuesque, but really, who wanted to be a statue?

‘So you get in the shower and I’ll go out and get some proper food – you’ve got nothing in,’ Amy said, slapping me on the arse and pointing me towards the shower. ‘Hitler’s not due back any time soon, is she?’

‘Please don’t call her Hitler,’ I groaned. It was fair to say that Amy and my flatmate did not get along. Luckily, said flatmate was away all week. ‘She’s not home till the weekend.’

‘Thank. Fuck,’ Amy declared with exaggerated relief on her face. ‘She’s the last thing we need.’

‘Agreed.’ I hated to encourage the two of them when they went at it, but it was true, my flatmate was not the most supportive human in existence. If I could get through this week, get things back on track before she came home, life would be easier.

‘Right.’ Amy pulled her keys to my flat out of her pocket and used them as a tiny, shiny pointer. ‘So, shower and hair wash for you, Sainsbury’s and seven chocolate oranges for me, and we’ll meet in front of the TV for a Buffy marathon in fifteen minutes. And I’m only giving you one day off because tomorrow, every ad agency in the country is going to be fighting over you, and there’ll be no time for vampire-slaying then.’

I nodded, hugged her and shut myself in the bathroom, suddenly desperate to strip off my wet outer layer. Flinging the soggy shift against the bathroom tiles, it hit with a satisfying slap and I stepped under the shower with almost a smile. My skin was cold and clammy and the hot water stung in the best way possible. I could feel myself warming up right through to my bones, which at least meant I could still feel something. Seriously, someone needed to let London know that it was summer. We’d had about three days of legitimate sunshine since May and it was almost July.

‘Maybe I’ll go travelling,’ I told the rubber duck who lived in the corner of the shower. ‘Maybe I’ll go somewhere warm.’

‘With what money?’ he asked. That duck was so cynical. ‘You haven’t got any savings.’

Cynical he might be, but he was also right. Bloody duck. I’d spent the first half of my twenties getting into a really quite impressive amount of debt of both the student loan and credit card variety. Interning and assisting were not well-paid professions, and without the Bank of Mum and Dad to help me through the first few years, I’d had to rely on the kindness of strangers. That is, the graduate loans officer at HSBC. He’d been very ready to help and even more ready to take every penny of interest back. So no, I didn’t have any savings, but I didn’t really have any debt left either, so that was something. Sort of.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I told the judgemental duck as I lathered up. ‘Tomorrow I’ll email everyone I know at the other agencies. How many references have I written in the last year?’

The duck didn’t answer. He was cynical and rude.

‘So many. I have written so many. I must have all the emails for the HR people somewhere.’

And I had. Aside from being amazing at my job, I was also one of the longest servers at D&D. They had a pretty high staff turnover, and for reasons I’d never really been able to understand before today, no one liked asking HR for a reference.

‘I don’t need to panic about this,’ I carried on. ‘It’s a hiccup. I’ll be in a new job by Monday. A better job. The best job ever.’

Well, maybe not the best job ever. I was really going to struggle to get the job of Alexander Skarsgård’s fang fluffer on the next season of True Blood. But still, never say never. I would go and work for a better agency. I would work on bigger accounts. I would manage a team who didn’t sniff the permanent markers when I wasn’t looking. It was time to dream the big dreams. Maybe I could even leave London. I knew a couple of girls who had got transfers over to New York. Maybe I could go and work in the States for a couple of years, do the whole Sex and the City thing. Or maybe even Australia. I’d heard there were a lot of opportunities in Australia. I hoped I’d be able to convince Charlie and Amy to come with me without too much violence.

I stayed in the bathroom, scrubbing away shame and disappointment and the top two layers of my skin until I heard the front door go and the TV come on. Wrapping myself up in the biggest, fluffiest towels I could find, towels that obviously weren’t mine, I emerged from the bathroom ready to tell Amy all about my plans. Much to the duck’s dismay, I was totally smiling.

For all of three seconds.

‘Are those my towels?’ My flatmate, Vanessa, stood in the middle of the living room with a very unimpressed look on her face. ‘Because if they are, you’re going to need to replace them.’

Oh. Fuck.

‘Can’t I just wash them?’ I asked, my fragile positive attitude shattering all around me.

‘No. You can’t.’ She looked so disappointed in me. ‘They’re towels. You don’t share towels. That’s disgusting.’

There weren’t many people in this world who were genuinely awful. Yes, there were the arseholes like Raquel in HR who got a kick out of making other people’s lives difficult, but it wasn’t like she went home and kicked puppies for fun. And as I’d learned already that day, even white supremacists could have a heart if you caught them on the right day. But Vanessa Kittler was a genuinely awful human being. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find out she had an entire pile of puppies in her room just for kicking around. No one would have been surprised to see her in a Dalmatian fur coat. In fact, if I’d found out she was a member of the BNP, I wouldn’t have been shocked. If I’d found out she was the secret underground leader of a fascist group planning the genocide of everyone with an undesirable body mass index or home-dyed hair, I might have raised an eyebrow. Just one, though. She was literally the worst person I’d ever met.

Resplendent in skintight black jeans, an obscenely low-cut white T-shirt and a black leather biker jacket, Vanessa looked me up and down, a small silver suitcase resting by her high-heeled feet.

‘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.