The next morning, I woke up wrapped in the same pale blue duvet cover I’d left behind when I’d moved to uni and a pair of arms that were brand new. Too scared to move, I tried to keep my breathing slow and even. I was in bed with Charlie. I was in bed with Charlie and neither of us was wearing any clothes. And the reason we weren’t wearing any clothes was because for the last twelve hours we had been at it.
I closed my eyes on my childhood room, my exam certificates hanging on the walls, my favourite photos lining the shelves, and tried to commit as much of the night to memory as possible. It was hard to keep the events straight, not because I’d been drunk but because I was suffering from a distinct case of what Amy always referred to as Boink Brain. Nothing fogged up your memory like a good shag. I was completely overloaded with happiness, and, given how long it was since I’d last had sex, every part of me was aching. Happily, like everyone said, it was just like riding a bike. A really, really fun bike. I remembered sneaking into the dark, empty house, checking for my parents and then kissing in the kitchen, fumbling with buttons and zips, taking far too long to get up the stairs, eventually finding my room. It was strange to know someone so well, to know everything about them, and then find yourself in a situation where you knew nothing. I had never seen Charlie naked. I had no idea what to expect in the trouser department. I had no idea how it would be.
More than once, Amy had tried to counsel me out of my Charlie crush by telling me that he was too nice to be any good in bed, that it would be like shagging my brother. As it was, I didn’t have a brother, but if that was how incest went down, I could see why it was so popular in the Deep South. Amy had been wrong. The sex was wonderful. Beautiful. It was like film sex, all deep and meaningful and very, very nice. I pressed my hand into Charlie’s, smiling lazily as his fingers instinctively curled around mine. Mine. He was mine.
‘Hey.’
I felt him rather than heard him, his words tickling my ear.
‘So.’ He snuggled up closer to me and I silently congratulated myself on having bothered to shave my legs the day before. ‘That happened.’
‘That did happen,’ I replied, too nervous to turn round and face him. Naked in the dark was one thing. Naked the next day with slept-in make-up and morning breath? Quite another. ‘Couple of times, actually.’
We lay quietly and I was glad he couldn’t see my smile. I looked like the cat that had got all of the canaries and quite possibly a parrot. I’d only been awake for a couple of minutes, but already it was like I’d woken in a whole new world. A new fantastic point of view. Aladdin and his magic carpet could piss off. I didn’t have a job and I lived with a psycho, but it didn’t matter. I had Charlie. My best friend, and now my – well, whatever he was, he was the best at something else too.
With a quick kiss to my shoulder, he rolled away, leaving my back cold and bereft. Since he was stuck on the wall side of a single lower bunk bed, there wasn’t really anywhere for him to go. Awkward.
‘Amy is going to laugh and laugh,’ he said after a moment. ‘And then laugh.’
I pulled the covers up over my boobs, ran a finger under each eye to minimize any mascara fall-out and rolled over to look at my conquest.
‘She is?’ I tried to sound as innocent as possible. ‘You think?’
‘Oh God, yeah.’ Charlie did not look changed. There was no beatific glow about his face. He was not gazing at me with a love so powerful it dared not speak its name. He was pretty much just laughing. Ha ha ha. ‘We will never hear the end of it. I feel like she’s been expecting this for ever.’
‘You do? She has?’
In his defence, I had a lot more evidence to draw on than Charlie did. For the past ten years, Amy had watched me pine and swoon and sulk and had routinely slapped me around the back of the head whenever I’d so much as mentioned the elephant in the room that was Me and Charlie. Or ‘Chess’ as I may or may not have named us. In public, when it was the three of us, it was different. She did make fun of us. She mocked our in-jokes and routinely told us to get a room whenever we indulged in some platonic snuggling. From Charlie’s perspective, Amy had been scoffing at this non-relationship for ever. He had no idea that she was counselling me behind closed doors. He had no idea how I was feeling. Which meant there was a chance he didn’t feel the same. Gulp. Puke. Gulp.
Raking a hand through his beautifully fucked-up hair, Charlie shrugged and yawned.
‘Maybe we just, you know, don’t tell her,’ he said, looking so terribly casual as he went about breaking my heart. ‘Just until we’ve worked this all out.’
‘Hmm, that’s one idea.’ I edged ever so slightly away. ‘But actually, it would really help if you could clear something up for me. What is “this”?’
There. My life was complete. I had made air quotes in bed with Charlie Wilder. Amy would actually have had a stroke if she could have seen what had just happened.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, easy as anything.
A very big part of me just wanted to nod, smile and shut up. I had Charlie in my bed. We had spent a good part of the night making love – not shagging but definitely, one hundred percent gazing into each other’s eyes, holding hands, Barry White in the background making love, with an emphasis on the ‘lurve’. That part of me did not like to make waves and was fairly certain that if I just lay there quietly, he would remember he had a penis, that he had put it in me fairly recently and would possibly put it in me again. Everyone knew that was the path to true love. But there was another very tiny part of me that really didn’t like the sound of this ‘I don’t know’ and ‘Maybe we shouldn’t tell your best friend in the entire world that we boned.’
‘You don’t know?’
It just came out. Honestly, I had no control over it.
‘I’m not trying to be a dickhead, Tess.’ Charlie sat up, hit his head on the top bunk and promptly lay back down. ‘I’m not pretending it didn’t happen, but we need to be realistic about this. We’ve been mates for years. We can’t just shag once and go back to being friends like nothing happened. That’ll just get weird.’
‘I didn’t say I wanted to,’ I said, trying to keep my voice down, but since I was me, it was hard. ‘I don’t want to pretend it never happened.’
‘Good. Because it was amazing.’ He reached over to stroke my arm and gave me a silly half-smile that I half recognized. ‘We just need to work it all out and I’d rather do that without Amy getting involved. She’ll be marching us down the aisle and getting ordained online or something.’
Wedding jokes. He was making wedding jokes. How to send a girl from bad pukey sick feeling in her stomach to good pukey sick feeling in her stomach in one easy step. And, little did he know, Amy was already ordained online. Handy.
‘Yeah, you’re right.’ I threw in a light laugh and a toss of the head for good measure, sort of a cross between a total sex goddess and a smallish pony. ‘I get it.’
‘It’s just tricky, the whole friends with benefits thing,’ he said with a smile, combing his fingers through my hair. Or at least he tried to comb his fingers through my hair. Long curly hair plus an all-night sex session equals many, many tangles. ‘It never seems to work, and you’re my best mate. I don’t want you to get hurt in this.’
Ohhh.
It was amazing how much damage you could do with so few words. Friends with benefits. Best mate. And thank goodness he didn’t want me to get hurt. THANK GOODNESS.
‘I think I need a shower,’ I said, grabbing a towel off the radiator and holding it against myself as I clambered out of bed. ‘Yes, I do.’
‘Wait, you’re not pissed off, are you?’
I span on my heel and stared down at the man in my bed. Tall, cute and, as it turned out, a bloody good shag. And weirdly, it felt like that was all I knew about him.
‘Why did we, you know …’ I started, not sure where I was going. ‘Last night. Why did you have sex with me?’
‘Because you kissed me.’ Charlie was doing a much better job of keeping his voice down than I was and looked as though he would really like me to try harder.
‘And if I hadn’t kissed you, we would never have …’ I just couldn’t bring myself to say it again.
‘I don’t know, because you did.’ He was talking to me, but his eyes were definitely scanning the room for his boxers. ‘Is this just regular post-sex crazy girl behaviour or what?’
‘I wouldn’t know.’ I snatched up his pants and threw them in his face. M&S cotton boxers, definitely bought by his mother. ‘Because I don’t have enough casual sex to know whether or not it turns me into a crazy girl.’
‘Can you not shout?’ he mumbled, pulling the boxers off his face. ‘Your mum is going to hear.’
‘And we wouldn’t want that, would we?’ I bellowed. Not shouting, bellowing. ‘We wouldn’t want anyone to know that I forced myself on you.’
‘Bloody hell, can you calm down?’ Charlie hissed, shuffling out of the bed and trying to put his giant hands on my shoulders. ‘What is wrong with you? All I said was I didn’t want to tell Amy that we slept together until we’d had time to work out what was going on. What’s not OK about that?’
‘Everything,’ I replied. I would not cry. I would not cry. I would not cry.
I didn’t want a shower any more. I just wanted to leave. Shaking his hands off my shoulders, I pulled on my knickers, my skinny jeans and a baggy black jumper Amy had the foresight to include in my packing. While crying.
‘Don’t, please.’ His voice had changed from confused and angry to confused, angry and a little bit scared. ‘Just sit down and talk to me.’
‘I don’t want to sit down,’ I said, my eyes burning bright red. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to work out what’s going on. I already know what’s going on. You’re a wanker.’
‘Why am I a wanker?’ Charlie asked, incredulous, as I grabbed my handbag and checked for all the essentials. It felt like it would really ruin the moment if I had to manhandle myself into my massive bra, so I picked it up and threw it in my handbag instead. ‘What have I done that you didn’t want me to do?’
‘Nothing,’ I said as I curled my hair around itself and fastened it in a topknot. ‘I did want to kiss you and I did want to sleep with you but I do not want to be your fuck-buddy, Charlie.’
There wasn’t a lot of point pretending I wasn’t crying now, and so I turned to face him, tears streaming, nose running, the whole ugly crying extravaganza.
‘I have been in love with you for so long, and I had no idea how not to be. I didn’t think actually sleeping with you would be the way to sort it out, but apparently it was. So thanks.’
Before I could launch into legitimate sobs, I opened the bedroom door, slammed it shut behind me and ran downstairs. Mum and Brian were drinking Sunday morning coffee in the kitchen in complete silence.
‘I think me and you need to have a talk, young lady,’ Mum said, cool as a cucumber.
‘I do not agree,’ I replied, slipping my feet into my Primark ballet pumps. ‘Brian, can you please run me to the station?’
‘Course I can, love,’ he said, coffee on the table, car keys appearing from his jeans pocket. ‘Come on.’
‘Don’t you dare walk out of this house, madam.’ Mum sounded shocked. It was fair. It was, after all, the first time in my entire life that I’d answered her back or not done as I was told. Fairly impressive at twenty-eight. ‘You sit down at this table and tell me what exactly is going on with you or you don’t come back to this house ever again.’
‘I’ll leave my keys with Brian then,’ I shouted as I passed through the front door. Probably a bit rash. I probably wasn’t thinking entirely straight. Or walking straight just yet.
‘Oh dear God, it’s drugs, isn’t it? I knew it. All those late nights in the office, never having any money, fired for “no reason”. What is it? Heroin? Are you doing the heroin?’ She was shouting just loud enough for the neighbours to have that on Facebook in the next ten minutes.
‘Yes, Mum,’ I replied as calm as you like. ‘I’m doing all of the heroin. Track marks up and down my arms, can’t get enough of the stuff. It’s aces.’
Marching towards the door, all I wanted was to be out of that house.
‘Tess Sigourney Brookes, you come back here this instant.’ My mum did not sound amused.
I didn’t turn round. I didn’t reply. I just got in the car.
‘Sorry to be a pain in the arse, Brian.’ I gave my lovely stepdad an apologetic smile as I buckled my seatbelt. ‘Just not having a very good week.’
‘Happens to the best of us, love,’ he said as he started the engine and backed out of the driveway. ‘Happens to the best of us.’
When I finally arrived back home, the flat was gloriously empty. The battery was flat on my phone and I’d left the charger at my mum’s, so there was very little to do but have a bath, wash away every trace of Charlie Wilder and collapse on the settee with a big bag of Wotsits. Or four big bags of Wotsits.
A week ago, I’d been prepping for my first day in my big new job. Seven days on, I had no job, I had no prospects, I’d shagged Charlie, I’d fallen out with Charlie, and I was relatively certain my mum had a bit of a bag on with me. I had excelled myself. An entire decade’s worth of drama in one week.
‘Sometimes things need shaking up,’ I’d told the rubber duck in the bath. ‘You’ve got to test the limits sometimes.’
He didn’t reply. He was getting a real attitude.
I was deep into my third episode of Come Dine With Me when I heard someone hammering on the front door.
‘Yay, Vanessa,’ I whispered, pulling my stripy blanket up under my chin.
‘Tess, are you in there?’
Not Vanessa. Charlie.
It was too late to run into my room and hide under the bed, so I did the next best thing I could think of. Pull the blanket over my head and shout, ‘No.’
But when I pulled the blanket down over my eyes, I saw a tall, creased-looking boy in the corner of my living room. All six feet three inches looking sad and stooped. My ovaries wanted to leap out of my body and never let him go.
‘Your mum gave me your spare key.’ He held it up before tossing it to me. ‘I didn’t think you’d let me in.’
‘I wouldn’t have,’ I replied, wishing I was wearing anything other than a giant Eeyore sleep shirt and a scrunchie. ‘So you can go now.’
‘I need to talk to you.’ He stepped towards the sofa with caution, staying as far away from me as it was possible to be, and rubbed at his eyebrow as he sat down. I curled up into a not-so-tiny ball and pouted. ‘I need to say I’m sorry.’
‘Yes, you do,’ I acknowledged. ‘So say it and then piss off.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘And you’re still here.’
Charlie took a deep breath in and stared at his feet. I pulled my knees up over my nose and peered at him over my blanket. This was horrible.
‘Do you remember the first time you talked to me?’ he asked. ‘Not in a seminar or anything, but the first time we properly had a conversation?’
‘Yes.’ Of course I bloody remembered, arsehole.
‘It was the Christmas party in the union, and you and Amy were wearing those stupid matching fairy outfits and all of the lads from my floor had a bet on which of them could get off with the two of you first.’
Oh, university. Hallowed halls of learning.
‘And then we were at the bar at the same time and you were not sober,’ he said with a smile. ‘And you asked if I’d done the reading for our media studies class, and I said I never did the reading for the media studies class, and you looked horrified.’
‘I was a very straight student,’ I muttered.
‘And then we were just chatting, and that girl I was seeing came up and kissed me.’
‘Sarah Luffman.’ Sarah bloody Luffman. I still wouldn’t accept her Facebook friend request to this day.
‘Sarah, yeah. Of course you remember.’ He rested his hands on his knees as though he was bracing himself. ‘Anyway, she came up and kissed me and I saw your face fall. You looked, like, properly heartbroken. And I didn’t know why, but it made me so sad because all night, all I’d been thinking about was kissing you.’
‘Because of the bet?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘Because I thought you were beautiful.’
Oh.
I wondered if it would be appropriate to ask him to wait while I went and changed. This conversation could not take place while I was wearing something I had bought for a tenner from the Disney store in the January sale.
‘But when I looked again, you were gone. And the next time I saw you, my flatmate told me you were going out with that bloke off the PE course. So I didn’t make a move. But we had so much in common and we were in all the same classes and, you know, that was that.’
‘And you never thought to bother again?’ I said, shuffling my feet a little bit closer to him. ‘In ten years?’
‘I know your mum and dad got divorced, Tess, but if you’d lived through what I’ve lived through, you wouldn’t be so quick to swap a friend for a shag. By the time we were both single, we were such good friends. We had so much in common – the books and the music and everything – and I didn’t want to ruin that. I was twenty. I couldn’t even think about anything long-term. But you were long-term to me.’
‘You do know the only reason I read all those books and listened to all that music was so that I’d have something to talk to you about in the first place, don’t you?’ I asked, looking at a knot in the floorboards. ‘Because I liked you.’
‘Sneaky cow.’ He pulled the sleeves of his jumper over his hands and smiled. ‘Anyway, I just wanted you to know why I might have freaked out a little bit this morning.’
‘I’m not quite sure I do know,’ I said, my heart pounding. I really needed to hear him say it. ‘You might want to clarify.’
That’s when I saw the full trademarked and copyright Charlie Wilder grin break out across his face. ‘I freaked out because I didn’t know what it was. Or what you wanted it to be. I could never just do the friends with benefits thing with you because you’re my Tess. I love you.’
‘You love me?’
They were words I’d heard a thousand times before, they were words I’d said a thousand times before, but they’d never, ever mattered until he said them now. It felt like Cupid, the Andrex puppy and a selection of assorted kittens had taken up residence in my stomach. There was far too much fluffy fluttering going on in there for my organs to work properly.
‘You love me?’ I said it again just to make sure.
‘Of course I love you,’ he repeated, taking hold of my hand. ‘You’re my best friend.’
And with that, Cupid, the anonymous Labrador and assorted kittens froze and turned around to look at me very, very slowly.
‘I’m your best friend?’
My French teacher had always told me the best way to understand something was to repeat it until you’d really drilled everything into your brain, but I was just not getting this.
‘My best, best friend.’ Charlie squeezed my fingers so tightly I thought they might snap, and I inched back ever so slightly on the sofa. ‘And we both know how important that is.’
‘We do?’
‘How many times have you seen me ruin a relationship?’ He let go of my hand and threw his arms up in the air. The arms that had been around me all night long. ‘I’m the worst! I can’t keep it together with a girl, you know that.’
I did know that. Charlie had a different girlfriend approximately once every five months. And once every five months I absolutely did not spend (on average) two hours online stalking the shit out of her and praying to a god I didn’t believe in that she would just go away without me having to resort to violence. So far, those prayers had been answered. I probably owed every major religion at least a fiver: the girlfriends never lasted more than a couple of months. One did almost six, but Charlie was travelling around Australia for three of them and I knew for a fact that he’d cheated. Not that he was a cheater. Most of the time.
‘There’s a reason we’ve never got together.’ Charlie seemed to be choosing his words very carefully. I hoped they were the right ones. ‘What if it doesn’t work out and we end up hating each other? I’ll let you down, Tess, I will. I don’t want you to hate me; I want you to be checking the football scores for me in the old people’s home when I’m too old and blind to read the screen. I want you to be in my life for ever.’
One by one, Cupid, the puppy and the kittens limped away, whispering awkwardly between themselves. I assumed they were uncomfortable with tears because dear God was I about to bring out some pretty impressive crying. The tears I’d busted out that morning were nothing compared with the biblical flood that was about to drown everyone in the room.
‘Ah, fucking hell – this is what I’m talking about. We’re not even going out and I’ve made you cry.’ Charlie dived across the sofa and pulled me into a hug, trying to stem the sobs. ‘See? It would never work.’
‘But … but we did it?’ As the words came out of my mouth, I wondered if I’d actually gone mad and we had, in fact, not ‘done it’ at all.
‘I know.’
‘After ten years? After never doing it at all?’
‘I know.’
To his credit, he looked terribly guilty. Not that it mattered in the slightest. My heart hurt. My everything hurt.
‘Why?’
‘I honestly don’t know,’ he replied.
We sat locked in silence on the sofa, half disengaged from the least sexy embrace in the history of embraces. I was staring at Charlie’s messy hair, his pale face, his sad eyes. He was staring at my Eeyore nightie. All I wanted to do was hug him again and tell him it was all going to be all right, that it didn’t matter and that we could just pretend it had never happened. We would just go back to being best friends and I’d go back to waiting for him to work out that I was the one. Even though I could still feel the red-hot tears spilling over my cheeks, every single part of me just wanted to make him feel better. Somewhere in the corner of the room, my self-respect shook her head in disgust. He didn’t say anything else. I couldn’t say anything else. Luckily, someone else didn’t have quite the same struggle.
‘Oh Jesus Christ, what’s going on now?’
In the midst of all our emodrama, I hadn’t heard the front door open. And I hadn’t seen Vanessa loitering in the hallway. But I heard her.
‘Don’t tell me you two are shagging?’ She hung her keys on my hook next to the door and inspected her nails. ‘Don’t bother, Tess, he’s shit in bed.’
‘What did you just say?’ I couldn’t possibly have heard her right.
‘I said don’t bother, he’s shit in bed,’ Vanessa repeated slowly, disappearing into her bedroom. ‘And between me, you and Mr Wilder, he’s not exactly packing down their either. Not. Worth. The effort.’
I let go of Charlie at exactly the same time he let go of me, and slid off the sofa into a graceless pile of too long limbs and donkey T-shirt at his feet.
‘You?’ I pointed at him. ‘And her?’ I pointed to Vanessa.
‘OK, don’t go mental, but—’
‘Oh my God, you and her.’
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?’
That best friend of mine, what a mind reader. We’d done a lot of picture burning when Amy had ended her engagement. Even though she had been the one to break it off, she was not one to leave that relationship without some righteous anger. It had been a fun time for everyone who wasn’t her ex-fiancé. I imagined he missed his twenty-year-old comic collection almost as much as he missed Amy. Possibly more so.
‘Yeah, I might be asleep, so let yourself in,’ I said. The exhaustion was overwhelming. My limbs felt so heavy I didn’t even know how I was holding up the phone. ‘See you in a bit.’
‘OK. I love you,’ she said, making kissing noises down the phone. ‘Don’t do anything stupid.’
‘I’ve never done anything stupid in my life,’ I replied. ‘I wouldn’t know where to start.’
Collapsing on the closest soft surface, Vanessa’s bed, I exhaled loudly and tried to have a Feeling, the phone still in my hand. But there was nothing there. My brain felt like a clown car, crammed full to overflowing with rainbow wigs, red noses and tutu-wearing bears. I should get out of Vanessa’s room. I should get dressed. I should call my mum and apologize for my behaviour. But I didn’t actually want to. At some point, I was going to have to speak to Charlie. And, must not forget, the council tax needed playing. Priorities, Tess.
Before I could decide which item on my did-not-want-to-do list was up first, the phone rang again. Once again, just in case it was about the council tax, I answered it.
‘Hello?’ I answered, so, so tired.
‘Kittler,’ a woman snapped down the line. ‘Don’t say a single fucking word. I am fucking furious with you.’
Oh no. There was no way I was taking an earbashing on Vanessa’s behalf. Not today.
‘I’m not—’ I started.
‘I said not a fucking word,’ the woman continued. ‘Do you know how hard it is for me to get you jobs? Do you?’
‘No?’ I answered. Because I didn’t.
‘No, of course you don’t, you selfish bastard. It’s really fucking hard. And after last week’s fucking no-show … I should fire you. I should refuse to even put you up for jobs. And now your fucking BlackBerry is out of service? What the fuck is wrong with you?’
I had, by this time, worked out that I was speaking with Vanessa’s agent, Veronica. She had a certain way with words that gave her away. That way was commonly known as ‘swearing’.
Vanessa’s career as a photographer was, at best, patchy. I’d only ever seen maybe ten photos she’d taken. For the most part, she seemed to take a lot of portraits of her friends, who used them for vanity projects and then randomly got her hired for fashion jobs or indie magazine shoots that never seemed to pan out. My shutterbug sensibilities were offended. The pictures that I had seen were flat, oversaturated and, quite often, completely out of focus. I’d seen better shots on Instagram and I hated Instagram. But no one cared what I thought. They cared that she was stupid hot, knew all the right people, and did I mention she was stupid hot?
Before I had a chance to explain to Agent Veronica that (a) I was not Vanessa and (b) just exactly what was wrong with my flatmate, namely that she was a see-you-next-Tuesday (incidentally one of Agent Veronica’s favourite terms of endearment), she had already started shouting at me again.
‘Luckily for you, someone is desperate. This new magazine has landed a last-minute interview with Bertie Bennett and they need a photographer.’
‘Bertie Bennett?’ I didn’t know who Bertie Bennett was.
‘Don’t fuck around with me today, fuckface. Bertie. Fucking. Bennett.’ Agent Veronica snapped. Agent Veronica liked swearing a lot. ‘It’s a piece of piss. Couple of portraits of Bertie, couple of shots of some of his favourite archive pieces, his favourite up-and-coming pieces. Nothing even slightly resembling hard work. It’s a better job than you deserve, and if I wasn’t shit out of luck with the first three people I’d called, you wouldn’t even be hearing my dulcet fucking tones right now.’
She did have a lovely voice.
‘You’re on a plane to Hawaii tonight. You’ll be back by Friday.’
‘Hawaii?’
‘What the fuck is up with you this afternoon?’ she asked. ‘You sound like you’re stoned. Are you on a juice detox or something? You haven’t been fucking born again, have you? I can’t be dealing with God botherers.’
‘Sorry, I’m not—’ My mouth was open and words had started to come out of it. All I needed to do was finish the sentence. All I needed to say was ‘I’m not Vanessa’ and then I could go back to watching shit telly in my shit Eeyore T-shirt on my shit settee, hating my own guts until Amy came over and agreed with me about how shit everything was.
Or I could go to Hawaii.
‘Kittler, you’ve got exactly ten seconds to say yes or I’m never putting your tiny fucking arse up for a job ever the fuck again. So say yes.’
Ten seconds.
Hawaii.
Piece of piss.
I looked up at the mirror above Vanessa’s bed (no, really) and took a moment. Ratty hair. Sad donkey T-shirt. No job. No boyfriend. No friends. Shit family. Council tax due. Turning opinion round on Tess Brookes was going to be hard bloody work. But what if I just wasn’t Tess Brookes any more? What if I was Vanessa Kittler? Just slightly less slutty and with a faint Yorkshire lilt?
‘Three. Two.’
‘I’ll do it,’ I told my reflection and Veronica in my best Lahndahn drawl. ‘I’ll go.’
‘Too fucking right you will,’ Agent Veronica replied. ‘I need to email you the brief. I know you’re a twat about flights, so book the ticket yourself and claim it back and don’t give me any shit about how expensive it’s going to be. I’m sure there’s room on Daddy’s credit card.’
‘No, that’s fine.’ My pulse was starting to race again. For different reasons this time. ‘Uh, my BlackBerry is, um, fahcked. Can you send it to my flatmate’s address? It’s Tess S Brookes at googlemail. And, uh, I’ll give you another number. Don’t call the BlackBerry.’
Hawaii.
‘Whatever. Just get your shit together, Kittler.’ Agent Veronica sounded very unhappy with Vanessa. Agent Veronica needed to get in line. ‘I won’t have you fucking up on me again. This is it. Your last fucking chance. These photos need to be as good as the photos that got me to sign your pathetic arse in the first place and not as wank as the ones you sent in last month. We did discuss the fact that they were indeed wank, did we not?’
‘Yes?’ I really wished I could see those photos. Presumably she’d been drunk when she took them. Or possibly she’d been too busy shagging Charlie to concentrate. Who knew? There was a world of possibilities.
‘Too fucking right, yes,’ she snapped. ‘This is your last fucking chance. Do not let me down.’
Last chance. Fresh start. It was all the same, really.