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5
At lunchtime, I open my laptop in the press room – a fancy title for a nicotine-stained windowless cell in the bowels of Crown Court, decorated with a wood veneer desk, a few chairs and a dented filing cabinet – and check my email. A message arrives from Mindy.
‘Can you talk?’
I type ‘Yes’ and hit send.
Mindy doesn’t like to email when she can talk, because she loves to talk, and she’s a phonetic speller. She used to put ‘Vwalah!’ in messages to myself and Caroline, which we assumed was a Hindu word, until under questioning it became clear she meant ‘Voilà’.
My phone starts buzzing.
‘Hi, Mind,’ I say, getting up and walking outside the press room door.
‘Do you have a flat yet?’
‘No,’ I sigh. ‘Keep looking on Rightmove and hoping the prices will magically plummet in a sudden property crash.’
‘You want city centre, right? Don’t mind renting?’
Rhys is buying me out of the house. I decided to use the money for a flat. Originally a city centre flat from which to enjoy single-woman cosmopolitan living, but the prices were a wake-up call. Mindy thinks I should rent for six months, get my bearings. Caroline thinks renting is dead money. Ivor says I can have his spare room and then he has a reason to finally kick out his flaky, noisy lodger Katya. As Mindy says, he could do that anyway if he ‘found his cojones’.
‘Yeees …?’ I say, warily. Mindy has a way of taking a sensible premise and expanding it into something entirely mental.
‘Call off the search. A buyer I work with is stinking rich and she’s off to Bombay for six months. She’s got a place in the Northern Quarter. I think it’s a converted cotton mill or something, and apparently it’s uh-may-zing. She wants a reliable flat-sitter and I said you were the most reliable person in the world and she said in that case she’ll do you a deal.’
‘Erm …’
Mindy quotes a monthly figure which is a fair amount of money. It’s not an unfeasible amount, and certainly not a lot for the kind of place I think she’s talking about. But: Mindy’s encroaching madness. It’ll probably come with an incontinent Maltipoo called Colonel Gad-Faffy who will only eat sushi-grade bluefin and has to be walked four times a day.
‘Do you want to come and see it with me, after work?’ Mindy continues. ‘She flies on Friday and a cousin of hers is interested. She says he’s a bit of a chang monster and she doesn’t trust him. So you’re front runner but you’re going to have to be quick.’
‘Chang monster?’
‘You know. Coke. Dickhead’s dust.’
‘Right.’
I think it through. I was really looking for something longer term than a fixed six months. Six months with option of renewal, I’d thought. But this might be a way to live the dream while I look for something more realistic.
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘Great! Meet you by Afflecks at half five?’
‘See you there.’
As I walk back into the press room, I realise why I’ve dragged my feet in moving out of the house, however uncomfortable it is. My decision to leave Rhys is about to turn from words into action, become real. Splitting equity, dividing up our worldly goods, coming-home-at-night-to-empty-rooms-and-a-big-yawning-maw-of-an-empty-future real. Part of me, a shrill, cowardly part, wants to scream: ‘Wait! Stop! I didn’t mean it! I want to get off!’ Motion sickness kicking in.
Yet I remember the text I got from Rhys a few days ago, saying, in what sounded as much like sorrow as anger: ‘I hope you’re looking for places because the end of living together like this can’t come fast enough for me.’
I flip my notebook open and wonder if I want another cow-shit coffee.
Zoe enters and hovers, giving off a static buzz of nerves.
‘Feel free to go and get something to eat. You can leave your things here if you like,’ I say.
‘Thanks.’ She puts her coat and bag down, and places her notebook on the table carefully.
‘Unless you fancy going to the pub for lunch?’ I continue, not sure where this magnanimity is coming from. Trying to atone for what I’ve done to Rhys, possibly. There will never be enough entries in the good deeds column of the Great Ledger of Life to offset that one.
‘That would be great!’
‘Give me five minutes and I’ll show you why The Castle has earned the accolade of “pub nearest court”.’
Zoe nods and sits down to transcribe her copy, longhand. I glance over while I’m typing. I knew it – her shorthand’s so perfectly formed you could photocopy it for textbook examples.
Gretton saunters in, squinting from me to Zoe and back again.
‘What’s this, Bring Your Daughter To Work Day?’
Zoe looks up, startled.
‘Welcome to the family,’ I say to Zoe. ‘Think of Gretton as the uncle who’d make you play horsey.’
6
I apologise to Zoe for not drinking alcohol when we get to the pub. I feel like I’m letting the profession down in moments like these. At every paper you always hear tales of great mythical beasts of olden times who could drink enough to sink battleships and still hit deadline, get up at first light the next day and do it all again. They’re legend, usually because they died in their fifties.
‘It’s soporific in court at the best of times, what with the heating and the droning on. If I hit the bottle I’d probably end up snoring,’ I say.
‘Oh, it’s OK, I’m a lightweight anyway,’ Zoe says. ‘I’ll have a Diet Coke as well.’
We scan the laminated menus on the bar, hearts sinking. The Castle’s menus have clearly been written by marketing managers who think they are conversant in the foreign language of ‘funny’. We try merely pointing at our selected lunch items to save our dignity. No dice with the morose barman.
‘I’ve got astigmatism,’ he says, as if I should know this.
‘Oh,’ I reply, flustered, trying for the last route out. ‘Then we’ll both have the Ploughman’s.’
‘Naked, Piggy or Extra Pickly?’
Dammit. ‘Piggy,’ I mumble, defeated. ‘Naked for her.’
‘You want that as a melt?’ he sighs, in a way that suggests most of the world’s problems are down to people like us wanting melts. We decide we do, but both pass on a squirt of the chef’s special sauce, given we’re not on nodding terms with him.
We make small talk, battling the octave range of Mariah Carey and multiple televisions, while two microwave-warm plates are banged down under our noses. As soon as Zoe finishes her meal, she says ‘Here’s what I wrote’, brushing crumbs off her hands and producing a spiral-bound notepad from her bag, flipping to the right page. ‘I wrote it out longhand.’
I feel a twinge of irritation at being expected to mentor while I’m still eating, but swallow it, along with a mouthful of rubbery cheese. I scan her story, braced for, if not car crash copy, a fender bender at the very least. But it’s good. In fact, it’s very fluid and confident for a first time.
‘This is good,’ I nod, and Zoe beams. ‘You’ve got the right angle, that the father and the uncle don’t deny that they went to see the boyfriend.’
‘What if something better comes up this afternoon? Do you stick with your first instinct?’
‘Possible but unlikely. The wheels turn pretty slowly. We probably won’t get on to the boyfriend’s evidence this afternoon.’
I hand Zoe’s notepad back to her.
‘So how long have you been here?’ she asks.
‘Too long. I went to uni here and did my training in Sheffield, then came to the Evening News as a trainee.’
‘Do you like court?’
‘I do, actually, yeah. I was always better at writing the stories than finding them, so this suits me. And the cases are usually interesting.’ I pause, worried I sound like the kind of ghoul who goes to inspect the notes on roadside flowers. ‘Obviously it’s nasty sometimes.’
‘What’s it like here?’ Zoe asks. ‘The news editor seems a bit scary.’
‘Oh yeah.’ With the flat of my knife, I push away a heap of gluey coleslaw that must’ve been on the plate when they heated it. ‘Managing Ken is like wrestling a crocodile. We all have the bite marks to show for it. Has he asked you the octuplets question yet?’
Zoe shakes her head.
‘A woman’s had octuplets, ninetuplets, whatever. You get the first hospital bedside interview, while she’s still whacked up on drugs. What’s the one question you don’t leave without asking?’
‘Er … did it hurt?’
‘Are you going to have any more? She’ll probably try to throw the bowl of grapes at you but that’s his point. You’re a journalist, always think like one. Look for the line.’
‘Right,’ Zoe’s brow furrows, ‘I’ll remember that.’
I feel that hopeless twinge of wanting to save someone the million cock-ups you made when you were new, and knowing they will make their own originals, and trying to save them anyway.
‘Be confident, don’t bullshit and if you do mess up and it’s going to come out, own up. Ken might still bawl at you but he’ll trust you next time when you say it’s not your fault. Lying’s his bête noire.’
‘Right.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I assure her. ‘It can be a bit overwhelming at first, then sooner or later, you start to recognise all human experience boils down to half a dozen various types of story, and you know exactly how desk will want them written. Which of course is when you’ve achieved the necessary cynicism, and should move on.’
‘Why did you want to be a journalist?’ Zoe asks.
‘Hah! Lois Lane.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Oh yes. The brunette’s brunette. Ballsy, stood up to her boss, had her own rooftop apartment and that floaty blue negligee. And she went out with Superman. My mum used to put the Christopher Reeve films on if I was off sick from school and I’d watch them on a loop. “You’ve got me, who’s got you?” Brilliant.’
‘Isn’t it weird how we make big decisions in life based on the strangest, most random things?’ Zoe says, sucking the straw in her Coke until it gurgles. ‘Like, maybe if your mum had put Batman on we wouldn’t be sat here right now.’
‘Hmm,’ I murmur indistinctly, and change the subject.
7
I see Mindy a mile off in her purple coat and red shoes. She looks like a burst of Bollywood sunshine compared to my kitchen-sink-drama drab black and white.
She calls it her Indian magpie tendencies – she can’t resist jewel colours and shiny things. The shiniest thing about her is always her hair. For as long as I’ve known Mindy, she’s used this 99p coconut shampoo that leaves her with a corona of light around her liquorice-black bob. I used it once and ended up with an NHS acrylic weave, made of hay.
She spots me and swings a key on a ribbon, like a hypnotist with a fob watch. ‘At last!’
Mindy isn’t kidding about it being central. Five minutes later we’re there, stood in front of a red-brick Victorian building which has changed from a temple of hard toil to a place of elegant lounging for the moneyed.
‘Fourth floor,’ Mindy says, gazing up. ‘Hopefully there’s a lift.’
There is, but it’s out of order, so we huff up several flights of stairs, heels pounding in time.
‘No parking,’ Mindy reminds me. ‘Is Rhys keeping the car?’
‘Oh yes. Given the way negotiations have gone so far, I’m glad we don’t have any pets or children.’
My mind flashes back to hours of my life I’d pay good money to have erased. We sat and worked out how to pick apart two totally meshed lives, me effectively saying ‘Have it, have it all!’ and Rhys snapping ‘Does it mean so little to you?’
Mindy slots the key in the lock of the anonymous looking Flat 21 and pushes the door open.
‘Shit the sheets,’ she breathes, reverentially. ‘She said it was nice but I didn’t know she meant this nice.’
We walk into the middle of a cavernous room with exposed brickwork walls. A desert of blonde wood flooring stretches out before us. Pools of honeyed light are cast here and there from some vertical paper lamps that look like alien pupae, or as if a member of Spinal Tap might tear their way out of them. The L-shaped sofa in the sitting area is an acre of snowy tundra, scattered with cushions in shades of ivory and beigey-bone. I mentally put a line through any meals involving soy sauce, red wine or flaky chocolate. That’s most Friday nights as I know them buggered.
Mindy and I wander around, going ‘woooh’ and pointing like zombies when we discover the wet room with glass sink, or the queen-sized bed with silvery silk coverlet, or the ice-cream-pink Smeg fridge. It’s like a home that a character in a post-watershed drama might inhabit. The sort of series where everyone is improbably good-looking and has insubstantial-sounding and yet lucrative jobs that leave plenty of time for leisurely brunching and furious rumping.
‘Not sure about that,’ I say, indicating the rug in front of the couch. It appears to be the skin of something that should be looking majestic in the Serengeti, not lying prone under a Heal’s coffee table. The coarse, hairy liver-coloured patches actually make me feel unwell. ‘It’s got a tail and everything. Brrrr.’
‘I’ll see if you can put that away,’ Mindy nods.
‘Tell her I’m allergic to … bison?’ It’s fake, I tell myself. Surely.
Standing in the middle of the living room, we do a few more open-mouthed 360-degree revolutions and I know Mindy’s planning a party already. In case we were in any doubt about the flat’s primary purpose, the word ‘PARTY’ has been spelt out in big burnished gold letters fixed to the wall. There’s also a Warholian Pop Art style print – an Indian girl with fearsome facial geometry gazes down imperiously in four colourways.
‘Is that her?’
Mindy joins me. ‘Oh yeah. Rupa does have an ego the size of the Arndale. See that nose?’
‘The one in the middle of her face?’
‘Uh-huh. Sweet sixteen present. Before …’
Mindy puts a finger on the bridge of her nose and makes a loop in the air, coming back to rest on her top lip.
‘Really?’ I feel a little guilty, discussing a woman’s augmentations in her own flat.
‘Yeah. Her dad’s, like, one of the top plastic surgeons in the country so she got a discount. So, what do you think to the flat, then?’ she says, somewhat redundantly.
‘I think it’s like that advert where they passed the vodka bottle across ordinary life and everything was more exciting looking through it.’
‘I remember that ad,’ Mindy says. ‘It made you think about people you’d slept with when you had beer goggles on though. Shall I tell her you’ll take it? Move in Saturday?’
‘What am I going to do with my things?’ I chew my lip, looking around. I was going to spoil the view by sitting down as it was.
‘Do you have a lot?’ Mindy asks.
‘Clothes and books. And … kitchen stuff.’
‘And furniture?’
‘Yes. A three-bed houseful.’
‘Do you really love it?’
I think about this. I quite like some of it. I have chosen it, after all. But in the event of a house fire, I couldn’t imagine protectively flinging myself on the occasional table nest or the tatty red Ikea couch as the flames licked higher.
‘Why I ask is, you could make a deal with Rhys to leave it. You said he’s keeping the house on? It’s going to be expensive for him to go and re-buy some of the bigger items, and a hassle. You could get money for them and then get things that suit wherever you end up buying. Or you could sell everything you own and buy one amazing piece, like an Eames lounger or a Conran egg chair!’
The Mindy paradox: sense and nonsense sharing a twin room – or even a bed, like Morecambe and not-so-Wise.
‘I suppose I could. It all depends how badly Rhys wants me out, versus how badly he wants to make life difficult for me. Too close to call.’
‘I can talk to him if you want.’
‘Thanks, but … I’ll give it a go first.’
We walk over to the window and the city rooftop panorama spreads out before us, lights winking on as dusk falls.
‘It’s so glamorous,’ Mindy sighs.
‘Too glamorous for me, maybe.’
‘Don’t do that Rachel thing of talking yourself out of something that could be good.’
‘Do I do that?’
‘A bit.’ Mindy puts an arm around me. ‘You need a change of scene.’
I put a reciprocal arm around her. ‘Thank you. What a scene.’
We study it in silence for a moment.
I point.
‘Hang on, is that …?’
‘What?’ Mindy squints.
‘… Swansea?’
‘Piss off.’
8
Mindy has to go home to work on reports for a meeting the next day so we say our goodbyes outside the flat. I’m walking to the bus home when I find my feet taking me towards the library. A few days earlier, loitering in Waterstones, it had occurred to me that if I decided to start learning Italian, I could revise at the library. Revise for the night classes I am definitely going to sign up for, soon. And then, if I ran into Ben, it’d be chance. Just fate, giving a tiny helpful shove.
As I approach, my posture gets better and my height increases by inches. I try to look neither left nor right at anyone as I walk in but can’t resist, my line of sight darting about like a petty con on a comedown. Central Library has the reverential atmosphere of a cathedral – it’s a place so serene and cerebral your IQ goes up by a few points simply by entering the building.
Inside, I unpack the Buongiorno Italia! books I happen to have on me, feeling intensely ridiculous. OK, so … wow, for a romantic language, this is harder work than I imagined. After ten minutes of intransitive verbs I’m feeling pretty intransitive myself. Let’s try social Italian: Booking a room … Making introductions … and my mind’s already wandering …
Ben knocked on my door bright and early on the first day of lectures, though not bright and early enough to pre-empt Caroline, who’s the one to call the lark a feathered layabout. I was anxiously turning my face a Scottish heather/English sunburn hue with a huge blusher brush, pouting into the tiny mirror nailed over my sink. Caroline stretched her flamingo legs out on my bed, cradling a vast quantity of tea in a Cup-a-Soup mug. It was a relief to discover that the girls in my halls of residence weren’t the demented, experienced, highly sexed party animals of my nightmares, but other nervous, homesick, excited teenagers, all dropped off with aid parcels of home comforts.
‘Who’s calling for you again?’ Caroline asked.
‘Someone on my course. He gave me my ID card.’
‘He? Is he nice?’
‘He seems very nice,’ I said, without thinking.
‘Nice nice?’
I debated whether to oblige her. We’d only been friends for a week and although she seemed sound, I didn’t want to abruptly discover otherwise when she started yodelling ‘My friend fancies yooooooo!’ across the union.
‘He’s quite nice, yeah,’ I said, with more take-it-or-leave-it insouciance.
‘How nice?’
‘Acceptable.’
‘I suppose I can’t expect you to do thorough reconnaissance,’ Caroline says, looking at the photo of me with Rhys on my desk.
It was taken in the pub, both squeezed into the frame while I held the camera above us. Our heads were leant against each other – his tangly black hair merging with my straight brown hair so it was hard to tell where he ended and I began. Rhys and Rachel. Rachel and Rhys. We alliterated, it was obviously meant to be. I’d daydreamed the two intertwined ‘Rs’ we’d have on our trendy wedding stationery invites, and would’ve put a firearm to my temple if he found out.
I glanced over at it too and felt a small tremor. Things were new and passionate, and unstable, like new and passionate things usually are, and we were forty miles apart. I’d been so elated when he’d said he wanted us to keep seeing each other.
We’d met a few months previously at my local. I used to go with my friends from sixth-form and we’d all sit with pints of snakebite and black and make moony eyes at the cool lads in a local band. They even had cars and jobs, their few extra years in age representing a chasm of worldly experience and maturity. This hero worship had gone on from afar for a long time. They were never short of female company and clearly content to keep a gaggle of schoolgirl groupies at arm’s length. Then one night I inadvertently found myself in a two-player game of call-and-reply on the jukebox. Every time I put a song on, Rhys’s selection straight after would pick up on the title. If I chose ‘Blue Monday’ he’d get up and play ‘True Blue’ and so on. (Rhys was in his ironic cheese phase. Shame it was long over by the time we really were planning our wedding.)
Eventually, after a lot of giggling, whispering and twenty-pence pieces, Rhys strode casually over to my table.
‘A woman of your taste deserves to be bought a drink.’
In a moment of sangfroid I’ve never since equalled, I found the words: ‘A man of your taste deserves to pay.’
My friends gasped, Rhys laughed, I had a Malibu and lemonade and a welcome for me and mine to join the corner of the pub they’d colonised. I couldn’t believe it, but Rhys seemed genuinely interested in me. The dynamic from then on was very much his man of the world to my wide-eyed ingénue. Later I’d ask him why he’d pursued me that night.
‘You were the prettiest girl in the place,’ he said. ‘And I had a lot of pocket shrapnel.’
There was a knock at my bedroom door and Caroline was up and over to answer it in a flash.
‘Sorry. Wrong room,’ I heard a male voice say.
‘No, right room,’ Caroline trilled, throwing the door open wider so Ben could see me, and vice versa.
‘Ah,’ Ben said, smiling. ‘I know there were a lot of freshers and cards yesterday but I was sure you weren’t blonde.’
Caroline simpered at him, trying to work out if this meant he preferred blondes or not. He looked at me, obviously wondering why I was the colour of a prawn and whether I was going to do introductions.
‘Caroline, Ben, Ben, Caroline,’ I said. ‘Shall we get going?’
Ben said ‘Hi’ and Caroline twittered ‘Hello!’ and I wondered if I wanted The First Person I’d Met In Halls to get it on with The First Person I’d Met On My Course. I had a suspicion I didn’t, on the basis it’d be tricky for me if it went badly and lonely for me if it went well.
‘Enjoy your day,’ Caroline said, with a hint of sexy languor that seemed at odds with it being breakfast time, trailing out of my door and back to her room.
I grabbed my bag and locked my door. We’d almost cleared the corridor without incident when Caroline called after me.
‘Oh, and Rachel, that thing we were discussing before? Acceptable wasn’t the right adjective. If you’re studying English, you should know that!’
‘Bye Caroline!’ I bellowed, feeling my stomach shoot down to my shoes.
‘What’s that about?’ Ben asked.
‘Nothing,’ I muttered, thinking I didn’t need the bloody blusher.
Surveying the Live-Aid-sized crowds milling around for the buses, Ben suggested we walk the mile to the university buildings. We kicked through yellow-brown leaf mulch as traffic rumbled past on Oxford Road, filling in the biographical gaps – where we were from, what A-levels we did, family, hobbies, miscellaneous.
Ben, a south Londoner, grew up with his mum and younger sister, his dad having done a bunk when he was ten years old. By the time we’d passed the building that looks like a giant concrete toast rack, I knew that he broke his leg falling off a wall, aged twelve. He spent so long laid up he’d had enough of daytime telly and read everything in the house, all the Folio Society classics and even his mum’s Catherine Cooksons, in desperation, before bribing his sister to go to the library for him. A splintered fibia became the bedrock of his enthusiasm for literature. I didn’t tell him that mine came from not being invited out to horse around on walls all that much.
‘You don’t sound very northern,’ he said, after I’d briefly described my roots.
‘This is a Sheffield accent, what do you expect? I bet you think the north starts at Leicester.’
He laughed. A pause.
‘My boyfriend says I better not come home with a Manc accent,’ I added.
‘He’s from Sheffield?’
‘Yes.’ I couldn’t help myself: ‘He’s in a band.’
‘Nice one.’
I noticed Ben’s respectful sincerity and that he didn’t make any cracks about relationships from home lasting as long as fresher flu, and I appreciated it.
‘You’re doing the long-distance thing?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Good luck to you. No way could I do that at our age.’
‘No?’ I asked.
‘This is the time to play the field and mess about. Don’t get me wrong, once I settle down I will be totally settled. But until then …’
‘You’ll collect lots of beer mats,’ I finished for him, and we grinned.
When we neared the university buildings, Ben got a folded piece of paper with a room plan out of his pocket. I noticed the creases were still sharp, whereas my equivalent was disintegrating like ancient parchment after too many nervous, sweaty-handed unfolding and re-foldings.
‘So, where is registration?’ he asked.
We bent our heads over it together, squinting at the fluorescent orange highlighted oblong, trying to orientate ourselves.
Ben rotated it, squinted some more. ‘Any ideas, Ronnie?’
My cheerfulness evaporated and I felt embarrassed. How many women did he meet yesterday?
‘It’s Rachel,’ I said, stiffly.
‘Always Ronnie to me.’
Our conversation about the stumpy passport photo came back to me and in relief and self-consciousness, I laughed too loudly. He must’ve seen my moment of uncertainty because there was a touch of relief in his laughter, too.
The best friendships usually steal up on you, you don’t remember their start point. But there was a definitive click at that moment that told me we weren’t going to politely peel apart as soon as we’d signed in and copied down our timetables.
I referred to the map again and as I leaned in I could smell the citrusy tang of whatever he’d washed with. I pointed confidently at a window.
‘There. Room C 11.’
Needless to say, I was wrong, and we were late.
