Having never been fired, let go or otherwise excused before in my life, I wasn’t sure what the correct protocol was. For the first time, I was thankful everyone else in the office were such lazy bastards. There was no one to see me snivelling and shoving my belongings into a reusable Tesco shopper, except for a terrified-looking intern and the graphic designer who everyone knew sniffed Bostick in the toilets. The company was going under and I was being let go, but the glue-sniffer kept his job. It was perfect.
I picked up my stapler and stared at it for a moment. I couldn’t remember a time when I didn’t have a plan. Whether it was setting up the girl’s football team in junior school because I had declared the PE teacher sexist, turning a profit on the refreshment stand at the village panto, or making sure I was sitting next to Jason Hutchins on the year ten bus trip to Alton Towers, I always had a plan. And the Cloverhill Panthers had come third from last in our local division, watering down the Ribena at the panto until it was basically pink piss had made exactly four pounds and seventeen pence, and for two precious hours and thirteen minutes, Jason Hutchins had been all mine. I always had a plan and that plan always worked. I dropped the stapler in my bag and walked out the door.
After a ten-minute wander down Theobalds Road, I found myself in Bloomsbury Square, shopping bag in one hand, dignity in the other. Hobbling over to an empty bench, I kicked off my new shoes without worrying what the British summertime mud would do to the gorgeous nude suede and stared vacantly at two dogs running up and down the park. They always looked happy, I thought, as I pulled all the pins out of my elaborate updo one by one. Dogs were always happy. Dogs didn’t have a plan. Dogs hadn’t been climbing up a career ladder for the last seven years. Dogs hadn’t been hopelessly in love with their best friend for the last ten. Well, I couldn’t hand on heart say that was definitely true, but it seemed unlikely.
I rifled around in my Tesco bag looking for something to spur on an emotion that wasn’t pathetic. All that was in there was my stolen stapler, three framed photos, a brand-new box of Special K cereal bars and about seventeen different pens. (Lots of highlighters. I liked a highlighter.) That was it. Seven years and I’d erased all evidence of my very existence from the office in one half-full environmentally-friendly shopping bag.
I pulled the photos out, one by one, and laid them on my black-clad knee. The first was of me and Amy, little-girl versions of me and my best friend, dressed up as princesses and hugging desperately for the camera. The next one was a more formal shot of me, my sisters, my mum and my grandmother, looking considerably less chipper. We weren’t huggers, the Brookeses. Someone basically had to die to convince my mother to go further than a stern pat on the shoulder. When my first granddad had passed away, she had ruffled my hair. It was intense. The third and final photo was of me and Amy again, this time all grown-up and joined by Charlie, my co-worker, best boy friend and the man I had been in love with for the past decade. The three of us were slouched on a sofa in some random Parisian hotel in front of a huge mirror with another one behind us. My face was obscured by the camera that had gone everywhere with me that summer, but my denim cut-offs and stripy T-shirt echoed endlessly in the reflections of the two mirrors. Charlie and Amy’s reflected faces smiled back at me. Amy was on my left, deep in her Amélie phase, black hair cropped close to her head and legs stretched out, draped across me and Charlie. To my right, the love of my life rested his head on my shoulder and held a lit cigarette off to the side, so as not to drop the ash on my bare skin. Even though you couldn’t tell by the photo, I remembered I was smiling. We were the three musketeers. Rock, paper, scissors. Amy was the scissors, Charlie was the paper and I was the rock. I was always the rock.
Slowly but surely, I felt my breathing return to normal and the tension in my shoulders ease ever so slightly. Just in time for me to realize someone was sitting beside me on the bench.
‘Morning.’ An incredibly average-looking man with a shaved head and a black bomber jacket gave me a sideways nod.
‘Morning,’ I replied, carefully placing the photographs back in my bag. No reason not to be polite. This was my life now, after all. Just sitting around, talking to the other non-workers-slash-vagrants in London’s parks while I lived vicariously through the dog ownership of others. I wondered if the Tesco near Russell Square sold White Lightning. It felt like the day was missing a bottle of White Lightning.
‘Don’t make a scene,’ the man said, moving down the bench towards me and looking straight ahead. ‘Give me your wallet and your phone.’
‘Sorry?’ I wasn’t quite sure I’d heard him properly. Was I being mugged? After seven years in London, was I actually being mugged? Not bloody likely.
‘Phone and wallet. Now.’ He pulled a small Swiss Army knife out of his pocket and gave me as scary a look as he could muster. ‘Don’t make me make you.’
Still not quite with it, I tilted my head to one side and stared. I couldn’t help but think he’d be scarier with hair. He looked like an overgrown baby.
‘I haven’t got a phone,’ I replied. This was actually happening. I was being mugged by a giant baby in a bomber jacket. ‘And you can’t have my wallet. There’s nothing in it anyway and it was a present.’
‘Everyone’s got a phone.’ He sounded a bit taken aback. ‘Give it to me now.’
‘No, really.’ I opened up my handbag and tipped it upside down, emptying the contents out onto the bench between us. Three lipsticks, a powder compact, my keys, more tampons than anyone could ever feasibly need and even more pens clattered against the wooden slats. I picked up my wallet and stuck it between my knees. I meant what I said – I’d already told him he couldn’t have that and I wasn’t about to go back on my word to a criminal. ‘See? No phone. I just got fired. They took my phone. Have not got one.’
‘You haven’t got a phone at all?’ The would-be mugger was visibly shocked. ‘That’s bollocks, that is.’
‘It really, really is,’ I agreed.
We sat in silence for a moment.
‘Haven’t got a job either,’ I said as I started scooping up my belongings and dropping them back in the bag. It seemed he wasn’t nearly as interested in highlighters as I was. Probably didn’t have much call for them in his game. ‘Phone’s not such a problem.’
‘Me neither,’ he replied, grabbing a couple of tampons and popping them into my handbag for me. ‘Had one. Lost it. Fucking Tories, innit?’
‘I suppose the recession has been hard for everyone,’ I sympathized. ‘It’s a tough time.’
‘Do you need to call anyone?’ the big baby asked. The man dug his hand into his non-knifey pocket and produced a brand-new iPhone. ‘You can use my phone if you want.’
‘Actually, that would be amazing,’ I said, readily accepting the handset but ignoring the controversial cover design. Pretty sure they didn’t sell Swastika iPhone cases in Carphone Warehouse. This was definitely home-made. ‘Thank you.’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll give you a bit of privacy.’ He nodded curtly, stood up and wandered a couple of feet away. I watched as a worried-looking middle-aged lady in a waxed jacket and an Alice band took a very sharp and sudden detour. I looked away as he followed her.
‘Hello?’
‘Amy.’ I would never answer the phone to an unknown number. Amy always would. ‘It’s me.’
‘What phone are you on? What’s going on? Did they give you a new phone. Did you get an iPhone? Have you got Siri? Can I ask him a question?’
‘It’s not my phone.’ I cut her off before she could come up with anything filthy to ask the omniscient Siri. ‘Are you at work?’
‘Yeah.’ She didn’t sound convinced. ‘Until five.’
‘Oh. I got the sack and I thought you might want to get very, very drunk.’
‘STELLA!’ I snapped my head away from the handset as Amy bellowed at her boss without moving the phone away from her mouth. ‘I’ve got a migraine. I’m going home. All right?’
‘I don’t think you can shout that loudly if you’ve got a migraine,’ I pointed out.
‘Be at yours in half an hour,’ Amy replied, ignoring me. ‘Don’t kill yourself before then, OK?’
‘OK,’ I said. It hadn’t actually occurred to me before she brought it up, but the Thames was awfully close by and it would save me from having to sign on. I didn’t actually know where the job centre was. Maybe my new friend could tell me. Or maybe I should just kill myself. Amy had hung up before I could ask her opinion and I noticed the phone’s owner hovering nearby. I hung up, smiled and held it out to him.
‘You know what?’ He waved my hand away. ‘Have it. I can always get another one.’
‘Oh no.’ I tried to press it back into his tattooed hand. ‘I couldn’t possibly. Really, I couldn’t.’
‘No, take it.’ He pressed it back into my hand and stood up. ‘How are you going to get another job without a phone? Just have it.’
‘Well, thank you very much.’ I gave him my cheeriest smile. ‘That’s really lovely of you.’
‘No worries.’ He held up his arm in a salute I vaguely recognized, and not from Brownies. ‘And don’t worry yourself. Fit bird like you? You’ll be fine. Just remember, fuck ’em all.’
‘Yeah, fuck ’em all,’ I repeated, trying to reconcile the fact that his compliment made me happy with the fact that it came from a man who was clearly some sort of neo-Nazi.
I watched my fairy godmugger wander off across the park, the edges of my stolen, swastika-emblazoned phone cutting into my palm, and just as it started to rain, I started to cry. And I did not know how I was going to stop.
The girl I met in the mirror at home was not the same girl who had left my flat three hours earlier. Her smart chignon had turned into a tangled mess of sodden curls, and the carefully applied but terribly subtle make-up was all gone, either cried or rained away. The brown eyes that had been so sparkly when they left the house were dull and rimmed with red. My simple black shift dress was wet through, now considerably less office chic – more black-latex-condom-frock with a Pritt Stick still in the pocket. At least now I understood why that little boy had burst into tears when I’d smiled at him outside Superdrug. I was still staring at my reflection, willing what I believed to be three new wrinkles on my forehead to go away, when the front door flew open and a tiny black-haired woman blew inside, hurling herself at me before I could even draw breath.
‘Oh my God! What happened? What did you do?’ Amy leapt up onto her tiptoes and crushed me in a bear hug. ‘Did you punch someone? Did you photocopy your arse? Did you embezzle them for millions?’
‘Downsizing,’ I choked, disengaging my soggy self from her arms. ‘There was a “restructure”.’
‘You know I hate when you use air quotes,’ Amy said, slapping my hands down by my side. ‘And that’s really, really disappointing. You didn’t punch anyone? Not even Charlie?’
Amy and I had been best friends since we could speak. Before that, I’m assured that we got on very well. Born six weeks apart, our mums had been besties ever since they’d bonded at an aerobics class in the village hall. We had marked every major milestone together – from first words and first steps right through to most recent snogs and latest hangovers. We were always there for each other in times of need, whether that need was me running out of teabags before there was such a thing as a twenty-four-hour Tesco in East London, or Amy walking out on her fiancé, Dave, three days before her wedding. She never had been good at making a decision and sticking to it. In the past two years she’d had three jobs and four zero percent credit cards, but when it came to me, she was as dependable as Ken Barlow and fiercely loyal. I couldn’t fault her.
‘I didn’t get a chance to punch anyone.’ I still couldn’t quite believe what had happened. I was redundant. I’d been called a lot of things in my time, but the ‘R’ word was the worst. ‘HR called me in. I thought it was just paperwork stuff for the promotion, and then they told me they were letting me go.’
The words stuck in my throat.
‘Nothing dramatic. Nothing exciting. Just restructuring.’
‘Are you OK?’ She eyed me cautiously, as though I might suddenly lose my tiny mind and bust up the entire apartment. It was fair. If I had been capable of feeling anything at all, there was a chance I might have. ‘Your job is, like, your everything.’
Just what I needed to hear.
‘I’m not anything,’ I said carefully. My mouth felt thick and the words weren’t coming out quite right. ‘I don’t feel anything.’
‘Nothing?’ Clearly I’d given the wrong answer. ‘Not angry or sad or confused or, I don’t know, stabby? Sometimes I feel stabby when I get the sack.’
Amy got the sack a lot.
‘Nothing,’ I repeated. ‘Just … a bit blank. A bit cold.’
‘Emotionally cold?’ She was far too eager for my liking. ‘Do you feel dead inside?’
‘Physically cold.’ Maybe calling her had been a bad idea. ‘And like I need a wee.’
‘Yet more disappointment.’ Amy dragged me through the tiny living room and into the kitchen to pop open one of the three bottles of cheap fizzy wine that were clinking together merrily inside a Sainsbury’s bag. ‘I don’t get it. Surely they can’t fire you. Everyone knows you’re the only one who does anything at that place. Have you gone mad? Did they fire you because you’re mad? What did Charlie say?’
‘He wasn’t in when I left.’ I accepted a Snoopy mug full of cava and gulped it down. Cheap fizz burned. Burning was good. ‘I don’t know if he knows.’
Of course Charlie would know. Everyone would know. Everyone would know that I had been fired. Every. One.
‘He hasn’t called?’ Amy topped me up before helping herself to a packet of Pop Tarts from my flatmate’s cupboard and sticking them in the toaster. I didn’t have the energy or inclination to stop her.
‘HR took my phone,’ I said, rummaging around in my handbag for my new-to-me iPhone. ‘Happily, I was the victim of a reverse mugging in the park and someone gave me this.’
My tiny bestie snatched the phone out of my hand and examined it carefully without asking me to elaborate. ‘Ooh, it’s a new one. Good result. Weird case.’
I took it from her, removed the offending cover and handed it back. ‘I can’t keep it. It’s stolen.’
‘Swapsies, then? You can have mine.’ She pressed several buttons and coughed before speaking. ‘Siri, why are Donovan & Dunning a bunch of wankers?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what you mean by that,’ he replied. Very diplomatic for an inanimate object.
I leaned against the kitchen wall, sipping my second, surreptitiously refilled mug of cava and staring out over the East London rooftops. They were exactly how I’d left them this morning. As I concentrated on the unchanging chimney pots, stupid things kept popping into my mind, like what was my mum going to say? What was I supposed to do when my alarm went off tomorrow morning? Would I end up homeless? I didn’t know how to go about getting a job. I’d been at Donovan & Dunning since I’d left uni. Before I left uni even – I’d interned there my entire final year. I was going to have to write a CV. Did people still have CVs? Was there something I was supposed to tweet? Maybe there was an unemployment app on my new phone. Most upsettingly, all of the unfinished jobs I’d been doing at work were bothering me. Someone needed to proofread the final air freshener presentation. And who else would take care of the copy for the new baked beans advert? Maybe they’d just lift it from an episode of Mad Men, save some time.
For the want of something better to do, I pressed my back against the cold kitchen wall and slid down to the floor. Ahh. That was better. Amy sat on the kitchen top, phone in one hand, Pop Tart in the other, gazing down at me with concern. It didn’t feel right. I was supposed to be the one who looked after her.
‘Tess,’ she said. I peered at her over the edge of my Snoopy mug with wide eyes. ‘You’re sitting on the kitchen floor in a piss-wet-through dress.’
‘I am.’ She was not wrong.
‘Your head is on the bin. And the bin smells.’
‘It is.’ Again, stellar observational skills. ‘And it does.’
‘Do you think you should maybe go and get changed?’
I didn’t think I should get changed. I was scared that if I took off my work dress I wouldn’t have anything to put on but my pyjamas, and if I put on my pyjamas I might never, ever take them off again. Had Michael remembered about lunch with that awful man from the car company? Eventually, Amy took my silence as a no.
‘How about a bath? You must be freezing?’
A bath sounded equally depressing. There was nothing to do in a bath that didn’t involve sobbing or razor blades. I wondered if Sandra the designer had remembered to change the colour of the squirrel in that paper towel concept.
‘Tess, I’m going to need some verbal feedback from you.’ Amy put down her breakfast long enough to snap her fingers in front of me. ‘What do you want to do?’
I looked up, pushed my scummy hair out of my face and shook my head.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I honestly don’t know. I don’t know anything.’
For the second time that day, I started to cry. My mother would be mortified.
With a sad sigh, Amy hopped down off the worktop and curled up beside me and the bin. ‘I know it must feel like shit,’ she said, sliding her arm between me and the wall and forcing a hug. ‘But you’re better than this. You know you’re amazing at your job. Whatever reason they have for whatever they’ve done, it’s going to be their loss. That place was killing you. You’ll have another job, a better job, at a better agency, this time next Monday. You know I’m right.’
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.
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