Band-Aid off a cut with a single, flamboyant, eye-watering rip, but when it came to matters of the heart, I removed things from me with painful slowness.
I decided to go out to get a video. And a bottle of wine, because there was no way I’d get through the evening without a drink.
“Gus won’t call anyway, Gus will be out with Mandy,” I said, playing “it really doesn’t matter” with the gods. If you can play that well, if you can convince the gods that you really don’t want what you really do want, then you’ll probably get lucky.
At the video shop Adrian greeted me like a long-lost sister. “Lucy! Where’ve you been?” he roared the length of the shop. “I haven’t seen you in so long!”
“Hi, Adrian,” I mouthed at him, hoping to lower his volume slightly by setting a good example.
“To what do we owe this pleasure?” he yelled. “Alone on a Saturday night? He must have dumped you!”
I smiled tightly and picked up Reservoir Dogs.
When Adrian had turned around to find my video, I gave him a halfhearted vetting. I owed it to myself, I told myself. Now that I was single again I had to keep my eyes peeled for the potential husband that Mrs. Nolan had predicted for me. He wasn’t bad, I thought wearily. Nice butt, nothing wrong with it, couldn’t fault it except for one thing, it wasn’t Gus’s butt. Nice smile, but it wasn’t Gus’s smile.
It was a total waste of time, my head was filled with Gus and I couldn’t look at another man.
Anyway I didn’t really believe that it was over with Gus—it was too soon. I needed to be hit over the head with proof, battered into the ground by it, before I could truly believe it. Giving up didn’t come easily to me. Letting go was not one of my strong points.
On the one hand I knew for certain that I’d never see
Gus again, and on the other hand I just couldn’t stop hoping that there would be some explanation, no matter how unlikely, and that we could start over again.
I went next door to the liquor store. It was full of young, happy people, buying bottles of wine and cans of beer and hundreds of cigarettes. I was suddenly pierced with the old familiar feeling that life was a party to which I hadn’t been invited. A feeling of belonging had made a guest appearance in my life while I’d been with Gus, but now I was back to feeling like an uninvited guest at life’s feast.
As I walked slowly back to the apartment, trying to waste time, I was suddenly overcome with panic, convinced that Gus was calling me at that instant. I rushed up the road and back into the apartment and breathlessly ran to see if the little red light on the answering machine was blinking. But it wasn’t. It stared and stared and stared at me and didn’t blink once.
It took forever for the evening to inch painfully, slowly toward darkness, for other people to come home from their nights out, for other people to go to bed, for the gap between me and everyone else to narrow, for me to stop feeling like the only one…
I got drunk and once again I called the number that Gus had given me. Nobody answered—luckily. Although I didn’t feel that it was lucky at the time, I was furious, beside myself with frustration and loneliness. I just wanted to talk to him, if I could have spoken to him I knew he would make it all right.
I even, in my drunken state, thought about getting a taxi to Camden and walking around and seeing if I could find him but thankfully, something stopped me—maybe the idea of stumbling across him with the mysterious Mandy. A little bit of sanity pierced my armor of obsession.
I woke to the stillness of Sunday morning. I knew, even before I got out of bed, that I was the only person in the flat, that Karen and Charlotte hadn’t come home the previous night. It was only seven o’clock and I was completely awake and completely alone.
How was I supposed to fill my head to keep the loneliness away? How was I supposed to stop myself from going mad thinking about Gus?
I could have read but I didn’t want to, there was nothing I wanted to read. I could have watched TV but I knew I wouldn’t be able to concentrate. I could have gone for a run, that might have taken away some of the terrible anxiety, but I could barely get out of bed. I was buzzing with nervy adrenaline but I couldn’t face getting up. It wasn’t just Gus that had deserted me, but my dreams of marrying him had also evaporated. Letting go of the fantasy was almost as hard as letting go of the man.
Of course, it was my own fault. I should never have taken Mrs. Nolan’s predictions seriously. I was the one who had berated Meredia and Megan for believing her. No sooner were their backs turned, than I had believed her also.
So instead of treating it like a casual fling, I had thought that Gus was the one for me and that we’d be together forever.
It wasn’t really my fault, I tried to persuade myself. Mrs. Nolan had sensed my insecurity and loneliness and told me what I wanted to hear. And, while I could take or leave the actual getting married part—you know, the white dress, arguments with my mother, cake, all that—I was very pleased with the promise of a soul mate.
How had I coped before I met Gus? I wondered. How had I filled all that empty space? I didn’t remember it ever
feeling quite this empty, but it must have, because I had lived for Sunday after Sunday without Gus.
Then I realized what had happened. He had come, filled the gap and, when he left, he took more than he had arrived with. He had charmed his way into my heart, made me trust him and then, when I wasn’t looking, had stolen my emotional fixtures and fittings, leaving my interior living room stripped bare.
I had been suckered and not for the first time.
Sunday took an eternity to pass. Charlotte and Karen didn’t come home. The phone never rang. At about nine o’clock I brought back the video, got another one and a bottle of wine. I drank the wine, I got drunk, I went to sleep.
And then it was Monday morning. The weekend was over and he hadn’t called.
Chapter 42
Hetty’s replacement started work with us that morning.
It had been six weeks since she had left, a long time for three people to spend trying to do the work of one.
But Ivor had begged Personnel for a stay of execution, a couple of weeks grace before they advertised for a new person. The poor fool had held out hope that Hetty might return to his short, pudgy, pink, freckled arms.
But she was now living in Edinburgh with her brother-in-law—very happily, by all accounts—so he had finally come to terms with it.
Our new colleague happened to be a young man. That wasn’t the random stroke of luck that it might, at first glance, appear to be. Oh no!
Meredia had arranged it that way. And the only reason that I knew about it was because I had caught her at her machinations.
A couple of Mondays before, because of a series of unfortunate accidents—my train rushed in as I reached the platform, my connecting train was actually waiting for me, etc., etc.—I had arrived early for work.
Meredia was actually in before me. That was surprising in itself, but what was more surprising was that she was already working, feverishly sorting through a pile of papers, discarding some and feeding others into the paper shredder.
“Morning,” I said.
“Shut up, I’m busy,” she muttered.
“Meredia, what are you doing?”
“Nothing,” she said, continuing to cram documents into the shredder.
I was intrigued, because she was obviously up to something. I should have known that there was no way that she’d be working at a quarter to nine on a Monday morning on work work.
I took a closer look at the pile of papers on her desk. They were job applications.
“Meredia, what are these and where did you get them?”
“They’re the applications for Hetty’s replacement. Personnel sent them down for Smelly Simmonds to look at.”
“But why are you shredding them? Don’t you want a new person in?”
“I’m not getting rid of them all.”
“I see.” I didn’t.
“Just the married women,” she continued.
“Might I ask why?”
“Why should they have a husband and a job?” asked Meredia, bitterly.
“You’re joking?” I said weakly. “Are you trying to tell me that you’re destroying all the applications from the married women just because they’re married?”
“Yes,” she said grimly. “I’m simply evening up the good fortune in the world. You can’t depend on karma to work properly. So, if you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.”
“But Meredia,” I protested, “just because they’re married doesn’t mean that they’re happy. They could be married to a man who hits them or who has affairs or who’s really boring. Or they could be widowed or separated or divorced.”
“I don’t care,” sniffed Meredia. “They’ve still had their big day, they’ve still had their waltz up the aisle wearing their fancy dress.”
“But if you don’t want them to be happy, surely the best possible thing you could do is ensure that one of them gets this job. Look at how miserable we all are!”
“Don’t try and get around me, Lucy,” she said scrutinizing another. “What do you think this Ms. L. Rogers is? Married or not married?”
“I don’t know. You’re not supposed to know. That’s why she put ‘Ms.’”
“Not married, I bet,” continued Meredia, ignoring me. “She’s only put ‘Ms.’ to hide the fact that she doesn’t have a man. Okay, she gets an interview.
“Well, look at it another way,” I suggested. “What if we get a single woman in here? Doesn’t that just increase the competition for the few available men out there?”
I had only been joking, but a spasm of horror wobbled across Meredia’s face.
“Christ, you’re right, you know,” she said, “I never thought of that.”
“In fact,” I said, feeling a bout of mischief making coming on, “you’d be much better off getting rid of the applications from all the women and just keeping the men’s.”
She liked the sound of that.
“Brilliant!” she exclaimed, hugging me. “Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant!”
I was pleased—any kind of subversion in the workplace lessened the tedium.
So she frantically flicked through the bundle of applications, and set about weeding out all the women before Ivor came in.
But the purge didn’t end there. Having the power of life and death over people had gone to her head.
“Why should we put up with some old man?” she demanded. And then proceeded to cull all of the men over thirty-five.
The once fat pile was emaciated by then and she whittled it down even more by checking under their hobbies and interests section.
“Hmmm, this one likes gardening. Say ‘bye bye’,” she said, flinging it to one side.
By the time she was finished there were only four left. Four men, between the ages of twenty-one and twenty-seven, who listed their hobbies variously as “partying,” “working out,” “socializing,” “vacationing in Ios” and “drinking.”
I had to say, it looked promising. If I hadn’t been living in a fool’s paradise at the time thinking everything was
blissfully wonderful with Gus, I would have been quite excited myself.
All four of them came for interviews over the course of that week. As each one arrived, Meredia, Megan and I loitered by reception to get a good look at them before they were whisked away to Personnel so that Blandina could ask them where they saw themselves in five years time. (“Swinging from a noose if I’m still working here,” was the correct answer, although they didn’t know. Never mind—if they got the job, they’d find out quick enough.)
We’d rate them on a scale of ten for good-lookingness, niceness of butt, etc., not, of course, that Meredia, Megan and I actually had any say in the final outcome. But that didn’t stop us from discussing them with passionate interest. “I liked number two,” said Megan. “What do you think, Louise?”
“My name is Meredia” said Meredia hotly. “And number three was by far the cutest.”
“I preferred two,” I said. “He looked really nice.”
Megan liked the sound of number four, the one who put “working out” as one of his hobbies, but when he arrived, we were all saddened to observe that he was terminally homosexual. And naturally he wasn’t picked because Ivor was about as homophobic as you could get. When he came back to the office after interviewing him, he told us many jokes along the lines of, “If I had dropped fifty pence on the floor, I wouldn’t have bent down to pick it up,” and, “Backs to the wall, eh? Guffaw, guffaw.”
“But seriously, girls,” he continued, “we couldn’t have a gay man in here.”
“Why not?” I demanded.
He went all coy. “What if he…er…liked…me.”
“You!” I sputtered.
“Yes, me,” said Ivor, smoothing back what remained of his hair.
“But he didn’t look mentally retarded,” I said, while Megan and Meredia sniggered. Ivor narrowed his eyes at me but I didn’t care, I was furious.
“What do you mean, Miss Sullivan?” he asked coldly.
“I mean that just because he’s gay and just because you’re a man doesn’t mean that he’ll be attracted to you.”
The cheek of him to think that anyone, man, woman, child or farmyard animal, might find him attractive.
“Of course he’d be attracted to me,” muttered Ivor. “You know what they’re like. Promiscuous.”
There was a chorus of outrage from Meredia, Megan and me.
“How dare you!” and “You fascist!” and “How the hell would you know?”
“What if he already has a boyfriend?” demanded Megan. “What if he’s in love with someone?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” stuttered Ivor. “And you can all shut up because we’re not hiring him. He can go off and get himself a job hairdressing, or waiting tables. He’ll be much better suited to that.”
He went into his office and slammed the door, and left the three of us positively seething.
Number two, the nice, smiley, twenty-seven-year-old, drew the short straw. He was offered the job, and he compounded his misfortune by accepting it.
His name was Jed and, although he hadn’t been the best looking of the bunch, I had a good feeling about him. He never stopped smiling, lovely big smiles. The corners of his mouth disappeared into his hairline and his eyes were nowhere to be seen—it would be interesting to see how quickly the job wiped the smile off his face.
Mr. Simmonds was very excited. “It’ll be great to have
another man around the place,” he kept saying, sloughing his hands together with glee, visualizing lunchtime pints and manly chats about cars and being able to throw his eyes to heaven and snort “Women!” and get an empathetic response.
Jed started work the Monday after Gus had disappeared on me.
I surprised myself by my resilience that morning. I got up, showered, dressed myself, went to work, wondered where I had gone wrong with Gus, but mostly felt not too bad, although in a dead kind of a way.
Megan was in the office before me, just back from a weekend in Scotland. She had been all Australian about it—why fly when you can spend twelve hours in a rattley old bus and save a little money? She had taken in about ten cities in the course of her forty-eight hours and climbed a few mountains and met a couple of guys and gotten plastered in a Glasgow pub with them and slept on the floor at their hostel and found time to send postcards to everyone she had ever met and hadn’t slept a wink and still looked beautiful and raring to go. She even brought us back a present, a slab of Scottish toffee, the good old-fashioned type that’s harder than diamond and glues your teeth together and renders you speechless.
Next to arrive was Meredia. She bustled in wearing her best curtain in honor of our new employee and pounced on the toffee, ripping off the tartan cellophane. We all dug in.
Then Jed arrived, looking shy and nervous, but still
grinning like a loon. He was wearing a suit and shirt and tie, but we’d soon knock that out of him.
Poison Ivor arrived hot on his heels and did his Important Businessman routine. He shouted and made lots of
manly physical contact and threw his head back a lot and barked with laugher. He’d copied it from the bosses upstairs. He loved to do it but didn’t often get the chance.
“Jed!” he barked, sticking out his hand and shaking Jed’s. “Good to see you! Glad you could make it! Sorry I wasn’t here to greet you—got caught up in something, you know how it is? I hope this lot of reprobates, ha ha, have been looking after you, ha ha.” He slung his arm paternally across Jed’s shoulder, and steered him over to my desk. “Ladies, ha ha, I’d like you to meet the latest addition to our team, ha, ha, Mr. Davies.”
“Jed, please,” murmured Jed.
A silence followed. None of us could speak because our jaws were glued together with toffee. But we smiled and nodded in an enthusiastic way. I think we made him feel welcome.
Ivor talked on and on about the importance of his office in the structure of the company, and about the career opportunities for Jed, “if you work hard.” He flashed the rest of us a bitter look when he said that. “Someday,” he said, “you could even end up at my level.”
Then he finished by saying, “Well, I can’t stand here all day chatting. I’m a very busy man.” He gave Jed a rueful, I-work-so-hard, one-man-toanother smile, and self-importantly sailed into his office.
There was a moment of silence. We all smiled awkwardly at one another.
Then Jed spoke.
“Asshole,” he said to the closed door.
The relief—Jed was one of us! Megan, Meredia and I exchanged proud, delighted smiles. Such promise! And he had only been in the office ten minutes. We would painstakingly mold him and guide him until he was as sarcastic and cynical as, well, maybe even, Meredia.
Chapter 43
I tried very hard not to think about Gus, and it worked. Apart from a constant feeling of slight nausea, I would barely have known how miserable I was. The sensation of having swallowed a lump of lead and not having the energy to drag the extra weight around with me was another little clue.