‘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 import-ant 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 wa
sn’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.’