Come Together Page 16

  So deal with it.

  I look down at Amy. She’s still asleep. It would be good to join her, but too much thinking’s gone down in my head for me to slip back into a dream state. It’s tempting, of course, to slide beneath the covers and wake her up with an early morning present, but last night was a late one, so I’ll let her be. Instead, I slip out of bed and dress, go to the deli down the street. Back in the kitchen and I’m slicing up the smoked salmon and layering it on the bagels. OK, so it’s extravagant. Just like insisting on paying for that dress Amy tried on yesterday. But gestures like that are what make life sweet. What better use for money is there?

  The bed’s Amy-less when I get there, so I put the tray down on the messed-up sheets and go and check out the bathroom. This, too, is an Amy-free zone. I stand in the corridor and call out her name, but there’s no reply, so I go downstairs.

  I finally find her in the studio. The French windows are closed and it’s oppressively humid, like a jungle. She’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, dressed in white knickers and my black Hendrix T-shirt. Very Yin-Yang. But it’s not what she’s wearing that grabs my attention. It’s what she’s staring at. The half-completed painting of Sally McCullen. The half-completed painting of the quite apparently beautiful Sally McCullen. The half-completed painting of the quite apparently beautiful Sally McCullen, with a pair of tits and an arse the likes of which Willy Ferguson hasn’t seen for years.

  ‘I can explain,’ I say.

  Amy doesn’t look round. ‘This is Sally, then. This is Sally, your model.’

  ‘Really,’ I try again, ‘It’s not—’

  Amy holds up her hand. ‘Maybe I’m wrong,’ she says, still staring at McCullen, ‘but didn’t you tell me that she was – and I quote – “A total moose. Wouldn’t touch her with a shitty stick. But that’s the point with nudes, isn’t it? They’re meant to be interesting, not attractive. Otherwise it’s just pornography. It’s just some sad pervert getting his rocks off by looking at some naked girl.”’ She finally turns round to face me. Her expression would cause an SAS squad to perform a tactical trouser-soiling manoeuvre. ‘That is what you said, isn’t it?’

  ‘Well, yes, but—’

  ‘But what, Jack? That you lied to me? That she isn’t stunning? That you aren’t some sad pervert? Well? Which is it? Come on, I’d like to know. What’s the matter, Jack – cat got your tongue?’

  I stare at my feet. The cat doesn’t just have my tongue. The cat has chewed my tongue up, digested it, and shat it out into the kitty-litter. I mean, what can I say? Yes, I have lied to her. Yes, Sally McCullen is stunning. And, yes, I probably am a bit of a pervert.

  Eventually, I say the only thing I can say in the circumstances. I say, ‘I’m sorry.’ And I look down at her and hope she’ll forgive me for being such a prick.

  6

  Amy

  I HAVE NEVER been more humiliated.

  Ever.

  I am the secret love child of Attila the Hun and Darth Vader; I’m that cross.

  I look behind me at the door through which I’ve been ejected and fire a volley of two-fingered vitriol with both hands. It’s all I can do to stop myself kicking the door.

  I stomp up the road under bruise-coloured clouds, muttering under my breath. By the time I reach the station, the heavens have opened and I’m soaked.

  Amy Crosbie: all washed up.

  I didn’t think it was possible to get fired from a temp job. I thought, as a light drifter through the ranks of the employed, I was untouchable. But evidently I was wrong.

  Being in the wrong seems to be a new skill of mine.

  I don’t like it.

  OK, so I shouldn’t have blagged to Elaine that I knew every switchboard under the sun. I should’ve told the truth, but you never get anywhere unless you lie about your skills. That’s the first rule of temping: tick every ‘yes’ box on the introduction form. When Elaine called me and told me there was a highly paid two-week job in the headquarters of a big law firm, I told her immediately that I’d do it. She looked me up on the filing system.

  ‘That’s good. You’ve worked an Elonexic 950 XPCZ 150 digital pci system 2 before,’ she said brightly. ‘You’ll be fine.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ I said, not listening to a word as I mentally totted up my wages and thought about the funky shoes I’d seen in Red or Dead last week. After all, how difficult could it really be? Reception work? I can do it standing on my head.

  So it didn’t cross my mind that I might not be qualified for the job, even when I was schlepping across London to the City, or when I was striding across the acres of plush atrium to my new desk. Or even when I wriggled my bum back into the space-age chair and introduced myself to Angela from Personnel.

  But I did think about it when I was left alone with something that looked like an air traffic control system. Then it dawned on me that this time, I’d blagged once too often. Red, orange and yellow lights flashed angrily, the vast silence of the reception area interrupted with the insistent buzzing of jammed lines.

  ‘Right,’ I muttered, looking at it and rubbing my hands together, but I could already feel an earthquake under the foundations of my temping confidence. After twenty minutes, I’d failed to answer any calls and I was starting to get panicky. After an hour, Angela must have sussed. She was back down from one of the many floors above me, strutting out of the lift in her sharp pinstripe suit.

  ‘Having problems?’ she asked.

  ‘No, no,’ I smiled, realising that my headset was on back to front. ‘Everything’s fine.’

  She nodded, evidently not satisfied. I watched her go. I was determined not to give up. I had a physics O-level. This should be easy.

  It wasn’t.

  Soon, there was a barrage of frustrated callers on my hands and I was having an extension line crisis. By eleven o’clock the switchboard looked as if it was about to explode. I started jabbing buttons indiscriminately.

  ‘Shit, bollocks!’ I panicked. ‘Go away, you idiots. Stop calling! Call somewhere else. Fuck off!’

  Two minutes later the lift pinged open and a balding man in an immaculate suit was running towards me. At first I assumed that there was a fire, since he was flapping his arms so wildly, but it soon became apparent that the only hazard in the building was me.

  ‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted, skidding to a halt in front of me. ‘How dare you swear into the telecom system! Do you realise that we’ve got some very important clients in the boardroom? Your foul language has been heard on every floor! Every floor!’ His bushy eyebrows quivered with indignation and his goggly eyes seemed to be in danger of popping out of their sockets.

  I stood up abruptly, my headset trapping me to the system and yanking me down again.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he barked, as I fumbled to unplug myself.

  ‘Shepherd’s Bush,’ I squeaked, noticing the intercom button for the first time. I punched it and it went out, as did the green light on the microphone directly above my big mouth.

  Angela burst through the doors by the stairs. She rested her hand on her heaving chest as she gasped for breath.

  ‘Which agency is she from?’ demanded the man, pointing at me as Angela rushed to his side.

  ‘Top Temps,’ she gulped. ‘They’ll be hearing about this.’

  I wasn’t even given a chance to talk my way out of the scrape before the man had me by the arm and was frogmarching me to the door.

  ‘Ow!’ I yelped.

  ‘Get out!’ he said, looking at me as if I’d just urinated on the carpet. ‘I never want to see you again. Do you realise …’ He couldn’t finish his sentence, and for a moment I thought he was going to boot me up the backside as he shoved me through the door.

  I throw myself into the underground, taking solace from being subterranean. It seems to be the best place for me. I change lines at random, letting the jumble of faces and posters soothe me whilst I think about all the things I should have said. In the end, I h
ave five expertly honed retorts that would have left Angela and her henchman stunned with the deadly accuracy of my tongue.

  It’s pointless, though. I’m never going to have a chance to explain myself. I have to accept it: I ain’t the winner here.

  I decide that what I need is a change of scenery, and get out at Green Park. I dawdle up the gravel paths, feeling the weight of the world on my shoulders. It’s still cloudy, but at least it’s not raining. I pull my damp jacket around me and slump into one of the empty deckchairs.

  I close my eyes and watch the dots on the inside of my eyelids float about. I know I’m going to have to confess to Elaine. I draw my knees up and hug them. Why hasn’t someone invented teleportation yet? This is one of those occasions I’d like to be beamed up. A remote island off South America would do.

  H is away filming somewhere and I don’t want to phone Jack. After finding the picture of Sally, I’m feeling slightly detached from him. Even though he spent at least an hour explaining it all and apologising, I’m still annoyed that he didn’t tell me the truth before. He must have thought I was too flimsy to cope with the fact that he was painting someone he obviously finds attractive. What did he think? That I’d crumple into a heap of jealousy? I might have done, but that’s not the point. So now I’m trying to be cool. But I’m not feeling cool at the moment. I’m feeling like a lump of jelly.

  I can’t turn to anyone else for sympathy either. I’ve well and truly burnt my bridges there. For the past week, I’ve spent all my free time calling everyone I know to extol Jack’s virtues and rave about how wonderful my life is. Now that I’m officially a girlfriend, I’ve been spreading the word of love and exuding positive vibes around all the people who are lucky enough to be in my Filofax. That’s what I told myself anyway. But who do I think I am?

  Let’s face it. There’s nothing sharing, caring or honourable about my intentions. I just want to make everyone else green with envy.

  I positively gloated to Susie, my best mate from college, which was pretty insensitive, given the fact that she’s in a floundering relationship with a married man. After my monologue about having found meaning in the world, Susie sighed miserably down the phone.

  ‘You’re so lucky.’

  ‘You could be too.’ I paused for effect. She knew what was coming. We’d had this conversation hundreds of times before. ‘He’s never going to leave her. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I know, but I love him.’ She said this in a pathetic cockney accent, like some weathered soap star and, as usual, we ended up laughing.

  ‘I’m really pleased that everything is going so well for you,’ she admitted at the end of our call. ‘Despite the fact that I’m choking with jealousy. I’d be over the moon if a bloke was that romantic. Keep hold of him, Amy, whatever you do.’

  Whilst I felt smug, I also felt guilty having peppered my description of the relationship between me and Jack with some Oscar-winning movie moments. At the same time, I generously embellished his character with more wholesome qualities than he’s ever likely to possess. For starters, I told Susie that when Jack turned up to my flat, he was bearing a colossal bunch of pink roses and that we had caviar and champagne on our picnic.

  The picnic was great as it was. And anyway, caviar makes me puke.

  But I know why I’m doing it. I’ve been so keen for Jack to be IT that I’ve invented and exaggerated things about him to convince my friends, and therefore in the process me, that he is.

  I look up at the trees and listen to the distant jingle of an ice-cream van. I take a deep breath.

  The truth is that my life isn’t wonderful and Jack isn’t perfect.

  I think about it for a moment and then, just to complete my self-destruction, I substitute a because: my life isn’t wonderful because Jack isn’t perfect.

  Maybe I’m thinking this because I don’t know if I’m going to spend the rest of my life with him. That’s normal, I guess, for a relationship that’s as new as this, but I’m in a panic about it, nevertheless. I’ve been waiting for the right bloke to come along for so long that I’ve lost sight of reality. I thought that when my love interest eventually deigned to show up in my life everything would be clear. Love. Marriage. Babies. No mucking about.

  But the bloke I’ve been waiting for isn’t Jack. The bloke I’ve been waiting for is perfect. He’s IT.

  He’s also a figment of my imagination.

  So I’ve got Jack instead. And whilst Jack is real, he certainly isn’t perfect. There are things about him that really annoy me. Enough things for there to be a list.

  – He’s vain. I mentally cross this one out. It’s not really fair. I’m only thinking that because he’s got this habit of holding his chin and looking at both sides of his face as if he’s in a shaving advert. Ridiculous, but hardly vain.

  – He’s ridiculous.

  – He’s childish. He farts and thinks it’s funny, he swings his balls from side to side when he comes out of the shower and he sulks when he doesn’t get his own way. But then, I’m not such a model specimen of adulthood.

  – The foot thing. Every time I’m trying to get to sleep, he twitches his foot in bed. It’s a nervous energy overspill, but it makes me think I’m sleeping with Alan Shearer. When he does it against my leg, it annoys me even more because of his bad foot maintenance. Why is toenail filing only restricted to girls?

  – He seems to be more committed to his friends than he is to me.

  – He paints beautiful nude girls for a living.

  Grrrr.

  So Jack isn’t perfect. I’ll have to live with it. I can’t blame him for my misery. The fact that my life is rubbish is my fault. And it’s mine to sort out, before I freeze to death.

  I slope up to Oxford Street for the inevitable showdown with Elaine. She’s not a happy camper. She sits sternly behind the desk in the ‘private’ office we’ve come into for our ‘chat’. She tells me that I’ve let her down, that she’s extremely disappointed in me and enquires how it’s possible to be so careless etc., etc. I stand with my hands crossed humbly in front of me, nodding and shaking my head in time to her comments until it’s going in a circle, apologising profusely and generally looking as meek as I can. Eventually, Elaine’s bollocking comes to an end. She stubs her cigarette out in the gravel around the plastic rubber plant. There’s about ten in there already. Maybe she’s having a bad temp day.

  ‘This is very serious, Amy,’ she says, sucking in her pock-marked cheeks as if she’s about to decide my punishment. The thick foundation stops in a tan line under her chin. ‘In the circumstances, I don’t feel comfortable placing you anywhere else.’

  There’s been a funeral bell tolling in my head, but now as I look up and our eyes meet, there’s an almighty clang, as if Big Ben has just fallen down its tower.

  Elaine doesn’t know it, but with her last sentence she’s cleared away the fog in my life. She’s jabbering on, but I don’t hear her.

  It all becomes incredibly clear.

  One word.

  That’s all it takes.

  Placing. Elaine doesn’t feel comfortable placing me.

  I don’t need Elaine to place me!

  I’m astonished that it’s taken this to make me realise what my life’s become. When I first met Elaine, I sucked up to her, but for all my smiles and diligence, I knew I was going to use her. Temping was going to be a stop-gap for a couple of weeks until I sorted out my life and then I’d never have to see her again. But over the weeks, then the months and now years, Elaine has become a permanent fixture in my life. I’ve placed all my faith in her to find me work, because I’ve become too complacent to think for myself. When did it happen? At what point did I hand over my power and start to rely on her so totally?

  All this time, I’ve been pretending that I’m detached from it all, that I’m above being a temp and I’m in control. I’ve been contemptuous of all the jobs I’ve had and people I’ve met and mostly of Elaine herself, but it was all just a smokescreen
. The contempt has been for myself.

  So it’s got to stop. Standing here like a naughty schoolgirl, I face up to the fact that H has been right all along. I’m coasting along in my life and I’m using Jack to provide me with feelings of connection. What kind of attitude is that?

  A weak one.

  And I’m not prepared to be weak any longer. Not me. I may not be able to work a switchboard, but there’s loads more I can do. And from now on, I’m going to stand on my own two feet.

  Amy Crosbie, this is your life.

  Once I’ve placated Elaine, I leave the building, buy a Kit Kat and a magazine and take the number 94 home. On the way, I do the ‘How Well Do You Know Your Boyfriend?’ survey and find myself guessing most of the answers. When I tot up my score, I fall into the ‘Mostly Cs’ category.

  You don’t trust him yet. You need to spend more time getting to know your man and find out what really makes him tick. Your relationship will blossom if you base it on honesty and truth.

  I know these surveys are ludicrously general, but my good mood is temporarily jangled. When I get home, I strip off, have a shower and then call Jack.

  ‘You’re home early,’ he says through a yawn. ‘Hang on a minute.’ He puts his hand over the receiver and I hear some rustling about. In a second he’s back on the line. ‘So why aren’t you at work?’

  ‘The job didn’t work out. But the good news is, I’m never going back. What are you up to?’ I ask.

  You call him at home at an unexpected time of day. He doesn’t sound thrilled to hear from you. Do you:

  A. accept that he’s doing something else and is naturally distracted?

  B. challenge him and ask him what’s wrong?

  C. suspect that he’s with another girl?

  ‘Just a bit of work. I might come over in a bit,’ he says. ‘If you’re in.’

  I didn’t mean to think C. I was A all along. Honest.

  Being a girlfriend is much more stressful than I remember. It takes up so much time. I now live in a permanent state of Just In Case. Just in case I see Jack, I now find myself shaving my armpits and legs nearly every day, which is leading to a stubble management crisis; trimming my pubic hair over the loo, which is a nightmare because pubes take ages to flush away; tidying up my bedroom and putting my clothes in the wardrobe instead of leaving them on the floor; re-washing my one nice duvet cover, rather than putting on the embarrassing floral spare; shopping in a supermarket so that I have edible supplies in, rather than existing on Pot Noodles and toast, and wearing exposable underwear.