But when it became obvious that Jeane wasn’t coming back to school and that I was beyond fed up with people wanting to talk about her and that things hadn’t just ended badly, it had actually been the worst break-up in the whole history of breakups, Barney and Scarlett had been there for me in a low-key, low-maintenance kind of way. Scarlett wasn’t half so whiny and hair-flicky now that she was with Barney, and Barney, well, I think I’d definitely call him a mate. He was funny and we talked about computers and Star Wars while Scarlett painted her nails. I think Jeane and I had brought out the worst in them, but together they were way, way more than the sum of their parts.
Now, they both smiled and Scarlett launched into a long story about her cousin walking out of her part-time job in Claire’s Accessories because the high-pitched screaming had perforated her eardrum and Barney wanted computer advice, while Heidi kept pouting at me from the other end of the table and clamping her elbows to her tits to give herself a cleavage.
Eventually everyone was assembled, food and drink were ordered, crackers were pulled and we started on Secret Santa. I’d got Mads, which had been a major bummer because we were only meant to spend a fiver and Mads didn’t do budget. ‘I might only be able to afford Topshop, but in my dreams I’m wearing Chanel,’ she was fond of saying.
I’d had to go to Cath Kidston to pick up Mum’s present and had bought Mads a pair of hairslides with little Scottie dogs on them. They were cute. All girls liked cute. Fact. Well, girls that weren’t hell-bent on imposing their own warped notion of cute on the rest of the world anyway.
I realised my mistake as soon as Mads opened the present. Mads didn’t really do cute either, unless cute came with the Chanel logo on it. Mad’s anticipatory smile faded, then returned, twice as wide but half as bright.
‘How sweet,’ she exclaimed, in much the same way as she’d said, ‘How gross’ when she’d tried Dan’s Bloody Mary. ‘Very sweet.’ She looked around the table with narrowed eyes. ‘OK, so who was my Secret Santa?’
I timidly raised my hand. ‘If you don’t like them, I’ll give them to one of the brats and you can have cash instead.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ Mads said, holding the hairslides to her heart as if I was about to snatch them back. ‘I do like them. They’re very, um, quirky.’
‘Yeah, they are,’ Dan said. He smiled slyly. ‘The kind of thing that if, say, you were porking Jeane Smith, which apparently you’re not, you’d give her as a Christmas present.’
‘Arsehole,’ I said, because he was. ‘Please credit me with some taste. I’m not boffing her. Never was.’
‘Not any more anyway,’ he muttered, and I clenched my fists but didn’t react because if I started hurling swears and getting angry then Dan would get the reaction he wanted and everyone would think I had something to hide, so I waited a moment and gave myself enough time to come up with a crushing response. ‘Maybe it’s because you’re not getting any that you’re so obsessed with my sex life.’
‘Hey! Nothing wrong with my sex life.’
‘Does bashing one out every hour count as a sex life?’ Ant drawled and we all groaned. I thought the subject was now closed. I was wrong.
‘Come on, Michael, just admit that you were seeing her,’ Mads said. ‘And that you did go to New York with her and that you were absolutely definitely one hundred and ten per cent snogging her at the Duckie aftershow party at Halloween because my cousin’s best friend’s older sister hangs out with the Duckie crew and she said that she saw you and Jeane there and that there were pictures of you making devil’s horns with Molly and Jane on the band’s Flickr.’
‘I’m not admitting anything because it’s not true,’ I insisted.
Dan actually clapped his hands together in glee because he had a mental age of ten. ‘Ha! Two negatives make a positive!’
‘No, they don’t, and anyway—’
‘But is she preggo? How can it even be possible that someone would want to have sex with her? Urgh, does not compute. But is that why she’s left school?’ Heidi asked sulkily. ‘Because she’s totes totes totes been expelled. For real. That’s what I heard.’
‘She’s not pregnant,’ Scarlett said sharply. ‘She’s left school because, because she’s … What is she doing, Barns?’
‘Preparing for total dork domination,’ Barney said. ‘TV show, website, book, public speaking engagements and jumble sales.’
‘Barney’s helping to build her website.’ Scarlett announced proudly. ‘At the moment he’s working on this animation of Jeane as a superhero. It’s really cool. Even though Jeane would make a rubbish superhero. She’d be far too bossy in a crisis situation.’
‘I don’t even believe it,’ Heidi snapped. ‘She got expelled because she never does any work and she argues with the teachers and there’s no way that Michael would ever have sex with her because she dresses like a total pikey and she’s fat.’
I could have cried tears of sheer joy when I saw two waiters coming towards us. There was a flurry of black pepper and Parmesan, then the conversation moved on to other things. The other things were who was seeing who, who was breaking up, how we were going to fill the gaping chasm in our lives now that The X Factor had ended, and what everyone was getting for Christmas and how much it cost. Weren’t there other things, important things, we could have been discussing? It didn’t necessarily have to be about workable solutions to ending world hunger but something more challenging than how ‘blates rigged that show is, I can’t believe a single word that comes out of Louis Walsh’s mouth’.
‘Buck up, mate,’ Barney whispered, and I realised I was slumped in my chair with a scowl on my face. All that dorkside crap must have slowly permeated my skull, like dripping water carves fissures into rock, because I was sitting here thinking about how dull my best friends were and how they all dressed the same and thought the same and all the girls pretended that they didn’t want pudding for five agonising minutes until they decided that it was all right to have pudding as long as everyone else did and it was so predictable and boring that I wanted to shout at them, so it was probably just as well that my phone rang.
It would be my mother calling to see if I’d remembered tinfoil but really calling to check that I wasn’t drunk or in a foreign country.
‘I’ve had one lager,’ I said, answering my phone without even checking to see who was calling. ‘And, yes, I will remember to get tinfoil.’
There was no reply, just this muffled snorting, and I realised it probably wasn’t my mum because the person calling was crying and when my mum cried, which wasn’t very often, it was mostly silent crying.
I held my phone away from my ear and all it helpfully said was ‘Unknown Caller’ because I’d deleted her number from my address book but even though she was crying and not saying anything, I knew it was Jeane. I just knew.
33
And then it was Christmas Eve and the world went silent and still.
Well, no, that was a total lie. Not silent. Not still – especially at eight in the morning when I was making my way back from an all-nighter in Shoreditch and decided to pop into the supermarket and get my Chrimbo comestibles ahead of the rush.
It turned out that the rush had got there first. Seriously, what was wrong with these people? It was Christmas Eve and they had nothing better to do with their time than get up, get dressed and go shopping.
At least I hadn’t been to bed yet and was still in the gold Lurex and taffeta ballgown I’d worn to dance to breakbeats and dubstep in a derelict mini-mart. Doing your Christmas food shop on the way home had a completely different vibe to getting up at dawn o’clock to do your Christmas food shop in tracksuit bottoms and hoodies.
Anyway, it was a bad scene. Everyone was shoving and a woman with two small children in tow actually called me a bitch when I snagged the last tub of brandy butter and someone else grabbed hold of the back of my fun-fur coat to yank me away from the tins of Roses. I’d been in more civilised mosh pits. And of course I couldn’t find
a cab or my Oyster card so I had to walk home in the bitter cold with four bags of heavy shopping (who knew sweets, cakes and tortilla chips could weigh so much?) in shoes that hadn’t been worn in very well by their previous owner.
The light on my landing was broken and I knew the caretaker was away until New Year so I had to wrestle with my bags and my keys in near-darkness, but eventually I was home.
Home.
It felt like I hadn’t been home for days, weeks even. The flat was just somewhere that I passed through to get clean clothes, charge up iPhone, iPad and MacBook and maybe sleep for a few hours, because honestly the last month had just been a blur.
My days usually started with a breakfast-meeting, then more meetings, then a lunch-meeting. Editors, agents, TV executives, publicists, sales and marketing, they all needed to sit down for ‘face time’. In the afternoon, once America had woken up, there would be conference calls and then maybe I’d head to the web company in Clerkenwell who were helping me build adorkable.com, or the production company in Soho who were making my documentary series.
I should have hated it but I didn’t. It was a kick to spend every day talking to people who listened to what I had to say. Usually, I had to work really hard to find people outside of Twitter who got where I was coming from, but now I’d found those people.
OK, they were all at least ten years older than me, but I’ve always known that I was way more mature than my immediate peer group. I also relished the complete lack of eye-rolling when I was sounding off about something. In fact, I was positively encouraged to sound off, but it was quite exhausting having to sound off for hours at a time and people always looked a little disappointed when I wasn’t sounding off, like I was a performing seal or something.
So, after a long day of sounding off, I needed to kick back in the evenings. Luckily, there was always something to do. It was the run-up to Christmas so there were parties and drinks and bands playing their last gigs of the year and special club nights and lots of alternative Christmas dinners with friends who wouldn’t be in London for the holidays. Even Ben was being dragged off to the wilds of, well, Manchester for a big family Christmas at his nanna’s.
But now it was Christmas Eve and the mad merry-go-round I’d been on had stopped, but that was all right. Because I totes needed time to regroup. And it was really just as well that Bethan hadn’t been able to come home because, apart from heading out to Tabitha and Tom’s open-house Christmas tomorrow (note to self: order a minicab), I was going to stay in and work on the first draft of my book.
It was going to be fun. Just like the old days. I’d camp out on the sofa in my PJs eating things with lots of sugar in them, watching every single musical that the TV schedules had to offer and banging out one hundred thousand words on the Life and Times of Jeane Smith and how the world would be a totes better place if everyone was a bit more like me, yo.
There wouldn’t be any more meetings or parties but I was still going to be very busy. Being busy was what was important ’cause if I wasn’t busy and I wasn’t focused then my mind started to wander and it always wandered in the same direction and it wasn’t a direction where I wanted my mind to go.
Being busy was the key. So, although I’d had, like, no sleep, I decided that I wasn’t going to go to bed but get to work. If I went to bed, I’d wake up in a few hours’ time and then I’d stay awake all night and although I was fine about being home alone and I had stuff to do and lots and lots of things to eat, being wide awake in the wee small hours of Christmas morning would make anyone feel a little mopey, unless they were waiting up for Father Christmas. Whatever.
The weird thing was that the flat didn’t really feel like home any more. It was so tidy. Lydia, my cleaner, had pitched an absolute fit after her first session and had forced me to buy all these shelving units with ridiculous names and pretended not to understand when I protested about the IKEA-isation of the domestic sphere. She also pretended not to understand when I said it wasn’t working out and that maybe I didn’t really need a cleaner. She tidied everything. Cleaning was her crack. She even went into my sock drawer (not that I’d ever had a sock drawer before, but she’d decided that each specific type of clothing should have its own drawer) and paired them all up.
As I unpacked the shopping, I noticed that she’d even touched my Haribo and arranged them in neat rows in the fridge. Unfortunately, she hadn’t noticed that I was out of milk and bought me some, but I didn’t have the energy to go out again and get shouted at by people who had full-on trolley rage.
I just pulled off my clothes and took great delight in throwing them on the bedroom floor because Lydia had gone home to Bulgaria until the third of January, put on some pyjamas and sat down to write.
It took a while to get going but soon I was engrossed and only getting up to make another cup of black coffee or go to the loo – though I’d also forgotten to buy loo roll but I improvised with a packet of Hello Kitty hand tissues that I found in a handbag. Anyway I wrote three chapters about my formative early years, glossing over anything to do with Pat and Roy because being raised by them had been boring enough: no one wanted to read about it too.
I’d just finished summing up the amazing adventures of Awesome Girl and Bad Dog when I realised I was squinting at my laptop screen because the daylight had disappeared and the room was in darkness. I had a cramp in my right hand and an ache in my neck from hunching over my laptop. I also felt thoroughly ooky, the way you did when you’d stayed up all night and it was now four in the afternoon and you still hadn’t had a shower.
I would feel tons better once I had a shower and possibly had a home-cooked meal inside me. Or a meal cooked by my local Thai takeaway place – they always seemed very friendly, homely even, when they answered the phone. But my need to be clean was even greater than my need to stuff prawn Pad Thai into my mouth.
When I staggered into the bathroom to turn on the shower, I realised that I’d also forgotten to get shampoo, but I was sure I had some little bottles that I’d nicked from various hotel bathrooms. I’d hunt for them while I waited for the shower to heat up. Except when I tried to slide back the shower door it was alarmingly wobbly and then it stuck, leaving a gap so small that I couldn’t even squeeze myself into the cubicle.
Lydia had obviously done something, because as well as getting up in my grill about my standards of cleanliness she was always breaking stuff as she charged around the flat with a damp cloth in one hand, dragging the vacuum cleaner behind her.
For one moment the enormity of not being able to get in the shower seemed almost too enormous, but that was just ridic. It was a fricking shower door and I wasn’t going to let it get the better of me. I would simply use some common sense and, if that failed, brute strength.
First I squirted some body lotion along the bottom of the door to get things going but it didn’t make one bit of difference. Then I tried to close the door, but it was stuck fast, and then I took a deep breath, tensed all my muscles and shoved the door as hard as I could. I didn’t just shove, I kind of hefted it too – actually I don’t know exactly what I did but the door lifted off its bottom track and it was really, really fucking heavy, and I was trying to get it back in place and not have it land on top of me or take half the bathroom tiles off with it but I couldn’t and I was gripping it so tightly that I bent back one of my fingernails and I had to use my whole body just to prevent it crashing to the floor when it slid out of my grasp.
‘Could be worse,’ I muttered out loud. It really could. Nothing was broken, though my hands were stinging like I don’t know what.
So then I couldn’t take a shower because the shower door was currently propped against the cubicle but I could ask the caretaker to come up, except he was in Scotland and Gustav and Harry were in Australia and Ben was in Manchester and Barney was with Scarlett and what was the point of having all these people to help me build a lifestyle brand and half a million followers on Twitter when it was Christmas Eve and I couldn’t have a shower
and there was no one to remind me to buy milk and shampoo and toilet roll because I was all on my own?
The buck stopped with me.
And being alone and being lonely were two different things but they felt exactly the same: they felt horrible. Christmas Eve was like Sunday evening but to the power of a gazillion, then tomorrow it would be Christmas Day and being alone and being lonely would feel even worse and I’d probably left it far too late to book a cab to take me to Tabitha’s anyway.
I realised I was crying, though generally, as a rule, I didn’t do crying. I couldn’t see the point. It didn’t achieve anything. It wasn’t useful and it just made me feel worse.
Made me feel so helpless that I was reaching for my phone to call the one person who I tried not to think about because if I did they’d be the only thing I could think about. We hated each other now and we hadn’t talked in weeks but I knew, I just knew that if I asked him to come round, to make the loneliness stop, to fix my bloody shower door, he’d be there.
For me.
34
‘What’s up?’ I asked, not unkindly but not like we were cool and she could just call me whenever she was feeling a bit down.
‘I’m sorry,’ she spluttered. ‘You were the last person I wanted to call, but I’ve called everyone else and you’re the only one left. The only one!’
OK, you’d have to be made out of concrete not to feel something when someone you’d had some of your best and worst times with was crying their eyes out and you didn’t know why.
‘What’s the matter? Are you all right?’
‘No. Nothing’s right and I don’t know what to do.’ She ended the sentence on a wail then she was crying too hard to talk.