On top of my feeling like a failure because I had managed to get involved in Leeds, I was going back to London and feeling displaced, lost in the nowhere land between living in someone else’s home Up Norf and not having a definite home in London. I’d made South East London my home when I finally returned to London from Leeds six years ago and I never thought I’d feel this loneliness. It was so illogical. Why did I feel like this? I could get my flat back whenever I wanted, I had loads of contacts in London I could freelance for, I could go back if I wanted. I could be a homeowner and journalist again just like that. It wasn’t as though I’d sold everything to come to be a lodger and an employee far down on the career ladder. Just loaned it out. I felt so lost though. I’d often felt like this when I was younger – displaced and homeless – emotionally. Not really sure of where I fitted in the world.
Maybe I should just accept I’m not good with people. I may listen to them and advise them, but like I said, there were very few people who’d be there if I had a four-in-themorning panic and wanted someone to talk to. Jess was only there when her family life would allow and I didn’t even think Drew would be there should I need him. I was in constant wonder at how many people kept in touch with friends from school and college and beyond. I had friends from college, but I always felt on the outside looking in. That I wasn’t one of the first people they thought of when it came to births, marriages and reunions.
I trundled up Stanmore Vale, sighing inwardly. That was the truly ironic thing about my life, really. I could connect with people quickly. People dragged me into the deepest enclaves of their lives in the blink of an eye, but I had hardly anyone I could do that with. I gave – my time, my ear, my advice – but rarely received. Ceri D’Altroy, she who was open to callers twenty-four/seven, couldn’t get the time of day from most people.
Already on my list of advisees were Claudine and Mel and Ed. Although Ed was slightly different. He’d just opened up to me the once and had gone about his business, completely ignoring what I’d said. Claudine and Mel were, I could tell, long-termers. They’d keep coming back and coming back, neither of them noticing that when they were getting their advice and listening ear, while they unburdened their souls, I was dying to talk about myself. Talk about why I had very, very few close friendships. And why I couldn’t keep a relationship going for toffee.
My relationship history read like a horror story. During college, I had a few boyfriends, but nothing serious. I met The Love Of My Life during the third year of college – which sent Drew into such a jealous rage he’d picked a fight with me, told me to f-off and walked out, only to reappear properly when The Love Of My Life left me for someone else. I never craved anything serious after that, partly because I was still holding out for Drew, partly because relationships or my lack of them weren’t the be all and end all. Telly, junk food, reading – far more important than bemoaning the lack of a man in my life. Then I moved back to London and did my masters, where I met Whashisface Tosspot. I saw him for a year, then we moved in together. I then spent that year trying to escape whatever Jedi Mind Trick/Work Of The Devil he had me under. He was nothing like a boyfriend. We had sex, we sometimes went out, I didn’t go out with anyone else, but still, he was nothing like a boyfriend. I had no burning passion for him. Mainly because, when I’d originally snogged him I’d been trying to make him feel better. And it’d rather spectacularly backfired . . .
I knew N—Whashisface Tosspot, from college, he was in the next halls to me, he had friends in my halls and I’d spoken to him a few times. He seemed nice enough, not overly friendly, not overly unfriendly. Just nice enough. About two months into the course, I’d gone to a party with a group of people from my halls and he’d happened to be there. I’d been contemplating the wisdom of leaving my coat in one of the bedrooms; wondering what the likelihood was of it being used by someone to have sex on when he’d come over to talk to me. During the conversation he’d asked if I was seeing anyone and I’d said no. Out of politeness, rather than genuine interest, I’d asked him if he was seeing anyone (those were the kind of questions that led to people pouring their hearts out to me).
‘Umm . . .’ he’d said, then looked very uncomfortable. ‘My last relationship was cut brutally short, six months ago.’
‘Right,’ I said, and sipped on the home-made punch in my hands. It contained vodka and cranberry I was pretty sure, but there were a few other things I couldn’t quite place.
‘Yeah,’ he’d continued, ‘my lady and I were going to get married and she left me. Smashed my heart into smithereens. Now she’s cohabiting with someone else. I was completely blindsided by that. As I said, my heart was smashed into smithereens.’
I’d had a strong suspicion that the conversation was going to become a blurt session when he’d asked if I was seeing anyone, but now we were heading up that path, I was determined to take us down another route. It was Friday night, I was at a party. For once, this man who had hunted me out to blurt at me was not going to get a listening ear. I just couldn’t be bothered. It was Friday night, for God’s sake!
I decided to avert the blurt session with a bit of levity. ‘I’ve forgotten what kissing’s like,’ I joked.
‘I’ll be more than happy to help you out in that matter,’ he replied.
I jumped inside. Actually, physically jumped, then my body froze. That’d never happened before. No one who’d been on the verge of blurting at me had taken a flip comment like that the wrong way. Then again, none of them said ‘smashed into smithereens’ either.
My head moved slowly as I turned to look him over properly. I’d seen him before, of course, but I hadn’t been offered the opportunity to kiss him when I’d contemplated him before, so I hadn’t looked looked. He wasn’t bad. He had receding dirty blond hair, a largish slightly hooked nose, small eyes. In his favour, he didn’t have a mono-brow. He wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t exactly overly endowed with attractiveness, either. Nothing about him said, ‘snog me’. I’d snogged men before who weren’t even vaguely good-looking, but had something about them that drew me to them.
‘No, you’re all right,’ I replied. I really hadn’t drunk enough to snog someone whose best feature was not having a mono-brow. ‘I’m being silly. I, er, need to go to the loo. See ya.’
Later, much later, back in halls, when the group of people I’d gone to the party with had broken out the tequila and hash, I went to make coffee. It was going to be an all night session and I wasn’t drunk enough for more tequila nor sober enough to go to bed. Whashisface Tosspot came to help with the coffee making. Even though I was only making one cup for myself.
‘I didn’t mean to offend you earlier,’ he said as he fussed around the sink and I stood beside the kettle waiting for it to boil. ‘I simply find you enchantingly interesting. And attractive.’
Who talks like that? I asked myself. ‘It’s OK, I wasn’t offended,’ I replied and willed the kettle to boil faster. He fancied me, I suddenly realised. He’d more or less told me I was a bit of all right, in that odd language of his; he’d taken my comment earlier the wrong way and had been overly eager to kiss me and now, he was looking at me. I could just tell he was looking at me, acting shy and nervous – as you did around someone you fancied. I could feel something from him and at first glance it seemed to be attraction. Except, on closer inspection, it wasn’t really a genuine type of attraction. The fact of the matter was, he only thought he fancied me. Like people start to fancy their therapists or their priests, he thought he fancied me because I’d listened to his story, all two seconds of it. He could probably sense that I’d listen to his story again, should he feel the need to open up some more. And this having someone there to listen, in his mind, translated into fancying me.
It’s so obvious what his problem is, I thought, as I watched steam funnel up out of the white jug kettle. He needed someone to make him feel attractive. He’d been hurt when his (ahem!) lady left. He was probably cautious around women. Unsure of his feelings and how they??
?d be received. What he wanted, what he needed, was to win. Just once. To get an ego boost that would send him off into the world feeling like a man. Feeling that he could pull. What he needed was a mercy snog. A small act of charity that would get him back on the dating horse.
Besides, if I didn’t snog him, there was every danger he’d start talking again – and completely ruin my night.
Instead of pouring hot water on the coffee granules, I crossed the kitchen, put my arms around his neck and kissed him before I could think twice about it. He was a bit taken aback but soon his lips were kissing me back. He wasn’t that bad at it, either. We stood snogging in the kitchen for ages but when he murmured, ‘Let’s go to your room’ things came to an abrupt halt.
Kissing was as far as my charitable acts were going to go. Besides, I’d grossly underestimated the vital roles of Messrs Vodka and Cranberry in this merciful act and as I was sobering up, I was feeling far less charitable.
‘No, I don’t want to rush things,’ I replied, not wanting to undo all the good work by telling him I didn’t even fancy him.
As it turned out, he didn’t want to rush things, either: he started coming to see me every day. He wanted us to ‘date’. A lot of the time I’d open the door and wonder how to tell him that I really wasn’t interested. That I’d wanted him to get up enough confidence to find himself a girlfriend, not think he was dating me. Because, with Whashisface Tosspot, dating involved two things:
1. Coming to my room and pouring his heart out about the long-term relationship that went wrong
2. Watching telly in my room.
I was more than partial to a bit of telly, as the world had probably guessed, but watching it with him was an ordeal. He had something negative to say about everything I watched: EastEnders (dull); Corrie (people with funny accents); Brookside (people with funnier accents); Sliders (odd nonsense); Star Trek . . . well, he realised the second he opened his mouth that it could end violently. He’d survived slagging off Sliders, slagging off Star Trek was giving me mitigating circumstances at the resulting murder trial. However, because of his negativity about my viewing habits, I’d invariably be sat watching television, my body tense, waiting for some comment he thought was highly original and highly incisive.
The more I saw of him, the more he riled me. Particularly his story of woe, which, on the scale of one to ten (ten being worthy of a made-for-Channel 4 drama) was a minus five. To him, being dumped by a woman he’d thought about maybe one day asking to marry him was the end of the world; to most blokes it was a lucky escape. He felt his heart, broken and damaged as it was, needed to be poured out at every given opportunity.
I listened because I listened to almost everyone and he had no one else to listen to him, but not even I, listener extraordinaire, could listen to him murder the British language for more than thirty minutes at a go. After half an hour I’d lean across and kiss him just to stop him talking. He’d willingly kiss me back . . .
Our relationship developed from there. I started getting used to him and his language loosened up. He found other things to talk about, so I stopped getting riled by him. Also, there was no one else on the horizon, so we started to see each other – in a very casual way. In other words: no one was allowed to know about us.
To be honest, I don’t think either of us really went beyond liking each other. Actually, neither of us went beyond tolerating/liking each other. We had nothing in common, we weren’t always gagging to have sex, even in the first few weeks, and I got more laughs off the evening news. We were a passion-free zone.
Despite all this, he wouldn’t let go. He wouldn’t accept there was nothing between us and let me go. He seemed to have a sixth sense for me deciding to do the decent thing and end things. I say this because whenever I found the right time and the right words, he’d treat me to breakfast in bed, would book a weekend away in a nice hotel, or tell me how much he liked (liked) me, to remind me he wasn’t all bad. When he knew I’d made up my mind to move on, though, and that croissants and orange juice weren’t going to cut it, he’d dust off his pièce de résistance – reminding me how much he’d been hurt in the past and how grateful he was that I was helping him get over that. (My instinct to help always won out over common sense.)
At every other time he treated me with the kind of contempt most people wouldn’t put up with from someone they hated. When it came to telling people about us, he developed a mental block that stopped him actually saying the words. People thought we were friends – particularly his family (he’d never tell his family that we were together because that would mean he’d gotten over his heartbreak and he would never admit that). When we looked for flats together, we had to get a two-bedroom flat and have our own bedrooms so everyone would know we weren’t living together. Sex was rationed out so we only did it on Friday or Saturday nights, i.e. the nights when he didn’t have to get up for work. If I tried to initiate it any other day of the week, he’d always reject me, reminding me that we weren’t actually seeing each other so probably not a good idea to have sex.
I did get the last laugh on that score, though: when I started to extract myself from him I went cold turkey with sex and turned down his seduction attempts. In response they became more elaborate and fervent, even started coming on ‘school nights’. After a couple of months of ‘er, no, I don’t think so’, he realised he’d have to seek his sexual favours elsewhere and so took to pleasuring himself. Unlike most other blokes, though, he pleasured himself while stood over the loo so he wouldn’t have to clean up the mess afterwards. (And thus, his full name was born. Jess had always called him ‘Whashisface’ because to use his name would mean she’d accepted him as part of my life – and she’d never do that. When I walked into the bathroom and caught him in flagrante dewanko, the moniker ‘Tosspot’ was added.)
‘He sucks the life out of you,’ Jess constantly said. ‘I’ll never understand why someone as vibrant as you is with someone as turgid as him.’ She was right, of course, but I couldn’t seem to snap out of it.
I often looked back on that time and wondered why I put up with it. And then I’d have my answer: Jedi Mind Trick or some kind of power endowed him by the devil.
Theoretically, after I’d extracted myself from him, the quality of blokes should’ve increased. To get any lower, they would’ve had to start digging because Whashisface Tosspot really was rock bottom. So, the only way should’ve been up. Up, to lads who wanted sex on week nights, who didn’t tuck their jumpers into their trousers and who could watch telly in silence for a bit. Except, it didn’t work like that. The blokes I met were after a free therapist or were psychopaths. It was one or the other, nothing in between. In fact, by the time I met the last bloke I was seeing, I was convinced that I had NORMAL BLOKES NEED NOT TRY stamped across my forehead.
Maybe I should just accept I’m not good at human relationships, full stop. I was crap at getting close friends, I was crap at not getting embroiled in other people’s dramas and I was crap with love.
I pushed my key into the door of 17 Stanmore Vale feeling very lonely and sorry for myself. I could talk myself into a bout of self-pity faster than anyone I knew. Woe is me, I’d probably be sobbing as I fell dramatically onto my bed, the back of my hand covering my forehead. Woe is me without any friends.
I pushed open the door, hoisted my rucksack onto my shoulder and pulled my holdall through the door. As if by magic, Jake and Ed appeared.
‘Hello!’ they both screamed. ‘Hello!’
I jumped at the loudness of their hello, then took a step back, eyed them even more suspiciously. ‘Hi?’ I offered cautiously.
‘Did you have a nice time?’ Jake asked. They were both grinning maniacally.
‘It was fine,’ I said, remembering everything I’d felt like a kick in the guts. But that wasn’t for them to know. I even managed to sound happy.
Jake and Ed’s faces fell slightly, but then, in unison, they both grinned again. Now they were freaking me out. Should I close the d
oor and run away? Should I try to make it upstairs before they attempt to sacrifice me to whatever god they’d taken to worshipping over the weekend?
‘Let me take your bags,’ Ed said, coming towards me.
‘Yeah, and I’ll make you a herbal tea. I filtered some water earlier. And I went to town yesterday and bought some chocolate cheesecake.’
‘I got the Jaffa Cakes,’ Ed said.
‘Yeah, well I got the caramel digestives,’ Jake replied.
‘And I got the green olives and chorizo slices.’
‘But who remembered the focaccia?’
They were going to fatten me up before the sacrifice. I stepped even further back, ready to run for it.
‘Come in and sit down,’ Jake said.
Ed wrestled my rucksack and holdall out of my grip.
Jake came to me, and led me into the living room. I sat cautiously on the sofa nearest the window. I could make it out of the window if it came down to it. One foot on the window sill, short jump down into the paved-over front garden and I’d be away down the road before either of them could even blink.
Ed raced upstairs with my stuff, Jake legged it to the kitchen and returned with a tray of biscuits, a cup of strawberry tea and a bowl of big, juicy green olives. One of the many things on my favourite foods list.
Jake and Ed sat on the other sofa, looked eagerly at me.
‘All right, what have you done?’ I said.
‘Done?’ they asked.
‘What’s going on, why are you being so nice? What have you done?’
They looked at each other, looked at me. ‘Nowt.’