Chapter Nine

On the tube journey home I didn’t stare at anyone. I didn’t exchange glances with the best-looking women in the carriage only for them to turn away in disdain, or attempt to size up the men without their noticing to see which ones would be most able to kick the shit out of me, should the occasion arise.

Instead, I saw Lucinda walking through an open-plan office as though down a catwalk, hungry eyes searching for a glimpse up her skirt. I couldn’t help it. Despite everything I’d thought earlier – she’s insane, she’s a chronic, pathological liar, she’s an exhibitionist – despite the fact that, if what she had said was true, she had been the only one to blame, I couldn’t stop myself wanting to growl at anyone who had had the chance to paw at her. Whether they had taken it or not didn’t matter.

At home, I found Janette in the kitchen, rapping along to ‘Still Dr. Dre’ and shaking her ass while chopping tomatoes and some green stuff with the window open, stereo on full blast. As I walked in she turned around, still dancing, and winked at me, tomato in one hand, knife in the other.

I imagined Lucinda slicing tomatoes in her flat and felt my heartburn flare up again. I searched in my pockets for some renus.

“I’m representing for them gangsters all across the world, still hitting them corners with them low lows girls –” she cut off mid-rap, seeing me intent on feeling my pockets.

“They’re on the counter, Stan. You forgot them together with your ipod and the phone bill I’d asked you to take to the paypoint.” She switched off the stereo and turned back to the chopping board.

“Shit. Shit. Shit. I forgot. I’m sorry. I’ll do it tomorrow on my way to work.”

“Yeah, except meanwhile, the phone’s been cut off. And it’s the third time I’ve asked you to take care of it. I tried calling your mobile but it was off.” She kept her back to me and started chopping again.

“I know. I’m sorry.” I moved up behind her and tried to nuzzle her neck. “Can’t you use skype until I get it sorted?”

I felt her stiffen in my arms. “The internet’s been cut off together with the phone.”

“Oh.”

She sighed. “Get me some coriander from the fridge, would you?”

“What does it look like?” She slammed the knife down on the counter, shoved past me, glaring over her shoulder, and stalked to the fridge.

“Never mind.”

I stood in the middle of the kitchen, arms at my side, feeling a bit foolish as I watched her lean into the fridge and rummage around while swearing under her breath.

“Seriously. I’ve never heard of coriander. I’ve never tasted the stuff.”

She turned around to face me, a plastic bag of green herbs wadded in her hand. She thrust it at me.

“This,” she hissed, “is coriander. And you have tasted it. In the tabouleh I made yesterday, which you ate at midnight when I was already in bed since you neglected to mention you’d be having pizza with Lucinda.”

She paused dangerously.

“In the pesto pasta salad I packed for your lunch on Thursday – no, wait, I forgot. I found it unopened Thursday evening. You’d gone to Pret for lunch.”

Another eerie moment of silence.

“In the Thai lemon and coriander chicken I made on Monday, which you did eat – straight from the fridge on Tuesday morning since you were out – you neglected to mention where – all night.” She smiled, suddenly. A huge, brilliant, disarming smile. It made her look incredibly young – 16, 17 tops. It was sudden. And it was staggering.

“Come to think of it, Stan, you’ve neglected to mention a lot of things lately. And you’ve neglected me. Can you tell that’s my word of the day – actually, Friday’s word of the day, courtesy of the desktop calendar you gave me for the office. ‘Neglect: to pay little or no attention to; to fail to heed; to disregard; to fail to care for or attend to properly.’ You know what I thought when I read that on Friday? You know what I thought, baby? I thought ‘Huh. That sounds familiar. I’m being neglected.’ And I thought, ‘Why didn’t I notice that earlier?’ And then I thought, ‘I don’t like being neglected.’ And now that Dan says they need more people in the New York office – ” she stopped, smiling sweetly – primly, even. She opened her eyes wide, then let her lids droop provocatively, leaning back against the refrigerator door. “Can you guess the end of the sentence?”

I stood, stunned. I thought, This is what it means to be rooted to the spot. I thought, Please God don’t let her open her mouth. I croaked, “New – York?”

The sultriness was gone. Her eyes turned normal again, her posture straightened. “What did you expect, Stan? That I’d marry you, and then we would live the three of us together, me, you and that crazy bitch? This isn’t one of your erotic novels. Which, incidentally, would appear to have all been written by men. But, hell, what do I know? I’m a financial consultant. A junior financial consultant. I don’t use big words. I make grammatical mistakes. I don’t express my feelings in rapturous turns of phrase. You like that? ‘Rapturous turns of phrase?’ I got that from one of your books. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, maybe? I can’t remember. I’ve read a lot of books while you’ve been out on the town with – ” Her lower lip trembled. “Anyway, point is, I’m leaving for New York in two weeks. I was going to tell you last week – Monday, in fact, over a candle-lit Thai dinner. Pathetic, right? I was going to let you talk me out of it. Tell me how much you love me. But today I called Dan at home. I said I’d had enough time to think about it, and that I’d ‘welcome the opportunity to test my abilities further.’” She crossed her arms in front of her chest and thrust out her chin. “Sound familiar?”

I nodded, numbly. It was the conclusion to every job application I’d written. We’d joked about how I’d gotten a job only after she’d re-written both my cv and my cover letter.

She looked down and mumbled into her chest, “I’m leaving at the end of the month.”

Chapter Eight

Visiting Lucinda became a habit in a matter of days.

One week, I was a slave to coffee, to Anthony, Gary and Alex's endless supply of online pussy, to the digital clock on my computer screen charting the passing minutes of the day - in other words, to acting the part of the quintessential working man and no one called my bluff.

The next week, I was a slave to the coffee shop girl across the street.

From quintessence to cliche'. I'm not sure which is worse.

In the first three months of knowing her, I succeeded in spending something close to £144.00 in coffee. I know, because I did the arithemetic in my head twice a day - every time I handed over my debit card - and died a small death each time.

£1.25 x 2 for two inches' worth of coffee a day.

£1.25 x 2 for two glimpses of the Pret girl.

And I never even got a free cup. Because she did everything by the book, never stepped out of line.

Months later, I found out why.

By then, we had moved beyond mid-morning and lunchtime banter. First, I had convinced her to go for drinks after work. Then, we had started spending an occasional Saturday or Sunday afternoon together, usually in or around Hampstead Heath - minutes from her flat. (How she could afford to rent a one-bedroom flat in Hampstead on her minimal salary was yet another mystery.)

Eventually, the occasional Saturday or Sunday had become a tacit tradition.

“So when did you start working at Pret?” I asked. It was a Sunday in early June, and we had just finished eating a rather large lunch in a pub around the corner from the flat, and I needed something – anything – to shake me out my post-prandial stupor.

“A month or so ago. When I got fired from my last job.”

“Oh, wow. Shit. I’m sorry.”

“It’s ok. It’s not like my dog died or anything. It was just a job. It’s too bad, though. I was pretty good at it.”

“What did you do? I mean, what was the job?”

“I worked for a marketing consultancy. Studying brands. Why people buy what they buy, what makes you choose a product over another, cheaper variety. How to attain customer loyalty. That kind of thing. The irony is, Pret used to come up regularly in the reports I wrote. Once, I had to test the recipes in the book they published last year – you know, the one that shows you how to make your own Pret sandwiches at home? And now I know the recipes by heart, since I make that shit every day. It’s so ingrained, I can’t make a salad at home without counting the tomato slices.”

“Is that bad? Counting the tomato slices?”

“Are you kidding me?” She looked at me with disbelief. “It’s deflating, is what it is. It’s dispiriting. It signals the death of creativity.”

“Ok, so don’t count them,” I tried. “Omit the tomato. Or eat it whole.” I got a flash of inspiration. “Or… don’t eat salad. Boycott raw vegetables. How’s that?”

She sighed in frustration. “You don’t understand, Stan. It’s not the vegetables that are the problem.”

It was as if her dog had died. And I had sniggered when she told me. Her dog had been murdered – slaughtered in front of her eyes, butchered into bite-size chunks, and I had broken into a fit of hysterical, uncontrollable laughter.

I tried another tack. “So why did you get fired? If you don’t mind my asking?” It couldn’t get much worse than my insulting her tomatoes.

She had gotten over my stupidity, though, and looked perfectly nonplussed. “Oh, I flirted too much.”

“You what?”

“Yeah, I tried it on with my supervisor – my married, just-promoted, stick-by-the-rules, part-of-the-establishment supervisor – in front of, well, everyone. In the most ‘inappropriate’ way possible. That’s what they said, at least. That it was in an inappropriate context. Meaning that if we had been drunk in the pub after work or at an office party or something it would have been fine. Because they could have looked the other way. Even he could have looked the other way. He could have carried on an entire conversation with his line manager while downing pints with one hand and groping me with the other. But in an open-plan office there’s no where else to look.”

As if acting out her own description, she had averted her eyes and was now looking past me, her expression verging on spaced out as she repeatedly pressed her spoon against the soggy tea bag in the saucer next to her empty cup.

“But what did you do? I mean, did the two of you actually - ?” I couldn’t help picturing her, bent over a photocopy machine in some poorly-lit backroom, a faceless figure thrusting into her from behind. I felt sick.

“My God, no. I told you. I got fired for flirting, not fucking. Like I said. He was married. And with a five-month-old baby daughter. You can’t compete with a baby.” She had sliced through the tea bag, scattering tea leaves onto the table.

“But – did you want to? Were you trying to get him into bed?”

Her eyes snapped back into focus, and she was suddenly looking at me, intent and angry.

“What the hell is this? Twenty questions? Of course I wanted to. That isn’t the point though, is it? You don’t get fired for wanting to fuck someone. Or for wanting to ‘fuck everyone in the department’ – that’s what one of the guys on my team accused me of once, can you believe it? I didn’t bat an eye, though. ‘Everyone but you, Alex.’ I said. The fucker. Ugly as sin, probably hadn’t gotten laid since secondary school.” Mid-diatribe, I was certain, she’d forgotten I was there.

“But what did you do?”

“Oh, I said once, off-hand, that I’d totally bang him if I got half the chance. It was a joke, right? Big deal. I was bored. But the fact was, it was true. I was crazy about him. And in a small team of six or seven people, if one of you is always staring at one of the others and making them squirm with your ‘inappropriate’ comments and making the others feel, as I was told, ‘ill at ease,’ and management gets a whiff of it – you end up in the shitter. So I, you know, ended up in the shitter.”

“You told your boss you wanted to bang him? Yeah, that is kind of asking for trouble, Lucinda.”

“Oh, not just that. I neglected to wear any underwear on a couple of occasions. Just to see if I could get away with it. Turns out I couldn’t.” Her eyes had turned mischievous, now – playful, even. She looked half-sheepish, half-smug.

“I mean, body-wise, I totally could. I’ve got great thighs. You must have noticed.” She paused and looked at me, expectantly.

“Absolutely,” I agreed. What was I supposed to answer?

“If they’d been less firm, they would have just wobbled over the tops of my hold-ups. But in terms of not getting caught with my pants down, or in this case, off, great thighs are more of a hindrance than a help. They attract attention. And if people stare at something day-in, day-out, they become familiar with it. Learn to recognise its contours – and notice the slightest change. Like, for example, when a lack of visible panty line is because you’re wearing a thong, or when it’s because there’s no panty to speak of. I mean, at Pret, I can tell at a glance when a salad doesn’t have enough olives. I should have taken that into consideration.”

She was beginning to sound slightly crazed, to the point where I was no longer aroused – or jealous. Against my better judgement, I voiced my thoughts.

“Olives? What are you saying? You’re talking crazy, Lucinda. You’re talking as if everyone in your office spent their time scrutinising your ass. Which, face it, amounts to wishful thinking. And you’re telling me you were talking about fucking your boss in front of everyone, but then you’re upset when they notice you’ve got your – your – ” I stumbled, then blustered on, breathlessly,“you know, on display?”

“Yeah, ok.” She shrugged, embarrassed. “So it’s wishful thinking. Truth is, I never went to work without pants on.” She winked.

“You didn’t?” I could have killed her.

“Nope. That was just a fantasy I had. But the rest is true. Cross my heart, hope to die.” She paused, grinning. “But if it’s of any consolation, I’m not wearing pants now. Look.”

Instinctively, I glanced at her lap – before remembering she was wearing jeans.


Later, on our way to Belsize Park tube station, she grabbed my hand, squeezed it, then let it drop.

“You think I’m disgusting, don’t you?”

“For making advances on your boss?”

“Yeah. And acting like the office whore.”

“But you’ve barely told me anything. And you’ve left me to guess how much of it is true. It could all be a pack of lies.” I waited for her to interrupt, but she didn’t. “What I don’t understand is, why would you have done any of that, anyway? Most people, if they fancy their married boss, don’t pursue him like that. It’s like you were trying get fired.”

“I know. It’s funny, isn’t it? And I loved my job.” She looked stooped, suddenly, her shoulders bowed inward, hiding her chest. “How many people do you know who love their job?” She turned her head to look up at me, squinting in the late afternoon sunlight as we stopped in front of the station.

“Not many. So why did you do it?” I hunted in my pockets for my oyster card, hoping she would notice and offer to give me hers, like the other times she’d dragged me to South End Green.

But her eyes remained fixed on my face. “Attention,” she smiled wearily. “What did you expect?”

Chapter Six

An hour after our first encounter, I was back in the office across the street, drinking my coffee and feeling queasy at the thought of all that caffeine, and wondering whether maybe she, too, drank too much coffee – secretly. When no one was looking. Then I realised that what I was really wondering was what she looked like naked.

In order to distract myself, I went to visit the guys in admin, whose porn collection was second to none: seriously raunchy shit that – God knows how – they managed to tap into at least a couple times a day. It was probably why they never got anything done: who would, with such an abundance of material to hand? And it was undoubtedly the reason behind the perennial air of seedy ill health that pervaded the entire department.

Wank often enough and it starts to show.

You begin to look like someone whose skin has turned grey from lack of sunlight – the stereotypical pasty bloke who spends his time hunched over his desk, intent on concealing the perpetual hard-on in his trousers and the enlarged images of shaved pussy on his computer screen while not having enough willpower to ‘simply delete the images and get some goddamn work done, for chrissakes…’ which is what his super-ego is telling him he should be doing.

I should know: I’ve been that guy, off and on, since I was about 14. Anthony, Gary, Alex – the admin guys might as well have been mirror images of me, so close was the sickly hue of their faces to mine.

Which is why my visits to the department – and I’m not overdramatising – so often felt like a homecoming of sorts. ‘These are my people,’ I would find myself musing. ‘This is where I belong: here, among the scum of the earth. Nerve endings, throbbing membranes, liquid conduits: that’s all we are. The only difference is that I can see it and they can’t.’

Not that that was strictly true. Because wank too much, and you start to lose perspective, no matter how self-aware you claim to be.

They weren’t so very far off, our forefathers, in claiming that playing around down there makes you blind. Fumble enough in the dark and your eyes grow small and squinty: you begin to grow feelers, and to rely on internal instinct to guide you forward. You get used to closing your eyes to better focus on your fantasies. You become impervious to outside influences.

You turn into a mole, and down you burrow.

And it wasn’t true that the admin guys were oblivious, or at least impervious, to the wickedness of their ways. Both Gary and Alex, you could tell – if you bothered to look, that is – were vaguely ashamed of the sickness that permeated their work space.

Gary’s bowed back and rounded shoulders veritably screamed self-loathing. And the fact that Alex never met anyone’s gaze for more than a brief instant, and even then succeeded in looking distant and disengaged, said it all: ‘I’ve never touched a woman before’ or ‘I’m a slave to fake pussy’ or ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with a real woman if I saw one’ – take your pick.

But I see all of this in hindsight.

Hindsight: backward sight, looking back. On the surface, perhaps, the view one sees when directing one’s gaze backward might appear less limited – or rather, less limiting – than that which one sees when looking inward – but the difference between the two is minimal, really. Both imply a reluctance to move: both can be equated to wearing blinkers.

Say ‘What if…’ ‘I now see…’ ‘If only I had…’ often enough and you might as well be masturbating. It’d be a helluva lot more honest. But then, I’m not a very honest person.

As for Anthony, I would like to think that his ‘don’t give a fuck’ attitude and quasi-paedophilic approach to sex – namely, sleeping with his sister’s sixteen-year-old friends every other weekend when they came up to London and crashed at his flat – was just a thin veneer disguising a deep sense of self-disgust. Surely, at some remote level, even the most primitive and heedless of depraved men must be aware of his depravity?

Of course, what really distinguished me from the three of them – not that I realised the significance of this at the time – was that I had Janette.

Which meant that wanking wasn’t so very indispensable – not really. And that I was a superior being to the other three: a statement to which I returned whenever I needed to assuage the guilt following an unplanned-for afternoon session.

If you have a girlfriend – if you have a Janette – you can’t be that hopeless. ‘Thank God for Janette and her lacy ensembles,’ I thought. And, more to the point, ‘Thank god I’m normal.’

Thank God, essentially, that one could ‘come home’ for short stints, initially taking comfort from being among one’s own kind, but in the end congratulating one’s self for being different, and taking flight again to be where one really belonged: with one’s face buried in Janette’s tits.

The fact that the word ‘one’ might needn’t necessarily refer to me, at least not forever and ever amen, managed to escape me.

Like I already said: oh, how blind I was.

Like I already said: I’m not a very honest person.

And, unfortunately, dishonest people lie to themselves better than anyone else.

Chapter Five

‘Stan? Stan.’ She is shaking my arm. ‘God, we don’t have to go the theatre. It was just an idea. We could try yoga. Or take pottery classes.’

I don’t want to take pottery classes, Lucinda, I want to scream. I want to bone you until you can’t breathe, until neither of us can breathe. I want to tear off your clothes before we reach my front door and I catapult you onto my dilapidated sofa and grind myself into you and watch you groan and smile and smile and groan.

‘Yeah, pottery classes might be cool.’

Which translates into There’s no fucking way you’re dragging me to a pottery class.

I try to stop myself picturing her writhing on my sofa, groaning and smiling.

Chapter Four

Lucinda viewed my relationship with Janette with something close to awe. ‘How does she get her hair so perfect?’ she asked me, when I showed her some photos I had of Janette on my mobile.

I had no answer.

‘Seriously, though. She’s beautiful.’ The tone was accusatory. And, looking at myself in the mirror most mornings, grey-faced, sullen-mouthed, I couldn’t help but sympathise with her sense of aesthetic injustice.

That said, it was my look of general unwellness that catalysed our friendship. She worked in a Pret a Manger on the Strand, around the corner from the Cold Turkey office, where I saw her on the days Janette didn’t pack my lunch.

Inevitably, I would end up just getting coffee. It was the cheapest option, and one that guaranteed at least a temporary adrenalin rush. I would spend the rest of lunch hour frenetically skimming the pages of whatever book I was reading that week and return to the office ready to tackle whatever complex filing task awaited me with renewed and inspired zest before the next moment of sudden despair attacked.

Walking into the Pret, however, I imagine I appeared less than inspired.

‘You look like hell,’ was, in fact, the first thing she ever said to me. I took it as a compliment: finally, someone noticed.

‘Seriously – you okay?’ she asked. I nodded. I imagined I was grinning, but the look of concern on her face indicated otherwise.

‘Don’t get much sleep?’ she prodded. Coming from anyone else, such insistence would have seemed rude. But from her, it was flattering. When was the last time someone had commented on the bags under my eyes? Stupid question – my friends knew to be surprised when I didn’t look ashen.

‘Yeah – I mean no. I mean I don’t get much sleep,’ I fumbled. ‘I definitely need more.’

‘Mmm.’ She nodded, wisely. ‘You should go easy on the coffee, you know. It’s dehydrating.’ She pointed at my – very large – take-away cup.

‘You should go herbal,’ she clarified, indicating the cup of tea she was handing to another customer. ‘It’s better for you. Good for the soul.’ She said it as if she meant it.

I found myself wishing fervently that I were the sort of person who talks about the health of their soul without laughing. It must have shown – she broke into a smile.

‘My god, I’m joking. I’m sure a double whiskey first thing in the morning is much better for you.’ She grinned, then nodded towards the deli counter. ‘You ordering anything else?’

‘No, just coffee. I want to dehydrate myself as much as possible’ I answered back. I am quipping with a beautiful girl who drinks peppermint tea and is self-deprecating, I thought to myself.

She’s probably self-deprecating in bed, as well, I found myself adding. It was difficult to restrain myself from asking outright if she was.

Chapter Three

By the time we’re walking home (my place – Lucinda assures me it’s cozy, which is a euphemism for claustrophobic) I’m struggling to breathe properly.

Excuse the present tense. It helps me relax. Action followed by further action: it means time isn’t still.

It means this, too, will pass.

It means that one day Lucinda will let me graze her thigh with my fingers and one day I won’t mind spending a tenner on a take-away for two because it’ll be a prelude to all kinds of in-bed debauchery that I can’t even begin to contemplate and one day this will be in the past and we will be in the future and one day I won’t sweat every time I face a till.

Please God let this walk be finite.

‘We really ought to vary our routine, you know. This could get staid.’ She walks with a veritable bounce in her step, pleased with herself after having demonstrated her discerning taste by criticising the shop’s entire selection.

She didn’t notice me sweating as I counted out five quid’s worth of twenty p’s and the sales guy grinned like a twat – she didn’t notice him leering at her legs. She was too busy shrieking with delighted disgust at the new releases on display and asking why I don’t get an online account, for fuck’s sake.

‘Did you hear me?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘No, you didn’t. What did I just say?’

‘I heard you. I heard you. Something getting staid.’

‘Watching films.’

‘But you’re the one who always suggests it.’

‘Yeah, I know.’ She is surprisingly patient. ‘I should be making more of an effort to get us out there. Doing stuff. Going to protests or something.’

I feel slightly sick to my stomach. ‘Protests?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. Not necessarily protests, as such. But demonstrations or something. Women’s right to choose, for instance.’

‘They already have it.’

‘I know, but I read somewhere they were trying to add, you know, stipulations to the law. Limitations.’

‘Yeah? Since when do you follow politics?’ I can’t help feeling alarmed. It’s reassuring, hanging out with someone who knows as little about what is going on in the outside world as I do. If that were to change – if anything were to change, I wouldn’t know what to do.

My stomach cramps up. Maybe I’m getting an ulcer.

‘I don’t “follow politics.” But I like to keep abreast of issues that affect me as a woman. You never know when I might get impregnated and need to take – ’ she pauses, looking for the right word, ‘measures.’

My feeling sick is starting to become second nature. Pretty soon my inclination to vomit will become as second-nature as a regularly-occurring itch.

‘Anyway,’ she continues, ‘it’s not like we have to go demonstrate. We could go, say, to an exhibition? Something about vaginas and uteri and stuff – ’

‘But I don’t want to go to an exhibition about vaginas – ’

‘ – or to a play. That’s what we should do. Go to a play.’

‘About vaginas?’

‘Stan, stop interrupting me. I was saying, a play, not the movies. See real people acting things out.’

‘Mmm.’ Dare I hope she’ll discard the woman blood idea?

‘In fact, forget abortions and fallopian tubes. Let’s get cultured.’

I let myself breathe out. I was right, after all: we are connected by an infinitesimal conglomeration of minute but intensely-charged electric particles, she and I. Where she leaves off, I begin. Where I daren’t tread, she refrains from entering. We are each other’s psychic other half –

‘Plus, think of how many new people we could meet that way. Actors. We could end up mingling with the cast after the show… Or what the director has to say in the question and answer session afterwards… And hear comments from people in the audience, and then if someone said something interesting we could approach them and – ’

I definitely, definitely feel sick.

Let’s face it: she, not we, would approach them. And it would be a man, of course. And he would want her phone number, of course. And then they would meet for coffee and he would be a theatrical genius and an arrogant prat but she wouldn’t see it and would go all bright-eyed when he quoted Pinter or Beckett, probably incorrectly but she wouldn’t notice or, worse, would think it sweet, and pretty soon he’d be inviting her over to look at his signed copy of Night of the Iguana or something and she’d be gushing the way she does when anyone mentions Tennessee Williams and he’d offer her wine and she’d drink it even though she hates wine, only drinks beer, but you can’t be a thesp and drink beer, and then they’d end up fumbling around on his sofa and with my luck he’d have a balcony overlooking the river or something and he would lead her onto it and pensively light a cigarette and look at her deeply and say he wanted to write a play about her.

I am going to die right here, on the pavement in front of Boots and Carphone Warehouse.

Chapter Two

When I first met Lucinda I was with Janette.

Janette had no neuroses whatsoever, and somehow succeeded in making mine seem normal, which was nice because I didn’t have to justify things like cutting out coupons from the Iceland catalogue or ordering hot water in cafés.

And although it made me a bit nauseous every time she showed me something she’d bought – Janette could have been the official spokesperson of the retail therapy association, if such an organisation existed – it helped that she hid the receipts. And anyway it was her dad’s credit card she was using, so the sickness I felt was mainly a vicarious one, one of solidarity with her father, though from her vague descriptions he didn’t seem the sort who even looked at his credit card bills.

I went out with Janette for nearly three years, but it felt like a lot less: she was not very demanding. She made life seem effortless.

Most of our generation slogged their way through university, fighting off regularly-occurring twinges of doubt and uncertainty or, at the very least, nihilistic laziness. The ones that actually graduated now trudge in and out of succession of soul-sucking jobs – and, of these, the lucky ones somehow manage to ‘find their place’ on the career ladder, reconciling rather than sacrificing job satisfaction with an adequate income, their ideals with their company’s. And, like I said, those are the lucky ones.

But Janette? Janette flew through university in a blur of unhesitating efficiency, landed her first serious in the summer after her first year of university and was recruited by one of the top marketing consultancy firms in the country before she even graduated. All of this without losing any poise.

Meanwhile I was doing an internship at Cold Turkey, an arts magazine where gaining experience largely amounted to filing press releases and printing address labels. The job had been Janette’s idea. She said it would help ‘get my foot in the door’: in her head, I would be the one doing the magazine’s cover shoots one day.

She put together my cv, she wrote the cover letter – she even picked out what I should wear for the interview. And, when it all proved rather disappointing, she went about filling my fridge with organic, often gourmet, groceries and making desserts from scratch (she only knew how to make tiramisu’ and cheesecake, but it was, as I assured her, the thought that counted).

Within a few months of our meeting she had moved in with me. My rent was halved, the flat transformed and my fears (unemployment, degenerative diseases, dying alone – nothing original) held in check: contained.

A typical conversation between the two of us would go something like this.

Me (walking in the room from the toilet, magazine in hand): Your magazine says I’m going to get cancer, probably.

Janette (sitting on the couch, blackberrying away): What magazine?

Me: The one in the toilet. The health one. It says your chances of getting bowel cancer are higher if you eat processed meats. Did you know sausages were processed?

Janette (realising the conversation is likely to be a long one, sighing and putting down her blackberry): Of course they’re processed. Did you think they were a part of the pig’s anatomy?

Me (ignoring the comment): And hot dogs… And bacon… And sliced ham… And roast beef… And beef twizzlers… I’m going to die.

Janette (patiently): But you don’t eat any of those things.

Me: Anymore. I don’t eat them anymore. But before I met you? I practically lived on value bacon and sausages.

Janette (slapping her thighs and getting up): You’re right. Let’s go for a run. Get those processed meats out of your system. Or off your mind, at least.

Me (sorrowfully): It’s too late. My ass is already bleeding.

Janette (yelling from the bedroom): If your ass is bleeding, you have hemorrhoids, Stan. Not cancer. You can’t die from hemorrhoids. Now: are you coming running or not?

Needless to say, I drove her insane.

And, by the same token, it was she who kept me from going insane.

Any guy, no matter how absorbed in his own neuroses, will agree that the sight of his girlfriend, topless, playing sexy housewife in hold-ups and heels – not to mention the aroma of imported pesto – when he comes home, can cure the worst ills.

The ill from which I was suffering was the sense my soul was being eaten away, bit by bit, with each working day. Janette was my antidote – my palliative – my drug.

You clock in every morning and work under fluorescent lights and leave the office when it’s already dark, but you can take some small consolation from the fact that you have a girl with perfectly rounded breasts who is up-to-date and in tune with the outside world (she didn’t read one paper – she read them all) yet singularly devoted to you, who wears lacy underwear because she likes it and only gets weepy when very, very drunk.

At night I would cling to her with the fierceness of a newborn at his mother’s teat or, simply, a five-year-old gripping sweatily at his consolation prize.

Being with Janette was three years of such small consolations.

I miss her egg and cress sandwiches.

I miss her slurred rudeness in the pub (She’d grown up with three brothers, she was used to talking back, ‘demanding respect.’ She got a kick out of it, you could tell.)

So Janette. Still at university when we first started going out, career mapped out before even receiving her graduation certificate, promotion six weeks into first job, second promotion and move to headquarters in New York within four months. Better than her brothers, better than anything Daddy could have hoped for.

But.

I hate the States without having even been there.

And Baby, eventually, has to be weaned.

So bye-bye Janette.

Bye-bye ironed pyjamas and gourmet coffee.

Bye-bye sex under suffused lighting and green potted plants with glossy leaves.

Bye-bye.

Chapter One

I wanted to kiss her, but she turned her face away. She said she wasn’t interested. She said she had other fish to fry. ‘What kind of fish?’ I asked. She smiled knowingly. ‘You do talk a lot of crap,’ she said.

We were on our way to rent a movie. Everybody we knew ordered movies online, but we liked to think we were different. Actually, I just happen to be tight, and the thought of paying a monthly fee when you never know if you’ll actually take advantage of what’s on offer makes me queasy. It’s why I don’t have a gym membership. Plus with a gym membership, your body improves. And then you have to keep working out to keep it that way, otherwise it goes worse than before. I’d rather keep the status quo. Flab is fine, as long as it’s unchanging.

Anyway, we were walking to the rental place where getting an overnight dvd is actually more expensive than renting online, which pretty much negates everything I’ve just said, at least regarding money and movies, but what the hell, I was feeling magnanimous, and anyway, I was counting on her paying. I like being magnanimous with Lucinda’s money. It makes up for the fact she won’t sleep with me.

‘The kind of fish that people are referring to when they say there are other fish in the sea,’ she explained.

My mind had wandered, calculating dvd rental costs and thinking up an excuse for not paying. I had to think a moment about what she was saying.

‘But you don’t need other fish. To fry or otherwise. You have me,’ I tried. I

t was pathetic enough that it just might work. Plus if she felt bad enough she’d definitely pay. And maybe suggest we take the bus back in case I was feeling particularly despondent and weak. And put it all on her oyster card even though it’s kind of illegal. I haven’t taken my oyster out of my top desk drawer since I first got it: the ten pound top-up is intact. I’m good like that.

‘You can be so sad sometimes, Stan, you know that?’ Sad. Almost as good as pathetic. ‘I’m thinking big fish, here. Oh, fuck – ’ We were outside the film shop. She stopped abruptly, patting her jacket pockets, then fumbled inside her handbag. ‘I’ve forgotten my wallet. You got cash?’

I felt my heart drop.