But believing that if he didn’t want me enough, then he can’t be good enough to have made me happy – isn’t that a fancy version of sour grapes? A way we rationalise that our disappointments don’t really exist? ‘What’s for you won’t pass you.’ Everyone knows that’s a fantasy to give us consolation and that things that could be for us, pass us all the time.
Oh, and the imaginary confidante also tells me that, had shoddy plumbing not done for my letter, and Ed and I had slightly inept, fumbling but thrilling intimate encounters throughout the first term, it would’ve probably burned itself out by age twenty, what with youthful love affairs tending not to last.
Maybe, maybe not. Or, we’d be the ones engaged right now? Hester lasted. He can do monogamy, and commitment.
My conclusion is this: there’s no rule that says the unavailable person you waste your life being in love with has to be the greatest human you ever met.
It doesn’t make the loss of him any less painful.
8
The sound of the digital alarm pierces my cranium and hurts physically, as if someone’s stabbing a chopstick in my ear.
I have that horrendous split second of not knowing why I feel so abysmal, and then blearily recalling everything I drank and what time I went to bed and knowing every last second of today’s agony is my own stupid fault.
I could call in sick, but my job is not super secure, and given it’s only eight hours until the weekend, I should soldier through, powered by Diet Coke, Frazzles and spicy shame.
I work for a website that covers what we loosely term the entertainment scene, called City Nights – long since imaginatively christened Shitty Nights or City Shites by the workforce.
As a user, for a subscription fee, you log in, type in a date and it tells you what’s on around the country and has tickets left, or a table for four free, that kind of thing. ‘Like Last Minute Dot Com for your social life!’ is the ad line. We cover the East Midlands but it’s a national service.
There’s two members of staff who we could politely call reporters who are, more accurately, twenty-something raw data harvest monkeys, Lucy and Seth, and then two more staff, of whom I am one and Phil is the other, who we could politely call sub-editors or, more accurately, an over-thirty and an over-fifty ex-journo, who have no other way to use a near-redundant skillset.
I check the copy for legal risks and basic English then slap it online with photos and very millennial-wanker, nudge-nudge wink-wink kind of clickbait captions. Like:
My boyfriend says he’d leave me for this peanut dipping sauce at Leicester’s newest Japanese restaurant: should I be worried?
Or:
What’s better than one Lewis Capaldi date at Nottingham Arena? That’s right: TWO (it’s not ‘none’, how dare you)
No, I don’t have strong self-esteem or record high levels of creative satisfaction, thanks for asking.
I used to be a writer on the local newspaper. As I felt the print industry tanking, I scuttled over to this ship, which was only marginally more afloat.
My ex Mark always said I needed to go to London, to a national, if I wanted to springboard into something better. He was proved right about that. He was right about a lot of things, making me worry he might also be right about other things that I was sure he got wrong.
Stripy Roger has no respect for my fragility and is standing on the kitchen table roaring, to summon me and his breakfast, as I enter the kitchen.
I find his food in the cupboard and try not to gag as an oblong of Whiskas chunks in amber jelly slithers out of the packet and into Roger’s bowl, whiffing of liver. He makes Cookie Monster noises as he piles into it.
I trudge upstairs, peel off my pyjamas and stand in a very hot shower. I can’t help but gaze down despondently at my apparently revolting tufted pudenda under the running water. I’d heard tell of this hairless breed of men who demanded similar, but I vaguely expected them to live in gyms, and / or the capital’s trendy boroughs.
It feels too karmic that a one-night stand that I attempted partly for vanity – look how easy it is for me to get tail – has ended up with me feeling like the last old mangy stray at the rescue shelter. I have minge mange.
I pull out a nicer dress than usual because, today of all days, my ego can’t take being clad as an ‘escaped toad disguised as a washerwoman’, as Susie and I describe our off-days style.
On the lurching bus ride into town, I consider taking my mind off my nausea by texting Susie a trailer for the Bald Ballsack Zack (ballzack?) anecdote, but I’m distracted by persistent calls from an unknown landline. Only total amateurs answer unknown numbers, you could be tricked into all sorts of unwanted conversations.
My office is in a fashionably bohemian part of the city centre, Hockley, but – less pleasingly – in a basement. You don’t realise how much humans need daylight until you’re without it. Even Goth humans like me.
‘Morning, cunts!’ says my desk mate, Phil, as I and my young colleague Lucy walk in. ‘Oof, big night last night was it, Eve? You’re as green as a Batchelors marrowfat pea.’
‘Thanks.’
‘A lovely pea, I stress. A feminine pea. You’re not the “witch from Oz” sort of green hag.’
‘A feminine marrowfat pea. That’s me.’
I pour myself a black coffee from the filter jug on the sideboard. Phil is in his late fifties and has what my colleague Lucy calls ‘a council meeting beard’, which somehow made me honk with laughter. (‘You know, like Bill Oddie or Jeremy Corbyn’s. Not like a “worn with beanie and sleeve tatts beard”.’)
Phil has confused ‘being lumpenly offensive’ with ‘a great sense of humour and big personality’. Nevertheless, we generally get along, due to my pragmatic decision to take no offence. I would a thousand times rather an abrasive but straightforward Phil, than a snaky, conniving alternative.
‘Are you doing the roller-disco pieces?’ he asks and I confirm that I am. Given I’m physically broken, I’m going to lean hard on puns.
Wheels on Fire? Starlight Ex-YES? Oh God that’s awful. Rock ‘N’ Roller?
My mobile flashes with Ed’s name. Ugh: this is unusual timing and it must be because he wants to talk about the proposal. I’m the last person who owes it to Ed to make him feel OK about saying yes. Nope. No way. I pop a couple of Nurofen Plus out of their plastic casing while scowling at the illuminated handset.
‘That’s a waste of money, you know,’ Phil says, nodding at the pills. ‘They’re ibuprofen. You’re paying that much more for branding.’
‘I’m a fan of late-stage capitalism and being in debt,’ I say.
‘You must love this job then.’
‘With all my heart.’
‘Politicians should study the phenomenon of Nurofen. People will flush away their money purely for a logo on a packet.’
‘How do you know politicians haven’t?’
Phil keeps squinting at the Nurofen, annoyed by my lack of taking the bait for an argument.
‘Here, listen to this comment on the site,’ he says, to a roomful of two women who are drinking coffee and not listening. ‘An article about BEST RESTAURANTS FOR ROMANCE is very isolating for those of us who are single and makes us feel excluded or unwelcome in such places. Please reconsider your heteronormative focus on coupledom. Jeezo. Life’s hard. We don’t all get to shag Beyoncé. Hey, what do you think to this reply: With your natural joie de vivre it is indeed surprising no one has made you their special companion, Sarah.’