by Lilly Miles
‘Who’s winning?’, ‘Who’s happiest?’, ‘Who’s better off without the other one?’
Me, me, me.
I’m prepared to admit it has to get boxed off and buried one day. I’ll have to wait for the decree absolute, but when it comes I think I’ll throw another party. Like the poem says, the end of love should be a big event. I’ll have to do something about the wedding dress, too. If it stays in my wardrobe I’ll inevitably get drunk and a bit Miss Havisham one night and decide to see if I can still fit in it, which even as a mental image freaks me out. The last thing I need to see is a weepy, drunk, badger-eyed woman in the mirror in a beer-stained frock which probably won’t fit me any more.
Celebrity ex-wives seem to be a lot better at this sort of thing than me. They get a big house or a place on Strictly Come Dancing, while their lizardy exes make public fools of themselves. I did read once that Jo Wood had a coffin-shaped box for her wedding ring, although rather than burying it she keeps it on the mantelpiece, which seems rather daft to me. Talk about leaving the body on ice.
But if I did that, where would I bury it? I’d have to wrap the dress round my rings. Maybe I could tie it all round a rock and throw it in the Thames? But, just like a funeral, would it mean a damn thing? The whole affair’s just as dead as it was before, it’s simply more hygienic to get rid of the body. It’s a case of getting your head around it, I suppose. And to be honest a burial’s a bit undramatic, and therefore not really me. Do you say some words over it afterwards? ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, naff off Twatface, now where’s the pub’?
No, I know what would be fitting. I’ll build a little raft, tie the dress and the rings to it, set it on fire and let it drift down the river. A Viking funeral at sea. I’ll probably end up with the river police on my back, but what the hell, this wound needs to be cauterized if I’m to recover properly.
Start as you mean to go on – in flames, if necessary.
DAY ONE HUNDRED AND FOURTEEN
THE one blissful thing about being suddenly single – hell, one of the many blissful things – is that you can make decisions on your own. No longer do I have to seek permission, keep someone informed of my whereabouts, or find a way to dovetail two social lives into one. If there’s something I want to do, there’s no need to avoid a row by engaging in a six-week campaign to make someone else think it was all their idea in the first place.
Wear my hair up or down? Paint the bedroom red or blue? If I get an invitation, I don’t have to defer to someone else in case ‘we’ had other plans. If I’m asked what I’d like to drink, there is no need to glance at someone to see how much he’s had and whether I’ve ended up the designated driver again. I can sleep on whatever side of the bed I fancy.
It feels a bit like a dictatorship just after a revolution: the despot has gone, democracy has arrived and suddenly I’m being given a say in things.
But as any Iraqi will tell you, despots at least give you a sense of certainty, whereas unlimited freedom leaves you facing the tyranny of choice. Not only is there now a choice, but you have to make one: there is no middle option. Do you want to stay in or go out? Do you want a super-tall skinny latte with chocolate sprinkles or a full-fat decaf mocha chococino?
‘Hurry up, my lovely,’ complained Fifi next to me in the queue at the coffee shop on Monday morning. ‘We’re late as it ez, and I need a coffee, izzeht.’
Sighing, I gave up and ordered the Earl Grey like I always did, waited while she got her frappa-whatsit and then we sauntered into the office next door, trotting to catch one of the clanking, ratchety lifts just as the doors closed.
‘So ’ow was your weekend7, then?’ Fi asked me.
‘Ah, not too bad. I spent most of Sunday in B&Q unable to pick a wallpaper for the bedroom.’
‘Are you decorating, then? I thought you’d have to sell up?’
I laughed. ‘Ha, no. Well, I thought the same, but the bank said I can take on the mortgage, so long as I don’t mind living on cold baked beans for the next twenty-five years.’
‘Faberluss!’ gushed Fi as the lift paused for breath between floors. She stabbed at the buttons and it sighed, then continued to wheeze its way upwards. ‘Damn thing. That’s amazing! You totally deserve the house, and once you’ve done it up it’ll be worth a bomb, izzeht. You’d have been gutted if you had to hand it back after all you’ve ben through. What if you’d ’ad to sell it to Twatface an’ Fatty, can you imaaagine?’
We stepped out of the lift, which did its daily jerk-of-death as we straddled the doorway, forcing us to snatch our limbs out hurriedly before it plummeted back down the shaft with a leg still in it.
‘God, don’t get me started. I’ve become quite obsessed about the house,’ I said, holding open the newsroom door for her. ‘It’s like my castle or something; I go home and shut the gate and lock the door, and feel totally safe. I’ve got so many plans and dreams for it, and I don’t see why I should lose everything.’
Plonking my bag down, and slurping my tea, I thumbed through the papers on my desk. ‘There’s no way I could have sold it, to Twatface or anyone. If they sent the bailiffs round they’d find I’d cemented my feet into the patio, or my fingernails on to the front step. I’d never give it up, it would be like admitting defeat.’
Fifi grinned over the top of her computer. ‘Then we should celebrate, don’you thenk? Porky from the cricket club’s avin’ a birthday party on Wednesday, do you want to come?’
She turned her screen around so I could see her email inbox.
‘Of course I want to come, there’s boys and beer . . . hang on, TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY? Are you mad?’
Fifi laughed. ‘There’ll be a whole cricket team, though! And reserves, izzeht!’
‘Yes, reserves of children. Get knotted, Fi.’
So Wednesday dawned and set, and after work there I was, tottering over the hill to Blackheath in my tightest jeans and a tit top, clutching a bottle of white in one hand, texting Twatface with the other about his latest legal inanity, and telling myself this was a ridiculous idea. I’d not eaten all day in order to fit into the jeans, and was so set on my target of A Night Out that when Fifi told me she couldn’t make it and had to go to a showbiz party in town for work it hardly put me off my stride. She rang as I dodged the traffic on the A2 and headed down to Porky’s flat in Blackheath Village.
‘Have a faberluss time, ring me and let me know how it goes!’ she said.
‘You’re not coming? But I don’t know any of them, apart from that one who snogged me once! And I didn’t even have time to eat some emergency cheese. I’m bound to get smashed.’
‘Ah, you’ll be fine, my lovely, and anyway Spacker’s not going. Talk later, byeeeee!’
Oh, marvellous. A thirty-year-old separated singleton wearing clothing she’d be too old for in another couple of years, knocking on the door of a twenty-one-year-old cricketer she saw once across a bar before snogging his mate, who was called Spacker. ‘The joyride which is my life,’ I thought, lifting the knocker.
Porky – whippet-thin and barely old enough to shave, by the look of him – opened the door.
‘Er, yes?’
‘Happy birthday!’ I cried with false jollity, thrusting the wine at him. ‘Remember me? Fi couldn’t make it!’
‘Oh, right, yes,’ he said, the look of confusion on his youthful face lifting slightly as he failed to remember me at all. He was clearly thinking that if I was a friend of Fifi’s then we must have met while he was drunk. ‘Come in.’
I continued to burble small talk at him as I followed him down a narrow corridor to a kitchen, where his girlfriend, a few others, and a massive collection of alcohol was gathered, and I said hello to some faces I vaguely recalled. For some inexplicable reason Porky had decided to celebrate his birthday with a barbecue in the rain, and after opening the bottle of wine I’d brought with me and filling a pint glass with most of it (there weren’t any other glasses, he was a twenty-one-year-old), I went out into the garden. The
boys were huddled around the barbecue, which had been put under a tree to keep it from being rained on. They were stood about in traditional male fashion, each with a pint of something in one hand, the other in a pocket, jostling to tell the funniest or dirtiest joke while avoiding eye contact by staring fixedly at the flames, which were failing to turn some sausages brown.
I pitched up into the middle of them, and was immediately welcomed. Fifi’s brother Beamy took me under his wing yet again. Bazzo, the big blond one, remembered me from last time, as did Raffles and Slappim – whose wandering hands never forgot something he’d yet to grope.
Bazzo, as the tallest and loudest, was holding forth on the topic of his job in the immigration service, and said: ‘Hey, you’re a reporter, you’ll like this . . .’
I sighed – people who think they’ve got a story for journalists rarely do – took a big gulp of my wine and said, with a sense of rising boredom: ‘Really?’
Oh, how wrong I was. Bazzo was working in Dover that week. He and his fellow immigration officers delighted in searching the bags of girls they fancied, purely so they could chat them up while rifling through their knickers.
‘. . . And the other day, right, this big coach came off a ferry, full of fackin’ nuns who’d been on a pilgrimage to Romania or somewhere,’ said Bazzo in his native south London patois, waving a can of Stella. ‘So me and my mate thought we’d have some fun, and ordered searches on the whole lot of them, and the priest that was with ’em. The priest went fackin’ batshit, but we told ’im: “Oi, no arguing, penguin boy!” Ha ha.
‘Only it turns out, right, two of the nuns were wearing G-strings and a third one was six months pregnant! We couldn’t fackin’ believe it! We were just havin’ a bit of fun, and really it was a scam, with these fackin’ illegals dressing up as priests and bringing half their village in! How’s that for a story then, eh? Nuns on the run! Ha ha!’
I was taken aback. ‘Bloody hell, Bazz, you’re right. That might actually be a story. Here, give us your number . . .’
Thrown into a good mood by the testosterone and alcohol, and with a vitally-important news contact under my belt, I continued to pay full attention to the wine until someone – Slappim, I think, and presumably as a way of distracting me while his hands were wandering towards my arse – said something like, ‘Haven’t you just split up with someone?’
Laughing – because I find that seeing the funny side takes the sting out of things – I regaled him with the story of my arrest and incarceration, which I’ve now told so many times it has become a well-rehearsed routine with sound effects, set pieces and timed pauses for canned laughter. I can’t really remember much about my performance, except that at one point there I was, stood under the tree out of the drizzle, surrounded by a semicircle of men who barely knew me, and whom I had yet to either rule in or out romantically, regaling them with, ‘But she’s FAT,’ and doing a Charlie Chaplin impression as I re-enacted pacing my cell in shoes too big for my feet. I distinctly remember the sensation of being effectively on stage, and thinking to myself that it was rather an odd way of dealing with heartbreak.
Then the little voice in the back of my head – the one you hear when you’re drinking, that tells you when it’s time to stop – said to me: ‘You have the undivided attention of a dozen boys. Try to do something that makes you seem attractive, which is not this.’ I remember hearing those logical words, and I remember completely ignoring them.
The boys had fascination on their faces, and fired questions at me about how big Fatty’s arse was, how many times I’d kicked Twatface in the bollocks, and what had happened since. They refilled my pint glass, plied me with barely-cooked chicken wings, and pointed out they were heading off to a club later which was renowned as a meat market, and, ‘You’re bound to get a seeing-to there, girl!’
After a while I began to feel the worse for wear, and wandered into the toilet. I’m quite good at vomiting, in that I always know when it’s coming and have time to prepare the scene. There was no way I was kneeling on Porky’s floor because it was covered in pee, but I leant over the bowl, held my hair out of the way, counted to three and hurled raw chicken meat with wine. For once my aim was off, though, and it covered most of the toilet seat and a bit of the floor.
As a nicely-brought up girl I couldn’t leave it like that. The trouble was, being a twenty-one-year-old’s flat with thirty people in it, the toilet paper had run out. I looked about me for anything I could use to mop things up – there was a bath and a sink, but no cloth, no spare bog roll, no nothing. The only absorbent material in the whole room was a towel hanging next to the sink.
In my inebriated condition, I felt there was no choice. I had to clean up, and the towel was all I had. So I smeared it around the toilet seat, mopped up the floor, and tried to rinse the resulting goop off in the sink. It didn’t really work, partly because I was too trashed to operate a tap, and partly because my drunken brain didn’t want to get the towel wet.
Then, to cover up my antics and compound my shame, I thought it best to make sure the towel dried as quickly as possible. So I hung it on the radiator, with flecks of semi-digested meat dangling limply from the damp threads, and turned the heat up to ten.
I was just shutting the bathroom door behind me, congratulating myself on such a clever and hygienic method of covering my tracks, when Porky’s girlfriend Louisa presented herself as though she’d been waiting for me to come out. ‘Crikey,’ I thought. ‘Can’t have that, towel won’t be dry yet. Keep her busy.’
Instead, Louisa said loudly: ‘You all right? We’ve called you a cab.’
‘What? A cab? Why’d I want a cab?’
Bazzo came up behind her and steered me down the corridor and through the front door. ‘It’s all right, we thought it’d be better than you walking home,’ he said, opening the car door and putting me in. Louisa thrust a plastic bag into my hands, telling me to use it if I felt sick, and told the driver my address. As he bounced me over the speed bumps I thought I had done quite well to have already emptied my stomach, and decided to text Twatface and tell him he was a cocksucker, and text Fifi to tell her that I was very popular indeed.
Just after the cab dropped me at home, Twatface rang. He stayed on the phone as I fumbled with the front-door lock, started undressing in the hallway and made my way upstairs. As I brushed my teeth I told him about the boys, and how tall they all were, and how one had given me a story, and hauled myself to bed. As I hit the pillow he said he was sorry not to have been there, and I told him he sounded like he was drinking. He laughed and said he was having a bottle of wine, yes, and was in his flat alone. I ranted at him for a bit about what a twat he was, then he sighed and said: ‘You’re too drunk for this conversation.’ And he hung up on me.
Outraged, I rang him straight back in the highest of dudgeons. ‘I may be drunk,’ I told him. ‘But at least I have been drinking with boys at a twenty-one-year-old’s birthday party, whereas you are drinking alone. LOSER!’ On which witty rejoinder, I hung up on him, and then rang Fifi and left a tearful message about how she was a terrible friend because she hadn’t come, and if she had I wouldn’t have rung Twatface.
The next morning, having scraped myself off the mattress and into the shower, and then staggered into work, Nancy silently put a cup of tea in front of me and said: ‘How are we?’
‘Nggh,’ I replied from my position face down on the keyboard.
‘Fifi says you’ve upset her,’ said Nance, disapprovingly. ‘Something about a phone call?’
I cracked an eye open and gazed blearily at her. I took a slurp of tea, and found the power to pull my phone out of the bag and flick through it. Presumably I had rung Fi too late at night. I checked the calls, and then with a growing sense of doom the sent messages.
‘Oh no,’ I said.
The first text I had sent to Twatface as I walked over the heath was at 7.29 p.m. The last one, in the cab back home, calling him a ‘cockpuales’, was sent at 8.43 p.m.
> Seventy-four minutes. Seventy-four. From a standing, upright, stone-cold sober start, to falling-down, flat on my face drunk, in less than an hour and a quarter.
Eyes wide, I lifted my head, rubbed my cheek, where the word ‘yuiophjkl’ was imprinted, and told Nancy, who shook her head in disbelief.
‘Jesus. What were you drinking, rocket fuel? You’re a danger with that phone when you’re pissed. When you’re drunk even your texts are slurred. What time did you call Fi?’
‘Twenty past nine. She can’t be mad at that. Hang on, she tried to ring me back at 2.10 a.m. I remember now, she rang me all worried or something, and I didn’t know what she was talking about.’
‘She says you told her to fuck off, and were really rude,’ said Nancy. ‘I think you need to say sorry.’
Fifi refused to speak to me, take my calls or respond to my emails. I put my head on the desk and tried to get through the day as quietly as possible. I began to really worry that I’d lost one of my best friends.
The next night she finally called me back. ‘Look you, ez bang out of order. It’s teken me this long to calm down enough to tell you how mad I am. You tol’ me to piss off, when I’d only rung to make sure you was OK. I came out of the party and got thez message from you in total tears about Twatface. I rang you straight away, and just got abuse. Is that all I’m good for?’
‘I’m really sorry, Fi,’ I said with remorse. ‘I had far too much to drink, I’d been asleep – well, unconscious – for about five hours when you rang, and I just didn’t know what you were on about.’
‘Tha’s no excuse,’ she said sternly. ‘You don’ treat people like that. I was relly worried about you. And if no one else has told you yet, I well – you’re drinking too much. You’re startin’ to act like your ex.’
She grudgingly accepted my apology and rang off. After the call ended I sat, staring into the fire in the freezing cold house where I couldn’t afford to turn the heating on, and thought about what she’d said.