by Jenny Colgan
Ellie burst out of the bathroom.
‘Hey, sugar,’ said Billy, curling his lip at her. Billy was medium height and emaciated and looked, in a bad light, like Rob Lowe’s ugly younger brother. After he’d been addicted to crack for fifteen years and had a YTS haircut.
‘Sorry,’ said Ellie, calmly. ‘Did someone say something? Or did I just hear a cat being sick?’
Julia manoeuvred herself to Ellie’s side and put her arm round her.
‘Why don’t you just come over here and we’ll cut the cake?’
‘It didn’t mean anything, sugar.’
‘Would you like a canapé?’ said Annabel. ‘I made them myself.’
Billy ignored her, pulled on his cigarette and dropped his ash on the carpet. Annabel sniffed loudly.
‘Babe, I’ve just composed a little melody for you to show you exactly how much you mean to me.’
‘Just as well it’s not the other way around,’ said Ellie, crossly. ‘Otherwise we’d all have to listen to “Agadoo”.’
Billy lifted up the saxophone, framing himself artistically in the doorway, winked meaningfully at her and threw back his head to start blowing.
‘This isn’t the one that sounds like “Baker Street” is it?’ said Ellie.
Billy paused and slowly lowered the sax. ‘Ehm, yes. Yes it is that one.’
Ellie sighed and slowly began eating a canapé.
‘Oh well. Go on then.’
‘You’ve put me off now.’
‘Fine.’
Billy looked down at Annabel, who seemed to have accrued a dustbuster from somewhere.
‘Excuse me, but I’m trying to make what’s known as a gesture?’
‘Yes, well, you’re actually making what’s known as a mess.’
Billy sighed and, very slowly, lowered the saxophone.
‘You know darling,’ he said to Ellie in a conversational sneer. ‘It’s not like we were going to get married or anything.’
‘Nobody gets married,’ groaned Ellie.
‘… it’s you that said you didn’t want commitment.’
‘Yeah, I don’t need a lot of commitment to ME.’ Ellie found herself yelling. ‘But you can’t make a commitment to a piece of TOAST.’
‘Jeez, what happened to everyone being laid back?’ said Billy.
‘For fuck’s sake Billy. Just because I went to Red Wedge doesn’t mean that you’re allowed to get off with a trombonist, okay?’
He pouted. ‘I just don’t know why it’s such a big deal. It’s not like I’ve bought her her own handset for the playstation.’
‘Oh,’ said Ellie. ‘So she’s been round your house.’ She stared at him. He was idly brushing back his gelled hair. Fury welled in her.
‘It’s a studio, not a house, okay babe? Chill! It’s ironic really … you know … being found snogging by someone who says they don’t want commitment then them blowing a gasket.’
‘For once in your fucking life …’ she screamed at him. The chiropodist began to edge towards the door.
‘Just for once: this is NOT fucking ironic, okay?’
‘Not unless he did the same thing on her twentieth birthday in the same clothes,’ whispered Arthur to Julia, who nodded.
‘For fuck’s sake, you prick. You really hurt my feelings. Can’t you see that?’
Billy shrugged. ‘It’s like that movie …’
‘It’s not like ANY movie, Butthead,’ shouted Ellie. ‘You actually hurt me, and you seem chronically incapable of giving a fuck.’
She burst into tears and retreated into the bathroom.
‘Chicks, eh?’ said Billy in the bad fake American accent he affected much of the time. He looked closely at the bathroom door. There was no sign of life. He turned and slouched moodily out of the flat.
‘And how about another quick “Happy Birthday to You”?’ suggested Annabel.
Six hours later Ellie was still lying across her bed in something approximating despair, although she was coming to the end of the drama queen stage. Mascara was running down her face and she was clinging onto another empty bottle. Julia and Arthur were sitting on the bed, Colin was mooching around petulantly. Loxy was waiting patiently outside.
‘Oh God,’ she said dramatically. ‘That’s the worst party I’ve ever had. Or been to.’
‘Nonsense.’ said Arthur briskly. ‘What about that time at Annabel’s when you threw up on her mohair rug?’
‘It was round and it was white, okay? Looked like a toilet seat to me. Oh God. I can’t believe I’m thirty. I’m thirty and I have absolutely nothing.’
‘You have masses of things,’ said Arthur, rubbing her back soothingly. ‘Friends, and a flat and a job and everything. And your mobile phone is really, really tiny and silver. I mean, what did you think things were going to be like when you got to this stage?’
Ellie’s vision clouded over as she thought of what it was going to be like.
‘Let me see,’ she said, staring into the middle distance. ‘I’m wearing a beautiful pink dress.’
‘Oh no,’ said Julia. ‘Not this one again.’
‘And I’m in a big pink room with billowing curtains … and I’m dancing to Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark … and my handsome partner leans over and whispers something like …’
‘Don’t worry, I’m sure house prices will keep going up for ever,’ said Arthur, squeezing her tightly. ‘I can’t believe you thought that having an eighties party would make the Brat Pack happen.’
‘What are you all talking about?’ said Colin, who still lived with his parents.
‘God, Colin, what’s the first film you ever saw? Jurassic Park?’ said Julia. ‘Ellie was talking about a very talented group of young actors in the nineteen eighties …’
‘… who now make furniture sale adverts and appear in films on Channel 5 after midnight on wet Thursdays,’ said Arthur.
‘And we loved them.’
‘Why?’ asked Colin.
Everyone looked at each other.
‘They had HUGE apartments,’ said Ellie. ‘Not flats, apartments.’
‘And they went to cool dances at school.’
‘And they started out unpopular, but then got really popular.’
‘And they had makeovers.’
‘And they were going to be friends for ever, despite their class and intellectual differences.’
‘And they were all going to be famous and successful and live happily ever after for ever!’
Everyone sighed.
‘That sounds complete shit,’ said Colin.
‘As opposed to what?’ sniffed Ellie. ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?’
‘Oh, Hedge,’ said Arthur, rubbing her head affectionately. ‘I don’t think we can get you what you want for your birthday. Although your chiropodist left you some peppermint foot lotion.’
Ellie had been known as Hedgehog since she could talk. Ellie’s mum had started calling her it because she was such a prickly little thing, and it had stuck, because the more you called her it, the pricklier she got. After her mother ran away with an chartered accountant called Archie, Ellie got pricklier still.
Whilst Julia was blonde and angelic as a child – she was still blonde now, although it took a little bit more effort, and she was certainly angelic bordering on martyrdom as far as the Hedgehog was concerned – Ellie was wild-eyed and had kinky black hair and sticky pink cheeks and looked as if she’d just run away from the circus. Their teachers in public had called them ‘Snow White and Rose Red’, in private, ‘Good and Evil’.
Ellie’s mother had skipped town without warning the year before the girls sat their GCSEs. It shocked their friends and neighbours in the respectable suburb, and no-one ever mentioned it to Ellie ever again, no matter how many tantrums she pulled. Julia, and her parents, had made sure that, when Julia sat down to study for her exams and, eventually, applied to university in Sheffield, Ellie did exactly the same, and they had gone up together. Which usually meant that they just felt li
ke very old best friends, although occasionally it could feel that they were yoked together unto death. Julia looked out for Ellie, and it seemed to Ellie that the trade-off was Julia got to be blonde and gorgeous-looking and pick up the nicest guys.
They’d met Arthur at college. Ellie had marched up to him in the student bar and declared that she fancied him. She’d found as a student that this method worked amazingly well on desperate teenage boys away from home for the first time. She would find in later life that it worked well on some older men too, but that the quality was definitely deteriorating year on year.
‘Tough,’ Arthur had replied lazily.
‘Why? What’s wrong with me?’
He looked her up and down.
‘One … two … ehm, three things,’ he said. ‘Adam’s apples I can take or leave.’
‘Oh,’ said Ellie. ‘Ohhhh,’ she said again as the ramifications sunk in. ‘I’ve never met anyone gay before.’
‘Really?’ Arthur had said. ‘How is Mars?’
‘I’m Ellie,’ she had announced sticking out her hand. ‘From Esher. Do you have any brothers who look exactly like you?’
‘No, Ellie from Esher,’ he had said, taking it. ‘Do you?’
‘Pardon me for asking …’
‘I’m not sure I like the way this is going.’
‘But aren’t you supposed to be really stylish and stuff?’
‘Clearly,’ said Arthur who was wearing satin smoking trousers and had his cigarette in a holder.
‘Well then, why do you hang around with Annabel and George?’
He shrugged. ‘To be honest, I like to keep a constant reminder around me of what I’ll never ever have to be. That and the sponge cake.’
‘Really! Me too! That’s me exactly! Would you like to be my partner in crime?’
Arthur had considered it for a second.
‘Yeah, alright then.’
‘My life,’ said Ellie now, sitting up on the bed, ‘is like one of those adverts for soup. You know, when someone has a really horrid, cold, rainy, bad day but it’s all right because at the end they sink into an armchair with a big cup of soup. WITHOUT THE SOUP.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Arthur. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your life that a little scooter wouldn’t sort out. Let’s go shopping on Sunday.’
‘No, it’s not that,’ said Ellie. ‘I mean, just, why do I just feel so bleargh? I mean, is all I have to look forward to squeezing massive foreign objects through my own tissues?’
‘You know, you really don’t have to have a baby if you don’t want to,’ said Julia.
‘We’re going to have to go,’ said Arthur, looking at Colin who was snoring sweetly in an armchair. ‘Come on; why don’t we forget tonight and go out tomorrow and drink the cocktail alphabet?’
‘Uh huh. Maybe. Okay,’ said Ellie. ‘You might as well go now. I’m wearing fifteen layers; it’s going to take me half an hour to get undressed.’
Julia kissed her on the head. ‘Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be worried about. Not really.’
‘Oh, I know,’ said Ellie wistfully. ‘That’s why I’m so worried about why I’m worried.’
‘You looked lovely tonight,’ said Loxy to Julia as they left.
‘Uh huh,’ said Julia. They picked their way through the party detritus and the old Classix Nouveaux LPs.
Ellie didn’t sleep. Or she thought she wasn’t sleeping, but found out she was when she fell out of bed. Having been dreaming of doing something rather disconcerting with Anthony Michael Hall, she bounced and shuddered awake with a yelp and scuttled about on the carpet, noting as she did so how filthy it was. It was grey outside, inside, on the floor, and especially under the bed.
‘Aargh!’ she yelped. ‘The first yelp of my thirties,’ she thought. She paused experimentally, in case the landlord she shared the flat with might get up to make sure she was alright. Her landlord was a bastard and it was a horrible flat, but she’d picked it because it was within walking distance of all her friends.
‘Shut up, Hedgehog!’ came a sleepy voice from next door. He’d come in late the previous night and eaten the remaining sausage rolls very, very loudly.
‘Shut up yourself,’ she yelled, snivelling. Unfortunately she wasn’t bleeding hard enough to go into his bedroom and do a Carrie imitation. She wiped herself with a dirty tissue and crawled back onto the bed, not noticing that the reason she had blood on her head was because she’d knocked the alarm clock off the bedside table. Lying back down, she dropped straight into a coma until the flat farting rev of her flatmate’s supposedly trendy scooter underneath her window woke her up at ten to nine.
‘Aargh,’ she yelped again, and leapt out of bed to look out of the window to try and work out what was going on.
‘Late for work again, Hedgehog? Not like you,’ shouted her big bastard landlord, a huge rugby player who was so muscular he couldn’t cross his own legs. Ellie was looking forward to his thirty-fifth birthday, when he would go to bed a brick shithouse and wake up morbidly obese. His hair was brown and stuck out persistently in different directions, despite his efforts to clamp it down with what Ellie fervently hoped was hair gel and not spit, and his face was permanently red.
She leaned out of the window. ‘Give me a lift on your scooter, Big Bastard.’
He snorted. ‘No chance. You are at least two hours off being ready and it’s morning traffic.’
‘Pleeease. I’ll do your ironing.’
He barked with laughter.
‘If I want fewer clothes I’ll give them to Oxfam, thanks.’
‘I hate you.’
‘I know, I’ve tasted your shepherd’s pie.’
‘I am thirty years old,’ Ellie rifled through her drawers, thinking. ‘And yet I do not appear to have a pair of unladdered tights. How can this be?’
‘Big Bastard!’ she hollered out of the window again. He was slipping his helmet on.
‘Ugh?’
‘Have you been stealing my tights for hilarious drunken pranks again?’
‘Guh … Yeah, I think so. We put one on Vince’s head for … ehm, some reason. Bloody funny though. Oh, and we took a pair of hold ups for Gaz’s stag. Oh, and that bet Willis had to put a pair on those monkeys at the safari park. And, ehm, Carmel borrowed a pair one morning. Oh, yeah, and I needed a pair to fix the car.’
Carmel was his dull girlfriend. Her only point of interest was that, as she was four foot eleven and Big Bastard was six foot four, people were always asking them how on earth they managed to have sex, as casually as if they were asking them if they wanted a cup of tea.
‘You are one big bastard,’ said Ellie.
‘Tough,’ he said. ‘Oh, and I need your rent and your share of the satellite TV.’
‘But I never watch the shagging satellite TV! You only use it for sport and women’s bosoms!’
‘Just write us a cheque, eh darling?’
‘Yeah, minus tight tax. Now I’m going to have to wear my white tights again.’
‘Nothing wrong with white tights.’
‘Yes, Big Bastard, but you think Jordan’s gorgeous. And please give me a lift.’
‘Phforr … Jordan. Sorry, what was that darling? No, I couldn’t possibly be seen out with someone in white tights.’
‘I hope you get run over by a lorry carrying really stinky chemicals that hurt you really badly and make you stink for the rest of your life. Even more than you do now. And maybe turn you purple.’ Ellie petered out, slamming down the window as Big Bastard completely ignored her.
‘Aha,’ she thought. ‘I’m thirty and even the quality of my insults is deteriorating year on year.’
Still, Big Bastard had been right about the ironing. Prodding desperately at a silk shirt that appeared to have taken on several different shades, Ellie cursed the entire institution. ‘In the future,’ she growled to herself, ‘ironing will be like dunking witches and bloodletting. They won’t have a bloody clue why anybody bothered.’
She tu
rned the shirt over and groaned at the large water stain that appeared.
‘Along with commuting,’ she sighed, throwing on a jacket with only one button missing and diving for the door, stopping to scoop up a spoonful of the horrid brown supposedly athletic mush Big Bastard had left behind to cement itself to a bowl. ‘And breakfast cereal, probably. They’ll discover it on an archaeological dig and say “Well, we’ve analysed it, and it’s not food.”’
Ellie stormed out of the door, not even stopping to pick up her newly delivered copy of Smash Hits.
‘Miss Eversholt! How kind of you to join us.’
Ellie tried to smile without using her teeth. Her boss, Mr Rooney, was of the school headteacher sarcastic variety, but you didn’t have the option of sneering back at him or pretending you had your period as compensation. He was pink-eyed, with thinning red hair, and had suspiciously scrofulous looking skin.
‘Everyone, we can start now! Miss Eversholt has deigned to grace us with her presence.’
‘Sorry Mr Rooney. Sorry everyone.’
As usual, the rest of the surveying team looked at her with complete blankness. They always did this, as if they thought being Assistant Administrative Director of Business Development was in some way odd. Ellie hated her job. Beyond hated it. She’d liked the idea of it, but then her idea of it was kind of sexy architects crossed with sexy builders. This didn’t turn out to have a lot to do with what it was, which involved large numbers of protractors and lots of long division. And for some reason the men who worked in it seemed to be required by law to wear loads of pens clipped onto their top pockets, and great big shoes that looked like Cornish pasties.
‘Well, you’ll be glad to know we’ve got a new job in, and it’s going to be taking up lots of our time. They’re turning the old library into … anyone? Anyone?’
‘Don’t tell us, groovy new fake open-plan warehouse flats with fake wooden floors and metal sinks,’ Ellie muttered to the person sitting next to her who was wearing a polyester blouse and completely ignored her.