Rubbish Boyfriends

by Jessie Jones

  Rubbish Boyfriends

  JESSIE JONES

  I’ve always wanted to be able to say, ‘If so and so left the company, I’d follow them.’ Now I’ve got two such people. Grainne Fox at Ed Victor and Maxine Hitchcock at Avon. You’ve been warned girls. If you ever leave, I’m stalking you.

  Thanks, also, to Caroline Ridding. I always knew we’d end up together.

  A massive big-up to the Hampstead Garden Beauty Salon for all the treatments I endured in the name of, er, research. Loving your work, Helen.

  And finally, to Matt, for patiently explaining for hours and hours the stuff I needed to know about how a car engine workszzzzzzzzzzzz …

  For Holly.

  May she never have a rubbish boyfriend.

  And for Sam.

  May he never be one.

  Contents

  Chapter Three Cm

  Chapter No. One

  Chapter Four Cm

  Chapter Not Quite No. Two

  Chapter Still Four Cm

  Chapter No. Two

  Chapter Five Cm

  A Blip

  Chapter Six Cm

  Chapter No. Three

  Chapter Seven Cm

  Chapter Not Strictly No. Four

  Chapter Eight Cm

  Chapter Definitely No. Five

  Chapter 8.5 cm

  Chapter No. Six

  Chapter 9.5 cm

  Chapter Still No. Six (With A Touch Of No. 3)

  Chapter Ten Cm (And Pushing)

  Chapter No. Six Again (With Nos. 1, Two & Five Thrown In)

  Chapter Six Lb Three Oz

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  3 cm

  ‘No, Dayna, no!’ the midwife scolds. ‘You mustn’t push yet. It’s way too early.’ But what the hell does she know? She looks about nineteen. I bet the closest she’s been to a newborn baby is … Yes, OK, she’s a midwife. Newborns are what she does. But standing around offering ‘helpful’ advice doesn’t count. It’s the having them that does. Which, in case you hadn’t guessed, is exactly what I’m in the middle of right here, right now.

  When I say in the middle of, I guess I’m thinking wishfully because the teenager between my legs tells me that, technically, at just three centimetres dilated, I’m only at the beginning of.

  We’ve all heard the stories about so-and-so and her two-hundred-and-fifty-eight-hour labour. I’d always imagined they were just that: stories. The labour equivalent to comparing injuries and ailments. Kind of like, ‘You’ve got sore eyes? Let me tell you, my eyes are so bad, Stevie Wonder wouldn’t want them.’ But right now I’m suspecting that, actually, the stories are watered down for public consumption. I’m getting the horrible feeling that the truth is much, much worse.

  It’s one in the morning. I’ve been in this labour room for three hours. Teen midwife tells me this could go on a while. How long exactly? She won’t tell me exactly, will she? She won’t even give it to me roughly – like to the nearest day or something. Three hours down, then, and counting.

  ‘Try to relax, Dayna,’ teen midwife soothes. ‘You’re looking a little stressed.’

  ‘Nnnrrnngg,’ is my response to that. Of course I’m stressed. I’m in agony and I’ve barely begun. Next she’ll be suggesting we light some of the stupid incense sticks that Emily thought might be just the thing.

  ‘I know, why don’t we light an incense stick?’ Emily asks.

  ‘Two words. One of them is off,’ I tell her through clenched teeth.

  She smiles at me as best she can. Emily is a labour virgin and has therefore yet to discover the true defin ition of pain. ‘Hang on in there, Dayna,’ she encourages. ‘You’re doing great.’

  ‘Arrggghhhh!’ I scream.

  Emily looks at me, then at teen midwife with panic in her eyes. ‘Can’t she have some more methadone?’ she wails.

  ‘It’s not the bloody contractions, Emily, it’s my hand. Let go, for God’s sake.’ I attempt to yank my hand from hers, but it won’t budge. For two hours she’s been squeezing it lovingly – as lovingly as a bone-crushing vice, that is. So far the pain transference has been an excellent distraction, but with her panic rising, her grip has intensified.

  ‘It’s called pethidine,’ teen midwife corrects, ‘and no, she’s already had the maximum dosage.’

  ‘Look, I’ve changed my mind about the epidural,’ I tell her. ‘I want one now. Definitely. I can’t go through seven more centimetres of this. It’s unbearable.’

  Teen midwife furrows her brow. ‘I’m not sure that’s an option any longer,’ she says. ‘The anaesthetist has seven ladies waiting and they all booked them on admission.’ She pauses to give me a don’t-say-I-didn’t-warn-you look. ‘If you remember, you were offered one.’ She glances at the table by the wall that’s groaning under the weight of the candles and incense sticks and whale-song CDs that Emily unloaded when we got here. ‘You said, and I think your exact words were, “Oh no, we won’t be requiring intervention, thank you. We’re doing it naturally.”’

  Smart-arse, photographic-memory, contraction-free midwife. Those might have been the exact words, but I didn’t say them. Emily did. And now I think about it, where did my so-called best friend get we from? Like we’re doing anything here. I don’t see her going through paralysing contractions just to dilate her cervix another tiny millimetre. Right now I could shove those incense sticks up her arse, closely followed by a pair of fat vanilla-scented candles (lit). Then, as I listen to her screams of agony, I’ll know that we’re truly in this together.

  It’s Emily’s fault that I’m here at all tonight. The trip to the firework display at the garden centre was her excellent idea. ‘I know you’re nervous about having the baby, Dayna,’ she said. ‘You need things to take your mind off it.’ Ha! Just five minutes of ear-splitting whizzes, BANGS!!! and wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees were enough to trigger labour. Only two weeks early.

  And without my proper birth partner, i.e. this baby’s father.

  Did I say baby? Sorry, I mean super-sized watermelon. Make that crate of. Because surely giving birth to a teeny-weeny baby shouldn’t hurt this much.

  But perhaps Emily has done me a huge favour. If this thing had another two weeks to grow inside me, how much more might it have hurt? And at least she’s here, even if it is with a bag of hippie rubbish, as well as another one – the food bag. (Don’t ask.) She could still be thousands of miles away in Tokyo, which is where she has spent the bulk of my pregnancy. She’s been learning Japanese. She’s fluent in ‘How much is this D&G handbag?’ and ‘Do you have it in brown?’ as well as several other essential phrases.

  She came home three weeks ago and we’ve spent the time since imagining how blissful this moment would be. I have a horrible feeling we might have misjudged things. The food bag for a start. Like the hippie paraphernalia, it was Emily’s initiative. Cereal bars, chocolate, crisps and a fruit selection to ‘maintain your energy levels’ and ‘stop us from getting bored’. Believe me, bored is not what I’m feeling. Then there’s the third bag packed with toiletries, make-up and lotions, as well as two wardrobe changes. Emily’s idea again. Where did she think we were going? Two weeks in Barbados? As opposed to two hundred and fifty-eight hours (OK, three so far) in hell.

  But I can’t blame Emily. The only fool here is me. After nine months (minus two weeks) to prepare for this, I should have known better.

  I close my eyes and clench my fists as another crushing wave of pain rolls over me. Jeeeee-sus, that hurts. I can’t believe I’m only three centimetres. ‘How much worse is this going to get?’ I whimper as the agony finally fades.

  Silence. Teen midwife has left us
for the moment and all Emily can do is give me a helpless shrug. ‘It could be worse,’ she says. ‘You could be facing this on your own.’

  ‘I am on my own.’

  ‘I’m here,’ she says, hurt.

  ‘I know, but he’s not, is he?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she soothes. She goes to take my hand again, but I snatch it away. ‘Look on the bright side. If I hadn’t been staying at yours since I got back, you wouldn’t have been so organised. Remember it was my idea to pack your bags last night. Good job, too, eh?’

  And to demonstrate her cleverness, she plunges her hand into the food bag, takes out a couple of Alpen bars and offers me one. I shake my head. Who can think about eating at a time like this? I feel bloated enough as it is. Three and a half stone I’ve put on … Tell me, how much of that is baby? They weigh pounds, not stones.

  Don’t they?

  ‘After everything we’ve been through, it’s amazing, isn’t it?’ she says.

  There she goes with we again, but I let it go. ‘What’s amazing?’ I ask.

  ‘Well, just that I’m the one getting married and you’re the one having the baby. I always thought Max and I would be parents first.’

  Max is the guy who took her to Japan. He went over there to make his first million. She went over to spend it. No, no, it’s not like that at all. It’s true love … But she is getting through the dosh like she’s Paris Hilton.

  ‘Sorry about that,’ I say, sounding slightly more sarcastic than I mean to. ‘You should have told me it was a race. I’d have hung back.’

  She laughs, but I wonder if she really is miffed. We’ve been friends forever and she’s always done everything before me. She learned to swim before I did. She plucked her eyebrows first. Started smoking first. Gave up first. And she’d been in and out of true, serious, till-death-do-us-part love seven or eight times before I’d even had my first proper boyfriend.

  Right now, though, I wish I’d never followed her down that particular road. If I’d held back on the proper boyfriend front for a while – until I was fifty, say – I wouldn’t be here now, about to endure another bloody contraaaaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhh!

  No. 1

  Simon. Number one, chronologically, at least. My first proper boyfriend, my first true love. Sure, I’d had boys before him, but they’d never lasted. I’d never had one of those, ‘Can you believe it’s been a whole year/month/week!’ relationships.

  But this time it was love with a capital L. He was the one I was surely going to have an anniversary with (any length would do), the one I might go on holiday with, the one I was definitely going to Do It with. It was fate, you see. Tell me, what exactly were the chances of the only two seventeen-year-old virgins in London fancying each other and getting it together? It was meant to be, clearly. Well, that was what I told myself at the time.

  I held off for a while, but not for long. I reckoned that virginity, unlike my signed, limited-edition *NSYNC poster, was not a thing to hang on to for posterity.

  Our first time: a beautiful, deeply spiritual experience; scented with a thousand candles and strewn with a million rose petals …

  No, no, no. Let me start again. Our first time: rubbish, basically.

  It was 1997. He was still living at his parents’ house. They were out and we went at it with a sense of urgency – more like panic, actually – because we didn’t know how long we’d have before they came home. We needn’t have worried. What I’d been holding on to for seventeen years and eleven months was gone in thirty seconds. At thirty-one seconds, I noticed Simon roll over and not-so-discreetly punch the air.

  Me? I was gobsmacked.

  Gobsmacked as in, Was that it?

  Most of my friends, including Emily, had been at it for a good couple of years. ‘It’s amazing,’ she’d told me shortly after she’d done it. ‘It feels just like a hammer in your stomach and you get these sort of electric feelings going up your spine and into your head.’ I guessed that probably everyone’s first time was different. At least, that’s what I hoped – if there were hammers and funny feelings up spines to be had, I wanted some of that.

  I decided to stay quiet and pretend to be as full of the joys of sex as he was so as not to look like the odd one out. Which I guess is what you do when you’re young and completely stupid. And when you’re as young and stupid as I was back then, I guess you miss all the warning signs, don’t you?

  Emily and I had left school after GCSEs and decided to have what is generally referred to as a gap year. I know that to most kids this means embarking on a life-changing trip to South America before going to study Important Stuff at University. For Emily and me it was actually a gap year in the literal sense, i.e. the bit in between with nothing in it, as in ‘Mind the …’

  Anyway, I ignored the warning and fell straight into it. And while I was down there I met Simon.

  Back then, I’d see a guy I fancied and just know I had to have him. Then, after pursuing him – sometimes for months – and finally getting him to ask me out, that would be it. Total turn-off. The thrill, it seemed, was always in the chase.

  Simon was different. Dark hair and piercing blue eyes, he had that Italian Stallion look going on but without the oiliness. He was good looking, yes, but there was more to him than that. I knew it as soon as I’d got him to buy me a drink by using a brilliantly subtle and psychologically ingenious chat-up technique: I asked him to buy me a drink. Fast-forward a few dates and I was hooked.

  Underneath all the manliness he was a sweetheart. In fact, if I hadn’t asked him to buy me a drink we would probably never have got together because he was so girl-shy. This only made him more endearing. He was affectionate and kind, always buying me little presents. Only little things because he wasn’t exactly rich, but, hey, can a girl ever get enough cuddly toys? Lots of cuddly toys. When we split up, several soft-toy factories in China were forced into bankruptcy.

  A month into our relationship, he surpassed himself. On my eighteenth birthday, he gave me the cuddly-toy equivalent of the Liz Taylor diamond: a huge pink teddy bear. It used to sit on the end of my bed making the whole room glow like a chocolate-box sunset. It was very big, very pink and very, very …

  God, that bear made me feel sick. I just wasn’t a pink-teddy sort of girl, but to have told him the truth would have been to shatter his illusion that I was, so I kept quiet. And I tried not to look too wistfully at that new slim-line Nokia I’d been coveting whenever we walked past a Carphone Warehouse.

  Cuddly toys aside, Simon ticked all the boxes. He was gorgeous, he was kind, he was funny, and – he got a double tick and a gold star for this one – he had a car. To a teenage girl who’s used to freezing in the queue for the night bus or begging her dad for the cab fare home, boyfriend-with-car can assume a disproportionate importance. A jangled set of car keys can transform the nerdiest, most wonky-eyed bloke into Johnny Depp.

  Simon’s car had been a pile of rust when his boss gave it to him. It wasn’t an act of kindness. Some customer had dumped it at the garage where he worked and boss man was too tight to have it hauled off to the knacker’s yard. Simon set to work on it like he was Dick Van Dyke. OK, so it didn’t fly like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, but the transformation was almost comparable.

  For the first few weeks of our relationship, I practi c ally lived in Simon’s car. Being jobless – and therefore penniless – I was the only layabout in London with a chauffeur. He took me everywhere: shops, dentist, cafés, clubs …

  But for how long can you party your life away and not give a second’s thought to the future? That sounded pretty cool to me but Dad said it had to stop. There was only room for one career-less, uneducated, poor person in our house and that was him.

  While I was flapping, wondering if my three GCSEs were enough to get me into medical school, Emily, my fellow jobless slob, made a decision. She decided to go to beauty college. This came as a shock because she’d always been a bit of a hippie – you know, into organic fruit and wearing those
bracelets made of twisted bits of coloured string. Natural was always best as far as she was concerned, and beauty school seemed just a bit vain coming from her.

  With hindsight, I shouldn’t have been surprised. Her vegetarianism wasn’t exactly 24/7. She had a break every Sunday morning when her mum made us bacon sandwiches as hangover relief. And when she said she wished the Palestinians and the Israelis would stop fighting it was only because she wanted to go to Jewish Summer Camp with our friend Elise without the fear of being bombed. It’s not that she wasn’t principled; just that she was eighteen.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with women making the odd trip to a salon to make the best of themselves, Dayna,’ she told me when the subject first came up. ‘Beauty is all about empowerment.’

  Of course! How stupid of me.

  ‘We’ll be carrying on from all those brave women who risked their lives in the struggle for sexual equality,’ she explained.

  ‘Like who?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s not the point. Just because we can’t remember their names doesn’t mean they aren’t some of the most important people in history. Look at the man who invented the wheel. Does anyone remember his name?’

  Inspired by her words, I thought long and hard about all my options and concluded that I didn’t have any. That decided it for me: I was going with her to learn how to wax eyebrows and – just like the man who invented the wheel – make the world a better place.

  The gap year was officially over.

  The day I started at the Holstein College of Beauty in the heart of London’s exciting and fashionable West End was the happiest day of Dad’s life because he also won £500 on a twenty-to-one shot at Doncaster. He decided things were definitely looking up. He didn’t know the half of it.