by Jessie Jones
While Emily and I were enrolling at college, Simon was also changing his life. He ditched his plan to become the World’s Leading Car Mechanic and got a job in a five-star hotel, which, for the sake of not wanting to have my arse sued by its legal heavies, shall henceforth be known as The Hotel. You know the one. It’s got a huge canopy out front and a circular gravel drive. OK, so only the mega-rich could afford to stay there, but we weren’t bitter. We consoled ourselves with the fact that at least we were able to become very familiar with the circular gravel drive. That alone was amazing. Really gravelly.
Simon was a room-service waiter. The tips were incredible and more than made up for the fact that he wasn’t learning a trade and any chance he’d had of having a career with the words World and Leading in it was now dead and buried. But so what when you’re making more than sixty quid a day in tips alone? That was his attitude and I fully supported him.
He was a fast learner. And not just at how to get a full English from the kitchen to the seventh floor before the toast went cold. Arabs and Yanks were the most generous tippers, apparently, and Simon would sniff them out like a bloodhound. He’d grease up to whoever was taking orders on his shifts and make sure he got the right rooms and avoided the duds – he said Germans were the tightwads, which is just one more thing we can blame them for I suppose.
Emily, meanwhile, was still on her empowerment trip. Beauty college was just stage one. Stage two was to find her own place, which, given that there was no way she could afford the rent on her own, meant our own place. No sooner had she said the words ‘Dayna, I think we should look for a flat’ than a flat fell into our laps. Our friend Elise was living in it with her boyfriend, but they decided to move south (of the river, that is – although Tulse Hill might as well have been South America for the amount we saw of her after she left).
‘But how the hell will we pay for it?’
‘You worry too much, Dayna. We’ll manage somehow.’
That was Emily all over. She operated on the we’ll-manage-somehow principle and somehow things invariably worked out. Mostly, I suspect, because it was the we’ll-and not the I’ll-manage principle. She never went into anything alone and always roped in someone – i.e. me – to go along for the ride.
Dad, who was still flush with his winnings, gave in to my emotional blackmail and contributed towards the deposit. (It’s incredible that at the age of eighteen, I was still using the I didn’t ask to be born thing – incredible, also, that it still worked.) The flat was ours. It was gorgeous. Two bright and spacious bedrooms and a massive south-facing garden. OK, so we were on the first floor and didn’t have actual access, but we had a superb view of it from the kitchen window.
Having lived with my dad for every single minute of my eighteen years, eight months and two weeks on planet earth, the day I finally moved out he was obviously seriously emotional, though mostly because he won two grand on a five-match combination bet on the football.
My perfect boyfriend (I was still ignoring the lack of hammers in stomachs and electricity up spines) offered to spend some of his tips on van hire for the move, which was very sweet. We had so little stuff that I didn’t actually think we needed a van. Then I remembered the giant pink teddy and relented. It took up almost the whole of the back; the rest of Emily’s and my worldly possessions fitted into the gap between its legs.
‘You do listen to some shit,’ Simon laughed, dumping my box of Boyzone and Backstreet Boys CDs on the living-room floor of my new home. ‘Anyway, that’s the lot. Got to get the van back. But before I go, I’ve got something to give you,’ he told me shyly.
‘What?’ I asked, excited. And nervous – I mean, this was Simon, remember. It could have been another cuddly toy.
He reached into his jeans, pulled out a huge wad of notes – £300 of rolled-up twenties – and pressed it into my hand.
‘Simon!’ I gasped. ‘I can’t take this. I’m not going to sponge off you.’
Simon had always paid for more or less everything, but that was only because I couldn’t. Things were going to change. I was an independent woman now and I was going to stand on my own two feet.
‘Of course you’re not going to sponge,’ Simon said. ‘It’s just something for emergencies. Look, I know life hasn’t been … um, easy,’ he was mumbling now. ‘Growing up without a mum and all that … But, er … I just want you to, you know … I’m, well … I’m here and all that.’
OK, as speeches went it wasn’t exactly Russell Crowe addressing the troops at the beginning of Gladiator. They were, however, the most special words I’d ever heard. I knew he was big and strong, and now he was proving that he cared. He really cared; I could feel it in his fingers as they folded mine around the money. Mushy but true: at that moment I was totally and utterly gone.
Then that’s what he was: gone. He kissed me and left to take the van back.
He was back about thirty seconds later.
‘You forgot something,’ he said.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Mr Pink.’ He stepped aside to reveal the teddy on the landing behind him.
‘Lovely,’ I smiled. Damn, I thought.
I’d been quietly hopeful that Mr Pink – so named by Simon after the sleazy one in Reservoir Dogs – would stay forgotten in the back of the van. But then, of course, I kicked myself for being such a deeply horrible person. How could I think like that after he’d shown me he was the kindest, most sensitive man, possibly in history?
I meant what I said about standing on my own two feet. No way was I going to rely on Simon for handouts. I was an independent woman. Emily was too. We were standing together in this. Independently together.
Emily had started going out with Max by then. He worked in the City. Something in insurance. I wasn’t sure exactly what he did and neither was Emily, but he earned more in a minute than Simon got in a day from tips. So Emily could easily have swanned through college, letting her boyfriend pay all the bills, but she had her guns to stick to.
‘Yes, we’ve got to get jobs,’ she agreed when I put the idea to her.
We found them at Fasta Pasta!, the Italian on the High Street, where we were hired as part-time waitresses. The money was hardly brilliant, but we were determined to make things work without anyone’s assistance, which, er, was helped enormously by the fact that we both had cash-rich boyfriends.
But it’s all about intent, isn’t it? We worked bloody hard in that restaurant and we couldn’t help it if our wages barely covered the rent. At least our hearts were in the right place – and won’t the surgeons be grateful for that should they ever have to open us up for surgery?
So there I was: working like a dog slinging pasta; going to college, which, much to my surprise, I was starting to enjoy; seeing Simon in the few spare minutes we both had. Life was cool.
Only it wasn’t.
Except I didn’t know that yet.
My dad celebrated like crazy on the day I got a distinction in my end-of-term tests, mostly because he came home with four and a half grand, having correctly picked four winners at Kempton.
Have I mentioned that Simon was a big bloke? Six foot three, to be exact. This isn’t important other than that his formidable height meant he was offered regular work as a bouncer. On the Saturdays that Simon had off from The Hotel he worked at a rough club in Stockwell called The Garage. With Simon working the door, Emily and I used to get in free. Even though the place had a reputation on account of the weekly stabbings, it wasn’t that bad. The music was loud and the crowd was cool.
Actually, given the heavy security on the door, I did wonder how knife-wielding loonies always seemed to end up inside. Simon told me it was a deliberate policy on the part of the bouncers: ‘Let in the nutters with the knives and the real nutters with the guns steer clear.’ I wasn’t so sure. I reckoned the bouncers were so busy deciding which of the girls in the queue were sufficiently near-naked to be let in, they didn’t notice the armed psychos stomping through. But I have to say
that in all my time there, I didn’t see a single gun, so perhaps their cunning plan was working.
With me having a place of my own, and him still living at home, Simon used to stay over a lot. That meant we had sex a lot. And of course, practice makes perfect, doesn’t it?
Not in our case. We were getting plenty of practice all right, but in the battle between quality and quantity, quantity won by a mile. Twice a day, six days a week to be exact. But while I may have still been seriously under-whelmed, Simon was having a ball and I was becoming rather worried. What the hell was wrong with me?
I didn’t have any previous experience on which to draw, but the routine just felt wrong. Kiss, grope, wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am, satisfied grin. Simon, that is, not me. Was that really all there was?
I tried to talk to Emily about it. I tentatively brought the subject up one night when we were watching Ally McBeal.
‘Do you think we’ll ever get bored of sex?’ I asked, carefully putting the emphasis in the right place.
‘God, no. Why should we?’
I shrugged a little shrug that was designed to communicate absolutely nothing.
‘Well, maybe we will,’ she said after a moment’s thought. ‘You know, when we’re old – like forty or whatever. Maybe by then it gets a bit, you know, yawn.’
I changed the subject then. Emily had just reinforced what I already knew: everyone was at it all of the time and loving every minute of it. I was a freak.
Even my dad was shag-happy … Yeurrghh! Not that I wanted to dwell on it, but there was no getting away from it. Over the years, Dad had had plenty of girlfriends. And why not? I was happy for him, I really was.
After Mum died, it was a long time before he socialised again. Her death shattered us both, but at very different times. I was only four when she became an angel. (That’s what I was told at the time and that’s what she is, OK?) The real grief – grief that hit me like a train – came some years later. I remember being round Emily’s house and watching her with her mum, simply being mother and daughter; talking, laughing, bicker ing. Looking at them, I felt a lead weight of sadness press down on me. All I could think about was what I would never, ever have.
For a while after that, wherever I went, all I could see were mothers and daughters – as if they never went anywhere without each other – and I wallowed in a depression made up of resentment of them and sadness for myself. And, being a typically hormonal, self-centred teenager, I didn’t give a second’s thought to how hard things had been for Dad since Mum died.
And things had been tough. He’d had to force himself out of his grief and make himself go back to work because he had a four-year-old to take care of. That can’t have been easy. And just as he was finally sorting himself out, there was me turning into a teen monster.
Eventually the acne cleared and so did my head. You don’t get over feelings like that, but you learn to cope with them. And, having put my dad through hell, I decided I wouldn’t begrudge him his fun, whether he got it from girlfriends or from gambling.
‘A whole year, Dayna,’ Simon cooed. ‘Can you believe it?’
I shook my head and smiled as he stroked my hand across the table. No, I couldn’t believe it. I’d never heard him coo before. And I couldn’t believe we’d been going out for a year.
We were celebrating our anniversary in true teenage style: flicks followed by food. We’d been to see Spice World – my choice and Simon didn’t complain once. How special is that? Sitting in that Italian restaurant afterwards, I was in total love mode. It was one of those places where everything is smothered in thick sauce and you have to duck the three-foot pepper mills. I didn’t mind at all that the sauce on my veal was a tiny bit gluey. It could have been actual glue and I wouldn’t have given a stuff because I had Simon.
Fair enough, the sex wasn’t setting the world alight or even slightly a-smoulder, but sex wasn’t everything. Maybe I was growing up, settling down. Or maybe Simon was just really, really special. Sitting opposite him, a glass and a half of cheap Frascati inside me, I decided that Simon was indeed amazingly special.
‘I feel dead lucky,’ he said.
Me too, I thought. ‘Why?’ I asked.
‘Because of you,’ he mumbled. Simon didn’t usually do mushy, and on the rare occasion that he did, he mumbled.
‘Why because of me?’ I persisted, desperate to hear him say something really nice about me.
‘You know,’ he said, the mumbling getting worse.
‘No, I don’t,’ I said.
‘You know … It’s like … You know …’
I shook my head.
‘It’s like … I love –’
‘Parmigiano, signorina?’
I looked up at the waiter holding the cheese-grater over my plate. The moment had been shattered. But it was OK. Everything was. Because Simon had clearly mumbled ‘I love’ and he was obviously, definitely going to complete the sentence with the word ‘you’.
As in me, Dayna Harris.
And as the waiter sprinkled smelly cheese on my glue – I mean food – I gave Simon the warmest smile I could manage because I loved him too.
An hour later, I was sitting in his car, drunk on love and cheap Frascati. Then Simon turned towards the backseat and so did I. What I saw made me jump – something big and body-shaped, covered with a blanket.
‘What the hell’s that?’ I asked, startled.
‘It’s for you,’ he said with a shy smile. ‘Your anniversary present.’
He reached over his seat and whipped the blanket from possibly the biggest, bluest teddy bear in the world.
Oh my God. Not another one. ‘Ahhhh …’ was all I could say.
‘Miss Blue,’ he announced. ‘Mr Pink was looking lonely, so I thought she might agree to become Mrs Pink or something.’
And for the briefest, maddest moment I thought that was a marriage proposal.
‘I got her at Argos, so I suppose that makes her a catalogue bride,’ he joked and proceeded to laugh like a drain. This was clever of him because, apart from being a good joke, it also ensured I didn’t go getting the wrong idea about him proposing or anything stupid like that.
The day I got the information that turned me into a near-suicidal wreck, my dad really couldn’t give a stuff because he’d just won £207,631 on a seven-race accumulator.
It was the Saturday morning after our anniversary dinner. Simon had stayed over, but had got up at six for a shift at The Hotel, leaving me alone with Mr Pink and his fiancée. After he left, I rolled over and went back to sleep, but half an hour later the phone woke me up. It was Dad with the news of his win. He knew it was a bit early, but he just couldn’t keep it in a moment longer. Obviously I was thrilled for him. He’d walked into the bookies with a £1 stake and walked out of it seven races later with £207,631.
£207,631!
Tax paid!
Amazing!
Dad was an electrician, but his second job was gambling. It was never problem gambling. He’d win a bit then lose a bit, always managing to keep things in check. But then he started winning a bit, then winning a bit more. It began with the five hundred quid he scooped on the day I started college and ended up with just over two hundred grand. It was the most amazing streak of his life.
‘It’s party time!’ he told me excitedly. ‘I’m having a do tonight at the Lancaster. Be there at eight.’
‘Oh, I’m supposed to be working …’ I replied. But sod it. How often does your dad win two hundred grand? ‘Eight o’clock, I’ll be there,’ I assured him.
After I put the phone down, I woke Emily. She wasn’t too pleased. She’d been at The Garage the night before and hadn’t rolled in until four. But – bless her – she did her best to look as thrilled as I was while I forced her to get dressed and dragged her to the café across the road.
That was our Saturday morning thing: breakfast at the caff. Normally, given our usual poverty, we stuck to beans on toast. That Saturday, though, it was my treat – I had
a rich daddy now! – and I ordered us the works. Two massive plates loaded with bacon, sausages, tomato, mushrooms, fried egg, hash browns and fried bread; a nutritionally balanced combination of regular fats, saturated fats and a healthy dollop of left-over-from-yesterday’s-pan fats.
What was I doing buying a vegetarian a great big plate of pig fat? Well, by then she’d been an out-of-the-closet meat-eater for months. A week after we moved into the flat, we did our first proper shop at Asda and I couldn’t tear her away from the meat aisle. Tomato-based sauces and aubergine dips were all well and good but she no longer had a handy mum to rustle them up for her; so, easy-to-grill sausages or burgers it was. Well, a girl has to eat, right?
But that Saturday she just sat in the café and poked at her food unenthusiastically. I put it down to tiredness and carried on gibbering, showing off my knowledge of gambling odds, before seamlessly moving the conversation onto the subject of true love.
‘I just never thought I’d meet a guy I’d be so happy with,’ I said dreamily. ‘You know, really happy. It’s wonderful, don’t you think?’
‘Oh, pur-lease,’ Emily groaned.
‘What? What have I said?’ I asked, shocked and, yes, a tiny bit hurt.
‘Nothing, really … Heavy night last night. My head. Not in the mood.’
‘Is something wrong?’ I asked, feeling very uncomfortable. Emily never usually did snappy. ‘Is it college?’
I know beauty school had been her idea and she’d practically had to drag me there on our first day, but lately she’d been losing interest. I think it was dawning on her that, actually, a career of exfoliating and epilating wasn’t going to make the world a better place, even if it did leave it nicely moisturised and slightly less hairy.
But she said, ‘No, it’s not college.’
‘Money?’ I asked. ‘My dad’s bound to give me some now. I don’t mind sharing it. You can pay me back when you’re rich. You know, after you’ve been to Africa to give those poor Somali women the free, life-changing full-body waxes they’ve all been waiting for.’