Rubbish Boyfriends

by Jessie Jones

  Usually a bit of teasing would break Emily’s moods. Not that morning, though.

  Instead, she fixed me with an ominous look. ‘Dayna, listen, I don’t know how to say this but … You’ve got to talk to Simon.’

  ‘What about?’

  She didn’t answer. Just pushed her plate aside and took my hand, squeezing it hard. (She’s always been good at that.)

  ‘What?’ I whispered, feeling really scared now.

  ‘I feel terrible about this, Dayna … but if you found out that Max had been – I don’t know – up to something, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?’

  I nodded, feeling sick, fearing the worst now.

  I listened as Emily spilled the beans. It took a while because Simon hadn’t just been up to something. He’d been up to lots of things – anything in a skirt, basically. And, what’s more, everyone knew about it. Everyone, that is, except me and, until the previous night, Emily. She’d found out by accident in – where else? – the girls’ loo.

  She’d gone to the toilet and finished her wee when – damn it! – she realised there wasn’t any loo roll. Don’t you hate it when that happens? Anyway, she deliberated for ages: should she let herself drip-dry or use the inside of her sleeve? Desperate situations call for desperate measures, right? Matters became further complicated by the appearance of a third option – there on the floor was a slightly trodden-on single sheet of toilet paper. Germ-infested it might have been, but at least it was loo roll.

  While she was deliberating, two girls came into the toilet and Emily idly listened to them gassing at the mirrors. One of them was telling the other about a bloke she’d shagged in the club’s upstairs office the week before. ‘He could’ve got into serious trouble for leaving the door, but he couldn’t resist me!’ the girl boasted. She told her friend she was mortified this guy wasn’t on that night because he’d promised her an action replay. The reason he wasn’t working, I realised, was because he had been busy celebrating his anniversary with me and Miss Sodding Blue.

  ‘Simon and Simone, eh?’ the girl had said as she left the loo. ‘Must be fate!’

  There was only one Simon on the door.

  Emily was stunned. Without even thinking, she yanked up her knickers – the drip-dry option, then – and set to work like the old dear off Murder, She Wrote. She knew the bouncers would all stick together and wouldn’t tell her anything, so she bypassed them and went to another source. She knew the ideal snitch: Spinner.

  I’m sure it wasn’t the name his parents had given him. He was The Garage’s resident DJ and he knew everything that was going on in the place. And he wouldn’t be able to resist telling Emily because a) he fancied the pants off her, and b) when he was on the decks he was whizzed up to the eyeballs and could not stop talking. She collared him in a break, bought him a beer and let him blab.

  He told her the bouncers had started a competition: who could get off with the most girls. They’d cancelled it after two weeks because Simon was so far ahead. Then, once Spinner had finished giving her a graphic rundown of my beloved’s exploits at The Garage, he told her Simon had promised to wangle him a shift at The Hotel. ‘He reckons the place is, like, pussy heaven, man!’ Spinner leered. ‘I reckon it’s all bullshit, but … Hey, hang on, you’re, like, best mates with his girlfriend, aren’t you?’

  ‘Like, yeah,’ Emily had confirmed.

  ‘Bollocks, man.’ He’d twigged too late. The code of silence had been broken.

  ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ Emily said when she’d finished telling me.

  I couldn’t speak. I just stared at my food, which was stone-cold by then.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ Emily asked.

  Simon denied everything at first. He came round that afternoon when his shift had finished. I set about him like a secret police interrogator from one of the countries that Emily was always telling me not to buy oranges from or whatever, and, eventually, he crumbled.

  It disappointed me how easily he caved in, actually. Six-three and built like a rugby player and he was such a wimp, cowering on the sofa and looking for a cushion to hide behind. I couldn’t believe the power I had over him … Although now I think about it, I was yelling pretty loudly. And I was hitting him – repeatedly and quite hard on the same spot on his arm. He probably still has a weak spot there to this day.

  When I quietened down enough to let him get a word in, the confession just spilled out. As if he was relieved to get it off his chest.

  He’d lost count of the girls he’d screwed at The Garage. And then there was The Hotel. The first time it had happened, the woman was French. Room 214. Simon had bagsied it because he knew that a regular from Texas, a big tipper, had checked in the day before. Simon said he was gutted when he walked in to find no Texan, just a woman in the bed. But he was a pro and he hid his disappointment. He whipped the silver dome off her full English and claimed that at the exact same moment she whipped off the sheet to show him her full French.

  ‘No lie, hand on heart, that’s exactly how it happened,’ he begged me to believe. He also expected me to believe that she then climbed out of bed, crossed the room and virtually raped him.

  What sort of idiot did he take me for? I went ballistic – obviously – but as I thumped his arm, I wondered, why was I so outraged? That he might not have been telling me the truth about the way it had happened or that it had happened at all? And if it really had happened that way, why hadn’t he just said no?

  Simon told me that none of the other room-service boys believed it had happened, but, even so, the next morning there was a virtual fistfight over who’d get 214. His best mate, Antoine, won the toss, and got a blowjob for a tip. Simon’s reputation was safe. ‘I mean, I was in serious danger of looking like a lying bastard,’ was how he put it. After Frenchy, it seems the floodgates opened. There were Lebanese women, Brazilians, Italians, Germans …

  To finish, he told me he’d even had a come-on from Kirsty, the American in the flat across the landing from mine. He reckoned he turned her down because it was unethical to ‘shit on your girlfriend’s doorstep’.

  Incredible, huh?

  And I’d thought Kirsty was a lesbian! Amazing what those boy-band looks can do to a girl, I thought.

  But then I got to thinking that maybe it was all my fault. Perhaps he’d felt compelled to go out and shag as many women as possible in as many different places as possible because I was so boring in bed.

  Look at that. I was blaming myself.

  I finally sank back onto the sofa and felt myself go numb with shock.

  He had been having lots of meaningless sex with tons of different women in loads of random places – and that, bizarrely, was his justification; that it would have been so much worse if he’d been cheating with just one girl because that would have meant he cared about her. But no, the numbers ran so high he’d lost count. And that made it all right.

  Because I was still The One.

  You know, he almost had me with that.

  ‘It meant nothing, Dayna,’ he said, sensing my weakness. ‘Please, you’ve got to believe what I said in the restaurant last night. When I told you that … I love you.’

  ‘But you didn’t say that, did you? You just said, “I love”. I love what, Simon? Because it can’t be me, can it?’

  ‘It is you. I do love you, Dayna.’ He looked at me desperately, willing me to believe him. ‘None of them meant anything,’ he pleaded. ‘It was just sex … It just happened.’

  I loved him. I wanted to forgive him. But when he said, ‘It just happened’, that sent me into a fury. I’m sorry, but nothing just happens. Stuff happens because either we make it happen or we let it. We can always, always walk away.

  In that instant, I knew he wasn’t my boyfriend any more. Love was for losers.

  So why, then, did it feel like the end of the world?

  By the way, I decided not to go to my dad’s knees-up at the Lancaster that night. Given the day I’d had, I think I had a pretty decent excu
se. But I’m telling you, that decision came back to haunt me big-time.

  Simon and I, along with the lesser-known Boyzone, may have split, but life had to go on. And at least there was college.

  I absolutely loved college, which, when I realised it, came as a huge shock. At school all I wanted to do was have as much fun as I could possibly cram in before I left. And I actually thought that was what everyone else was doing, until everyone else went off to study law or rocket science or take over the world or whatever.

  I’d only gone to college to keep Emily company and to kill some time, so when I found myself enjoying it, no one was more surprised than I was.

  The Holstein College of Beauty was on Wigmore Street, just minutes away from Paradise on Earth (AKA Selfridges). It was a private college, which meant fees. Luckily, the bills coincided with the start of my dad’s winning streak. He wrote the cheque without having a heart seizure, rationalising that since it was him who’d been on at me to do something with my life, he could hardly complain when I asked him to pay for it.

  Emily and I were convinced we were the only ‘normal’ people on the course. All the other girls – there wasn’t a single bloke – fell into one of two cat egories: the Essex Girlies and the Hampstead Princesses. The Jewish girls were there because Mummy thought it’d be a hoot for her little princess to have her own salon. The Essex girls were there because they just loved getting their nails done and what with the growth (literally) in extension technology, it would be madness to miss out.

  Some of them were natural-born beauty therapists. But one stood head and shoulders above the rest … Me! No kidding, I was brilliant – first time for everything, I supposed – and I was loving it.

  I know what you’re thinking: like, duh, it was only a diploma in beauty therapy; not a degree in Eng. lit. or a PhD in Really Complicated Things at Cambridge. Let me ask you some questions, then:

  What does the body’s lactic acid system utilise in the absence of oxygen?

  The epiphysis consists of what type of tissue?

  What is the function of the aorta?

  If you answered glycogen, red bone marrow and to transport oxygenated blood away from the heart, give yourself a gold star. You must be a doctor. Or a beauty therapist, perhaps.

  I’d always been a bit disgusted by the human body and I couldn’t understand anyone who wasn’t. To this day, actually, I don’t get how a surgeon can slice someone open without throwing up (‘Scalpel … Forceps … Sick bucket’). But once I started to learn about it, I was fascinated.

  My transformation into a total swot coincided with Emily’s into a college dropout. My growing fascination with the human body was matched by her increasing lack of interest. She tuned out of classes and found a distraction in detective work. Having nailed the case of Simon the sex junkie, she decided to investigate some of the Billericay blondes that she saw as definitely being (her words) a bit dodgy looking.

  ‘See that girl?’ she whispered to me one day when we were eating our sandwiches in the college café. ‘Fake nails, fake boobs and fake cheekbones.’

  ‘Which one?’ I asked, straining to see.

  ‘Eating the Waldorf salad, pink hair. That’s fake too.’

  ‘Excellent work, Inspector! How ever do you work these things out?’

  ‘Oh, get lost. I was only saying.’ She sipped haughtily at her Diet Coke for a moment, then added, ‘Anyway, I think I’m going to go to Japan.’

  ‘Why? Is that where all the really dodgy fakes are?’ I asked, still in tease mode.

  ‘Ha-ha, very funny. No, I’m going because Max has asked me to.’

  ‘Japan!’ I choked, suddenly taking her seriously. ‘But that’s like … the other side of the world,’ I told her, clearly demonstrating my geographical brilliance. ‘How long for?’

  ‘Only six months.’

  ‘Six months,’ I gasped. She was trying to make it sound like nothing but I knew it was forever.

  While I slipped into shock, she told me how Max had so impressed his bosses doing whatever it was he did, they wanted him to go to their Tokyo office and show the Japanese how the hell to do whatever it was he did – because obviously they were as clueless as Emily and I were.

  And he wanted to take Emily with him.

  ‘What about college?’ I asked, though I knew it was a stupid question. ‘You can’t quit now.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Dayna, I hate all this left-ventricle-in-right-ventricle-out stuff –’

  ‘That’s it, Emily!’ I squeaked. ‘Left ventricle in, right ventricle out. I knew you could remember it.’

  ‘That’s not my point. You know I hate college.’

  ‘You said you loved the facials.’

  ‘Yes, but I was being disgusting at the time.’

  I wondered what she was talking about. It wasn’t until ages later that I twigged and I haven’t been able to shift the mental picture since. No wonder she had such good skin. And I thought it was the Clarins.

  I was mortified. I had felt let down when Geri left her Spice pals, but this was a million times worse. ‘Please don’t go,’ I pleaded. ‘Who’s going to help me pay the rent?’

  This was a pointless tack to take. Finding a new flatmate wouldn’t be that difficult, and anyway, I could afford to take my time and be choosy because my dad had given me fifty grand of his winnings.

  ‘You’ll be OK,’ she said. ‘Besides, you’ll qualify soon and then you can start mega-earning.’

  ‘Exactly. We’ll both qualify soon. Quitting halfway through the course is a complete and total waste.’

  ‘Look, Dayna, you can’t hang about in life. You have to grab opportunities as and when they’re presented to you.’

  That sounded just like Max talking to me, but what did I know?

  ‘How are you going to preach against global capital ism in Japanese?’ I argued. ‘What happened to taking a stand against the oppressors?’

  ‘The only person telling anyone what to do around here is you. Now shut up and let me do my sums. Max is getting tons more money now and he wants to know how much I need for new luggage. He says you’re not allowed battered cases in first class. I think I’ll get a set of LV.’

  Louis Vuitton, eh? Finally, I saw her point and it was inarguable. I had to concede defeat.

  I felt pathetic. There she was about to embark on a perilous adventure in an unknown land (OK, a few months in a glitzy city, living the life of a loaded expat, but you get my point) and there was me crying about losing a flatmate. It was pathetic, but I was feeling very sorry for myself …

  No best friend, no boyfriend …

  Suddenly I missed Simon.

  How could she do that to me; make me miss a bastard like Simon?

  ‘You’re really going, aren’t you?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s the chance of a lifetime for Max … And for me.’

  ‘But I’ll never get through the exams without a revision buddy.’

  ‘Of course you will. You’re the cleverest girl here by a mile.’

  Which is exactly what best friends are supposed to say, I suppose.

  Simon hadn’t vanished from my life completely. I hadn’t seen him since the day we split up, but he called me now and again to see how I was doing. I didn’t tell him I was sitting at home crying and wallowing in Celine Dion’s Titanic song because I wasn’t. Well, maybe once or twice, but then I kind of got a grip and got some normal, healthy hatred going – as you do – which helped no end.

  Yes, I hated Simon. But hate passes, doesn’t it? Not that I was shallow or anything, but I was losing my best friend and I reckoned I could do with all the mates I could find.

  So, soon after Emily told me she was going to Japan, I shocked the hell out of him by being friendly when he called. Once he realised my matey-ness was for real and not my patented sarcasm, he asked, ‘So, do you fancy a drink sometime?’

  ‘Yes, let’s do it,’ I chirruped happily.

  ‘Great,’ he said, unable to hide his surprise.
‘One night next week?’

  ‘How about tomorrow?’ I said, probably a bit too hastily.

  Emily appeared just as I put the phone down. She raised an eyebrow at me. ‘Please don’t tell me you’re going out with him?’

  ‘What’s it to you?’ I snapped. ‘Haven’t you got packing to do, Madam Butterfly?’

  The last time I’d seen Simon I’d been punching a confession out of him, but there we were, having a drink, acting as if it had never happened. Emily had been dead set against it. She told me that sitting in a pub with Simon, talking about anything apart from what a complete bastard he’d been was ‘reinforcing our roles as victim and oppressor’ and ‘granting him unspoken approval for his behaviour’, and ‘blah, blah, blah …’

  What did she know? I thought as I drained my third Vodka Red Bull and felt myself getting more than a little woozy. Why couldn’t Simon and I be friends? He was still a nice guy. So what if he’d had a lot of sex with tons of women who weren’t me? I’d punished him for that by dumping him. Besides, he wasn’t the one betraying me by flying halfway round the world, was he?

  During that drink, all our bad history ceased to matter because I was just having a good time. And getting a bit tipsy.

  ‘I don’t work at the hotel any more,’ he announced suddenly.

  Ah, too many guilty feelings about all those women he’d shagged behind my back, I assumed.

  ‘The bastards changed the tipping rules. They made us put it into a pot and we had to pay tax on it, so I thought bollocks to that.’

  Oh, right.

  ‘I’m concentrating on my martial arts now,’ he went on. ‘I have to. The Garage has really changed. It’s all gang stuff now. We’re part of a turf war most weekends. We just have to go with the flow and hope nothing too serious happens.’