This is a Love Story

by Thompson, Jessica

  The Cube is a media group which produces a range of unusual publications read by very niche audiences. Some of them cool, some not so cool. This means I am writing about a host of quirky subjects, ranging from what’s going on in the world of fishing (less fun) to testing fast cars (a lot more fun). Some of our publications are small and virtually unknown, others are read by thousands.

  This job is perfect for me as I love writing. I still can’t quite believe my luck. I weave in and out of the bodies around me in a strange kind of dance – ducking, diving and dodging. Schoolchildren swarm around and pensioners scuttle into shop doorways, newspapers tucked under armpits.

  Something in me thrives on the energy of London. Despite the infuriating nature of this lifestyle, I can’t imagine anywhere else I would want to be.

  Every day it’s the same: I come home, feet aching, eyes bloodshot, hair limp from a combination of the weather and the pollution, but I am inspired. As I lie in bed I can’t wait for the next morning so I can take it on all over again. Even if the first hour is pretty painful.

  After five minutes of dancing through the crowds I am close to my office, a small, modern installation down a busy side road. It is nestled between two restaurants, one Indian, one Italian. Their beautiful, garlicky aromas manage to waft into our air-conditioning system and I spend most of my time in the advanced stages of hunger. There is a small car park behind the office with a bench in the middle, and a homeless guy often sits there.

  He’s there right now, and as I realise I’m going to have to walk past him again, butterflies fill my tummy.

  I noticed him the very first day I arrived. It was hard not to as he called out to me from a small, hungry mouth, almost lost in the brown and black streaks on his weathered face.

  ‘Can you spare some change, love?’ he said, a look of hope in his eyes.

  I turned away and walked past him. I never quite know how to handle these situations, and I’ve got too much on my plate right now.

  He doesn’t look crazy, or on drugs, or any of those stereotypes. He smiles at me sometimes; I smile back. I don’t have the time to get involved. I know that’s bad.

  I’m scared of him, really, and the reality of his life. He has icy blue eyes, so icy they make me cold. I don’t like looking at them, so I turn away.

  The first time I met him, I asked one of the women in reception who he was.

  ‘Who are you talking about, love?’ came a high-pitched voice from a blonde, middle-aged character behind the desk.

  ‘You know, the guy sitting in our car park,’ I explained.

  ‘Hmm, I don’t think we’re expecting anyone today,’ she said, rifling through a tray of papers in front of her.

  Receptionist number two piped up, ‘Oh, Sandra, you know who it is. It’s Dancing Pete.’

  ‘Dancing who?’

  ‘You know, the homeless fellow who insists on sleeping out the back.’

  ‘Dancing? Why dancing? I’ve never seen him dance, for God’s sake!’

  By now the two ladies were in a frustratingly slow-moving conversation. It was like observing a pair of peacocks, clucking away pointlessly behind a glass screen, waiting to be put down and made into exotic handbags.

  ‘Homeless fella? I didn’t know we had one of those,’ Sandra squeaked, as if she was talking about a new franking machine or state of the art photocopier.

  ‘Yeeessss. He’s been hovering around for a couple of years now. Are you blind?’

  I walked away from them mid-chat; they barely even realised I had gone.

  But the situation bothers me again this morning as I walk through the rear entrance to our car park. I don’t drive, but the cut-through saves time and you have to come through the back if you want to take it.

  He is sitting on the bench with his head in his hands. He looks up as I approach, his face as sad as ever.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he calls out as I walk past, grimacing because I don’t want him to see me, but he always does.

  I stop in my tracks and find myself standing next to the bench, but looking straight ahead so as not to make eye contact.

  I should have just walked on, I tell myself.

  ‘Yes,’ I say feebly, regretting my actions.

  ‘Have you got any spare change?’ he asks, as always – like the answer will be any different this time.

  I say nothing and walk forward quickly, swipe my entry card to open the glass doors and step into the lift. I hear him mutter, ‘I just wanted to get myself a cup of tea,’ as I go.

  The lift to the third floor is small and often smells of PVA glue. I don’t know why this is. No one else seems to know, either.

  ‘Hello, gorgeous!’ says Lydia, the second I enter the office. She gently squeezes my left cheek, which she has done pretty much every day since I first set a shaky little Bambi foot into the office. I am glad to be distracted from the fact that I keep walking away from someone who clearly needs help.

  Lydia is the office co-ordinator. A very important-sounding title for someone who potters about and does all the annoying things no one else wants to do. I think she is capable of more, though.

  She has a wild shock of thick chocolate curls set against a freckled face and the most piercing green eyes I have seen outside the pages of a children’s storybook.

  She is all cuddles and warmth and exactly what you need when you start a new job. Although she is only three years older than me, she just took me under her wing.

  ‘Hey, Lyds, good weekend?’ I respond, making my way over to my desk with a big smile.

  Like a fairy, Lydia floats around me, whipping things out of my way. Before I know it my jacket is hanging neatly on the hatstand and my list of editorial tasks for the week is fanned in front of me in perfect order. I quietly wonder how many arms she has.

  ‘Bloody excellent, thanks, Si. You will never guess what happened on Friday night,’ she begins, a wicked smile on her face.

  I start to scan three scribbled Post-it notes on my desk. And no, I’m sure I will never be able to guess what happened on Friday night.

  I haven’t known Lydia for long, but she seems to have a social life which revolves around eight-inch heels, copious amounts of Jack Daniel’s, bribing DJs with cold hard cash to play eighties cheese, and then busting into kebab shops on the way home and making everyone inside laugh. These are just some of the tales I’ve heard.

  She leans in and whispers in my ear, despite the fact that I have made no effort to guess what happened on Friday night. It could be anything. She really is that random.

  ‘I got barred from that salsa club in Leicester Square,’ she says, before giggling and standing back up proudly, one hand on a curvaceous hip.

  How, I wonder, do you get barred from a salsa club? Violent clockwise turns? Stiletto rage? I offer no response but look at her with a raised eyebrow. I can’t wait to hear this one.

  ‘Well, basically, we had too much to drink before we got there, which wasn’t a good start, and I fell down the stairs that lead to the toilet. They thought I was really drunk, but I wasn’t, you know. I’m sure it was my shoes . . .’ she trails off with an element of shame to her voice.

  I switch on my computer and it whirrs into life like an aircraft. I’m sure they aren’t supposed to sound like that.

  ‘Oh God, did you hurt yourself?’ I reply with little interest. The story isn’t as exciting as I first thought it might be and I’ve got so much to do today.

  ‘Not really. The heel snapped off one of my shoes, though, which made walking home a bit difficult,’ she adds, twiddling a long, luscious curl with her index finger and glancing over at our office goldfish, Dill, who is looking with longing through the glass at the outside world.

  Rhoda, our advertising features writer, bought Dill six months ago and treats him like a child. There are toys. Yes, actual toys for fish, floating around in the tank. She buys them at the weekend and brings them in on a Monday. I’m surprised she hasn’t put up an alphabet wall-chart yet.

>   I smile widely and look at Lydia. I continue the small talk to stay polite but I am struggling not to laugh at the mental image of her tumbling from the dizzy precipice that is high fashion.

  ‘So what was the damage?’ I ask, feigning interest but distracted by the tremendous workload that lies ahead.

  ‘Well, they were Kurt Geiger, love. So, like, £120,’ she replies with a giant sigh.

  I feel her pain.

  Caffeine. I need caffeine. I rise slowly and head towards the drinks machine; a small queue has formed and within it the usual inane chatter has commenced. One thread goes along the lines of how we’re due a really hot summer this year as the last three have been terrible, another analyses how many holidays are acceptable in a year before you’re considered just plain greedy, and the final one – the most dire – is about speed cameras and how unfair it is that Mark Watson received a ticket for driving at 100 miles per hour rather than the 96 he claimed to have actually been travelling at. At last my turn comes and I get a large tea with one sugar.

  I return to my desk and get to work, but I’m soon interrupted by a frenzied kerfuffle, which has broken out like a virus in the area behind me.

  It is a large, open-plan space and my desk is one of eight in the middle of the room, which are separated by little partitions. To the left of my desk are three small offices with their own doors and windows. The rest of the space is taken up with the usual suspects: more desks, noisy fax machines, recycling bins and a huge coffee machine. Our boss’s office is on a floor above ours, and has its own little stairs leading up to it like a tree house.

  I keep looking at my screen, trying hard to concentrate. I doubt it is anything that would interest me. Normally I have a great ability to tune everything out, but there is talking, and lots of it.

  Concentrate. Concentrate.

  Suddenly a sharp elbow belonging to Lydia is jabbed into my shoulder and I realise she’s standing next to my desk, grinning at me. Strange, contorted expressions that are meant to be subtle, as if to say ‘Look behind you,’ without yelling it out loud, which is what she clearly wants to do.

  Oh, for God’s sake, I think, as I reluctantly spin my chair 180 degrees and see a figure in the middle of the din. He is surrounded, ambushed by fussing colleagues. All I can make out is a shade of green. Lush green.

  My heart skips a beat, then two. Three may be pushing it.

  A couple of people move out of the way, and as I slowly scan from the middle of the T-shirt upwards, my eyes meet a familiar face.

  Holy shit. It’s squirrel man.

  And if it’s possible, in this stark, dentist’s-chair-like lighting that we are bathed in, he looks even more gorgeous than he did earlier this morning. He does look decidedly miserable, though.

  But why is he here? Who the hell is he? Is he being interviewed? Maybe he’s here to fix something . . .

  No, he looks too soft for all that, and everyone seems to know who he is. ‘Lydia, who the hell is that?’ I whisper into her ear, my right leg trembling a little.

  ‘It’s Nick,’ she whispers back, giving me a wink.

  Of course. Bollocks.

  Nick went away just before my first day, so he’s the only person working at The Cube I haven’t yet met. I do know, according to the kitchen rota, that it is his turn to get the milk and sugar on a Tuesday, and that he drinks peppermint tea with caraway seeds. I always thought he sounded like such a pretentious shit from the way people talked about him.

  Apparently, since Nick’s been away, Kevin in accounts has been screwing up invoices and wandering around listlessly, Tom in editorial has tried to take on the role of leader of the pack and failed miserably, and Rhoda has even taken up smoking again. The lads all think Nick was incredibly funny before his girlfriend left him for someone else. If I hear one more account of the time Nick dressed as a tree and spent two hours in reception unnoticed, I may actually cry.

  His girlfriend and the guy who ‘snatched her away’ both worked here, I’m told. What a mess.

  Now I am no longer faced with working alongside someone who is a hysterical jackass (which would have been bad enough) but instead – even worse – a heartbroken shell of a man who will probably leave a trail of teary snot wherever he goes.

  And this heartbroken shell of a man is the guy I almost fell in love with on the train this morning.

  Gutted.

  Nick

  Usually, eturning to work is pretty dull, especially after a break in Ibiza. It certainly wasn’t this time.

  I have managed to avoid budget, boozy lads’ holidays in recent years. Scarred by trips to Spanish islands in my early twenties that were great fun at the time, I now feel like they’re the last places I would want to be. I’ve spent enough time spewing in cheap hotels, falling into swimming pools and twisting limbs while attempting drunken stunts on holidays like that. No more Shagaloof for me, thanks. It just isn’t my cup of tea any more.

  I prefer city breaks now, if I’m going away with the boys. We still have a hunger for exactly the same things – pulling hot girls, drinking too much and dancing – but we have more money these days so we do it in a different setting. Our recent trips have involved smoking weed in Amsterdam, eating the best steak imaginable in Paris, clubbing in Brooklyn, stuff like that. We aren’t kids any more.

  So it’s either overindulgent stuff in cool cities, or exciting adventures in tropical climes like Fiji. I love sharing my favourite life stories under the stars with random backpackers I’ll never see again.

  But many of my friends are hurtling towards thirty, and I’m getting there too. The prospect of a milestone birthday and a stag party do funny things to the male mind.

  ‘Come on, mate, you’ll love it – and it’s my stag do. So you have to come, really, don’t you?’ said Ross, punching me hard on the arm like an American jock when the idea of Ibiza was first floated. He acquired the habit of punching me on the arm at university and he’s carried on ever since. He does it for pretty much anything: birthdays, holidays, Tuesdays . . . It’s slightly annoying and he’s definitely too old to do it now, but it’s his trademark so I guess it can stay. I always reckoned if we failed to find nice women, we could live together as bachelors and never have to grow up, punching each other all over the nation’s golf courses and the bingo halls of west London. But that was looking pretty remote now.

  Ross is my best mate, who I met at university. I thought he was a bit of a dick at first – he was the loud, rowdy one who always had to drink more than anyone else and he was more successful with women, too, which made me massively jealous. He’s a big bloke – not fat, but burly, with broad shoulders and messy hair that makes him look as if he’s just stepped off a rugby pitch. Girls love that, I’ve learned.

  After just six months of living with him in halls I realised that it wasn’t a competition, and that actually, he was a pretty cool guy. He even taught me how to talk to women without stuttering or spilling my drink all over them. He’s not the best-looking bloke I know, but he has this incredible confidence, which seems to take him everywhere he wants to go.

  Obviously I had to go to his stag do, even if it involved sitting in a pile of steaming horse manure for three days. This was Ross . . .

  Like I said, Ibiza – not a place I would have envisioned myself visiting these days. The prospect of packed nightclubs and vomit-inducing light sequences made me sweat just thinking about it.

  I protested, I did, but they had me by the short and curlies. The whole lot of them had worked out a response to every attempt I made at suggesting different locations. Eventually, the old ‘last chance to have fun before marriage’ guilt trip, combined with a bit of Googling and the promise of lots of hot girls, was enough to seal the deal.

  It was only a few days, I told myself, and if it was too dire I could always get lost in the historical Ibiza Town everyone bangs on about.

  Packing my suitcase wasn’t too hard: shorts, shorts, pants, more shorts and some shower gel. I wedged five bo
oks into my hand luggage; if they went missing en route I feared I might lose my only escape if things got bad.

  I was pleasantly surprised – something about the atmosphere got me in the mood to let my hair down as soon as we landed on the island. It was scorching hot and I needed to have some fun.

  After a pint or five too many I managed to tell Ross I loved him on more than one occasion, fall down a small flight of stairs one night, and tread on several girls’ sandaled feet in nightclubs – one of whom slapped me in the face. I felt nothing.

  It was bloody brilliant.

  Although I returned to London with the dreaded Ibiza flu everyone talks about. They should vaccinate for this shit. I’m afraid if I keep blowing my nose like this I may look down at the tissue and find the damn thing sitting there and looking at me from a bed of translucent snot.

  It seems that seven days of pouring various different beers and spirits down your throat like there’s a fire in your belly is not that good for you.

  In addition, I smoked a disgusting number of cigarettes and joints, leaving me wheezing like a broken chew-toy.

  I am a lightweight. It’s official. I had to have a week off sick, for God’s sake. Getting out of bed this morning was a joke – I’m surprised I managed not to drown in the puddle of drool next to my face let alone actually reach across to the alarm.

  But lurgy aside, returning to an OK job that I’ve been in for far too long feels like a big comedown. That combined with the fact that I’m twenty-seven.

  And single.

  Nor has Amelia flooded my doormat with letters documenting her shame and regret at leaving me for one of our colleagues, and I was pretty sure she would. I had fantasies of not being able to get into the house due to the sheer volume of letters she might have sent me.