Getting Over Mr. Right

by Chrissie Manby

  As I had feared, the bathroom mirror greeted me with a reflection of the face I deserved after such a big night on the town. Evidently, I had not followed the beauty editor’s cardinal rule and taken my makeup off before bedding down for the night. I panicked when I saw a thick black hair sprouting from my top lip, before I realized that it was one of my false eyelashes gone very badly awry.

  I forced myself into the shower and washed my hair three times, but even as I dried myself, I knew that the smell of pure alcohol was still seeping from my body and would do so for the rest of the day. I examined my tongue. It was white and furry. My entire body was suffering while my liver struggled to process three Christmases’ worth of wine and spirits. I had aged a decade and a half in my sleep.

  And I had a young man in my bed.

  Time to panic.

  What was I going to do about Jack?

  At least I had managed to wake up before him so I could make the best of my hungover face before he saw me. But I didn’t want him to hang around. What on earth were we going to talk about? I had to get rid of him. Mum and Dad were returning from Cornwall today.

  Jack would prove harder to get rid of than I had hoped. When I came back into the bedroom after my shower, he was just where I had left him, spread out across the bed like a starfish. Dead to the world. Well, not actually dead. I did check to see if he was breathing and was relieved when he let out an almighty snore. The almighty snore didn’t, however, wake him up. He carried on sleeping.

  I looked at my watch—it was ten o’clock—and made some calculations. Mum and Dad would not be back until three in the afternoon at the earliest. I knew that Dad would not want to check out of the hotel until they absolutely had to. He was a great believer in getting his money’s worth. Even if he drove like the devil’s own horseman, Dad would not make it from Cornwall to Croydon in under five hours.

  So I had until three. With that in mind, I let Jack doze on while I fed the dog and drank some extremely strong coffee. After that I raided Mum’s store of Emergen-C. Little by little my hangover started to recede. I decided I could handle this. When Jack woke up, I would offer him some breakfast, thank him for making sure I got home okay, and send him on his way with dignity and style.

  Unfortunately, Mum and Dad were not the only returning travelers I had to worry about.

  The weather overnight had not been fantastic. The rain that had prevented me from getting a taxi had carried on for hours. It was still gray that morning. A gray day didn’t bother me so much. As soon as I got rid of Jack, I was going to spend the rest of the day indoors doing nothing. Not even walking the dog. Ben was getting too old to want to go for a walk every day. But what I had reckoned without was the weather’s effects on a series of outdoor events up and down the country. Including the Reading Festival.

  It was around eleven o’clock when I heard the sound of a key in the door. I was sitting at Mum’s dressing table at the time, examining my spots. I always got spots the morning after a heavy night. I jumped up and looked out of the window. Had Mum and Dad come home early? It was worse than that. Dad’s Saab wasn’t parked on the drive, but Lucas’s friend’s VW camper was.

  The boys were already inside.

  “I hope your sister has left us some bacon,” said someone.

  “Don’t worry about it,” said Lucas. “She’s a vegetarian.”

  “Lucas,” I hissed down the stairs at him. He was in the hallway, kissing his dog in a very unhygienic way.

  “Did she look after you properly?” Lucas addressed the hound.

  “What are you doing back here?” I asked.

  “It rained,” said Lucas simply. “It got all muddy.”

  “So you came back? But you paid hundreds of pounds for those tickets. What kind of wimp are you?”

  “There’s nothing good on today, so I thought we’d come back here and hang out, seeing as Mum and Dad won’t be back till later.”

  “You can’t just bring all your mates back with you.”

  Two more lads, who had been good enough to stay outside to finish their skinny roll-up cigarettes, appeared on the doorstep.

  “All right, Ashleigh?” Freddie called up the stairs. Freddie was a lovely boy. Very well brought up. And ordinarily it was a pleasure to see him, but not right then.

  “Can’t you go back to one of their houses?” I suggested.

  “No. You’re being weird,” my brother noted. “What’s going on? You haven’t …” He stepped backward with a look of mock horror on his face. “You’ve got a man up there!”

  “I have not,” I said, wondering how the hell I was going to get Jack out without my brother seeing. Would Jack be prepared to stay in my bedroom until Lucas and his mates were too busy with the PSP to notice him sneaking out through the front door? Or perhaps he could climb out of my bedroom window onto the flat roof of the garage below before shimmying down a drainpipe. I had done that a couple of times back when I was still at school and not allowed out because I was supposed to be concentrating on my A-levels. Oh, God. What was I thinking? I couldn’t ask Jack to do that. What if he fell and broke his neck?

  “She’s got a bloke up there!” my brother crowed. “My sister’s getting laid.”

  Freddie looked a little disappointed. Later I would find out that he had a crush on me. “Come on, Lucas,” he said. “It’s hardly very gentlemanly of you to suggest something like that.…”

  “What do you want to do, Freddie? Go up there and challenge the cad to a duel? C’mon.” Lucas jumped into the en garde stance.

  “I just think you should be a bit more respectful to your sister, that’s all.”

  “Challenge me to a duel, then,” said Lucas, playfully bumping chests with his friend. Then he turned his attention back to me.

  “Come on, sis. Tell us who you’re hiding up there. I want to know who’s been having his wicked way with you in our parents’ house. Our parents’ house!” He parodied shock and horror.

  “Lucas,” I said, “piss off. For God’s sake. Will you just grow up? There’s nobody up here but me.”

  “Then why are you whispering?”

  “I’m not whispering,” I said in a hushed tone.

  “There’s definitely someone in there. I’m coming up.” Lucas began to bound up the stairs two at a time. I prepared to repel him from the landing. But I needn’t have bothered because before Lucas was even halfway up the stairs, Jack chose exactly the wrong moment to come out of the bedroom.

  “What’s going on?” he asked, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. He looked like a little boy. Much younger than he had the previous evening. Now I could see quite clearly that he was nowhere near twenty-four. He was as young as my brother. Exactly the same age as my brother, to be entirely accurate.

  “Jack Green?”

  “Lucas-Pukas?” said Jack, responding with the nickname Lucas had carried all the way through school and just about managed to shake off now that he was in college. “What are you doing here, man?”

  “I could ask the same of you!”

  “Is he your housemate?” Jack asked me.

  “She’s my sister!” Lucas helpfully filled in the gaps. “What the fuck are you doing in my house?”

  Jack looked to me, as if to ask my permission to elaborate on our night’s activities. I shook my head subtly. As if Lucas hadn’t already guessed. Jack carried on down the stairs. He and my brother indulged in a matey, back-slapping hug. It turned out they had been in the same class at secondary school.

  “Lucas is the guy who had that party I was telling you about,” Jack told me. “Awesome, man.” He bumped fists with the other guys.

  “This is so fucking unbelievable,” said Lucas. “Come on, man. I haven’t seen you in ages. Come and have some breakfast with us.”

  Jack had the decency to look back up the stairs and give me an apologetic shrug before he followed Lucas into the kitchen, where they would doubtless finish all the bacon, forgetting that I had given up vegetarianism long ago becaus
e Michael thought it was silly.

  I stayed upstairs in my room. Of all the people I could have chosen to jump back into the dating pool with, why on earth did he have to be one of Lucas’s school friends? Never mind that he was of legal age. Anyone of Lucas’s age was still a child, as far as I was concerned. Which meant I really was a cougar! I had lost my virginity before that boy went to secondary school. Oh, it got worse and worse—although downstairs Lucas and Jack seemed to be having a fine time, catching up on the news and gossip since they’d left school after finishing their A-levels. From time to time a gust of laughter would reach my burning ears. And what else could they be laughing about but me? Lucas was almost certainly filling Jack in on my small nervous breakdown. Losing my job. Ruining my best friend’s wedding. The little house fire …

  I was in agony. I lay in bed, fully clothed, with the sheets pulled up to my ears in an attempt to block out the noise of my brother’s hilarity. Tears ran down my cheeks as I thought how I would appear if Michael could see me right then. A laughingstock. Desperate. Oh, yes, if Michael heard how low I had stooped, he would be laughing, too. I might just as well take myself off to a nunnery. Assuming they would even have me with my track record of immoral behavior.

  While the boys downstairs partied, I could only cry. I felt so sorry for myself I couldn’t have cared if I dissolved in a saltwater puddle of my own making. Someone somewhere was having a divine joke. I saw myself in another Broken Hearts United meeting, but this time Enya would be full of pity for me.

  At about two in the afternoon there was a soft knock at my door.

  “Go away,” I said. I didn’t want to talk to anyone.

  But the knock came again.

  I got out of bed and wrenched the door open. “What do you want?” I asked brusquely, expecting Lucas.

  It was Jack.

  “I’m going home now. But I thought I should come and say good-bye,” he said.

  “Good-bye.” I smiled tightly.

  “And thank you. I really enjoyed … er … spending the night with you.”

  I nodded.

  “And I’d like to do it again sometime. If you … er … Will you give me your phone number?”

  “You don’t really want it,” I snapped. I could imagine it all. Lucas would be at the bottom of the stairs, waiting to hear if I’d been taken in. He’d almost certainly set Jack up to ask me out again. Well, I wasn’t going to fall for it.

  “Oh. Okay. Then I’ll see you around, I guess,” said Jack.

  “Bye,” I told him, closing the door in his face with a quiet but determined click.

  I was never going to go out, get drunk, and pick up a random bloke ever again.

  I didn’t go downstairs again for the rest of the afternoon. I just lay on my bed listening out for any sign that Lucas might have gotten rid of the rest of his stupid friends. But the VW van stood in the driveway all afternoon while Lucas entertained his mates and made more fry-ups. The smells that drifted up the stairs made my stomach growl and grumble. By four o’clock I was beginning to hallucinate bacon sandwiches but still I could not go downstairs. My shame was greater than my need for a sandwich.

  To take my mind off my humiliation and the fact that at any moment I might start to eat my pillow, I took Mini-Michael out of his hiding place in the cupboard. I was going to make him pay for my latest mistake. I twisted his limbs and punched his little woolly face. I stuck pins from his head to his toes. Just as I was stabbing Mini-Michael in the stomach, my brother walked into my bedroom without knocking on the door.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  He was holding a plate upon which were a couple of crudely made sandwiches and a handful of crisps.

  “Nothing,” I said, quickly shoving Mini-Michael under my pillow.

  “Were you stabbing something?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.”

  “It looked like you were stabbing something. Are you self-harming? You haven’t gone mental, have you, sis?”

  “I have not.”

  “Okay, then. Whatever you say. I’ve told the lads they’ve got to go now,” he said. “And I made you this.” He held out the sandwich but I didn’t take it for fear that by moving I might reveal Mini-Michael. “I’ll just leave it here. I hope you … er … start to feel better.” He put the sandwich down on my dressing table and backed out of the room, as though someone had told him that you should never turn your back on a nutter.

  For that was what I had become. My brother’s kindness in bringing me that sandwich moved me to tears again. He was a great little brother. It wasn’t his fault that Michael had dumped me. I resolved to be far nicer to Lucas in the future.

  My resolution to be nicer to Lucas did not last long.

  A couple of days later I dragged myself to the Jobcentre for the humiliation of my fortnightly job seeker’s interview. It was a horrible thing to have to do. Personally, I found it so awful to be told off about my job-hunting success (or rather lack of it) by a woman who always had her cardigan buttoned up wrongly that I found it very hard to believe anyone would contrive to stay on benefits deliberately, which was what her every question seemed to imply.

  Anyway, it never put me in a great mood. It was just another thing serving to remind me that my life was officially rubbish and there was no particular reason to hope that the status quo would be changing anytime soon. After the Jobcentre, I ran a few errands for Mum. I returned a couple of books to the library for Dad. While I was in the library, I browsed the self-help section to see if they had anything new. Nothing except a book on making the most of menopause, which was, thankfully, just about the only problem I didn’t have right then.

  While I was at the library, I also took the opportunity to check my email. It was much more relaxing than checking it on Mum’s laptop. Though Mum knew that there was no limit to the amount of time she could spend on the Internet for her twelve pounds a month with BT Broadband, it didn’t stop her from hovering anxiously while I checked my mail. She couldn’t quite shake the memory of the time when she and Dad still had a dial-up connection and Lucas ran up a four-figure bill playing Warcraft when he was supposed to be studying.

  There was little of interest in my email account that day. Some spam asking me if I wanted to improve the length/girth/hardness and/or general appearance of my penis. A couple of fund-raising requests from people I knew only vaguely. I deleted those straightaway, before I could read what they were fund-raising for and start to feel guilty that I didn’t have the money to help out.

  And then there was an email from YouTube, informing me that someone I knew had just posted a new item. My little brother, Lucas.

  I clicked on through. The little video window opened on a view I knew well. It was the view of my bedroom window from outside my parents’ house. I felt a rising sense of dread as I wondered what on earth Lucas had been filming. Did he have some shot of me mooning out over the street like a latter-day Rapunzel, waiting for a prince who would never turn up, no matter how long my hair got? No. The camera pulled in closer. I wasn’t in the shot. But there was something in the window. Something that had been posed as though looking out like a prisoner. I squinted at the screen.

  “Oh, my God.”

  It was Mini-Michael.

  The computer had finished buffering and now the full horror of Lucas’s latest creative endeavor began to unfold. The shot changed so that the camera was looking out from inside my room, from Mini-Michael’s point of view. No wonder my brother had been so quiet for the past few days. The time and effort involved in this little stop-motion animation was obvious. It looked very slick. I had to give him that. But the content …

  There was Mini-Michael, plucky as a paratrooper and prickly as a hedgehog with sewing pins as he shimmied his way down from the windowsill using a curtain as a rope. Lucas, with the skills he had learned at art college, had somehow even animated the little doll’s face, so that he could convey his despair and panic as he tried to escape from my bedroom, whic
h he managed, at last, only to run straight into the jaws of Ben the dog.

  The fact that Lucas had been into my room was bad enough, but it was the commentary beneath the clip that really pushed me over the edge. It was a conversation between Lucas and his art-school friends.

  “Cool doll,” said one. “Where did you get it?”

  “Under my sister’s bed. I think she made it. It’s supposed to be her ex-boyfriend.”

  “That boring accountant bloke you hated?”

  “Yeah,” wrote Lucas. “That’s the one. He dumped her and went off with a Brazilian.”

  “Can’t say I blame him,” said Lucas’s friend. “Brazilians are hot. So, is this like some kind of weird voodoo shit or what? Your sister is out there.”

  “I certainly wouldn’t cross her,” my brother wrote.

  Lucas had only one sister. It didn’t take Inspector Poirot to work out that I was the voodoo knitter and Michael was my intended victim. Now I was really panicking. Just who had seen the clip? If that idiot Lucas hadn’t thought to take my email address off his circulation list, then it was possible, indeed quite probable, that he had forwarded the clip to our entire extended family. And perhaps even to Michael himself if Lucas had also copied in the addresses from my contacts list, which I had allowed him to do when he was flogging his handmade Christmas cards to supplement his beer money. The ramifications were just too terrible.

  “I’ll kill him,” I said, jumping to my feet. “I’ll bloody kill him.”

  By the time I logged out of YouTube I was foaming at the mouth. No one batted an eyelid, of course. I was, after all, in a public library. Threats of grievous bodily harm were commonplace from the weirdos who used the library as a place to keep out of the cold while the hostel was shut.

  When I got back to Mum and Dad’s, I was white-hot with rage.