Break-Up Club

by Lorelei Mathias

  ‘I’m sorry, I just don’t think it will. Surely we’ve both got more chance of improving our careers if we actually use the time to make a film, rather than schmoozing about drinking champagne and watching other people’s work?’ The knot was growing in size. Now she was wondering if this whole thing wasn’t a huge mistake.

  Lawrence opened his mouth to protest, but Cheryl came back to the counter. She tapped some buttons and stared at the screen. ‘Oh. Computer’s frozen. I was just about to confirm your seats. Hang on, let me just reboot.’

  Holly could feel the Gobi desert relocating to her throat. Was it unfeasibly hot in here suddenly? Was this I.T. fail some kind of sign not to book the tickets? No… signs were nonsense. They’d been dreaming about this holiday since forever! Well, since their first date at a bar in Waterloo called Cubana, where they had danced salsa and smoked cigars until 3 a.m. As first dates went, it was up there with the best of them. It had started out with them watching a play at the Old Vic. Afterwards, they’d strolled along the Thames looking for somewhere to drink, completed the obligatory circuit as every bar was closing up, before heading back to the Cubana Bar with its reassuringly late license. They’d been the last to leave, but not before promising the Cuban musicians they’d all go and stay with their relatives in Havana one day. Which is how they came to be sat here now, in Tooting Bec Discount Travel Centre.

  ‘Holly,’ Lawrence interrupted her reverie.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Did you hear any of what I just said?’

  ‘What? Yes. Sure.’

  ‘So you don’t mind lending me the money? Oh, you’re the best girlfriend ever!’

  ‘For the Cuba flights, sure. I already said I’d put that on my credit card. So long as you’ll pay me back when you can…’

  Lawrence looked down at his dilapidated trainers. ‘No, I was just saying that if I don’t get the flights to Paris now, they’ll be astronomical next month. So, if you lend me the money for that now, I’ll then have more money to pay you back for the Cuba money next month when I’ve been paid for that corporate filming job I did? Basically, it just makes good financial sense to get them now before they double in price?’

  The knot in her belly, previously conker-sized, was now more iceberg in scale.

  ‘Holly?’ Lawrence took her hand. ‘You’d just be helping me out so much. Remember last year, when that rep from Red Green films was so positive about my work? I think if I can just get talking to them again this year then I might honestly have a shot at being taken on.’ He stared at Holly with his ‘look, I’m a reasonable man’ face on. ‘Folly, it’s only £50. If I had it and you needed it I wouldn’t think twice! You know, when I’ve made it, you won’t know what’s hit you, you’ll be sooooo spoiled!’

  How did he do that? Not only manipulate her into lending him money, but also insult her by simultaneously insinuating that she was mean with her money? There was no winning.

  ‘Besides, you can just use Lawrence Logic and pretend the Cuba flights were £25 extra each. I know, I’ve got it! You’re always saying you’d go to the cinema more if only you had the time, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well… our plane will have in-flight entertainment on it, won’t it, Cheryl?’

  Cheryl nodded. ‘Yes, it should have a full programme of the latest movies.’ She turned to stare at Lawrence, as though intrigued as to where he was going with this.

  ‘Well, an eight-hour flight is like going to the movies at least three or four times. So, at standard central London prices, you’re looking at £10 times four, plus if you indulge in popcorn once or twice, well, you’re already way over the £50 mark already!’

  Cheryl looked impressed at Lawrence Vorderman. ‘That’s a funny way of looking at things. I might start doing that…’

  Holly nodded weakly. ‘Yes it is. He’s a bit special, this one.’ She turned to Lawrence. ‘Have you checked there’ll be popcorn on the plane then?’

  ‘Ha-ha. You get the point, don’t you?’

  Cheryl was smiling at them, clearly having fallen for Lawrence’s Odd-box charms.

  Lawrence looked at Holly, hope flashing in his blinking, puppy-dog eyes.

  ‘Please, Fol? You know I’ll pay you back.’

  Holly sighed.

  ‘OK. Sorry, Cheryl, can we just get another flight on there too? One return to Paris?’

  ‘Just the one?’ said Cheryl, looking to Holly in surprise.

  ‘Yes. I’m not going, I can’t afford it.’

  As Lawrence went through the finer details, Holly picked up her other credit card and handed it to Cheryl. ‘Whack the whole sorry lot on there please.’

  Lawrence grinned his schoolboy smile as Cheryl totted up the bill. Holly was practically shaking as she typed in her PIN and the receipt whirred and printed the four-figure amount that was pushing one month’s salary. It’s just pretend money, she told herself. And it’ll be a great chance for us to put the spark back. And he’ll definitely pay me back before my contract finishes, so it’s basically all good. Plus one day, Lawrence actually will be a red carpet sensation able to treat us and I’ll feel much less like a gargantuan mug, so thinking about it, we’re totally fine and dandy here aren’t we, she decided, just as Lawrence leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

  ‘Thank you so, so much. Right, I’m taking you home for a mojito to say thank you!’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’

  ‘And Hol?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re sure you won’t come with me to Paris?’

  ‘ARRRRGH. NO!’ she squawked. ‘My love,’ she added, seeing the hurt in his eyes.

  As they walked up the road towards Lawrence’s flat, Holly’s phone beeped with a text message: ‘You are cordially invited to an “Eff-Off Valentine’s Day party”. Next Saturday at Flat A, 249 Fortess Road, Tufnell. Bring booze, snacks and your sexy (ideally single) selves, 7 p.m. onwards. Love B xx.’

  ‘Oh right? I think I’ve just been invited to a party at my own house. How very Bella!’ Holly said as they walked through Lawrence’s cluttered but high-ceilinged hallway. Once again, as she walked into the tiny bedroom she’d dubbed The Lawrence Pit, she had to restrain herself from calling 999 to inform the police of a burglary. It looked like someone had taken a machine gun, pointed it at the room and splattered it with jumble-sale bullets. In the far corner of The Lawrence Pit was a not-quite-double bed. Next to that, a desk bowed inwards with the weight of the enormous monitor, currently doubling as TV and computer. Next to that stood the leaning tower of Ikea – a cream canvas wardrobe that was perpetually lopsided: having begun life as a temporary storage solution, it had become permanent as time went on. It was empty bar a few discarded items; among them a suit jacket that hadn’t seen daylight since 1997. The rest of his clothes were hung neatly… on the floor. Holly tried not to let any of this bother her as they kissed, fell into bed in a mojito-fuelled slumber.

  The next morning, Holly was playing one of her favourite weekend games: setting her alarm at least an hour before she needed to get up, then pressing snooze every nine minutes and drifting back into legalised, blissful oblivion. On this particular Saturday, things were getting a little out of hand. She’d been snoozing for almost 90 minutes when Lawrence interrupted her by planting a kiss on her nose.

  She opened her eyes one at a time. Lawrence was dressed in his Che Guevara T-shirt again, some rogue chest hairs poking out of the top.

  ‘Folly, sorry to wake you. I have to go now. Is it OK to borrow some cashish?’

  ‘Mmm? Sure. There’s a load of change in my purse. Help yourself,’ she said through slumber, before rolling back under the covers, wishing that his broken blinds would magically fix themselves in order to cover the gap where the sun was streaming through.

  ‘Oh,’ he said, surveying the coins. ‘I need a bit more than that. I’ve got to pay for my website hosting tomorrow or else it will all come crashing down.’

  ‘Is anything actually on you
r site yet?’

  ‘Well, no, but I have to pay rent on it still, otherwise I’ll lose the domain name, or something. Sorry. My Solo card is up to its limit, and mum said she can’t give me any more money this month. Can you lend me, like, fifty, that should cover it? Sorry, I hate to ask…’

  As if on cue, the opening beats to The Littlest Hobo bleated out like a cacophony into her left ear. And the snooze fest was over with a thud. Holly punched the ‘stop’ button on her phone, and resolved to change the once-nostalgic-now-infuriating alarm tone at the next available opportunity. She sat upright, shook her hair, and rubbed the sleep dust from her eyes. Keep calm, she told herself. Yes, he’s the only person she knew that still took money from his parents. Yes, it was the third time she’d lent him money in as many weeks. But these were all things she should think and not say, in order to prevent an outbreak of world war three.

  ‘Um, how to put this without sounding like a naggy old hag. Did you not hear me the other day when I said my job is currently hanging in the balance? This is radical but – have you ever thought about getting a part-time job, or something? Just for a bit, so you can catch up on your finances a little?’

  ‘Oh here we go. By the way Holly, it’s really NOT sexy how much you sound like my dad sometimes. “I don’t know why you don’t go in for bar work, or take a Saturday job as a labourer,”’ he said, mocking his dad’s West Country accent. Holly couldn’t help giggling at his performance, even if it was designed to wind her up. Bollocks, why did he have to be funny, even when he was being a knob?

  ‘Folly,’ he said, back to his normal accent, ‘we’ve been through this before. I need all the time in the day to work on my films. On my reel. On keeping in shape. So I don’t have time – that’s reason number one. Reason number two: If I have a part-time job – for example – an usher at a crap musical, I’ll just feel shit about myself, and I’ll be too tired and deflated to work on my directing stuff. Then before I know it, I’ll actually BECOME an usher. That will be my life. People will look at me while I shine a light to their seats at We Will Rock You and they’ll say, “Oh there goes that nice usher man again. I wonder how many years of training he took to get there.”’

  Holly rolled her eyes and tried to call to mind all the reasons she was with him. Funny. Intelligent. Caring (sometimes). Gorgeous. She checked them all off, and then began to dig around in her hard drive of happy memories. The day he’d taken her to the seaside as a surprise, and they’d ended up sleeping on the beach under the stars. The time she’d been to stay with his family in Cornwall and they’d all played guitar karaoke together out in their garden. And… and… But the images were beginning to fade; the more Lawrence wittered on, the more pixelated the halcyon days became…

  ‘Don’t you see, Holly? The money saved will be nullified by the psychological damage incurred – which will slowly become my undoing.’

  …until they were gone entirely, and all she could see standing in front of her was an absolute tool.

  ‘Surely you can understand that, Hol?’ the tool was saying.

  She sat up in bed and stared at him.

  ‘Lawrence. Just for a second, pretend that your parents aren’t around to help you out, and to pay your bills. You wouldn’t just give up on being a director, would you? You’d find a way?’

  Lawrence appeared to have stopped listening. He was shoving clothes into a bag, no discernible logic to his approach. He calmly upturned the entire contents of his underwear drawer. In amongst the pants and old coins, there fell a bottle of lighter fluid, some cigarette filter tips and an old Pringles tube. He pocketed the change, and left the drawer and its offspring all over the floor.

  Whenever Holly watched him packing for anything, or getting ready to go out, it was like watching small hand grenades being detonated one after the other. And yet none of this bothered Lawrence, who remained calm throughout as he moved on to dragging a massive holdall down from the top of the wardrobe. As he did, a thousand more things came cascading down all around, knocking other things flying.

  ‘You know, Lawry, maybe you’d even feel proud of yourself, for getting there on your own? Besides – when did you last actually do a proactive film anyway? I’d really love for us to work on Mind the Gap. If you could only help me write it. I know you had some doubts about it, but I can really imagine it having a powerful twist at the end!’

  ‘All right, maybe.’

  Holly felt the good kind of butterflies kick off in her belly. ‘Yay! How about we try and make it in time to enter into the next Future Shorts?’

  ‘Okay. Sure. Just as soon as I’ve finished wading through corporate sludge for Barclays. And once I’ve built my website.’

  ‘You’ve been saying that for years.’

  ‘Have you ever tried to understand HTML? It’s, like, harder than Mandarin! Anyway, we both know this isn’t really about coding, is it? This is about that giant chip you’ve got on your shoulder, isn’t it? That, just because my parents have been supportive, it’s somehow my fault that yours aren’t?’

  ‘All I’m saying is, I’ve always had to do part-time jobs to get by, and it’s not done me any harm.’

  ‘But I don’t have time! No offence Folly, but editing’s nowhere near as competitive or hard to get into as directing, is it?’

  ‘I’m sorry? What did you just say?’

  Lawrence inched away, a look of fear on his face.

  ‘Do you think I just filled out an application form? Did my job just fall into my lap from the sky? No – I did twelve months of unpaid internships while also working in an effing call centre!’

  Holly climbed out of bed and began throwing things into a bag. She cast a look at herself in a nearby mirror. Catastrophic bags under the eyes, and a spot the size of Copenhagen brewing… but she could probably just manage the journey home looking like this. Provided she held her head down and avoided all eye contact. Anything but stay here a minute longer. She had just hit her Lawrence Limit. And in her experience, it was always better to walk away when this happened. She pulled on her jeans, and shoved her red hoody on over her head. ‘I’ll do a transfer when I get home,’ she said, her voice measured.

  Lawrence looked humbled for a moment. ‘Thanks baby. Look I’m sorry; I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I’ll walk with you to the bus if you wait five minutes. Don’t you want a shower or something?’

  ‘No, I’ll have a bath when I get home.’

  ‘Holly,’ he said, taking her by the shoulders and looking her in the eye.

  ‘Womble.’

  Holly broke away and picked up her bag.

  He grabbed Georgia and started to pick out a familiar tune. ‘Feels like nothing matters… in our private universe…’ he sang.

  Arses, thought Holly, trying to keep her armour in place. It was, to use so saccharine a phrase, ‘their song’. It was also so ludicrously moving that it could engender a tear in the most stony-hearted of folk. But not today. Right now, the dulcet early-nineties tones of Crowded House just weren’t up to the job.

  ‘Goodbye, Lawrence.’

  ‘You know, Holly, it’s actually not my fault that I have supportive parents,’ he began.

  Oh, here it comes, she thought. Any moment now he’ll step on the hidden tripwire and blow her resolve into smithereens.

  ‘Just because they help me out, doesn’t mean I don’t work hard myself. But it’s like, for some reason, nothing I do will ever be enough for you. You know, they’ll never say about me that, “Oh, that Lawrence Hill, he had it so tough, he grew up on a council estate and triumphed against all adversity,”’ he said, as though he was quoting from an imaginary Sunday Times Culture section. ‘“He got himself through university before he became a Bafta-winning success.” No, Holly, I’ll never be able to say that, because yes – I had help – I had a privileged upbringing – I went to a fee-paying school! I’m sorry! But for the love of shit, it’s not my fault!’

  Oh. She’d never actually thought about it like that b
efore.

  ‘Lawrence, are you honestly expecting me to sympathise with you that you’ve not had it tough?’

  ‘In a way. I think a lot of people trade off their poverty, and make themselves sound all holier-than-thou that they lived in a council estate, had to do ten jobs at once just to live, and wore nothing but ill-fitting hand-me-downs. It’s annoying.’

  ‘Jesus, who are you? I wore nothing but ill-fitting hand-me-downs! I don’t understand why we are together!’

  ‘Shit, sorry Holly. That came out all wrong. I love you baby. Please don’t shout.’

  She stared at him as her arms folded themselves.

  ‘I’m sorry. Listen, I’m so proud of you, you know I am. You’re an amazing editor, and you’ve done so well to get where you are…’

  ‘Yeah. Because Prowl is really about reaching the absolute zenith of my creativity, isn’t it!’ Holly said, gathering her bags and stomping out of the room, stubbing her toe on one of the distended cupboard drawers. ‘AAARRRRGH!’ she exclaimed; the final chip in her resolve against hissy fits. She walked down the hallway and slammed the door behind her for maximum impact, before feeling her eyes fill up with warm saltwater.

  As she stepped out into sunny Streatham, thought number one was, bollocks, why had she inherited her dad’s temper? Thought number two, holy crap, she was about to lend Lawrence even more money! And thought number three, how many rows had they had this year? Which was closely connected to thought four: when was their sell-by date?

  *

  Holly.Braithwaite@Totesamaze‌Productions.com to

  Jeremy.Philpott@Totesamaze‌Productions.com

  Subject: Possible series idea

  Hey Jeremy

  Sorry to email on the weekend but I just had an idea for a series that I wanted to run past you: THE HELIUM DEPOT.

  This is a story about a celestial lost property bureau. A control centre where all the helium balloons that children have ever lost go to. See, when you’re a kid, losing a helium balloon is one of the saddest things that can ever happen to you. Wouldn’t it be great if they all ended up somewhere safe though?