by Lisa Jewell
Vince sat and munched on his toast while Jeff glided from room to room getting ready for work, emerging fifteen minutes later in a sharp navy double-breasted suit, crisp white shirt, buffed black Chelsea boots and subtle patterned tie, reeking of Christian Dior and swinging his briefcase as if he was actually looking forward to going to work.
‘You don’t fancy giving the place a once-over with the Hoover, do you, mate? Since you’re at home all day’
‘What am I – your wife?’
‘Only asking. Right. ‘I’11 see you later. Don’t wait up.’ And then he left, leaving Vince feeling very much like a wife – and a neglected one, at that.
Four hours later, Jeff was back. His tie was loose and hanging round his neck like a noose. His breath smelled of pubs and his eyes had a red tinge to them.
‘What’s going on?’ said Vince, eyeing him up in the hallway.
‘Fucking cunts,’ said Jeff by way of reply. He dropped his briefcase on the floor and ripped his tie off.
‘What?’
‘Fucking cunts,’ he said again. ‘Made me redundant. Wasn’t even allowed to finish the day. Had to leave there and then. Jesus.’
‘You’re joking?’
‘Do I look like I’m joking?’
‘No,’ said Vince, ‘not really’
‘Fucking cutbacks. Last in, first out. Jesus Christ.’ He grabbed a handful of his hair and slumped over the kitchen table. ‘What am I going to do?’
‘Get another job?’
‘Yeah, right,’ he thundered, ‘because if Janssen Higham are making people redundant then there are bound to be loads of other jobs going spare in the City, aren’t there? Because the other banks are just desperate to pick Janssen’s shitty leftovers out of the gutter, aren’t they?’
Vince shrugged. The way the City worked was a complete mystery to him.
‘No,’ sighed Jeff, ‘it’s over. The bubble’s burst. The dream’s over. Reality bites, man… reality bites.’
Vince bit his cheek and tried not to laugh. Jeff always behaved as if he thought he was being filmed.
‘So,’ Vince propelled Jeff’s original question back at him, ‘what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Jeff, letting his head flop backwards. ‘I really don’t fucking know.’ He sniffed loudly and slapped the palms of his hands on to his thighs. ‘Right now I just want to get arseholed. You well enough to make it to the pub?’
Vince weighed up the benefits of lounging around the house in his dressing gown watching daytime TV and eating toast against the rare and hedonistic pleasure of a solid midweek afternoon’s drinking, and went to his bedroom to get dressed.
It took Jeff two further days and a hell of a lot of drinking to decide what to do about his future. He pondered various business ventures – up-market sandwich deliveries, up-market tie shops, up-market party planners – but when his parents told him they’d rented a luxury five-bedroomed villa in Estepona for the whole winter and invited him along to ‘clear his head’ and ‘consider his options’ he’d made his mind up immediately. He put his redundancy payment into a high-interest bank account, packed his tennis racket, his sunglasses and his swimming trunks, and headed for the Costa del Sol with barely a backward glance. His future could wait until next year.
Vince, in the meantime, needed a new flatmate.
Ten
Cassandra McAfee was quite patently mad. It was obvious from the moment she stepped through the door, half an hour late, back to front, and apologizing to Ted from the flat across the hallway for barging in on him in the middle of his dinner. She spun round as Vince opened the door and grimaced at him. Her legs were twisted round each other like coiled rope, and she was doing some strange kind of dance.
‘Ooh – toilet – please. I’m totally bursting.’
Vince pointed numbly in the direction of the bathroom. ‘Second door down.’
She dropped her bag at his feet, sprinted past him, with her knees still locked together, and flung herself bodily through the bathroom door. She was still buttoning her jeans when she emerged a minute later. ‘Sorry about that,’ she said as she flashed him a smile. ‘Cassandra. Cass.’ She gave him her hand. He shook it, gingerly.
‘Vince.’
‘Vince,’ she repeated. ‘Nice flat.’ She put her hands in her pockets and looked around. She was tall and rangy, with swimmer’s shoulders and curly honey-blonde hair tied on top of her head like a bobble hat. She had clear skin with a pink glow to it and full lips that wrinkled up with all the extra skin in them. But it was her clothes that got in the way of Vince being able to fancy her – patchwork denim flares, Day-Glo trainers, a heavy hand-knitted cardigan in moss green with a red collar and blue patch pockets, and a multicoloured velvet scarf with sequins on it tied loosely round her neck.
She looked like she’d been covered in Superglue and rolled through Camden Market.
‘Wow,’ she said, staring up at the big, high ceilings and the intricate plasterwork in the corners, ‘this is really lovely. And there’s so much space. Which is just as well because I’ve got tons of shit.’ She smiled as she said this, as if it were a good thing.
‘Oh,’ she said, as he pushed open the door to Jeff’s spartan, minimalist bedroom a minute later, ‘what a sad-looking room. How could anyone live like this? A room like this needs colour. And drama. It needs… soul.’ She stood dramatically in the middle of the room, her arms spread messianically. She paused for a moment, her mouth still slightly ajar as if waiting for inspiration. ‘Can I paint it?’
‘Er, sure. Yeah. I’m pretty sure we’re allowed to redecorate.’
‘Crushed raspberry,’ she said, resolutely, folding her arms. ‘A really rich, succulent crushed raspberry. So rich you’d want to lick it off the walls. Mmm.’
‘Mmm,’ he said, ‘sounds great.’
Vince still had another two people booked to come to see Jeff’s room tomorrow night, and he wasn’t entirely convinced about this mad patchouli-scented woman with her heinous knitwear and crushed raspberry walls, but she appeared to have arrived here with every conviction that the viewing was a mere formality and everyone else he’d seen that evening had been marginally less palatable than her and she could move in pretty much immediately, and she seemed harmless enough so he’d acquiesced and had already made a mental note to himself to cancel tomorrow’s viewings. It just seemed so much easier.
‘Have you remembered about Madeleine?’ she said over a glass of wine in the kitchen.
‘Er, no,’ he said, squinting as he tried to recall every detail of their conversation. ‘Who’s Madeleine?’
‘She’s my cat. I told you about her on the phone. You said it was cool. Remember?’
‘Ah – yes. Your cat.’
‘Well, she’s more than a cat, actually. She’s my best friend. We’ve got this… connection.’ She tapped her temples and lit the little roll-up she’d just made for herself. ‘I had this friend once. A spiritualist. She told me that Madeleine was a monk in a former life. In the twelfth century. Somewhere up north, apparently. On an island. But not just any old monk – a much-revered monk. A famous monk.’
Vince threw her a sceptical look.
‘I know that sounds mad. I thought she was mad. But it turns out that it’s true.’
He threw her another sceptical look.
‘No, seriously, it is. She wakes up every morning at sunrise and chants. Like this,’ she closed her eyes and proceeded to make a bizarre humming noise. ‘And always to the west. Always to the west.’
Vince laughed. She looked so serious, he couldn’t help himself. She smiled at him and exhaled a fan of smoke. ‘Yeah,’ she said, ‘I know. I’m a fruit. But you’ll get used to me. Honest. And you will love Madeleine. Trust me. She will add a new dimension to your life. Everyone who meets her says so.’
Cass moved in four days later. She arrived in a camper van driven by a white guy with ginger dreads and a goatee beard twisted into a knot. The van was so full
that every single window was obscured. Her possessions spilled out of the damp van in tumbledown boxes, tied into bundles and wrapped in blankets, looking more like things to be removed from a property than brought into one.
The living room slowly filled up with plants during the course of the day. More and more plants were plucked from the back of the van and deposited in various locations throughout the room. Ferns, Swiss cheeses, wandering Jews, huge, aged-looking plants boasting cascades of new shoots that hung from them like tumbling children. They came in mismatched pots, some cracked, some split in two by huge overgrown roots. They settled on windowsills, on mantelpieces, on shelves, on the coffee table, and they brought with them the damp, earthy tang of outdoors.
Finally, when it seemed that there was no longer an empty surface or corner left anywhere in the flat, Cass and her ginger friend appeared on the doorstep, proudly holding aloft a wickerwork cat box. ‘Here she is!’ beamed Cass. ‘Queen Madeleine herself.’ She opened the gate on the box and the animal emerged. ‘Welcome to your new home, Madeleine.’
She was large and extremely fluffy, with thick tufts of strawberry blonde fur tinged milky coffee around the edges. Her face was flat, as if she’d run into a wall, and her eyes were the colour of Lucozade. She shook the stiffness out of her legs and proceeded to wander very slowly around the flat, sniffing things, turning at every sound, peering around corners and behind furniture. Her thick-piled paws clicked prettily against the wooden floors.
‘There you go, girl,’ said Cass. ‘What do you think, eh? Do you like it?’
She turned at the sound of Cass’s voice and proceeded to wrap herself affectionately around her crouched legs, as if she were trying to bind her up in invisible string.
‘And this is your new flatmate,’ she said, indicating Vince.
The cat moved towards Vince, rubbed her big body against his calves and mewed loudly.
‘There,’ said Cass, folding her arms across her chest in satisfaction, ‘she likes the flat and she likes you. Everything’s going to be just perfect.’
Vince looked down at the huge swathe of strawberry blonde fur left spread across the legs of his favourite black trousers and hoped to God she was right.
Eleven
Vince took a pen and ran a line through the word ‘grip’, changing it to ‘grasp’, then reread the text. He sighed and ran another line through the words ‘lifelike little,’ changing them to ‘tiny lifelike.’ His gaze strayed from the paper in front of him to the view of Tottenham Hale Tube station through the window, and he had one of his occasional yet overwhelming reality checks: Vince had the silliest job in the world.
He was perfectly prepared to admit that. You couldn’t work in the marketing department of Coalford Swann Collectibles without being able to admit that to yourself. No one who worked here took it seriously. Coalford Swann was a family-run business based in Essex, which had been producing treacly porcelain monstrosities such as Bethany Belle for forty years. As well as legions of tiny pink-cheeked little children in hand-stitched clothing, they also made reproduction Victorian dolls with spooky faces, a small range of terrifyingly lifelike newborn babies complete with swollen eyelids and umbilical stumps, and a whole cutesy miniature town by the name of Blissville which was designed to be collected tiny building by tiny building and displayed in a faux-mahogany shelving system, which came free with orders over £100.
Coalford Swann advertised in the flimsier of the Sunday colour supplements, but still saw itself as very much at the higher end of the ‘modern collectibles’ market. And, indeed, Vince couldn’t deny that the products themselves were beautifully and thoughtfully made, full of detail and lovingly rendered. When you saw the dolls in close-up, when you looked at the tiny glass eyes, the hand-stitched silk dresses, the weeny leather buckleup shoes and touched the soft, silky hair, you could only agree that they were worth every penny of the £ 59.99 they were being sold for, but for all the quality and craftsmanship there was nothing that could take away from the fact that they were truly disgusting in every single way.
Every week a large parcel would arrive, slathered in ‘Fragile’ stickers and addressed to Vince’s boss, a twenty-eight-year-old by the name of Melanie. Every Monday morning Melanie would call a department meeting and the four of them would come into her office to find a new Coalford Swann creation sitting proudly on her desk. And every Monday morning the four of them would almost wet themselves laughing for at least five minutes.
It was Vince’s job to create the copy that accompanied each new product in the advertisements that went out weekly. It was widely recognized that, of all the silly jobs in this department, Vince had by far the silliest, and the rest of the team never failed to be impressed by the saccharine literary depths to which he was able to plunge with just his Biro and a blank sheet of paper.
Vince still wasn’t sure how he’d ended up in this job. He’d taken a diploma in Media Studies after his year out, done some work experience at an advertising agency for six months after leaving college and had somehow ended up in their copywriting department. He’d left the agency with absolutely no idea what he wanted to do with the rest of his life, and given that his six-month stint of copywriting was the solitary rose in the experiential desert of his CV, he’d somehow been forced on to that path and here he was, three years later, advertising copywriter for the tackiest company in the world.
Every few weeks he’d have a mini-crisis, think to himself, what am I contributing to humankind, to the future, to my own sense of self-worth? He’d toy with notions of working for charities, joining the VSO, writing a novel, becoming a care worker, but then he’d have a couple of laughs at work and the thoughts would recede into his subconscious like sun-dazzled moles creeping back into their holes.
He was experiencing one of these mini-crises this afternoon as he toiled over little Bethany Belle and her pink romper suit, but work wasn’t the only thing on his mind today. His love life was bothering him, too. There’d been a scene the night before, with Magda. She’d obviously picked up on his restlessness and growing ambivalence because, after a solid bout of Magda-initiated sex (a sure sign that she was feeling insecure – she never usually bothered), she’d curled up towards him in bed and stroked his arm in a manner that suggested less a desire to stroke his arm and more an intention to broach an awkward topic of conversation.
‘Vince?’ she’d said.
‘Yes.’
‘How do you feel about me?’
‘What?!’ he laughed, groaning inwardly.
‘You know – how do you feel about me? About us?’
‘Well,’ he said, stroking her arm, ‘I think you’re great – you know that.’
‘No, but – really. Properly. You know. I mean, do you … love me?’
Oh, God. What could he say? He could lie. He could say yes. He’d done it before. But that was generally before sex. Not after sex. Not with a long-term girlfriend. This was different. Magda was different.
When a stunningly beautiful girl who most men would pay good money to spend just one night with, a girl with firm, olive breasts and buttocks like rose petals, snuggles up next to you after forty minutes of selfless, enthusiastic sex, wraps one long, smooth Mediterranean leg around you, looks up at you with enormous cocoa-powder eyes and asks you if you love them, what sort of man was he not to punch the air and yell, ‘Yes, yes, yes!’? When a wonderful girl who’s picked up your dry-cleaning for you, who’s put up with your mates, who’s reminded you about your mother’s birthday, who’s given you at least fifty brilliant blowjobs, asks you if you love them, how the hell do you say no?
He fiddled with a strand of her hair while he pondered his next move and smiled wanly, desperately, at her. She stared back at him, accusingly, and Vince felt her body tensing up beneath him.
‘Right,’ she said, sitting bolt upright and clutching the duvet defensively to her breasts.
‘Magda…’
‘No. Vince. It’s fine.’
‘Bu
t…’
‘Look, at least you didn’t lie to me.’
‘But Magda, it’s not that I don’t – ’
‘Vince – just leave it. You’ll only make it worse.’
‘I mean, I don’t even really know what love is.’
‘Oh, God…’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, grabbing her forearm ineffectually. ‘There must be something wrong with me.’
‘Oh, God!’ Magda let her head fall on to her chest and smoothed her hair back wretchedly. ‘Men! Fucking men. You’re all so… pathetic!’
‘No, really,’ he persisted, ‘maybe there is something wrong with me. Maybe I’m… dysfunctional. You know. I mean, I feel as if I should love you. Maybe I even do love you. Maybe I’m just too fucked up to even know how I really feel. Maybe not having a father around when I was younger…’
‘Look. Vince. Will you just shut up.’
‘Shhhh… ‘ Vince put a finger to his lips and indicated Cass’s room with his eyes.
‘I will not shush,’ she said, snatching the rest of the duvet away from him and covering herself further. ‘And I will not listen to your bullshit theories about why you don’t love me…’
And then, of course, she started crying.
They talked for an hour. They got nowhere.
By the time Vince woke up the next morning he was convinced that it was over. That they’d split up. But Magda awoke with other ideas.
‘I think we should spend some time apart,’ she sniffed.
‘I need some space.’
‘Fine,’ he nodded, ‘I agree.’
‘Don’t call me,’ she said.
‘I won’t,’ he said.