I Followed the Rules

by Joanna Bolouri

  I spent over five hundred pounds on therapy in the last year with a forty-something-year-old American therapist called Pam Potter, whose name makes her sound like a garden gnome, but who happily listens to me bitch and whine in exchange for fifty pounds an hour (she was marginally cheaper than the psychologists with real names) and then says, ‘I hear what you’re saying, Phoebe.’ The fact she had two working ears leads me to believe this was true, but not entirely helpful. However, it did help me come to the conclusions that a) I am still angry about the whole Alex thing, and b) although I wasn’t completely blameless in our relationship, I did deserve better. No, I do deserve better. This year, I have to get Alex out of my system once and for all.

  Monday January 3rd

  It was Pam Potter’s idea that I keep a diary. Apparently this whole ‘writing down my feelings’ lark should be therapeutic, but it just feels weird.

  I haven’t kept a diary since I was a fifteen-year-old loner with an ear cuff and a mono-brow. Back then my diary was hidden under my mattress and contained 13,000 different swear words to describe my parents along with some angst-ridden poetry about a boy in my class who never spoke and wore eyeliner. As it is, I still fancy boys who wear eyeliner, but I’m less inclined to insult my parents these days, except for when they send me those organic chocolates I hate at Christmas.

  Despite it being a holiday, I had my first monthly session of the year with Pam this evening. She’d dyed her hair brown over Christmas and looked remarkably like Tina Fey.

  ‘How was the New Year for you? In our last session you mentioned you were still struggling with your break-up. Has that changed?’

  ‘God, no. I feel as if all I do is think about him . . . or moan about him . . . or just miss him. Recently I am seeing things more clearly, though.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I threw myself into that relationship head first. I’ll be the first to admit that I was lonely, and when he showed interest in me I clung on to him. I might have been needy, but he was worse – he was lazy. He was too lazy to end it so instead he just kept me there until someone better could replace me. He couldn’t even be bothered to have his affair somewhere private. I remember when I caught them in our bed. OUR FUCKING BED!’

  Pam just nodded, but I’m certain that if she wasn’t being paid to sit through this story for the millionth time she’d have happily drop-kicked me out the office window.

  I could feel myself shaking as I visualized the moment I caught Alex. I’d arrived home early from a concert that had been cancelled at the last minute. I came in and threw my jacket on the couch and watched it fall on top of a bra I didn’t own. It was bright pink and about three cup sizes bigger than mine. The moaning from the bedroom gave me the answer to a question I hadn’t even had time to ask myself. ‘I walked into the room and stood there like an idiot. I couldn’t even speak. He just shrugged and said, “This was bound to happen. You knew things weren’t right between us.” I stayed with Hazel until I found my own place. She’s been very supportive. All my friends have.’

  ‘Good. That’s important. But it’s been almost a year, Phoebe. How do you feel you can move on from here? You’ve expressed the desire to on several occasions.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking about New Year resolutions. I need to change the way I think, otherwise I’m going to be stuck in this cycle forever. I’m going to change. I’m just not sure how yet.’

  *

  After my session with Pam, I called Oliver to tell him my plans. I could practically hear him rolling his eyes at me.

  ‘You don’t need to make a list of stupid resolutions you’ll never keep, Phoebe. Remember last year you were going to start running?’

  ‘I did start running. I totally ran. And anyway, I’m just making one resolution this year, one that matters.’

  ‘You ran once round the park and then you vomited in a hedge, Phoebe. That doesn’t count. You need to stop being so uptight and planning things. You never used to be like this. You used to be fun and carefree! We used to get pissed and you’d tell me all your secrets and we’d dance to really shit pop music at 5 a.m. Now you’re like the anti-Phoebe.’

  So much for the support of my friends. ‘I got a little lost,’ I said quietly. ‘You know it’s taken me a while to get back on track after I split with Alex.’

  ‘I know that, but I suggest it’s time you start getting found. And laid. You need to get your groove back.’

  ‘Jesus, you sound just like Lucy. You two are obsessed.’

  ‘You sound repressed.’

  ‘I’m going now. Save your sex advice for Pedro. I have plans to make. Talk later.’

  Trust him to piss all over my chips. He knows nothing.

  Tuesday January 4th

  Back at work today after my New Year break and I immediately wanted to set myself on fire. I’ve been working at this newspaper for three years, and approximately three weeks have been enjoyable. After running screaming from high school at seventeen, advertising sales was pretty much the only job for which my supposedly winning personality was more important than my qualifications. This was just as well, as I scraped a C pass in English and a Masters in forgery after faking my mother’s handwriting on sick notes throughout my final year. I’m surprised they didn’t have some sort of fun run to raise money for my recovery. The trouble with my job is that I’m meant to be good with people. Charming, even. Be interested in what they have to say and make them trust me, nay, LOVE ME to the point that they name their first child after me and then leave the kid out of their will because they love me more. But in fact I’m rubbish at small talk, I hate it, and if someone doesn’t want to take advertising space that’s fine with me; I honestly couldn’t care less. That last statement perfectly sums up my attitude towards my job: I couldn’t care less. But I do my best to talk a good enough game and sell my soul on a daily basis because I need to pay the rent. We share office space with ten other companies, most of which are in the financial sector, so I often have to share the lift with ball-bags who wear ridiculous ties and talk about numbers and golf. On the upside, the location is brilliant: a two-minute walk from the train station and upstairs from a pub and a sandwich shop where I’m found most mornings buying coffee and toast. The sales floor is mostly open-plan, and my desk is unfortunately directly in front of my boss Frank’s office, giving him a perfect view of what I’m doing all day (which is usually nothing). Most of the other staff have pictures of their family on their desks, but my ‘unkempt shambles that I call a workspace’ (Frank’s words) is decorated with a picture of a cat with a watermelon on its head, mostly obscured by empty coffee cups and aspirin packets. Today’s regular morning meeting was painless enough – lots of encouragement from said boss, who is the most horrendous blowhard to have ever walked the earth, which no one paid any attention to. Then I caught up on four hundred emails that had arrived over Christmas and the skeleton staff had ignored. Lucy arrived late as usual, stuffing her face with a breakfast bagel and swigging coffee from her glittery flask. ‘You all right, my lovely?’ she shouted over. ‘Recovered yet?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine; you want to have dinner tonight? Sushi?’

  ‘I can’t. I already have plans.’

  ‘New fella?’

  ‘Old fella. That guy I was seeing last year, the one with that yappy dog I hated.’

  ‘You said you’d never date anyone with dogs again. What changed?’

  ‘His dog died.’

  I am 43% 97% sure that Lucy had nothing to do with that dog’s demise. Lucy, like Oliver, is a serial dater. When I first started at The Post she was dating two men at the same time and this seemed perfectly acceptable to her. She’s like the Pied Piper with men, they follow her wherever she goes and she has no intentions of becoming tied down any time soon.

  ‘The dating part is the fun part. After you start all that living-together nonsense it becomes a drag, so I
prefer to keep things simple. I love the “getting to know you” part.’

  I, on the other hand, have never been very good at dating, and the ‘getting to know you’ part scares the shit out of me. I’ve had five dates in my entire life, and all of them ended up in some sort of relationship. There was Chris – my first boyfriend at school, which lasted precisely six months, until he went to university in Manchester; Adam with the exceptionally large penis, whom I dated for five months before he decided he’d rather piss off and join the air force than be stuck in Glasgow with me; Joseph, who only lasted three months as he had issues with intimacy and being shite in bed; James, whom I dated for a year, but who was profoundly annoying and had a crippling phobia of baked beans; and finally Alex, who turned out to be the biggest mistake of my life. Even though it’s been nearly a year since we split, the thought of having to find someone new continues to be frightening and I don’t see me rushing out to meet anyone anytime soon.