Feb 13th
I am truly myself with you/I want you to be my wife/I can never look at you the way you look at me. Spot the odd one out.
Again I send none of them.
Until 11.58pm on Valentine’s Day, when I drink a bottle of red wine, then type:
‘I am hopelessly in love with you.
I fucking hate you.
God, I miss you.’
And press send.
I wake up the following morning and enjoy a full seven seconds of peace of mind before I remember what I’ve done.
Please let this be a Bobby Ewing dream, please …
This is not a Bobby Ewing dream.
I feel mortification burning through me. I phone Laura, even though I know Dave has taken her somewhere in Sussex with giant plasma screens in the bathroom for a wanton long weekend, and she could really do without the interruption.
‘I’ve done something stupid but maybe it’s not that bad …’
Laura is always kind but unfortunately she’s always honest, and never just tells me what I want to hear. Sometimes I wish she wasn’t my best friend.
Apparently what I’ve done is ‘not cool.’
‘I’ll send an email this morning saying my e-mail account’s been hijacked?’
Apparently this idea is ‘not cool’ either.
‘We could pretend that actually you wrote it when you were at my house, drunk, for a dare, and then you sent it to him because … er …’
Apparently this idea is ‘not in any way believable and also not cool.’
I am too scared to go into my email account for the next twenty-four hours, and eventually I make Laura log in from a computer in her hotel.
‘Yup,’ she says. ‘He’s read your email.’
I am lying on my bathroom floor at this point. I have been lying here for maybe five hours, wrapped in my granny’s pink fluffy robe, with a pillow behind my head, staring at the ceiling. My upstairs neighbour must have had an overflow; there are seventeen hairline cracks in my ceiling, that, like the stars above London, make themselves more apparent the longer you look at them.
I know Laura would offer to read me the email if she thought it was appropriate. She is not offering.
‘Oh God, is he angry? Does he think I’m an idiot?’ I say.
‘Soph. It doesn’t matter what he thinks. What matters is how you feel. The only thing he put in his email that I think is worth repeating, because for once I agree with him, is that it might be better if you don’t press send when you’re drunk.’
‘Please delete it, and delete it from the deleted messages bin too.’
‘Done,’ she says.
I hang up and turn to face the towel rack.
I am sinking. Please help me.
I have cried every day for two weeks. I thought crying was meant to be a release but it only seems to feed itself. I’m not talking about whole-body keening, shaking, wailing. Just a steady flow of tears, out of the eyes, down the face, like a broken tap that’s not bad enough to call in the plumber for.
It’s weird, it’s become like breathing. Actually the breathing, in between the crying phases, is more of a problem than anything. I basically sometimes forget to breathe in: sounds ridiculous, I know. But I can take a breath: in, out. And then at some unconscious level, my brain can’t be bothered to issue the command to breathe in again. I have to jump start my lungs about five times a day.
Anyway, the crying: it is absolutely brilliant what you can do quite easily while tears are pouring down your face.
Activities include:
walking down Oxford Street in rush hour without feeling embarrassed
dancing to ‘Come On Eileen’ at an 80s party your best friend has dragged you to
having your hair done at a posh salon off Hanover Square to cheer yourself up – this one is particularly excellent: when a hairdresser sees you crying, they assume it’s because you hate what they’re doing to your hair, so they give you free cappuccinos and do a superb job on the blow dry
sitting in the freezer with Zoe, hoping the cold will turn your tears into salty little full stops
There is a shiny silver lining to these clouds: you can’t chew and cry at the same time. Just as well; I’m eating like a mountaineer, in the gaps between the tears.
But then there’s always another cloud: Devron.
We’re due to meet to talk about a ‘Change of Direction’.
He asks ‘Alright?’ in a very matter of fact way, and I start crying, as I always do when anyone talks to me or touches me. I’m like a malfunctioning Tiny Tears doll. At least I’m not spontaneously wetting myself. Not yet, anyway.
‘Ah, your grandma,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘She died recently …’
‘Oh. No, not that recently. This isn’t about that.’
‘Oh.’
‘If it was, I’d say you can take a half day, a day’s compassionate leave, if you need it.’
The fact that this is not about my grandma, but about a man, makes me weep with self-disgust.
‘You must have been close to her,’ Devron says.
‘It’s not that,’ I say. ‘I … I split with my … boyfriend.’ I didn’t have long enough to think of him as a fiancé.
‘New boyfriend?’
‘It was just coming up to a year.’
‘Oh, so not that serious …’
‘Actually,’ I straighten up in my chair, ‘we were engaged.’
‘Christ, he didn’t stand you up at the altar, did he?’
‘No.’
‘Because if that’d happened, I could understand you’d be well pissed off. God, the embarrassment, all that cash on a wedding …’
‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘I guess I’ve just taken it pretty hard.’
‘But it’s not like you were married or had kids or anything.’
Oh. You’re right. Silly me! I was getting confused. I thought we’d been married for fourteen years and had two kids and a dog. Now you’ve pointed out that this wasn’t the case, I’m so entirely at peace with the situation. In fact I feel amazing.
‘I’m going to do something about it,’ I say, blowing my nose. ‘I won’t let it get in the way of my work.’
‘Good. It’s not very professional, if you know what I mean.’
Not professional – like picking your nose and sticking your fingers in a pie not professional? Or not professional like shagging Mands from behind on the executive boardroom table? – We’ve all seen the CCTV, Devron …
I walk back to my desk and make two calls: an emergency appointment later today at my GP, and a visit tomorrow to a psychotherapist.
My GP appointment is at 3pm, and at 2.58 I show up at the surgery. I have to be back at the office for a final product meeting with Will at 4.30pm and they always make you wait an age here. The receptionist, who I know only as Cerberus, for her un-bedsidely manner, is in discussion with a man who wants to join the practice because his girlfriend’s flat is round the corner. She is explaining in an increasingly smug tone, that this is not how the NHS works. He thinks he can bulldoze her into giving him the forms by increasing the aggression in his voice. Not a chance.
Sure enough at 3.08 he gives up, calls her an officious cow, and a small victory cheer pips through her smile.
Still in front of me is a paunchy old perma-tanned man. He wants to have a row with Cerberus for being made to wait an hour last week, which meant his brand new Porscha – yes, apparently you pronounce the e as an a – got clamped. Good luck winning that argument, mate.
At 3.17 he too gives up and takes his seat in the waiting room.
‘Sophie Klein, I have an appointment with Dr Salter,’ I say.
She squints at her screen. ‘Your appointment was at 3pm.’
‘I’ve been standing here since 2.58.’
‘If you’re late again, we won’t be able to see you. Do you know how many no-shows this surgery has each week?’ she says.
Today is
not the day to take the bitch on.
I take my seat, take a deep breath and try to calm myself. I stare at the white wall but all I can think of is a snowy night back in November when James and I stole onto the roof of my block of flats, and with one iPod speaker in each ear, danced round the roof to Dean Martin. We looked out across the silenced city and then James pointed down to the street: ‘We’ve got company.’
I thought Ben the caretaker might have busted us, but when I follow James’s finger, I see his car, dusted in snow, and on the roof of it a fox, moving its paws along to the melody.
Memory’s a bastard, I think.
I glance over at perma-paunch who is talking to a thin woman of around sixty, dressed in tight white jeans and a white Ralph Lauren shirt.
‘I recognise you,’ he says, ‘I’m Stefan, I own Zarimkadeh, the jeweller’s in the high street.’ He leans forward, hairy hands on knees spread wide.
‘Oh yes!’ she says, ‘I was in at Christmas, you had those divine yellow diamonds!’
‘Next time you come in, I’ll do you a deal,’ he says. ‘You’re looking very well, very very good.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, stroking her collarbone with an elegant, bangled arm.
‘You keep yourself well maintained, I can see you take care of yourself,’ he says.
She nods energetically.
‘A lot of women let themselves go … get fat … horrible.’
I stare at his shiny, pointed cowboy boots, then up past a huge gut hugged by a hot pink Lacoste t-shirt, spilling over an Hermès belt, then up to his Versace shades that sit on a bonnet of thickly sprayed hair.
‘My wife, she does an hour on the treadmill every morning and an hour in the pool every night. She has the body she had when she was sixteen, terrific.’
Long marriage! She must be tolerant to put up with such a creep.
‘How old is your wife?’ asks the woman.
‘Twenty-five,’ says Stefan. I chuckle, but from the look he flashes it appears he isn’t joking at all.
My name is called and as I walk past him I consider saying various things:
‘Your shop is less than one mile away. If you walked to the surgery rather than drove your Porsch-ah, you wouldn’t be such a fat douchebag, and you wouldn’t get parking tickets.’
‘It is OKAY not to be thin when you’re sixty, or even when you’re sixteen. How dare you talk about how “horrible” it is for an older woman to “get fat” when you are fat.’
‘You do realise there’s no point wasting £600 on an Hermès belt when your tummy’s just going to cover it up, don’t you?’
‘And another thing! I haven’t seen boots that try-hard, worn by someone who couldn’t look less like a cowboy, since I last went down the Kings Road in 1988.’
Instead when I walk past, I mutter ‘arsehole’ just loud enough so that he can hear.
Watch me. Any day now my passive-aggression is going to morph into aggressive-aggression.
I hope Devron’s around when it does.
‘Sadie Klein, date of birth 1953?’ says Dr Salter.
‘No, we’re no relation. Sophie Klein, 1976,’ I say.
She looks at me with a touch of suspicion.
‘How can I help?’ she asks.
I start crying uncontrollably. BORING! I think, as I rapidly grab one tissue after another from the box on her desk, like a depressed magician.
I tell her the one-minute version of the story. I now have multiple formats: a five minute cut-down for strangers on the bus, the twenty-minute version for friends I haven’t seen since the break-up and the screenplay, in case Harvey Weinstein comes calling.
Dr Salter chews the end of her pen. ‘You don’t actually believe any of the things this man said to you, do you?’
I snivel and nod.
‘Clearly his behaviour says far more about him than you, there’s nothing wrong with your body. And this man must have plenty of his own issues that he’s projecting outwards. Was he very body-conscious himself?’
‘Only about women …’
‘Do you ever think about harming yourself?’ she asks, looking at a shopping list on her computer screen.
‘No, I would never do that, my mother would kill me,’ I say, and she laughs, although I’m now the one not joking.
‘Okay, well, anti-depressants are not a long-term solution.’
‘I don’t want to be on them, but I’m worried about losing my job.’
I hate the thought of anti-depressants. I don’t like the fact that as a 34-year-old woman I should need them to help get me through a break-up, and I don’t want to be anaesthetised against life’s ups and downs. Actually, I do want to be anaesthetised against the downs, that’s the whole point.
‘There are plenty more fish in the sea,’ she says, leaning her chin on her hands and her elbows on her knees: two parallel bars blocking my path to the narcs. ‘Have you got many friends?’ she asks.
‘Yes, I’m lucky. I have lots of people who care about me and who I can talk to.’
‘Well, if I were you I’d go to a gallery or a museum. Distract yourself, get on with your life. It sounds like you’re better off without this man.’
The tears are on a roll, but I am now irritated.
‘I can’t actually move at the weekends,’ I say. ‘I tried to see a film the other day and I had to leave the cinema because I was crying so loudly.’
‘What was the film?’ she asks.
What? ‘A French film, about a guy in prison.’
‘Try something more upbeat. I hear Avatar’s excellent.’
Dr Barry fucking Norman.
‘Come on, stiff upper lip,’ she says. This is not my approach at all. ‘Go and splash some cold water on your face, no one likes to see panda eyes.’
I am rigid with indignation. I’d heard the NHS doled out anti-depressants like sweeties. Now that I can’t have them, there’s nothing I want more.
‘Will you ask me the question on your screen again, please?’ I say.
‘Sorry?’
‘I wasn’t concentrating the first time. Ask me again, please.’
‘Do you ever think about harming yourself?’
‘Yes. Sometimes.’
‘Do you? Really?’
I nod, James-style.
She takes a deep breath. ‘Okay. We’ll start you on 20mg of Citalopram and let’s see how you get on. They take at least a month to kick in …’
On my way back to work, my winning green prescription clasped tight, I realise the bottom line: I can’t change what James said, what he did, what he thinks, who he’s chosen or who he is.
And I find these facts unbearable.
I return to my desk and an email from Devron.
‘Sophie.
Tried to find you after our chat but you’d disappeared. So: big ‘Change of Direction’ from the Board re: your custard project. New objective for next financial year: budget slashing.
Tell suppliers to pull plug on work-in-progress. Updates next week.’
I phone Maggie.
‘Help! Devron’s just asked me to cancel my whole new range.’
‘How far are you from launch?’
‘Two weeks.’
‘His reason?’
‘The Board. Budget cutting?’
‘Not a chance, if it’s the Board and it’s money, he won’t fight for you.’
‘Appletree have been working on it for a year! Will’s due here any minute to go through the final product specs …’
‘Shareholders, Sophie. You’re not going to win. I’m sorry.’
Will is totally gracious about it even though it’s one of the worst things we could do to a supplier.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I say. ‘I think Devron’s got another angle in mind, hopefully I’ll rebrief next week …’
‘Don’t worry Soph, these things happen. It’ll all work out.’
‘– Do you want to grab a cup of tea in the canteen?’
He looks at his wa
tch. ‘How about that Shake Away?’
I shouldn’t really. I need to email all the ops guys to tell them the new range is cancelled …
‘It’s Islington – only twenty minutes in a cab,’ says Will.
Besides, I’m weeks behind on purchase orders.
‘Hundreds of different milkshakes …’ he says.
And I really should collect my pills from the chemist.
‘You shook on it, remember?’ he says.
Or I could escape my life for one hour.
‘I’ll grab my coat.’
‘This place is dangerous,’ I say, surveying the menu.
‘You could have a different milkshake every day for a year and still have some left to try,’ says Will, with a look on his face suggesting he’s done just that.
‘What do you recommend?’
‘I’m having a Hot Norah – chocolate muffin, dime bar and bits of Malteser.’
‘That’s a drink?’
‘Not for the faint hearted,’ he says, a hint of pride creeping into his smile.
‘I’ll go Chunky Kit Kat if I can try this Norah thing.’
‘Verdict?’ says Will. ‘You think it’s too full on?’
‘Not full on enough!’ I say, taking another sip. Who needs anti-depressants when you’ve got hot milkshakes with muffins and chocolate bars for croutons?
‘What do you reckon? Anything we could do with it from a development point of view?’
I consider for a minute. Yes. You could definitely take the concept and look at it in another format – translate it into a cake or a biscuit. ‘Potentially. I’ll give it some thought.’
‘Great,’ he says, smiling broadly. ‘You finish the rest – I’ve got to catch my train.’
‘Take this with you,’ I say, shoving the drink back in his hand. ‘This slope’s too slippery for me.’
‘What do you mean?’ he says.
‘Too fattening.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘I mean it’s full of sugar and fat.’
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