by Jamie Jones
Despite the age gap and the fact that she was my boss, we agreed to meet up later that week for a drink, whilst also pledging to “behave normally” at work. From that first drunken exchange, we knew that we weren’t going to last forever but we liked each other, were both single and had fun in each other’s company so decided to give it a go. However, our being together did cause Vicky a lot of stress as it broke a strict rule our employers had about bosses fraternising with members of their team. Nobody at work, other than Vicky’s closest friends, were allowed to know about our relationship. She would be a bag of nerves in the office, terrified that the Big Boss would find out about us. I probably didn’t help the situation by purposefully winding her up, leaving notes on her desk saying things like “looking forward to going out later”, or trying to grab a kiss from her in the car park as we all left for the evening.
By the third week of us seeing each other, Vicky’s nerves were shredded and the paranoia about “work finding out” dominated every second we spent together. Even on nights out, we would have to get separate taxis back to her house just in case someone saw us getting into a cab together. I would then have to get the driver to stop half a mile from her place and walk the rest of the way, keeping an eye out in case I spotted anyone from work. This was our weekly routine despite Vicky living at least 5 miles away from anyone else that we worked with. We would sit in her front room, watching a film or listening to some music and she would draw all the curtains, just in case someone from work knocked on the front door unexpectedly.
The paranoia wasn’t the strangest thing about Vicky though. That accolade went to her complete and utter obsession with Friends. In 1999, most of the country appeared to be in love with the japes and scrapes that the coffee loving thirty somethings from New York found themselves involved in. I watched the show, like everybody else. Vicky was different though, she was obsessed with it. Now that’s not a word that I throw around lightly, but I knew obsession when I saw it and Vicky was hooked. She would insert dialogue from the show into everyday conversations and I’m pretty sure she thought that the character of Phoebe was based on her personality. We could be having a perfectly normal conversation about where to meet for a drink or what to watch on the TV when, rather than say a simple “No”, or “No thanks”, she would put on her Phoebe accent and loudly exclaim, ‘Ohhhhh No!’. I would paint on a tight, cold smile and look to change the subject. I got increasingly worried one night, when she spent ten minutes trying unsuccessfully to get me to put on a Joey accent and ask her, ‘How you doin’?’ as we made our way up the stairs.
We had some mildly enjoyable nights out during our 6 weeks together but we didn’t match. We didn’t want the same things in the short or long-term. We were never going to last forever, we both knew that. Even when using the in-jokes that every couple needs to distinguish themselves from the masses, we would manage to annoy each other. She knew I wasn’t keen on the Friends chatter and I could take her from smiling to livid in less than a minute by starting to sing ‘Desiree’ by Neil Diamond. I would tell her that it was just a song that I loved to sing but she’d bare her teeth upon hearing the opening lines, about a boy becoming a man in the hands of an older woman.
‘There’s only 5 year’s difference between us for god’s sake. Who the hell listens to Neil Diamond anyway? You’re 23 not 63.’
I would just carry on warbling, occasionally forcing the name Vicky into Desiree’s place in the song, which would usually see her storm off in a huff.
One Tuesday night in July she asked me to hers for dinner. Nothing unusual about that, other than she had informed me to, “Not bring any clothes for work tomorrow and don’t bother bringing any beer.’ I didn’t need to be Sherlock to work out that we were heading for the “it’s not you, it’s me” talk.
We didn’t get round to eating dinner. In fact, I’m not even sure she’d made any. I was hardly through the front door before she kicked off the “it’s not you, it’s me” talk. As she began her obviously well rehearsed speech, I stood there thinking, ‘Wow, this is a novelty, someone other than me being at fault for a relationship ending’. To cut a long drawn out explanation short, especially as it was littered with quotes from Friends, Vicky had realised that she needed to get back together with her ex-boyfriend, Adrian. He had called her the week before when I was at her local pub watching the football and told her through a flood of tears how much he still loved her and wanted her back. She realised in that phone call that he was the love of her life and they had spent the last few days planning how their new life together would pan out.
I didn’t have anything to say. I wasn’t upset, it was going to end sometime soon and I certainly wasn’t going to miss the Phoebe impressions. I gave her a quick hug and a, ‘Good luck with it all, I’ll see you at work in the morning.’ I thought it really was that simple, no problem, no big deal. I had got to know her, enjoyed her company and my best wishes for the future were genuine. She looked a bit gutted that I hadn’t burst into tears or made a scene that she could recall to her mates but I was already on my way to her front door, heading home.
Work was difficult for the next couple of weeks. I was fine, but Vicky had got it into her head that I was upset about us splitting up, and would be constantly checking that I was ok. I exploited her concern a couple of times by telling her that ‘Yeah, I think I am too upset to work this afternoon”, so that she would let me leave early and I could join my mates in the pub.
I had spent the previous couple of months looking at jobs that would enable me to leave the building society. After many failed applications, in August I was offered a 4 month contract working for a college in Cambridge on their student admissions desk. Despite my dad going absolutely bonkers at me leaving a permanent job for a temporary contract, I knew it was a chance I should take. It wasn’t the opportunity of a lifetime, or anything like that, but it was a chance to do something different.
After accepting the job offer, I went into work the next morning to hand in my notice. This meant that I had to give my resignation letter to Vicky. When I got into the office, she was in a meeting so I left the letter on her chair and got on with my day. I told my other workmates, who were all happy for me. It wasn’t until dinnertime that Vicky came back to our office and read my letter. As she read the two lines of text, her hand went to her mouth in an exaggerated show of despair and she ran melodramatically from the office. One of the girls went to make sure she was ok and came back with a tear-stained note which read “Meet me in the canteen please, Vicky. x”
Never one to miss a trip to the canteen when I should have been working, off I went. I got a cup of tea and wandered over to a table in the far corner where I found this woman that, 6 weeks ago I had thought of as cute, hunched over a table in floods of tears, with mascara and hair everywhere. She looked like Marilyn Manson after he had finished a particularly sweaty gig. With an anguished howl, she opened up with; ‘You’re leaving because of me, because I split up with you, I know you are. I’ve ruined your life, it’s all my fault.’
Blimey, wasn’t expecting her to say that.
Me – ‘Errr….honestly Vic’ it’s not because of you. You knew I’d been applying for other jobs.’
Vicky – ‘Nooooooooooooooooooooooo, you’re lying. I know you’re leaving because I broke your heart.’
Try as I might, I couldn’t stop the giggle rising up from deep inside me, forcing tea to explode out of my mouth, up my nose and all over the the table.
Vicky – ‘Are you laughing?’
Me, spluttering and thinking “Jeez, she fancies herself”- ‘No, of course not, my tea just went down the wrong way. Sorry about that. Anyway, look, I promise it’s not about you. We had fun, it ended, we’ve both moved on. Me leaving is just about my new job, I promise.’
Vicky – ‘It’s like on that tape that you made me by that Morris man you like, about heartbreak and…..’
Me – ‘It’s Morrissey.’
Vicky – ‘What is?�
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Me – ‘The name of the singer, it’s not Morris, it’s Morrissey.’
Vicky – It’s like the song when he sings about sitting in the bar with his head on the bar. That will be you now, sitting with your head on the bar thinking about having to leave your job because of what I’ve done.’
After a quick ponder, I realised she meant the lyric in “The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get”. That was the first track on the tape that I’d made her. I was just about to ask her if that was the only song she had listened to when the howling started up again.
Vicky – ‘You have to understand, I had to go back to Adrian. He’s the Ross to my Rachel. Your Morris man would understand that, wouldn’t he?’
Me – ‘It’s MORRISSEY! Not a difficult name to remember is it? Anyway, it doesn’t matter whether he would understand or not, I am finishing here next Friday and it is nothing at all to do with you going back to your ex-boyfriend, ok? Sod this, can you tell everyone I’ve gone home sick, I’m off to the pub.’
Vicky – calling after me ‘You won’t find the answers to your troubles at the bottom of a glass, Jay. You know where I am if you want to talk……’
She may have carried on talking but I was already out of the canteen and heading to my car. I left the next week, with Vicky taking a day’s annual leave on my final day so that, to quote from a note she sent me, “we don’t both get upset about you leaving because of me.”
The following Monday I packed the glove box full of specially created compilation tapes with titles such as ‘Early Morning Indie Tunes’ and ‘Friday Night Drive Home’ and began my drive to Cambridge with a smile on my face. I came home with the same smile thanks to a day spent talking to students and not worrying about profits, arrears or the number of calls I’d made. The upside to the commute was that I got to spend 2 hours a day driving on the motorway with Morrissey or Billy Bragg pounding out of the stereo whilst I screeched along.
I met up with Amy a couple of times during my spell at the college. We went for coffee or lunch, never a beer anymore and it was fine. It wasn’t difficult or full of stilted conversation, it was just fine. We had moved firmly into friends territory, talking about our plans for the future and her telling me that I “needed to get a proper girlfriend and settle down”. That was a conversation that I found odd to be having with my (ex-) girlfriend of 3 years, but never mind. I would tell her that I had no intention of settling down anytime soon as I was enjoying life too much. We both knew that was a slight exaggeration and I suspect we both knew that I would sit there and daydream about her saying, “Shall we just get back together?” Instead we maintained a characteristically English silence on the matter.
We were getting on so well as friends that I even treated Amy and my mum to tickets to see Billy Bragg and the wonderful Kate Rusby at Cambridge Corn Exchange. The 3 of us sat in the upper circle of the venue, stone cold sober, with my mum being extra careful not to mention anything about mine and Amy’s relationship. I knew that she wanted to break down in tears, grab Amy’s arm and beg her to take me back, but she managed to hold it together. It didn’t occur to me to ask Amy what her new boyfriend thought about her going to a gig with her ex and his mum.
That gig was a dry run to see if we could have an enjoyable, civilised night out together now that we were just friends. The reason that we needed a dry run was that I had 2 tickets for the Homelands dance festival. I’d bought the tickets the previous year, as soon as they went on sale, to try and convince Amy I could change and go to gigs that she liked. In fairness, she had tried to persuade me not to buy them, but I had been convinced that by the time the festival rolled around we would be back together. The decent thing for me to have done would have been to give her the tickets and tell her to go and have a good time with her new man. On the other hand, I’d shelled out £60, had never been to a dance music festival before and the Chemical Brothers were headlining. Not for the first time where Amy was concerned, I decided not to do the decent thing. I don’t know whether it was her desire to see the Chemical Brothers or her feeling that, as I had bought the ticket for her, she should come with me, but she did.
The long train journey to Winchester should probably have been quite awkward, as we were now a couple that had grown up together but had been apart for almost a year, but it wasn’t. We chatted about anything and everything other than our respective love lives, both determined to make the most of the day out. Homelands was billed as taking place from 1pm-5am but, having never been to such an event before, we weren’t really sure when it would all start to get going. We had both been to plenty of indie festivals though, so we knew the score. When we got to the site at 2pm I rushed straight to the solitary beer tent, which was unusually deserted, to get us both a drink.
While watching the early afternoon DJ’s and live acts, which included a cracking set from Asian Dub Foundation, we kept drinking. In the style of any indie festival we’d ever been to, by that time we were both merrily half-cut. The only problem was, by 8pm at Glastonbury or Reading only a couple more acts were due to play, at Homelands it hadn’t even really started. By 11pm, I was hammered, dancing around to the DJ brilliance of Paul Oakenfold whilst Amy, who had stopped drinking, was developing a hangover. Things picked up as we got to 1am and Fatboy Slim and then The Chemical Brothers came on and got the crowd jumping. By 4am we were knackered. With the trains from Winchester not starting again until later that morning, we gratefully pounced on a couple of stray cardboard boxes, opened them out and got some kip in the middle of the festival site. We woke a couple of hours later and walked the two miles back to the station to begin the long journey home. It hadn’t been a dream day out but it hadn’t been a disaster, plus we got to see the Chemical Brothers. It was to be the last day out that Amy and I would have.
Life was bumbling along quite obligingly with work, a new house and going to plenty of gigs and football matches with my mates. I was determined to regenerate, Dr Who style, into a simple soul and it felt like that was all I needed. I also entered my last extended love affair of the millennium when I stumbled across the Tindersticks. Their ‘Simple Pleasure’ album was released in September and it was the comfy set of slippers to accompany the pyjama top and bottoms that Moz and Billy Bragg provided me with. Stuart Staples voice was like a hot cup of tea with not quite enough milk, a tasty concoction with a hint of a tang and hidden layers of taste. I put the 6 minutes of defining glory that was the albums final track ‘CF GF’ on to a tape and would listen to it over and over again. Nothing else on the tape, just that song recorded 15 times. I explored their rich back catalogue and found albums that convinced me to buy cheap old man’s suits from charity shops for £3 a go in an attempt to be part of the Tindersticks gang. Songs like ‘Jism’, ‘Travelling Light’ and the duet with Isabella Rossellini, ‘A Marriage Made In Heaven’, were the soundtrack to my autumn, lighting the candle in my brain and running the bath at the same time.
Elvis Boxers & Matching Socks
WHILST comfortably wrapped up in a Tindersticks world, I wandered into my final relationship of the millennium. Sam was the best friend of Jacko’s girlfriend, Claire. I had talked to her on group nights out in Peterborough over the previous couple of years and despite being a bit full of herself, she was an infectious character. She was a ball of energy whenever she was out, determined to get the party started. Her personality was a heady mix of cultures with Sri Lankan parentage and a wannabe cockney attitude due to her living in the commuter town of Hitchin. Until that summer I’d never considered that anything would ever happen between us. She had, up until recently, been with the same boyfriend for years and there had never been any kind of spark between us. By the time I was looking to sneak out of clubs and home to my Morrissey CD’s & a cup of tea she would be in the middle of the dancefloor flinging her arms around to the latest chart tunes.
Then, during one particularly drunken night out, the kind of evening that’s all Sambuca and revelations that you regret making public
the next morning, Claire casually said to me, “Sam really fancies you”. That was the first time that had happened to me since school and I had thought that, by 23, we’d grown out of the “my mate fancies you” approach. I leant against the bar of The Solstice and watched Sam chatting to my mates, arms whirling around trying desperately to squeeze as many words as possible into every sentence. I knew that we were very different people but what harm could it do to act on Claire’s covert information?
I had resigned myself to a contented single life with my mates, Morrissey and The Posh taking centre stage. I wasn’t sad about the thought of not getting into another relationship, in some ways such a life sounded like heaven. However, stood at the bar that night, swaying from the Sambuca rattling my brain, I thought that I should take a chance. A woman fancied me, she was single and so was I. Why was I even thinking? I knew that I should have been over there buying her a drink.
My self doubt soon wrestled back its controlling interest in my brain and despite Claire reassuring me, I wasn’t convinced that Sam fancied me. I wasn’t being self deprecating but why would she? I was a Moz fanatic with a £6 haircut, which now incorporated ridiculously long Weller-esque sideburns. I was still dressing like Britpop ruled the world. Everything about me was firmly anchored in 1995 and refusing to set sail for the new millennium. I was a miserable sod as well, at least half the time. Sam was one of those people that thought me being miserable was an act that I was putting on to be deadpan and funny. It wasn’t and she would learn that lesson the hard way.
It was whilst thinking “why would she fancy me?” that I remembered Sam was a big fan of Gaz Coombes from Supergrass. So that was it, my sideburns had finally worked their magic.