The (Im)Perfect Girlfriend

by Lucy-Anne Holmes

  Lucy-Anne Holmes

  The (Im)Perfect Girlfriend

  PAN BOOKS

  Content

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Chapter Sixty

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  Chapter Sixty-Seven

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  Chapter Seventy

  Chapter Seventy-One

  Chapter Seventy-Two

  Chapter Seventy-Three

  Chapter Seventy-Four

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  Chapter Eighty

  Chapter Eighty-One

  Chapter Eighty-Two

  Chapter Eighty-Three

  Chapter Eighty-Four

  Chapter Eighty-Five

  Chapter Eighty-Six

  Chapter Eighty-Seven

  Acknowledgements

  one

  I used to be in a wonderful relationship with a bloke called Simon. We were supposed to live happily ever after. But we didn’t. Our wonderful relationship followed the other oft-trod path.

  It went tits up.

  I wish I knew when the tits started turning upward. Was there one moment between us that activated a throbbing red panic button marked ‘DOOM!’? Or was the relationship always wrong? Was it kaput from the start but we were so drunk on sex, three-for-the-price-of-two wine offers and foot massages that we didn’t notice?

  Or did I just cock it all up?

  I bet it was the latter. I’ve always been particularly brilliant at cocking things up.

  I wish I had protected the relationship. I wish I’d nurtured it like a child. Instead I said, ‘Where do you want to play? The building site or the road? And would you like a gun or a knife, or how about both and some solvents?’ So off my relationship toddled into the middle of the M25 with a Pritt Stick up its nose.

  But it was perfect to begin with. I remember the first of December last year. London was just settling into the season of goodwill, otherwise known as fraught hell. The weather had turned its usual off-white-knicker-grey and it was church-before-breakfast cold. The papers were flooded with stories of global warming and Simon and I had taken them very seriously. We’d decided not to touch the thermostat but use our body heat for warmth and share baths. We were eco-warriors, treating our one-bedroom flat in Camden as though it was a honeymoon suite in the Maldives.

  Simon and I had been going out for a little over two months but we’d been great friends for twelve years and flatmates for one year before that. Simon said he waited patiently for me to wake up to the fact that the love of my life was sleeping in the next room. In my defence, I’ve always found it hard to wake up. Anyway, we were in love. We were in a bubble of love floating over the seasonal mayhem. I didn’t think there could be a pin in the world sharp enough to pop it. And I definitely wasn’t aware that someone was sharpening an axe with the intention of hacking our love bubble to pieces.

  I’d always hated Christmas before. Each year I tried to copy the gleeful expressions that women have in Boots adverts. But it’s hard to experience glee when you’ve been queuing in Topshop for forty-five minutes, you’re sweating out an office party hangover, you’re just about to hand over all your credit cards knowing at least two will be declined and you’re feeling obese because you’ve just tried on a dress that made you look like a papier mâché Christmas bauble. Historically, I’d endured the Christmas process by drinking through the pain and asking anyone who’d listen why we couldn’t just chip in and buy Jesus a card. However, last year it was the happiest time of my life. I’d even bought an advent calendar. That was how much I wasn’t hating Christmas last year.

  ‘You have the first chocolate, babe,’ Simon said when we opened the window marked ‘1’. We were post-bath, swaddled in a duvet, lying on the sofa. ‘I’m going to massage your feet.’ He wiggled himself around in the quilt so my feet were on his lap and I bit the milk chocolate snowman’s head off.

  ‘I love you, Sarah,’ he said, but even if he hadn’t said it I would have known. The fact that he was prepared to go within ten yards of my feet told me.

  I’ve always had smelly feet. This is because I am a diehard supporter of cheap, high-heeled shoes. My family has called me Fungus Foot for most of my life. My response to this has been to tie shoes up in plastic bags, leave them outside rooms and then douse my honky hoofs in strong man deodorant. Simon had a far more radical response to my feet. He thought they needed some loving. He would wash them in the bath and then rub cream into them as we lay on the sofa.

  ‘I love you, Simon Gussett,’ I told him dreamily. I didn’t even flinch as I said his surname. I just looked at his beautiful face with those blue eyes and that sexy brown stubble and the top of his muscly shoulders as they worked on my feet and I smiled. Then he smiled back, and the act of looking into each other’s eyes and smiling always triggered the same reaction. We had to kiss. Kissing Simon was perfect. There was neither tooth-bashing nor dribble. We kissed until it became necessary to stop so that we could breathe, by which time my lips were so swollen it looked like I’d been pleasuring a brillo pad. We grinned at each other again and I felt the urge to utter something brilliantly intellectual.

  ‘Have I mentioned that I’m hopelessly in love with you?’

  He sighed contentedly and resumed work on my feet. Then he started a deep and meaningful discussion about a very important issue.

  ‘Do you know who my favourite actress is?’

  ‘Um . . . Angelina Jolie?’

  ‘Nah . . . minger.’
/>   ‘Penélope Cruz.’

  ‘Munter chops? Hardly.’

  ‘I give up.’

  ‘Sarah Sargeant.’

  I beamed because I’m Sarah Sargeant. And I’m an actress. And in just two days’ time, I was going to fly to LA to play a role in my first Hollywood movie. Not just any Hollywood movie. An Eamonn Nigels psychological thriller. With seventeen lines I was going to immortalize a stripper called Taylor who got murdered in a hedge. This wasn’t just the next rung on my career ladder. It was my leg-up into the loft. I’d been in a Pizza Hut ad. I’d done The Bill and Midsomer Murders. I’d performed on stage in the West End. Now I was going to Hollywood. It was the start of my dream. (My apologies. It was X Factor season.) Everything I’d worked, acted and extensively waitressed for my entire adult life had been granted. And I had a beautiful boyfriend who was proud of me. I’m surprised I didn’t explode with bliss.

  ‘Sarah Sargeant. I’ve heard she’s up and coming,’ I opined, as though I was on Newsnight.

  ‘She keeps me up and coming,’ he smirked, as though he was on a building site.

  I sniggered dirtily.

  ‘And do you know who my most favourite charity-setter-upper is?’

  This was the cherry on the Bakewell. Simon’s career was cooking perfectly too. He had made a lot of money as the sole importer of a drink you might have heard of, Cockalada. It’s a tequila-based beverage served in a realistically shaped plastic willy. But he’s so kind he didn’t just want to make money and spend it on himself. So he’d set up a charity that offered adventure holidays to teenagers who couldn’t afford them. The first trip had been to Brazil. I went with him. It was a huge success and now Eamonn Nigels, the famous film director, had not only given me seventeen lines in his film, he had also backed Simon’s charity financially.

  ‘No, no, I don’t know who your favourite charity-setter-upper is. Bono?’

  ‘Pah!’

  ‘Geldof?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Who, then?’

  ‘Elton John.’

  I thought I was very funny. Simon forgot my feet and lurched at me. I ended up squealing into his armpit as he tickled me. I wish time hadn’t galloped away so carelessly from that armpit moment. The following day things started to change. A series of ominous phone calls were about to slyly wreck our elegant equilibrium.

  two

  The first phone call came when we were buying a Christmas tree. We weren’t comically struggling through snow-covered streets in leafy Hampstead with a real evergreen held above our heads. Far from it. We were in Argos in Camden High Street. Argos had for a long time been on my list of most unpleasant things. It was wedged quite high up there between eating offal and thrush. So I should have known.

  I suppose Argos deserves to be congratulated for making the simple process of shopping hard. Why go into a shop, pick up the item you want and pay for it when you can follow this nifty little process?

  1 Locate a catalogue with all its pages in

  2 Find the code of the item you want

  3 Find a pen and an order slip

  4 Write code on order slip

  5 Queue at a till

  6 Eventually talk to a man who will either tell you the item isn’t in stock (in which case return to 1 now) or take your money and give you a receipt with a code on it

  7 Wait for your code to appear on a screen

  8 Go up to a counter and queue with all the other people whose codes have appeared on the screen

  9 Collect the item, which may or may not be the item you want

  On the day in question Simon and I were stuck on 3 because someone had nicked all the little pens that the store provided.

  ‘Would my movie-star girlfriend mind staying here while I whiz across the road to the bookies and pinch one of theirs?’ Simon asked.

  ‘Your movie-star girlfriend wouldn’t mind at all.’ I smiled. I loved it when he called me his movie-star girlfriend. ‘As long as she can have a small kiss with a tiny amount of tongue before her charity-setter-upper boyfriend leaves her for a whole minute,’ I replied, because love makes you feel like a god but talk like a pillock.

  We had a little snog while an eight-year-old boy shouted, ‘Urgh!’ and then Simon ran off, leaving me holding the page. My finger was on the three foot Fibre-Optic Starburst Christmas Tree that we liked because it had cascading lights and was only twenty quid. My phone rang. It was Eamonn Nigels.

  ‘Oh my God!’ I womanly whooped when I answered. ‘Guess what! Simon and I are just buying a Christmas tree and we’ve decided that rather than placing an angel on the top, we’re going to put a picture of you there! Because you are like an angel to us.’

  Now, Eamonn Nigels is a successful film director with gravitas and understated style. It was fairly obvious that he’d abhor the thought of us cutting out his head, placing it on cardboard and circling it with fairy lights. But I wanted him to know how grateful we both were to him.

  ‘Sarah, where are you? Sounds like a riot!’

  ‘Pretty much. Argos.’

  ‘You poor thing.’

  ‘Hmmm. Anyway, not for long! I’m seeing you in a few days,’ I screeched. ‘What’s the weather like in LA? I mean, I know it’s warmer than here. I’ve bought a lot of summer clothes. Like credit-card-abuse amounts of summer clothes.’ I cackled. ‘But does it get chilly in the evenings? My mum keeps going on about it. Now I’m sure you don’t go out at night and your fingers and toes drop off, but, what I’m trying to say, not very succinctly is, do I need a jacket?’ I have a habit of speaking incessant bollocks when I’m excited.

  ‘Oh, Sarah. I don’t know how to say this. But we’ve lost the film. It’s off. The studio’s gone bust.’

  ‘What?’ I said quietly, and I stepped away from the fibre-optic tree, past the Christmas shoppers and into the chilly outside air. I saw Simon darting out of the betting office and sprinting across the busy street. He spotted me and grinned as he waved a blue biro and narrowly avoided the front of a 134 bus. It was the first time since we’d been going out that I couldn’t smile back at him.

  ‘The studio’s gone bust, Sarah,’ Eamonn repeated. ‘I’m so terribly sorry. I’ll speak to you soon.’

  I sat down sadly on the pile of Argos catalogues by the entrance. Simon arrived.

  ‘I’m not going to LA any more,’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh shit, babe,’ he said, standing in front of me and pulling my head to his chest.

  ‘Bollocks and wank,’ I groaned into his jumper as the disappointment descended. This left me with no job and no money. All I had was a dream in smithereens and a pile of vest tops that I didn’t need and couldn’t afford. It was like I’d been so close to success that I could smell it, but just before I could get my fingers on it some bastard had whisked it away.

  ‘Come on, babe. Think positive.’

  Simon was a big ambassador for positive thinking. He was the only bloke I’d ever met who bought books from the Mind Body Spirit section of bookshops. His latest purchase was The Passage To Enlightenment. But these books made him so chilled out he hadn’t even minded when I wrote ‘Back’ in biro on the front cover before the word ‘Passage’. I didn’t read those books. I was much happier with a Jilly Cooper.

  ‘Oh, not the positive, babe. Can’t I just wallow?’ I protested.

  ‘No, Sare! Where focus goes energy flows! If you focus on not having a job, then you’ll never get a job. Come on, visualize getting another job.’

  I moaned dramatically like a child who’d been told to pick up their toys.

  ‘Close your eyes,’ he ordered.

  I obeyed, unwillingly and with a huff.

  ‘Now, visualize!’

  ‘Si!’

  ‘Visualize. Come on. You’re on stage. A big theatre. A huge audience. They’re all cheering. Can you hear them?’

  ‘Hmmm,’ I said, even though all I could hear was traffic and the sound of the Argos automatic doors.

  ‘Yeah!’ h
e burst loudly, and he spoke with such enthusiasm that I opened one of my eyes to sneak a look at him. Simon still had his eyes closed. His face was scrunched up. He was taking powerful breaths as though he could smell summer dew, not flue. And he smiled contentedly like he really was imagining me in a great theatre job. I sat looking at him, thinking that he was the loveliest man on earth. Then a small boy approached and offered to sell us a tiny Argos pen for 20p.

  three

  Now, that wasn’t exactly the beginning of the end between me and Simon. Nothing had really changed. We were still in love. The only thing that was different was that I felt a bit crap. I had gone from being a movie-star girlfriend to an unemployed girlfriend.

  If I was to be honest, I felt a bit worthless. If our relationship was a shiny new car, then a dent had appeared on my side that I was ashamed of. But I was trying to fix it. I was trying to bash the panel straight. Simon prescribed that I use the disappointment to my advantage. So I spent three days sending out letters to theatre and television companies that said:

  Dear Potential Employer,

  I was due to fly out to LA this week to film the new Eamonn Nigels film. However, the studio responsible for the film has gone bust.

  Hence I am writing to you cheekily today on the off chance that you might have a job going for a talented actress in her twenties*. Hollywood’s loss could be your gain.

  I would be so very much obliged if you would consider me for any roles you might have.

  Kind regards

  Sarah Sargeant

  * I was actually thirty, so that was just a small white lie.

  I attached my CV to the letter. I was proud of my CV, although it did contain one or two more small white lies. Not that I am a liar by nature. I have hardly ever lied in my life. This is because:

  1 I went to a convent. Catholic Guilt featured rampantly on the curriculum

  2 The few times I have lied, the lie has been uncovered in a hugely embarrassing and public manner. (Most notably when I made up a sex story on a blog and the Evening Standard wrote a feature on it. Long story)

  But, in my defence, everyone lies on their CV. A CV is a piece of promotional material. And we all know that pieces of promotional material are pretty lies fabricated to sell stuff.