by Shari Low
‘Twenty-two!’ chorused the crowd.
Meanwhile, Roxy contemplated how long she’d take to die if she mutilated herself with a bright purple dabber.
And just when she thought it couldn’t get any worse, her mother and Vi had roped her into their weekly yoga class, French for Beginners, and she could now yee-har any cowboy into a frenzy on the line-dancing floor. That’s when she wasn’t developing the skills she’d picked up at the seminar in the church hall on ‘Finding Your Inner Woman’. Although it seemed that Roxy’s inner woman had buggered off on the same bus as her will to live.
She fleetingly considered hopping on a train and heading back to London but the truth was she couldn’t face that either. For a start she’d have to share a bed with Ginny. Secondly, there was no way she was showing her face in London until she’d had her eyebrows done. And she didn’t think that Anastasia, the resident eyebrow guru at Harvey Nicks, did house calls to Loserville, No. 1 Dead End Street, The Back of Beyond. And thirdly…if she was really honest, she just couldn’t be bothered.
What was wrong with her? It was as if she’d gone to sleep as a fabulous, adventurous, exotic creature and woken up as an extra in Dawn of the Dead. Was twenty-seven too young for a midlife crisis?
She picked up the book in front of her–a rip-roaring romp through job options entitled Choosing the Right Career. She’d limited herself to three pages an hour because any more than that caused her eyelids to shut. It was an excruciatingly tedious dictionary of employment that proved beyond reasonable doubt that Roxy Galloway was not cut out for bog-standard work. The As were mildly interesting: airline director, architect, aviation instructor. Bs bordered on mind-numbing: baker, billboard erector, butcher. By the time she got to the Cs she realised that not one job appealed to her. Not one. Actually, that wasn’t strictly true–‘costume mistress’ had potential, but only if she was guaranteed major movie work and got to examine Kiefer Sutherland’s inside leg measurement at close quarters.
She slammed the book shut. Boring. Boring. Boring. She contemplated texting Ginny again, but changed her mind. She’d already sent her approximately thirteen texts that week begging her to swap their lives back, and all she’d accomplished was a repetitive strain injury in her thumb.
How had Ginny survived here all these years? No wonder she’d slumped into apathy and dejection–if the boredom didn’t kill you then it just rotted your brain cells until you lost the power to speak using words of more than one syllable. And since you never saw anyone remotely interesting (kinky reverends aside), grooming and presentation inevitably slid down the slippery slope that ended with Flokati leg hair and eyebrows you could crochet.
Tuesday–she hadn’t bothered with make-up.
Wednesday–grimy hair in a ponytail.
Thursday–she wore a pair of her mother’s trainers to work.
Friday–she borrowed Auntie Vi’s lilac velour tracksuit and in a certain light it actually didn’t look too bad on her. Okay, it looked like crap, but she didn’t care.
‘Nice tracksuit.’ Mitch slapped a pile of books on the reception desk. She was wondering where he’d got to today–the early morning had been even more excruciating than normal without his predictable presence.
‘Don’t you Catholics believe telling lies is a sin?’
He did a shrug/nod thing that indicated an affirmative response.
‘Then if you don’t mind standing back…that way the bolt of lightning may kill you but I should escape with minor scorch wounds.’
Mitch grinned. “Have you always been this self-absorbed?” he teased.
‘And by self-absorbed, you do of course mean gorgeous and fascinating?’ she fired back.
‘Self-centred and obnoxious,’ he countered.
‘Witty yet smart.’
‘Spoiled and arrogant.’
Roxy leaned forward on the counter, eyes twinkling, their noses almost touching.
‘But you still think I’m fabulous, don’t you?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Good. Now stop staring at me, because if you’re the type of bloke who gets excited about velour then our lives are even further apart than I realised.’
And the truth, Roxy had discovered, was that if you put them in their natural positions on life’s big playing field, they’d need a telescope and a satellite navigation system to find each other.
She may have experienced a small surge of cervical interest when she first set eyes on him, but she soon learned that Mitch was the personification of her six-inch Manolo stilettos: initially appealing, but obvious that they were a bad fit, uncomfortable and didn’t gel with her lifestyle. Turns out that far from being an erudite, angst-ridden, tortured writer who was working on a future classic, he was actually penning a sequel to his surprise début hit, a lad-lit tale of frolics among the hurling community in his home town on the outskirts of Dublin.
Er, fab. Three hundred and fifty pages of in-depth fluff about men with sticks and irreverent dicks. And no, she hadn’t confessed to him that she’d had to look up ‘hurling’ in the dictionary.
Other own goals? He was from a family of farmers and priests–which meant he woke early, dressed badly and would never agree with Roxy’s theory that Sundays were for breakfast in bed, lunch in bed and dinner in bed.
Oh, and he could talk until her hooters were literally dropping off with boredom about the merits of small-town life. And how did she know all this? Because it seemed that in Mitchland the definition of ‘writing a novel’ was ‘spend an inordinate amount of time lounging around the library’.
Roxy picked up a piece of paper from the desk–preparation for today’s round of a new game she’d dreamt up after a conversation on Monday when she realised that he had absolutely no concept of fashion, technology or current trends.
‘Okay,’ she announced, ‘here we have today’s puzzlers.’
Mitch laughed. ‘Noooo, haven’t you humiliated me enough?’
‘Probably, but it’s the only pleasure I’ve had all week so go with it unless you want to see a grown woman cry.’
He exhaled deeply, pushed up his sleeves and stretched his head from side to side. Then he closed his eyes and made beckoning gestures with his hands.
‘Okay then, give me your best shot.’
Roxy checked the array of scribbles in front of her and selected her first blow.
‘Roberto Cavalli is famous for making what?’
Mitch’s brow furrowed as he racked his brain.
‘Er…Tyres?’
‘Fuck, you’re useless.’
‘I’m fairly sure it states in the rules that the compere isn’t actually allowed to abuse the contestants,’ he replied, in his very best serious tone.
‘Sorry, sorry…I’ll award you one point as compensation for my unprofessional conduct. Okay, next question. A Blackberry is a famous…?’
‘Pie.’
She shook her head mournfully.
‘Mark Anthony famously married…?’
‘Cleopatra.’
‘A Bluetooth is a…?’
‘Dental problem.’
‘And finally, a true or false. A metrosexual is someone who is fond of a fumble on the tube.’
‘False!’ he blurted instantly.
Roxy was astonished. ‘Correct! Yaaaay! So what is it then?’ she grinned. Maybe she’d underestimated him after all.
‘No idea, but I figured it was a fifty/fifty shot.’
Roxy couldn’t suppress a giggle. Mitch, she mused, was the kind of guy who would never, ever understand why she wanted to be cremated after death and have her ashes placed in her beloved Marc Jacobs Stam Bag and buried under a floor tile in Tramp.
The penis embargo was definitely safe. His presence might make an hour or two in the library equivalent of death row pass a little quicker, but the chances of him getting her knickers off were up there with discovering that he was the secret love child of Alan Sugar and Jerry Hall.
He just so wasn’t her type.
But if she didn’t break the monotony of her life then she was going to be the first official casualty of terminal boredom, so that’s why it was so easy to say,
‘Mitch, do you have plans for tonight?’
‘Well, I’m still waiting for Cameron Diaz to confirm, but I could probably squeeze something else in.’
Roxy groaned. ‘You do realise that you’re not funny, don’t you?’
His eyes widened and he clutched his chest. ‘Oh, dear Lord, the shock! The pain!’
‘Yep, I’m feeling it too…somewhere around the arse region. Anyway, presuming Cameron doesn’t call, fancy going out tonight? Thought I could dig out my tiara and slip into a little taffeta number and we could go for oysters, champagne, and then you could spin me around a dance floor before whisking me home in a chauffeured limo.’
He shook his head dolefully before shooting her down. ‘Sorry, can’t. I need twenty-four hours’ notice to get my tiara out of the bank vault and I’m not going out without it.’
The edges of Roxy’s mouth crept up.
‘Oh, fine–we’ll skip the tiaras. So how about you pick up a bird in a lilac tracksuit, take her to the nearest pub and ply her with alcohol until she forgets she’s stumbled into the seventh circle of hell?’
‘How did you know? That’s my idea of the perfect night out. Did the same thing to Drew Barrymore last week and she’s been stalking me ever since. I’m sure that’s why Cameron hasn’t called–doesn’t want to upset her pal.’
‘Understandably. Oh, and just so we’re clear, I’m only doing this because you’re the only person I’ve met all week who doesn’t qualify for school dinners or a bus pass. This is what’s called “desperation”.’
‘Fine, but just so my ego doesn’t top itself, can you at least pretend that it’s wanton desire for my body?’
She looked him up and down. Grey T-shirt that screamed ‘Asda’. Jeans that screamed ‘High Street’. And boots that screamed, ‘I should have been at that line-dancing class too.’
He obviously didn’t realise that the only defence for wearing cowboy boots this season was if you planned to pass the time between lunch and dinner rustling sheep up the High Street.
‘No,’ she replied, deadpan.
‘Great–pick you up at five then.’
The door banged behind him just as Vi reappeared with two steaming mugs and a box from the baker’s.
‘Thought you looked a little down in the mouth when I left, my love. So I brought you a little treat.’
She opened the box with a flourish.
‘Strawberry tart!’
‘Yep, you really know how to show a girl a good time. Could you stand a little to the left?’
‘Then I’d be in the direct line of the dartboard,’ Mitch objected.
‘That would be the general idea.’
Darts. In a pub. On a Friday night. If she were a horse someone would have put her out of her misery by now.
How did other people stand this?
She looked around her, her eyes only slightly blurred by the alcohol that was slowly taking effect. It was a typical rustic pub found in typical rustic villages all over Britain. The carpet was a fraying collision of pink and purple fleur-de-lis. The walls were decorated in a shade of peach that she believed Dulux called ‘Crappy Pub Walls’. There were several shelves dotted about, all decorated with small brass jug things and plates with blue designs on them. And dried flowers everywhere. They were in huge pots in the corners. They hung upside-down over the five-foot-wide fireplace. They dangled from every corner of the room. The sixty-something, loud, drunk woman at the bar who had obviously yet to be informed that the Seventies had actually ended had even shoved some dried flowers down her silver lamé-encased, abundant cleavage. This wasn’t just a pub–it was where dried flowers came to die. Of suffocation, apparently.
Roxy wiped the palm of her right hand on her tracksuit, then pointed her first dart towards the board on the opposite wall.
‘Ginny!’ she spat as she threw the first one. It caught the wire grid and ricocheted off to the side. Six feet away, eight senior citizens playing dominoes ducked in unison.
‘Felix!’ she spat as she threw number two. Triple nineteen. Half-pissed, yet she was still a natural.
‘Men!’ The third dart hit the bull’s-eye. Eight senior citizens moved to another table and several members of the pub’s ladies’ darts team eyed her with newfound interest.
Roxy pulled her two darts out of the board, retrieved the third from the leg of a nearby chair, and then grabbed her purse from the ring-stained table. ‘I’ll get the drinks. And don’t even think about cheating when I’m clutching three instruments of death. By the way, are you having a good time?’
Mitch laughed. ‘Absolutely–how could I not when I have such great company in such salubrious surroundings? I’d come help you at the bar but my feet have stuck to the floor.’
A few minutes later she was back, slamming a pint of Guinness and a Cosmopolitan (also in a pint glass–eat yer heart out, Carrie Bradshaw) down on the table. ‘If that barmaid draws me one more evil look I’m going to deck her,’ she muttered. ‘It seems that ordering cocktails makes me about as popular as genital warts around here.’
She slumped into the burgundy, faux-velvet banquette and put her head on the table. When she eventually straightened back up, almost swaying off the chair in the process, the tears were welling.
‘Sorry, Mitch, but I’m just pissed and pissed off. How did I get here? This has been the worst week of my life, and Felix…’
‘The boyfriend?’
‘The bastard–he hasn’t even tried to get in touch. Two years! Two years we were together and he can’t even phone me! And I’m only telling you this because after this month is over I’ll never see you again. Hopefully,’ she added dolefully.
‘Thanks,’ said Mitch, raising his glass to her.
She pushed him playfully. ‘You know what I mean. I am never, ever going to set foot in this hellhole again. It’s nothing to do with you. I’m actually beginning to think that you’re quite…nice.’
‘Nice?’
‘Nice.’
‘Hold on, I just want to rustle up some witnesses so that they can remind you that you said that when you sober up.’
‘But other than you, nice man, my life couldn’t get any worse.’
Roxy felt a slight breeze behind her. It could have been her imagination but she was sure the temperature in the pub just dropped by a few degrees.
‘So, still here then? I’d have thought you’d have moved on to your next lot of victims by now. Hi, Mitch, how’re you doing, mate?’
‘Grand, Darren, grand.’
Roxy sighed. ‘Forget what I said about life not getting any worse. Mitch, can you see from there if I’ve left my darts on the bar? Why do I never have a lethal weapon when I need one?’
She briefly scanned Darren up and down. Brown boots. Khaki combat trousers. A white T-shirt. She wasn’t sure if he was going to have a few drinks in a relaxed atmosphere or invade a small country.
‘How’s Ginny doing?’ she asked sweetly. It was so far below the belt it was trailing on the fleur-de-lis carpet, but hell, he deserved it.
Darren shrugged his shoulders, doing his best to adopt an air of windswept nonchalance.
‘I’ve no idea. I thought that when it came to my fiancée you had all the answers.’
Ouch. His tone couldn’t have been deadlier if it came with a side order of anthrax.
He turned to face Mitch, blanking Roxy out completely.
‘See you later, mate. Good luck with Cruella.’
His firmly toned thighs retreated into the blur of villagers and desiccated hydrangeas.
‘A fan, obviously,’ Mitch laughed.
‘One of many,’ replied Roxy. A pain had started to work its way from her temple to the crown of her head. She should go home, but she’d forgotten her house keys and her mother and Auntie Vi had said they wouldn’t be back from their Art
class at the local college until after eleven. And that was…She squinted at her watch but it was no use, the numbers swirled before her. Time for another Cosmo then.
She was scoping the bar to see how busy it was when she spotted two familiar faces in the corner just outside the ladies’ loos. They looked around furtively, then ducked inside. No! What the hell were they doing here? It was ridiculous! It was outrageous! It was…too good an opportunity to miss!
‘S’cuse me a sec.’ She pushed herself up and followed the retreating forms into the ladies’ loos. They were so busted! They wouldn’t know what had hit them! Oh, the cheek…
By the time she got into the toilets, they’d already locked themselves in the loo together and were giggling merrily. Did they have no shame?
She battered on the door. ‘Open up right now.’ Silence.
She kicked the door loudly enough to show she meant business.
‘Open up. I saw you come in, I know it’s you and I’m not bloody leaving until you open this door,’ she repeated, this time with an extra pinch of menace.
Silence.
Eventually the door catch clicked and it slowly opened, exposing two nervous, shamed faces.
Roxy folded her arms and put on her very best stern face–the one she usually reserved for traffic wardens and sales assistants who tried to refuse her a refund.
‘I don’t believe you two! Did you honestly think you wouldn’t get caught? Urgh, I’m disgusted!’
She slapped her hands onto her hips and her eyebrows jumped half an inch to a position of ‘Don’t even think about arguing with me’.
‘Right, here’s the deal. I can go and shop you to the guy who owns this place and you can persuade him not to phone the police…’
They stared at her with barely disguised contempt.
‘Or you can hand over that stuff and I’ll say no more about it.’
Romeo and Juliet from the fifth-year study group stared at their shoes for a few seconds then surrendered. They knew when they were beaten.
And that’s how, three minutes later, Roxy Galloway, aged twenty-seven, came to be hanging out of a pub window, in the village she’d grown up in, inhaling some of Morocco’s finest. She made a mental note to make a new carving under the library desk first thing Monday morning. ‘Roxy loves underage drinkers with weed.’