It’s been about a month since I last wrote, and various things have changed since then. Firstly, Mad Mary (hell-boss) has started seeing her on-off boyfriend, evidently Madder Michael again. The advantages of this are that her copious reserves of hatred are routinely directed at him rather than at me, and that she leaves the office ridiculously early every day to make elaborate – and probably revolting – dinners for him. The disadvantages, apart from the extra workload produced by her romance-driven slacking, are that each morning as I arrive, and then every time I go anywhere near her pit of an office, she grips my arm in her hateful, vice-like claws and proceeds to spew out a coffee-scented torrent of verbal vomit about the sex she and Mental Michael had the previous night, interspersed with alarmingly vitriolic remarks about his obsessive behaviour and unappealing personality, and punctuated with snorting ejaculations of snot into an already damp-looking Kleenex. When I started work here, I thought Michael was a monster, so vicious was Mary’s criticism of him, but since then I’ve realised the man is a saint.
Secondly, I got rid of Alan. Or, rather, he got rid of me, about two weeks ago. ‘Alice,’ he intoned sorrowfully on the phone at 7.45 am - a strange time for breakups in my opinion, but what can one expect from a City Boy? - ‘I don’t know what you think of this, but I don’t feel like there’s much point in us meeting up tonight. I don’t really feel that this is going anywhere. You seem very emotionally distant to me – ‘(I rolled my eyes at Freddie, who was ironing, typically topless, while I tried to eat my cornflakes without alerting Alan to the activity with crunching) – ‘and perhaps you have some problems you need to resolve.’ I drew breath to thank him for his no-doubt excellent advice, but he wasn’t even close to finishing. ‘I’ve asked around and a colleague recommended a really excellent therapist, so if you’re interested in exploring that route I can give you her number.’ (Cornflakes and milk suddenly back in the bowl in shock-related spitting incident). Long silence. On the phone: ‘Alice?’ From the ironing board: ‘Ally?’ From the cornflake dropper: ‘You think I need to see a therapist?’ Alan: ‘I think we all need to talk to people sometimes –‘ Alice: ‘I just don’t think that we were right for each other, so –‘ Phone removed from my fingers. Freddie: ‘Fuck off, tosspot.’ End of phone call. End of Alan.
Thirdly, Freddie finally disposed of Neenee, which was almost a shame, because I’d almost started to like her. She came over one evening and mentioned having read Twilight. ‘You look like how I imagined Bella before I saw the film’, she told me shyly. ‘Thank you! You’re actually sort of like Alice Cullen’, I squealed, more in reference to her weird urge to ‘style’ everyone than anything else. Her hand fluttered excitedly to her chest ‘Oh Ally!’ she tittered, ‘That’s so totally sweet of you. I, like, MODEL myself on her.’ Freddie had grimaced. ‘You model yourself on a vampire.’ he muttered, surprising me with his Cullen knowledge, ‘Sounds about right’. Neenee smirked and poked him in the ribs.
The following Saturday he came back from an evening out with her. ‘How was Neenee?’ I’d asked, pausing the not-particularly-good X-Factor auditionee that ITV was allowing me to inflict on myself. He sat down next to me and confiscated the remote control. ‘Yeah, well. Over.’ I leant away to look at him. (Trying not to smile) ‘What?’ ‘I broke up with her’, he elaborated, ‘she was mental.’ ‘Oh’, I responded, speechless. ‘You watching this crap?’ he asked, nodding at the TV. ‘Yes…’ I said. ‘Fair enough.’ He pressed play, and put his arm round me. ‘Good Lord he smells good,’ I thought, breathing in deeply and wondering if he could feel my heart beating. His arm tightened around my shoulders. Bliss.
Half an hour later, as Dermot O’Leary wrapped up the show, I realised Freddie had begun to execute the well-known Accidental Breast Brush with his left hand. I leant against him permissively. ‘Oh, Ally’, he piped up, leaning away alarmingly, ‘I got you something.’ He poked around in his bag and then plonked a tub of Yin Yang ‘Rich Skin Food’ on my lap. ‘I told my sister about your moisturizer because she’s always on about her spots and then she got this and when we were talking about you’ – my mouth fell slightly open – ‘she said she’d tried this and you’d like it. So…there you go.’
There was an awkward moment as I looked at it, and then looked at him, and thought, in one of those surreal moments of clarity, how absurd it was that I was interpreting this metrosexual outburst as a declaration of, if not love, then at least extreme liking. I braced myself for his getting off the sofa and disappearing to bed with a patronizing pat on my head. Then I realised that one of his hands was on my knee, with no intention of withdrawing judging by the firm grip, and the other, the one that had been involved in the Breast Brush, was still sort of around my shoulders and playing with my hair. I looked at him, and blushed at the eye contact and looked at the floor, and then at him again, and then said, oddly, ‘Freddie…have you been drinking?’ (What is the MATTER with me?) Knee-hand sliding to thigh with a faintly lascivious chuckle. ‘Actually, no.’ Hand tangling distractingly in my hair, pulling my head back slightly. ‘Oh’ – breathless – ‘Freddie…what…’
Kiss.
‘This is a really bad idea’, I muttered desperately as he dragged me into his bedroom an indeterminate time period later, clothes and feelings in utter disarray. He laughed and kicked the door closed.
So…I THINK we’re seeing each other. Now THIS is a really bad idea...
