The Good, the Bad and the Fugly: Part 2, The (Oh So) Good

The Good

After Freddie had hip-squeezed and guilt-tripped me into toast-making, football-watching submission, the rest of the week passed in faintly flirtatious harmony. On Thursday Jamie had friends over for dinner. Freddie sat next to me, his arm possessively on the back of my chair, and drank most of my wine and made unflattering whispered remarks about a male guest who kept trying to flirt with me, reducing me to shocked giggles. Laura took me aside afterwards to tell me she was glad I was making an effort with him, and Jamie thanked me profusely for keeping things so civil while his friends were round. I marveled inwardly at their failure to realize that I’d just succumbed to the worst infatuation of my whole life, and admitted awkwardly that I’d misjudged Freddie ‘a bit’. On Friday night we watched Have I Got News For You while Freddie ironed (topless) and I applied mascara, and both of us said we didn’t really feel like going out but sort of had to. ‘You look fucking hot’, he told me as we left the house for our respective parties, ‘behave yourself and be home by midnight’. I giggled and blushed and told him to shut up.

Cora came over on Saturday morning for brunch, and we were sitting in the garden, discussing the day ahead and concluding that the park was the only thing for it, when Freddie came downstairs. No shirt, horrible pajama bottoms. I gazed, lovingly. ‘Morning, Ally,’ he said, nodding at Cora and stealing a piece of toast from my plate with a provocative grin in my direction. ‘Morning, Freddie,’ I sighed blissfully at him, wriggling happily as he leant over me and used my knife to spread his purloined slice with some of my St. Dalfour marmalade whilst bombarding me with a reassuring blast of something that might not have been Lynx, but was definitely not Tom Ford.

‘How are you today?’ I murmured into his armpit. ‘Yeah,’ he replied, straightening up and munching contentedly, ‘I’m alright, thanks. Can I steal some of your tea?’ I nodded, conscious as I did so that I was leaning pathetically towards him and smiling stupidly while Cora gaped from the other side of the table. ‘What are you DOING?’ she hissed furiously as soon as Freddie had gone into the kitchen for a mug, ‘he’s SOOO BAAAAD’. I shrugged helplessly and smiled some more as he sat down next to me. ‘We’ve got some pain au chocolat as well if you want’, I babbled, made moronic by his proximity, and then, afterthoughtishly, ‘Oh, this is my friend Cora’, as she kicked me under the table.

‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, still looking at me. ‘Charmed’, said Cora, disgustedly. ‘So,’ he said, after a pause during which he reached over me for the aforementioned pain au chocolat, ‘what are you girls up to today, then?’ He grinned at Cora, who looked affronted and busied herself with a text message. ‘We’re going to sit in the park and have a picnic’, I told him, ‘you should come too if you don’t have plans.’ Cora shot a filthy look at me across the table as Freddie slurped his tea and said, ‘Yeah, alright, I’ll come and join you when Neenee’s up. Whenever that is.’ He glanced restlessly up at his bedroom window and remarked, ‘Bloody hell that girl’s lazy.’

While I suppressed a sudden urge to snatch back my delicious French pastry at this unwelcome reminder that he was not, by any means, my man, and that this was probably not such a misfortune after all, Cora rolled her eyes and darted a venomous look at her new enemy. ‘That’s not a very nice thing to say about your girlfriend,’ she remarked icily. Freddie shrugged. ‘I suppose I won’t say it when she’s my girlfriend, then’, he replied, almost as coldly, the ambiguity of ‘when’ making my heart and eyelashes flutter with hope and hate. Cora glared at him and began gathering up the breakfast things. ‘I’m done, Alice,’ she said briskly, ‘and so are you, by the looks of things. Let’s go, I want to get some sun.’ Freddie looked incredulous. ‘Cora,’ he said, ‘this is a garden. There is sun in it.’ He looked at me sorrowfully. ‘Don’t go yet, Ally, I’ll be bored.’ I looked at him, and looked at Cora and didn’t move. She smiled. ‘Those are lovely pajamas, Freddie’, she began, bitchily. I looked at her again. It was clearly only going to get worse. ‘You’re right, Cora,’ I conceded, ‘I’ll put my shoes on.’

‘What were you DOING?’ I squeaked, out on the pavement, ‘that was so MEAN.’ ‘You were NEVER going to leave,’ she replied vindictively, ‘I had to get you OUT of there. He’s APPALLING and you were PATHETIC. He’s viler than ALEX. He’s my WORST.’ I shrugged miserably. ‘It’s my fault you think that, I shouldn’t have been so horrible about him,’ I said weakly. ‘Yes you SHOULD,’ she cackled. ‘Until he drowned your brain in his disgusting tsunami of testosterone your descriptions did him perfect justice. Let’s just hope he and poor old Whorebitch don’t find us in the park. God.’ I had to agree with that, at least, but as I trailed wistfully after her to Wholefoods I found myself dwelling on the word ‘when’ and the memory of Freddie’s knee pressing against mine under the garden table. Either I was being ruthlessly used for beverages and baked goods, I thought, or Neenee was going to have to find some other man’s room to be lazy in.

Swine Flu Freddie and Ally Cat

Look on my Saturday evening, ye readers, and despair for me...:

I arrive home with Becky, who is supposed to be eating dinner with me after an afternoon in the park, to find Freddie lying on the sofa, surrounded by piles of damp-looking man-size Kleenex and empty mugs, with the remote control dangling limply from his left hand and a self-pitying expression on his slightly gray face. ‘Hello, Freddie’, I say coolly, hoping to beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen, ‘this is Becky. Becky, this is Freddie’. ‘Hi Alice’, he groans at me, annoyingly, as he struggles into a sitting position and rudely ignores Becky. ‘How are you? Good day?’ I pause in the middle of the living room, faintly exasperated by his desire for a conversation. (I have Mad Mary to blow coffee-breath and sickness into my face all week, I certainly don’t need Freddie doing it all weekend.) ‘Fine, fine’, I say, and then, with an apologetic glance at Becky, and because I really see no way of avoiding it, ‘are you alright?’

He nods, pathetically. I sigh. ‘You don’t really look it, Freddie.’ He sighs too. ‘I don’t feel very well’. He does look wretched and my maternal instincts begin to misbehave within me. ‘Do you think you’ve got a temperature?’ I ask, sinking into an uncomfortable half-sitting position on the other sofa. He shakes his head and mutters something about being fine. ‘Freddie, you’re not fine,’ I say, because it’s manifestly true. He blows his nose loudly. ‘Do you want me to get you some more tea?’ I ask. He gazes at me gratefully. ‘I’d love that, Alice. That would be very sweet.’ I reach over to pick up his flotilla of used coffee cups and head for the kitchen, with Becky twitching slightly in my wake, obviously desperate to say something.

As soon as we’re out of sight, she explodes into stage whispers. ‘THAT is FREDDIE?’ she chokes, unable to contain herself. ‘Yes’, I reply. ‘THAT is Freddie. He’s sick. I’m going to make him tea.’ I put the kettle on. ‘He’s FIT’, she gasps, gripping my arm. ‘Mm, not right now. Right now he is unfit,’ I say absentmindedly. (Becky thinks a startling range of men fall into this category). ‘ALICE’, she squeaks, beside herself, ‘he’s GORGEOUS. You should definitely have sex with him.’ ‘BECKY!’ I explode, appalled, ‘He’s HATEFUL. He threw away my toothbrush and groped me in the middle of the night after using his awful friend to flush me out of my room. He is a BAD man and I am not having sex with him.’

She stands grinning at me. ‘You fancy him,’ she says provocatively. I roll my eyes. ‘No, Becky. At best, I tolerate him. At worst, I actively dislike him. I definitely do not fancy him. This is not a Rom-Com. In real life, Becky, when people don’t like each other it’s because they don’t like each other, not because they secretly want to have sex with each other.’ ‘Yes you do,’ she interrupts, with unreasonable disregard for my entire argument, ‘you’re making TEA for him AND –‘ (as I begin loading the dirty cups into the dishwasher), ‘you’re cleaning up after him’. I straighten up and look at her to see if she’s serious. She is. Ugh. ‘He’s SICK and I’m being NICE. That’s all that’s happening here.’ ‘You like him’, she insists, unperturbed. ‘No. I DISlike him,’ I tell her, grimly, ‘I am currently thinking that swine flu would be an appropriate karmic punishment for his revolting ways, though despite the fuss he’s making, man-flu is more probable.’

‘You fancy him,’ she says again, grinning some more. ‘And I’m going home now. You should spend time alone together, and anyway, I really don’t want to get sick. I have a date with Paul on Tuesday’. I gape at her, appalled. ‘Which one’s Paul? Wait, you’re LEAVING? I bought things for dinner. DON’T be stupid. Look, I’m sorry he’s here, I thought everyone was out tonight.’ She shrugs. ‘Seriously, he looks really ill, though also hot. He probably HAS got swine flu. Give him the dinner.’ The kettle boils and as I make Freddie his tea, Becky makes her escape. ‘Bye, Freddie’, I hear her warble as she goes, ‘have a nice night with Alice. She’s making you dinner.’

Teeth clenched, I go back into the living room carrying Freddie’s tea. ‘Ally’, he sighs at me, blissfully, ‘thank you so much for making me dinner. I’m really hungry. You’re so lovely.’ ‘No, I’m not -’ I begin, before crumbling into a begrudging ending of, ‘that’s alright, I’m cooking anyway.’ Half an hour later, Freddie is eating my salmon fishcakes and vegetables and mumbling compliments. An hour later we’re watching The Bourne Ultimatum in companionable silence. Two hours later, he’s asleep and I wash up and then go upstairs to find a blanket for him. Two hours and fifteen minutes later, having covered him with the blanket and found myself thinking that he’s really quite nice when he’s sick, I realize that Becky’s right. He’s not bad looking…

---

And then, of course, I remembered that good looking or otherwise, he is also Freddie, and frightful and overbearing and rude and probably sexist. And just to prove the point, as I bent down to pick up his dirty tissues he lurched into consciousness for long enough to pat my hip and mumble into the cushion he’s probably been drooling on, ‘You’re a great little nurse, my little Ally Cat.’ HIS LITTLE ALLY CAT? Oh god. And I made that man dinner. I swatted his horrid wandering hand off and ran upstairs to shower and exfoliate and Yin Yang myself into something approaching cleanliness. I’m going to sleep now. Angrily.