FINALLY

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...

The Homecoming

Well, Freddie’s home. He walked in with his personally moulded backpack and slightly peeling skin a few days after we’d expected him, and shortly after I’d got home. From a date. A fifth date. With the datee. We were sitting on the sofa and I was giggling, as one often does on dates with passably attractive men, at a joke that wasn’t really all that funny. Freddie walked in, bare-armed, weighed down with baggage (literal and probably metaphorical), looking tired and tanned and like he needed a shower and a haircut. It was fortunate that I wasn’t standing up or I might have swooned. I am officially a pathetic female. And to think I’d persuaded myself that I was over Freddie and falling for dire Datee, with his door-opening, chair-pulling, jacket-taking good manners. Vom.

So, after a momentary pause, I recovered enough to launch myself from the sofa, squealing his name with Neeneeish glee and fling my arms round him, breathing ‘Oh God, I’m SO glad you’re home’ into his sweaty, manly neck. He squeezed me until breathing anything, even endearments, was no longer an option, said ‘I missed you too’ and then held me away to look at me. My heart thumped as his left hand slid gently down my waist to my hip, and his right hand cupped my chin and cheek and tilted my face up to his. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about you, Ally’, he muttered and, as we both forgot the regrettable presence of Datee, my eyes fluttered shut and –

Oh, alright, FINE, it never happened. I just realised as I shuffled hurriedly away from Dateee and gazed in breathless, heart-pounding adoration at Freddie, that the above was exactly what I WANTED to happen. Really, I couldn’t do anything very much at all, until Freddie broke the awkward silence with ‘Hello, Ally’, and put down the giant backpack. He stood rubbing his shoulder - which made me quiver and yearn to offer him a massage – come ON, girl, get a grip - and glanced between me and Datee with an uncertain smile.

‘Freddie! Hi!’ I gasped, sounding embarrassed and hostile, and got up to greet him. My attempt at a hug was made deeply awkward by his effort to kiss me on the cheek, ending in an uncomfortable, nervous-laughterish pause and a brushing of lips that, whilst tantalising, was also gut-wrenchingly embarrassing, the more-so as I could tell that he was staring at Datee the whole time. Ugh, how I LOATHED myself for letting him talk me into letting him into the house. Death.

Datee, meanwhile, had risen from the sofa himself, and come to hover near our miserable, unsatisfying reunion. ‘Hi’, he semi-shouted, apparently his tone of choice, incidentally – ‘Alan.’ As he said it I realised what I’d found attractive about him; he reminded me of Alex the Wanker Banker, which wasn’t entirely surprising. Alan is a management consultant, which is the same breed of man, just a bit slimier, I’ve always thought.

‘Hi’, replied Freddie warily, stepping forward slightly so that he was alongside me, our arms touching, in the hallway. I leaned shamelessly in against him, smiling stupidly just because he was there. I knew that I ought to be somehow taking advantage of the whole thing to make him jealous, but alas, such cunning seems beyond me. I could only formulate increasingly desperate strategies to pretend that Alan was really just a friend and get him out of there because the idea of Freddie thinking he had competition was inexplicably horrendous.

‘You a friend of Ally’s?’ Freddie prompted, and my stomach contracted. ‘Yes –‘ I squealed hopefully, but Alan was quicker and, unsurprisingly, louder. ‘We’re seeing each other,’ he claimed decisively and erroneously, without so much as a glance in my direction. ‘Are you’, Freddie replied, obviously not expecting an answer. He wound his arm around my waist. ‘Lucky man’, he remarked, and squeezed. I wriggled free, feeling wretched.

‘Ya, I guess so’, Alan said, with laugh that tried hard not to sound annoyed. ‘So you’re –sorry, was it Jamie?’ Freddie reached down for his bag. ‘That’s the other one, mate. You met Laura yet? She’s nice.’ He smiled pleasantly. ‘No, no,’ Alan said, more casually, ‘just you.’ Freddie grinned wolfishly, mystifyingly pleased. ‘Sure…and has Ally given you the grand tour of the house yet?’ This was weird. Were they going to be friends now? Not good. ‘I think she’s planning to do that later,’ Alan said, which annoyed me, because I had no such intent and it sounded lascivious. I cleared my throat. ‘Alan, it’s kind of late already, sorry not to have shown you round earlier, I didn’t think…’ – all the while wondering if it was rude to invite someone in and not give them a tour – was this some strange piece of etiquette I’d somehow missed in my childhood? – ‘….anyway, maybe another time.’

He frowned. Freddie nodded. ‘Shame,’ he commiserated, ‘it’s a great place. Ally’s got the best bedroom, I think. Kind of wish it was mine.’ I stared at him, because that was a lie, more or less. Alan stared too. ‘I doubt she’ll swap,’ he said, weirdly. ‘Nnooo, I don’t suppose I will. Although Freddie’s room is also lovely and he’s made it look very nice’, I babbled frantically, ‘now, Freddie, if you want to have a shower do you think you could go now because I’m going to need one too, and I want to go to bed soonish. We were just saying goodnight, weren’t we Alan?’ Freddie ruffled my hair with his free hand. ‘Sure thing, babe, I’ll give you a shout when I’m done’.

Alan peered up the stairs after him, and then turned to me. ‘So, that’s Freddie’, I said nervously, ‘he’s sometimes sort of protective, so – ‘ I got no further. Alan grabbed me with unexpected skill and force and kissed me. Also unexpectedly, I found myself kissing him back, and remembering all the things I liked about him. And then he broke off to say, ‘So…how about the tour?’ as though the thing was a certainty. ‘Um, NO,’ I snapped, outraged, wondering how I’d feel about it if Freddie hadn’t just come home looking like a ruffled God, and not especially liking the answer to that question, ‘no, it’s late and I’m tired. I’ll call you tomorrow. I’m sorry about – I didn’t know Freddie was home today, so…’

He left. Twenty minutes later, Neenee knocked on the door. ‘Lissy-wissy!’ she trilled as she brushed past me.

God, I’m so stupid.

The Good, the Bad, and the Belatedly Fugly: Part 3, The Fugly

So, cast your mind back to the last time I wrote. I was wandering happily away from the house, head full of Freddie, off to have a picnic in the park with Cora. Belatedly, here comes the Fugly part…

‘Oh NO!’ Cora said suddenly, looking despairingly over my shoulder as I nibbled tortilla chips and guacamole on our makeshift picnic blanket, ‘they FOUND us. Gah, Neenee looks annoyed.’ I sighed disgustedly. ‘She’s the sort of girl that probably always does. Oh well. Know your enemy.’ And I turned and waved at the approaching pair. Within seconds, my wish was being granted. Neenee, apparently, has an ardour for talking about herself that even I - a woman who repeatedly writes about her own life on the internet with the expectation that strangers will read it - find extraordinary.

They sat down and, coiling repulsively around Freddie like some pernicious creeper, Neenee squealed in delight at seeing Julianne Moore on the cover of Cora’s copy of Vogue. ‘Oh, I LOVE her, sooo beautiful, really unusual looking. She makes a great model, too, she has such an expressive face. I did some face-modeling a while ago, ‘beauty’ they call it, but I just didn’t find it, you know, um, creative enough? I’m a really creative person and I need to express that so I applied to art college with a specialism in photography. And, you know, I know it’s the right thing for me because that’s how I met my Fweddie.’ She giggled up at him revoltingly, whilst Cora tapped away furiously at her phone and I stared, transfixed, at Freddie’s blank expression.

‘But I don’t miss the modeling’, she went on, inexorable in her self-obsession. ‘It was so wrong for me, you know, and because I wasn’t tall enough for catwalk my agency didn’t give me the attention they should have done. I mean, I think I could have been really successful if I wasn’t so petite. But I’d rather be little, anyway. I think it’s more feminine, you know? And it’s great knowing it’s there, you know, that my face is always going to be looked at in that way? Cause, like, not everyone has the right look, you know?’ There was a blissful pause during which Cora sighed meaningfully and I read the text message she’d sent me during the diatribe. ‘GAHHHH. MISS BATES MEETS DEMON PIXIE. Is that a FAIRY tattooed on her ankle?! Hahahahaha.’

‘You could almost have been a model, Alice’, Neenee piped up again, surprising me in the guilty act of trying to look for the (there it was – alarmingly kitsch) ankle tattoo. ‘You’ve got the height for it, anyway,’ she added, smiling at me with her perfect little teeth, ‘and you know, it’s all about how you present yourself.’ She looked me over critically. ‘OOOOOO, you should let me style you.’ Freddie shifted uncomfortably away her. ‘Neenee,’ he said impatiently, ‘Alice is 25 or something, she doesn’t want to be styled.’ He glanced at me evilly. ‘And I’m pretty sure she only wears her frumpy cow-girl dresses for picnics. Normally she looks quite…’he grinned at me, ‘...groomed.’

I threw a grape at him and laughed. ‘I’ll have you know this is my D.H. Lawrence tea-dress, Freddie.’ He grinned some more and kicked me lazily on the ankle. ‘Call it what you want, Ally, it’ll always be the frumpy cow-girl dress to me.’ I giggled, Cora made a non-verbal sound of disgust and Neenee pouted furiously. ‘I’m sure I saw it in Whistles’, she muttered crossly. ‘Yes, that’s where I got it from’, I said, puzzled. ‘But you said it was…’ Neenee’s voice trailed off uncertainly, but Cora cut in, ‘She meant that she feels like she’s in a D.H. Lawrence novel when she wears it, Neenee. Alice has an infatuation with badly written melodrama.’ Freddie scowled and threw the poor grape at Cora’s face.

Neenee looked from one of us to the other and leaned towards Freddie. ‘Fweddieeee’, she wheedled, ‘Neenee wants an icecweam.’ Cora and I exchanged horrified glances which made her laugh a bit too loud and Neenee stared at her viciously and unfolded her tiny, evil form from the picnic blanket. ‘It’s been nice getting to know you better,’ I murmured up at her lamely, feeling that it had been anything but, but also feeling too English not to say it. ‘Um, Freddie,’ I went on, suicidally polite, ‘there’s a really nice Italian ice cream parlour over that way –‘ I pointed ‘-if you’d rather not have Mr Whippy.’

He had been staring, as far as I could see, at Neenee’s purple-painted toe nails. Either he had a foot fetish, I reasoned, or Neenee’s baby-voice had been pushing it even for him. When I said his name he looked at me with a slightly annoyed expression. ‘Alice, I don’t want an ice cream at all. I don’t like ice cream,’ he remarked in cryptic irritation. Neenee leaned down and stroked his hair possessively, saying, as if he’d been addressing her, ‘I know you don’t, honey bunny, but Neenee does.’ Cora squeezed my hand desperately and I thought Freddie winced. He got up, all the same, said he’d see me later, and walked off in the direction I’d suggested. Neenee simpered an insincere goodbye and trotted off after him, pretending that she couldn’t keep up till he threw her, in her annoying Katy Perry shorts, over his shoulder. She screamed in delight. I choked back vomit. ‘Oh Alice,’ Cora said, pityingly, ‘I’m sorry, but she is FUNNY.’

See, I told you. FUGLY.

And then things got even fuglier. Fugliness has been, it would seem, all around me, much of it frustrating my efforts to blog. Liz, the other assistant at work, was made redundant in the company’s belated response to the credit crunch, leaving me with double the workload and double the attention from Mad Mary. Ahh. My personal hell. Then the nice men next door that Laura and I have been flirting with to get free access to their wireless internet for the last two years moved out, to be replaced by a sweet two-child family that doesn’t have internet at all.

After almost two weeks of peculiar, fraught squabbling over internet packages (Jamie wanted Sky, Laura wanted the cheapest thing available, Freddie wanted Virgin and I just didn’t care at all) Freddie lost his temper and got us Virgin XL without warning anyone. He announced it in a terse email sent round to us all while we were at work. ‘Got us Virgin. TV etc. £12 each monthly. Hope ok. Fred.’ I arrived home at 10.30 that evening after working late and then meeting poor Liz for a drink, to find Freddie sitting in the garden, drinking beer while Laura and Jamie checked Facebook feverishly in the living room, apparently having recovered from their yearnings for other broadband deals.

With no one to talk to, I went out to the garden. ‘Ally’, Freddie said brightly as I hovered in the doorway, ‘how was your day?’ He patted the seat next to him. ‘Fiiiine’, I said, sitting down with him, ‘yours?’ He nodded. ‘Not bad.’ He waved his beer bottle at me. ‘No thanks,’ I told him, before realizing he wanted another. I rolled my eyes and fetched one, feeling dangerously wifey. He put his arm round me as I sat down again. ‘Thanks, gorgeous’, he grinned, evidently feeling provocatively husbandy. I rolled my eyes and slapped him lightly on the leg, and then leaned against him, because he was nice and warm and frankly the weather wasn’t, especially.

He sniffed my hair appreciatively. ‘You smell nice. Good shampoo. Speaking of – you’re running out of that Yin Yang stuff you use on your face. Can you get some more? I quite like it.’ I leaned away and scowled at him. ‘YOU get some more. They’ve got an internet site, just go and order some, it’s not hard.’ His arm tightened around my waist. pulling me back against him and I could feel him laughing. ‘Don’t they have it in shops? Need some to take to Kenya with me.’ ‘Kenya?’ I asked, my voice higher pitched than it ought to have been. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘got some money to make a documentary over there – wildlife and the environment thing. Be out there for three weeks.’ ‘Oh!’ I said, ‘That’s what you do.’ Then, voice tragic, ‘When are you leaving?’ ‘Friday,’ he said, his fingers unexpectedly weaving between mine and squeezing hard. ‘This Friday?’ I asked, too surprised to pretend I didn’t care. ‘The day after tomorrow?’ ‘Yyyeaaahhh, ‘It’s ok, I’m coming back,’ he teased. ‘Would’ve thought you’d be glad to have a break.’ I breathed in deeply and smelled beer on his breath. ‘Well…I’ll miss you’, I admitted, softly. ‘I’ll miss you too,’ he told me, and his hand found its way back to my waist. I sighed and looked down. He pulled me even closer, and put down his beer.

And then, by all the rules of the RomCom, we ought to have kissed. I wanted him to kiss me. I could tell, by the way his fingers were tickling my ribs, that he wanted to kiss me. But what actually happened was that Jamie and Laura shouted that they were going to bed, and too many moments passed, and I remembered that he was my flatmate and he had a girlfriend, albeit a demon pixie one, and this was a bad, bad idea. ‘Freddie’, I said, pulling away, ‘I’m going to bed.’ ‘Yeah’, he said, letting me go, slightly to my disappointment, ‘me too. Um, email me which shops they sell your cream stuff in.’ ‘Mmhmm’, I agreed, trying to remember what we’d been talking about before he’d done the rib-tickling thing, and stumbled off into the house. When I got home the next day there was a note in the bathroom: ‘Ally – left already. Thanks for email. No time for shop, took our moisturizer. See you in three weeks. Fred.’ Unexpectedly, I cried. Fuuuugly.

Swine Fever Fall Out: Part 1, Shoreditch Whorebitch

‘Oh my GOD, Alice,’ Cora snapped at me, putting down her cake fork in irritation, ‘can’t you just SHUT UP about fucking FREDDIE for ONE MINUTE while I eat my éclair? You haven’t talked about anything else for the last hour, you’re OBSESSED.’ I opened my mouth to protest, but she waggled a stern finger at me. ‘I think Becky and those people that read your blog are right. You have a crush on him - as wrong as that may be - and until you admit it I don’t want to hear any more about him.’ She raised her fork again and shoveled in her mouthful of fresh cream and choux pastry with a vehemence I found almost frightening.

I stared at her, stunned and horrified by the et tu Brute-ness of it all. It was Wednesday afternoon last week, and we were in Maison Bertaux in Soho, having both escaped from work early to eat our favourite chocolate éclairs. This was supposed to be a safe place, full of understanding and free of criticism. Still, thinking about it, I realised that I really had talked about nothing else. I hadn’t told her about Becky’s new ‘boyfriend’, Paul, or mentioned my new Mango dress, or gossiped about Jamie’s dinner with his ex-girlfriend. I hadn’t even said that I’d got asked out on a date by a reasonably promising man in Whole Foods on Sunday afternoon, even though that was a genuinely funny story, unlike the one I was now telling about Freddie and his probably unintentional failure to thank me for hanging up his washing on Sunday.

And, let’s face it, this wasn’t the first complaint I’d had. Liz, at work, had rolled her eyes at me during our Monday morning coffee break, remarking with a sigh, as I began the story of Saturday evening, ‘Oh dear. Freddie again.’ Even Mad Mary seemed to have gathered that I was in some way connected with a man whose name began with an F, a sure sign that he’s been mentioned much too often in the workplace.

‘You’re right,’ I conceded, poking at the chocolate topping. ‘I’m sorry, let’s talk about something else.’ We did, and it was a very nice afternoon tea, but I went home feeling uneasy and irritable, the more so as I realised shortly before we finished our third pot of tea that I had a spot brewing on my left cheek. Finding the house empty, I decided to combat this new threat with an early night, so I showered and Yin Yanged as soon as I’d eaten dinner. Getting out of the shower, it occurred to me that I ought to drink some of Dr Stuart’s Skin Purify tea, too; a theory confirmed by a glimpse of the growing blemish in the steamy mirror.

With this in mind, I wrapped myself hastily in my (slightly too small) towel, and ran down the stairs, hair dripping in wet coils over my face, eyes piggy with shower-water and surrounded by smudgy mascara, skin cleansed and shiny, spot a-glow and – ‘Hello, Alice! This is Neenee.’ There, in the living room, looking at me with loathsome amusement on their faces, were Freddie and an immaculately made-up female with great shoes and, it would seem, an unbelievably awful name, whom I could only imagine was ‘some girl from Shoreditch’.

‘Hi Alice’, said ‘Neenee’ holding out a hand on which each fingernail had a different, arty, polish-pattern. ‘Oh – gosh – um – towel –‘ I stuttered pathetically, wanting desperately to die. ‘I just came down for some tea, I’ll get out of your way.’ ‘Neenee’ smiled coldly, Freddie grinned happily. I hurried off into the kitchen, leaving them to snuggle up hatefully on the sofa, and tremblingly boiled the kettle whilst also trying to arrange my hair to cover the spot.

Then, taking a deep breath, I went back through the living room, hoping to get away with muttering good night and dashing back up the stairs. Nope. ‘How was your day, Alice?’ Freddie asked, arm around Neenee’s shoulders. ‘Fine’, I said, wishing he wouldn’t look at me, ‘yours?’ ‘Yeah’, he began, but was immediately interrupted. ‘Sorry, darling,’ ‘Neenee’ said, suddenly, touching his face in a manner that made me want to retch, ‘Alice, your leg’s bleeding’. I looked down. Oh yes. So it was. Just below the knee. ‘Must’ve cut it shaving. ‘ I shrugged, miserably, ‘oh dear’. She looked at me pityingly. ‘Shaving? You should really wax, so much better.’

I nodded and smiled and, feeling sick with embarrassment, walked bloodily upstairs. Immediately I called Cora and whispered the awful news to her. ‘Oh my GOD,’ she squealed back, ‘that sounds DIRE. What a Shoreditch Whorebitch! And who the fuck’s called NEENEE?’ Gales of laughter. ‘Well, Alice, thank God you DON’T fancy him, anyway.’ A long, long pause.

‘Thing is, Cora, I think I do.’