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.

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.

The Good, the Bad and the Fugly: Part 1, The Bad

The Bad

As you may recall, my evening of woe with Wanker Banker Alex was followed by a tense week with Freddie. We were both in the house far more than is usual for either of us; in my case because of the exhausting, uglifying dregs of my swine flu, in his because…oh, God only knows why Freddie does anything. God only knows what he does at all, frankly. Anyway, when we weren’t having another awkward conversation about the weather or Gordon Brown or something equally depressing and English, or avoiding such interactions by taking refuge in our respective bedrooms (actually that may only have been me), we were irritating one another.

‘Those pajamas are disgusting’, I remarked one evening, without the slightest context, and to Freddie’s obvious surprise. ‘Not as disgusting as your toothbrush’, he muttered back, no doubt itching to get the poor thing and bin it again. ‘Well, but I don’t walk to the corner shop with my toothbrush, do I?’ I replied patronisingly. ‘And I don’t put my pajamas in my mouth’, he retorted, making me want to slap him. ‘Your hair is blocking up the plug-hole in the shower,’ he informed me confrontationally on Tuesday morning, standing in front of me at 6.45 wearing only a towel, with his arms aggressively folded. ‘Mmhmm, ok, I’ll unblock it,’ I told him, thin-lipped with irritation. ‘But while we’re on the subject of bathroom etiquette, perhaps you could ask your girlfriend to stop stealing my Yin Yang moisturizer.’ Freddie looked sheepish. ‘That might have been me’, he said apologetically.

Minor quibbles erupted into a near row on Wednesday. I wanted to watch a documentary on the BBC about Milton. He wanted to watch Manchester United v. Barcelona. The football had already been on for some time when I came downstairs for my literary fix. ‘I hope you know that’s going off at 9’, I said lightly, hoping that he was only watching casually. ‘I hope you know it’s not,’ he replied, grimly, refusing to look round. ‘Mm, no, it is, Freddie, because I’ve been planning to watch this show for ages’. (On the other sofa I saw Jamie stiffen with the fear of confrontation). ‘Bad luck,’ Freddie said, and turned up the volume. Annoyed, I turned off the television and stood in front of it. He stared at me. ‘What the fuck, Alice? Turn it back on.’ (Voice definitely raised.) A stand-off ensued. He glared at me uncompromisingly; I stood shuffling my feet and feeling that I’d bitten off more than I could chew. ‘Alice,’ he said again, ‘turn the TV on.’ ‘No’, I muttered, sullenly, ‘not unless I can watch my Milton thing’.

He stood to approach me (and the hotly contested household appliance) and his hands gripped my hips to move me out of the way. I refused to be moved. He looked down at me angrily for a long, hip-tingling pause. Then his left hand detached itself from my right hip and he leaned against me and around me to turn the TV back on, while my heart thudded angrily and I considered kicking his shin. (I didn’t, because I am a coward.) He looked momentarily past me to check the score, and then stared down at me. ‘Alice. Please let me watch the football. Your Milton thing is on the BBC, I looked. You can iPlayer it. I know you don’t like me very much, but I think we should try to get on.’ I felt a sudden rush of guilt and murmured something about not disliking him, which he swept aside with ‘It doesn’t really matter. Can I just watch the football.’ I nodded, speechless. ‘Good’, he said gently and gave the hip he was still holding a manipulative little squeeze.

Ten minutes later I had made him a cup of tea and some toast and was curled up next to him on the sofa, his arm resting behind me as he explained why Alex Ferguson was a fool for not having Paul Scholes on the pitch. Argument over. Freddie and Barcelona 2 – Alice and Manchester United 0. I think Manchester United minded more than me.

Swine Fever Fall Out: Part 2, Alex

You last saw me trembling and miserable in my bedroom, confessing to a sickening attraction to Frightful Freddie to a suitably sickened Cora. Well, things quickly got worse. The following evening, as I endured my purgatorially long bus journey home, my phone rang. I was listening to the radio on my hands free kit, so I answered without knowing who was calling, assuming, based on past experience, that it would be my mother. ‘Hello’, I said, peering depressively out at the hateful, hateful London traffic. ‘Hi Alice’, said the caller, (male voice, slight estuary accent) ‘I wasn’t sure you’d pick up.’ He sounded drunk and not very happy, and for several seconds I couldn’t breathe.

‘Hi Alex’, I eventually murmured back, and then, automatically, ‘how are you?’ There was another longish pause before he answered, sounding even drunker, ‘Well, I got fired. Which is fucking annoying.’ I was still struggling with the fact that I was talking to Alex – or Wanker Banker to you (see first entry) – so I only managed to say ‘Oh. I’m sorry, Alex’. I really was, too. For all his wankerishness, and the never seeing him, and his drunken implication that I was lucky to be going out with him, I’d quite adored him and I’d liked to think that his life would tick along vilely but happily without me. Anyway, the idea of Alex, of all people, being fired was unspeakable. This was really bringing the formidable evil of the credit crunch home to me.

‘So look, let’s do something, I’m sick of not seeing you’ he barked in his usual, consummately self-involved way, and my heart fluttered pathetically and unexpectedly. ‘I don’t know’, I sighed, ‘I’m quite busy’. He snorted. ‘Are you seeing someone?’ A pause. ‘…Kind of’. (A lie, obviously). ‘Kind of? What’s this guy’s name?’ Now, obviously he was being a prick, and the only appropriate answer was ‘None of your business, now I’ve got to go. I’m sorry you got fired’, but somehow what I actually said was, ‘He’s called Freddie’. Even as I said it I realised that Freddie didn’t matter at all, and I wanted more than anything to go and see Alex, which ought to have been a relief but wasn’t.

‘Freddie? Shit name. Fucking awful, actually. I’ve got to go, call me later if you want to go for a drink.’ He hung up. Ahh, Alex. How I’d missed his rudeness and abrupt adieus. Naturally I spent the rest of the bus journey in a state of wretched inner turmoil, trying and failing to re-interest myself in Freddie, and leaving panicky voicemails on a range of female friend answer machines. By the time I walked into my house, I was an image of overwrought femininity, wide-eyed with distress and only avoiding tearfulness by virtue of my stiff upper lip upbringing. I burst through the door, desperately hoping to find Laura and Jamie, staunch allies in my time of Vile Alex need, but instead getting – you guessed it – Freddie. He was standing, topless and barefoot, in the middle of the living room, apparently trying to unravel his iPod earphones.

He looked up and looked worried. ‘You alright, Ally?’ I gulped and shifted from one foot to another. ‘My ex called me’, I replied miserably. ‘He’s been fired. He wants to see me and I don’t think it’s a great idea.’ I looked up at Freddie despairingly and vaguely hoped that he would say something useful. He put his earphones down on the sofa and stood with his hands on his hips. ‘Fuck him.’ He said decisively. ‘He’s feeling a bit down because he got fired and he wants to shag you to make himself and his ego feel better. Don’t go there, Ally, you’ll only get hurt.’ I stared at him tragically and protested weakly, ‘I don’t think it’s like that’. He shrugged ‘As a bloke, I’m telling you, it is.’ There was a pregnant pause as I looked at the floor unhappily and Freddie looked at me uncertainly, before he murmured ‘Oh Ally, I’m sorry, the guy just sounds like a real prick’, and pulled me into a naked-chested embrace. ‘I know’, I muttered into his surprisingly nice-smelling shoulder, ‘he really is.’ Then he let me go a bit and looked at me for a while, and I thought he might kiss me, which was interesting because I had no idea what I’d do if he did, but actually just said, ‘Right, I have to change. Neenee’s coming over in an hour’.

‘Oh,’ I gasped, stepping back and trying not to think about his nice-smelling shoulder any more than I absolutely had to. ‘Right. I’ll go out then, I don’t want to be in your way. You know what, anyway, I think you’re wrong about Alex, I think I’m going to go and see him’. And as I said it I realised that Alex didn’t matter at all, and I wanted more than anything to stay at home with Freddie, which was ridiculous and confusing. Freddie looked irritated and shrugged.

Thus, half an hour later, ridiculous and confused, I plunged back into the London evening to meet Alex. Freddie looked me up and down as I left the house in my 2nd date outfit, but didn’t pass comment. Alex, when we met, was tipsy but surprisingly human. This meant that I also got tipsy, and found myself kissing him outside his house. He also smelled nice. Freddie-ishly nice. ‘Alex’, I blurted out, ‘do you wear Lynx?’ He pushed me away in apparent disgust. ‘No, I don’t wear fucking Lynx, what do you think I am? Fourteen? This is Tom Ford.’

This was typical Alex behaviour; vain and irritating. God, he might as well have been wearing an apricot coloured scarf. ‘Well, I’m SORRY’, I snapped back, recognizing my error in coming at all, ‘but you smell like Freddie.’ (Forgetting, obviously, that I’d pretended that I was going out with Freddie.) ‘Your new boyfriend wears LYNX?’ Alex howled, either angry or amused, I wasn’t sure which. ‘No, apparently he wears Tom Ford’, I replied, exasperated, ‘and anyway, it’s none of your business and this was a mistake and I’m going home.’ This bus journey was equally hideous, though shorter, and ended with a dark and empty living room, and a bathroom in which I found my pot of Yin Yang moisturizer with the top off. Shoreditch Whorebitch.

I woke up to a hangover, the beginnings of Freddie’s swine flu, an antagonistic text message from Alex, and the miserable realization that I’d had a dream about kissing either Freddie or Alex – I wasn’t sure which. That evening, I caught the train home to Suffolk, and embraced sickness and parental care. And the whole of this week has been spent either avoiding Freddie or having to engage in painful conversations with him that clearly neither of us enjoy.

Gah. Lowest ebb.

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.’

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.

The Breakfast Clubbing

Well, dinner didn’t happen, mostly because Freddie did another of his disappearing acts, resulting in neither sight nor sound of him until the very early hours of Wednesday morning.

I was woken by the sound of my bedroom door opening, and a male voice shouting something about it being the wrong room to some other unknown called Tommy. I sat up in bed, too confused to be frightened, and plaintively told the intruder to go away. At the sound of my voice, though, Loud Mouth took another (drunkenly unsteady) step towards my bed and bawled gleefully to ‘Tommy’ that ‘Ay ay, there’s a GIRL in here!’ Mortified, and newly scared, I made a squeaking noise and pulled the duvet over my head – a poor evasive action, in hindsight, but clearly all I was capable of at the time – and hoped Jamie would wake up and save me.

Thankfully, the period of heart-thumping suspense that followed was short-lived, because Freddie’s voice began shouting, too, from downstairs. ‘For fuck’s sake Jonny, just get out of her room. The bathroom’s next door, you cock. Get the fuck out of her room.’ Loud Mouth Jonny retreated and I bounced out of bed to slam the door behind him, to hear him remark (as he stumbled off to urinate on my toilet seat) ‘I’m leaving, but I bet she’d’ve liked me to stay’, and snigger revoltingly. I hesitated momentarily, staring at the back of the door, before adrenaline and anger got the better of me and I threw it open again and marched downstairs, wearing only knickers, a tank top and an aura of righteous outrage.

‘Hi Ally’, Freddie said uncertainly, scrambling up from the sofa. His eyes had the unnatural brightness of the drunkard, and he was staring at my knickers. (Maybe Becky had a point last week).‘Don’t you ‘hi Ally’ me,’ I retorted, intending to sound dignified in justifiable offence, but only managing a mixture of querulous and petulant. (No matter – right was on my side). ‘Firstly, my name is Alice, I hate being called Ally, and secondly, why did a strange man just walk into my bedroom?’ I paused, momentarily distracted by my own peevishness and by a glimpse of my underdressed self in the wall mirror. Then, since there was no one else in the room, ‘And why was he calling you Tommy?’

Freddie blinked at me and made an obvious effort to look at my face instead of my underwear. I thought smugly that it was a good thing that my skin has been behaving of late, and that the Yin Yang regime has left it with a healthier than usual glow. (Confrontation is easier when pretty.) ‘Sorry, Alice.’ He rubbed his face tiredly, which was, irritatingly, quite mollifying. ‘That’s my mate, Jonny, from university. He’s a bit drunk, I’m really sorry. Must’ve thought your room was the bathroom, s’my fault.’ He looked at me helplessly. ‘Well, then, I’ll just give thanks he didn’t unzip and wee all over me’, I replied grumpily, ‘but it was scary, especially because of the Tommy thing. I thought there were two strange men in my house.’

‘Oh God, Alice, I’m so sorry,’ he said, running his hand through his hair, ‘everyone at uni called me Tommy. I’ll make it up to you.’ He peered at me some more. ‘You look all cold and scared, you poor thing.’ ‘Well,’ I said in an annoyingly high-pitched voice, because it was the middle of the night and it WAS scary and I had expected Freddie belligerence, not an apology, ‘I was scared, it was horrid’. The results of this were also surprising. Freddie took a step forward and enveloped me in a Lynxy embrace, trapping my folded arms against his chest and filling my nose with deodorant and some form of alcohol. ‘Poor Ally’, he mumbled, causing my eyes to roll.

The strangeness of the moment, which was considerable, was broken when Loud Mouth Jonny descended the stairs and guffawed. ‘Bloody hell, Tom, I didn’t know you had a thing going on with one of your housemates. Thought you were seeing that girl from Shoreditch,’ he huffed out, between heavy, beery breaths. Mortified, both by this odious assumption and by my undressed state, I struggled free of Freddie and hurried back upstairs, mumbling goodnight to him and unable even to speak to the loathsome Jonny. ‘You tosser,’ I heard Freddie say as I shut my bedroom door.

If I’d expected his contrition to manifest itself in sober, daytime life, I was wrong. As usual, we saw little of each other beyond momentary crossings of our bathroom-bound paths in the morning (during one of which he angered me by raising his eyebrows at the state of my new toothbrush) but we were all at home yesterday. We were all at home, and so we all had brunch together. Freddie, annoyingly, behaved as though he was holding court, leaning back in his chair and talking endlessly, with Laura and Jamie hanging on his every word, Laura giggling wildly at his every (weak) joke, and occasionally hopping up and fussing around him with tea pots and toast racks and MY organic Grove Fresh orange juice.

‘Did you know, Jamie’, I remarked, eventually, unable to bear Freddie’s self-satisfaction any longer, ‘that Freddie brought a friend home on Tuesday night, and that he walked into my bedroom? It was horrible.’ The other two looked momentarily appalled, and then Freddie started laughing, which of course meant that his thralls had to as well. ‘Oh yeah, that was bloody funny, Ally, you have to admit. You were so frightened,’ he went on mockingly, grinning at the other two. ‘She came running downstairs in her night clothes looking like she was going to cry. I had to give her a cuddle to calm her down.’ Laura sighed disgustingly, Jamie smirked admiringly, Freddie laughed uproariously, and I just gaped disbelievingly. He has no shame.