I reread the email, the office falling quiet around me, all eyes on my hot pink face.
From:
To:
Hi, I’m sure you’re feeling the same way as me. No need to make it difficult. It’s been fun, but I think we should stop seeing each other. Thanks for a great laugh.
X
My colleagues are staring at me, unable to tear their gaze away from my beacon of a face. Their eyes lit up with anticipation. That is the problem with these new-fangled open-plan, glass-walled offices: it is very difficult to do anything personal without the whole team commenting on it to each other behind my back. Or Facebooking about it if they don’t mind me being privy to what they are saying:
Lovely top, Gracey. Is it new?
Sitting at work staring at my computer – with Grace Wharton.
Don’t think we can’t see you hiding your chocolate, Gracey. LOL FTW.
I know you can all see me; I’m sitting opposite you at a desk with a privacy board made for a munchkin. Talk to me for God’s sake, the old-fashioned way, with your mouth and your eyes, and maybe a bit of body language thrown in for good luck, thus avoiding the need for stupid acronyms like LOL or FTW, whatever they might mean.
Ok, so I do actually know what LOL means, but I’m just making a point.
FTW, on the other hand – absolutely no idea.
We’re not even really allowed to use Facebook at work. Just like we’re not allowed to check our personal emails at work. Not unless it’s our private internet time; a measly ten minutes every couple of hours where we can do what we like with our computers as long as it doesn’t involve naked people or libellous slandering of our employer. You can tell when it’s private time because the office bursts into a flurry of activity as everyone looks to see who’s LOLing in public.
I’m scarily close to the end of my private time, slightly unfair as that feels, since time seems to have been standing still for the last eight and a half minutes. Although the email is in my work account, it’s most definitely personal. It’s not like my lovely boss can’t see me either, tucked away in her own office made of so much glass that I get scared walking through the door in case it’s polished so well that I mistake it for thin air. No doubt I’d end up head first through it, spurting blood all over her luxurious cream carpet from a non-lethal but very bloody neck wound. Surefire way to have my P45 fly on to my desk; second only to using the internet for one’s own benefit outside of private time.
I take my eyes off my computer for a moment and stare out of the window – the real one, with the outside world on the other side of the glass. My stomach has dropped all the way down to my unpainted toes and not even the bright July sunshine can lift my spirits. I am being dumped by email. This has to top the list of cowardly, horrible ways to end a relationship. The least he could do was meet me face-to-face to do the deed. That would give me ample opportunity to throw something at him; preferably something hard and sharp and prone to do lasting damage.
How dare he dump me by email?
How dare he dump me at all?
How dare he?
How dare …
Wait a minute … who is he?
‘An email? Shit, some people are so rubbish. What are you going to do?’ Etta is sitting crossed-legged on the only sofa in the pub, gulping down her cider like it’s going out of fashion.
‘What do you mean? I don’t even know who sent it. I’m not going to do anything about it; it’s already filed in my bin,’ I reply, impatiently tapping the table with a beer mat.
It feels like Daisy has been up at the bar since the Stone Age and I am really thirsty. And when I say thirsty, I mean I want alcohol. There could be a jug of deliciously thirst-quenching water sat in front of me and I’d still sit and wait for Daisy.
‘You can’t ignore it! What about the girl who was really on the receiving end? She’s probably from your company, given he sent it to your work email. You might know her. She’s going to be waiting to hear back from this dick, and that’s never going to happen, is it? Besides, you have to tell him what a self-centred prick he’s being. Email, jeez.’ Etta turns her attention back to her pint of cider, her eyes glazed.
She is my oldest friend, built like Gisele Bündchen with a face to match. She swears like a trooper but looking like she does, she can get away with it. Besides, she has to; she works as an event organiser and apparently people don’t take her seriously until she turns the air blue. Actually she started working as an event organiser straight out of school and is now managing director of her own company, Etta Events. Imaginatively named, but highly sought after, she has a black book, a Who’s Who bigger than Mark Zuckerburg’s Facebook friends list. We met at primary school; the poor girl was given the task of showing the new girl around and making her feel welcome. She hasn’t been able to shake me off yet.
Daisy arrives with our wine – and another pint of cider for Etta – with the ease of someone who is well practised at juggling a bottle, glasses and a pint. She has a bag of Salt ’n’ Shake in her mouth just to remind the men in the darkened corners that we’re the more accomplished gender when it comes to multitasking. She’s the exact opposite of Etta; five foot nothing with a bright blonde pixie cut and eyes to rival Bambi. Silence descends over our table as we drink. All the worries of the working week dissipate with the first sip, or in Etta’s case the fifty-first.
We have a Friday night ritual. Whoever arrives first at the pub gets the sofa but has to buy the first round. Daisy and I work in the same building and deliberately walk slowly from Fenchurch Street to the tube to allow Etta time to get ensconced on the worn leather sofa in the cosy pub in South Hampstead, near where we all live. Etta always gets there first and she never buys the first round. Excuses of losing our favourite table spill from her lips, and we somehow all ignore the fact that she has managed to purchase her own beverage whilst still holding onto the only table with a sofa. It’s a running joke that nobody really finds funny except us. Besides, the sofa isn’t even that comfortable. The pub is one of those that has been around since the dawn of time, all flint and fireplaces, low ceilings and uneven wooden floors. The sofa looks like it hails from a time before the pub was even a glint in the builder’s eye.
The other patrons of the The York tend to be men over a certain age who have yellow beards and not very many teeth. We like it in here as we feel like we’re amongst friends.
I’ve kicked off my nude LK Bennett rip-offs and have my bare feet propped up on the sofa, my chipped nail varnish looks a bit like I feel, and I surreptitiously hide the worst of it under Etta’s bum. Daisy has done the same with her real LK Bennetts and we settle down for a night of hard gossiping.
‘You have to at least tell him that he’s sent it to the wrong person. Assuming that it is a he?’ Daisy turns to me, drink in hand, and I shrug.
I had checked the address. The ruddy thing was sent from a [email protected]. But girls don’t send Dear John emails, do they? I thought we were slightly more couth than that, though maybe I could be proven wrong.
‘But just imagine how the poor girl’s going to feel when he eventually sends it to the right person – assuming that it is going to a girl. Either way, the real recipient of this email is going to feel pretty crappy about it. I know I did. It gave me heart failure when I saw it. Then I remembered that I wasn’t going out with anyone and that made me feel marginally better. Marginally. Stupid crappy men.’
Crappy is the extent of my swearing. I’m not exotically glamorous enough to pull off anything more risqué. Decidedly Average Gracey, that’s me. Five foot five, almost brown hair, almost brown eyes. I wear New Look suits and pretend LK Bennetts from Primark to work. I think that sums me up nicely.
No wonder I’m not dating anyone, I think, taking a large sip of white wine.
Daisy sits forward in her chair.
‘OK, so, is not knowing that the man you’re dating wants shot of you worse than receiving an email that tells you as much but with the added bonus of “thanks for a great laugh” line?’ She accentuates the last few words with air commas and Etta and I share a look.
Daisy has a penchant for air commas but here, at least, they do serve a purpose. Much more so than when she’s talking about her ‘goat’s cheese’ which Etta and I may or may not have stolen from the fridge in a late-night drunken binge. It wasn’t our fault that she kept deliciously spreadable cheese in our shared fridge, which just so happened to go really well with the crispbread we’d borrowed from the Tesco Metro whilst topping up our wine supply. Everyone knows crispbread without a topping sticks the two halves of the mouth together, rendering it defunct for drinking any more alcohol.
‘What’s worse is not knowing, definitely,’ Etta says, sipping the last of her cider. ‘This poor girl may waste many a night waiting for Mr Dickwad to get in contact when she could be out finding Mr Right, or even Mr Right Now. You need to tell him his mistake. All of them.’
‘All of them?’ I snort into my wine, sending it up and out of my nose.
My eyes water at the stinging sensation and I curse the email once again. Daisy hands me a soggy paper beer mat to dab my tears of pain, but the dubious stains make me think twice. I reach into my bag and start rummaging through the essentials until I find my own safe pack of tissues.
‘Yeah, all of his mistakes. The wrong recipient, the kisses, the laugh line, urgh. You’ll be writing a frigging essay, Gracey.’ Etta rolls her endless legs out from under her and trots up to the bar for another refill.
I would normally get the next round but today my mind is distracted with the thought of how I am going to reply to whoever has kind of sort of almost dumped me.
With our working weeks seeming to run to the mundane, it would be sensible to think that Etta, Daisy and I spend our weekends doing off-the-cuff crazy stunts. But no. Saturdays, without fail, pan out one of two ways.
Option one. The flat starts to stir at around noon. After the alarms have been going off like klaxons every weekday before the larks have even thought about going to sleep, noon is a very reasonable hour to be waking on a weekend. Besides, I’m only twenty-five, technically still a teenager, and everyone knows teenagers are bone-idle. So actually, I’m a very active teen, seeing as I get up really, really early Monday through Friday.
Anyway, Saturdays. Whoever is up last has to make breakfast for everyone, so I tend to meander slowly until Etta and Daisy are both showered and dressed. Twisted logic, except that otherwise I would end up eating either hot floppy bread with nothing on it, or wheatgrass nuggets with a shot of yak milk. As it happens, I’m a dab hand in the kitchen, especially breakfasts. Sausages, bacon, eggs, toast, beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, and a hot steaming pot of tea. Perfect.
The flat is a wonderful place to cook, too. Etta moved here a couple of years ago as a present to herself for setting up her own business, mortgaging herself to the hilt in order to be able to afford it, with a rather hefty parental loan to boot. But having Daisy and me here helps with the costs. Etta and I had been flat-sharing in a rental up until then, so it was natural for me to move in too. At least, that’s what I figured, so I packed my stuff up when Etta did and followed her here. Daisy, who I met at university, joined us a few months later when she finally moved out from her parents’ house.
Etta had the decorators in for a few months when we first moved in because the old owner had seemingly had a love of cats and cigarettes in equal measure. The annoyance of builder’s bums and out-of-tune whistling was totally outweighed by a finished interior that was no longer yellow with dangerous levels of ammonium. The flat is in an old mansion block in Kilburn, with two flats below us and one above. The kitchen is my favourite place, if I’m not counting my bed. It’s all exposed brickwork because that was cheaper than plastering up to the high ceilings, and it has a little table where we all congregate to set the world to rights.
The breakfast smells are normally enough to entice Harry down from his flat above ours; Handsome Harry as we like to refer to him. He is the epitome of droolishiousness: tall; dark curls that occasionally flop over his cute green eyes; and he’s Irish. He has the kind of face that sells men’s aftershave, not the square-jawed Lothario type but the cute boy-next-door who’s dived into the ocean in his pants and ended up on a boat all wet and casually flicking his curls out of his eyes. But he’s not annoying with it, like so many males with an iota of a square jaw seem to be. He’s kind, generous, and caring too. To give a sense of just how incredible he is, we had to sign a pact between us the same day he brought round homemade sangria as a welcome gift: thou shalt not sleep with Harry. Yep, even Etta had to sign, though he’s altogether too male for Etta: she has herself a gorgeous Esme. We’re uninventively known collectively as the Fab Four – to anyone in the Fab Four, anyway. To everyone else we’re just Grace, Etta, Daisy, and Harry.
Once we’ve devoured our breakfasts, we normally drag ourselves off to the living room and onto the two second-hand sofas where we peruse this week’s stolen magazine bounty. Don’t worry, we don’t steal them from the shops. No, we stoop a lot lower than that. A long time ago, during one of those stories that always start with Do you remember that time when we were really drunk?, we happened upon the recycling rubbish of those lucky souls who inhabit Belgravia. I’m not sure who made the suggestion first, but I was like a kid in a sweet shop. I have an addiction to magazines; not your weekly rubbish either. Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, House and Home, Elle, Red, Country House, etcetera etcetera. These well-polished bins were not only cleaner than the inside of Kim and Aggie’s toilet bowl, they were festooned with piles upon piles of hardly touched magazines, obviously bought by their owners to sit looking glossy on top of a coffee table. Mostly their spines are still intact, and sometimes they are tied together in bundles with what looks like gold thread. OK, so that last bit is a slight exaggeration; it’s probably just good old garden twine. But still, the loot is incredible.
Since we’ve been doing this, I’ve managed to save almost £200 a month. I probably should have become addicted to something less expensive – cocaine, speed, alcohol – although I’m not sure we would have found any of that rooting around the bins of the Belgravians. They’re not completely wasteful.
Back to Saturdays. With the magazine perusing over, the drinking commences at around five p.m. Then the pampering and preening starts for the evening. Harry normally makes his excuses at this point and heads back upstairs until we’re all ready. This can vary depending on how much we drink and how much we’ve all planned our outfits. I thought that living in a house with two other girls would mean a wondrous shared wardrobe and shoe stash, until I moved in with Etta the supermodel and Daisy the elfin. Both of whom are gorgeous and look amazing in their own way. I, on the other hand, am still decidedly average and fit into neither of those categories. Five foot five in my bare feet, dwarfed by Etta’s legs alone, yet gargantuan compared with Daisy and her size-minus-zero figure. It’s pretty good really, as I blend in whenever we’re all together. It gives me time to assess situations from an invisibility cloak to rival that of Harry Potter himself, before whipping out the witty one-liner or the riveting story that has everyone laughing and waiting with bated breath for more. (Or perhaps that only happens in my head.)
Prep done, we head out, we get drunk and dance until our feet hurt.
But as was saying, Saturday unfolds in either of two ways. Option two starts the same way, only after breakfast we head to the shops. This only happens the weekend after payday. We head out together, minus Harry, vowing to girly shop like there’s no tomorrow. Unfortunately, because of our absurdly diverse wardrobe needs, we usually end up in a full-on head-to-head over where we should go. Uniqlo, a favourite of Etta’s; clothes too vanilla for Daisy. Urban Outfitters for Daisy; way too quirky for Etta. Both way too out there for me: I’d be happy with a quick browse in H&M or Primark. I know what fits me and hides the unflattering bits. There’s also the fact that Etta never buys anything as she never has any spare cash, and Daisy is always wittering on about how she should be saving her money so she can afford a place of her own before she retires. I’m more than happy to spend what little I have left on alcohol. So we invariable arrive home empty-handed.
By the time drink o’clock comes around, we all look like we could murder each other, let alone a drink. Come to think of it, I’m not sure why shopping needs to be a team sport. Solitary all the way I say. I’m making a mental note to remember this, come next payday.
This weekend it’s a mid-month stay-in-and-slob weekend. I’ve snagged the new issue of Red and am lying on the polyester Ikea rug, happily flicking through the pages, trying to decide how to better my life this week. The magazine is full of awe-inspiring stories and articles to tempt me out of the humdrum of everyday life and start afresh. I could be a zookeeper, or an international furniture wrangler, or, if I believe everything that’s not an advertisement – and that leaves at least four pages – then I could be anything I want to be.
I slurp my tea and watch Etta chewing on her toenails. She may have legs the length of the Great Wall of China, but she can still get her feet in her mouth. If I tried that, my leg wouldn’t get past my chubby thighs. She swears by yoga, I swear about it. Go figure. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t need to read magazines like Red to decide what she wants to do with her life. She already knows because she already does it. Great job, loves to exercise, happily engaged to a lovely lady. Awful cook though, really awful cook – she’s the one doing the floppy bread for breakfast – but she knows it and does it anyway.
The thing with Etta is that she isn’t a quitter. She’s worked blooming hard to get where she is today. Twenty-four, and she runs a team of go-getting events people. I’d carry on waxing lyrical about how brilliant she is at her job but, to be honest, I’m not quite sure exactly what she does. Except I know that she organises things – and people – really well.
I, on the other hand, haven’t yet decided what I want to be when I grow up. Plenty of time for that, though. At the moment I’m far too busy making a scrapbook of possibilities out of magazines pilfered from those I aspire to live like. I rip out the article on furniture to add to the book, alongside lots of articles about women who manage teams while wearing expensive well-fitting suits with proper heels.
I sigh as quietly as possible and reach for the copy of House and Home.
‘Harry, you’re a bloke,’ Etta says, toes far away from her mouth now as she lies languorously on the pink sofa by the tall sash windows overlooking the tree-lined avenue.
‘Last time I checked,’ Harry winks at her in a fashion that would make other men just look sleazy.
‘Would you ever send a Dear John email?’ Etta replies, ignoring his wink.
‘A what?’
‘A Dear John email, or text, or whatever? You know,’ she continues, staring up at the high ceiling, ‘dump your loved one by written communication instead of face-to-face?’
‘I’d never get the chance. I’m always dumped first,’ Harry says, and I assume he must be joking.
Daisy lets out a half cough, half hiccup and clears her throat to hide the noise.
‘I got one yesterday,’ I say, turning my attention back to my life coach on glossy pages.
‘But you don’t have a boyfriend, do you?’ Harry laughs a little too loudly.
‘Well, you were quicker than me at remembering that small fact. If you ever do find someone who doesn’t leave you first, then don’t dump them by email, it’s not nice.’ I look up from my magazine.
‘Noted, thanks for the advice.’ Harry raises his eyebrows at me. ‘Daisy, tea.’ He is holding out his muscly supermodelesque arm with an empty cup swinging from his finger. I’m pretty sure that’s what he does for a living: Mr Supermodel. Once upon a time he did tell me what his actual job title was, but I was too drunk to process all the long words.
His teacup is dangling precariously close to the pyjama bottoms that double up as my lounge pants, and I will Daisy to take it from him before the dregs land on the white cotton and render it see-through. The sight of my hairy legs through the wet cloth is one I don’t particularly want to share. Especially not with Harry.
Daisy grunts and bats her voluminous eyelashes. For one so small, Daisy has more than her fair share of them. She’s like a deer.
‘Pretty sure it’s not my turn,’ she says, peeping out from under her choppy fringe at him.
Unfortunately for Daisy, Harry is immune to her charm and his arm stays aloft. I can see the tea winking playfully in the swinging cup. Of course, I could just move my legs out of the way, but that would mean physical exertion and, as it’s not yet my turn to get up and put the kettle on, I am intent on burning off as little energy as possible.
‘Arm. Hurts,’ Harry moans.
‘Oh for God’s sake, Hazza. . . We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
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