Confessions of a Reluctant Recessionista (8 page)

‘Do the whole relationship thing, you know? Things are just … really weird at the moment and I need to be on my own, focus one hundred per cent on myself, on finding a new job. You know how it is.’

‘No, I don’t know, Dan,’ I said, trying as hard as I could to stop the tears coming. ‘I really don’t.’

There was a long, painful silence.

‘I have to go, Cassie. I’m really sorry.’

He hung up.

I took the 7 For All Mankind jeans off, sat down on the floor and burst into tears. Seconds later, a rail-thin sales assistant wearing crimson lipstick yanked the curtain open, revealing me, sitting cross-legged on the floor in my halter neck and purple knickers, to most of the Womenswear (Casual) section.

‘Is everything all right?’ she asked, plummily.

‘No, it bloody well isn’t,’ I sobbed, grabbing at the curtain and attempting to cover myself up with my coat.

‘Well … I am sorry but there are other people waiting
to try things on,’ the assistant huffed. ‘So perhaps you could deal with your … problems somewhere else.’

‘Yes, all right,’ I sniffed. I was tempted to call her a heartless bitch, but instead I just asked, ever so politely, if she would mind closing the curtain so that I could get dressed and continue my meltdown somewhere else.

I changed as quickly as I could, wiped my eyes and, with as much dignity as I could muster, stalked over to the till to pay for the jeans. Nervous breakdown in front of snooty sales assistant or no, flattering size eight skinny jeans at less than £150 don’t come along every day. You have to embrace opportunities like these when they are presented to you.

With the jeans purchased, I composed myself and ventured downstairs, to International Contemporary Collections. Since I was already here and had a perfect excuse for indulging in a little retail therapy I felt I might as well carry on. I purchased a gorgeous Vivienne Westwood print blouse and a cute pair of earrings from Juicy Couture before stocking up on some essential beauty things on the ground floor. As I left the shop I realised that I had entered my pin number at the till without even looking at the total. I had no idea what I had just spent and I really, really didn’t care.

Cassie Cavanagh
will shop if she wants to, shop if she wants to, shop if she wants to

Two days after Dan broke up with me, the Harvey Nicks bags still lay untouched in the corner of my bedroom. I was, I have to admit, wallowing a bit. After I returned from my shopping trip on Tuesday I’d rung Ali, who hastened round with several bottles of booze. I can’t remember exactly what we drank now. I think she made cocktails of some sort. It’s all a bit of a blur. At some point I crawled under my duvet and have hibernated there for the best part of forty-eight hours.

Occasionally I’ve surfaced to go to the loo or to pick, half-heartedly, at the contents of the fridge. But other than that I’ve loyally floundered in smelly pyjamas, watching DVDs borrowed from Jez, the bloke from downstairs who, fortunately for me, owns a vast collection of violent action movies and political thrillers. As far as I’m concerned, these are the only genres that can be tolerated post break-up. Far better,
in the early days of heartbreak, to wade knee-deep in blood and guts than to weep for lost love, so my usual collection –
Love Actually
,
How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days
and various Jane Austen TV adaptations – has been banished indefinitely.

Needless to say I’m a terrible person to live with at the moment, but Jude has been an angel. She’s brought me cups of tea accompanied by Marmite on toast (even though she loathes Marmite and just the smell of it makes her gag), she’s ventured downstairs to Jez’s flat to exchange
Hard to Kill
for
Kill Harder
, she even offered to do my laundry (I accepted). Apart from her initial, knee-jerk ‘that sodding wanker’ comment, she did not bad-mouth Dan at all, she listened sympathetically when I raged about him, she nodded dutifully when I told her how wonderful he was and how I couldn’t live without him and how I must, must have him back.

However, this, the morning of day three AD (After Dan), Jude woke me at eight thirty brandishing a cup of tea and a determined frown.

‘Jesus, Jude,’ I complained, ‘it’s not like I’ve got a job to go to.’

‘Precisely,’ she said, snapping open the blinds to reveal skies that looked as grey and miserable as I felt. ‘I know you’re feeling down, but enough is enough. You have to get up and start putting the Recession Buster into action. I want you online by nine a.m., checking out the job sites. Register with some agencies.’ She smiled at me, wrinkling her nose just a
little. ‘And you really ought to think about taking a shower.’

I clung on to my duvet for as long as possible, only venturing from the safety of my bedroom once I’d heard the front door slam as Jude left for college. I couldn’t face any further admonishments from my well-meaning flatmate and I had to admit that she was right. It was true, joining the ranks of the great unwashed was hardly likely to help out in the job-search stakes, or more importantly in the getting-Dan-back stakes. And I had decided, over the course of my morning cup of tea, that all this wallowing was ridiculous. I could get him back. I
would
get him back. This whole break-up thing was just an overreaction – an understandable overreaction – to the shock of losing his job. I would leave him alone for a few more days and then I’d ring him. He might not agree to give it another go straight away, he was much too stubborn for that – but I’d talk him round. I can be persuasive too, sometimes.

I showered, washed my hair, put on a life-affirming outfit (the new skinny jeans might have a whiff of sadness about them, but they still looked good) and flipped open my laptop. I did not, as Jude had suggested, start looking at recruitment agency sites, but fell at the first hurdle and went straight to Facebook. I brought up Dan’s profile and felt a sharp twinge of agony as I noticed that he had changed his status from ‘in a relationship’ to ‘single’. Still, it could be worse, he could have de-friended me. There were a
bunch of messages from various friends and colleagues expressing sympathy over his job loss. I scrolled down. And then my heart stopped. There, plain for everyone to see, was a message from someone called Tania Silk.

Missed you last night. Hope all’s well. Later? xxxxx

Who the fuck was Tania Silk? I clicked on her name and a picture came up, a full-length shot of a tanned brunette in a red bikini in front of a turquoise sea. The picture was taken from too far away for her face to be clearly recognisable, but the body was annoyingly impressive.

I rang Ali.

‘Who the fuck is Tania Silk?’ I snapped at her before she’d even had a chance to say hello.

‘What? What are you talking about? Market’s open, Cass, can’t talk now. Nick’s on the warpath and my head’s on the block. Ring you back later.’

I stormed around the flat, my heart beating fit to break my ribs. He was seeing someone else. He was seeing someone else? He couldn’t be. I felt physically sick. I went back to my computer, looked at the message again. Maybe it was perfectly innocent. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe she was just a friend. A friend I’d never heard of. Who sent messages with five kisses at the end. I clicked on her name again and peered at her face. She was familiar. Older, in her thirties, in very good shape . . . I’d seen her before. I’d seen her recently. I’d seen her at the Hempel, at the drinks party, sitting with my then boyfriend, now ex-boyfriend, talking for too long, their heads too close.

Somewhere underneath the heap of dirty clothes, magazines and DVD covers next to my bed there lay the cheat sheet Nicholas had given me, the list of names of guests for the party. Flinging aside grubby T-shirts and copies of
Vogue
, I tore through the pile until I found it. I flicked through page after page of overweight forty-somethings until I found it, Rylance, Siddell, Silk. There she was. Tania Silk.

One of Alchemy Asset Management’s rising stars, Tania Silk manages the £800 million Global Equities fund. Over the past two years, the fund has returned more than 10 per cent per annum in a highly challenging market and has a Triple A rating from FundWatch
.

Tania hails from New York: she misses baseball and 24-hour pizza delivery but has discovered the joys of cricket, pub lunches and running in London’s parks
.

Cricket? She likes cricket? What the hell is wrong with her? (Dan loves cricket.)

She’s too old for him. She must be thirty-three if she’s a day. She’s at least six years older than him. She’s ancient. She’s an old hag.

She’s a fund manager. She’s a rising star. She must be clever. He can talk to her,
really
talk to her, about what he does.

How long has this been going on? Did this start at the party? Did something happen at the party? In my head, I rewound the tape. Dan and I were sitting together, having a drink. He’d been telling me about Ali and the French guy. Then he got up, said he’d be
back in a little while and he disappeared. For an hour. And the next time I saw him, he had his arm around her.

Oh God oh God oh God.

He was with her at the party. And afterwards he went to bed with me. I went to the bathroom, threw up, brushed my teeth and went back to bed. I lay there, for hours, not sleeping, not reading, not watching TV, not anything, just feeling as wretched as it is possible to feel. As hard as I tried, I could not stop playing things over in my head, not just the moment that I saw them together at the party, his arm draped around her shoulder, but other things, too. His mobile ringing in the middle of the night a few weeks ago, and him getting out of bed to take the call, for example. He said it was Mick, but when I asked Mick the next day in the pub about it, he just looked at me blankly, before starting to babble about a problem at work. I thought about all the nights he’d been ‘too tired’ or ‘too busy’ to see me lately, the twenty-four long-stemmed red roses he sent, completely out of the blue, after he’d been ‘working all weekend’. The Louboutins. My beautiful Louboutins. It came to me like a slap in the face, a punch to the gut, the cruellest cut of all. They were a guilt gift.

Seized by a terrible and all-consuming rage, I leapt out of bed, grabbed the shoes from my closet, marched into the kitchen and threw them in the bin. I ate everything in the fridge (including an entire block of cheddar, a jar of artichoke hearts and half a tub of
Häagen-Dazs), threw up again and then went back to bed.

Ali called just after five.

‘I’m so sorry, Cass, I’ve had an absolute bitch of a day.’

‘Did you know, Ali? About her?’

‘There were rumours . . .’

‘You knew?’ I shrieked. Betrayal by him was one thing, by her, another matter altogether.

‘Rumours, Cassie, and there are always rumours about guys like him. I didn’t
know
anything. I was going to talk to you about it last week, but you were so happy, planning weekends away and everything . . . And I didn’t know anything for sure . . .’ Her voice tailed off. Then, in a more assertive, Ali-like tone, she said, ‘Get up, get dressed. I’m coming round and we’re going out.’

I fished the shoes out of the bin and carefully wiped them down with a moistened sheet of kitchen roll.

Ali rang again an hour later.

‘You ready? I’m outside, in a black cab.’

We started off on the roof terrace at Shoreditch House. Then there was a bar, and then another bar, and another one after that. There were peach Bellinis, watermelon Martinis, cosmopolitans and Kirs. We ended up in the Crazy Bear in Fitzrovia where I got trapped in the ladies loos, which are entirely walled with mirrors, for a fifteen minutes. Eventually, Ali came to find me.

‘I couldn’t find my way out,’ I slurred at her. She giggled, leading me back out to the bar. I collapsed into an armchair next to the fire.

‘It’s not funny,’ I whined. ‘Everything’s falling apart.’ We were getting to the maudlin portion of the evening’s festivities. ‘I don’t understand why he did it. I don’t understand why I wasn’t enough for him . . . What did I do, Ali?’

‘You didn’t do anything, Cassie, he’s just a shit. I know that deep down you know that.’

‘He’s not a shit . . . He’s just . . .’

‘An arsehole.’

‘No, no. I must have done something to drive him away. I just don’t know what. You have to tell me, Ali, what you heard. You were suspicious, weren’t you? Why? Please tell me what you know.’

‘Cassie, it doesn’t matter now . . .’ she started to say.

‘It does matter, Ali. I need to know, please just tell me.’

She sighed. ‘All right, it was a couple of weeks ago. In the pub after work, some guys were talking about her. Tania. Apparently she has a bit of a reputation, she had to leave Allen Brothers because of an affair with her boss. Allegedly. Anyway, they were talking about her, you know the sort of thing, “I’d hit that,” all that bullshit, and someone said something about Dan, suggesting that they should ask him what she was like.’

‘Oh, Christ.’

‘Anyway, the second they noticed I was listening
they shut up. And . . . I don’t know, I didn’t really take it seriously. I thought maybe they were talking about something that had happened before you guys got together.’ She didn’t sound very convincing. ‘I was going to ask you if everything was OK, but when I came round last week and you were talking about anniversary weekends and things, I just assumed everything must be OK.’