Pear Shaped (24 page)

‘I think I have the wrong form,’ I say to the lady behind the desk.

‘So you do. Try this,’ she says, handing me a new clipboard, as I start the box-ticking over again.

As I have walked out of a Tuesday afternoon status meeting at the exact point Devron stood up to present ‘10 Inspirational Shopping Trolley Designs from Around The World’, I am in no hurry to get back to the office. Nonetheless my colleagues think I have just popped to the loo, so I figure twenty minutes is probably the most I can spend in the clinic without alerting Janelle to my absence. (In the last month Janelle has twice caught me hiding in the fridge with Zoe; she’s so entirely on to me.)

‘Is it alright if I just do the urine, not the scrape thing?’ I say to the receptionist.

‘It’s better if you do both.’

Hmmm, better for who, I think.

I pee in a jar, post it through a cubbyhole and I’m back at my desk fifteen minutes later.

‘Where have you been?’ says Janelle.

‘Er, having a wee?’ I say.

And because I am telling the truth – well, a James sort of truth – I appear to be sincere, and she can’t haul me up on the fact that I have missed Devron’s weekly death-by-boredom slot.

For the second time in a month Laura says: if you want to call him, don’t. Write him an e-mail. Don’t send it.

So I write him another email every day, and because Devron is no longer in the Maldives and I am in the final stages of my custard project, I spend only half the entire day staring at my screen, crafting the email, changing the font, deleting, snipping, shaping, adding.

Feb 4th

Hello again James!

Great news! You are STD free. I highly recommend hanging out at your local council-run genital health clinic, it’s a
terrific
way to spend one’s leisure hours. And they’re so twenty-first century, they’ll even text you the results!

Feb 5th

Guess what? It’s a year ago to the day since I first met you. You may not remember, but that night
you
chatted
me
up. Did I pretend I was a 28-year-old leg model? Did I ever lie to you about what I look like?
You
asked
me
to tango, remember? Oh, the bloody irony.

Feb 6th

All the money in the world can’t paper over the cracks in your soul. You don’t want to admit you cheated because that makes you the bad guy. The fact that you let Noushka put a soy cherry yoghurt
– which isn’t even food – in my bloody fridge, tells me that you are at best a fool, and at worst, well … the Devil has all the best tunes, so CLEARLY you are not the devil …

Feb 7th

You can tell your new girlfriend next time she’s interviewed and asked to describe her personality, she might want to include Predator, Fiancé-stealer and Moron in her list of nouns (and yes, I know they should be ADJECTIVES, not NOUNS, but then ‘I like jewellery’ isn’t a personality trait now is it …)

Feb 8th

You are a gold-plated cliché.

Here’s what I bet:

You’ll end up marrying Noushka or some identikit hard-bodied, hard as nails gold-digger who is years younger than you, who you think is feisty but is actually just spoilt.

The minute you have kids, you will realise that having kids is not like having toys, and you will feel your age plus ten years immediately.

Your previously perfect shiny wife will be knackered and hormonal, like every new mum is, and will fail to continue making your penis the
centre of her universe. At this point you will begin to wonder what has gone wrong.

Even with the best marriage counselling in the world, you will be resentful and bored after seven years, but by that time your erectile dysfunction will have kicked in, and she’ll be shagging Gareth, her personal trainer, who overdoes the free sunbeds at work and wears Lycra t-shirts with deep v necks. And you won’t be able to divorce her because then she’ll take you for half your cash.

So, to that end I wish you both good luck, Good Luck, GOOD LUCK.

Feb 9th

I have been reading about sociopaths. There are seven signs that identify a sociopath, and you check eight of them. You are irresponsible, selfish, charming, self-interested, impulsive, ruthless and cruel and I rue the day I ever met you. When you told me your grandfather made his fortune by torturing helpless little minks, I should have paid closer attention.

Feb 10th

You are a shallow, emotionally immature, half-baked, fully fledged idiot. You said on our first date that you never lied, yet you are the most dishonest
human I’ve ever met.  Your self-justification reflex is so strong, you probably don’t even see how cowardly you’ve been. That wouldn’t fit with your view of yourself – Saint James, King James, Mr Wonderful. I’ve got news for you Mr Wonderful – when you realise what a giant mistake you’ve made, I won’t be sitting around waiting for you. Well, maybe I will, if you realise in the next month or so …

Feb 11th

How dare you call my friend Debbie fat! Oh, and by the way, I had my BMI measured yesterday and my body fat is 18.2%, which actually makes me officially ‘underweight’ according to government statistics.

And another thing! That night you met Pete and you said I should keep losing weight, Pete thought you were an arse.

Feb 12th

In future if you want someone to project manage your kitchen, HIRE A KITCHEN PROJECT MANAGER. (Try Google or the Yellow Pages.) Pay them a 15% fee. This will work out considerably less emotionally damaging for them than a proposal of marriage, which is subsequently retracted.

I would say ask Noushka to help next time, but
no doubt she is brainstorming her next toenail polish business plan (toes/fingers – they’re the same bloody thing, James!)

Feb 13th

I am truly myself with you/I want you to be my wife/I can never look at you the way you look at me. Spot the odd one out.

Again I send none of them.

Until 11.58pm on Valentine’s Day, when I drink a bottle of red wine, then type:

‘I am hopelessly in love with you.

I fucking hate you.

God, I miss you.’

And press send.

I wake up the following morning and enjoy a full seven seconds of peace of mind before I remember what I’ve done.

Please let this be a Bobby Ewing dream, please …

This is not a Bobby Ewing dream.

I feel mortification burning through me. I phone Laura, even though I know Dave has taken her somewhere in Sussex with giant plasma screens in the bathroom for a wanton long weekend, and she could really do without the interruption.

‘I’ve done something stupid but maybe it’s not that bad …’

Laura is always kind but unfortunately she’s always honest, and never just tells me what I want to hear. Sometimes I wish she wasn’t my best friend.

Apparently what I’ve done is ‘not cool.’

‘I’ll send an email this morning saying my e-mail account’s been hijacked?’

Apparently this idea is ‘not cool’ either.

‘We could pretend that actually
you
wrote it when you were at my house, drunk, for a dare, and then you sent it to him because … er …’

Apparently this idea is ‘not in any way believable and also not cool.’

I am too scared to go into my email account for the next twenty-four hours, and eventually I make Laura log in from a computer in her hotel.

‘Yup,’ she says. ‘He’s read your email.’

I am lying on my bathroom floor at this point. I have been lying here for maybe five hours, wrapped in my granny’s pink fluffy robe, with a pillow behind my head, staring at the ceiling. My upstairs neighbour must have had an overflow; there are seventeen hairline cracks in my ceiling, that, like the stars above London, make themselves more apparent the longer you look at them.

I know Laura would offer to read me the email if she thought it was appropriate. She is not offering.

‘Oh God, is he angry? Does he think I’m an idiot?’ I say.

‘Soph. It doesn’t matter what he thinks. What matters is how you feel. The only thing he put in his email that I think is worth repeating, because for once I agree with him, is that it might be better if you don’t press send when you’re drunk.’

‘Please delete it, and delete it from the deleted messages bin too.’

‘Done,’ she says.

I hang up and turn to face the towel rack.

I am sinking. Please help me.

I have cried every day for two weeks. I thought crying was meant to be a release but it only seems to feed itself. I’m not talking about whole-body keening, shaking, wailing. Just a steady flow of tears, out of the eyes, down the face, like a broken tap that’s not bad enough to call in the plumber for.

It’s weird, it’s become like breathing. Actually the breathing, in between the crying phases, is more of a problem than anything. I basically sometimes forget to breathe in: sounds ridiculous, I know. But I can take a breath: in, out. And then at some unconscious level, my brain can’t be bothered to issue the command to breathe in again. I have to jump start my lungs about five times a day.

Anyway, the crying: it is absolutely brilliant what you can do quite easily while tears are pouring down your face.

Activities include:

• walking down Oxford Street in rush hour without feeling embarrassed
  
• dancing to ‘Come On Eileen’ at an 80s party your best friend has dragged you to
  
• having your hair done at a posh salon off Hanover Square to cheer yourself up – this one is particularly excellent: when a hairdresser sees you crying, they assume it’s because you hate what they’re doing to your hair, so they give you free cappuccinos and do a superb job on the blow dry
  
• sitting in the freezer with Zoe, hoping the cold will turn your tears into salty little full stops
  

There is a shiny silver lining to these clouds: you can’t chew and cry at the same time. Just as well; I’m eating like a mountaineer, in the gaps between the tears.

But then there’s always another cloud: Devron.

We’re due to meet to talk about a ‘Change of Direction’.

He asks ‘Alright?’ in a very matter of fact way, and I start crying, as I always do when anyone talks to me or touches me. I’m like a malfunctioning Tiny Tears doll. At least I’m not spontaneously wetting myself. Not yet, anyway.

‘Ah, your grandma,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘She died recently …’

‘Oh. No, not that recently. This isn’t about that.’

‘Oh.’

‘If it was, I’d say you can take a half day, a day’s compassionate leave, if you need it.’

The fact that this is not about my grandma, but about a man, makes me weep with self-disgust.

‘You must have been close to her,’ Devron says.

‘It’s not that,’ I say. ‘I … I split with my … boyfriend.’ I didn’t have long enough to think of him as a fiancé.

‘New boyfriend?’

‘It was just coming up to a year.’

‘Oh, so not that serious …’

‘Actually,’ I straighten up in my chair, ‘we were engaged.’

‘Christ, he didn’t stand you up at the altar, did he?’

‘No.’

‘Because if that’d happened, I could understand you’d be well pissed off. God, the embarrassment, all that cash on a wedding …’

‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘I guess I’ve just taken it pretty hard.’

‘But it’s not like you were married or had kids or anything.’

Oh. You’re right. Silly me! I was getting confused. I thought we’d been married for fourteen years and had two kids and a dog. Now you’ve pointed out that this wasn’t the case, I’m so entirely at peace with the situation. In fact I feel amazing.

‘I’m going to do something about it,’ I say, blowing my nose. ‘I won’t let it get in the way of my work.’

‘Good. It’s not very professional, if you know what I mean.’

Not professional – like picking your nose and sticking your fingers in a pie not professional? Or not professional
like shagging Mands from behind on the executive boardroom table? – We’ve all seen the CCTV, Devron …

I walk back to my desk and make two calls: an emergency appointment later today at my GP, and a visit tomorrow to a psychotherapist.

My GP appointment is at 3pm, and at 2.58 I show up at the surgery. I have to be back at the office for a final product meeting with Will at 4.30pm and they always make you wait an age here. The receptionist, who I know only as Cerberus, for her un-bedsidely manner, is in discussion with a man who wants to join the practice because his girlfriend’s flat is round the corner. She is explaining in an increasingly smug tone, that this is
not
how the NHS works. He thinks he can bulldoze her into giving him the forms by increasing the aggression in his voice. Not a chance.

Sure enough at 3.08 he gives up, calls her an officious cow, and a small victory cheer pips through her smile.

Still in front of me is a paunchy old perma-tanned man. He wants to have a row with Cerberus for being made to wait an hour last week, which meant his brand new Porscha – yes, apparently you pronounce the e as an a – got clamped. Good luck winning that argument, mate.

At 3.17 he too gives up and takes his seat in the waiting room.

‘Sophie Klein, I have an appointment with Dr Salter,’ I say.

She squints at her screen. ‘Your appointment was at 3pm.’

‘I’ve been standing here since 2.58.’

‘If you’re late again, we won’t be able to see you. Do you know how many no-shows this surgery has each week?’ she says.

Today is not the day to take the bitch on.

I take my seat, take a deep breath and try to calm myself. I stare at the white wall but all I can think of is a snowy night back in November when James and I stole onto the roof of my block of flats, and with one iPod speaker in each ear, danced round the roof to Dean Martin. We looked out across the silenced city and then James pointed down to the street: ‘We’ve got company.’