Six Months to Get a Life (12 page)

So, today I found out that my detailed critique of my work’s strategic review proposals had no impact whatsoever. They have confirmed their original proposals for a ‘restructuring of our operations and a consequent repositioning of our staffing resources’ which, for me, means that I have to compete for a job with short skirt Sarah, the brown-nosing attractive little miss perfect. They are hoping to get all of the restructuring done by the time people go off for their summer holidays. How considerate of them.

I also got the predictable news that I didn’t get that asset protection manager job. On reflection I think I was a bit naïve even going for it. I need a new job but I probably should be focussing my efforts on vacancies that I at least have some chance of being offered. I did read in the paper the other day that they are recruiting for staff to work in the passport offices. Maybe I should apply for one of those vacancies. Sean’s passport still hasn’t come through. I could process his application.

It is a bit early to start panicking but I am beginning to fear that my decision to move into a rented flat might have been slightly rash. But shit happens to those that let shit happen to them, so I must keep looking for new jobs and not be thrown off-course at the first adverse wind.

Talking of the flat, I started thinking about packing today. Friday is moving in day. Having lost most of my stuff to my ex, I actually don’t have much to move so I ended up only thinking about packing. Five minutes on Thursday night should do the trick.

I may have shot myself in the foot again today. This afternoon I was supposed to be filling in a work performance evaluation report on our lorry fleet, but instead I thought I would spend some time discreetly filling in a ‘programme office manager’ job application. Unfortunately, when I went to make a cup of tea, Daniel came over to see my workstation and spotted the application on my screen. He sent me the following email:

Arsehole.

OK, so maybe I was being a bit economical with the truth in my application, but who isn’t? Note to self, don’t ask Danny boy to write me a reference.

Tonight is my last night living with my parents. Looking back on the last few months, there were some initial teething troubles but we soon got into a routine and coexisted without too many issues. I am grateful to my parents for giving me a place to stay for a few months. Their house was just about big enough for the kids to stay at from time to time although the queues for the bathroom won’t be missed. Neither will the attempts to get me to go back to my ex.

Without wishing to be ungrateful to my parents for what they have done, I can’t wait to become an independent, fully functioning adult again. I am not sure how often I will use it, but I want the freedom to walk naked around the flat when I want to, to invite my mates round for a few beers (not while I am naked obviously), to eat in front of the telly, to sit on the loo with the toilet door open if there is something good I am listening to on the radio and even to leave the hoovering until tomorrow if that’s what I decide to do. I need my own place.

The boys came over tonight, partly to show solidarity in thanking their grandparents for their hospitality but mostly to watch the England match. Another World Cup over before it has even begun for England.

I am writing today’s update from my new abode. I can tick that goal off then. The flat has two bedrooms. The master bedroom has a double bed, a pine wardrobe with doors that don’t shut properly and a scratched up table and chair with a view out of the window overlooking the road and the number 164 bus stop. The walls are off-white, as they are throughout the flat.

You can tell that a previous set of occupants used the second bedroom as a children’s bedroom. There are two single beds in there already, the pine frames of which are adorned with the remnants of stickers that someone has made a token effort to try and remove. The wallpaper around the beds is beginning to peel off, probably as a result of bored little fingers fiddling with it after lights out. A quirky comic strip light shade – the only lightshade in the whole flat – has also managed to outlast the previous tenants.

As well as the bedrooms, I have a decent sized albeit completely dull and characterless sitting room, equipped with a sofa and an armchair as well as a basic dining table and chairs. There is a dark wood TV table in the corner that is too small to accommodate my large telly, so I have had to mount the telly on the dining table for now.

The best thing that can be said for the kitchen and bathroom is that everything seems to work. I am not sure I will be able to fully relax in the bath until I have disinfected it several times. The cooker is filthy too. Looking on the bright side, at least I won’t have to clean the flat to high standards when I move out.

The move went as well as could be expected. When my ex and I moved to our (now her) detached pad in Surrey, we had two lorries full of stuff. Now, I can comfortably fit my worldly possessions into the back of my car.

If truth be told I am feeling a bit crap tonight. I can’t help thinking about how far I have fallen. My ex is still in our detached house, the most expensive house in the street. I am in a flat on a main road in Morden.

I am trying not to dwell on my previous life but I can’t help recalling summers spent in the garden with our huge paddling pool and table tennis table. The neighbours’ kids used to drop in just to play in our garden. There will be none of that here.

Like missing my ex’s birthday, this move feels like I am hammering another nail into the coffin that contains our relationship. I won’t share time with my ex in this flat. She will have no association with it. I thought I had already got my head around mine and my ex’s separation, but tonight I am really coming to realise the permanence of it all.

Even moving from my parents’ to here is hard. I have hardly spent any time on my own at my parents’. I am now in a flat where for most of the time Albus and I will be the only occupants. That is going to take some getting used to.

I am still convinced that in the long run moving out of my parents’ is the right thing to do. Living with my mum and dad always felt temporary. I couldn’t entertain there, I couldn’t make my mark on the property or give it my personality.
I couldn’t bring women back. So moving into my own place, however shitty it is, has to be the right thing to do. Maybe I need to feel lonely to give me the push to get off my backside and sort my life out.

Now that I have moved away from my parents I can do whatever I want. The trouble is, I am now asking myself what ‘whatever I want’ looks like in reality. I haven’t exactly got a queue of women waiting to come over for wild parties. I am not even sure that I would want to bring Amy here (I am being presumptuous even thinking that she might want to come). What would she make of this flat? She drives a Porsche and lives off the Ridgway for god’s sake. Would she approve of the England flag hanging out of the window?

Because I haven’t lived on my own since god knows when, and because my parents have done the cooking for the last few months, I need to reacquaint myself with a frying pan. My mum bought me a cook book as a house-moving present. She is fretting that I will live off takeaways and ready meals. She may well be right to fret. It isn’t that I can’t cook but I am not sure how inclined I will be to go to the effort of cooking when I am only cooking for one.

I flicked through the cook book. I am a bit of a snob when it comes to food. I am partial to take-away curries but generally want proper fresh English meat and vegetables. Having said that, I pushed the boat out tonight and cooked a big spag bol – the Italian type that takes hours to cook rather than the British type where you chuck everything in a pan with a jar of sauce. So there!

Spag bol, a bottle of lager or six and watching the World Cup. It shouldn’t have been a bad night. But I couldn’t get excited by Honduras versus Ecuador. More significantly I can’t seem to shake off the loneliness. And the flat was so quiet when the football had finished and the telly was off.
I am not used to quiet, so I put the radio in the kitchen on before I went to bed to create the illusion that I am not alone.

The kids are coming round tomorrow and then I have dinner with Amy so tomorrow shouldn’t be as bad as tonight.

And there was me worrying about how quiet it would be. At about midnight I discovered that my neighbour is also an 80s rock fan. I like Def Leppard as much as the next middle aged soft rock enthusiast, but I could have done without hearing ‘Pour Some Sugar On Me’ ten times over in the middle of the night. I think he was head-banging too. Personally I never got the point of head-banging. I never got the long hair and studs thing either.

Jack was playing cricket so only Sean came round in the end this afternoon. We did some web surfing to personalise the flat a bit. I hope Jack likes the Chelsea duvet cover. We put a few photos up in their bedroom to make it look more homely and relevant to their lives, and then Sean ate some of my spag bol before going off to a sleepover with some mates. I resisted the spag bol because I am going out on the town tonight with Amy.

It has been a while.

OK, so I need to tell you how last night went. Well, I should say up front, just to manage your expectations, that it has still been a while.

Amy and I went to the Spotted Horse in Putney, a fairly unadventurous, traditional pub with a decent atmosphere, particularly in the winter months by virtue of the fact that it has an open fire. The choice of pub was Amy’s and her decision was influenced by the fact that Lucy was ill and was staying at her dad’s in Earlsfield, so Amy wanted to be somewhere fairly close in case she had to jump in a cab and pick her up in a hurry. I did wonder if my ex followed similar logic and went out on dates to pubs in Morden when I last had the kids when they were ill. I doubt it somehow. I also vaguely wondered whether Amy was half hoping that her ex would see her out on a date. I probably shouldn’t assume that Amy is as devious as me.

Amy looked stunning tonight, dressed in a simple but elegant black number. I wish I could describe it better but I am a bloke after all. Her hair is beautiful and striking, her skin pale but blemish-free and her smile just makes me melt. For the football lovers out there, Amy is undoubtedly Premier League. She might be Spurs or Everton rather than the
real top dogs of Manchester City or Chelsea, but she’s certainly right up there. I am probably your Nottingham Forest – had the odd glory day but now a bit tired and dated. If Amy had been your supermodel, your Man City or Chelsea, she wouldn’t have so much as looked at me. As it is, if Amy and I come to anything then I am definitely punching above my weight.

I bought the first round of drinks. This didn’t seem like a lager night to me so I went with Amy’s suggestion of getting a bottle of wine to share. Being no wine expert, I let Amy choose and we ended up with a cool Australian chardonnay. Over our first glasses we each gave the other a brief life history. (Mine: ‘University, marriage, two kids, divorce, new flat’; hers: ‘Grew up in Wimbledon, marriage to rich financier, one kid, hubby had affair with au pair, divorce, dog.’) We then moved on to jobs. I told her about single-handedly bringing about efficiency savings of £1 million per year and she told me she lives off the proceeds of her divorce but also makes a few quid writing for a website for bored housewives.

But the most interesting conversation was about our children. Not general background stuff on what they are like, but very specific stuff. It turns out that Jack and Lucy have been texting each other non-stop for the past week and Lucy is trying hard to resist telling Jack that she has a crush on him. I haven’t seen Jack all week so I hadn’t picked up on this surprising development. I say surprising because despite Jack talking a bit more about girls over the last year or so, going to an all-boys school, as far as I know he has never actually progressed this interest into anything so much as a conversation with a girl. He still prefers to spend all his waking hours playing sports.

Anyway, with the wine consumed, the evening ended on a very pleasant note. We did exchange a kiss, and on the lips
too, not some perfunctory peck on the cheek. This momentous coming together happened as the cab we were sharing stopped outside iron gates that presumably hid Amy’s home behind them. I was half-hoping, no I was completely hoping, that she would ask me in for coffee but she didn’t. Instead, she told me how much she had enjoyed the night and hoped we would do it again soon. There was a bit of an awkward pause and then Amy opened the cab door. She was climbing out before I decided I had to kiss her. I don’t know where my confidence to make the first physical move came from but I rushed out of the cab after her, grabbed her hand and turned her towards me. The kiss itself was probably a bit of a lunge, a bit of a clash of my lips upon hers with a bit of nose bumping going on too but once Amy had realised that she wasn’t being mugged, there was definitely two people participating in the kiss. Well, three if you count the cab driver who was standing next to us making sure we weren’t about to do a runner.

I slept in late this morning, because I can. I am pretty chuffed with how last night went. Can I now officially say I am in a relationship? Maybe I can but who would I tell? Not my single mates as they will just take the piss. I could tell my ex but I would only be doing that to make myself feel good. She wouldn’t be interested. I could have told the boys when they came round for tea tonight but I decided that it is too early to get into it with them. Having said that, when Jack got in the front door, he had a smug grin on his face. With a knowing expression, he asked what I got up to last night. I took it on the chin and resisted the temptation to tell him that I know his secret as well as him knowing mine. He will tell me about what is going on with him and Lucy when he is good and ready.

The boys and I had spag bol converted into a chilli for tea
(I think I might freeze the rest now). After living in the flat for the weekend, personalising it and having the kids round, I feel much happier about the move. We will do our best to make some good memories here.