The Case of the Missing Boyfriend (28 page)

‘It is. And it’s pronounced
Yan-shau-stee.’

‘God! Are you sure it’s him?’

‘Of course I’m sure! He remembered me too.’

‘Oh God, how embarrassing. But he’s gay.’

‘Exactly.’

‘God. What a
waste.
Still, perfect for you really.’

‘Because?’

‘Well, you’re such a fag hag, aren’t you? Now you even have a gay gynaecologist.’

Dealing with the Past

As if having my bits inspected by Twinkletoes wasn’t enough trauma for one day, just as I walk into Spot On, my BlackBerry beeps with a message from Darren. ‘She’s New, She’s Improved. She’s Back,’ it says.

I glance around to see if he is sitting in the lobby and then shrug the message off and look up at the receptionist.

‘She’s back!’ she says.

I shake my head in disbelief. ‘Jesus. If you can’t take a morning to go to the doctor’s without getting a load of gyp . . . Anyway, as far as I recall you were off for four
weeks
in June, so—’

‘Not you!’ she says in a whisper. ‘VB. She’s back. And she wants to see you.’

When I enter VB’s office, she stands, walks around her desk and . . . hugs me. I am so shocked by this that I remain entirely rigid, and then, rather cleverly, I grab her shoulders and force her away in the pretence of getting a better look. ‘Well look at you!’ I exclaim, holding her at arm’s length. ‘Gosh you look well.’ And she does. She looks more than well: she looks like an entirely different person.

She seems to have aged about ten years in six months, but she looks better for it. Her features look softer, her skin less taut – it’s as if she’s had a reverse facelift.

‘Oh, I don’t,’ she says, uncharacteristically. ‘I look a mess really. But I’m not sure I care any more. I hear you’ve done a sterling job on the Grunge! account, by the way.’

I swallow hard and release her shoulders in the hope that she will now return to her side of the desk and stop being creepy. She does neither.

‘So how are you?’ she asks.

‘Good thanks, yeah.’

‘No, I mean, really. How
are
you?’

‘Good,’ I say. ‘I
am
good. Really.’

‘I realised that we spend more time with people here than we do with our partners.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I suppose we do.’

‘Do you have a partner, CC?’

‘I, um . . . Look, did you want to see me about anything in particular?’

VB shakes her head. ‘No, not really. I just wanted to catch up.’

‘Would you like me to give you a report on the whole Levi’s thing?’

VB shrugs. ‘No. Everyone tells me that it’s all going swimmingly without me, so . . . I’m just easing myself back in gently, if you know what I mean.’

‘Sure,’ I say.

‘Everything OK? At the doctor’s?’

She’s really weirding me out now, and I’m having trouble keeping it out of my facial expressions. ‘Yeah, just a check-up,’ I say. ‘Routine.’

‘Good, well, if there’s ever anything . . . If you ever need to talk. Well, I’m here for you.’

‘Right,’ I say. ‘Well, I’ll, erm . . .’

‘It’s no good bottling things up.’

‘No. Well, I’ll catch you later on then.’ And with that, I give her a little wave and walk briskly out of her office.

On my way down I call in to Creative. Mark is on holiday, but Jude and Darren both look up from Jude’s screen which is displaying an image of a yogurt pot.

‘Hiya,’ I say. ‘Don’t tell me you’re actually working!’

Jude frowns at his screen, and then turns slowly to face me. ‘Working?’

‘That is work, I take it,’ I say. ‘Not some new dairy fetish?’

‘Yeah,’ Jude says, vaguely. And then as if his spirit snaps back into his body, he suddenly breaks free of whatever he has been thinking about. ‘Sorry, yes. It’s for that dairy campaign. We’re just looking at what everyone else is doing.’

‘Cornish Cow? But we haven’t even signed them yet,’ I say.

‘No,’ Jude says. ‘But there’s nothing else happening at the moment, so we were just having a look. Dairy is very dull. I hope if we do get it we can shake things up a bit.’

‘Shake it up!’ Darren laughs.

I frown.

‘You know. Dairy. Milkshake . . . never mind.’

‘No,’ Jude says drily. ‘Never mind.’ He clicks his mouse and the screen goes blank.

Both he and Darren swivel to face me. ‘What’s up?’ Jude asks. ‘You look confused.’

‘It’s just bizarre here today,’ I say. ‘VB is being all huggy and now you’re both working.’

‘Ah, you met the cyborg,’ Darren laughs.

‘The cyborg?’

‘Yeah, we think that they’ve replaced VB with a cyborg.’ ‘Right. Well she’s certainly being very Stepford-Wifey.’

‘Stepford what?’

‘It doesn’t matter. It’s a cult film, but probably a bit before your time. A bit before
my
time, actually.’

‘Did she hug you?’ Jude asks.

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘She did. You too?’

Jude nods.

‘She was going on at Jude about dealing with the past and not bottling things up,’ Darren says.

‘I got that too.’

‘Personally I think they’ve blown her brains out with electric shock therapy,’ Darren laughs.

Jude pulls a face like he’s smelt something bad. ‘She
is
still one of the partners,’ he points out. ‘I don’t think we should be, you know . . .’

‘Sorry,’ Darren says.

‘And anyway,’ he adds. ‘Mental illness isn’t something to be joked about.’

‘No. Sure. Sorry,’ Darren says again.

I shrug. ‘Well, I’m with Darren on this one,’ I say. ‘That Greenham woman out there is
not
VB.’

‘Greenham?’ Darren asks.

‘Greenham Comm— oh, never mind. Again, a bit before your time.’

That night, unable to concentrate on my exercises, I add
Living Life Lightly
to the heap of self-help books above the bed and try to read the first chapter of
The Blue Bistro
instead. But my mind is elsewhere, and my eyes just skim the page.

My brain is occupied with a vague unfocused process of passing the day in review. It’s not unlike dreaming.

I feel the cold steel of the stirrups, and see Victor’s head bobbing between them . . .

I hear VB say, ‘Do you have a partner, CC?’ and then Jude with, ‘She is, you know, a
partner.
’

I see Darren smiling at me and hear Victor saying, ‘The abortion was fairly recent . . .’

I try again to read the first chapter of
The Blue Bistro
and then give up and lie and stare at the wall instead.

I hear Darren saying, ‘Deal with the past’.

Victor,
Victoria
, partners and
partners
. Even before I’m asleep, the whole day feels like a riddle.

I scream like a child in a horror film and hurl myself from the side of the bed, knocking whoever is attacking me out of the way.

It’s completely dark in my bedroom, and for a moment I think my assailant has attacked me with a bat. I wonder where the nearest weapon would be, but then, as I scrabble my way across the bedroom floor towards the vague, grey light of the hall, I find I’m walking on rubble, and think that perhaps we’re having an earthquake and a lump of the wall fell on me. I’m sweating and shaking and my heart is racing.

In the hall, all is incongruously quiet. I start to wonder if this isn’t a nightmare.

I stand and grab a hefty bottle of perfume from the bathroom shelf and return to the bedroom door. It’s not much of a weapon, I know, but it’s heavy and square, and hitting someone over the head with a glass brick has got to be better than bitch-slapping them. Plus, in films, squirting it into their eyes always seems to do the trick. I have some doubts, though, about the range of L’Eau d’Issey’s squirter.

I edge to the door. Silence. I reach out and take a deep breath and simultaneously flip the light switch and leap, ninja-style back into the room.

And then I understand. No attacker. No earthquake. No dream.

Just one collapsed IKEA bookshelf.

One side of the fixture has broken free, ripping a lump of plaster from the wall, and the entire thing has hinged downwards, whacking me on the face and scattering my books across the floor. I’m lucky I’m not unconscious.

I raise a hand to my cheek – now stinging – and return to the bathroom mirror. I have a small straight cut along the top of my cheekbone.

One inch higher and it would have had my eye out. ‘
Fucking hell!’
I mutter.

I dab some perfume on the cut as an antiseptic, then return to the bedroom and start to scoop the books from the floor and pile them against the wall. There are a surprising number (mostly self-help manuals), and, as I build the pile, I end up surprised not that the shelf collapsed, but that it held out so long.

I shake the white chunks of plaster from the bedding and pillows (it’s far too late to be vacuuming) and slip back beneath my quilt, and then fall surprisingly quickly back to sleep.

When my alarm goes off at seven on Thursday morning I’m pretty sure that I have been having nightmares all night – certainly I feel tired and irritable.

But as I lie in my bed, looking up at the damaged wall, and then over at the pile of books, thinking,
Do I really have to go to work today?
only one dream sequence remains within reach. I was lying on a slab, in a morgue. The slab was uneven because it was made of piles of books. Beyond my swollen belly, between my knees, Victor the gynaecologist was bobbing around, and then laboriously, painfully, pulling something out of me. At first I expected to see a baby, but then I realised, in anguish, that whatever he was delivering was
dead
. And
huge
.

Once it was over, Victor had looked at me and smiled and done a little salsa dance. ‘Success,’ he had said. ‘All gone.’

I looked over to see what he had removed: a bloodied adult body. A dead body. Brian’s body.

Still thinking about taking the day off, I force myself out of bed. But when I see the state of my face, it’s a no-brainer: I call in sick.

The cut on my cheek is tiny, but my eye has come up in a real shiner. I am stunned. I haven’t had a black eye since Ronan.

Experience tells me that four days will be enough for the bruise to fade. By Monday, Michael-Jackson quantities of foundation will suffice to hide any remaining signs of injury.

I eat breakfast, then vacuum the bedroom and momentarily consider trying to put the shelf back up. Though I have a box full of tools I have never been much cop with a screwdriver, let alone a drill. I think that I inherited my mother’s ‘
why have a dog and bark yourself?
,’ mentality as far as DIY is concerned. Which is fine, of course, as long as you have a dog. Alone, unscrewing the remaining side of the bookcase is as much as I manage.

Without the shelf, the piled books get in my way, and, in fact, begin to embarrass me. For there’s clearly something not quite right about having fifty self-help books . . . Clearly there is something a little shameful about having so many and
still
not being ‘sorted’, as they say in the personals.

On further reflection, there’s also something rather sinister about the fact that the shelf that Brian put up has combined forces with my fifty failed self-help books to try to murder me in my sleep. By the time I have had lunch, it’s decided: with the exception of
Living Life Lightly,
(which, presumably was the straw that broke the IKEA shelf ’s back) the books have to go.

I phone SJ and ask her if she can swing by on her way home and run me to Oxfam.

It’s twenty to six when I open my front door. Her face falls. ‘Fucking hell,’ she says. ‘You have been in the wars.’

‘I know,’ I say. ‘It looks worse than it is.’

‘It looks like you’re back with Ronan,’ she says.

‘I know.’

‘You’re not, are you?’

‘Of course I am,’ I say, rolling my eyes. I grab her hand and pull her through to the bedroom and nod at the missing lump of wall. ‘Bookcase fall on lady face,’ I say.

‘OK. I believe you,’ she laughs. ‘Fuck though! And you were
asleep
?’

‘Scared the shit out of me. I thought I was being attacked.’ I glance at my watch. ‘Can we get a move on though? They said they close just after six.’

We load the seven bags of books into her Megane. ‘Are you sure you want to come with me with that face?’ she says. ‘Cos I can just drop ’em off and come back if you want.’

‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘You can take them in if you want . . . I can stay with the car in case of traffic wardens and stuff. At least they won’t mess with me looking like this.’

‘So you were asleep,’ she says again, as she pulls out onto Regent’s Park Road.

‘Yeah. My first reaction was to run into the bathroom for a weapon.’

‘Have you got one? A weapon?’

‘The only thing I could find was a big bottle of perfume.’

‘Ooh,’ SJ giggles. ‘I’ve got a bottle of Paradise and I’m not afraid to use it.’

‘Actually it was L’Eau d’Issey – a big bottle though.
I
wouldn’t want to be whacked over the head with it.’

‘You look like you
have
been,’ she laughs.

‘Yeah, well . . . My second thought was that it was an earthquake. The books made a hell of a noise.’