The Drought (The hilarious laugh-out loud comedy about dating disasters!) (3 page)

“
Let’s all
leave the room,” Rob quickly interrupted. “Come on, outside in five
minutes. Let’s go eat.”

Rob wandered into the kitchen
to put his mug in the washing up bowl, while Jack and Ollie
disappeared upstairs to get dressed. I slipped on my jeans, trying
to remember if I’d ever gone commando before now, and careful not
to catch my bits in the zip.

We met outside and climbed into
Rob’s Peugeot 306. The weather was far too cold to have the roof
down on his blue convertible, and we urged him to switch the heater
on before he had even put the key into the ignition.

As we pulled out of the drive,
I took my phone out of my pocket and took a deep breath before
making the plunge to listen to the remaining 46 messages. Most of
them followed a similar pattern. Stacey would wail uncontrollably,
scream down the phone, or say in a calm matter-of-fact tone that we
were over. A lot of the messages were incoherent and sandwiched in
the middle was one from my mum wishing me a Happy New Year, and
reminding me that I had to come round for lunch soon.

With a bit of encouragement
from my friends, I played them my top three favourite messages.

1.42am – the
angry message:
“
If you don’t switch your phone on I will smash your stupid
fucking PlayStation into little pieces. Who do you think you are?
You can’t treat me like this. You’re not a real man. You’re
pathetic.”

2.23am – the
hysterical message:
“
I can’t believe you have just left me on my own (inaudible).
This is the worst night of my life. I’m all alone (inaudible)
nothing but that shit DVD set you bought me for Christmas. And
you... And you... And you... (pause and then more sobbing and
sniffing) You just left, and I’m all alone. (more
sobbing)”

And my personal favourite:

3.46am – the
calm message:
“
Daniel Hilles. (pause) You are a wanker.”

Like any good group of friends,
my boys rallied around me. And found great delight in the almost
inevitable break-up of my relationship.

“
That last
message was classic,” Jack said choking back the tears. “I can’t
believe it has taken her three years to realise how much you love
to hand jive. We’ve known for years you’re a real grade A
stroker!”

“
Okay, let’s
go over this again,” Rob said as we approached our destination.
“What happened last night? What did you do to her?”

“
That’s the
thing,” I started. “I didn’t really do anything.”

Rob pulled the car up and we
got out. The streets of South Wimbledon were dead; the glow from
the Greasy Spoon the only sign of life in a row of closed estate
agents, kebab houses, and newsagents.

“
You must have
done something, or was that just her way of talking dirty?” Jack
said as we moved in pairs towards the inviting warmth of the Greasy
Spoon.

“
Piss off,”
was about the best response I could muster, my head still
pounding.

Eileen greeted us with her
usual warm smile as we entered the cafe. “Hello boys, sit down and
I’ll bring you over some tea.”

The Greasy Spoon had become our
regular morning-after pick-me-up ever since we discovered the place
last year after a particularly heavy night that involved two
bottles of tequila, a crate of Stella, and a half-Mexican,
half-Korean guy surprisingly called Owen, who had taken us to an
underground rave in Shoreditch.

Come rain or shine, Eileen and
her husband Bob opened up every morning at 6am. It was an
old-fashioned cafe, but immaculately clean – a rare thing for a
cafe in south London these days. But it was the food that kept us
coming back. You simply couldn’t beat it.

We took our usual table in the
corner by the window and Eileen brought our tea over and took our
orders, which didn’t take long seeing as we always had the same
thing – Full English with the works.

A partygoer
from the night before was slumped at a table across from us wearing
a blue and yellow paper crown. His friends, or whoever he had the
misfortune to have seen in the new year with, had kindly stuck a
piece of paper to his chest which read:
If
found please deliver to 21 Evelyn Road.

“
Right, spill
your guts, Danny boy,” Rob demanded.

Finally succumbing to the fact
they were never going to let up, I took a sip from my hot mug of
tea and attempted to make sense of the events that had resulted in
my girlfriend accusing me of being a rapist, albeit one of the
heart.

“
Everything
was fine until we left the pub after midnight,” I began. “I decided
to go to the cash point so I could buy some booze to take to the
party.”

“
I remember
that,” Rob said. “I think I joked about turning you away from my
house if you turned up empty-handed.”

“
Well, Stacey
took that as you not wanting her at the party.”

“
What? That’s
ridiculous,” Rob said half in disbelief, half
defensively.

“
I know it’s
crazy,” I reassured him. “I told her that, but she wouldn’t listen.
She got it into her head again that you guys don’t like her and she
wasn’t welcome at the party.”

“
Bloody
women,” Jack said raising his eyebrows. “You should have given her
a slap,” he said joking.

“
She really
went into one,” I continued, shaking my head as I thought about it.
“She stormed off, saying it was my fault. I tried to reason with
her, telling her she was being silly but she wouldn’t listen. There
was no way I could let her walk home by herself, she was too drunk.
So I just followed her to make sure she got back okay. When we got
back to her flat she was screaming at me, F'ing and blinding, and
calling me a C U Next Tuesday.”

“
You arranged
to see her next week then?” Ollie questioned.

The stupidity of his question
took me aback. “No, I didn’t arrange to see her next week,” I shot
back. “She was calling me a... never mind.”

“
So what
happened?” Rob said trying to get me back on track.

“
For a while I
tried to calm her down, but that just made her angrier and she
started lashing out. It was at that point my patience ran out and I
totally lost it. I told her that she was right – nobody liked her
when she behaved like this and nobody wanted her at the party in
this type of mood. I was so angry. I stormed off but she kept
calling me and abusing me down the phone so I switched it off and
came to the party.”

I sat back letting my own words
sink in. It was a horrible situation, and I didn’t really know what
else to do. I only hoped my friends would have the answers.

“
Well, at
least she knows the truth now, that none of us like her.” Ollie’s
comment was met with stunned silence. I saw Jack kick him under the
table and screw his face up at him. I looked at them all, scanning
their faces and reactions to Ollie’s bombshell.

“
It’s not that
we don’t like her,” Rob was the first to try and explain, “It’s
just that she can be a bit... intense sometimes.”

“
Like when you
were in Paris last year and she got jealous because you were
staring at that woman in the Louvre,” Ollie said.

“
That was the
painting of the Mona Lisa,” I corrected Ollie.

“
Exactly,” Rob
said making his point.

“
Or the time
she cock-blocked me when I was trying to chat up that older bird
she was with at that party last year,” Jack said.

“
What party?”
I was puzzled.

“
The one at
the big house in Kent.”

“
That
older bird
was her mum,
and we were at a funeral.”

“
Well, her mum
was bang up for it,” Jack responded, taking a mouthful of his
tea.

We all burst into laughter and
the tension that had been briefly hanging in the air was broken
immediately. Stacey hadn’t exactly endeared herself to my friends
in recent months, and her behaviour last night was becoming too
much of a common thing. But things hadn’t always been like this,
and that is what made this situation all the more difficult to
fathom.

“
So what
happens now?” Rob asked me as Eileen came over and placed plates of
bacon, egg, sausage, beans, toast, and fried bread, in front of
us.

“
I guess I’ll
have to go round there and face the music.”

Chapter 3:
The Break-up

Thursday, January 1, 2009 -
10.43am

Countdown to start of drought:
38 minutes

I’d been with
Stacey for just over three years. We’d met at university and the
first two years of our relationship had been pretty smooth sailing.
Don’t get me wrong, we’d had our moments during that time like any
couple, who doesn’t? But there was a time when I honestly believed
she could be
the one.

I can still remember the first
moment I laid eyes on her during Freshers’ Week. Drinks had been
arranged for everyone on our marketing course so we could get to
know each other. Stacey wandered into the bar late, having got
caught in one of those famous British summer showers. She was
soaked to the bone, but was still the most attractive girl there in
my eyes.

“
Hi everyone,”
she said as she sat down in the seat opposite me. “Sorry I’m late,
I was washing my hair.” We all broke out in laughter, and I knew I
liked her instantly.

“
Can I get you
a drink?” Dean Marshall asked her. It was a simple question, but
one I ultimately regretted not asking myself. Dean had played his
cards early, so I decided to turn my attentions to Ellie Thornton.
After all, this was university and there were plenty more fish in
the sea, as my mum used to tell me.

Still, I grew
fond of Stacey in our first year of university and we became close
friends. We were both from south London, and had a common bond in
that we both agreed
Danger Mouse
was undoubtedly the most underrated superhero of
all time.

By this time she was already
seeing Dean, but that didn’t stop my heartbeat quickening every
time she smiled. She had an edge to her and didn’t suffer fools
gladly. I liked that about her; that she was able to stand up for
herself, but at the same time she could be soft and vulnerable,
none more so than the time Dean dumped her at the end of our first
year at university, and I was left to pick up the pieces of her
broken heart.

It didn’t happen instantly but
over time I think we both realised our feelings toward each other
went deeper than just friendship, and within weeks into our second
year we shared our first kiss.

From that moment our uni lives
became entwined. We had the same friends, we went to the same
parties, and we were on the same course so we studied together.
Despite spending so much time together, it never felt
claustrophobic.

But the moment we left
university something changed. We had lived in the same bubble for
so long, and Stacey found it more difficult to adjust than I
did.

At the start it was subtle
things, like giving me the silent treatment if I had been on a
night out with my friends without her. “Why do you exclude me from
nights out with your friends,” she would moan. “Why can’t I be
involved in that part of your life?”

I tried to involve her when we
first moved back to London, but she would spend the whole night
moaning that there were no other girls to talk to, and she hated
the two Jack’s in my life. “Why do you drink Jack Daniels? It turns
you into an idiot,” she would say of my newfound taste for the
Tennessee Whisky. “And I don’t trust your friend Jack. Doesn’t he
have a girlfriend? He tried chatting up my friend Sophie last
week.”

And there was my problem –
Sophie. We had never seen eye-to-eye. In the three years we had
been at university, I had only ever met her best friend Sophie
once, and it was clear from the start that she didn’t like me. To
be fair, that was partly down to Stacey. Sophie was slightly older
than Stacey and I, and during the course of our first meeting she
had asked me to guess her age. Getting a woman’s age wrong is never
a good thing at the best of times, so I decided I was going to play
it safe and say she was the same age as me. But at the last second
Stacey lip-synced the number 30 to me, so I went with it.

“
You think I’m
30?” Sophie growled at me as Stacey giggled. “Do you have shit in
your eyes? I am 24, you cocky little twat.”

From that moment on I think it
is fair to say Sophie hated my guts, and it was only when we
returned to London I started to notice the influence she held over
Stacey, especially after they decided to flat-share together. Maybe
it was because she was older, but Stacey literally hung on every
word she said, and that combined with Sophie’s obvious disdain
toward me, definitely had an effect on our relationship.

I noticed Stacey drank more
around Sophie, and in her drunken state, Stacey started to pick
fights with me over the most pointless of things. I tried to avoid
confrontation as much as possible, telling Stacey that we would
sort things out in the morning. But with Sophie in her ear egging
her on, she’d go on and on, to the point where I would get pissed
in an attempt to drown out her constant whining. Eventually I'd
succumb to the goading and we’d have the most explosive rows. She’d
end up in tears and I’d have to apologise. For weeks she would
emotionally blackmail me by reminding me of the night I made her
cry. And I'd apologise again.