JENNY COLGAN
Talking to Addison

Copyright

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Copyright © Jenny Colgan 2000

Jenny Colgan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006531777

EBook Edition © APRIL 2013 ISBN: 9780007393923

Version: 2016-01-19

Dedication

This book is dedicated with love

to my truly fantastic and long-suffering

parents – Mum, sorry I didn’t take

my accountancy exams, Dad, sorry about all the swearing.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Part II

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

Part I

One

A famous arctic explorer once said that polar expeditions were the most successful form of having a bad time humans had ever devised. Of course, he’d probably never answered an ad for a flatshare with a bunch of complete strangers. Although if it hadn’t been for them I would never have met Addison. Hmm. Which, when I think of it, is kind of like saying, OK, I lost all my fingers and toes to frostbite, but I met some very sweet penguins along the way…

Thirty-six hours after I moved in to 12a Wendle Close, Harlesden, I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. Tiptoeing around someone else’s home is weird enough, particularly if it’s just after a late night and you can’t remember their name or where they keep the Sugar Puffs or, say, you’re a cat burglar. Tiptoeing around your own is discomfiting to say the least. But here I was, creeping into my own house and closing my bedroom door extremely quietly, heart pounding, after my very first quick jaunt to the shops, to make friends with my newsagent and see what flavours of Skips he had.

If I pressed my head against the thin wood veneer of the door I could just about hear my new best friends in the nearby ghastly open-plan Formica kitchenette.

‘Well, I think we need a special long-term rota too. For cleaning the shower curtain and the drawers. And washing the skirting boards.’

‘That’s a great idea, Carol,’ came another voice, deep with awe. ‘Maybe we could do one big job every Saturday night and make an event of it. We could even get takeaway pizza!’

‘And don’t forget the nets!’ screeched the unfortunately named Farah, who was about two foot tall and was always being mistaken for a monkey, or Martin Amis. ‘I’ll get my coloured pencils out and start drawing it up. This is going to be such fun!’

They all mewed.

‘Didn’t I just hear Holly coming in?’ asked Laura, who was stolid and sat down a lot. ‘That sounded like her bedroom door …’

Damn.

‘No!’ I attempted to telepathically send to them. ‘It must have been the wind. That … mysterious indoor wind.’

‘… Why don’t we go and ask her what she’d like to do?’

I inhaled sharply.

‘Yes, let’s!’ yelled Farah. And there was a pounding at my door.

‘Holly? Holly, are you there?’

Carol, official leader of Scary Clean Freaks Incorporated, put her head round the door assertively. Was it only a week ago I had checked out her ankle chain and pondered whether we’d ever get on? She looked at me sneerily. I sensed that she secretly knew of the scientifically proven inverse relationship between me and housework (the more messy things were, the less inclined I was to do anything about them), even though I’d attempted to be pristine for my first few days.

‘We were just wondering …’ she hissed.

Laura sniffed, noisily, behind her. Laura sniffed all the time. I always wanted to tell her that it was OK; no one was about to make her do double PE any more. Carol shot an evil sideways glance like a viper.

‘Ahem. We were just wondering, given that we’re – ha – divvying up the rota, if there was anything you particularly liked doing?’

I eyed her steadily, not about to be intimidated by someone who ringed their lips with dark lipstick pencil on their skin.

‘How about I take lightbulb-dusting and big spider removal?’

‘Ooh, that sounds good,’ screeched Farah from somewhere beside my knee. Carol dispensed another one of those Robert de Niro-to-doomed-gangster stares.

‘We thought you might prefer loos, sinks and floors,’ she said pointedly.

‘Oh …’ I said. ‘You mean, all of it.’

‘Ha,’ she smiled. ‘Don’t get around to much cooking, do we?’

I realized I’d been outmanoeuvred.

I counterattacked. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to co-ordinate,’ she said. Laura nodded happily.

‘Oh, tough one.’

‘… that means I buy all the cleaning materials, arrange the rota, organize the external cleaning contractors, e.g. the carpet shampooers I’ve got coming in, arrange everyone’s telephone hours and oversee everyone’s painting choices. So we’ve all got quite enough to be getting on with, don’t you think?’

I wanted to try one last stance – perhaps suggesting that Farah take the floors, after all, she was closer – but all I could say was, ‘Telephone hours?’

‘I know, I thought of it,’ Carol said proudly.

‘It’s a great idea,’ said Farah, standing between Carol’s legs.

‘Basically, it means you can only use the phone or get phone calls at your set time each night. Then, when we get the bill in, you pay for all the calls in your time, and nobody lies about the expensive numbers.’

I stared at her.

‘Well, that’s going to cut down on my sex-line income.’

Laura’s eyes widened with shock. Carol laughed politely, to show me that if I felt like fighting her, she was up to it.

‘What’s to stop me making phone calls on other people’s time?’

‘We’re going to have a phone-lock that can only be opened by me. You come to me when you want to use the phone and I’ll see if it’s your hour or not. Really,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘your chores are much easier than mine, believe me.’

‘Oh goodness me, I think I just heard my mobile go off,’ I announced in a flurry.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, when they showed no sign of backing away from my door, ‘I just have to, ehrm, excuse me …’ Fortunately, the henchmen stuck next to Carol and backed away when she gave the signal, as my next move would have been to scream ‘Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!’ whilst shoving them out of the door and pulling a hose on them.

I slammed the door behind them and sat on the bed. My mobile wasn’t going off, naturally, but I took it out anyway and thanked this little machine. How could I ever have thought they were only of use to wankers on buses who thought that someone not on a bus might want to know when they were on a bus? Oh – and how the fuck was I going to get out of here?

Some people pick the wrong men all the time. I pick the wrong places to live. Well, OK, I pick the wrong men too, but anyway. So it was that after finally getting totally creeped out by my last landlord, in Hackney, who smelled of piss and used to turn up at random hours of the night to ‘inspect’ things (my knicker drawer included) – which followed the three girls in Dulwich who had all joined a beardy-weirdy religious cult and refused to allow men over the threshold, except for the cult leader, whom they all slept with whenever he wanted them to – I had ended up here, in a new house-share with three banana brains who all worked in the local hospital as phlebotomists. Apparently this meant they took blood samples from people. I assumed in Carol’s case she simply bit them.

Anyway, they’d advertised in Loot for a fourth member to join a new household in tasty Harlesden, and, amazingly, I got it. Perhaps I was the only one who didn’t blanch at the interview, when Laura came in and reported obediently to Carol that she had just bleached the teacups.

‘And how often do you boil-wash the crockery?’ Carol had asked me.

‘Ehm … I find about every half-hour just about does it,’ I’d gone for, and noticed her put a big tick on my application form, which had been broken down into sixteen handy sections. The relief of going from the dissipated seediness of Hackney – where they wanted extra rent if you got an inside loo – to a brand new ‘executive’ flat in the famous industrial waste area of North West London made it seem like a good deal at the time, but had blinded me to the obvious: i.e., all these people were mad, but because they outnumbered me in the house I was beginning to think that they were right.

I began to inspect my mobile for germs, and was getting really close up when it rang in my face.

I shrieked, did a comedy clown fumble, and dropped the phone under the bed.

‘Are you all right?’ said Carol’s voice from just outside the door. She was obviously listening to everything. I shrieked again, swallowed some air, choked, coughed, and managed to wheeze, ‘Fine, thank you.’

‘It must be pretty dusty under your bed.’

‘Yes, yes it is, thanks,’ I said, sitting upright with the phone. Then I jumped – how the hell did she know where I was? I felt a cold hand of fear.

‘Hello?’ I finally choked into the phone.

‘Do you know, I haven’t made a woman scream like that for years,’ drawled the well-modulated voice.

I relaxed slightly.

‘Josh, you have never made a woman scream like that. In fact, have you ever made a woman?’

‘Oh ho ho. Yes, of course.’

‘In your country of origin?’

He paused.

‘Not precisely.’

I’d been teasing Josh about this for as long as I’d known him, which was a l-o-o-ong time. Because he was attractive and also nice to girls, most people assumed he was gay. For someone with a posh background, a good job, and a nice haircut, he did horrendously badly with the opposite sex, which I couldn’t understand – not that I’d ever wanted to shag him myself; he was so nice.

Anyway, thank God he’d rung me back. Worriedly searching the ceiling for CCTV, I sat back on the bed.

‘Josh, you know when you moved into Pimlico and I said I didn’t want to move there because it was snooty London and you were moving in with Kate who hates me?’

‘Um, yes.’

‘Well, you know, how’s it … how’s the whole flatshare thing going?’

‘It’s going fine.’

‘Right – GREAT! Right. How’s that other guy you got in to fill the space doing?’

‘Addison? He’s just great … Well, quiet, and undemanding.’

That didn’t sound much like me.

‘Uh huh. So, no one’s moving out or anything, then?’

Josh sighed. ‘Don’t tell me. Not another Turkish Lesbian Women’s Collective?’

That had been Hoxteth, two years ago. I’d been kicked out for not liking chickpeas and buying that symbol of male forced dominance, sanitary protection.

‘No. Worse.’

‘The cat lady?’

‘Christ. No, not worse than her. But still, pretty bad.’

I heard Carol’s voice:

‘Holly! Would you like some tea? Because it’s your turn to make it!’

I ignored her.

‘Josh, this is absolutely desperate. Listen, you know that little boxroom you were going to turn into a study?’

‘The one you described as a coffin?’

‘Yup, yup, that’s the one. Ehm, have you …?’

‘Turned it into a study? Not since you were last here. I’ve leased it out as a bedroom, though.’

‘NOOO!’

He laughed.

‘You bastard! Josh, I know this is a huge favour – and please say no if you don’t want to – but please, please, please can I come and live in your coffin? I mean, boxroom?’

‘You’ve asked me this before, Holl,’ he said with a sigh.

‘I know.’

‘Then you always dash off and the next thing I hear from you you’re on the run from a postgraduate mathematics badminton team.’

‘I know. I’m crazy.’

‘You are crazy. Why didn’t you just move in when I bought the place?’

‘Because you’re rich and Kate makes me miserable.’

‘I am not rich, and Kate can’t help being … Kate. Anyway, if that’s how you feel …’

‘No, no! I’m sorry! Please. Please. Please.’

There was a loud knocking at my door.

‘Tea, please, Holly! It’s in the lease!’

‘It’s the Gestapo!’ I whispered. ‘How soon can you come and get me?’

‘I’ll have to check with Kate and Addison.’

‘Josh!’ I screeched, near to tears. ‘Please.’

‘OK,’ he relented. ‘I’ll pick you up at about seven. Have you got much stuff?’

‘Just a coffinful.’

‘And no diving off again, do you hear me?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I mumbled meekly.

I could have snogged Josh, I was so pleased to see him. I wanted to grab hold of his legs round the ankles and sob with gratitude and pour unguents over his feet. Or is that glue?

Carol had not taken the news well, particularly when I retrieved my deposit cheque from the shiny silver box to which only she had a key (I distracted her by upending her Asda coupons all over the kitchen floor then making a dive for the key when she bent over). In fact, she had advanced on me until her face was only a few inches from mine – well, her make-up was. Her face was probably about a foot away.

‘Think you can just do what you like round here?’ she asked menacingly.

‘Yes, I do, actually. That’s why I don’t live with my parents any more.’

‘So, who’s going to take your room? You’ve got to sort that out.’

‘Ah. Yes, well … I’m afraid you’re going to have to sue me for my friends and acquaintances. Here, I’ve written down my forwarding address on this piece of paper –’ I waved it reassuringly. It said: 1 Holly Lane, Hollywood, 020 8555 5555 – ‘and don’t forget to send those bills on to me!’

‘We won’t,’ said Carol grimly. Laura opened and shut her mouth like a fish.

‘Well, I think it’s disgraceful the way you’re leaving Carol in the lurch like this,’ she announced, quivering. ‘All the trouble she’s been to.’

‘And me!’ piped up Farah from somewhere around my ankles. ‘I did the rotas!’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘My best friend’s got cancer. I’m nursing him till he dies.’

Laura backed away, crestfallen.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she muttered.

‘Oh really?’ said Carol. ‘What kind?’

I couldn’t think. ‘Ehm, nose cancer?’

‘You’re sick,’ she said, turning to march out of the room.

‘So are you!’ I yelled after her.

She turned once more, her brutally permed hair a weapon.

‘Well, at least I’m clean and sick.’

Fortunately, Josh’s sporty little spitfire had turned up, and he was honking enthusiastically. Josh did everything enthusiastically.

I tore out of the house.

‘Where the hell am I going to put anything?’ I wailed, after hugging him over-affectionately then examining his two-seater.

‘I’m so sorry, darling. I meant to trade Bessie in for a Volvo but, you know, I just couldn’t find the time.’

‘Ha ha ha. Listen, would you mind sitting on my duvet?’

He gave me a look.

‘Well, it’s not like real sex, is it?’

It took us an hour and a half to crawl back into town. Even though it was only April, Josh insisted on having the roof off, so I had to hang on to everything I owned, like an earthquake refugee.

‘Freedom!’ I yelled into the air. ‘I am never going to move into a crappy flat again.’

‘Except for the one you’re about to move into.’

‘Josh, it could be a shed at the bottom of the garden, I don’t care! I’m FREEE!’

‘OK, steady on,’ said Josh, obviously worried I was about to start leaning dangerously far over the bonnet and singing ‘My Heart Will Go On’.

There are two schools of thought concerning the children of parents who divorce nastily just as you’re approaching puberty. One school says, Well, life is like that – chin up, and maybe the seething atmosphere at home will spur you into staying late at the library and moving on to better and brilliant things in an attempt to pull yourself out of the flotsam. Lots of famous people have divorced parents. They over-achieve for attention. That wasn’t exactly my school.

The other school says you should instantly become über-truculent and demanding, and put everything you do your entire life down to your bad upbringing. I tended to this school, it being rather easier and low maintenance, plus it tended to mean better Christmas presents, if dodgier exam results. It had worked reasonably well during my teens, but when your friends no longer have to see you every day in class and are too busy off doing horrid careers and stuff – well, so, now I was twenty-eight, and it was definitely becoming less fun by the day, especially when everyone I used to know had suddenly become fascinated by MORTGAGES, for fuck’s sake. I just didn’t get it. Boys and pop music – fascinating. Mortgages are what you get when you look up the dictionary definition of ‘not fascinating’. Hence my precipitative flat-hopping.

To make matters even worse, I was starting to realize that my anti-establishment tendencies were beginning to marginalize me – not as a free spirit, as I’d always thought, but along with the old hippies and socialist workers and people who talked about smashing the state but couldn’t actually get it together to wash their trousers – ever. It was extremely depressing. I mean, nobody likes washing their trousers, but I didn’t want it to define my entire existence. To make matters worse, my father, who took up bringing home blonde women full time after he left my mum, had recently brought home one my age. Who also had a mortgage. And a sports car. Sigh.

Josh had a mortgage, but he was also a complete sweetie pie who could be endlessly relied upon in a crisis, as I knew and had shamefully abused in the past.

We finally pulled up in front of his dilapidated Victorian pile in Pimlico.

‘I see you’ve still not got the builders in.’

‘No, I couldn’t afford them,’ said Josh, hopping out of the car without opening the door and pulling up two bin-liners of my stuff. ‘Until now,’ he smiled sweetly in my direction.

‘Ah yes, about that …’ I followed him in, clutching my socks and pants bag, my cheese plant and Frank Sinatra the bear. One of the reasons that I’d wound up in Harlesden in the first place was that being a freelance florist and general under-achieving free spirit didn’t exactly pay very much, and Pimlico was basically posh these days.

He told me, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The going rate for coffins wasn’t so bad after all.

The flat was quiet inside. It was big and tatty and comfortable, and I’d always liked it. Josh had bought right at the top of the market and paid a stupid amount of money for it – apart from being infested with dry rot and woodworm and all sorts of other nasty moving things, it needed a new roof – but it was a good homey home. The kitchen was large, with nasty old units, a rickety table and four chairs in the middle, cracked floor tiles, and a huge window at the back which opened on to a rusty excuse for a fire escape. I pottered about in my tiny new room, mostly leaning against cupboards to get them to shut and stuffing things under the bed.

‘Umm, sorry about the mess,’ hummed Joshua when I went back into the kitchen for a cup of tea. ‘It’s not usually … Well, in fact, it is.’

‘Great!’ I said.

He smiled weakly at me. I leaned across the table.

‘Josh, thank you. I’m sorry I forced you into this. I promise I’ll be a good tenant. You’ll see. I promise.’

He grinned back at me.

‘Good. And I could do with the company, to be honest – Kate works all the time and Addison is, well …’

‘Yikes!’ I pounced immediately. ‘Tell me the gossip about Kate.’

‘Oh, she’s a complete bitch, as ever,’ said Kate, striding into the kitchen and dumping a Marks and Spencer’s bag, an enormous briefcase, a Nicole Farhi raincoat and an expensive leather handbag on to one of the rickety chairs.

‘Hello, Holly. Josh left me a message on my voicemail. Which I got about ten minutes ago. But never mind, eh? Welcome anyway.’

I went to give her a hug or something, but she was already en route to the bottle opener. Josh touched her lightly on the arm.

‘How was your day, Skates?’

‘Great. Great. As usual. Two sexist comments, four reports to do this week, one irregular forecasting, and I have to be in Dublin for 8 a.m. tomorrow morning, to give a presentation on a report I haven’t even read yet. Then back in the office by noon to account for myself, two more meetings and a 4 p.m. deadline for the Kinley account. Oh, and then a client dinner with a bunch of ghastly old bores who’ll try and feel me up in the Met bar.’

Josh nodded sagely. Kate pulled the cork with a savage ‘pop’ and poured out three humongous glasses of wine.

‘So, Holly, what are you up to these days?’

Kate had always intimidated me. We’d only really met because the three of us were on the same corridor of student halls. We’d both stayed friends with Josh – most people did – but never really got on with each other. She was rather more of a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-type person – she didn’t actually say ‘lickspittle’, but you could tell when she was thinking it.

She’d done business studies and got some hugely well-paid and prestigious job in the City, which hadn’t helped relations between us particularly. I always felt she was just about to offer to buy a Big Issue off me.

Actually, that wasn’t quite why we didn’t get on. Specifically, well, you know in Freshers’ Week, one is often, er, tacitly encouraged to get … Well, anyway. Originally, there were the three of us in a row on one of those grotty endless corridors that was distinctly not the Brideshead University model I’d always dreamt of. It was in Coventry for a start.

Students were still sharing showers, a good life lesson for future flatshares in how much YEUCH people are actually made of, and how, just when you think you’ve seen everything, there’s always a new variety of repulsiveness.

Josh had opened his door on the very first day and sat there crudely beaming at everyone who walked past, a technique which probably wouldn’t have worked so well if he hadn’t been so blond and pretty. I wandered in there by accident, already worried by how keen my dad and Blondie had been to leave me, but faintly reassured by the seemingly enormous cheque now burning a hole in my pocket. It worked out to a lot of Caramac bars, although, as I found out four weeks later, not that many beers and taxis.

‘Hello,’ said Josh. ‘This place is nice, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a shit hole!’ I said, looking around at the regulation stained walls, stained carpet and dodgy pinboard.

‘Oh yes …’ He took in the room. ‘So it is. Oh well – only three years to go.’

‘And a week,’ I said.

‘Of course. Hmm. What do you think the cooking facilities are like?’

‘I don’t know – what’s a cooking facility?’

Through the paper-thin walls we could hear loud, fairly dramatic sobbing. We raised our eyebrows at each other.

‘What is this, primary school?’ I said, a tad callously.

‘Maybe she misses her mother,’ said Josh.

I sniffed derisorily, something I’d been practising throughout my teens to great effect.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s go cheer her up.’

‘Ah, the beginning of my crazy university years,’ I said, but I followed him dutifully outside.

Next door, perched on the narrow bed, with the door open, sat Kate, thin and a little pinched-looking, and dressed head to toe in immaculately ironed Benetton separates. Even though she appeared distraught with grief, she still had been composed enough to hang up lots of perfect shirts, I noticed.

‘Hello there,’ said Josh. ‘I’m sure it won’t be as bad as all that. When I went to boarding school I cried for my mother for four days. Mind you, I was six years old at the time.’

‘My mother?’ said Kate, spluttering. ‘I don’t miss my mother! I just can’t believe I didn’t do better in my A-levels than to end up in this shitty place!’

‘Didn’t you work hard?’ I asked her. That was my excuse.

‘Of course I worked hard!’ she said, looking up. ‘I had a fucking place at Magdalene.’

‘Oh, I see. They only want really tall girls, don’t they?’ I said sympathetically.

‘What the fuck’s nervous anxiety, anyway?’ Kate went on, ignoring me. ‘I’ll tell you what it is: it isn’t enough to get your exam marks upgraded. I wish I’d had a fucking full-on nervous breakdown. Then they’d have had to let me in.’

‘Have one now,’ I suggested. I knew she wasn’t actually shouting at me, but she was certainly shouting in my direction.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Josh kindly, touching her on the shoulder. ‘Would you like to come out with me? I’m going ice skating at the Christian Union.’

‘You’re not Christian are you?’ I said, disappointed. I’d liked him.

‘No! But I sure can SKAAAAAATE!’

So the three of us ended up in one of those forced friendships that come together extremely quickly out of necessity in early college. Kate quickly decided that Josh was her own personal property, which annoyed me. OK, so both of them had flat stomachs and good posture, but I didn’t like the assumption that as Kate was prettier than me I should butt out, especially as I didn’t even fancy Josh and in fact assumed pretty much from the start that he was gay, rather than, as I later found out, completely and utterly confused.

Kate hadn’t cottoned on to this, however, and insisted on treating me as an annoying kid sister hanging round with the grown-ups, her repertoire including: ‘You again, Holly?’ ‘You don’t mind, do you, but I’ve only got two cups?’ and ‘Sorry, Holl, but it’s only a plus-one.’ Soon their status as monied and classy students at a poor and common college became clear, and I started going out with a greasy sports science student who once tried to teach me kung fu and chipped my collarbone, so I pretty much left them to it – which doesn’t mean to say that she didn’t really fuck me off, Kate being the accepted sucking pig to Josh’s sow and my runt. An analogy bordering on the disgusting, but that’s how it was.

In time, of course, Kate realized that simply because her and Josh went to a lot of places JUST THE TWO OF THEM, it didn’t actually mean they were a couple. But not before I got my revenge…

In a misguided attempt at collegiate unity, two socially inadequate but horrifically bouncy ‘ents officers’ – to be involved in ‘ents’ of course meaning you are anything but – arranged a ‘Corridor Convulsion’ early on in our first term. There was a good and complicated reason for it at the time, but what it meant in effect was an excuse to haul in lots of weepingly cheap alcohol and stuff it down the faces of naïve but nubile eighteen-year-olds in the hope that they might accidentally strip their tops off and run down the corridor. Actually, maybe that was the official reason and it just sounded all right in those days.

Josh of course would do anything of a community nature enthusiastically and Kate was still in the ‘gamely joining in’ stage, before she realized that she could dress up as a giant antelope and it still wasn’t going to make her sexually attractive to Josh, so we all trawled into the hallway to figure out what was happening.

What was happening was what happens anywhere with horribly diverse sects of shy and socially inept people away from home for the first time and unsure of their very identities: groups of twos and threes stood in small corners grunting nervously at each other and downing obscure former communist bloc spirits as fast as they possibly could. A group of rugby- or aspirant rugby-playing lads started getting rowdy in the corner, and the ents officers gibbered around, excited yet again at the possibility of not being one of the 29 per cent of students who leave Coventry certified virgins. What they didn’t yet know was that 100 per cent of ents officers leave 100 per cent of all institutions certified virgins.

A petite, very pretty blonde girl who wore enormous fleeces and was clearly out to score with a rugby boy – Why? being the only unanswered question – became the first person, at around 10.30 p.m. and after a lot of goading, to take off her top and flee down the corridor, bouncing merrily, to massive applause. After that, about fifteen of the men immediately tried to do it with their cocks out – what is it about British men and being completely naked for no good reason? I’ve seen someone play the piano with his.

Anthropologists would have had a field day with all this, given, truly, how few of us that year had yet seen another buck-naked human being we weren’t blood related to.

Finally, and it all starts to get a bit hazy around this point, pretty much everyone had done a quick streak and been accepted into the gang. Mine would have been sexier had I not stumbled over somebody’s outstretched foot and made a noise which sounded like a fart (but wasn’t) on my way down. Josh skipped along his, to yells of ‘faggot’, but generally good-natured ones.

And at last there was only one more person to go. Kate would clearly rather have died than take part in anything so vulgar. She had that faraway look in her eyes she got whenever she dwelt on what romantic and glistening evenings she could be having at Oxford right now. I started egging her on, and pointing out to people that she was the only one who hadn’t done it, just in case she got away with it.

‘Shut up, Holl,’ Kate hissed.

‘Kate hasn’t gone! Kate hasn’t gone!’ I shouted loudly to the rugby players.

‘KATE! KATE! KATE! KATE!’ they started chanting.

Kate flushed redder than ever.

‘Everyone else has,’ I said petulantly.

‘Go on, Skatie,’ said Josh, who, due to his upbringing, was completely unable to understand why someone wouldn’t want to take part in group-enforced humiliation in the name of fun. The rugby boys name-calling had failed to abate and formed an increasingly ferocious background.

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake!’ said Kate, furious.

‘KATE! KATE! KATE!’

Kate pulled up her top extremely quickly and made a sprint down the corridor. Immediately, silence fell. Quite simply, Kate had the flattest chest anyone had ever seen.

Of course, nowadays, that doesn’t matter. Kate Moss resembles a boy who’s been stung by two bees and nobody bats an eyelid. But when you’re nineteen and desperate to find yourself attractive …

To cut a long story short, that was never a moment when anybody needed me to inadvertently expostulate:

‘Christ, they look like two Pop-Tarts!’ loudly enough for everyone to hear.

Kate handed me one of the glasses of wine.

‘Sorry, I didn’t hear that … what did you say you were up to again?’

‘Ehm, I’m … I’m a florist.’

‘Still! My goodness. Is it … fulfilling?’

‘Huh?’

Fulfilling? I couldn’t even conceive of what that might mean, and was standing with a confused expression on my face until I remembered that when Kate asked a question, she required a logical answer quickly – time being money, etc.

‘Yes, it is,’ I said. ‘The pay is shit and the hours are crap and your hands are wet all day, but apart from that it’s fantastic.’

She smiled thinly. ‘Never mind, eh? You’d probably hate a career job anyway.’

‘This is a …’

‘Where do you work?’

‘Actually, I’m freelance at the moment …’

Well, I couldn’t commute to Hackney Flowerarama any more, but I did have a chum at New Covent Garden who was going to let me help out.

‘Oh, so you’re like a temp florist? How funny!’

I didn’t know what to say to that, so I went and helped Josh, who was chopping onions for spaghetti bolognese. I could see Kate reflected in the kitchen window. She did look fantastic – tired, but fantastic. Her dark hair was glossy and tied back in a chignon, and she was wearing an expensive fawn suit. I wiped my hands on my pinafore and sighed.

‘Tell me about your mystery flatmate. Is he away?’ I asked Josh.

Josh and Kate looked at each other and smiled.

‘Away?’ echoed Kate. ‘Addison doesn’t do away.’

‘What – you mean, he’s in the house?’

I felt nervous suddenly. I’d been stomping about merrily for two hours, singing and making loud noises in the toilet, and all along there had been an additional presence. Spooky.

‘Oh yes,’ said Josh. ‘I’ll probably leave some food out for him later on. He forgets to eat until he faints, so I put it by his door.’

Curioser and curioser.

‘Can I meet him?’

They exchanged glances again.

‘Ehm, best not.’

‘Well, I’ll have to meet him sometime,’ I argued. ‘What if he just pops up in the bathroom one day? I’ll scream the place down.’

‘You might do that anyway,’ said Kate.

‘Addison is very … well, sensitive. He’s a computer buff, you see.’

Only Josh still used words like ‘buff.’

‘You mean, what – an anorak? A geek? Dork? Nerd?’

‘Ahem.’

Josh gave a polite cough as a shadow flitted across the open kitchen door.

‘Is that him?’ I hissed. ‘I’m going to see.’

Kate stepped in front of me and shut the door.

‘What is going on?’ I asked. ‘Is he hideously deformed, like the Elephant Man?’

Josh patted me on the shoulder.

‘Sorry, Holls. We’re not doing this on purpose. Addison does a lot of highly technical, top-level computer work, and he hates being disturbed when he’s working.’

‘But he’s in the flat.’

‘He works from home.’

‘And for about twenty-three hours a day,’ muttered Kate. ‘It’s really easy to forget a hard day’s work when you’ve got beeps and tapping going on all night next door to you.’

‘Better than some things …’ I started to say, then remembered that Josh’s bedroom was next door to mine, and didn’t.

‘So, I mean, what’s he like?’ I started again. A man of mystery? Sounded good to me.

‘Oh, you tell her, Josh. I’m absolutely exhausted,’ said Kate. She took out her Psion and started stabbing at it, making me feel like a complete idiot. Then Josh and I shared our ‘it’s Kate’ glance, and I felt a bit better.

‘Well …’ started Josh, stirring the sauce. I went and leaned on the cabinet next to him.

‘He’s quiet. Very quiet. In fact, I think he’d rather not speak at all. He was amazed when we didn’t have e-mail in every room in the house so we could just communicate that way.’

I raised my eyebrows. At the table, Kate let out a long ‘How can I be so busy and successful when there are people in my kitchen making spaghetti bolognese?’ type sigh.

‘Whenever he bumps into one of us in the hallway he acts like a startled rabbit, like he genuinely wasn’t expecting anyone to be there. And he refuses to answer the phone or the doorbell. And he never eats.’

‘Hence the food drops.’

‘Hmm? Yes.’ Josh artfully splashed a measure of red wine into the sauce, crying out ‘Whoops!’ flamboyantly when he got a bit on his professional apron. I really could understand why women had a hard time taking him seriously.

He caught me watching him.

‘Am I being gay again?’

I smiled at him, colouring slightly. When we were at college, I used to tease him on a semi-continual basis when he’d bring his girl stories to me, but now I was his tenant, and it felt a bit uncomfortable.

‘That was a very masculine dash of wine. But I am definitely fascinated by my new invisible flatmate.’

‘Try taking the room next to his – it’ll wear off soon enough,’ growled Kate from the table, where she continued to do Very Hard Sums.

‘Oh, can I?!’ I yelped, before realizing the faux pas.

‘Sorry, darling,’ said Josh, ‘but you’re not – aha! – coffin up enough rent for that!’

Kate and I stared at him in disgust until he apologized.

Dinner was good. Josh liked to cook, and was good at it. He had a sinecure at his family’s ancient law firm near Chancery Lane, which required him to turn up at about ten thirty looking well groomed, take long lunches and impress foreign clients with his Englishness and hand-made shoes, before retiring to the senior partners’ offices at four thirty to partake of an early gin and tonic before heading home. Which was just as well, as he wasn’t the most academic of characters: you wouldn’t want him defending you in a murder trial whilst simultaneously admiring the court cornicing. The only thing preventing the absolute outbreak of class war was that he didn’t get paid that much for it. It just stunned me that such things still existed outside of the kind of stuff Rupert Graves does in all his films.

Kate ate about three bites, wiped her lips ostentatiously with a napkin then declared she had mounds to do and retreated to her room with the remainder of the wine. Her good night to me was curt, to say the least.

I looked at Josh.

‘What is with her?’ I asked. I mean, she’d always been uptight, but this was real carrot-up-the-bum stuff.

Josh toyed with his spaghetti.

‘Oh, it’s that stupid job of hers,’ he said. ‘She works fourteen-hour days, then comes home like a bear.’

‘What, pooing in the woods?’

‘Grizzly.’

‘Oh. Good spag bol.’

‘Thank you.’ Josh coloured prettily. ‘So, anyway, I keep saying she should change it, do something less stressful, but she just bares her teeth at me and hisses something about me being privileged and how I would never understand what it means to fight for something.’

‘Her dad’s a GP, isn’t he?’

‘Uh huh.’

‘Hmm. But she must make an absolute fortune. Why does she live here?’

Josh looked faintly amused.

‘Charmingly direct as ever, darling.’

‘Oh, you know what I mean.’

‘I know. I’m not sure, really. She does make a stinking amount of money, though. Something like more in her bonus than I do in a year.’

Than I will in a decade, I thought to myself mournfully.

‘We moved in together when I came down,’ Josh went on, ‘and she’s been here ever since, so I suppose she likes it. It’s only four stops on the tube, and pretty cheap.’

I remembered a rather better reason though. Well well well, after all this time. But then, even if she didn’t still fancy him, I suppose if I was feeling stressed out, I wouldn’t mind coming back to a nice warm flat and spaghetti bolognese and someone nice like Josh you could be rude to. Well, she certainly wouldn’t get away with being rude to me.

‘Would you mind getting out of that shower!’ screeched Kate, banging her Clarins bottles on the door at five o’clock one morning (I was doing nights at the market). She carried them daily in and out of the bathroom, presumably in case I stole them.

‘I don’t know what can be keeping you in there that long. You can only smell of flowers, surely.’

She banged again.

‘OK, OK, I’m coming,’ I yelled back, frantically drying myself and wondering if I could stab her with a cotton bud.

‘I have got a plane to catch, Holly,’ she said. Because I have a career and you don’t, she might as well have added.

‘Oh no! The Euro will fall!’ I opened the bathroom door dishevelled, wrapped in two threadbare towels which almost but didn’t quite cover all my bits.

‘Will it?’ she said, instantly alert, then relaxed as her brain realized the context. She gave a tight smile, said, ‘Excuse me,’ and slipped past me, unbelting her Liberty robe.

Bitch, I thought to myself – one of my litany of dreaded ‘thought retorts’ – and headed for bed.

Over the next week or so I started to settle in. I was working part-time shifts at the New Covent Garden market, day and night, and as Kate went to work at 6.30 a.m. and returned at 9 p.m., I normally missed her, and steered well clear of the shower in the morning.

The house, though always untidy, was clean – for me, a perfect state of affairs. Kate paid someone to come in and ‘do’ once a week, which I disagreed with in principle but thoroughly enjoyed the benefits of. It began to feel like home, despite the coffin, which was nine foot by seven. Not the kind of place you’d let a cat visit, in case its brains got bashed to bits in a nasty swinging incident.

I was used to creeping in at odd times of night, and was always amazed to hear the faint tapping of fingers on a keyboard, random beeps and small buzzing noises from Addison’s room.

I never saw him, but fantasized wildly about him. A monster? Kate and Josh’s deformed lovechild, half man half robocop? Perhaps he was blind! That was why he crept around in the dark and didn’t go outside. I had a brief romantic reverie of my being his life partner, caring for him, being his lover and his guide; ‘Holly,’ he would say, ‘you, you are my eyes.’ And, plus it would be a double bonus when I got to forty and wouldn’t have to bother about how I looked.

Then, ping, I realized that the Internet is in fact an almost purely visual medium, and apologized in my head to all the blind people in the world.

Finally, after about a fortnight, I cracked.

It was about 3 a.m., and the house was completely still. I’d been unpacking tulips from 11 p.m., but the work had thinned out and Johnny, my gaffer, had sent me home. It took about ten minutes on Josh’s bicycle – in the very dead of night I would glide down hills, hands free, and have to restrain myself from shouting out loud to fill up the rare London silence.

I had crept into the house, exhilarated and pink-cheeked from the spring wind. My hair was tangled, and I didn’t feel sleepy. My hours were so topsy-turvy, I didn’t know when I slept. The television, however, was in the sitting room, which backed on to Kate’s room – so, no Channel 5 soft porn for me. I was about to head through to the chilly kitchen to make some tea when I saw the omnipresent blue glow underneath the door, the familiar tap tap tap.

Well, sod it, I thought to myself. Two weeks living in the same house as someone and not seeing them is simply freaky and unnatural. There could be nothing wrong with just popping in and introducing myself, for fuck’s sake. It was only … well, ten past three in the morning. I felt strangely excited, like playing ring-the-bell-and-run-away. If I got yelled at, I could always hide and say it was Kate.

I crept across the hall, instead of walking across it like I normally did when I came in late at night so everyone would know it was me and not a burglar; steeled myself and rapped gently on the door.

The typing noise stopped. Encouraged, I tapped again. ‘Hello?’

There was no response.

Feeling like an idiot, I repeated, ‘Hello?’ leaning slightly on the door.

Clearly it wasn’t locked.

Half horrified at what I was doing, I pushed open the door.

The large room was dark, but light streamed in from the moon and the streetlights. The place was also lit up with an unearthly green glow, which I realized, once my eyes adjusted, came from a huge VDU. The room was so filled with banks of electronic equipment it was like the flight deck of the Starship Enterprise. LEDs lit up and monitors bleeped quietly.

Sitting with his back to me was a very tall man, who resembled a normal man who’d been put on a rack and stretched out. His black spiky hair stuck up straight from his head, and I couldn’t see his face.

He didn’t turn round, although he must have heard me, because his back stiffened.

‘Hello?’ I whispered. ‘Sorry to disturb you, but I saw you were still working and, well, I moved in here a couple of weeks ago and my name’s Holly and I thought that, you know, since we lived together, we should perhaps lay eyes on one another.’

I swallowed. My voice seemed to echo in the empty room, and I felt like a complete dork. Then, when he didn’t reply, I started to get annoyed. It wasn’t like I was demanding anything unreasonable. This was only basic human contact, for fuck’s sake! The way Kate and Josh tiptoed around him was ridiculous. He needed shaking up, if you asked me. He still hadn’t even bothered turning round! That was bloody rude.

‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t realize you were so rude. I won’t bother you again. Excuse me.’

I turned to go. Slowly, I heard the revolving chair creep round behind me. I looked back.

A huge pair of dark brown eyes, blinking rapidly, regarded me with a mixture of curiosity and fear. I almost gasped aloud. He was … well, just spectacularly beautiful. Just, like, Oh my GAWD! Not in a pretty, boyband poofy kind of way, but that chiselled, sensitive look that cries out, ‘I may have been staring at this computer screen for fifteen hours, but as my physiognomy suggests, I have the soul of a poet. And not one of those ones with hair in their noses that you see in the Sunday supplements.’ Even from behind his glasses you could see that his eyelashes cast long shadows on his ludicrously high cheekbones and a frown seemed to pass over his exquisitely high forehead.

I managed to quell my first urge, which was to lie at his feet and present my stomach to him to be tickled, when I noticed he was wearing a Star Trek T-shirt. How original of someone who played with computers all day long to like Star Trek, I thought.

‘Excuse me,’ he said. His voice was quiet and soft, with no discernible accent – not like mine. I got very London, selling flowers every day.

He looked at his hands. His fingers were incredibly long – practically prehensile. I actually sighed.

‘I was a bit caught up in what I was doing.’

He sounded apologetic, and I was in one of those brain-twisting moods whereby if you meet someone who is clearly your soul mate you feel an overwhelming urge to be rude to them.

‘So you don’t listen to people when they come to say “hello”? What were you doing?’

He stared at his hands again and didn’t say anything. I thought for a bit.

‘OK, shall we start again?’ I announced. ‘I’m Holly, and you’re Mr Addison, I presume.’

‘Not mister, just Addison,’ he said quietly.

‘Ooh, what a great name!’ I said, reaching out to shake his hand. He didn’t take mine, and regarded it with some alarm. ‘Addison Madison?’

What? What magic potion had I just taken to turn me into the Moron of the Western World? I cringed.

He blinked. His eyelashes practically bounced off his sweetly pouted lips. ‘Ehm, no … Addison Farthing.’

‘Farthing, Farthing – right, of course, how silly of me,’ I gushed, like I was interviewing him on a breakfast show. ‘Of course.’

I was backing away and backing down big time.

‘So, anyway, I thought, you know, time to say hello, pop in, have a chat …’

Addison continued to regard me impassively.

‘So, here we are, having a chat … and it’s been lovely chatting to you. Really. We must do it again some time.’

He continued staring at me as I backed out of the room.

‘Great! Nice to meet you! Nice Starship Enterprise, by the way!’ I said as I got to the door, but he was already turning back to his enormous screen and had clearly forgotten my very existence. Huge cables twisted round the table legs, heading off God knows where. The tapping started up again and I closed the door gently. Outside in the hall I leaned on the wall and let my jaw drop in wonder. Oh my God. No wonder Kate liked him locked away.

‘I spoke to Addison last night,’ I announced to Josh the next day. He was eating dinner and I was eating breakfast and trying to avoid his dinner – the smell of pork chops half an hour after I’d woken up made me feel a bit sick, I had discovered.

Josh looked up at me from an article he was reading in Homes & Gardens. I’d suggested Loaded as a slightly more useful manual for pulling, but it didn’t quite suit him, somehow.

‘And?’

‘And?? AND?? Excuse me, but as landlord of this establishment, I do believe it is your duty to let me know when you’re hoarding Johnny Depp in geek form on your property!’

‘You never asked.’

‘Why did I never think to ask?’ I asked, slapping myself on the forehead. ‘So many gorgeous computer geeks in the world, so little time. Josh! If it hadn’t been for my extreme bravery last night I might never have met my future life partner! Ooh –’ a thought occurred to me – ‘and our kids get to be brainy, too!’

‘He is very pretty, I suppose,’ said Josh, a tad dreamily. I narrowed my eyes at him.

‘Only in an objectively aesthetic way! Not in a romantic way! Not that there would be anything wrong with that! But I don’t! Not that it’s bad!’

‘Stop, stop! You’ve got caught in the Richard Gere “I’m not gay/but it’s OK” cycle of eternal justification. The only way to break free is to remove that plate of pork chops from my vicinity before I vomit on it.’

‘Thank goodness for your magic spell-breaking powers,’ said Josh, picking up his plate and moving over to the sink.

‘You know, I must have him,’ I went on. ‘He will be mine.’

‘But he doesn’t talk.’

‘That’s OK. I can talk to you, or my mother. Addison is for kissing and worshipping.’

‘So, like, there’s no difference between me and your mother?’ asked Josh gloomily, rinsing his plate off.

‘Well, you haven’t ordered me to help with the washing-up yet, so, perhaps there is.’

‘Don’t you have work to go to?’ he asked, a tad crossly.

‘Ah, that’s more like it.’

‘Fine. See you later. I’ll just continue here on my lifelong mission of female identification.’

I popped my head back round the door.

‘You know, if you meant that sarcastically, you should really take that pinny off.’

He gave me the V’s.

‘Bye, Addison!’ I called out cheerily as I passed his door. There was a small break in tapping in response. I took it as a good sign.

Two

It was getting dark when I hopped on the bike and headed up to the market. Going out in the chilly nights was the worst; I knew I had several hours of rushing about with my hands wet to come, and all around me the nine-to-fivers were heading for home, fresh pasta and The Bill. And they all made twice as much as me. It didn’t seem fair. Working in the market wasn’t anything like working in a shop. Then, you got to choose things yourself and put them together, and if someone had been rude to you on the phone you could put a bug in their gladioli. Here, I had to check ten thousand tulips and try to work out which ones were the best.

I worked for Johnny, who was wizened and had been on the flower markets for four hundred and seventy years, as he never stopped reminding me.

‘Aye, you never saw colours like that in my day,’ he’d snort derisively at one of the more over-the-top hybrids.

‘That’s because everything was in black and white, then,’ I’d point out to him. ‘It was the olden days.’

‘People used to eat flowers during the war, you know.’ He was quite one for reminiscing. In fact, he was absolutely, bar none, the best person I’d ever met at making up things about the war.

‘Hey, Johnny,’ I waved to him as I whizzed round the corner. The lorries hadn’t started to unload yet, so people were standing around, smoking roll-ups and gossiping about magnolias. The flower people despised the fruit people in the next set of bays, and they in turn thought the flower people were a bunch of big pansies who couldn’t lift a box of melons if their lives depended on it.

‘Hey there, lass.’ He regarded me critically. ‘You know, when I was your age, I was selling out the back of my own van.’

‘Johnny, you have no idea how old I am. In fact, I’m nine years old. And I have my own van. I do this for fun.’

‘I never met a lassie who knew when to shut up,’ he observed mournfully, and threw me over a pair of heavy gloves.

I’d only been there a couple of weeks, and already I hated it. It was exactly like school. The girls all wore inappropriate clothing, smoked behind the sheds and picked on me. Either that or they were so stupid they had to be reminded every day how to pick up a box of flowers without drooling on it.

So I tended to slog away on my own, pausing only to hurl abuse at Johnny or to point out things to the drooling girls along the lines of ‘Box – there! … You see box? Pick up box?’

The smoking girls teased me because I’d been to college, particularly Tash, their queen, this scrawny girl with thick black eyeliner who had a real mother-smoked-in-pregnancy look about her. Tonight she sidled up alongside me, observed my work closely for several minutes, and then said:

‘Hmm, yes, I see now why that needed a degree – getting all those tulip heads in a line can’t be easy.’

The rough boys all guffawed and I tried to laugh but couldn’t. I hated her, and I hated being bullied, and however rude I could be to Johnny it wouldn’t translate to this lot. They were rough as badgers’ arses.

‘Could you pass the sign-in sheet?’ I hated it but sometimes I just had to talk to her.

‘Sorry, love, I’ve only got a GCSE in general studies.’

All the boys laughed again, and one of them shouted, ‘Oi, watch out, Tash, she’ll trip on the chip falling off your shoulder.’

I grimaced and pretended to join in, boiling inside, but really I felt like when I was taken by some older girls to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show when I was eleven – it was all too trashy and I just didn’t get it, but I was laughing along anyway. They were mean, mean kids. Because I didn’t blow cigarette smoke out of my nose they called me TinBits.

‘Please,’ begged one of the lads, bending on one knee before me, ‘your exquisite virginal majesty, might I just for one second peek up your skirt?’

‘She’s got her knickers welded to her bottom,’ yelled Tash.

I very nearly flashed my tits at him just to piss him off, but instead made a hasty vow to myself to apply for every florist’s job in a five thousand-mile radius.

For the rest of the night, Tash contrived to make fourteen derogatory remarks, upset my flowers four times and spend at least an hour talking about me (I suspected) on prolonged fag breaks with the lads. I was being bullied! I couldn’t believe it! This wasn’t fair.

My shift finished at 4 a.m. and I freewheeled home as usual, down the hill back to the big house. I crept in and saw the light on under Addison’s door. The urge to see him again was overwhelmingly strong so I wandered into the kitchen and made two cups of tea. I didn’t know how he liked it, so I put three sugars in for luck as I’d never seen him eat – he probably needed the nutrition. Then I ferreted around for a couple of biscuits to add to it, but the only thing going was a very lonely Penguin – Kate allowed herself one every fortnight. I took it anyway, planning to replace it, pronto.

I knocked on the door softly.

‘Addison, it’s me.’

The soft clicking noises stopped for a second. I could imagine him desperately trying to wrack his brains for a single person he could be expected to identify from a ‘me’.

I pushed the door again and popped in.

‘I made tea!’ I announced, like a fifties housewife.

His short-sighted – oh, but beautiful – eyes swivelled round to focus on me. His glasses were sitting on top of the mother-ship console.

‘Tea!’ I indicated by holding the cups up and motioning like a lunatic.

He focused on the cup and followed its path as I went to place it beside him whilst I wondered if he was mentally subnormal.

‘Not there!’ he barked.

‘OK, OK, put the gun down. How about I hand it to you?’

Slowly he extended his arm. I placed the cup in his hand, handle facing outwards – which meant burning a hole in my hand, but I didn’t mind because when he took it, the tips of our fingers touched, and I swear I felt a bolt of electricity shoot through me.

I waggled the Penguin at him.

‘Penguin?’

He stared at it for a bit then shook his head, so I ate it. After all, as he’d taken the tea, that implied a contract that allowed me to stay for a little bit.

I leaned over. His computer screen was covered in bizarre symbols, just like in James Bond films.

‘What are you working on?’

He tried to cover up the screen, but as his arms were like matchsticks, it didn’t have much effect. However, as the symbols meant as much to me as EC policy directives, it was a pointless exercise anyway.

‘Ehm, nothing. Thanks for the tea …’

He sipped it, then tried to disguise his gagging reflex.

‘That’s all right. How was your day? Mine was shitty.’

And so I told him all about the nasty boys at the flower yard. Mainly for conversation really, because I knew the second I stopped talking there would be complete silence.

Much to my surprise he appeared to be listening – well, not doing anything else, which had to pass for it.

When I’d finished, I took another sip at my tea and said:

‘So, what do you think I should do?’

He looked at me for a second, then cracked an absolutely heartbreaking smile.

‘Not talk to anyone?’

A sentence! Almost. I grinned back at him, then decided to leave on a high note. I nodded with my mouth closed, mouthed ‘good night’ to him, and retreated, leaving him sniffing suspiciously at his tea.

‘Success!’ I crowed to Josh the following evening. ‘He talked to me.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Well, he told me not to talk to anyone. But apart from that I consider it an outright success.’

‘Oh, speaking of outright success, did you steal Kate’s Penguin?’

Shit; I’d forgotten all about it.

‘Mmmm … maybe.’ I surreptitiously checked round the outside of my mouth in case there was any chocolate left there from last night.

‘You’re in trouble.’

‘OK, OK, I’ll just go out and get her one.’

‘It’s too late. Plus, she knows it’s a blue one. I’d make myself scarce, if I were you.’

Unfortunately I wasn’t working that night and, annoyingly, felt that cold thing you get in the pit of your stomach when you know you’re going to get into trouble later.

‘Argh! I am not in trouble! I am going to go out now and buy her fifteen Penguin biscuits and … and make her eat herself to death like in Seven. I am NOT going to let her intimidate me like this. She is so damn ANAL about everything.’

‘Which is why she’s one of the best corporate raiders under thirty in London –’

‘Just under thirty.’

‘I know what she’s like. Be nice to her. She has it hard enough at work. Everyone is really mean to her.’

‘Ooh, gossip? ’Fess up.’

Josh was an indefatigable gossip, although he wouldn’t thank you for pointing out this particular trait.

‘Well, she just has an overwhelming inability to spot married guys. I mean, they can have a bloody suntan ring round their fourth finger and Kate believes them when they say it’s impetigo. And she’s seeing this guy now who only phones her in two-minute bursts from call boxes at eleven thirty at night, and they do a lot of their dating in their lunch hours … Any day now she’s going to find out he’s another louse. Deep down, I think she realizes they are and it’s all a big psychological mishmash.’

‘Wow,’ I said, nodding thoughtfully. ‘That whole big psychological mishmash thing.’

And we each thought about our own for a second or two.

‘So,’ I resumed, ‘she’s grouchy all the time and it’s not my fault.’

‘I don’t think she’s that happy at having another woman around the flat.’

‘I’m not exactly a threat,’ I said, looking down at where the button should have been on my pyjamas. Fortunately, I’d known Josh a long time.

‘It’s not that. It’s a territorial thing.’

I grunted. ‘What, like cats have? I thought there was a funny smell in my room. Maybe she’s pissed in it.’

‘Ssh,’ said Josh, as we heard the door open.

‘Shit! I’ve forgotten to go out and get the Penguins!’

He winced at me as Kate did her normal arrival routine: an enormous sigh, an elaborate dumping of her expensive accoutrements, and a full-body lunge for the bottle opener.

Josh winked at me, and I smiled manfully.

‘Hey, Kate, how’s it going?’

‘Shit! Holly, did you eat my Penguin?’

I cringed, which wasn’t what was supposed to happen. I was supposed to say something along the lines of, ‘Yeah – do ya wanna make somethin’ of it?’ and spit on the floor. Instead of which I said, ‘Yes. Look, Kate, I’m really sorry, I’ll buy you some more.’

‘No, it’s fine,’ she sniffed, LYING. ‘I’ve only been out working for twelve hours, slaving over a huge offshore investment, which is almost entirely my responsibility, something unheard of for someone under thirty …’

‘Just …’ I said, under my breath.

‘… why on earth should I want or deserve a little bit of relaxation, which I’ve already bought and paid for, when I come home exhausted? I’m silly, really. I should just give it up and mess about with flowers and eat other people’s Penguins all day long.’

She picked up the wine bottle and retreated from the room, continuing, ‘Really, I must just be so, so selfish.’

Once she’d gone I beckoned to Josh.

‘Hand me that bread knife.’

‘Now, you remember what I said …’

‘I heard what you said, and now I am going to kill her with a knife. GIVE it to me.’

‘No.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t think you understand the situation: I am going to have to kill Kate with a knife, and I’m asking you to pass it to me.’

‘Sit down,’ he said, handing me a plate of couscous. ‘Ignore it. What else was Addison saying?’

‘Nothing.’

‘Don’t sulk.’

‘No, I mean it. Actually, nothing. Has he ever spoken to you?’

‘Not really. He just turned up when we put the ad in, and he’d brought so much computer equipment we didn’t have the heart to send him away again. Plus, Kate thought he was cute.’

‘He’s better than cute. Oh, did she try and pull him and fail?’ I asked eagerly.

‘No, she tried talking to him for ten minutes then ran out of attention span. Plus, also, he didn’t show any of the normal signs of bastardy.’

‘Ah, ooh, she is just SUCH a cow!’ I exclaimed again.

‘She’s fine. Now, go out and buy the biscuits.’

‘What! After all that – you must be joking.’

‘Unless you want “all that” every night for the rest of your life, I would go and buy the biscuits.’

‘Fine, fine, fine. I will go and buy the biscuits. Then, I will pee on the biscuits.’

I ended up heading to the gigantic supermarket which is open all night, all the time. I think they keep the staff caged there, like animals. They all have rickets from being out of natural light for so long.

I hate supermarkets. I can stand for hours in the shampoo section, stymied. Should I be putting fruit in my hair? What will happen if I don’t? What is shampoo, anyway? Are there any more foods just out there waiting to be discovered? Etc, etc. As usual, it took me three hours to collect a more or less random selection of products, plus fourteen packets of Penguins. I’d wanted Josh to come with me or, ideally, volunteer to do it himself, but he’d started to get a bit shifty and got out work files to do stern lawyer stuff with – like, as if.

Finally I wandered home, feeling a bit mournful and stopping to put my bags down every five minutes.

When I walked in, the house was very quiet. Josh was locked away in his room – I hoped it was with his Playstation – and Addison had disappeared. I had never even seen him go to the toilet. I liked that. He was too unearthly for bodily functions. Men, or at least the ones I’ve always known, think that it’s endearing to you if they fart a lot. Addison wouldn’t be like that. And then, they’d smell of angel dew.

Feeling mildly nauseous, I backed my way into the kitchen with my sixteen bags, swung them round to dump them on the table and accidentally clobbered Kate on the side of the head. With the one with the tin cans in.

‘Ow!’ she growled at me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I cringed, though I wasn’t really. But I didn’t want her to think I’d done it on purpose.

‘I didn’t do it on purpose!’

‘Oh, forget it,’ she said.

I did a mental double take. That didn’t sound like Kate. Surely she should be demanding my first-born child and threatening to take me to court.

‘Really, I am sorry,’ I said again, putting the rest of the bags down. I saw her properly for the first time. Her eyes were all red, and she was doing the giveaway, back-of-the-mouth sniff. As a world-class crier myself, I knew what had been going on.

‘Are you OK?’ I asked, as sincerely as I could, which of course meant it came out sounding like I was a confessional TV host.

‘I’m fine, really.’ She sniffed properly, and patted down her immaculately glossy hair. Now, there was someone who knew a bit about shampoo.

I started to unpack the shopping.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, casually, as if I was a trained counsellor and did this kind of thing all the time.

‘Nothing … nothing. Oh GOD.’ Her face completely collapsed into tears. ‘I HATE him. I really, really, really, really HATE him! And he doesn’t even CARE!’

I put down the tin of Heinz spaghetti (where had that come from? Had I let a four-year-old do the shopping?) and sat down beside her.

‘There you go,’ I said, patting her lightly on the arm and saying the things you’re supposed to. ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry. Absolutely, he’s a bastard.’

‘You don’t even know him!’ she snivelled.

‘OK, is he a bastard?’

‘YEESSS!’

I patted her harder. ‘OK. Tell me, what happened?’

Her sobbing slowed down a little bit.

‘I was seeing this guy, and I really liked him and I thought … well, stupid bloody me, eh, how dare I think that I could ever go out with someone who wasn’t MARRIED?’

‘Oh no!’ I thought of what Josh had said. ‘I’m really sorry. Didn’t he tell you?’

‘He said he thought I knew. I asked him to come out for my birthday and he said he couldn’t, he had to take Saffy to the dentist …’

‘Who’s Saffy?’

‘That’s what I said. Then he coughed and said, ehm, it was his dog.’

‘A dog dentist.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘So you guessed from that?’

‘Ehm, no. I believed him.’

‘Ooh, nasty.’

She hiccuped. ‘Then I went in to give him a surprise birthday present a day early …’

‘But it’s your birthday.’

She ignored me and sniffed even harder. ‘And he’d left his wallet open on the desk … and I saw a picture of Saffy.’

‘Not a dog?’

‘A five-year-old girl!’

‘Well, kind of a bit like a dog then …’

‘No!’

‘He could be divorced, couldn’t he?’

‘He isn’t. I asked him. And now it’s all over.’ She started sobbing again.

‘Why did no one else in the office tell you this?’

‘I don’t know! I don’t really … talk to the girls in the office.’

I bet you don’t, I thought. In fact, they probably set you up.

‘Would you like some Heinz spaghetti?’

She thought about it for a moment.

‘Yes, please.’

We sat and ate spaghetti in silence. I wanted to broach the topic of Josh, but I couldn’t bring myself to. Also, whenever I’m in Kate’s presence and trying to think of something to say, I always have a horrible compulsion that I’m about to accidentally mention Pop-Tarts, like Basil Fawlty and the Germans.

Kate appeared slightly coy and lifted up her fork.

‘Ummm … would you like to come out for my birthday?’

‘Sure!’ I said. I was so relieved she wasn’t giving me trouble, I’d agreed before I realized what I’d just committed myself to.

Josh wasn’t coming to Kate’s birthday do. He was on parental duty. His parents were officially now genteel poor, living in a huge house they could no longer afford to run. They’d been cleaned out by that, Josh’s education, and the education of his three sisters, who were all beautiful, and all completely stupid. Despite these extremely positive attributes, none of the girls had ever got married, which meant no new influx of old money into the fforbes’ family coffers. The family, though, were holding up very well, marching on with some good stories and a lot of dogs and gin and tonics.

Which left, as far as I could make out, all of Kate’s City friends and, ahem, me. Actually, I wanted to go. Young, rich, probably good-looking men … I liked the sound of it. Obviously, I was going to marry Addison, but that didn’t mean I couldn’t get taken to nice restaurants in the meantime.

Unfortunately, everything I had to wear was grubby – the market was going to make you dirty anyway, so it scarcely mattered – apart from my pyjamas, and I didn’t think they would cut it. Finally, I dug up an old black summer dress which was so faded it could pass as grey, the colour du jour, apparently. It was too chilly, even in April, to wear it, and as I didn’t have a tan it gave me an air of being clinically dead, but it really was all I had, which depressed me more than I wanted to think about.

I teamed it with my favourite daisy necklace and twirled in the mirror. I looked nine.

I was meeting Kate and her gang at some posh pub over an ice rink near Liverpool Street station. It was mobbed and full of braying, identical young men, who had rather better skin than the young men I’d grown up with but were just the same old wankers – with money.

‘You’ve got to take it to the EXTREME!’ one rather red-faced young man was hollering to his chum, two feet away.

‘Quite!’ the other, equally stolid, chap bawled back. ‘That’s why I’m chartering a helicopter in the Canadian Rockies next season!’

‘Uh … yars! Me too!’

The women were all eerily like Kate: their hair was shiny, and their lips were pursed. In fact, it was quite difficult to track Kate down in the thicket of size-eight Nicole Farhi, but I spotted her eventually. She didn’t exactly appear overjoyed to see me, which pissed me off – I was feeling a bit off-the-beam as it was.

‘Thanks for coming,’ she said a little stiffly – reminding me that we were only forty-eight hours from wanting to murder each other. I nodded stiffly back, handed her a parcel and looked around. There were about eight guys in various stages of hee-hawing: my kinds of odds, I thought to myself. All around were champagne bottles and buckets.

‘Great!’ shouted one of the men. ‘More champagne!’

I realized they were talking to me, and I panicked. Meanwhile, Kate had opened my present – a furry penguin. I’d thought it would be funny, but everyone stared at it in disdain.

‘Oh, how charmante,’ said one of the blokes, before the company stared at me one more time, cottoned on to the fact that I probably wasn’t going to be buying them any champagne, then turned back to each other.

Kate gave me a half smile, and handed me a glass of champagne, then prodded the man to her right.

‘James, this is Holly.’

James grunted at me. Kate leaned over to the person he was talking to, and nudged him as well.

‘And this is James B.’

‘James B.’ I nodded.

‘And over there are Jamie Egbert, Jim, and, ehm, Finn.’

Only Finn heard and tilted up his head. At first sight he looked a little odd, and I couldn’t work out what it was. Then I realized that his tie was loosened, and he appeared to be wearing dirty spectacles. This reassured me, and I gave him a rather gushy grin, which clearly terrified him, as he instantly returned to staring at his glass.

‘So!’ said Kate brightly. ‘This is all very nice.’

‘Who are all these Jameses?’ I asked her.

‘Work colleagues, mostly,’ she said.

‘All of them?’

‘Err, yes.’

‘Birthdays can be horrid, can’t they?’ I said sympathetically.

‘What do you mean?’ she snapped.

‘Nothing! Lovely champagne.’

I played with the glass for a second, then tried to lean into the two Jameses’ conversation. They were talking ferociously about tax liability and the nastiness of the government for trying to extract money from their enormous pay-cheques to finance boring old services, and they managed to avoid looking me in the eye for ages whilst I tried to think of a ploy to enter the conversation.

‘I hate tax too,’ I announced when one of them paused for breath. ‘Mind you, I don’t pay more than ten pee in the pound.’

They raised their eyebrows at me. ‘Really? What do you do with it? Is it offshore?’ asked James 1.

‘God, I wish I could figure it out,’ said James 2. ‘Did you form a limited company? What’s your secret?’

‘Ehmm … actually, most years I, just, ehm, fall below the threshold,’ I mumbled.

Their faces registered shock, then instant embarrassment at registering shock – after all, they were terribly well brought up boys.

‘Oh, lucky you,’ said one of them, then clearly wished he hadn’t. I felt an absolute pariah; you really shouldn’t go drinking in the City unless you have at least one toe made of gold or something.

‘What do you do?’ asked James 2, regretting he’d ever bothered to focus on me.

‘Ehm …’ I thought frantically. This conversation, however demeaning, was the only thing I had going on, and it was about to finish two seconds after I said ‘florist’. And they may all have been wankers, but they were handsome, rich wankers, so a girl has got to try. Now, let me see: Astronaut? Philosopher? Nurse? Ooh, they loved that.

‘I’m a nurse,’ I said. It was worth it just to see their little faces light up.

‘Way-hey!’ shouted one of them. ‘What kind of nurse?’

I took another slurp of champagne. ‘I work in the … waterworks department.’

James 2 turned white.

‘Don’t worry, I’ve washed my hands.’

‘Oi! Jimmy! Egbert! Finn! Come and meet Kate’s flatmate – she’s a nurse!’

I hate boys.

Kate shot me a deadly look. I cringed at her. I’d only meant it as a laugh, but if she blew me out, I’d have to basically destroy myself with humbleness.

The other lads came over. They were a bit pissed, and up for ribbing someone they appeared to think was somewhat akin to a prostitute, but with an even kinder heart.

‘Do you have to, like, you know, rub ointment in, like Joanne Whalley-Kilmer in The Singing Detective?’ asked one of them, breathless.

‘Sometimes.’ I nodded sagely. ‘Usually when I’m on night shift.’

There was a collective groan.

‘Do, ahem, nurses still wear uniforms these days …?’ asked one of them, under the pretence of historical analysis.

‘Oh yes. At St Mungo’s our uniforms are white: it’s like a hangover from the days when it used to be run by’ – my pièce de résistance – ‘nuns.’

‘Ooh.’

‘What do you find most interesting in your field? I mean, aren’t you working a lot on prostate disease? Do you find this is becoming more of an environmental syndrome, or does it retain its genetic antecedence?’

Shite! This came from Finn, the one I’d noticed earlier, with the smeared glasses. Smart aleck bastard. A collective groan went up from the other boys. I wondered what a prostate was. I knew it was something to do with willies, but I didn’t know what.

‘Ehm … really, with the greenhouse effect it’s all getting pretty environmental,’ I stammered.

‘Really? Is that true? How fascinating! Where else do you see this type of phenomenon …?’

Annoyingly, the other boys were starting to turn their backs on me. They were obviously used to whoever this mega-nerd was, and sexy nurse was being replaced with scientist nurse. Boo. Kate was still throwing visual daggers in my direction.

‘Oh, all over the place,’ I said carelessly.

‘Really … oh, I know you’re off duty now, and I hate to bother you, but medicine is a real interest of mine and …’ He flushed. ‘Ahem … would you like to get together to discuss it sometime?’

‘Sure,’ I said. You really have to be a troll for me not to agree to go on a date with you. I’ve always figured it’s a law of averages. Of course, that probably explains a lot about my life.

‘OK! OK, brilliant,’ he said, clearly surprised and a bit overwhelmed. ‘Ehm … I know, what about the Natural History Museum?’

What? But you’re a rich City person. I mean, surely I deserved the Oxo Tower at least?

‘Next Saturday? Are you on duty?’

I reluctantly said no, I wasn’t on duty, which at least was the truth.

‘Great! I’ll meet you there at two! OK! Fantastic! Brilliant!’ Unable to stop thanking me, he retreated back to his group of Jameses, where I was disgusted to see him being slapped on the back by his friends. And I wasn’t too proud of myself, either.

Kate came over. ‘Well, you’ve certainly made an impression. Do they know you actually run a daisy hospital?’

‘I’m sorry, Kate. No one would have spoken to me otherwise. AND, hey, it worked! I got a date!’

‘Finn is not a date. He’s a walking CD-ROM.’

‘That doesn’t sound too bad to me. What does he do?’

‘He’s developing string theory for stock markets.’

‘Wow, I don’t know what that is, but it sounds like he must be RICH.’

‘No – wow, he must be DULL. Just a friendly warning … Oh, and he actually works for the University of London, doing a research project, so he’s not even rich.’

‘I’m going to the Natural History Museum with a student?’

‘And he’s going with a nurse.’

The ‘party’ didn’t last too long after that. Bizarrely, the pub shut at nine – it was probably run by the banks, making sure their bonus-slaves didn’t stay up too late enjoying their youth. So we found ourselves back round the kitchen table, slightly drunk, by ten o’clock, opening another bottle of wine. Kate was talking about how much shit she put up with at work, but I kept getting confused with all those Jameses, so I just nodded along generally.

Josh finally returned, a bit wobbly on his gin and tonics.

‘I got a date!’ I hollered, as soon as he walked in the room.

‘No!’ he said, clearly amazed.

‘Yeah, a full-on nerd date,’ said Kate, leaning into her glass of wine.

Josh sat down, his eyes shining.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how did he ask you?’

‘Well, he just said, “Would you like to go to the Natural History Museum …?”’

‘Under false pretences,’ said Kate.

‘And you said yes,’ said Josh, breathless with admiration.

‘Yup!’

‘He just said, “Would you like to go to the Natural History Museum”?’

‘Apparently they let you in half-price if you don’t know anything about science,’ added Kate.

‘And that’s all it takes to ask a girl out.’

‘That’s all it takes to ask me out,’ I said, before Kate pointed it out.

‘Wow,’ said Josh. ‘It’s that simple.’

‘It’s that simple.’

We all stared at our drinks.

‘Kate,’ said Josh, ‘would you like to go to the Natural History Museum?’

Kate’s head snapped up and she looked perturbed.

‘Are you asking me out on a date, or are you just testing?’ she said crisply.

‘Don’t be daft, this is practice. Do you think I can pull it off?’

‘Oh,’ said Kate. ‘No, that would never work.’

‘Right. OK. Fine,’ said Josh.

‘It’s not a universal chat-up line,’ I said consolingly.

‘No, Holly is what’s technically known as easy,’ explained Kate.

‘OK,’ I said, rising somewhat unsteadily to my feet. ‘If you’re going to be horrible, I’m going to talk to my other friend around here, Addison.’

I lurched out of the kitchen, a tad unsteadily, and wandered across the landing, to the fast becoming familiar under-door blue glow.

I pushed the door ajar.

‘Addison!’ I said loudly, for the benefit of my ex-friends sitting in the kitchen. He did that gorgeous rigid back thing. God, I love that.

‘What are you doing?’

I leaned forward, peering over his shoulder. To my amazement, instead of indecipherable computer babble, on his monitor was a picture of a hugely breasted fat lady.

He coloured and immediately dived for the escape button, but it was too late.

‘Addison!’ I said again, shocked. In my slightly drunk frame of mind, I felt deeply insulted. After all, here I was, and he still felt the need to … well.

‘Addison,’ I said a third time. He still wasn’t meeting my eyes. ‘Do you know lots of women?’

His beautiful dark gaze was focused solely on his computer keyboard.

‘Because, you know, you might find … what you’re looking for … closer than you think.’

I couldn’t believe I was being such a tart. On the other hand, tart tactics were required when dealing with someone as shy as this. Plus of course I was pissed – that wonderful moral leveller.

I took his hand.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘you’re very attractive.’ Really, I like to take all my chat-up lines from Dynasty, circa 1986.

His hand lay in mine like a piece of wet melon. Not noticing, I leaned over and kissed his forehead. He smelled of that wonderful Banda paper you used to get in schools: fresh and dry and inky.

He wasn’t kissing back though. I realized this after say, thirty, maybe forty seconds. No reaction. Nada. Nothing. I kissed his head again. He didn’t even move.

‘So,’ I said tartily, ‘ehm, you know where I sleep …’

Sheesh. This was it. This was the pits. Robocop or the Natural History Museum. Even I hadn’t plumbed my own depths before.

Amazingly, he simply took my hand off his forehead and squeezed it. Less amazingly (given he was a sober person who’d just been come on to by a mad harpy), he then handed it back to me and returned to his keyboard. I stood there for about ten seconds more – just to prolong the humiliation, I suppose – then retreated backwards slowly, whilst he busied himself with some computer stuff which, as far as I could see, had nothing more to do with big-breasted Betty.

‘Oh God.’

‘You’ll get over it! You’ve got over worse stuff!’

‘Like what, exactly?’

‘What about that time you taught yourself to snowboard to impress big Eric and broke your ankle?’

Josh was failing to comfort me at the breakfast table. Not only this, but I had an interview today for a real live flower shop, which I had to do after the utter humiliation of basically prostrating myself in front of my flatmate. I wasn’t sure that counted as extenuating circumstances.

‘Anyway, I’ve done much worse things.’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know … what about that time I got bitten by a dog?’

‘Ehm, you know what, Josh? I don’t think that really embarrassed the dog. So it does NOT compare.’

Kate of course had already gone to work, presumably clear-headed and ‘motivated’.

‘Yes, but I cried when I got my tetanus shot.’

‘You must have been about eight years old.’

‘Still embarrassing, though.’

‘And they gave you a cream cake at the end of it, which really means that it does not compare. Now, ask me a question about flowers.’

‘Ehm … what colour are tulips?’

‘OK, ask me a question about a flower you’ve actually met.’

‘I’ll have you know I took the church prize in our village for flower arranging three times in a row!’

‘You surprise me.’

‘They were very … manly arrangements. OK, how do you grow a sunflower?’

‘Stick it in any old shit and ignore it for months.’

We both paused for a minute.

‘That’s my life,’ we both said simultaneously.

I couldn’t believe a flower-shop interview could be so intense. There were three people in the tiny office at the back of the shop: an old bloke who might conceivably have been dead; a woman with very high hair, a monobosom and an imperious expression; and a sullen Indian girl with either a very large bogey or a bolt through her nose – it was hard to tell in the gloomy room.

‘Now, here at That Special Someone, we take our customer care extremely seriously,’ announced the big woman (I’d known she’d start the talking). ‘Can you give us a particular example of good customer care you’ve been involved with in your previous jobs?’

I fucking hate job interviews. They are crap. They ask you all these bloody questions, whereas really they only want to know what you smell like, and how much you’re prepared to say you agree with their bizarre views on racial hygiene.

‘Well,’ I began, modestly, ‘once, these schoolkids came into the shop; one of their little chums had been knocked down by a car – on the school-run, ironically enough – and they’d clubbed all their pocket money together to buy him a princess bouquet, but they didn’t have enough for the delivery charge. So, I took them to little Tommy myself.’

They were buying this. I couldn’t believe it! The big woman was practically wetting herself.

‘Yes?’ she said. ‘Go on.’

‘Well, it turned out that Tommy’s dad owned a major chain of conferencing suites, and we got the contract to do all of them after that.’

The bolt/bogey girl smirked worryingly, but the big lady was overwhelmed. Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie – I mean, if charitable situations like that ever presented themselves, I’d like to think I’d rise to the challenge. None had, that was all.

‘Well, that’s just wonderful. Perhaps you can bring a little bit of that magic to That Special Someone, don’t you think, Mr Haffillton?’

Mr Haffillton declined the chance to appear any less dead.

‘I thought so. So, Holly, what about your horticultural qualifications?’

What about them? They didn’t test you on telephone manner and Cellophane wrapping, the only two genuine skills required.

‘Yes … obviously, I’ve been gaining experience out of London’ – I took the bet they wouldn’t know where Harlesden was, and I was right – ‘but I’ll be back down the Chelsea Physic Garden right away, you bet!’

‘Not on our time, of course!’

‘Ha ha ha! Of course not.’

God, I wish I didn’t need this job, but Tash had given me a wedgie the other day and I’d had to hide and have a cry.

‘Chalitha! Wouldn’t you like to ask a question?’

Chalitha shrugged her black-clad shoulders petulantly.

‘Come on now, Chalitha! We’re all just one happy family here!’ Big Lady grimaced at me as if Chalitha had just made some enormous joke.

‘I dunno … What’s your favourite band?’

I judged the situation carefully.

‘The Sex Pistols.’

‘Cool.’ She nodded her head and turned to the old dead man. ‘She’ll be all right, uncle,’ she announced. Aha. She turned back to me.

‘The last girl liked Mariah Carey.’

Actually, the question clearly wasn’t any more or less stupid than any other job interview question, and certainly got to the heart of the matter.

‘I couldn’t have worked with her,’ I said confidently.

‘No, can you imagine? She’d have worn little miniskirts and warbled emotionally all day.’

‘I just spit,’ I said reassuringly, then burst into a fake laugh when I realized Big Lady was staring at me with raised eyebrows.

‘Ha! ha! Only kidding. Ehm, I think a happy work place is essential to provide the very premium in customer service, don’t you?’

She nodded sternly. ‘Yes. But this is a very efficient business. Naturally, we don’t put up with any hanky-panky.’

‘No, ma’am,’ I said.

She loved the ‘ma’am’ thing, I noted instantly.

‘Well, we’ll be letting you know,’ she said, rising imperiously to her feet.

‘Thank you very much, ma’am.’

I practically walked out backwards.

I hung around that night, desperate for the phone to ring before I had to head up the hill – possibly for the last time.

‘… Then I thought I’d say, “Tash, I’m sorry you didn’t get better womb nutrition and have no prospects, but just LEAVE ME ALONE!”’ I announced for Josh’s benefit.

‘And, for the boys, I thought I’d pity them too. Kind of like, “Isn’t it a shame you’re just so deeply ignorant?”’

Josh was chopping vegetables, but he stopped to look up at me. ‘You don’t think that’s a little … well, you know, deeply deeply fascist?’

‘I think it’s only fair after what they’ve put me through. Really, I’m very humanitarian.’

‘Ah yes, Mr Gandhi.’

‘Exactly. I mean, it’s not as if I’d ever have the balls to say any of it.’

‘You could try, if you feel that strongly about it.’

Kate wandered in, and waved approximately, too exhausted to talk.

‘Yes, and die in the attempt.’

I thought for a bit.

‘Josh, you know, I lie all day long and think horrid things about people. Do you think I’m morally bad?’

Josh turned on the food processor for a minute to think about it.

‘Don’t turn on the food processor to give yourself time to think about it! You should know immediately!’

‘I don’t think you are.’ This was from Kate. That was unexpected. ‘I think you’re normal. Lying all day long and secretly wanting to kill people is human nature.’

‘Hmm, I don’t know if I want to kill them, as such.’

‘I don’t …’ Josh’s forehead creased up in concentration. ‘I don’t think bad things about people. Or at least I don’t think I do.’

Kate and I glanced at each other and Kate rolled her eyes. It was true actually. Josh was really quite ‘good’, in a primary school sense. The only reason we didn’t hate him too was that he was a very easy tease and he cooked.

‘Yes, but you’re sickeningly nice,’ said Kate. ‘You’re different and weird.’

There was a moment’s pause.

‘No, actually, I am thinking nasty thoughts about somebody now,’ said Josh, turning the food processor back on. Kate and I shared a rare moment of bonding and grinned at each other when, thank God, the phone rang.

‘JOSH! TURN THE FOOD PROCESSOR OFF!’ I yelled, flapping my hands up and down.

‘Oh yes, just boss around sweet old, pushed around “he’s too nice” Josh,’ he grumbled.

‘SHUT IT!’ I yelled, just as Kate picked up the phone.

‘Holly Livingstone’s office,’ she said sweetly as I winced and lunged for the receiver. She held it at arm’s length.

‘Yes, she’s here … May I ask who’s calling?’

I jumped up and down on the lino in frustration and made clawing motions with my hands.

‘I’ll just see if she’s free.’

Finally she handed the phone over.

‘Hellayer!’ I said in my best posh telephone voice. ‘This is Holly Livingstone.’

‘Hellayer!’ said the voice back, so I instantly knew it was Big Lady.

‘This is Mrs Bigelow’ – oh, that’s why I hadn’t been able to remember her name – ‘of That Special Someone. We’ve decided to offer you the post of Floral Executive. Nine to six, five days a week, alternate Saturdays off.’

Then she named the salary, which although more than I was getting for shift work down at NCG was still, I could practically guarantee, lower than that of every single person I went to college with, even that enormous girl with egg down her front and her glasses stuck together who treated English as if it wasn’t her first language, even though it was, and the Art Historians.

‘Great! That’s great!’ I stuttered, then remembered I was supposed to be the kind of person who would be fielding job offers constantly. ‘I mean, I think that will be suitable. When would you wish me to start?’

‘Saturday?’

Oh no. Saturday was my Natural History Museum date.

‘Will Monday be all right? I wouldn’t like to leave my former employers in the lurch.’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said, flustered. ‘Of course, I absolutely agree. Employee loyalty is extremely important here at That Special Someone.’

So it was settled. Kate nearly slapped me for not renegotiating my salary offer when it would clearly be all such a high-ranking employee would deserve.

I debated with myself briefly whether to just blow off New Covent Garden completely, but couldn’t quite bring myself to do so, and pedalled in an insouciant three-quarters of an hour late.

‘You wouldn’t have got away with those kinds of hours during the war, you know,’ muttered Johnny as I swung into the forecourt.

‘Actually, I’m sorry – I got bombed on the way here and had to stop and rescue some orphans from the rubble. Is that OK? Also, I quit.’

‘Well, just get in there and get started.’

‘Johnny, didn’t you hear me? I just quit. I’ll work tonight, then you can pay me and I’ll be off.’

He stared at me, surprised.

‘So, you’re off then.’

‘That would be my definition of “to quit”, yes.’

He nodded his head slowly.

‘What are you going to do?’

I decided to brighten up his evening.

‘I’m going to join the army.’

‘Are you really?’

‘Absolutely. Going to continue with your valiant efforts to protect this country through the twin poles of duty and flowers.’

‘Ah, get away with you, you liar.’

‘I’ll miss you,’ I said.

He shrugged at me. ‘No, you won’t. In you go. Go clean up the daffodil line.’

I parked the bike and tiptoed into the vast shed.

‘TinBits!’ yelled one of the boys. ‘Where have you been? Wanking behind the melons just hasn’t been the same without you.’

It gave me a grim satisfaction to realize how little I was going to miss this place.

About halfway into the shift, the moment I’d been dreading arrived. Tash sidled up to me, her yellow teeth glinting.

‘Bit late tonight, weren’t we? Didn’t learn to tell the time at college then?

I didn’t say anything.

‘Forgotten how to talk as well?’

Oh God, I was too old for this.

‘Piss off, Tash,’ I said quietly. ‘I’m leaving.’

‘WHAT did you say?’ she said. ‘Hey, lads, did you hear this?’

I pretended to ignore her, and picked up my first box. Inside, I started trembling.

‘Miss Degree here just told me to piss off. Didn’t you?’ she said, pointing at me.

‘Tash, I really don’t want any trouble. It’s my last night, so you can go and find someone else to pick on, OK?’

‘Oh, diddums. Don’t want any trouble?’ She pushed her hand up under my box, so the flowers scattered all over the floor.

‘You think you’re just a bit too good for us here, don’t you?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said, meaning: ‘Yes, I hope so.’

‘Catfight!’ shouted one of the lads.

‘You think you’re just a little bit special; a bit above all this.’

‘Fight! Fight! Fight!’ the lads picked up.

‘No, I don’t,’ I said, but caught my breath in surprise when she pushed me. The blood started to rush in my ears, but I certainly didn’t know how to fight. I leaned down to pick up the box, and she kicked me in the shoulder.

After that, everything seemed to rush. Immediately the boys and the other drooling girls formed a circle round us, and I was trapped. I got to my feet, wondering what on earth to do. Tash was looking at me, laughing.

‘Not quite so up on the smart remarks now, are we?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, leave it, Tash.’ I was trying to be reasonable, but my voice came out all shaky. Then, suddenly, like one of those flying vampires in the movies, she launched herself at me. I was falling backwards, and someone was clawing at my face and hair. A jumble of thoughts rushed through my head, not the least of which was: How embarrassing; my first fight at the age of twenty-eight.

My focus swam back in, and I realized she was sitting on top of me, getting ready to punch me. The boys were yelling, and I thought what a turn-on this must be for them. I tried to twist her off, but she slapped me hard on the side of the head. Oh God. My heart was beating a million miles an hour.

‘JUST FUCK OFF!’ I screamed. ‘FUCK OFF!’ She slapped me again, hard, then made her hand into a fist and drew it back to punch me.

She crunched into me with such force that my head rattled off the concrete. I was stunned by the violation and thought I was going to pass out; I wanted to. I couldn’t see anything, but suddenly she seemed to float off me; the weight was lifted and I wondered if I’d died and was having an out-of-body experience.

The next thing I knew, Johnny was pulling me up, brushing me down and exclaiming, ‘Girls fighting! I don’t know.’

‘I told you I was going to the wars,’ I snivelled, then realized I was crying, and there was snot and blood and tears all down my face. Tash was being held back by two of the lads, who were killing themselves laughing.

‘BITCH!’ she shrieked at me. ‘PATHETIC BITCH.’

I certainly wasn’t going to respond in any way that was going to antagonize her. In fact, I wasn’t going to stay another second.

‘I’m going home,’ I sniffed to Johnny.

‘We’ll have to get you cleaned up a bit, don’t you think? Could be quite a nasty shiner.’

‘NO!’ I said. ‘I’m going home NOW!’

‘Do you want me to phone someone to come and pick you up?’

‘No … I’ve got my bike and I just want to go HOME.’

‘All right then …’

He walked me to the bike, clearly concerned. Then he asked me to hang on a minute, nipped into his office and came out again with an envelope, which he handed to me.

‘Take care of yourself,’ he said. ‘You’re not as tough as you think you are.’

‘I think I’m as tough as a small mouse,’ I said. ‘And I’m still not as tough as I think I am.’

He clapped me avuncularly on the shoulder. ‘Don’t cycle too fast.’

I didn’t cycle at all, but wheeled my bike down the hill, crying and feeling very sorry for myself indeed. The road was quiet at that time of night, with only the occasional car flashing past me. I was glad. I didn’t want to be seen.

The house was cold and still, as usual. And after last week’s débâcle, I certainly wouldn’t be popping in to chat to Addison. Sniffing, I went off to the bathroom to clean myself up. I could feel my left eye very sore and swollen, and there were scratches over my eyebrow and down my cheek.

As I crept past Addison’s room, I spotted an amazing thing. Usually his door was tightly shut, a warning against any interruption. Tonight, however, it was open – just a tiny, tiny crack, barely noticeable, but definitely open. Was he out? No, it was just that my ears had become so inured to the tapping I didn’t hear it unless I was listening for it. Plus, of course, he never went out. And given that he did everything on purpose … he must have left it open for a reason. Could it be … could it be possible that he wanted to talk to me?

Desperate for some human sympathy, even of the completely mute kind, I pushed the door a little more. He was there, as ever, transfixed by the computer screen. As I walked in, though, he moved his swivel chair a little, turning away from the screen and towards me.

‘Addison …’ I said in a very small voice, and immediately burst into noisy sobs. ‘Addison!’

His face registered shock as he saw me, and he stood up. For the first time I noticed how tall he was, how long his legs were. I gazed at him, my lower lip wobbling uncontrollably.

‘Look at you,’ he said softly.

‘It wasn’t my fault!’ I snorted.

‘Did you get mugged?’

‘Ehm, no, I was in a fight … but it wasn’t my fault.’

He nodded, as if it didn’t surprise him for a second that I’d been in a fight.

‘Come on,’ he said, and I followed him into the bathroom. Completely helpless, I let him sit me down on the side of the bath and dab my wounds with TCP. Although my insides were still churning and I was very upset, nonetheless there was definitely something thrilling about Addison touching my face. This was practically a date. Then I caught sight of my face in the mirror.

‘Oh my GOD,’ I moaned. My eye was twice its normal size, and as pink and purple as a prize fighter’s.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Addison comfortingly. ‘Sit still.’

‘I can’t … I mean, I’ve got a date and a job and – oh GOD. Ouch! Where did you go to medical school?’

‘If it stings, that means it’s doing you good.’

‘Yeah, a bee said that to me once.’

‘Ssh,’ he said, uncoiling an Elastoplast on to my right cheek. ‘It’ll be a lot better in the morning.’

‘Will it be gone in the morning?’

‘Ehm … no, but it will be better.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, still gazing at him, my eyes still wet. For the first time ever, he smiled straight at me. I felt faint.

‘Get some sleep.’

‘OK.’ I toyed with the idea of feigning a few internal injuries so that he’d have to undress me, but remembered the other night and wisely decided against it.

I slept for ten hours, all the adrenaline flushing its way through my system. When I woke up the next afternoon, I rediscovered the envelope Johnny had given me. Inside were practically two weeks’ wages.

Josh couldn’t believe I’d been in a fight. He was unbelievably jealous. We’d decided that beer was really the only response to my ordeal – or white wine spritzer, if you were Kate – and the three of us had repaired to a new pub round the corner which, ideally for my benefit, mistook having the place in practically complete darkness for atmosphere.

I had pondered long and hard about whether to try and smother my eye – now vicious shades of yellow and green – in foundation, but this had only made me appear even more like a startled panda bear than I normally did, so I’d nitched that and gone the other way entirely, making up my right eye with dramatic eyeliner and green shadow. From a distance, it wasn’t too bad; I just looked like I’d escaped from a glam rock band, and sufficiently tarty and hard that you wouldn’t want to get any nearer. Close up, I was terrifying.

Kate, once she’d established that I hadn’t been raped or anything, could barely stop laughing. And Josh kept asking me stupid questions about whether or not the blood had rushed to my head. I pointed out that it had, and that it kept on rushing, straight out of my nose, and could he possibly be a bit more sensitive about it?

‘Yes, these playground warriors can get a bit uptight about their traditional fighting techniques,’ chided Kate. ‘Watch out, or she’ll give you a killer Chinese burn.’

‘Ha ha ha,’ I said, but stopped with my mouth hanging open as this unbelievably gorgeous guy loomed out of the darkness right in front of me.

Forgetting for a moment that I was tarted up like Marilyn Manson, I immediately tilted my profile up towards him, so that I could feel even more stupid when he swept right past me and went up and introduced himself to Kate.

Josh shot me a look of utter horror – how could this chap simply walk up to a group and introduce himself to a complete stranger? Then he sat back and waited for Kate to give the guy a good rude brush off. Josh really doesn’t know much about women.

I mused for a moment that, if it weren’t for my black eye, Mr Deeply, Deeply Suave – who was wearing a grey cashmere top and a Burberry trench coat which matched Kate’s exactly – would have been after me first, but I couldn’t even kid myself: I got the nerdy scientist guys, Kate got the rich ones. He even seemed familiar, in an American way.

Sure enough, he was American, and soon Kate was giggling away – not one of nature’s gigglers, but she was giving it her best shot – and chatting happily to him, and the very next moment a bottle of champagne had miraculously arrived out of nowhere and he was pouring her some. Not us, only her. I assumed she would remedy this deeply unfair state of events immediately, but when I looked at her I noticed she had subtly adjusted her body language so it seemed as if she hadn’t even come in with us. And their heads were bent very close together. I was sure, still, that I’d seen him before.

Josh scuttled his chair round to me, muttering crossly.

‘I’m sorry, but we appear to have been barred from the international Burberry convention,’ I said to him, and he grunted. Then his face lit up.

‘I know, why don’t we have champagne? We can have fun, right?’

Kate and big beautiful thingy suddenly let out a pealing laugh.

‘Josh, their definition of fun is probably comparing international money markets. But I would very much like another Becks, if you’re buying. And some salt-and-vinegar crisps, which are essential medicine in the treatment of black eyes.’

Ridiculously, as the bar was trying to be trendy, it sold those cute teeny bottles of Moët & Chandon, and Josh returned laden with my beer, the crisps between his teeth, and a quarter bottle of champagne to himself, which he sipped morosely through a straw. I couldn’t help laughing and had to restrain myself from rubbing him on the head with my knuckles.

‘Don’t worry!’

‘How can I not worry? I’m twenty-eight years old and I haven’t had a girlfriend for three years!’

‘Or a boyfriend.’

‘Would you stop with that already.’ He pouted. ‘Some of us just … take a bit longer to get round to things than other people.’

‘What, like puberty?’

‘Do you want to be homeless again?’

‘No!’ I said emphatically.

‘And anyway, I’ve got a right to complain – you’ve got a date and Kate’s obviously met her soul mate, and you’ll all move out and have a squillion babies and I will die all alone.’

‘I know!’ I said brightly. ‘When I marry Addison, we’ll stay in the house and you can babysit our beautiful and brainy children.’

‘Oh, right. And I’m the sad fantasist.’

‘Not at all. He put this Elastoplast on my cheek. I’m going to keep it forever as a symbol of the first time we touched.’

Josh looked appalled.

‘I think I’m going to be sick. Holly, please don’t go all gooey over Addison …’

‘Too late!’ I exclaimed triumphantly.

‘… I really think there’s something a bit wrong with him. You know, like that weird form of train-spottery autism thing that boys are meant to get?’

He thought for a minute.

‘I wonder if I could get it.’

‘You could count things, I suppose. Then memorize them.’

‘Ah yes. I can see the appeal.’

‘Josh,’ I said, ‘don’t worry about me and Addison.’

Kate, unsurprisingly – well, a little bit surprisingly, I’d have assumed she was a ‘Rules’ girl as it had the kind of anal, personality-smashing techniques she tended to like – chatted to the beautiful thing all night then swanned off with it to dinner somewhere. Le Caprice, I assumed. I had no idea what Le Caprice might be like, but it sounded the kind of place that people who wore designer underwear (I knew Kate did, because I stole a pair of her pants out of the drier once, but I couldn’t get both legs in them) might go.

Josh and I hadn’t stayed long. He’d decided he had to get back to gen up on some football scores.

I hung around the next morning, Saturday, to see if she’d come in or not and was disappointed to find that she had and therefore clearly hadn’t gotten into something drunken and debauched, which would have been enjoyable for me. She swanned into the kitchen at around ten, carrying the Financial Times and looking composed and well rested. I busied around, pretending to be making coffee, and bursting to ask her what had gone on, however she calmly sat down and opened her newspaper. I tried to contain my frustration.

‘Coffee?’

‘Decaf, thanks, if you’re making it. Black, no sugar.’

I looked over at her.

‘That’s a very pointless cup of coffee.’

She raised her eyebrows at me.

‘Actually, it consumes more calories than it contains, like celery.’

‘Aha.’ I poured the water out. ‘So that’s what coffee is for.’

She smiled primly at me and went back to her paper. I tried again.

‘It’s my big date today. You know, at the Natural History Museum.’

‘How nice for you.’

‘Hey, maybe we could double date some time – Finn and I and you and …’

Kate put her paper down.

‘Do you really think so?’

I tried to imagine the situation and couldn’t.

‘Oh, I’m sorry, aren’t you seeing him again?’

She immediately bristled.

‘Of course I am. I expect John and I will be seeing each other on a regular basis.’

‘John? John what?’

She affected disdain.

‘Oh, I don’t recall.’

‘Sounds made up to me.’

‘What sounds made up?’ mumbled Josh, wobbling in unsteadily like a new-born kitten.

‘John Nobody – Kate’s new love.’

‘Oh God – another one,’ said Josh, spooning sugar into his coffee.

‘WHAT do you mean by that?’ said Kate ferociously.

‘I don’t know – how many suave pretty-boy married men have chatted you up this year and not given you their last name in case you dig them up out of the phone book?’

‘John is not married. I could tell.’

Josh and I glanced at each other.

Suddenly the phone rang, and we all jumped three feet. Kate hopped up, then, when she realized we were watching her, feigned a leisurely gait.

‘Ehm … I’ll get that … probably the office.’

‘Probably Relate,’ I said, ‘calling you in as a witness.’

Josh and I peered round the kitchen door as she furiously motioned us away. Her expression quickly revealed her disappointment, however. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand.

‘It’s Addison’s mother.’

‘I’ll get him,’ I said quickly, and rapped on his door.

‘Hrh?’

‘Addison, it’s your mum.’

‘Can you tell her I’m out?’

‘I don’t think that’s going to work.’

‘He’s in,’ said Kate down the phone.

‘Can you tell her … I’m … busy.’

‘He’s busy,’ said Kate. ‘Yes, he’s eating. No, much the same. No, no sleep, no. OK, I’ll tell him.’

She hung up.

‘When’s the last time you spoke to your mother, Addison?’ I asked him.

There was silence from behind the door.

‘Not since he’s been here,’ whispered Josh.

‘I normally speak to her,’ said Kate. ‘She sounds all right most of the time.’

‘Right.’

Kate bent down to pick up the post. As she did so, something slid out from the pocket of her exquisitely fresh Meg Ryanesque pyjamas.

‘What’s that?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, grabbing it, but it was clearly her little mobile phone.

‘That pesky office, eh?’ said Josh.

‘Erm, right.’

I thought it would take me three minutes to get ready, but of course I had forgotten about my black eye, now puce and vermilion, and found myself in a desperate, excited rush whereby no matter how I tried I couldn’t seem to get it together to leave the house. I’d forgone the Alice Cooper style for a prolonged attempt to whiten it out, which was now making me look like one of those eyebrowless sci-fi entities. I toyed with buying an eye-patch and pretending I was starting an early eighties revival, but it would take too much explaining, and, given that I’d only met this bloke for two minutes, I wanted to appear as non-mad as possible.

I still hadn’t decided what to do about the nurse thing. After all, I had kind of got this date under false pretences, and it also meant he was a bit of a perv. I hummed and hawed and stomped around a bit, which was clearly annoying Kate. Normally on Saturdays she was up at eight, dashing to gyms and swimming pools and popping into the office and Joseph and the Fifth Floor at Harvey Nicks and going to exhibitions whilst Josh and I lay on the two squashy old sofas in the living room, watched black-and-white films, and ate Jaffa Cakes, but it was eleven thirty and she wasn’t dressed yet. As well as the mobile, her pager was placed on the kitchen table and she seemed to have been reading the same page of the paper for some time.

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