This is a Love Story (3 page)

Rhoda, our advertising features writer, bought Dill six months ago and treats him like a child. There are toys. Yes, actual toys for fish, floating around in the tank. She buys them at the weekend and brings them in on a Monday. I’m surprised she hasn’t put up an alphabet wall-chart yet.

I smile widely and look at Lydia. I continue the small talk to stay polite but I am struggling not to laugh at the mental image of her tumbling from the dizzy precipice that is high fashion.

‘So what was the damage?’ I ask, feigning interest but distracted by the tremendous workload that lies ahead.

‘Well, they were Kurt Geiger, love. So, like, £120,’ she replies with a giant sigh.

I feel her pain.

Caffeine. I need caffeine. I rise slowly and head towards the drinks machine; a small queue has formed and within it the usual inane chatter has commenced. One thread goes along the lines of how we’re due a really hot summer this year as the last three have been terrible, another analyses how many holidays are acceptable in a year before you’re considered just plain greedy, and the final one – the most dire – is about speed cameras and how unfair it is that Mark Watson received a ticket for driving at 100 miles per hour rather than the 96 he claimed to have actually been travelling at. At last my turn comes and I get a large tea with one sugar.

I return to my desk and get to work, but I’m soon interrupted by a frenzied kerfuffle, which has broken out like a virus in the area behind me.

It is a large, open-plan space and my desk is one of eight in the middle of the room, which are separated by little partitions. To the left of my desk are three small offices with their own doors and windows. The rest of the space is taken up with the usual suspects: more desks, noisy fax machines, recycling bins and a huge coffee machine. Our boss’s office is on a floor above ours, and has its own little stairs leading up to it like a tree house.

I keep looking at my screen, trying hard to concentrate. I doubt it is anything that would interest me. Normally I have a great ability to tune everything out, but there is talking, and lots of it.

Concentrate. Concentrate.

Suddenly a sharp elbow belonging to Lydia is jabbed into my shoulder and I realise she’s standing next to my desk, grinning at me. Strange, contorted expressions that are meant to be subtle, as if to say ‘Look behind you,’ without yelling it out loud, which is what she clearly wants to do.

Oh, for God’s sake, I think, as I reluctantly spin my chair 180 degrees and see a figure in the middle of the din. He is surrounded, ambushed by fussing colleagues. All I can make out is a shade of green. Lush green.

My heart skips a beat, then two. Three may be pushing it.

A couple of people move out of the way, and as I slowly scan from the middle of the T-shirt upwards, my eyes meet a familiar face.

Holy shit. It’s squirrel man.

And if it’s possible, in this stark, dentist’s-chair-like lighting that we are bathed in, he looks even more gorgeous than he did earlier this morning. He does look decidedly miserable, though.

But why is he here? Who the hell is he? Is he being interviewed? Maybe he’s here to fix something . . .

No, he looks too soft for all that, and everyone seems to know who he is. ‘Lydia, who the hell is that?’ I whisper into her ear, my right leg trembling a little.

‘It’s Nick,’ she whispers back, giving me a wink.

Of course. Bollocks.

Nick went away just before my first day, so he’s the only person working at The Cube I haven’t yet met. I do know, according to the kitchen rota, that it is his turn to get the milk and sugar on a Tuesday, and that he drinks peppermint tea with caraway seeds. I always thought he sounded like such a pretentious shit from the way people talked about him.

Apparently, since Nick’s been away, Kevin in accounts has been screwing up invoices and wandering around listlessly, Tom in editorial has tried to take on the role of leader of the pack and failed miserably, and Rhoda has even taken up smoking again. The lads all think Nick was incredibly funny before his girlfriend left him for someone else
.
If I hear one more account of the time Nick dressed as a tree and spent two hours in reception unnoticed, I may actually cry.

His girlfriend and the guy who ‘snatched her away’ both worked here, I’m told. What a mess.

Now I am no longer faced with working alongside someone who is a hysterical jackass (which would have been bad enough) but instead – even worse – a heartbroken shell of a man who will probably leave a trail of teary snot wherever he goes.

And this heartbroken shell of a man is the guy I almost fell in love with on the train this morning.

Gutted.

Nick

Usually, eturning to work is pretty dull, especially after a break in Ibiza. It certainly wasn’t this time.

I have managed to avoid budget, boozy lads’ holidays in recent years. Scarred by trips to Spanish islands in my early twenties that were great fun at the time, I now feel like they’re the last places I would want to be. I’ve spent enough time spewing in cheap hotels, falling into swimming pools and twisting limbs while attempting drunken stunts on holidays like that. No more Shagaloof for me, thanks. It just isn’t my cup of tea any more.

I prefer city breaks now, if I’m going away with the boys. We still have a hunger for exactly the same things – pulling hot girls, drinking too much and dancing – but we have more money these days so we do it in a different setting. Our recent trips have involved smoking weed in Amsterdam, eating the best steak imaginable in Paris, clubbing in Brooklyn, stuff like that. We aren’t kids any more.

So it’s either overindulgent stuff in cool cities, or exciting adventures in tropical climes like Fiji. I love sharing my favourite life stories under the stars with random backpackers I’ll never see again.

But many of my friends are hurtling towards thirty, and I’m getting there too. The prospect of a milestone birthday and a stag party do funny things to the male mind.

‘Come on, mate, you’ll love it – and it’s my stag do. So you have to come, really, don’t you?’ said Ross, punching me hard on the arm like an American jock when the idea of Ibiza was first floated. He acquired the habit of punching me on the arm at university and he’s carried on ever since. He does it for pretty much anything: birthdays, holidays, Tuesdays . . . It’s slightly annoying and he’s definitely too old to do it now, but it’s his trademark so I guess it can stay. I always reckoned if we failed to find nice women, we could live together as bachelors and never have to grow up, punching each other all over the nation’s golf courses and the bingo halls of west London. But that was looking pretty remote now.

Ross is my best mate, who I met at university. I thought he was a bit of a dick at first – he was the loud, rowdy one who always had to drink more than anyone else and he was more successful with women, too, which made me massively jealous. He’s a big bloke – not fat, but burly, with broad shoulders and messy hair that makes him look as if he’s just stepped off a rugby pitch. Girls love that, I’ve learned.

After just six months of living with him in halls I realised that it wasn’t a competition, and that actually, he was a pretty cool guy. He even taught me how to talk to women without stuttering or spilling my drink all over them. He’s not the best-looking bloke I know, but he has this incredible confidence, which seems to take him everywhere he wants to go.

Obviously I
had
to go to his stag do, even if it involved sitting in a pile of steaming horse manure for three days. This was Ross . . .

Like I said, Ibiza – not a place I would have envisioned myself visiting these days. The prospect of packed nightclubs and vomit-inducing light sequences made me sweat just thinking about it.

I protested, I did, but they had me by the short and curlies. The whole lot of them had worked out a response to every attempt I made at suggesting different locations. Eventually, the old ‘last chance to have fun before marriage’ guilt trip, combined with a bit of Googling and the promise of lots of hot girls, was enough to seal the deal.

It was only a few days, I told myself, and if it was too dire I could always get lost in the historical Ibiza Town everyone bangs on about.

Packing my suitcase wasn’t too hard: shorts, shorts, pants, more shorts and some shower gel. I wedged five books into my hand luggage; if they went missing en route I feared I might lose my only escape if things got bad.

I was pleasantly surprised – something about the atmosphere got me in the mood to let my hair down as soon as we landed on the island. It was scorching hot and I needed to have some fun.

After a pint or five too many I managed to tell Ross I loved him on more than one occasion, fall down a small flight of stairs one night, and tread on several girls’ sandaled feet in nightclubs – one of whom slapped me in the face. I felt nothing.

It was bloody brilliant.

Although I returned to London with the dreaded Ibiza flu everyone talks about. They should vaccinate for this shit. I’m afraid if I keep blowing my nose like this I may look down at the tissue and find the damn thing sitting there and looking at me from a bed of translucent snot.

It seems that seven days of pouring various different beers and spirits down your throat like there’s a fire in your belly is not that good for you.

In addition, I smoked a disgusting number of cigarettes and joints, leaving me wheezing like a broken chew-toy.

I am a lightweight. It’s official. I had to have a week off sick, for God’s sake. Getting out of bed this morning was a joke – I’m surprised I managed not to drown in the puddle of drool next to my face let alone actually reach across to the alarm.

But lurgy aside, returning to an OK job that I’ve been in for far too long feels like a big comedown. That combined with the fact that I’m twenty-seven.

And single.

Nor has Amelia flooded my doormat with letters documenting her shame and regret at leaving me for one of our colleagues, and I was pretty sure she would. I had fantasies of not being able to get into the house due to the sheer volume of letters she might have sent me.

Toby Hunter, for God’s sake!

Toby joined The Cube three years ago when I was a trainee designer and Amelia was a writer. He was the new company lawyer, a young guy for his position. He and his wife became friends of ours – they would come over for dinner and everything.

I should have suspected something when Amelia kept going down with this bug and Toby would always get it too. I learned later that he was off sick on the same days. Both workstations empty at the same times. The idea was so preposterous that I just pushed it out of my mind. It was a
surely not
situation.

This bug was so bad, she said, that she couldn’t get out of bed. And there I was, working away happily in the office when he was over there getting into it with her. It was Toby who quit work first. He said he’d got a new job at a blue-chip company. I believed him. Next thing I know, Amelia’s bags were packed and she was sailing off into the horizon with floppy-haired, watery-eyed Toby Hunter. I only hoped he would be sailing off somewhere nice soon, in an ambulance . . . The whole thing made me sick. (Actually, I am a tad jealous about his law career. I’m fast becoming a bitter ‘artist’ who wished he’d studied something else.)

Amelia didn’t even serve out her notice period. Boom. Gone. Just like that. And all the while Toby’s wife was coming round on Friday nights and crying into a hanky while we got drunk on Grolsch, wondering what the hell had hit us. She even tried to kiss me one particularly booze-addled evening. I soon put a stop to that. The whole thing was enough of a mess as it was.

Needless to say, it was all pretty embarrassing at work. Everyone knew what had happened. It was a messy home situation, which should never have leaked into our professional lives. Getting together with people at work is a huge mistake.

I feel like life has juddered to a grinding halt. The brakes have been applied, pretty sodding hard, and there are angry tyre marks on the road. People don’t seem to be taking my position very seriously, either. I’m sure if she’d left me for someone a bit cooler, like a footballer or a musician, they would be rushing round with porn magazines and takeaway.

My career has hit the buffers, my love life is in tatters and most of my friends are now marrying/having children/having some sort of meaningful life. Ibiza and its aftermath did a good job of numbing the pain for a couple of weeks, but when I woke up this morning I was greeted by that horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach.

Doom, I think it is.

This is not what I envisaged when I left university. Full of the hope of youth, I thought that by the time I reached thirty I would be the CEO of some multimillion-pound company, with a sexy wife, two children and a car that required that special petrol just because . . . well, because it’s a flash car, isn’t it?

OK, OK, I know that’s not very realistic. But at least I could be running my own design studio or something. I could have at least got that sorted.

Now I have just two and a half years to achieve all this and basically it’s not going to happen.

I was considering this very situation on the train this morning, the same anxiety gripping my chest, when something odd happened. Flicking through my copy of
Metro
, I stumbled across a picture story about a squirrel on waterskis. Utterly ridiculous.

For some unknown reason, this was a temporary cure for my weary heart and I felt the sudden urge to laugh my backside off. You know, the kind of laughter that makes you accidentally fart or snort like a greedy pig. The kind of laughter that only comes when you are so depressed that suddenly the most inane things are funny enough to bring you to tears.

You can’t laugh like that, though, on a stuffy train full of tight-lipped Brits. It wouldn’t be acceptable. So I spent a few minutes holding in my amusement with great difficulty. The more I held it in, the funnier it became. My eyes were filling with water and my stomach muscles were jumping up and down furiously. Trying to divert my attention from the rodent I looked up and saw a pair of the most beautiful denim-blue eyes ever, peeping over the top of the same newspaper.