Twenty Something (2 page)

‘Thinking about your girlfriend's box, more like,' he quipped.

Er, no.

But, while we're on the theme of boxes, let me tell you about investment banking. Essentially it involves putting large numbers of apparently meaningless figures into Microsoft Excel boxes. Any figures will do — one of my more entertaining colleagues once projected a blue chip's profit and loss column on the basis of his mates' telephone numbers. His team couldn't work out why so many of the forecasts started ‘207' and ‘208' (but mainly ‘207', as we don't like to have too many friends who live in Outer London). Once you've done this, you turn it into a ‘model', which should be as opaque and needlessly complicated as possible. Then you make it all up into a presentation, which your boss will take credit for if the client likes it and blame you for if he doesn't.

One day, when you're thirty going on ninety-five and the concept of fun and a full head of hair is a distant memory, you'll marry a beautiful stupid woman who is madly in love with your wallet. Ten years later, she'll no longer be beautiful (but she'll still be stupid), and you'll have two kids with your looks and her brains whose names you have great difficulty remembering. Fortunately, you won't mind by then, as you're the boss and you get to sleep with your secretary in return for expensive presents
to ensure that your once-beautiful, always-dumb excuse for a wife remains in the dark.

It's a wonderful career, and I'm very excited about it.

When I got home at 10pm last night, Flatmate Fred, a ‘freelance' writer, was in a filthy mood, as I'd woken him with my morning sing-along. I tactfully suggested that if he got up before midday this would be less of a problem. Freelance Freeloading Flatmate Fred didn't like this lifestyle tip and stormed out of the room, still in his dressing gown from the weekend. Perhaps when your boss thinks you're slack and your girlfriend hates you, it's not a good idea to go and offend your only flatmate as well.

Talking of girlfriends, my domestic fun-bag rang at 11pm in search of a serious argument. When it became clear that I wasn't in the mood for chit-chat — what, did she expect me to apologise for calling her a vacuous, hormonal trollop? — she proposed a trial separation, and I agreed.

But after I'd injured my hand thumping down the phone, it occurred to me that there were all sorts of small points that we hadn't clarified. Just what the hell does ‘trial separation' mean? When does the trial end? Who gets to give the guilty/not guilty verdict? How separate are we meant to be? Is texting allowed? Emails? Is it supposed to be a break which brings us back together, renewed and rejuvenated? Or is it a trial run for a much more permanent separation? Am I allowed to pull other people? As with many things, the devil is in the detail.

I try to ring Lucy back to clear up some of these troubling matters, but she's turned her phone off.

Devilish filly. I go to sleep fantasising about her sister by way of revenge.

Only three hours' sleep, as Flatmate Fred heard last night that he'd got an advance on his latest book idea (advance came from Daddy), so we went out to celebrate the greatest achievement of his life so far.

Turned up for work in odd socks.

Rupert (bald): ‘It's dress-down Friday, not dress-like-a-tramp Friday.'

After that little vignette, however, the day got significantly better. Managed not only to leave at 6pm (a record), but also to fiddle my expense account so I could get a free taxi home (not usually allowed unless you work after 9pm).

While I'm cooking the books, Flatmate Fred is attempting to cook chicken for six of our friends. Flatmate Fred can't cook. You might have thought that, in three years of loafing around, the freeloading freelancer would have progressed beyond
Young, Broke and Hungry,
but he hasn't. When I enter the kitchen, the fire alarm's going off and he's running round the flat in his ‘laundry day' Y-fronts, sweating like a pig and trying to smother the flames with the introduction to his third unpublished book. Not many people can set fire to roast chicken. Flatmate Fred can.

But, by 7.30pm, it's all sorted and our friends start arriving. Is it a supper party or is it a dinner party? Conundrum. We discuss this at some length and conclude that, while you take someone out for dinner, you have supper at home. And if that supper is a party? Then it's a dinner party, unless you're over thirty and it's a bring-the-kids-in-their-carrycots/leave-the-kids-at-home-with-the-babysitter-whom-Daddy's-shagging-type event, in which case it's a supper party. Simple.

But my friends are a good bunch really, despite their dubious conversational abilities: Flatmate Fred, the posing, pampered
drop-out living in Daddy's flat; Rick, my ginger best mate, with his dad's looks and his mum's brains; and Jasper, who gave up a job in the city (which he was very good at) to become an actor (which he is very bad at).

There were girls there, too, of course — we needed someone to laugh at our jokes. I'd met them in alphabetical order. Claire and I used to play doctors and nurses together (as toddlers), I sent my first Valentine's card to Katie (aged twelve), my first kiss was with Mel (aged fourteen) and I lost my virginity to Susie at university aged nineteen (although I thought she was called Amanda at the time, which would have spoiled the alphabetical-order thing).

Katie is Rick's twin sister (Rick, but hairless in the right places), Jasper fancies Claire (I got there first aged two — back off), Claire fancies me (she's only human), Rick fancies anyone in a skirt, Katie fancies Jasper (which really annoys Rick) and Mel and Susie are both madly in love with Flatmate Fred, which is entirely wasted on him, as Flatmate Fred only fancies himself (and maybe Jasper, but this remains unsubstantiated conjecture).

It's so confusing that even we have forgotten the order and disorder of our little web. No matter. Considering that the evening had all the sexual explosive energy of a suicide bomber entering heaven to collect his seventy-two virgins, it was a most successful gathering.

And so to bed. Imagining a fivesome with Claire, Katie, Mel and Susie.

Woke up with a herd of buffalo playing five-a-side football behind my eyes. Felt too rough to get up, so I lay in bed thinking about Lucy.

Sadly, it's horrifyingly simple in the cold, painful light of morning: we've reached the final stage of our natural
relationship. We've done mad passionate shagging. We've done falling completely in love. And now we're completely done out. I know that she's not The One, whatever that might be. And when you've been together for three years and suddenly realise this, everything else falls away.

I used to enjoy her flirting with my friends. Now I get insanely jealous every time she talks to one of them. We used to have spontaneous sex in public places. Now she tells me every time she's faked an orgasm. I used to love the fact that she sounded so posh that she probably wore pashmina knickers. Now I shiver every time she opens her mouth. I hate her taste in music, I hate her friends and I hate the way she says, ‘OK, then' at the end of every telephone conversation. I hate her clothes, I hate the decorations in her flat and I especially hate the way she drives her detestable little car.

There was a time when she could do no wrong. Now she can do no right. All her endearing eccentricities have become unbearably annoying faults. And I just can't cope pretending to like her any more.

I hate myself for hating her, and I hate myself for not being brave enough to do anything about it. We've been going out for three years, but if I'm honest about it, I've spent half that time inventing convenient internal excuses to delay breaking up: ‘But I've already bought her a birthday present/it's only two months till Valentine's Day/what if she went off with any of my friends?/I might never have sex again' etc. etc.

In fact, I was trying so hard to think of something I did like about the two of us that the football-playing buffalo returned with a vengeance to put a stop to any further thought processes. I crawled to the sofa and watched TV. The most successful thing I did all day was take my dressing gown off (twelve hours after putting it on) and go back to bed.

Home, sweet Home Counties, to visit my darling 'rentals – the street name I use to refer to Mummy and Daddy so my mates don't take the piss too badly. I always wanted to call them ‘Mum 'n' Dad', but they're just not ‘Mum' 'n' Dad' types. So it's stuck — Mummy and Daddy in the vocative; 'rentals in the third person.

Daddy (alpha male rental) meets me at the station.

‘Who's your daddy?' he asks, climbing out of the battered Volvo.

‘Er, you are, Daddy,' I reply, pushing the dog off the front seat and getting in beside him to give him a hug. No Public Displays of Affection for our family.

‘Wicked,' he says, pulling away in third gear while trying to do the Ali G Westside sign.

Occasional excruciating references to outdated popular culture aside, my dad is the world's loveliest man. Mates who come to visit seem to spend as much time talking to him as they do to me. He is a retired headmaster, the same yesterday, today and for ever — a solid man mountain of integrity and bonhomie.

‘Your mother's in a filthy mood,' the man mountain warns me on the way back in the car.

Never ‘Mummy', never ‘Amelia' — it's always ‘your mother', as if he were somehow separated from any involvement in the process.

But he wasn't wrong about Mummy. She was in a tub-thumping, bottom-clenching howler of a grump. And, unsurprisingly, it was all my fault.

‘How could you be so insensitive to Lucy?' she demands, refusing to kiss me as I walk through the kitchen door.

‘What do you mean, “insensitive”?'

‘I mean, breaking-up-with-her insensitive. That girl's the best thing that ever happened to you.'

‘No, she's not. She's not even in the top ten of good things that have happened to me. And it's only a trial separation. And how did you know, anyway?'

Lucy, bless every little conniving cell in her beautiful body, is so bloody close to my mum that she'd rung her in floods of tears to indulge in a mutual oestrogen-bonding, Jack-bashing session.

My mum likes Lucy because she's just like her — vacuous, petty, pretty, snobby and attached to someone much better than her. Harsh — but there, I've said it.

It's now a week since I made my New Year's resolutions, and I've just flicked back through my diary to check on my progress.

Not good.

At work I'm treading water, spending most of the day entering obscure opinions under a variety of aliases in the ‘Have your say' section of the BBC news website. I've drunk forty-two units in a week (the twenty-four of these on Friday night making me an official binge drinker — result). My Bible reading stalled on the sixth day (of creation, not of January) and I've just realised that I started at the wrong end of the Koran.

While I've updated my diary almost every day, I've only really used it to slag off my friends, my job and my mother. The only serious exercise I've undertaken is masturbation, and I've exceeded my limit of four for the week (by a factor of three, for which I blame Lucy's absence). I've given nothing to charity and I'm getting fatter by the second. On the plus side, I haven't flirted with anyone at work (because they're all male) and my testicles and hairline appear to be behaving themselves.

And I seem to have fulfilled my desire to ‘love Lucy more/break up with her in a mature and dignified manner' by
writing horrible things about her and brokering a trial separation with the luscious little frollop.

In a bid to remedy this, I phone her in the evening to try to talk things over.

‘Why the fuck did you ring my mum to talk about us?' I ask in a conciliatory way.

‘My mum,' she mimics. ‘Little Jacksy's Mumsies-Wumsies. Mummy's not happy, is she?'

‘Not as unhappy as Jack is.'

‘Why are you referring to yourself in the third person?'

‘Second sign of madness.'

‘What's the first?'

‘Deciding to go out with you.'

Click. Brrrrr. 15—0, Jack Lancaster.

Woke up this morning and counted at least thirty hairs on my pillow while listening to
Thought for the Day
on Radio 4 (Bishop of Liverpool talking about spiritual implications of the Congestion Charge).

Realised after a while that four of these were Lucy's (I haven't washed the sheets for two weeks), but it's still a worrying statistic. Five more came out in the shower and I swept my hair back to examine the view in the mirror. Aaaargh, spamhead! It's retreating in all directions like a brigade of Italian war heroes. Upwards, sideways, diagonally. This isn't meant to happen until your fifties. This is the end of my youth. Baldness goes hand in hand with arthritis, impotence and senility. It is the first sign of my mortality. I will never pull randomly again unless I'm at a cowboy party and wearing a hat.

Spent so long considering these unpleasant implications that I turned up late for work.

Rupert (bald): ‘Why are you late for work?'

‘Because my hair started falling out in the shower. I'm going to have a bald patch.'

‘That's not a bald patch — that's the solar panel for your sex machine.'

It would take more than energy-harnessing sunshine to sort out my current excuse for a love life.

Not many things can make a hundred city bankers in an open-plan office stop what they're doing and simultaneously look in the same direction. The last time it happened was when the managing director's jilted wife evaded security and came up to the fourth floor to have a cat fight with his secretary. Apart from that, it would require news of an anthrax attack at Bank station — or maybe an announcement that we were going to IPO and could all retire early — to raise our collective noses from the grindstone.