it was all going to be all right, that it didn’t matter and that we could just pretend it had never happened. We would just go back to being best friends and I’d go back to waiting for him to work out that I was the one. Even though I could still feel the red-hot tears spilling over my cheeks, every single part of me just wanted to make him feel better. Somewhere in the corner of the room, my self-respect shook her head in disgust. He didn’t say anything else. I couldn’t say anything else. Luckily, someone else didn’t have quite the same struggle.
‘Oh Jesus Christ, what’s going on now?’
In the midst of all our emodrama, I hadn’t heard the front door open. And I hadn’t seen Vanessa loitering in the hallway. But I heard her.
‘Don’t tell me you two are shagging?’ She hung her keys on my hook next to the door and inspected her nails. ‘Don’t bother, Tess, he’s shit in bed.’
‘What did you just say?’ I couldn’t possibly have heard her right.
‘I said don’t bother, he’s shit in bed,’ Vanessa repeated slowly, disappearing into her bedroom. ‘And between me, you and Mr Wilder, he’s not exactly packing down their either. Not. Worth. The effort.’
I let go of Charlie at exactly the same time he let go of me, and slid off the sofa into a graceless pile of too long limbs and donkey T-shirt at his feet.
‘You?’ I pointed at him. ‘And her?’ I pointed to Vanessa.
‘OK, don’t go mental, but—’
‘Oh my God, you and her.’
It was too late; I was freaking out. The Andrex puppy had morphed into a Rottweiler and Cupid had traded his bow and arrow for an AK-47.
‘It was nothing,’ he said insistently, grabbing hold of my wrists a fraction too tightly. ‘It was just one of those things. I don’t even know. It was nothing.’
‘It was several times,’ Vanessa called from behind her closed bedroom door. ‘Your place, this place, that hotel for the weekend in Wales.’
‘You went to Wales?’ I breathed. ‘You went on a mini-break?’
Truly this was the last straw. Everyone knew that a mini-break was the universally accepted sign of true love. Bridget Jones said so.
‘Remember you asked me not to tell Tess until you “knew what we were”?’ she called. Exactly what he had said to me that morning. ‘And because she’d probably have a nervous breakdown.’
‘I didn’t say that.’ Charlie squeezed my wrists until they hurt. ‘I didn’t. Tess, it wasn’t anything. It wasn’t worth upsetting you.’
‘I didn’t say anything because, really, it wasn’t worth upsetting you,’ she agreed from her bedroom. ‘It wasn’t worth upsetting my yeast infection either.’
‘Oh, fucking hell,’ I whispered to Eeyore. From the look on his face, he really got it.
‘And after all the effort he put into getting into my knickers, I never even came. I’ve had more fun with an electric toothbrush,’ Vanessa said as she reemerged, holding her passport aloft. ‘And he was such a whiner afterwards. I’d let you listen to the messages, but I deleted them after that time I played them at the comedy phone messages open mike night. Anyway, Tess, are you even listening? I’m going to be away for at least a week, longer if I can help it. Honestly, I know you don’t care, but I have had such a stressful few days. Council tax is due next week – pay it, yeah?’
Of course she didn’t bother to lock the door behind her, which made it all the easier to grab hold of Charlie and bundle him out of it. By his face.
‘Get out,’ I shouted, grabbing hold of a handful of hair and physically pushing him away from me. I couldn’t get rid of him fast enough. My skin was crawling at the thought of Charlie and Vanessa. Him kissing her. Her touching him. ‘Get out of my flat.’
‘Tess, I love you,’ he said, desperately clinging to the door frame.
‘Please fuck off!’ I slammed the door, really not giving two shits whether his fingers were still inside or not. I sort of hoped that they were. Eeyore approved. ‘Go away, Charlie. Don’t come back.’
I counted to ten, panting hard and waiting for the pleading to stop and the crying to start. Eventually, all that was left was silence. He was gone. Charlie had said he loved me. Charlie had had an affair with Vanessa. The council tax was due. So this was what heartbreak felt like? Bollocks to that. Having never actually been in love with any of my boyfriends before, I’d never actually had my heart broken before. I waited to feel the urge to consume large quantities of ice cream and cry. But I didn’t want to cry, and I certainly didn’t want dairy products. I felt sick. I felt angry. I wanted to break something. I couldn’t break Vanessa, but I could break some of her things.
With my hands curled into tight little fists, I kicked Vanessa’s door open (entirely unnecessary but it felt right) and looked for something to destroy. Her room was, as usual, a complete shithole. My room was generally a bit of a mess, but it was a clean, white-walled, cream-carpeted, orderly mess. A teetering stack of unread magazines here, a collection of credit card statements there. Vanessa’s room was disgusting. My room was more of a disappointment. In all the years I’d been here, I hadn’t got as far as putting up a single picture or photo on the wall – they all lived on my desk at work, my first home. There was a framed print of a Warhol I’d seen at the Tate Modern with Charlie sitting on the floor by my chest of drawers. He’d been coming over to hang it every Sunday for the last six months, but he’d never quite made it. And so on the floor it had stayed. My room looked like a corporate crash pad rather than somewhere a real person lived. It was where I crawled under the covers at midnight on a Wednesday after a client dinner and where I hung all of my smart separates, still in their bags from the dry-cleaner’s.
Staring at Vanessa’s overflowing wardrobe, I suddenly hated all of my clothes. It felt like everything I owned was black, blue or white, unless Amy had picked it, and then it was sequinned, short and generally unwearable. Even my jeans were ‘casual Friday’ appropriate. The toes on my Converse were bright white. My heels, aside from my Promotion Shoes, were all sensible. I hated everything. I hated myself.
Vanessa’s wardrobe was a tumble of colour and texture. I barely touched the door and the entire contents burst on to the floor, making a desperate bid for freedom. Red strapless dresses, printed palazzo pants, skintight liquid leggings, silk and satin and velvet and leather, all pooling around my feet and begging to be rescued. I stomped on a particularly ridiculous pair of leather hot pants I remembered seeing her swan around in and sulked. Her room was just so her. Two of her walls were painted deep red and the other two hot pink. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. It clashed, it was too bright, too bold and a little bit gross, but it looked amazing. Just like Vanessa. If Vanessa’s room was her, was my room me? Was my sad little white-walled, devoid-of-personality shell of a bedroom really me?
There was no discernible carpet under my feet, just a collage of dirty clothes, open mail and magazines. Dirty mug upon dirty mug upon dirty mug sat everywhere you looked, and half-empty takeaway boxes, plates and forks were balanced precariously on every available surface. No knives, though. Vanessa never used a knife and I found it infuriating. Even more infuriating was the lack of things available to break. The dirty pots looked like they were about to get up and crawl to the kitchen themselves so I wasn’t touching them, and I wasn’t rock and roll enough to put the telly through the window. The only other things I could see that were legitimately worth money and fuck-up-able were her dead ‘work’ BlackBerry and my old camera. I couldn’t bear to do it. I let out a little frustrated scream through my gritted teeth and punched a pillow, shaking from head to toe.
I was a rubbish woman scorned. Hell totally hath seen fury like me. I’d seen waitresses in Pizza Hut with more fury. I was a complete failure. Back in the living room, I heard the landline ring. There wasn’t a single person on earth I wanted to talk to. But of course I answered it anyway.
‘Hello?’ I