‘I’m fine,’ I lied, closing my bedroom door on the outbreak of World War III in the living room. ‘Amy’s here.’
‘What happened?’ He sounded so worried. Bless. ‘We just got an email a minute ago saying you’re no longer with the company. What is going on? You quit without telling me?’
You had to laugh, didn’t you?
‘They sent an email saying I’m no longer with the company?’ I laid back against my fat marshmallow pillows and closed my eyes. ‘That’s all it said?’
‘Yeah. I emailed you this morning but it kept bouncing back, and then you didn’t answer my texts so I phoned HR to see if you’d called in sick. Then they sent this. Tess, what happened?’
‘Restructuring?’ I suggested. ‘Downsizing? Redundancies?’
‘Oh. Fuuuuuuck.’
‘Yeah.’ I felt the first tear in a while trickle down my cheek.
I heard Charlie sighing on the other end of the phone and imagined him sitting at his desk three over and two across from where I used to sit. His hair, almost the exact same shade of dark coppery brown as mine, would be all rumpled as usual. His tie would be loose, as though it were four fifteen on a Friday instead of twelve twenty on a Monday, and he’d be wearing the glasses with clear lenses that he’d bought at Urban Outfitters to try to look a bit cleverer because he had a big client meeting this afternoon.
‘Shit, Tess,’ he said after the pause. ‘I’m sorry. That’s bollocks. What a load of wank.’
And that magical way with words was why I was the creative director and he was an account manager. Or at least that’s why he was an account manager.
I had been in love with Charlie Wilder for ten long years but it felt longer. Ever since I’d spotted him sitting outside our halls of residence playing a guitar covered in Smiths stickers, a battered copy of Catcher in the Rye by his side, I just knew he was the one. OK, so I hadn’t actually read Catcher in the Rye and I only knew one or two Smiths songs from films or TV, but regardless, I was smitten. Because these two things meant that Charlie Wilder, unlike every boy I had gone to school with, was Terribly Deep. When you added that observation to the fact that he was six three and therefore taller than me, even in heels, it was hard to fight fate. Unfortunately, it was fair to say that Charlie wasn’t hit quite so squarely by Cupid’s arrow. It took almost nine months for me to work up the courage (i.e. get drunk enough) to talk to him, and by that time he had a girlfriend. Eventually, after I’d spent two years reading every book I heard him so much as allude to and learning every lyric Morrissey had ever written, we somehow became friends. And once we were friends, I was terrified of scaring Charlie out of my life by confessing my all-encompassing, soul-crushing love for him. As far as I could tell, he wasn’t exactly struggling to suppress his feelings for me. There hadn’t been so much as a drunken semi-song, and, as Amy routinely liked to tell me, every girl accidentally snogs her boy best friend at some point. Or if you were Vanessa, gave them an STD. Everywhere we went, people assumed we were a couple. When they worked out that we weren’t, they wanted to know why not. Charlie always laughed and said I was too good for him. I always laughed and agreed. And then died inside.
But no. So we were the very definition of ‘just good friends’. Every Sunday, we went to the pub and ate too many Yorkshire puddings. He killed my spiders; I bought his socks. He was dreadful at remembering to buy socks. But every single time we spoke, whether it was about work, football or the seasonal special at Starbucks, all I wanted was for him to grab hold of me, spin me around and tell me he loved me. It was, admittedly, a little bit sad. As far as I was concerned, there were two kinds of men in the world – Charlie and the Not-Charlies. The Not-Charlies didn’t get a look in.
So you can understand why I was a bit slow to process exactly what he’d said.
‘Hang on – no one else got laid off? No other redundancies?’
‘No. No one. And Michael just announced that we won that air freshener account. Everyone was asking where you were. It’s mental. What exactly did he tell you?’
Reluctantly I went over the whole story, my heart sinking through the floor as reality set in. Donovan & Dunning weren’t restructuring. The only person being downsized was me, and it was working. I’d never felt smaller in my entire life. I just couldn’t understand why. What could I possibly have done wrong?
‘I’ll try to find out what’s going on,’ he promised when I’d finished. ‘Do you want to come over later? We could get very, very drunk and watch Top Gun?’
I did like Top Gun.
‘And I’ll buy all that girl shit you like? You know – wine, those massive cookies, chocolate that isn’t a Mars Bar?’
I also liked girl shit.
‘Come on, Tess, you’ll feel better. You know you want to.’
And I did want to. But the idea of curling up on Charlie’s sofa eating chocolates that weren’t Mars Bars while he sat there feeling sorry for me was too much to bear. The only thing worse than being in love with someone who didn’t love you was being in love with someone who pitied you.
‘I think I just want to go to sleep. I’m really tired,’ I said, rolling out of my towel and into the nightshirt underneath my pillow. So what if it was only midday. I was unemployed. ‘Call you tomorrow?’
‘Make sure you do,’ he said sternly. ‘It’ll be all right, you know. Love you.’
‘Love you too,’ I replied, wincing with every word. Not because he didn’t mean it, but because he did. Just not in the same way. ‘Oh, and Charlie – I know what you’re going to say, but could you make sure Sandra changes the colour on the squirrel?’
‘You’re hopeless,’ he sighed. ‘Will do.’
Hanging up, I shuffled my bum up the bed until I could kick my feet under the covers and pulled them up over my head. Vanessa and Amy were still going at it in the living room. I couldn’t even make out what they were arguing about at this point – it was just high-pitched squealing. It sounded like dolphins re-enacting Toy Story 3. And I hadn’t lied – I really was exhausted. Tomorrow I would get up and I would draft my CV. Charlie would have found out exactly what had gone down at work and I’d call all the lovely recruitment agencies and ad agencies and let them know that I was ready for a new challenge. Maybe if I just went to sleep, everything would be better when I woke up. That always seemed to work in the movies, after all.
In the four days that had passed since I’d been fired I had learned the following lessons. One: what worked in the movies did not work in real life. Two: advertising was the creative industry equivalent of the movie Mean Girls. Three: four days wasn’t long enough for your hair to start washing itself. Four: if, however, you just didn’t get out of bed, you stopped noticing that your hair smelled disgusting after two and a half days, so that didn’t really matter.
I had woken up on Tuesday strong, confident and fully committed to writing a new chapter in The Story of Tess. Amy called in sick with another migraine and played cheerleader, DJing a motivational mix of music from my largely unplayed music library. By midday, I had an amazing CV, I’d called and left voicemails with every advertising agency in London, and I’d drunk five and a half cups of coffee. Big cups. By four p.m., my CV had gone out to eight recruitment agencies, I’d been to the toilet six times and Charlie had reported back at least a dozen different rumours about my ‘no longer being with the company’. The three favourites seemed to be that I had been leaking information to a competitor, that I had blackmailed the company into promoting me, and, my personal favourite, that I’d been sleeping with Michael and that he’d sent me to France to have his baby. Because clearly it was 1852 and that’s