‘And here’s another thing,’ says Sharon, ‘he was really angry. Vicious. White hot anger. Never seen anything like it.’
‘How exactly is that supposed to cheer me up?’
‘Well if the movies of Sandra Bullock have taught me anything, it’s that the opposite of love is indifference. Now you can say what you like, but he was definitely not indifferent to you back there. So from now on, the best thing you can do is to deflect indifference with more indifference. Then you’ll be grand.’
You’re quite wrong,I think, looking dully at her. The opposite of love isn’t indifference. It’s disembowelment.
‘Or else, if you fancied a laugh,’ says Maggie, hauling herself up to go outside for a fag, ‘I could get him audited for you? If there’s anything he hasn’t declared to the Inland Revenue in the last few years, even as much as a pair of jocks, we could make life very uncomfortable for him.’
I just sniffle by way of a response. Sorry, but it’s all I’m able for.
‘Ah for fuck’s sake, Jessie, you’re going to have to snap out of this. I don’t think I can put up with you trailing around the house out of your brains on whatever pills Ma’s been slipping you for the past few weeks. The guy’s a prick and the sooner you draw a line under this the better. Simple as.’
‘Yeah and I mean, it’s not like he ever asked you to marry him or anything, now did he?’
‘No. No, you’re right. He never did.’
MAY
JUNE
Chapter Twelve
OK, good news and bad news to report. First, the good: I’m no longer sleeping on the sofa at home any more. I know, miracle. Sharon, in a flush of generosity which I’ll forever be grateful for, took pity on me and said that from now on it would be OK if I crashed out on a makeshift fold-up bed in her room. A vast improvement to sleeping on the bum-imprinted sofa downstairs, let me tell you.
We’ve become close, Sharon and I. She’s been helping me and I’ve been helping her. Every spare minute we have, we’re online vetting out suitable men for her and weeding, as she puts it, the WLTMs (the Would Like To Meets) from the RAMFs (the Run A Mile Froms). Then, at night, we lie awake giggling and messing and talking about boys and about some of the more eejitty email replies she’s got, usually until Joan wallops on the bedroom door and tells us both to shut up, that we’re keeping her awake.
So it’s kind of like being a teenager again, minus homework/spots/hopeless crushes on band members/older, unattainable boys in school. I swear to God, this is doing me good on several levels. Renews my faith that love and romance do exist in the cyber world, if nowhere else, for starters. And any topic of conversation that takes my mind off that other matter can only be a good thing, can’t it? We’ve reached an unspoken agreement in the house to draw an iron veil over that bowel-withering event back in April and the general embarrassment of my carry-on, which is probably just as well. Even Maggie, queen of the quip, has left me alone and hasn’t had a go at me. At least not on the subject of He Whose Name Shall Forever Remain Unspoken, that is. On just about everything else, though, she’s the same as she ever was, a wise-arse that looks like she’s about ready to throttle me if I as much as look sideways at her.
After said event, Sharon told me in no uncertain terms that I’d made the big romantic gesture, it blew up in my face, so therefore it only proved the theory she’d espoused all along. Namely that Sam was never anything more than a big knobhead with no knob. Furthermore, she reckoned that his behaviour towards me that horrible night was exactly the electric shock treatment to the heart which I needed to jolt me back to reality. From then on though, she started to monitor my behaviour and began by stealing my mobile from my handbag and deleting Sam’s number, as well as removing the photo of him and me together on a Caribbean holiday, which I had kept as my little screensaver. Her heart was in the right place, I had to keep telling myself, even though it was a complete waste of time, I’ve had that number memorised pretty much since the day he first gave it to me.
Then, as we lie in our beds at night, she often tries to get a laugh out of me by imagining all sorts of wild and wacky ‘serves him bloody right’ scenarios. Since we’ve broken up, he’s turned to drugs and has now mortgaged his life away to support his two grand a day habit, is a particular favourite.
‘Or, hang one, I’ve a good one,’ Sharon said to me hopefully one night while she stared at the ceiling smoking a fag and I tried to get into one of her Danielle Steel novels. ‘Did you ever think that he might be gay and is only realising it now? I’ve seen it happen before, you know. Toxic bachelors who flit from girlfriend to girlfriend but never settle down; next thing, before you can say Gianni Versace, they’ve gone and shacked up with some skinny-arse David Furnish type.’
‘Where exactly have you seen this before?’
Someone on the street maybe, I’m thinking? Some local hot gossip I don’t know about?
‘On EastEnders.Sorry, when I said I’d seen it before, I didn’t mean in real life. By the way, do you think I’d sound more glamorous to fellas if I changed my name?’
‘Changed it to what?’
‘Shazwanda.’
‘Ehhh…no. Definitely not. Now, goodnight…Shazwanda.’
Heartache, I’ve decided, is a bit like measles; the later it comes to you in life, the worse it is. But now that the healing has begun, in my quieter, calmer moments, and with the benefit of hindsight, I’ve come to accept the following: if Sam is able to deadhead me out of his life so easily, then our entire relationship was a bit like Communism; good in theory but lousy in practice. Yes, he knew every incarnation of me, from humble runner in Channel Six to weather girl to fully fledged TV presenter. But the one incarnation of me that he couldn’t handle was unemployed loser. Which, when you think about it, says far more about him than it does about me. And my contacting him all the time was, to borrow Sharon’s metaphor, a bit like her relationship with Pot Noodles. Irresistible in the short term, deeply satisfying and nigh on impossible to say no to, but afterwards you’re guaranteed to feel like complete shite and end up hating yourself even more for not having any self-control. Sharon’s very fond of any metaphor that involves food.
So, anyway, I’ve stopped. No phone calls, no incessant texting; I don’t even read the papers just in case there might be a bit of gossip about him. Like a recovering alcoholic, I’m taking it one day at a time. But right now I’m almost seventy days without contacting him and as far as I’m concerned, that’s one of my proudest achievements.
Anyway, only middling news about Sharon’s love life to report. After intensive site-trawling, and much gentle guidance on my part, she did eventually whittle all the guys she’d been in regular contact with down to one special someone. A guy called Dave who worked in IT: thirty-five, separated, no kids. Looked cute in his photo, even if it was hard to tell, given just how far he was standing away from the camera. The only tiny point in his disfavour was that, during a late-night email to Sharon, he made the cardinal error of letting it slip that she appeared to watch a lot of TV, whereas he was someone who found real life far more stimulating. It took me several hours to convince her that this was actually a perfectly normal stance and that he wouldn’t necessarily be alone in thinking so. Anyway, they got to a point where they were messaging every day, sometimes several times a day and when the time finally came for them to meet up, she was up to high doh with excitement. Her cunning plan was to meet for dinner somewhere posh in town; a proper, grown-up date, right down to beard rash and love bites to show for it at the end of the night, with any luck.