I know I sound like a fifteen-year-old with a crush on the captain of the hockey team, but honestly, that’s how I felt. I hadn’t had that shy, almost reverent feeling for someone, that sense of desire so strong it hurts to swallow, since I was travelling in Asia on my gap year, and fell headlong for a shaggy-haired, guitar-playing waste of space called Kyle. Of course I hadn’t known at the time that Kyle was a loser, and I squandered nine months of my life that I’ll never get back finding out: nine months putting up with his infidelities, his unreliability, his pointless and persistent drug use, all because I was in luuurve. I more or less swore off that sort of emotional incontinence post-Kyle. A couple of weeks after he finally dumped me because one of the other girls he was shagging was proving to be even more of an all-forgiving, bankrolling sucker than I was, I met Sean and we went out for almost a year, but I was never particularly serious about him if I’m honest, just swept away by his glorious looks and the fact that he wrote poetry that was actually rather good. Then along came Chris, but he cheated on me and my tolerance for that sort of thing was pretty low after Kyle, so I dumped him as soon as I found out (he literally came home with another girl’s knickers in the pocket of his jeans), and swore off emotional involvement forthwith. Then I met Ben, and after a few months of not being each other’s boyfriend or girlfriend, he met Nina, so I was properly single again. I stayed that way for ages and was pretty sex-starved to be honest, until I got together with Wallace. That really was his name. And (I am cringing slightly remembering this) he used to like me saying it while we had sex. As in, “Fuck me, Wally! Fuck me harder! Give me your hard cock, Wally!” Call me shallow, but after a month or so of this I realised I simply couldn’t live with myself and I certainly couldn’t live with Wally, so I told him to sling his hook. That had been a couple of years ago and, barring the occasional drunken post-pub shag, I’d been more or less celibate. I was about due for an emotional shake-up, and it had well and truly come.
At ten o’clock we heard Claire knock at the door, and I let her in and between me and Oliver the whole story came spilling out, and Claire said Pers quite often gagged on her food and generally managed to sort it out herself, but it sounded like Oliver had done exactly the right thing if we were worried. And she gave Pers a massive cuddle and said she’d better get her home to bed, so yet again I failed to glean any meaningful information about where she’d been and who she’d been seeing. A few minutes after Claire and Pers left, Oliver said he’d better be going too.
“Are you okay now, Ellie?” he asked.
“Yes, I’m fine. Sorry I went all wobbly on you, and thanks so much for taking care of Pers.”
“No, thank you.” He gave a lovely, soppy smile. “She’s an absolute sweetheart, I’ve really enjoyed spending the evening with both of you. I used to… I miss… Anyway, it’s been a pleasure.”
He reached out and tucked a strand of hair that had escaped from my ponytail away behind my ear, and when his finger brushed my cheek it felt like an electric shock. He pulled me into his arms and gave me what I really, really hoped was a bit more than a brotherly hug, and said he’d see me soon. And I went to bed, cherishing the memory of his lean, strong arms around me and his scratchy jumper against my lips, with the heat of his body beneath it.
I’d arranged to work from home the next day, and normally I get an amazing amount of work done in bed with my laptop, endless cups of tea and Radio 4 in the background, but that day I simply couldn’t focus. Every time I tried to think of catchy lines for our ad campaign or draft a lucid and compelling press release, my thoughts scurried off in the direction of Oliver. Every time I heard the sound of a woman’s heels on the pavement outside, I worried it would be Rose, and felt a horrible sinking sense of guilt and shame, as if she was going to walk in on me trying to squeeze my lardy thighs into her jeans, or something. After a couple of hours I lost patience with myself and went to have a shower, and the rush of the water must have muffled the sound of the front door because when I came downstairs in search of toast and Marmite, there she was in the kitchen filling the fridge with the various noxious-smelling cheeses she’d brought back with her.
“Hey,” I said.
“Hey, Ellie.” Like Oliver, Rose had a gorgeous, golden tan, but she looked tired and her hair was all over the place – I suppose she’d spent the night stranded in some airport lounge.
“How was it?”
“Apart from the stupid delay at the end we had an amazing time,” she said. “Pip’s finally dumped Sebastian, she shamed him by getting off with a ski instructor called Hans in front of everyone, and Sebastian’s furious. We spent most of the holiday making jokes about Hans off to wind him up, I wish you’d been there.”
“All Hans on dick?” I suggested with a grin, and Rose laughed.
“Exactly. And Vanessa said she’d picked up a stomach bug so she wasn’t drinking, or eating much, but actually she was panic-dieting. She told me she put on a stone over Christmas.”
“Marriage will do that to you,” I said.
“And I brought you chocolate. Loads of chocolate, and a bottle of this lethal aquavit stuff.”
I felt another wave of guilt. Great, thanks, Rose, come back from your holiday with presents for me and I’ll just try and steal your boyfriend, it’s all good.
“Thanks. I’ll try and resist it though, I’m sort-of dieting, too.”
“Really? You’re looking amazing, actually, I noticed as soon as I saw you. Not that you aren’t always gorgeous of course. My lucky sister, who was at the front of the queue when the cleavages were handed out.” That was Rose’s kind way of saying I was fatter than her.
“Oh, and,” I tried to make my voice sound casual, “Oliver came round last night. I was babysitting Pers and he stayed for a bit. I think he was expecting you to be here.”
Rose’s smile disappeared and her face smoothed into a sort of blank mask, the way it does when she’s upset. “Did he, now?” she said.
“Yes,” I blundered on. “Honestly, Rose, I do think it’s a bit unfair of you not to have told him you weren’t going to be here. Even if you’d had a row.”
“What makes you think we’d had a row?” she snapped. “What did Ollie say?”
I hastily assured her that he hadn’t said anything at all, beyond general ski-related chitchat. Then I told her about Pers choking, so she’d understand that Oliver and I had had more important things to talk about than any row they may or may not have had.
“But it was obvious,” I said. “You texted me to tell me your plane had been delayed, why didn’t you text him? It’s not his fault he had to come back early. Especially as you’d made arrangements to meet him.”
“Well, Ellie, it’s very good of you to be so concerned about Oliver not experiencing any inconvenience,” she said, “but frankly if he chooses to treat our relationship like it’s some meaningless, casual fling then he should be expected to be treated the same way.”
Then of course it all came spilling out. Unlike me, Rose can never resist confiding all the gory details about her boyfriends: what they get up to in bed, what they row about, when they do and don’t call. I suppose it’s an outlet for the insecurity and turmoil that everyone feels when they’re in love, even if they’re as poised and beautiful as Rose.
It was on the sixth night of their holiday, she told me, a gorgeous, radiant evening, with the moon and the stars pouring light down on to the glittering expanse of snow and the mountains looming over it all like white ghosts. She and Oliver had gone for a walk, taking a bottle of champagne with them.
“It was like something out of a fairytale,” she said. “You know, the little gingerbread-style houses and the narrow, cobbled streets, and Ollie and me walking along hand in hand. It was so romantic, it was just perfect. I know we haven’t even been together that long but I was sure he’d brought me out there for a reason.”
So Rose, swept away by these surroundings and, if I know her and her mates on holiday, emboldened by copious a
mounts of wine, had decided to seize the moment. Like a total numpty, instead of shutting up and letting Oliver do the talking, she’d mentioned Commitment.
“And he just went all remote, Ellie,” she said, sniffing. “He said I’m a lovely girl – cold fucking comfort – but it was early days and we should get to know each other better and have fun and,” her voice wobbled a bit, “maybe see other people. The complete fucking fucker! See other people! Just because some silly cow he lived with upped and left him, he thinks he can play the broken heart card for ever.”
“What silly cow?” I said. I knew nothing about Oliver’s relationship history and of course I was intrigued, as I was by anything to do with him.
“I don’t know,” Rose said. “He won’t talk about it. Just kind of burbles wistfully about the one that got away. But we’ve all got one. Look at me. I’ve got loads and I don’t let it stop me. Anyway, then the next day he said he’d had a call from work and had to fly back to London, and there I was left there looking like a total loser.”
“I’m sure you didn’t look like a loser,” I said soothingly.
“Oh, I so did,” said Rose. “And I had to play gooseberry to Pip and bloody Hans while they practically shagged each other in the bar every night.”
“Ugh, grim,” I said.
“Oh, Ellie,” Rose said, and there was a wobble in her voice that made me worry she was about to cry. “What am I going to do?”
“You need to think about this rationally,” I said. “What’s gone wrong with previous boyfriends, where can you spot parallels with the Oliver situation, and how can you prevent yourself falling into the same traps again?” I pulled my shorthand notebook out of my handbag and picked up a pen. “Come on, you were talking about your one that got away – or several that got away – let’s do a Venn diagram.”
Rose sniffed, blew her nose and managed a watery giggle. “Okay, Venn diagram it is then.”
“So, Danny. What happened with him?”
“It was all going really well,” Rose said. “We’d got to the stage where we were seeing each other almost every night and I mentioned moving in together – because after all we were practically living together anyway – and after that he just sort of switched off, and then I found out he was seeing someone else, so I finished with him.”
“Right,” I said. “Infidelity following premature suggestion about commitment.” I wrote it down. “Next?”
“Neil,” Rose said. “I was, like, so in love with Neil. Even though he was a lot older than me. I thought that was a good thing, I thought it would mean he’d be more mature and stable, more likely to want to settle down.”
“But?” I said.
“But he’s American, obviously, and he was only out here for six months, buying art. So I thought perhaps I might go back with him. I even looked into getting a Green Card and talked to Quinn’s Manhattan office about getting a job there. I was really excited about it, and then when I told Neil my idea he told me not to be ridiculous.”
“What was ridiculous about it?”
“I was just a fling, he said. ‘A summer full of fun’ was his phrase. Dickhead.”
“Okay, so dumped by dickhead after taking casual fling too seriously.” I wrote. “Aiden was next, right?”
Rose nodded. “We’d been going out for about a year. Then this new woman started working with him and he talked about her, like, a lot. And you know how you sometimes just know something’s going on?”
“Mmmm,” I said non-committally.
“So I checked the messages on his phone, and I didn’t find anything, but he went completely mental at me for snooping, and after that things weren’t right any more, and we drifted apart.”
“Okay, I’ll put ‘drifted apart after snooping caused by fear of affair and worry about commitment’,” I said. “I don’t know about you, but I’m beginning to discern a pattern here. Now, Mark.”
“Okay, okay,” Rose said. “That only lasted five weeks. He dumped me after I said I thought we were seeing each other exclusively, and he thought we were dating other people too.”
“Commitment-phobe frightened off by demands for exclusivity,” I said. “I think we have the answer, Rose. You need to forget commitment, and work on being less clingy. Think cool, elusive, remote. Think Scarlett O’Hara meets Buffy.”
“Ellie, you’re a genius. You and your Venn diagrams! From now on Oliver bloody Farquahar can do the running. I’m not calling him, I’m not texting him, and if he comes round here I shall be out. And we’ll see if a couple of weeks of that treatment doesn’t change his mind.”
And she hefted her bag of skiing stuff on to her shoulder and stalked off upstairs.
My advice had been good, I knew that, but I wondered whether I’d also invoked the law of unintended consequences. After all, if Rose was going to be giving Oliver the cold shoulder, then Oliver might find himself at a loose end, and in need of company occasionally. I logged on to Facebook.
CHAPTER NINE
Rose was true to her word. A couple of weeks passed and Oliver’s number remained untexted, his Facebook wall unwritten on. Every now and then I heard Rose talking to him on the phone, sounding breezy and cheerful, saying things like, “Oh, I’m so sorry, Ollie, but I’ve got a… something on on Thursday,” and, “I’m working late that evening otherwise I’d love to have seen you,” and so on. She has nerves of steel, she really does. Unfortunately this meant that I didn’t get to see Oliver either, and what with the launch of YEESH’s digital poster campaign on the Tube and my continuing regimen of early morning runs, vegetable soup and no booze, I felt that my social life was going from below average to non-existent.
After a week of heinously late nights – I think I’d left work after eleven o’clock on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday – the artwork was finally signed off on Friday afternoon. It had really gone to the wire – the boards were due to go up on Monday morning so London commuters would be faced after a weekend of debauchery with hard-hitting messages about STIs that were sure to get their week off to a truly horrible start. The initial creative from the design agency had been all wrong – totally off-brand, Duncan complained – and it had had to go back again and again, while Ruth and I sweated blood over the copy. Eventually we’d settled on two images: one of a girl’s face and chest on a pillow, dimly lit but clearly in the throes of sexual ecstasy, and one of a bloke’s face, similarly contorted but seen from below. The copy read, “She [or he]’s not the only thing you picked up tonight,” and then there were a few scary bullet points about the increasing rates of various infections, and our freephone number and web address. I’d questioned whether showing sex taking place in the missionary position in both images was reinforcing gender stereotypes, but as Duncan pointed out, you can never overestimate the ability of the general public to fail to get the message, so we’d kept it simple.
Anyway, at last Ruth clicked ‘send’ on the final email to the production guy, and we all sat back in our chairs and looked shell-shocked with relief.
“Drink?” Duncan suggested, but to be honest by this stage we were sick of the sight of one another, and Ruth said she’d arranged to take Diana out for dinner and Duncan said he was desperate to get to the gym and I suggested we have a night out the following week, and we switched everything off and locked the office and drifted away, zombie-like with post-deadline fatigue.
I’d ring Claire, I decided, and see if she could leave Pers with Portia, her neighbour, and pop out for a beer or two, or otherwise I could just go round to hers and we could order a curry and watch a cheesy film, or something.
She took ages to answer her phone but eventually I heard her say, “Hey, Ellie, how’s it going?” She sounded flustered and out of breath.
I told her about the work stuff, and asked how she and Pers were doing.
“We’re fine, just great! Just a bit mad at the moment, I’m getting ready to drop Pers off at Portia’s while I’m out.”
“Fab!” I said. “Where are
you going? Mind if I come along?”
There was a sort of awkward, pregnant pause, then Claire said, “Oh, it’s not really that kind of out, Ellie. You see, I’m meeting…” then there was a crash and a wail, and as so often happens during conversations with Claire, she said, “Shit! Got to go. I’ll call tomorrow, petal, okay?”
Feeling a bit deflated, I texted Ben to see what he was up to, then got off the train a stop early and walked along the river and through the park. It was a gorgeous, sunny February day – one of those days when you start to feel like you have broken the back of winter and spring genuinely can’t be far away. The river sparkled in the setting sun and there were drifts of snowdrops and crocuses scattered through the grass. It all perked me up a great deal, and by the time I got home I was thinking that actually a night out to celebrate was just what I needed, so I got in the shower and shaved my legs and scrubbed my tired, greasy hair and used some of Rose’s Dermalogica exfoliating stuff on my face. By the time I’d finished straightening my hair – which was really looking horrible, I noticed, straggly-ended and split to fuck – Ben had replied.
“Sorry, Ellie, busy tonight. Maybe catch up next week? Bx.”
Oh, I thought. That was a bit shit.
By this time my feeling of wellbeing had totally evaporated, and when Rose came home she found me sitting at the kitchen table, still in my towelling dressing gown, morosely drinking vodka and slimline tonic.
It Would Be Wrong to Steal My Sister's Boyfriend Page 9
