‘He isn’t too far off, you know, Sienna,’ she said, very quietly now.
‘Sorry – I don’t know who you’re talking about,’ I said, thrown into a state of bewilderment again.
‘Your man. He will come round to you. It will work itself out.’ Her eyes met mine and I felt an ice-cold sensation down my back again.
God, this was weird. But she was definitely nuts and, like a horoscope, frustratingly vague. You will breathe today. At some point in the next forty-eight hours, you will fall asleep. You will change the bed sheets within the next fortnight . . . Well, duh. Ridiculous.
He could be the milkman who owes Dad and me a fiver. He could be my uncle who promised he would call last year and just stopped trying. But still, he could be, well, you know . . . Nick.
Right. I need to get out of here, I thought. I peeled five £20 notes from my purse and walked out of the shop with my bags. What a strange woman. I considered the madness of the situation as I joined the hustle and bustle of the centre of town.
Couples embraced against walls and street signs; giggling children ran between bollards and bins; lone wanderers looked at stunning cakes and carefully crafted clothing through panes of sparkling glass and smiled at the beauty of it all.
There was something really special about today and it only reinforced my love affair with London. I had been so infatuated with Nick recently that my thoughts had been totally taken up by him. We had spent so much time together that I now had some to myself. And with it, I was going to explore my surroundings more, be independent. This was the only city where you could meet such a choice selection of eccentrics as I was doing this afternoon.
When I got home, I started pulling my new wares out of their gold bags and carefully unwrapping the tissue paper. You didn’t get this kind of treatment in JD Sports.
When I pulled the last parcel out of its bag it seemed heavier than the others. Odd . . . I tore away at the tissue paper and saw a flash of green. A load of silk came pouring like water out of the hole I had made.
Oh my God, it was the dress.
I held it in the air and felt the skirt come tumbling down, swishing against the floor.
‘Wow, Sienna. That’s absolutely incredible,’ came my father’s voice as he stood in the doorway behind me, holding on to the wooden frame with a white-knuckle grip. ‘What’s it for? Are you going to a party or something?’ he questioned, a look of wonder on his face.
‘No, Dad. I didn’t even buy it. I don’t really know what to do. A woman I don’t know gave it to me today, she really wanted me to have it.’ I sighed as I sat back on my bed, guilt and joy rushing over me all at once.
‘You’ll look incredible in it, Si.’ He stood for a minute, looking really proud of me. I didn’t know why. I hadn’t done anything good.
Unsure of what to do with the dress, I slipped a soft hanger through the straps and balanced it on the door handle of my wardrobe. Dad and I stood and surveyed it like it was a painting in the Louvre.
Was I the kind of girl who could do a dress of that calibre any justice? I really didn’t feel like I could, but now I felt a huge responsibility to do so. It was wasted on me, really. It was as if the crisp memory of one woman’s youth was now hanging in my room, aching to be relived through some impossible love story. What made it worse was that I wasn’t sure if I really believed in love any more . . .
The dress had been playing on my mind all day long. I’d managed to shake it off in the last hour or so, but now, as I looked down at my kitbag, I thought again about this beautiful unexpected gift, given to me by an ex-ballerina I didn’t even know. A dancer who took people’s breath away as she whirled across stages all over the world. I was in two minds about running it back to the shop.
I met a girl today who could wear a dress like that, and that made it all even worse. Her name is Chloe. Now she is beautiful.
She’s on work experience at the office and will only be with us for a week. She has a mop of crazy blonde hair and a really pretty face. She also has a kind of naughty, bad girl look about her, while seeming angelic at the same time.
She’s the kind of girl that makes even the most confident woman look in the mirror and notice new flaws, so it was no surprise I was suddenly feeling so inadequate.
Thank goodness she’s only here for a week, I thought.
Being that beautiful, people must make assumptions about you before they know you. I didn’t know how she’d wangled a placement from Ant, seeing as he’s about as flexible as a wooden ruler, but I think her looks probably helped. She might be a really nice girl with incredible talent and drive, but I guess I’ll never know. Girls like that get the things they want in life, I thought.
I looked in the mirror at my long brown hair, which tumbled wildly over my shoulders because it hadn’t been cut for a while. I looked at my pale skin, which I had never had the energy or time to stain with fake tan. My nails were self-painted and the varnish had started to chip. My eyebrows needed plucking.
I wasn’t fierce. I wasn’t even that sexy. I wasn’t like Chloe.
Six
‘If I could just turn back time, I would give her everything.’
Nick
The word temp is short for temporary. I even looked it up in the dictionary:
1) adj. 1. Lasting for a limited time; existing or valid for a time (only); not permanent; transient; made to supply a passing need.
When I met Chloe Rogers three weeks ago, I thought she would be with us for a week. It would be temporary. Very much so, and even if Ant did decide to create an extra editorial assistant role, it would not necessarily be her filling it.
There’s a lot of competition out there. I assumed there would be a whole interview process where a load of miserable-looking, dejected journalists would turn up, for once having shaved/worn a suit/wiped off the habitual sulky expression, and go for the job.
But here she is, in all her sexy glory. With her own desk, being sexy, day in day out. It’s extremely distracting. The first email this morning went a bit like this:
To: Redland, Nick
From: Rogers, Chloe
Subject: Tour of Balham needed
Text:
Nick,
I have been with this company for three weeks now and I don’t know Balham very well.
I have no idea which café does the best prawn sandwiches, which pub serves the nicest beer and doesn’t smell of wee, or how to avoid the local tramps.
Do you think you can help?
Fancy giving me a tour? On a strictly colleague to colleague basis, of course . . .
Chloe
x
Now that is flirting. I may be a little bit slow off the mark when it comes to women, but even I can pick up on the hints in that message. She even did the double bluffing thing with the ‘strictly colleague to colleague basis’ remark.
Still. I love it, and she’s pretty funny too. Funny women are even more attractive than the just attractive ones.
I flexed my fingers and clicked reply, the familiar butterflies of an exciting new romantic liaison filling my tummy.
To: Rogers, Chloe
From: Redland, Nick
Subject: RE: Tour of Balham needed
Text:
Chloe,
Well, I’m sure I can fit a quick tour of Balham in at lunchtime. How are you set for today? The rest of the week is looking a little chaotic . . .
I can’t promise you much knowledge of the local homeless population, although if it’s tramps you’re hoping to avoid then just stay away from our car park.
I can definitely help you on the pub and the prawn sandwich fronts. In fact, let’s do both. I know a great pub, which doesn’t smell of urine, and serves excellent bar snacks.
Pick you up (from your desk) at one?
Nick
But I wasn’t going to put a kiss. She put a kiss, but I wouldn’t be sucked in so easily. I was going to play hard to get. I had tried playing by my own rules and avoiding office ro
mances, but this would just be a bit of fun – so I told myself.
Wow, she had replied already.
To: Redland, Nick
From: Rogers, Chloe
Subject: RE: re: Tour of Balham needed
Text:
Nick,
See you then. Don’t be late.
Chloe
X
A capital kiss this time, nice work.
I leaned back in my chair and looked at my latest illustration. I was quite happy with it. It was a far cry from my frustrated scribblings at the start of the year. In fact, I was quite happy with life.
Just lately I had been feeling really inspired, and I wasn’t entirely sure why. I thought a lot of it might be down to just accepting the way things were and having fun. I had spent a lot of time panicking about how my pre-thirty vision was not quite going to plan, and how much I loved Sienna. But somehow, I’d managed to cast all that aside and learned to live in the moment.
It was probably all about enjoying the journey. That’s what a stranger told me on a bus some weeks ago, and although it seemed ironic at the time, I really understand it now. Do I really want to hit eighty and regret how much time I spent worrying about the future in my twenties and thirties, when actually everything worked out just fine anyway? I can’t think of anything worse. What I’m learning, and slowly, is how to get the balance right. To work really hard, to be ambitious, to be a go-getter, but also to give myself a break when things aren’t quite going to plan. If you’re trying hard and working to improve every day, then what more can you do?
I still can’t help but love Sienna, though. I adore her. Looking at her still makes me melt somewhere deep in my soul. Her presence lifts me up more than anyone else I know. Thinking about her fills me with happiness. What we have is unique. But I have accepted that she will never be mine, so I have to just love her from a distance and move on. It’s working. It really is. I am finally achieving peace.
It was tough at first, weaning myself off something that I was so addicted to. It started off strangely. I had all these crazy dreams about her; I could be anywhere – a train station, a supermarket, a shopping centre – and I would see her. I could tell it was her so I would try to tap her on the shoulder to talk, but when she turned round her face was blurred out. Once we were in a library and I could see her through the gaps in a bookshelf. I would try to tell her I loved her, but she didn’t know who I was.
So many nights I woke in a cold sweat. So often my finger hovered above her name on my mobile contacts list. I even wrote a letter once, but I screwed it up and threw it away. I felt like I was losing my mind.
Now I realise that I was sweating her out. And she’s gone now. Not literally, obviously – I still see her, and we still hang out, but less often. When I do see her, I go and have dinner with her and George at the flat. It’s less intense that way, and her father loves it.
The yearning is more of a quiet nagging, rather than the raging fire it once was. I can see other women now. I can look at them and appreciate them. It’s like the blindfold has been pulled from my eyes and I’ve been set free – and I love it. I can actually want someone else.
And right now, I want Chloe Rogers. Not in a ‘Let’s play chess, go for a stroll round a National Trust property, and have a latte and a toasted teacake’ kind of way. I want Chloe in a naughty weekend in the country kind of way, one that doesn’t involve stepping out of the hotel room unless a fire alarm goes off. Oh no . . .
It was eleven o’clock, my turn to make the coffees and also time for Tom’s weekly prank. It had been a long while . . . A promotion was on the horizon so I was behaving myself more than usual, and working crazy hours to boot.
I rose from my desk and stalked out into the office, my bright blue trainers shuffling against the scratchy polyester carpet. The sound of hurried typing and quiet phone calls could be heard across the room; everyone was deep in concentration including Sienna, who was leaning so close to her computer screen I wondered if she wasn’t due for an eye appointment.
Chloe was sitting opposite her; she grinned at me then looked down at her keyboard. I gave her my special smile, the one I reserve for girls I fancy. It’s often met with a look of disgust and horror, but she tucked her hair behind her ear and her fingers lingered around the bottom of one of the strands. That’s supposed to be a good sign, right? Girls play with their hair when they like you. Fact.
‘Boo!’ I dug my index fingers into Sienna’s shoulders and she almost headbutted the screen in shock.
‘For fuck’s sake, Nick!’ she shrieked, slapping me hard across the stomach and frowning.
I drew a chair up next to hers and started indiscriminately closing all the windows on her computer, one of which seemed to be a heated eBay bidding war for a pair of leather boots.
‘Nick, stop it!’ she whispered, pushing my hands out of the way and knocking over a small glass of water in the process. She started to laugh.
I tried to help her mop it up but accidentally wiped the majority of it onto her lap. She gasped in shock as the cold water soaked into her dress, giving me another evil look that soon melted into a grin.
‘What do you want?’ she asked, pushing her smiling face towards mine and flicking great blobs of water into my hair with her left hand. Sienna could never really be angry with me.
She looked lovely today, in a close-fitting flowery dress with tights and ankle boots. Her hair was even longer now. It struck me how much it had grown since I’d first met her.
‘Nothing really, Si. Just wanted to annoy you a little and I think it worked. When can we do some city exploring? It’s been ages . . .’ I gave her my best sulky face. I had learned it from my grandmother’s dog, Suki, who was quite literally a spoiled bitch. The queen of getting what she wanted, Suki had skills I wanted to learn.
But I wasn’t kidding about it being ages. It really had been. I was all for the giving it some space theory, but this was possibly a bit much.
‘Hmm, let me have a look.’ She pulled out her burgundy diary and started frantically flicking through the pages. A few receipts fell out, then some guy’s business card. I wondered who that was . . .
‘Looks like I’m busy for . . . well . . . the rest of my life . . . Sorry, buddy!’ She shrugged her shoulders, a cheeky smile painting her features. I dropped my head towards my lap and sighed.
‘Just kidding, sweetheart. I’ll text you a couple of weekends I have free and we’ll get something sorted,’ she added, her hand on my arm. ‘I do miss you a bit,’ she whispered in my ear, looking like she instantly regretted it.
I noticed Chloe surreptitiously peeping over the partition; as soon as her eyes met mine she looked back at her screen.
I shifted away from Sienna a little, aware that our closeness was a bit odd. It was hardly giving off the right vibes if I wanted to get involved with Chloe.
As I started to stand up I leaned towards Sienna, moving a great drape of glossy brown hair away from her perfect little ear. ‘I miss you too, Si,’ I said so quietly it was almost a breath, and walked away.
A deep and tangible emptiness was returning. Come on, Nick. Be strong, please. You’ve been doing so well, I told myself.
‘Nick!’ I heard a familiar yell as I walked towards the kitchen. The call of the Tomcat distracted me from my sudden downward spiral.
My gangly friend put his arm around my waist as we walked into the kitchen, wiggling his bottom like a woman. It was so embarrassing when he did that. It was a wind-up for the sake of a middle-aged lady called Delia, who is something of a homophobe and is convinced that Tom and I are embroiled in some kind of love affair. Delia, who was standing by the kettle, threw her spoon into the sink and stormed out in a huff. Obviously discrimination was still alive and well, then . . .
‘Fancy going for a burger at lunch?’ asked Tom, pulling out a series of mugs from the cupboard.
‘I can’t mate, really sorry,’ I responded, picking out the green one for myself. I loved that
mug. Sienna’s dad gave it to me.
Tom threw teabags into the line of cups from a distance, missing most of them.
‘Meeting?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Wank?’
‘No.’
‘Dump?’
‘No.’
‘Doctor’s appointment?’
‘No.’
‘Girl?’ came his final guess, hitting the nail on the head.
‘No.’
‘Oh, come on. It must be a girl,’ he probed, running a bony hand through his floppy hair, which was about to envelope his face if he wasn’t careful.
‘No, not at all. I might, actually, just want some peace and quiet away from babysitting you. By the way, speaking of girls, have you scared away that Fiona or whatever her name is yet?’ I laughed, prodding him in the side with a fork.
‘No, Nick. It’s going really well, actually,’ he retorted, flouncing out of the kitchen with one of his shoelaces undone. He was such a weird one.
I grabbed the bag of sugar from the bottom shelf and filled his mug three quarters of the way up with pure sugar granules, then disguised it with a teabag, milk and a tiny bit of water. He was going to love this.
I delivered the sickly sweet concoction to Tom’s desk a few minutes later. ‘There you go, pal,’ I said, careful not to thump the mug down on his desk through the sheer weight of it.
‘Thanks, Nick,’ he replied, staring at the computer.
I skulked back into my office.
Seconds later I heard a cry of ‘Pah!’ and a loud slamming noise, which resembled the sound of a mug full of sugar being bashed onto a wooden surface.
‘Right, that’s it!’ he shouted, storming into my office. He was laughing already. ‘This, Nick, is for you.’ He thrust his arm forward and a sudden wave of water washed over me, covering my face, hair, T-shirt and worse, my lap. I didn’t even have time to move away from it. The cheeky sod . . .
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