It's Not You It's Him: An absolutely hilarious and feel-good romantic comedy

by Sophie Ranald

  Don’t get me wrong, I have the greatest respect for Barri. Especially if by ‘respect’, you mean ‘abject terror’. Barri started his career in fashion on the shop floor of a department store and worked his way up to Head of Marketing before jumping ship, selling everything he possessed, including his beloved loft apartment in Shoreditch and his vintage 1950s convertible Beetle, starting up an online designer fashion outlet store in an already overcrowded market and building it into a success story that allegedly had venture capitalists sniffing around to invest and catapult the business well and truly into the big leagues.

  But Barri was also… well, take the thing with the pastries.

  ‘Croissant, anyone?’ Kris said, reaching his elegant, lilac-polished fingers across the table, grabbing one from the plate and taking a flaky, buttery bite.

  ‘I’m good, thanks,’ I replied. I hadn’t had breakfast, but I had found that since Renzo dumped me, the constant replaying of our last night together in my head meant the very thought of food made me want to spew.

  ‘I had an egg-white omelette earlier, I’m stuffed,’ Sally said.

  ‘God, I swore I wouldn’t touch carbs until February,’ Lisa said. But she broke a loose fragment off the end of a pain au chocolat and we all watched as she brought it up to her lips.

  ‘Hungry, Lisa?’ We’d all been looking at the food, not the door, and Barri’s voice caught us by surprise. ‘Why don’t we all dig in. Moment on the lips, lifetime on the hips, but life is for living, right?’

  Lisa dropped the flake of pastry like it was laced with rat poison, and all the faces in the room turned to look at our boss, and the woman with him.

  ‘Team, I’d like you to meet Felicity,’ Barri said. ‘She’ll be covering Lingerie while Moby Chick is off on maternity leave.’

  Lucy, whose baby had been born three weeks early just before Christmas, had done a great job of pretending that Barri’s nickname for her while she was pregnant was funny, even though we all knew it wasn’t really. Still, we were too scared of Barri turning his acid mockery onto us to say anything.

  ‘Oh my God,’ Felicity said. ‘This is, like, so amazing. I’m so excited to be working with you all, and with Barri, of course.’

  She walked into the room and took a seat between Sally and me, poured herself a coffee and added milk and sugar, then tore an almond croissant in half and put one half of it on a paper napkin in front of her and the other half in her mouth.

  ‘Starving,’ she said, through a mouthful of crumbs. ‘Excuse me.’

  We all watched, agog, waiting for the moment when Barri would make a comment about how many calories our new colleague had just ingested and reduce her to shame, probably tears and possibly, later, vomiting in the toilet.

  We’d all been there – I had, anyway. Okay, Kris hadn’t, but he was a bit of a special case, being relatively new to the business and still Barri’s pet, and blessed with the physique of a racing greyhound and a metabolism that kept him whip-thin even though he devoured a pulled-pork burrito with extra cheese and guacamole for lunch every single day.

  I know what you’re thinking. But what about the body positive movement? Where’s the embracing of diversity? The average woman in the UK is a size sixteen! You can be beautiful and healthy no matter what your size! But you try telling that to Barri. Go on, I dare you. Better still, do it while you’re eating something perfectly normal like a tuna mayo baguette, to get the full impact of his corrosive contempt right before he sacks you.

  Occasionally I allowed myself to dwell on the impact the culture of my workplace might be having on my self-image, but I never dwelled for long. It was what it was. I loved my job, and whatever hang-ups I had about my body I’d had long before I’d even known Barri existed. This was the fashion industry, and everyone knows it’s fucked up. And besides, all those covetable samples we could buy for ten per cent of their retail price were a size eight.

  But Felicity didn’t seem even slightly bothered about what Barri, or any of us, might think of her. I don’t blame her, I thought. If I looked like that, I’d have rock-solid self-esteem, too. She was a drop-dead stunning size fourteen, with skin like a pearl, curves everywhere and dark hair cascading in natural waves down her back, and the air of unshatterable confidence that you only get if you’ve never once had to worry about how to pay your gas bill and whenever you go to a nightclub they know your name and let you in straight away.

  ‘Now.’ Barri took his place at the head of the table. The smile on his face when he introduced Felicity had melted away entirely. ‘You may be wondering why I’ve joined this meeting today, rather than Lisa managing it as usual. You do all follow the industry’s reports on our business, yes?’

  I glanced at Lisa and saw her flinch. The moment of confidence that had tempted her to a morsel of pain au chocolat had vanished, and was regretted.

  Around the table, everyone’s faces were still and scared. Except Felicity’s – she was looking calm, interested, even eager.

  ‘This.’ Tapping on his iPad, Barri fired up the big screen at the end of the room and brought up an email. ‘I received this from a journalist working for The Draper, which as you know is the trade publication with which we’ve always had a close and constructive relationship. They have been contacted by a leading broadsheet investigating allegations of sweatshop labour in our industry. And they want me to comment. Because apparently our supply chain is involved. Would any of you like to suggest what I might say?’

  No one said anything.

  Barri said, ‘Let me read you an extract from the report that’s due to be published next week. “Amalia is thirteen. She went to school until last year, but now she works in a garment factory in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She’s paid sixty pounds a month to produce dresses that sell for up to twelve hundred pounds in Britain, including on online boutiques such as Luxeforless.

  ‘“No one asked me how old I am,” Amalia told our reporter. “They just asked me if I could sew. I can, because my mother taught me. She worked in a factory, too, but she can’t any more because the arthritis in her hands got too bad and she coughs all the time from the chemicals they use to dye the clothes. I wish I could go back to school but I have to support my mum and my brothers.”’

  There was silence around the table. Barri flicked off the screen and said, ‘The factory in question supplies several of our brands.’ He wasn’t shouting, but I could tell how much effort it was costing him not to – his voice was trembling with rage. ‘Across denim – Sally, that’s your problem – women’s formalwear – Tansy, you’re in deep shit. I could go on but I won’t, although I can mention that this particular manufacturer doesn’t work with footwear or lingerie, so Kris and Felicity, you’re in the clear, for now. I shall be spending the next few days and weeks on fixing the massive reputational damage this has caused.

  ‘In the meantime, I want you all to prepare an in-depth report into the supply chains of every single one of your brands. I want it detailed, and I want it tomorrow. Got that? And if anything even slightly dodgy is found anywhere, we’re delisting that designer.’

  He shot one final, poisoned look around the table then stood, drew himself up to his full five foot five, and strutted out.

  I could hear my colleagues’ long release of breath around the table. I breathed out, too: at least my missing Christmas dresses had gone below the radar. For now.

  ‘I guess we’re done here for this morning,’ Lisa said. ‘Felicity, Tansy will show you where you’re sitting and where everything is. If you have any difficulty compiling the reports Barri’s asked for, let me know. Because if they’re not with him by close of play tomorrow…’

  She tipped her head back and drew a finger across her throat. It was a gesture we’d all seen Barri make when he was about to subject someone to a particularly brutal humiliation or, if they were lucky, sack them.

  ‘Shall we?’ I said to Felicity, and we gathered up our things and left the meeting room.

  As we walked towar
ds our bank of desks, she said quietly, ‘He so knew, you know. About the sweatshop labour and the underage thing. He’s just furious because it got found out.’

  Put that way, it was obviously true.

  ‘I guess he did,’ I said.

  Felicity wrinkled her perfect little ski-jump nose. ‘Way to start my first day in my new job. Jesus.’

  I said, ‘You’ll be fine. He likes you – for now, anyway. We’ll go for a drink if you survive the week.’

  ‘Deal,’ she replied.

  Inevitably, it was late when I got home that night, almost nine o’clock, and I was starving. Approaching the house, I could tell by the lights in the upstairs rooms that Charlotte was out, presumably staying over at Xander’s, but Adam was in. Not that that was particularly unusual – Adam was generally in, sitting at the computer in his bedroom, tapping mysteriously away on his keyboard.

  I went upstairs and knocked on his door.

  ‘Hey, Tans.’ He spun round on his wheeled office chair and smiled at me.

  ‘Hey. How was your day?’

  Up until last year, Adam had worked from home, coding and mining cryptocurrency – at least, that’s what Charlotte had told me. The coding I got, kind of, but cryptocurrency? It seemed dodgy as anything to me, but as least he wasn’t baking crack in the cooker. Anyway, he’d recently been offered a job by the firm where Renzo and Charlotte worked, as their head of information security.

  ‘Okay.’ Adam, bless him, is a man of few words. ‘Yours?’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Fucking horrible. Listen, do you fancy popping out to the Daily Grind for a beer? Tuesday’s burger night, remember?’

  Adam looked alarmed, as he always did at the prospect of having to leave his bedroom and go out where there are actual humans. But he loved a burger, and he was always forgetting to eat.

  ‘Okay,’ he said.

  Before he could change his mind, I said, ‘Great!’ and headed back downstairs and out of the front door. Adam followed me a few seconds later, shrugging on a thin denim jacket that wasn’t even slightly equal to the freezing, drizzly night.

  He didn’t seem to notice the cold, though. That was another thing about Adam – he seemed to live in a slightly alternate version of the world from most people. Take his reaction to me. I don’t want to sound vain – and believe me, no one is more critical of their appearance than I am – but because I’m tall and I’ve got long blonde hair, guys tend to react in a certain way when they meet me. Sometimes, like when I met Renzo and he asked for my number after, like, thirty seconds, this worked in my favour. More often, it’s just annoying, so much so that I can’t even hear the name of the eighties pop band Blondie without wanting to murder the person saying it, immediately and violently. Usually, though, I didn’t even notice it any more. But Adam always saw me as just another person, and I liked him for it.

  A wave of warmth and noise met us as we pushed open the glass door of the Daily Grind. Without asking, Adam headed to the bar and I wove my way through the crowd until I found a free table. A few minutes later he appeared with a glass of white wine for me and a beer for himself.

  ‘The burger special comes with blue cheese and bone marrow,’ he said, wincing. ‘So I got a regular cheeseburger for me and the chicken one for you, because that’s what you usually have, right?’

  ‘Cool, thanks,’ I said, although I would have quite liked to try the blue cheese. Bone marrow, whatever that was, maybe not so much.

  We sat in silence for a bit, sipping our drinks, until our food came. My burger looked amazing and smelled even better, but just as I was about to take a massive bite, I remembered what I was going to talk to Adam about, and my throat closed up. I cut the burger in half, picked up a fry and drank some more wine.

  ‘So,’ I said. ‘How’s Renzo?’

  Adam said, ‘Tanned. He was skiing over New Year’s.’

  ‘I know,’ I replied. He’d even asked me to go, in what felt like the distant past, but I reluctantly said no, because I’ve never learned to ski and Renzo’s one of those people who go zooming down black runs like it’s a badge of honour to break a leg, and I didn’t want him to think less of me. Now, the idea that I could have had three nights with him in a chalet in the mountains, kissing and cuddling under a furry blanket as we looked out at the moonlight reflecting off the snow, was almost too painful to bear.

  ‘He’s not doing so great at work, though,’ Adam said. ‘He was down more than two million today.’

  My mouth went dry and I took another gulp of wine. I knew from talking to Renzo how brutal the world of high finance could be, and that if he didn’t make money for the fund, he’d be out on his ear. Not only would that be horrible for him, but the last connection I had with him, through Adam, would be lost.

  ‘They make losses sometimes though, don’t they?’ I said. ‘All the portfolio managers do.’

  ‘Renzo doesn’t. Hardly ever, anyway. He was the top performer last year. His bonus was like…’ He mimed a rocket taking off. ‘I think he’s missing you.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Dunno. It’s just speculation. But the evidence points that way.’

  ‘Adam,’ I said. ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Sure. Are you going to eat that? If not, do you mind if I do?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ I said, my stomach knotting as my heart ached. ‘I’ll get us another drink.’

  When I got back from the bar, which took longer than it should have because I had to knock back some random bloke who offered to buy me a drink and then hassled me for my number, Adam had finished the first half of my burger and started on the second. He’d picked off the slice of tomato and left it on the side of the plate, so I ate it and took another chip.

  I said, ‘Listen, you know I want to get Renzo back.’

  Adam rolled his eyes. ‘Hard not to know. It’s not like you don’t mention it at least five times a day, every day.’

  ‘I don’t!’

  Adam looked at me and ate another bite of burger.

  ‘Okay, maybe I do. But if we were back together, I’d stop, and then you’d stop being annoyed by it, right? And Renzo would stop losing money at work, and everyone would be a winner.’

  ‘But he doesn’t want to get back with you,’ Adam said. ‘I mean, I don’t even know why he finished with you, but if he didn’t mean it he’d have answered those texts you keep sending him.’

  Adam and I were mates, but I wasn’t about to tell him what had gone wrong between me and Renzo. There was a small crumb of comfort in knowing that at least it hadn’t spread around the whole of Colton Capital.

  I said, ‘I know. Texting him isn’t working. It’s desperate and stalkerish and I’ve got to stop doing it. I need to see him, and I want you to help me do it.’

  ‘What, you’re going to turn up at the office?’

  ‘No! God, no, not that. I’ve got a much better idea.’

  I picked up one of the remaining chips and took a small bite off the end of it. It tasted great and I managed to swallow it without the familiar sick feeling overwhelming me. Progress. I finished it and took another one.

  ‘So are you going to tell me this brilliant idea of yours or are you just going to sit there stuffing your face?’ Adam said.

  ‘I’m not—’ I began, and then I saw the expression on his face. Adam rarely makes jokes and he’s not very good at them, but when he tries I feel it should be encouraged, so I laughed.

  ‘It’s actually very simple,’ I said. ‘You’ve got access to each other’s diaries, right? Like, for planning meetings and stuff?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess,’ Adam replied. ‘But I don’t really have meetings with Renzo’s team. They’re investment, I’m IT. Totally different departments.’

  ‘But in theory. Like, if he was taking a client out for drinks or whatever, you’d be able to see from his diary where he was going.’

  ‘Maybe. But he might not put the venue. Or he might just block it out as unavailable. Or he might not put it
on his calendar at all if it was out of hours.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘There’s no such thing as out of hours in that place.’

  If there was one thing that had marred the idyllic few months I spent as Renzo’s girlfriend, it was how difficult it was to actually get to see the man. He was typically in the office at seven in the morning (after spending an hour in the gym) and rarely left before nine at night, and when he did it was often to attend dinners with clients, which usually went on late into the night. I suspected that sometimes so-called gentlemen’s clubs were involved, although Renzo had assured me that entertainment of that nature was frowned upon by HR and couldn’t be expensed, and that anyway he’d never look at another woman as long as he had me.

  ‘You’re in the same office as him,’ I said. ‘You get to talk to him every day. If you’re, like, getting in the lift together, you could ask him where he’s heading and he’d tell you.’

  ‘You make it sound like we’re best mates,’ Adam objected. ‘We’re not. I hardly ever speak to him.’

  ‘But you’re close enough that you think he’s missing me,’ I said.

  ‘That’s just logic,’ Adam said. ‘Last year he was a star performer. This year, he’s hit the skids. What’s changed? You’re not together any more.’

  Without really noticing, I’d finished almost all the chips. There were only two left, so I took one and pushed the plate over to Adam.

  ‘This is last Rolo territory,’ I said. ‘Come on. I’m your friend, even if Renzo’s not. Don’t you want to help me? And help Colton Capital, because if Renzo carries on doing as badly as he is, it would be bad news for the fund, and for you and your bonus at the end of the year.’

  ‘I don’t care about money,’ Adam said. ‘Anyway, they pay me loads.’

  I thought, not for the first time, how unfair it was that Adam didn’t need or care about money, yet had heaps, whereas I did and was skint. But clearly the prospect of a hefty cheque at the end of the year wasn’t going to persuade him. My wine was finished, there was only about an inch of beer left in Adam’s glass, and the staff were starting to clear up for the night.