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

by Sophie Ranald

  ‘Evening,’ I said. ‘Wow, looks like you’ve been busy.’

  Neither woman said anything. Chelsea waved a hand at me, then carried on pinning as fast as she could. Her mother snatched a piece of fuchsia lace from the pile next to the machine and reached up to the shelf above her for matching thread.

  ‘Come into the kitchen,’ Chelsea said, once the last pin had been removed from her lips and stabbed through the pattern and fabric.

  Her magenta hair was frizzing a bit over her sweating forehead and her eyes were red-rimmed. She rolled her shoulders as she left the room, then they dropped back into the hunched position I guessed they’d been in for many hours.

  ‘I’m fucking knackered,’ she said, pouring two pint glasses full of water from the tap and handing one to me. ‘I can’t drink any more coffee, I’m rattling. And it’s too hot.’

  She pulled her T-shirt away from her body and sniffed it.

  ‘Jesus. I haven’t showered since before my shift last night, or slept.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Drink your water, and tell me what’s happening.’

  She gulped the whole glass down in one go, then refilled it and necked some more.

  ‘So, a couple of weeks ago some posh bird came by my stall and bought, like, four dresses,’ Chelsea said. ‘She wanted to take more but I said no, cos I was running low on stock and for all I knew she was going to sell them on on eBay or something. I’ve had that happen before. I sold a jacket for one fifty and, the next week, I saw a woman wearing it. I didn’t recognise her – and I know all my customers – so I asked her and she said she got it online for three hundred. Not cool.’

  ‘Not cool at all,’ I said with a shiver of guilt.

  ‘Anyway, so this woman,’ Chelsea went on. ‘Turns out she’s one of them influencers on Insta. She didn’t sell the dresses. She wore them. She wore them to, like, The Ivy and shit, and she tagged me in her posts when she did. And next thing I know, I’ve got a queue outside my stall. All these rah girls going, “Babe, this is so, like, authentic,” and buying up my whole stock.’

  ‘But that’s brilliant! You’re hitting the big time!’ I didn’t want to tell Chelsea that I was about ninety-nine point nine per cent sure that the original posh bird was Pru, and that it was the dress I’d worn out a few weeks ago that had sparked this sudden spike in demand.

  ‘Yeah, it would be fucking brilliant if I could keep up,’ Chelsea said. ‘But I can’t. I’ve got no stock, so people are putting in orders, and they all want them, like, yesterday, because they’re off to Provence or Marrakesh or Indo-fucking-nesia for their holidays, or they’ve got a wedding in Gloucestershire that they need a “real statement piece” for. And they’ve paid deposits, and Mum and me have been working our bloody tits off and we’re still miles behind, and I’m meant to have forty dresses done by next Saturday and it’s more likely that England will win the shagging World Cup.’

  She slumped into a chair and put her head in her arms, her shoulders starting to tremble with fatigue, or tears.

  ‘It’s okay, Chelsea,’ I said. ‘We’ve got this. We’ll make a plan.’

  ‘What plan, though?’ she demanded. ‘Mum and I are working flat out and there’s no way we’ll get everything finished in time. I’ve been working for twenty hours solid and Mum for twelve, and we’re both due on shift at six tomorrow. And if I don’t keep up making my regular stock I won’t have anything to sell when people come by the stall and then it’ll be game over.’

  I saw her point. I was about to tell her to calm down again, but she was in full flood.

  ‘And I know what people are like. I see it all the time at work. Someone comes in wanting to buy Nip and Fab pads and we’ve sold out, and they throw all their toys out the pram and demand to see the manager and start slagging us off on Twitter. And that’s just normal people like us – how badly are these girls going to kick off if they don’t get their outfit for their flash wedding on time?’

  ‘They’ll go to Harrods and buy something else,’ I said. ‘But obviously, you don’t want to let anyone down. Let’s take this one step at a time.’

  ‘I haven’t got time!’ Chelsea snapped. ‘I need to be back in there, working.’

  ‘No, you don’t. You’re running a business now. You need to think like a manager. Remember that last mentoring session we all had together? Remember the bloke from that incubator fund who said the biggest mistake entrepreneurs make is carrying on like they did when they were one-person bands and not learning to outsource when growth is happening? That’s happening to you, right now. Admittedly it’s happened sooner than we expected, and we don’t have mechanisms in place to facilitate it, but you and I need to be working right now to find them.’

  Chelsea looked up at me. She was still super-stressed, but there was a new calm and purpose in her face. I only wished I was feeling calm myself – but I carried on.

  ‘Now. Tell your mum to step away from that machine and get some rest. I don’t know about you, but if I was having a baby tomorrow morning, I wouldn’t want the midwife to be so knackered she went in there like she was cutting a seam. Would you?’

  Chelsea winced and giggled. ‘Hell, no.’

  ‘Right. And have a shower yourself, if you want. And let’s order in some food. I bet you haven’t eaten in ages.’

  Chelsea didn’t say anything, but her stomach let out a massive rumble that was enough of an answer.

  I picked up my phone. ‘What do you want? Fried chicken? Burgers? Ramen?’

  ‘Pizza,’ she said. ‘With salami and red onion and chilli and a stuffed crust. If you don’t mind?’

  ‘Works for me.’

  She shuffled out, and I started putting in an order for food when I heard an almost inaudible cough.

  I looked up and saw Nathan hovering in the doorway, looking hopeful. He reminded me a bit of Freezer when Adam rattled the Dreamies packet.

  ‘Hungry? I’m just ordering in some Domino’s. What do you fancy?’

  ‘Mega Meatlovers,’ he said shyly. ‘If that’s okay? That shit is peng.’

  ‘Of course. And for your mum?’

  ‘She likes ham and pineapple,’ Nathan said. ‘Freak.’

  I laughed. ‘I’m not keen on pineapple on pizza myself. But hey, each to their own, right?’

  I tapped in our order, adding some garlic bread and wedges for good measure, reassured to hear the sound of water pattering in the shower tray. At least Chelsea was getting in some self-care. But she needed more than food and a freshen-up: she needed her entire business rescuing, and I wasn’t sure how – or even whether – it could be done.

  I took my tablet out of my bag and logged into my email. I thought about my suppliers in East Asia, and the ones in Turkey. Probably, I could call in some favours somewhere, but even if Kuan-Yu in Taipei or Erdal in Istanbul were willing to help, I wasn’t sure they’d be able to. Chelsea’s order was tiny by their standards, and it wouldn’t be financially viable for them to take a handful of machinists off the production line to make up fewer than a hundred garments using what was basically scraps of random fabric, rather than the vast bolts of cloth they usually worked with. The couturiers in Paris used suppliers for fine embroidery who were better able to cope with small-scale orders, but their work came at a crazy price – all the profit Chelsea could hope to make would be wiped out in labour costs.

  And then I saw a LinkedIn invitation that had been hanging around in my alerts for ages. I tapped on the red dot while my brain hummed hopelessly in search of a solution.

  ‘Harriet Dawson would like to connect with you…’ Harriet who? I was pretty sure I didn’t know anyone called Harriet. I clicked and read it, and my brain clicked, too. Harriet. The woman I’d met at the Streets Ahead gig I’d been to with Josh, who’d so fascinated me with her description of the charity she’d started that I’d even forgotten Renzo was there.

  ‘Stitch Together helps refugees and asylum seekers integrate into their new communities… Many of the wome
n have amazing needlework skills… We work with partners who pay the London living wage…’

  I did a series of rapid calculations, first in my head and then on a spreadsheet. Paying a skilled seamstress to make up her garments, even allowing a generous ten hours for each dress, would make Chelsea a decent profit. And what was more, the project had the potential to scale up. If Pru’s friends wore the dresses on their holidays or to their swanky weddings and got noticed, and more orders flooded in, suddenly there could be the beginnings of something viable.

  I tapped out a rapid-fire email to Harriet, then tweaked the numbers on my spreadsheet some more. Soon, I was so engrossed that I barely noticed Chelsea emerging from the bathroom, wafting fragrant steam, and Nathan answering the door and returning with boxes of pizza that smelled even better.

  ‘I think we can make this work,’ I said triumphantly.

  Twenty-One

  To be honest, I’ve never been much of a birthday person. When I was very little, Mum used to make the usual amount of fuss, baking cakes and arranging parties at which I remember Pass the Parcel and Musical Bumps featuring heavily. After we moved to Cornwall, it all got a bit more complicated. Already, Dad’s little problem was becoming a big problem, and money was always tight.

  Mum tried her best, but I was getting too old for fancy cakes and party games. Trips to the cinema followed by McDonald’s just couldn’t happen, and even though Mum did her best with craft-based activities, treasure hunts in the garden, home-made sausage rolls and falafel balls, because she couldn’t bring herself to shop at Iceland like other mums on a budget did, I could see my classmates’ reactions turning from bewildered to sneering.

  And when we moved house and changed schools, I told her, abruptly and probably hurtfully, that she needn’t bother any more. It was just as well, because there certainly wasn’t a child at Trelander Academy willing to risk social death by turning up at my party, and Mum would have made her courgette cake and veggie burritos for nothing.

  At uni, my birthday was always a non-event, falling as it did right in the middle of exams, when everyone was in peak stress mode. Not that I had a huge cohort of friends falling over one another to go out with me and get bladdered on cheap lager before staggering home via the kebab shop.

  My last birthday, when I turned twenty-six, had been a bit better. Lucy at work had hers the day after and, because she was pregnant and off the booze, we’d gone out after work with Sally, Kris, Lisa and a few others from the office to a restaurant that specialised in puddings and shared more than twenty between the ten of us, and it had felt deliciously subversive knowing how furious Barri would be if he found out we were indulging so shamelessly.

  Actually, with hindsight, it’s possible Kris ratted on us, because Barri’s comments about Lucy’s expanding waistline ramped up from goading to downright vicious after that.

  But this year, I wasn’t expecting much. Twenty-seven isn’t a landmark birthday anyway, I told myself, fighting back a twinge of disappointment when Josh told me he was flying to Belfast to record a single with Ruby the night before and didn’t know when he would be back. Even for a fake boyfriend, that’s pretty fucking shoddy, I thought, before remembering that until Facebook reminded him on the day, he probably wouldn’t even know it was my birthday.

  So I got up in the morning, same as on any other day, went downstairs and made myself a coffee. Adam had left for work already. In the unlikely event that anyone was going to send me a card, it wouldn’t arrive until the postman did, hours later, and I’d only see it when I got home. And, same as any other day, I got the Tube to work, fighting the urge to have a good old cry of self-pity.

  I was cheered up by a beautiful bunch of flowers on my desk – pink roses and peonies, my favourite – with a note from Debbie wishing me a happy day. I was surprised and touched, and felt a fresh twinge of guilt about Josh. This can’t carry on forever, I told myself firmly. At some point, the charade was going to have to end. I’d have to give up on Renzo and move on with my life.

  Just not yet.

  At the desk next to mine, Felicity was eating hard-boiled eggs out of a Tupperware box, looking as morose as I felt.

  ‘God, that stinks,’ Kris grumbled.

  To my surprise, instead of slapping him down with a sassy comeback, Felicity snapped the box closed, marched off to the kitchen with it and returned empty-handed, looking as if she, too, might be on the verge of tears.

  ‘Happy now?’ she said.

  Kris flushed. ‘I didn’t mean you to…’

  ‘Well, I did,’ Felicity snapped. Over the hum of our computers, I heard her stomach give a massive rumble.

  You ok? I tapped out to her on WhatsApp. Fancy popping out for lunch? Or for a drink later?

  She glanced down at her phone, then up at me. ‘Sorry, I’m busy. Are you doing anything nice for your birthday?’

  ‘Guess not,’ I said. ‘I might share a bottle of wine and a takeaway with my housemate, or something. Rock and roll.’

  ‘What about your chap? The handsome Australian?’ It was an innocent enough question, but there was a bit of an edge to her voice.

  ‘He’s out of town with work.’ I sighed, picking up my phone again to text Adam. ‘I suppose we’ll do something to celebrate when he gets back. Whenever that is.’

  We both returned to our screens and the day dragged slowly by. A smattering of birthday wishes appeared on my Facebook wall. Adam replied, saying he was working late but suggesting I meet him at the Daily Grind at eight, which meant I’d have to stay late at the office too, because I was pretty sure that if I went home I’d never summon up the energy to leave again.

  I had a meeting with the marketing team about the promotional shoot for my new collection, which was normally one of my favourite parts of my job. Today, though, I couldn’t manage to get excited about the location, a disused gas works in Nottingham, or the selection of head-shots the modelling agency had sent over, or the stylist’s vision of ‘an urban dystopia brought to life by glamour’.

  I emailed two of my suppliers to chivvy them about late deliveries, and my words were more acid and less diplomatic than they needed to be. I sent Daria the update she’d requested on the progress of my mentoring relationship with Chelsea, but something stopped me from mentioning that, even as I wrote, there were eight women, hailing from Syria, South Sudan, Eritrea, Albania and Zimbabwe, all working busily to fulfil the orders that had flooded in from Pru’s friends and Instagram followers.

  I’m not sure what prevented me from sharing what was, after all, a bit of a coup for my mentee. Maybe it was a sense that something might still go wrong, and I didn’t want to big up Chelsea – or, by extension, myself – until I knew the frocks had been delivered, quality-checked and dispatched (via Nathan on his moped, to save on courier costs) to their new owners.

  Daria might well not care – she might just view it as a minor achievement and send me back a two-line email saying she was pleased things were going well. But, on the other hand, she might tell Barri. And right now I wanted to stay as far below his radar as I could, especially as I was spending my lunchtimes searching for a new job.

  I hadn’t been sacked, and I hoped I wasn’t going to be, but I sensed that my days at Luxeforless were numbered, and I wanted to jump before I was pushed.

  I stared at my spreadsheet, making a few minor, pointless tweaks to prices and volumes to try and make my margins better, then closed the file without saving my changes.

  At last, at half past six, I gave up, shut my computer down and left the office. The rest of the buying team had already called it a day and only the late-night customer care women were still there, their screens in sleep mode as they played Causality on their phones. It was still brilliantly sunny outside, and I was too hot in the long-sleeved blouse I’d worn to work because the air conditioning in the office was always turned to arctic. The pavements on Regent Street were thronged with tourists and commuters, all wilting in the heat as they hurried towards the e
ven hotter Tube. It hadn’t rained for weeks; London was sweltering and Josh had been leaving Tupperware bowls of water out for the foxes at night. I’d have to remember to do that before I went to bed, I thought – his concern for the little family, a vixen and three cubs, was contagious.

  It was too early, when I alighted at our stop, to go and meet Adam, so I decided to go home and change after all. Even though I was only meeting a mate for a drink, it was still my birthday, and I was conscious that all my make-up had melted off in the heat and I felt sticky and uncomfortable in my work clothes.

  The house was empty and silent. Freezer was perched on the fence, watching to see whether Adam or Hannah would arrive home first. He glanced in my direction, then looked away again, deciding I was of no interest to him.

  ‘You and the rest of the world, Freezer,’ I muttered darkly, heading upstairs for a deliciously cool shower. I got ready quickly, keeping my make-up minimal and not bothering to do anything with my hair except bundle it into a messy up-do. I put on a white cotton sundress from a couple of seasons ago and slipped my feet into jewelled flip-flops, and then I hurried out again into the warm evening.

  In my haste to get home and freshen up, I hadn’t noticed that there was a sign on the door of the Daily Grind: Closed for a private function. See you again soon. Bollocks. I was turning the other way, towards the Prince George, cursing other people and their rich and full social lives as I fished in my bag for my phone, when I thought I heard someone call my name.

  I stopped and turned again towards the closed glass door of the Daily Grind, taking a proper look inside this time. The bar wasn’t crowded, but there must have been at least forty people in there. There were candles burning on the tables and bunting strung from the rafters. Looking more closely, I could see there were letters on the individual triangular flags, and they spelled out a message that said, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TANSY.