Geli Voyante's Hot or Not (2 page)

‘
Of course,’ he lies, like he does every week. ‘Well, I’d better leave you to it. I need to talk to Roger – had another reader lavish praise on me in a letter to the editor.’

Before I can answer,
he pops back down into his pod and I can breathe properly again now that the lush man is out of my direct vision. I could look at this letter – no doubt I won’t understand any of it. I rarely do – but considering the time, I’d better switch on my computer and actually do some work.

Computer
loaded. Connect to Internet. Facebook. Click log-in. Password? Toblerone. Connected!

Let’s ju
st have a little scroll down my News Feed:

“Claire Voyante is listed in a
relationship with David Sinclair. Say congratulations!”

O
oh! Claire has a new boyfriend. Bitch! He has no chance though because she’ll never marry someone called Sinclair to become Claire Sinclair. It’s more stupid than Claire Voyante. There’s a mini-picture of the two of them. Looks kind of geeky – exactly her type then. Boring. I know they won’t last, so I don’t care… much.

Scroll down some more.

“Glinda Rosenberg wrote on your wall. 9.13 a.m.”

Excellent
! Glinda is my very best friend and no doubt has messaged me to arrange lunch, even though we live together and saw each other at breakfast – the reason I was late for work… again. I’m just about to click “view wall-to-wall” when something catches my eye and I frantically, and quite manically, scroll down. Run mouse, run!

Fuck.

It can’t be…

“Tiggy Boodles is engaged to Calvin Murphy-Lee
. Say congratulations!”

“Millicent ‘Lily’ Jackson is engaged to Jasper Jenkins
. Say congratulations!”

“Sarah Sim
mons is engaged to Toby Holton. Say congratulations!”

Shit. Shit. Shit.

Three! Three in one day! This cannot be happening to me. Especially not Tiggy. Why, oh why, Tiggy? I didn’t even know she was seeing someone seriously.

Lately, I’ve noticed this
a lot though. All my so-called friends are getting engaged, settling down, beginning the cosy coupledom of married life, until death (or divorce) do them part. Each time I see an announcement, a little part of me dies (and I don’t say congratulations). Each time, I can’t refrain from thinking,
but what about me
?

Not that I actually think “what about me?” because what they are doing is just Not Hot. I
should know. I declared it so.
Everyone
knows that grown-up life begins at twenty-five and before that you are still a child. You wouldn’t let a three-year-old
child
get married; equally, you shouldn’t let a twenty-three-year-old
child
get married. These may be adult bodies we inhabit but on the inside we’re no better than toddlers. Until twenty-five, that is.

I mean,
everyone
agreed I was right to declare that paying back student loans at above £15,000 earnings wasn’t Hot. Changing the requisite to over twenty-five gives the post-uni people time to sort their lives out and allows them a greater chance of getting a foot on the housing ladder (house prices ain’t Hot either). It allows them the opportunity to deal with silly credit card debt without the additional worry of student loan debt. This would boost the overall economy and make a better Britain, or at least that’s what Jerry (real name Ben Anderson;
Ben and
Jerry) declared to me after he read that particular Saturday column of mine.

Jerry is
the economist columnist here and whereas Theo is Hot, Jerry is gay. We are beyond looks. But, at least he makes sense when he talks, doesn’t mind me calling him Jerry, and calls my column “inspired” – far more flattering than Theo’s grimaces. He’s one of my work besties and sits at the other side of me.

I suppose
I can just about cope with Lily and Sarah’s engagements, but Tiggy... I cannot accept she…
she is
getting
married
.

Tiggy Boodles is my arch-nemesis. She cannot be getting married for legitimate reasons because she is incapable of love. This is a spite campaign against me so
that she can declare in her pathetic rip-off column that I was wrong and weddings for the under twenty-fives
are
Hot. But, if she hadn’t got some poor schmuck to agree to marry her – and I bet she cajoled him into proposing – she wouldn’t be saying that. I bet this Calvin Murphy-Lee person did not drop to one knee or, if he did, it was only because Tiggy was gripping his arm tightly with her talon-grip and pushing him to the ground.

Tiggy Boodles is your classic airhea
d. She is blonde to my brunette, orange to my human-colour, and a copycat to my creative – proved by her rip-off column: “Fab or Faux”. Sound familiar? Week-in, week-out, she declares my column as faux. She likes broken, low-quality records, as you’ve probably gathered. It’s funny though as I’m the one with all the awards… and my own boobs. There’s nothing faux or unnatural about me… unlike the silicon in her.

I
n public, however, it’s a different story. There are air-kisses for the silly cameras that inevitably seem to follow Tiggy Boodles around like the poop (not the scoop) she is. For the record, the
air-five
is the Hot way to greet friends and enemies alike. She schizophrenically acts like we’re best buddies because we both hail from the same hometown of Durban, South Africa, we both attended the same university here in the UK – Leeds – and we now live in London, where we write a similar column, in the same publishing family. I quickly and rather unnecessarily add that my column is far superior, but as we both work in the
New News
family and with
New News
being big on family values, bizarrely they encourage this deluded, juxtaposed rivalry in the spirit of
sisterly
banter. They think it’s great, newspaper talk for: it sells copies.

To me though, despite what senior management
may say, Tiggy Boodles is faux and I hate her. She is nothing but a parasite whose favourite activity is replicating my life to torture me. Go figure. 

It
wasn’t always like this. Once upon a time, back in Durban, we were best friends, inseparable in and around the Berea, the neighbourhood where we both lived. This was up until the point she stole my childhood sweetheart, Eric Nevis, in a move that divided the loyalties of our year group at Durban Girls’ College and then we were never found in the same vicinity again. Even though our worlds collided practically every day and we shared the same
physical
space, we were operating on different
levels
. That made it like we weren’t in the same place, even if she was standing two metres away or sharing a desk with me in class. The girls’ loyalties may have been divided, but the teachers didn’t care. Hence, the forced desk sharing. 

Eric later cheated on her – he slept around, especially w
ith the tourists frequenting Durban’s Golden Mile – and, to my great delight, gave her a nasty disease. It gets better. He then told everyone the
real
reason why he dumped her instead of covering it up with social niceties. Fantastic! Even if he had left me for Tiggy I instantly forgave him for that.

E
very so often, I like to include STIs in my column as Not Hot. It gives me great satisfaction to know I’m subtly, but publicly, having a dig at Tiggy. Better still, she knows it. It also wins me brownie points with the adults because I have a huge teen following and it promotes me as a modern day heroine for promoting safe sex. Ha! And it’s all thanks to Tiggy Boodles for being a cheating, phoney slut. It kills her to know that.

However, Tiggy Boodles may be a cheating, phoney slut, but she is a cheating, phoney slut who is now engaged. That smarts. More
so than when she enticed Eric away from me using the lure of cheap sex. I cannot believe a girl of her dubious morals is getting married before I am, and to this Calvin person, whoever this deluded Calvin person is. Quasimodo’s uglier brother, perhaps?

Quic
k! Click on Calvin’s name. Excellent, his profile isn’t limited.

Oh dear… Oh dear, oh dear
… This is not good. This is not good at all:

Name: Calvin Murphy-Lee

Sex: Male

Interested in: Women

Relationship Status: Engaged to Tiggy Boodles

Birthday: 16
^th
January, 1977

Hometown: Windsor, Berkshire

And, oh my
, he’s
Hot
. Let me just view some more photos to make sure. OK, he is deliciously hot. Look at that picture of him on the beach. Hel-lo Mr washboard abs. Hel-lo chunky man thighs. Hel-lo baby blue eyes. Hel-lo perfection.

Life is truly not fair. How is Tiggy Boodles, Tiggy Boodles of all people, engaged to a deliciously hot, thirty
-year-old City boy who is probably worth millions by now and who, worst of all, looks
nice
? Not just nice in the looks sense,
but
like a nice person
.

He’s tagged in an album entitled “Christmas with Shelter
”. Calvin has
sacrificed
his Christmas Day to help others out and, by the looks of it, not only is this a regular Christmas occurrence, it seems Mr Murphy-Lee helps out all year round. I suspect he doesn’t do this to impress people either. I can tell this because he isn’t posing in any of the photos in the “look at me, look at me” manner I equate with Tiggy. He looks oblivious in fact.

How on earth has the
most evil, most selfish girl in
both
hemispheres managed to snag a gorgeous, rich,
nice
man? How has she done it? She hates the homeless. She hates charity work. I mean, I suspect she even hates her own mother (justifiable, I’ve met Ursula), so what on earth does he see in her?

I
f it is true, if she really has managed to capture this man’s heart, then where is my Calvin Murphy-Lee? Let me face the gutting truth for one moment here, that she has uncharacteristically kept quiet about him, which makes this more likely to be the real deal. This makes no sense whatsoever.

I am interrupted from these brain-aching thoughts (OK, and some
photo-drooling as well) when my phone rings. It’s an external line meaning it has to be one of two people. It could be Tiggy herself who learnt a long time ago not to bother phoning me using her internal line here in the Gherkin as her number pops up on the display – think of the devil – or it will be Glinda.

I no longer have caller ID for external lines since I stupidly declared it Not Hot, reasoning it effectively ruined the element of surprise.
On Monday morning I arrived at my pod to discover Kenny from the IT department had decided to
helpfully
remove this feature for me. He didn’t realise that whereas I may have declared it Not Hot – it had been a tough week, news was slow – it didn’t mean its purpose was defunct and
I
wanted a personal surprise on the end of the line. I was merely pointing out that
some
people
like to be surprised; therefore for
them
, but
not
for me, caller ID was Not Hot. Clearly Kenny has never had to write a Hot or Not column week-in, week-out. Bless him.