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I
F YOU FOUND
it hard making it through the article above, it really wasn’t any easier actually dating Jackie. For one thing, she left out a few things—the muttered swearing when it rained, the complaints about the blister she got, and the rude things she kept saying about the barman just loud enough for him to hear. But, overall, you know, it was quite a successful date.
I’d made a list of things I had to work on with her. I wanted to make people like her. I wanted the village she lived in to like her. I wanted her to feel happy. Then, just kind of, I figured she might start to understand people.
DUSTER: Jackie Aspley update please?
ME: Wait and see.
DUSTER: You have not, we notice, killed her.
ME: It’s all in hand. Trust me.
B
EING HER BOYFRIEND
was tricky. One thing was easy, though—we didn’t have sex. Having had sex with Romeo, I figured it would be easy enough, but for some reason I really didn’t much feel like it. Luckily, neither did Jackie. She just asked me to hold her and told me that was nice. One evening, when far too drunk, she told me that she’d never had proper sex. At uni, she’d kept on dating gay guys, then the people on the first newspaper she’d worked on were all awful, so she’d never done it until she’d met her husband, and he turned out to be so bad at it that it left her forever wretchedly disappointed.
“And,” as she said, “I like you so much, I’m not sure I could face finding out that you were crap in bed too. So I’d like to postpone it as long as possible. Hope that’s okay. You’re being so nice about it.”
I nodded, and added ‘Give Jackie Orgasm’ to my list. I looked at it and changed it to ‘Give Jackie Orgasm?’ Something she said nagged at me. Overall, though, it was quite cushy. I’d spend the nights hugging her, watching television, sleeping in the expensive bed with her, and then sneak home in the morning to feed the cat.
WHO ARE OUR ROMANIAN INVADERS?
Jackie Aspley befriends a Romanian Beggar
S
UVENA USED TO
be a dentist. Now she sits on a bench on Marble Arch in the rain. When it stops raining she ventures as near as she can to a 5 star hotel without getting arrested and begs for money.
“I tell my family back home I have got work at a dentist’s,” she tells me in flawless English. “They would be so sad if I told them the truth. They would order me home. But the problem is, I was promised work over here, and then the dental surgery who offered it me cancelled it after I arrived. They said the position was no longer available, but I think they didn’t want to get the bad publicity your paper gives people who employ Romanians. So I must beg until I can get the air fare home. It is very cold.”
I feel awful for her, and insist she takes my Hermes scarf. I assure her that she can eBay it for at least £200, but she tells me she does not even own a smartphone. She refuses to take my phone, partly because it seems to embarrass her, and partly because it seems to always be ringing with people wanting to shout at me. I have to take three calls during our interview.
“You make so many people so cross,” she says with a laugh. “What do you do to them?”
“I don’t know,” I tell her.
“I used to be a dentist. And yet people like you less than me.” She lays a hand on mine. “Poor you,” she says, and I get the taxi back to the station thinking that things must be pretty bad if a homeless Romanian dentist pities me.
Jackie Aspley, thedailypost.com
COMMENTS [most popular]:
WinSomeArmy: ‘These people are the vermin of Europe and you’re sending this cow to give them hugs? Get over it!’
SanityClause: ‘She’s different now she’s eating the happy sausage!!!
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H
ER NEXT ARTICLE
went down even worse. The only thing you need to know about “Jackie Aspley’ Search For The Perfect Teabag” is the dreaded phrase at the bottom. “There are no comments on this article.”
J
ACKIE WAS IN
a real mess. She sat in the village coffee shop and her hair looked matted together. She was wearing a designer dress that looked as though it had been slept in. She’d put on make-up, but it looked as though she’d turned her head to one side at the last moment. She kept smiling at me, and it took me a few seconds to realise she was trying not to cry.
I put my arm around her before I realised what I’d done.
It all came flooding out in words, so many words I didn’t know what to do with them. “My editor took me out to lunch, which is normally when she tells me that I’ve
really
upset someone. And I was wondering what I could possibly have done... and then she told me that I’d upset no-one. And that that was the problem. No one cares about me any more.”
She looked up, and before I’d even thought about it, I said, “But I care about you.”
“Don’t say that,” she said, squeezing my hand. “My editor says it’s all because of you. At first there was a proper spike in interest, but then when you turned out to be nice and normal and... and... good for me, then people started complaining.”
Wait. People complained that someone was less broken?
“She showed me print outs of
horrible
things they said about you on the site. It’s so lucky you refused to be in any pictures or let me use your last name, because you’d hate it all. You’d hate it all so much. And that’s not the worst of it. My editor said that my articles since I’ve met you have become less good. No one looks at them. No one wants to advertise next to them.”
The irony of all this floored me. I’d meant to make her a better person, but in doing so I’d made her less good. Although, thinking about this, I could have killed her, rather than her career. And that was worth it. She still had an amazing house and fields of animals. She had kept on telling me how much she hated being a journalist.
“This is good, isn’t it? You said you wanted out. This is the chance.”
“Yeah,” she said, and her voice was small. I talked on about her running a food business, of creating jobs in the community, and she kept on agreeing in a smaller and smaller voice which eventually faded away entirely.
“What’s wrong?”
She looked up, running fingertips around her eyes, drawing the make-up out in panda smudges.
“My editor has given me an ultimatum,” she said. “I’m either to dump you or I’ll be dumped from the paper.”
This was my out. Amazing. But it felt like a hollow victory.
“What did you say?”
“I refused. She told me to think about it over the weekend. She’s spiked my piece on cupcake recipes.”
“Okay.” I gave her a hug.
“Okay?” she said, her voice picking up again. “I’ve committed columnist harakiri for you and you just say okay?”
“I’m stunned, that’s all I can say. The woman I first met would never...”
“Oh,” Jackie laughed. “She was just as bat shit crazy. But now she’s the same in a nicer way.”
We hugged for a bit. She wasn’t wearing perfume for the first time ever. She smelled really nice.
“We’ll always have cats,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, rallying as she raised her cup. “Here’s to cats.”
I
WOKE IN
the middle of the night to hear a noise that I thought was mice in the skirting board. My first thought was that the cats would be pleased. Then I worked out what it was.
I followed the tapping noise through to the living room. In front of the chilled embers of the fire, Jackie sat typing.
“I’ve come up with a third way,” she said. “I’ve told them to print this and, if they don’t like it, just to sack me. No redundo, nothing. Just get me out the door. But they won’t. This is personal dynamite.” She gave me a tiny little smile. “And, if it is a suicide note, then it’s a brilliantly honest one. It explains everything about me. And every word of it’s true.”
She stood up and smiled.
“I’m going to make us a cup of tea and then come up to bed,” said Jackie Aspley.
THE SHOCKING TRUTH OF MY AWFUL FAILURE
Jackie Aspley gives a personal blast
I
’VE SPENT MY
life being criticised. I’ve always worried I’m too fat, too plain, too unattractive. I always watched my weight like a Tory minister watching foreign people. Fat was EVIL and mustn’t be allowed to get under my skin.
All that changed when I became pregnant thanks to ex-husband. Finally, I knew that I could actually become the kind of woman who could get fat. Naturally, with all that came a whole load of worries—was I really the right person to bring another life into the world? Would it look at me, sack of mad neuroses that I was, and blame me for everything? Or would it somehow heal me?
When he told me I was pregnant, my GP urged me to “eat for two now.” He’d always been worried about my bird-like appearance, but this was the chance to let rip.
At first my ex-husband was full of praise—for the first time in my life I had tits. Big boobies, knockout knockers. They started inflating almost at the moment of conception and just didn’t stop. I loved them. I’d just sit around at home and play with them.
For a while my stomach stayed mercifully unchanged. I ate more but still went to the gym (just very gently). I missed drinking but the soup of hormones knocked me flatter than any red wine every night.
Then the morning sickness kicked in and I realised what an unfit mother I would be. I just couldn’t cope with the morning sickness. All around me my friends were offering me joyously simple advice for dealing with it, every time with the added, “Of course, I got off scot-free, but poor you!”
It just wouldn’t stop. It was like being on a constant hen-night on a cross-channel ferry. I was that little girl in
The Exorcist,
which also meant that my poor ex-husband no longer got his cherished jump start in the mornings. That was when he started staying out late in interns. It was grim.
And then, just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I started to show.
I’ve been thin for so long I’d forgotten what fat felt like. At first it just looked like I’d eaten a heavy press launch lunch. But it didn’t go away. The more I threw up, then impossibly the more it grew. I worried about what it was feeding off, as I certainly wasn’t keeping down enough food to nourish it. Was my own baby eating me alive? Would it be born out of a pile of my own dust?
I struggled on. I’d turn up to work looking DREADFUL. My spending on fashion increased, which was ludicrous, as I could no longer guarantee to be able to amortise the cost of a dress across so many wears. Like a minor royal, I’d wear it a couple of times and then throw it to the back of the cupboard.
I tried wearing corsets a couple of times, but my GP was horrified, and I nearly died from the pain.
So Jackie Aspley carried on growing.
One day, my husband remarked, “You’re fat.”
I snapped back, “I’m pregnant,” but he was unrepentant. “You’re almost obscene. How much larger are you going to get?”
I really didn’t know what to say to that. I was being fat-shamed by a man who nudged 18 stone and believed that two breakfasts were the right way to start the day. And he was calling me overweight. AND I WAS PREGNANT!!!
He also wasn’t pleased that he had to make his own breakfasts. In the early days of our marriage, to assure us both that things were going okay, I played the homemaker and fried him sausage, eggs and bacon (my Muslim husband). Now I couldn’t face the smell of raw meat, so he had to try and do it himself, which meant that he was in a foul mood and that the cleaner would later threaten to resign every time she ventured into the kitchen. Every single day. I ended up trying to wash the frying pan myself while dry-heaving.
Sex was also difficult. Like a child stuck on the first level of Pac-Man, despite being thoroughly bad at it, my husband kept on plugging away. He called having sex with pregnant me “mounting the insurmountable” or “Mohammed coming over the mountain,” but we kept trying, even though I was sure it was hurting the baby as much as it was hurting me. Of course, I knew he had started having affairs by this point. He was always coming home late with some stupid excuse or other. In the early days he’d bring me back a nice little present (like a potted plant). As time wore on it became a pen he’d nicked from the office. I tried not to let it hurt me—my other friends had husbands who were delighted by their pregnancy. Baby-Nerds, we called them. But not my husband. He announced one night that he’d be thrilled so long as it was a boy. That was the sum total of his enthusiasm.
But I kept on—I’m sure many single mothers have had worse. I felt out of my depth, alone and afraid, but I also knew it was my job As A Woman to have a baby. To prove that I could get something right. At about that time I was sent out to do yet another piece on awful immigrants and was startled at their amazing fecundity. They seemed so good at it and relaxed by it. It was killing me and they just laughingly told each other jokes. I wonder if that planted a seed for some of the unkind things I said about them? Often we’re mean about things we’re jealous of. It’s funny how it takes all of your life to learn how to be good at living it.
At 19 weeks, things got troubled. I’d just started working out whether or not to have cosmetic surgery at the same time as a caesarean. It was, I decided, going to be my big reward for all that morning sickness. But one morning, the sickness stopped. I felt such relief I cried. My husband came down to find that I’d cooked him breakfast again, and he patted me on the head. “At last,” I told him. “It’s going to be all right.” When I went to pee later, there was blood everywhere. I screamed at him to phone an ambulance, but he pretended not to hear me. I had to crawl to my mobile, leaving a crimson smear across the cream carpet that never quite cleaned out. And they came, and they were nice, but tight-nice, forced smiles. They wouldn’t quite answer any of my questions. When you’re a journalist, that tells you that something is wrong. I knew long before they told me that my baby had stoppedgrowing.