‘Uh-huh.’
‘What was all that about?’
‘Nothing. That barman’s a dick.’ I pour two glasses.
‘What are we celebrating?’
‘The death of hope,’ I say, clinking his glass and taking a sip.
‘Sorry?’
‘I think I quit my job,’ I say, remembering that this poor man is a human being and that I am an utter idiot.
‘You quit today?’
‘Don’t know. Maybe.’
Over a drink I tell him a highly abbreviated version of my ongoing feud with Devron.
‘… And it was only a bloody custard sample I lost, not the Turin Shroud … And, he thinks we don’t know, but we’ve all seen the footage, that he’s been shagging in the office, plus – one: he cheats his expenses, and b: he’s fucking lazy, and four: he has this dreadful high-pitched shrill laugh like a goat … and basically I don’t want to work for a moronic, misogynistic little twat … has that wine gone already …?’
‘Looks that way,’ Jack says, raising his eyebrows.
‘Shall we get another bottle?’
‘I’m fine, I’m driving,’ he says, awkwardly.
‘You’re over the limit, aren’t you? You’ve just drunk half a bottle.’
‘Er. No. I’ve only had the one,’ he says, pointing at his glass which still has quite a bit left in the bottom.
‘Look at your glass! Weirdo. Why aren’t you drinking?’
‘Actually, I’ve got a slight migraine.’
‘Can you get us another bottle, I can’t go up there again … thanks … not the same stuff.’
He hurries to the bar.
‘Not English!’ I shout after him. ‘READ THE MENU! They’ll trick you!’
While he’s at the bar it occurs to me that it might be sensible to eat some food, so I summon the waitress and order two of the brownies Maggie was raving about.
Jack returns with another bottle and a large glass of tap water. ‘There you go, Sophie.’
‘What do I want water for? Water’s for babies. Anyway, yeah, so my boss is a douchus, dufus, douchebag dickwad,’ I say, swallowing a burp.
Jack laughs nervously.
‘So, what are you up to tomorrow?’ I say.
‘I’ve got a big meeting first thing down at the Southbank with a developer …’
‘Where’s my brownie … I ordered you a brownie, I
need a brownie … Ah, here we are, my two brownies, like my two dads but with brownies instead of Charlie Sheen and who’s that other guy …?’
The waitress puts the brownies down on the table and Jack asks her for two forks.
‘Forks are for babies!’ I say, as I pick off a corner of warm brownie with my fingers. God, it’s a proper squidgy brownie, more like a mousse inside. ‘Try some, delish,’ I say, pushing his plate towards him.
‘I think I’ll wait for the fork, thanks,’ he says.
‘Suit yourself,’ I say. ‘But by the time that fork gets here, I might have eaten both of these …’
‘You couldn’t eat two of them, you’d be sick.’
‘Are you calling me a pig?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Are you saying I’m fat?’
‘No! Not at all!’ he says, turning scarlet.
‘You are though, aren’t you. You think I’m fat.’
‘Not at all, you’ve got a great body.’
‘Ooh, a great body! A good woman! You say that now and then a year down the line you’ll turn around and say you can’t love me because I’m fat and white and you only like skinny black girls. That’s why you’re single at forty! No one’s good enough for you!’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Like as if I pretended I was taller … or thinner … or black or whatever …’
‘Will you excuse me for a minute,’ he says, standing up and heading off to the loo.
While he’s gone I check my phone: Laura, asking how it’s going. ‘Better than I thought. He’s cute x,’ I reply, realising now he’s left the table that I do actually quite fancy him.
Jack’s taking his time. I decide to make good on my promise and finish off both the brownies. The forks have still not materialised; my right hand is now smothered in brownie innards.
The pub has thinned out and we seem to be the only table left in here. The evil barman is standing polishing glasses, staring at me with a smirk on his face.
Where is Jack? I could really do with popping to the loo to wash these brownies off my hand.
My phone beeps again.
Jack!
Jack?
‘Am sorry Sophie, my friend called with a flat tyre – I had to go and help her. Take care.’
I think it’s been three days since I walked out on Devron, and Jack walked out on me, so it’s probably a Friday? I am trying to scan a red pepper in Fletchers at the self-service till. I hate these tills – they never work, but the regular queues are mammoth and I need to get home to start thinking about when I’m going to think about my future. I hate red peppers too, but I’ve read somewhere that eating vitamin B will cure my insanity, so I’m upping my intake. I also have a pineapple under my arm – apparently tryptophan will restore my harmony and well-being if the red pepper doesn’t quite cut it.
The built-in scales are broken. I have a bag of cleaning products already scanned – soon I’ll start cleaning my flat again, I’m sure of it. The machine says ‘ask the Help-friend’. The Help-friend is wearing his invisible cloak. I press a few buttons, hoping I can outsmart the machine. I consider stealing my shopping. I imagine at that point the Help-friend would make himself visible, at which
point I imagine smashing the Help-Friend in the jaw with the Toilet Duck.
I am dressed in a tracksuit, sparkly ballet pumps, a Soul II Soul hoodie from 1988 and a sweetie necklace that Laura gave me. Plus the pineapple wedged in my armpit. I look like a crackhead prostitute clown. If I’m going to get busted for shoplifting from my soon-to-be ex-employer, I cannot allow this to be the outfit I’m immortalised in on my mugshot. This is not what success looks like.
I wait. I press a few more buttons. I say ‘fuck’ twice, quite loudly. I slap the checkout machine screen. I shove my staff discount card in the slot and this sets off an alarm, and I whisper the word ‘cunt’.
I have another flashback to my third date with James and the crazy woman in Soho who he gave £20 to, to demonstrate the ‘KIND’, ‘GENEROUS’ and ‘COMPASSIONATE’ facets of his character. I think about how this situation could be any worse – oh yes, if James and Noushka suddenly appeared behind me in the queue. Luckily Noushka doesn’t eat anything apart from cotton wool balls soaked in cold pressed flaxseed oil which she buys from Harrods Food Hall, so that is one disgrace I am spared.
I abandon the shopping, dump the pineapple on the help desk and head back to the car park. In my car I let out one long, loud primal scream. No one is around to witness this latest shame and madness. Nonetheless, I feel
like I am my own witness, standing looking into my car at a stranger losing her mind.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the fight of the century, inside Sophie Klein’s very own head! On tonight’s billing, we have a selection of brutal and pointless bouts:
You had to give him a second chance
vs
You should never have taken him back
He manipulated your insecurities
vs
You LET him do all of it
It’s not about your weight, he’s just pinning it on that
vs
Wow, you’re fat!
It was a car crash waiting to happen
vs
If you’d played this differently, you could have won
THERE IS NO DOUBT: I HAVE GONE BATSHIT CRAZY.
Today I got out of bed for the first time in nine days and thought about changing my sheets. I wish sheets were like hair and cleaned themselves after two weeks.
Today I actually got as far as stripping my sheets and dumping them in the washing machine.
Today I turned the machine on and washed the sheets. Tomorrow I’ll dry them.
I forgot that changing your sheets is a complex, multistage process and involves putting the sheets back on the bed. At the height of my relationship with James, I changed these sheets daily and made up the bed like a boutique hotel. It has taken me three weeks of planning and four days of doing to wash these sheets.
Today, I moved the clean sheets back into my room and into a pile on the floor.
How did I ever put a double duvet cover back on by myself?
The first two hours of every day are the worst. Whether my day starts at 3am, 5am or 11am, my first thought is of James and Noushka having rigorous, vigorous sex on my 94% quartz kitchen counter. Heated, animal, insatiable, mind-blowing, desperately hot hot hot sex that is better sex than anyone in the universe has ever had.
My second thought is usually that it is all my fault a) for not being as thin as Noushka, and b) for encouraging him to go that party with her.
All subsequent thoughts involve me pondering how happy, fulfilled and over-sexed he is, and how I will never find a human being on this planet who can accept me as a size 10. I can feel my mind poisoning me.
If I can just sit upright, then 4 times out of 10, I can actually get out of bed. If I can get fully vertical, I can make most of the thoughts fall down, out of my brain, like a handful of earth in a fine sieve. A few little rocks always stick, no matter how much I try to tamp them down: I don’t love you enough. I’m not going to marry just anyone. I can never look at you the way you look at me.
I lie in my bed and think:
By the age of fifteen, you’ve sussed your place in the beauty pecking order. At school, you can see that Juliet Parker has boys stuck to her like Velcro, and why ever not.
She has long lean legs, ice white hair, deep blue eyes. If you can’t be her, you want to be her best friend.
You see Amanda Leicester reading in the library: acned, heavy-jawed, dumpy, nicknamed ‘Lezzer’ by the local boys’ school.
And you can place yourself on the spectrum between these two, preferably nearer the Juliet end, and know that with your face, that is pretty enough for everyday use, you’ll be fine.
And so you learn to appreciate how you are blessed with other abilities: you cook well, you’re interested in other people, and they in you. You understand that for most of us in the middle of that spectrum, your value is not based on just looks, but on character, spirit, kindness, a sense of adventure, what you do for the world.
And you see Juliet Parker marry Max Allford, the best looking bloke at the boys’ school, when she is twenty-three, buy a four-storey house in West Hampstead, and have two beautiful blond children, who you occasionally see lying on the floor of your local Pizza Express, screaming for more ice cream.
And one day, Juliet Allford opens her husband’s laptop and sees, on his Facebook account, a string of obscene emails between him and a girl whose name rings a vague bell from some Credit Suisse conference Max attended a year ago in Prague, that time he missed his flight home ‘because of the traffic’. And her beautiful Boden life comes apart at the seams.
And you see ‘Lezzer’ get a double first from Cambridge, lose a shitload of weight with the help of amphetamines, and still she has a rather heavy jaw, but – can you believe it – in spite of her jaw she has managed to become an anthropologist? And now she’s on BBC4 once a week with her own TV show, and you know what, that jaw looks quite beautiful on camera.
One of the things I hate about being on Citalopram – aside from the fact that I see it as proof of my own backboneless, pathetic inability to cope with something akin to a broken fingernail in the greater scheme of things – is the way the pill packet is labelled.
My birth control pills used to go round in a circle, clockwise. You always knew were you stood with them. But these little white dots, with an indent in the middle that looks like an open mouth, almost a smile – why, they go left to right, left to right. And because I am used to taking pills that go round in a circle, I take them in a circle, and it is not until Thursday of the second week in bed that I think: did I take my pill yet today? Is it Thursday or Wednesday? I don’t know what day it is. Then it occurs to me that I can’t even be sure of what month it is. I have to look on my mobile phone and this strikes me as a bad sign.
I think the pills might finally be kicking in.
They feel weird – like they’re Botoxing my emotions and I now have Liz Hurley’s forehead for a psyche. They don’t stop the loop of thoughts: he never loved you, you’re unloveable, it’s all your fault. But they do mostly stop me from crying, even though I want to cry. It’s as if my tear ducts are constipated.
The only good thing is that I now seem to be a more socially functioning human being. I still find getting out of bed brutal: so brutal that I have, six years after buying it, finally mastered how the auto-timer on my oven works.
Forget alarm clocks. Forget alarm clocks in another room. Forget Laura phoning to cajole me. Forget writing motivational coloured post-it notes that flap like hyper-coloured moths on my bedside table saying ‘you are great’, ‘life is short’, ‘get over it’.
I’ve found that the only foolproof method of making sure I get up is to put a pain au chocolat in my oven the night
before, timed to be cooked exactly two minutes after my snooze has gone off three times the following morning.
The first time I tried this I messed up the oven programming and cried with frustration onto the yellowed pages of the oven manual.
The second time was worse. I’d figured out the programming but I thought I could get away with another ten minutes of snooze time. If a Nokia phone alarm won’t get you out of bed, your smoke alarm sure as shit will.
But since day three, I’ve been up and out of bed eating perfectly cooked pain au chocolats by 10am every morning.
So, I can now get myself out of bed in the morning. This feels like a rather impressive achievement.
I can also now read again. I realise that since the day I found Noushka in James’s house, I have not read a single book, newspaper or recipe. I haven’t watched TV, listened to the radio – the one time I went to the cinema turns out I picked the wrong film …