The Cupid Effect (15 page)

I did get the last laugh on that score, though: when I started to extract myself from him I went cold turkey with sex and turned down his seduction attempts. In response they became more elaborate and fervent, even started coming on ‘school nights'. After a couple of months of ‘er, no, I don't think so', he realised he'd have to seek his sexual favours elsewhere and so took to pleasuring himself. Unlike most other blokes, though, he pleasured himself while stood over the loo so he wouldn't have to clean up the mess afterwards. (And thus, his full name was born. Jess had always called him ‘Whashisface' because to use his name would mean she'd accepted him as part of my life – and she'd never do that. When I walked into the bathroom and caught him
in flagrante dewanko
, the moniker ‘Tosspot' was added.)

‘He sucks the life out of you,' Jess constantly said. ‘I'll never understand why someone as vibrant as you is with someone as turgid as him.' She was right, of course, but I couldn't seem to snap out of it.

I often looked back on that time and wondered why I put up with it. And then I'd have my answer: Jedi Mind Trick or some kind of power endowed him by the devil.

Theoretically, after I'd extracted myself from him, the quality of blokes should've increased. To get any lower, they would've had to start digging because Whashisface Tosspot really was rock bottom. So, the only way should've been up. Up, to lads who wanted sex on week nights, who didn't tuck their jumpers into their trousers and who could watch telly in silence for a bit. Except, it didn't work like that. The blokes I met were after a free therapist or were psychopaths. It was one or the other, nothing in between. In fact, by the time I met the last bloke I was seeing, I was convinced that I had NORMAL BLOKES NEED NOT TRY stamped across my forehead.

Maybe I should just accept I'm not good at human relationships, full stop. I was crap at getting close friends, I was crap at not getting embroiled in other people's dramas and I was crap with love.

I pushed my key into the door of 17 Stanmore Vale feeling very lonely and sorry for myself. I could talk myself into a bout of self-pity faster than anyone I knew.
Woe is me
, I'd probably be sobbing as I fell dramatically onto my bed, the back of my hand covering my forehead.
Woe is me without any friends
.

I pushed open the door, hoisted my rucksack onto my shoulder and pulled my holdall through the door. As if by magic, Jake and Ed appeared.

‘Hello!' they both screamed. ‘Hello!'

I jumped at the loudness of their hello, then took a step back, eyed them even more suspiciously. ‘Hi?' I offered cautiously.

‘Did you have a nice time?' Jake asked. They were both grinning maniacally.

‘It was fine,' I said, remembering everything I'd felt like a kick in the guts. But that wasn't for them to know. I even managed to sound happy.

Jake and Ed's faces fell slightly, but then, in unison, they both grinned again. Now they were freaking me out. Should I close the door and run away? Should I try to make it upstairs before they attempt to sacrifice me to whatever god they'd taken to worshipping over the weekend?

‘Let me take your bags,' Ed said, coming towards me.

‘Yeah, and I'll make you a herbal tea. I filtered some water earlier. And I went to town yesterday and bought some chocolate cheesecake.'

‘I got the Jaffa Cakes,' Ed said.

‘Yeah, well I got the caramel digestives,' Jake replied.

‘And I got the green olives and chorizo slices.'

‘But who remembered the focaccia?'

They were going to fatten me up before the sacrifice. I stepped even further back, ready to run for it.

‘Come in and sit down,' Jake said.

Ed wrestled my rucksack and holdall out of my grip.

Jake came to me, and led me into the living room. I sat cautiously on the sofa nearest the window. I could make it out of the window if it came down to it. One foot on the window sill, short jump down into the paved-over front garden and I'd be away down the road before either of them could even blink.

Ed raced upstairs with my stuff, Jake legged it to the kitchen and returned with a tray of biscuits, a cup of strawberry tea and a bowl of big, juicy green olives. One of the many things on my favourite foods list.

Jake and Ed sat on the other sofa, looked eagerly at me.

‘All right, what have you done?' I said.

‘Done?' they asked.

‘What's going on, why are you being so nice? What have you done?'

They looked at each other, looked at me. ‘Nowt.'

‘Have you rented out my room and are now trying to soften me up before you break the news?'

‘No.'

‘Have you accidentally burnt my belongings?'

‘No.'

‘Oh no, you haven't broken one of my
Angel
tapes, have you?'

‘Noooo,' they chorused.

‘Didn't you say we'd die horribly slow deaths if we touched them?' Ed added.

‘Yeah, well, you'd be surprised how ineffective that threat is nowadays,' I mumbled.

‘We haven't been near them, we swear,' Jake said, hand on heart.

‘Then what is it?'

Jake and Ed looked at each other. ‘You tell her,' Ed said.

‘No, you,' Jake said.

They carried on like that until Jake finally gave in and said, ‘The thing is, Ceri, we really missed you.'

‘Yeah,' Ed added. ‘We didn't realise how much a part of our family you were until you went away.'

‘And then Ed started saying that if you had a good time when you were in London you'd probably want to move back there.'

‘You were the one who said she'd probably realise what a strain it was living with two lads and would decide not to work her notice and go straight back to London, Jake.'

I didn't know if I should laugh or cry. But tears crept into my eyes.

‘And it were you who were almost crying at the idea that we'd end up going back to stained teaspoons and toothpaste smudges on the taps, Edward.'

‘You actually started crying.'

‘Liar!'

‘Is that why you bought all that food?' I asked.

They nodded in unison. ‘And we got you some wine.'

‘And beer.'

‘Yeah, and beer.'

I started laughing, causing a tear to break free and crawl down my face. I wiped it away with the back of my thumb. ‘I'm not going anywhere.'

‘Sure?' Jake said.

‘Really?' Ed said.

‘Positive. Ceri D'Altroy is in this house for the duration.'

Both lads grinned like I'd promised to get them subscriptions to the porn channels of their choice. I had to laugh. Just when I was feeling so low I could take to my bed with an armful of
Angel
s and a bottle of wine for a week, Ed and Jake had made me feel loved. Wanted. That's what I needed when I got my bouts of loneliness dressed up as depression.

How I got sometimes wasn't, I knew, depression. Not hopelessness when I couldn't get out of bed. More, teariness at being alone. Emptiness at not having a someone who had it in their job description that they had to be there for me. Pain at never quite getting it right on the relationship level. I could make friends, acquire confidences at the drop of a hat, tell other people how to fix their relationships, but when it came to intimacy with men, things fell apart. Having to accept my life would probably be a love-free zone for ever.

These were the thoughts that dogged my night times, made my heart heavy and achy. That, I suppose, had been part of what I'd been feeling as I traipsed from London to Leeds.

There, in the midst of it, were Jake and Ed. Two lads who actually wanted me around. Who'd panicked at the thought I wouldn't be around.

‘Thanks for all the effort boys,' I said, getting up. ‘I missed you too.'

‘Group hug!' Jake screeched, then they both charged at me, leaving us all in a laughing bundle on the soft-pile living room carpet.

chapter twelve

Party People

‘Oh come on, Cezza, there'll be men there,' Jake said.

‘There's men on my telly,' I replied, stuffing garlic mash potato in my mouth.

Ed and Jake were off to a party being held by some of their Met buddies and, seeing as this was my first weekend back after my visit to London, they weren't going to leave me alone. They'd put me on a kind of suicide watch since that Sunday, where one of them had to know where I was every hour of the day. I was constantly called or emailed at college. I had them knocking on my door to offer me tea or food if I sat upstairs. I had two shadows who wanted nothing but my happiness – that phrase ‘be careful what you wish for' kept replaying itself in my head when I started griping that no one would miss me if I wasn't around.

They weren't going out this Saturday night without me – and Jake seriously thought blokes at a party would be enough to prise me out of my pyjamas and away from my bowl of comfort food. The choices were: garlic mash, pyjamas and a blockbuster movie on TV or traipsing through the streets, going to a party where I only knew two people and having to move from my sofa to get ready. There was no contest. I was going nowhere.

‘Yeah, but these men will talk to you,' Jake persisted.

‘The men on my telly talk to me. And, sometimes, I even talk back.'

‘But you might get a snog off one of them,' Ed chimed in.

What do I say to that? ‘I'll get a snog off one of the men on my telly?'
And
not sound like a freak?

‘All right. But if I don't get a snog, you lot are in for such a hard time.'

They laughed.

‘Obviously, neither of you realise how hard I can make things for two boys like you.'

They both grinned as I put down the bowl of garlic mash, threw back my duvet and stomped to the stairs.

‘Wear your leather pants,' Jake called.

‘How do you know I've got leather trousers?' I called back.

‘You just look the type.'

‘Yeah, and wear your sparkly gold top, too.' Ed added. Fashion advice from Mr ‘Live In My Lumberjack Shirt', himself.

I got showered, dressed, brushed my teeth and put on make-up in record time. The lads, very wisely, wolf-whistled when I descended the stairs. I was indeed wearing my leather trousers and my sparkly gold top.

With most proper student houses you had to enter through the back door because the front door usually led into someone's bedroom. It was a way to make a four-bedroom house into a five-bedroom house. This student house, where the party was being held, was no exception.

Ed and Jake went to find their mates – aka the people with the drugs – as soon as we walked in through the back door. They left me in the living room with the rest of the partiers. ‘It'll increase your chances of a snog,' they reasoned, ‘not having two men around.'

‘Yeah, cos I'd even look twice at either of you,' I replied. ‘No offence.'

I leant back against the wall of the living room, ignoring the way my jacket stuck to the wall.

This was a proper student house. The single red light bulb did nothing to mask the horrors that had been regurgitated on the carpet. The furniture had been pushed back to the far end of the room and showed signs of overuse. Generation after generation of student had skinned up on the arms of that browny sofa and non-matching armchair. God alone knew what those stains between the threadbare bits were, but I had my suspicions.

I leant against the wall and let my mind wander back in time. Back about twenty years, actually. I couldn't help thinking that the eighties may well have been the decade that fashion forgot – actually, that fashion taunted – but at least they knew how to put together a choon in those days. Every other song you got in the eighties you wanted to dance to or sing along to – even if you were wearing a puff ball skirt, a batwing top, bright blue eye-shadow and your perm had been back-combed and hairsprayed to stand at a ninety-degree angle. And anyway, all the people you were dancing to were just as badly dressed as you, they too found joy in frilly white shirts and lip gloss.

Harking back to another era instantly doubles your age
, I thought, and started gulping beer. And being stood at a party while doing the harking tripled my age . . . but it was true. Music was music in those days: Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet, Madonna, Luther Vandross, Haircut 100, Barry White, Howard Jones, Phil Collins all so much better than the trendy nonsense served up nowadays.

Please, put a bit of Howard Jones on. Seriously. Anything but this 21st century nonsense.

Erm, Ceri, how old are you?
I asked myself sternly.

Time was when I'd be elbowing my way to the centre of the room so I could be seen by everyone as I danced. I had that much faith in my body-moving abilities. Time was, though, when I wouldn't have turned up to a student party in leather trousers and heeled boots. In my student days, any person turning up to a party in leather trews would've been lynched for being the capitalist, cute-ickle-animal-hurting bastard they were. Nowadays I was more likely to get stock tips on which type of animal you got the best hide out of.

Not that I dwelt entirely in the past, but when I was a student, I had things to worry about beyond where my next joint was coming from, mainly because I didn't do drugs. (I was completely of the ‘do what you want within reason' mentality but drugs were not for me. Alcohol did strange things to me; adding drugs to that equation would be asking for my parents to identify my overdosed body.) Even in sixth form I was politically-minded. I stood on the picket lines with the ambulance men; I organised a convoy of coaches to go to Brighton to march in protest against student loans. In school I boycotted any company that had holdings in South Africa.

In college, I lobbied Parliament; I joined the Students' Union and actually tried to get students involved in political stuff. It goes without saying that I actually got down on my knees and thanked God the day Thatcher resigned. I cast my eye around the room, I'd be lucky if most of this lot knew who was Prime Minister at the moment.