This is Not a Love Story

Chapter Two

I must get rid of Martin. I am walking to the bus stop and with every stomp on the wet ground my resolve hardens. He utterly, totally infuriates me. If someone utterly, totally infuriates you after only six months, I don’t believe it is necessary to consult the self-help books to conclude that he is absolutely not ‘The One’.

I must dissect this issue.

What do I like about Martin? I stop dead in the middle of the street as I rack my brains and a man sat on the ground at my feet holds out his hand hopefully. There is literally nothing I like about Martin. Or, at least, the things I thought I liked are now tainted with the fact that he’s so bloody irritating. It’s seeped into everything; he can’t even yawn without making me want to throw myself out the window.

I look down. ‘I don’t like anything about him!’ I shout happily. The homeless man frowns.

‘Who?’

I find some spare change, hand it over and keep walking. If I don’t like anything about him, this will be very, very easy. There will be nothing to keep me holding onto him! Nothing to cry over; just the sweet, free feeling of relief. I can wake up each morning to the sound of silence, watch films without him constantly correcting the ‘corporate Hollywood bullshit’ and eat foods that haven’t been fortified with extra protein for his ‘guns’.

I think I definitely used to like Martin, at the start. I definitely did. Maybe. We met in a really boring way (should have been a sign, really) at an awful club called 42nd Street just off Deansgate. I went with my best friends Cecilia, Anna and Sophie; we used to visit this place all the time while we were students, and thought it’d be fun to go back and relive it now that we were all grown-up with jobs and things. In case you’re considering emulating this idea, I can assure you that it is not fun. It isn’t even funny . It’s just very, very sad.

Anyway, I spotted Martin standing moodily next to the toilets, and he looked so mysterious and brooding that I just had to go and talk to him. He told me that he hated clubbing (and, it turns out in the end, all types of fun) but had gone along with his brother who was getting over a pretty nasty breakup. We didn’t really have anything in common, but, like all nightclub romances, it didn’t really matter, and he came home with me anyway.

Two years later, he still hasn’t left.

Right, come on, there must have been something I liked about him. Think. Oh, his eyebrows! I used to love his eyebrows. They were so... expressive. And he made me laugh, sometimes. Mainly at him, rather than with him, but I’m not sure I could really tell the difference at the start. I probably thought he was being ironic. In any case, his eyebrows now piss me off to the extent that I often fantasise about waxing them when he’s asleep and then overdosing him with Botox so that even the bald space where they used to be wouldn’t twitch. And I haven’t so much as smiled in his company for months. If I’m honest with myself, I think anyone could have walked into the club that night and I’d have done the exact same thing. I was twenty-five and people were starting to get their shit together; it seemed like the time for me to do the same.

After only a thirty-four minute wait (winner) I’m on the bus, wedged next to a man who has an oozing, shiny scalp and smells like compost. My hair is dripping onto my knees and I can’t feel my toes. If I won the lottery, I would buy a chauffeur. Not a car, because driving is boring and if you’re out somewhere and someone offers you a drink, you have to say no. Driving is the antidote to spontaneity.

I would really prefer to be sat by the window, because weirdly it’s a lot easier to think when you can see things moving past, even when your only view is the bowels of Salford. Instead I make do with focusing on the greasy smear on the ‘STOP’ button in front of me and contemplate how to remove Martin from my life and, most pressingly, my apartment.

What I think I should do is sit down with him with a nice cup of tea and kindly explain that I think he’s a wonderful person (he isn’t) but that I just need to focus on myself and I hope we can still be friends. An offer that I pray he will not take me up on. That way he can move on, I can move on, and there will be no animosity or ill-feeling when we each reminisce about our pasts. He can look back fondly on our six months together and, with the rose-tinted glasses of time, he will probably begin to wistfully dream of me as ‘The One Who Got Away’. Perhaps even I, with a great deal more time, might one day think of his eyebrows with a smile, and be grateful that we were so mature and dignified about our incompatibility.

What I will probably do, I concede, is start an argument until he storms out and then change all the locks.

The bus has pulled up outside my office block; a pebble-dashed, diarrhoea-coloured monstrosity, currently looming down on me from its rain-grey backdrop and making me wish I’d never been born. I pull my swipe card from my pocket and wonder, as I do each day, why we need one when really, who in the name of god would ever want to break into this place? I spend around 82 per cent of my working day (calculated by an Excel spreadsheet last Tuesday, so yes I do use the full Microsoft Office package I asked for, Theo) devising plans to escape. So far, setting the place on fire seems to be the only feasible option.

It came to me on a particularly mind-numbing Monday afternoon, when the office radio asked me, ‘have you had an accident in the workplace that wasn’t your fault?’ and I thought, no... but I could. I toyed with electrocuting myself, but then the soul-sucking building would still be standing, and I’d probably die, so now I spend most of my time wondering which part of my body I wouldn’t mind getting minor burns on for the sake of compensation. No more job, no more hideous poo-toned prison, pocket full of cash. Sorted.

It wouldn’t even be that hard , I realise, as I’m walking down the stairs into my basement dungeon. For all the state-of-the-art security in this place (a swipe card and a man named Leonard who is permanently asleep at the front desk), health and safety here is non-existent. The fire doors are constantly pegged open, wires poke out of most of the walls and the huge thirteenth-floor windows open fully, which is incredibly risky in a place like this, where quality of life is at about 0.01. Not to mention that everyone smokes in the toilets, so all it would take would be one unextinguished cigarette and POOF, bye-bye bane of my life. It did cross my mind once, very fleetingly, that I could perhaps get another job. But I was quite hormonal at the time and I wasn’t thinking straight.

I reach the bottom of the stairs and shoulder the cheap, wooden door onto my corridor three times until it swings open and smacks the wall. Apparently our department can’t stretch to a new doorframe, although I’m sure there’d be a couple of grand in it for me if I dislocated my shoulder. Every cloud.

The corridor is deserted as usual; it’s ten past nine and I’m ten minutes late, but I’ve been here for six years now and have yet to arrive after anyone else on the entire floor. Every morning I consider breezing in at 10a.m. like my colleague Kelsey, and I sit in front of the news in my pyjamas with a cup of coffee, watching the minutes inch by in the corner of the screen, trying to relax. And every morning, without fail, Louise Minchin says, ‘It’s 8a.m., up next—’ and I leap off the sofa, shove on my clothes and run out of the house. Because what if today was the day someone came in on time ? And they thought that every morning I swanned in late too? And so, every day, I enter my department at roughly 9a.m., turn on all the lights and sit here seething and online shopping until someone comes in and their presence forces me to actually work.

Amazon has got some absolutely incredible deals today. A hand blender for a tenner! A sausage maker for only thirty quid?! Am I dreaming? I already have two hand blenders (thanks Nana, two Christmases in a row) and would not know where to buy sausage meat to save my life but really. This world we’re living in is fantastic.

It’s 10.45 and I’ve already restrained myself from buying a Cinderella pug costume for the dog I don’t own and have opened a Word document and typed ‘TO DO’ at the top. I’m just typing ‘best shampoo for frizzy hair’ into Google when I hear familiar quick, light footsteps trotting down the corridor.

‘For the last time, Bernadette, Romulus is incredibly sick! I will not have you dismissing his fragile condition like this! He needs warmth, love and someone who cares, and quite frankly you sound as though you don’t give a flying fuck. Now you give him a bath and get him into bed this instant , or mark my words, you will hear from my lawyer.’

Oh, kill me now. It’s Theo.

My boss.