My Very '90s Romance Read online

  Dedication

  This book is dedicated with love

  to my truly fantastic and long-suffering

  parents—Mum, sorry I didn’t take

  my accountancy exams;

  Dad, sorry about all the swearing.

  A Word from Jenny

  Hello!

  Well, the reason for this introduction is that I was thrilled when my American publishers said they wanted to publish one of my old novels. Then, I started thinking about it and realized that out of everything I’d ever done, this book—about someone who is online all the time way back in the days when this was considered incredibly peculiar behavior and you still had to plug your computer into your phone line—would have become really, really dated in a way the others haven’t!

  I started writing books about twenty years ago, and before that I was trying to make it as a cartoonist, hampered only by the fact that I was very bad at drawing and had no idea how to break into the world of cartooning. I wrote a strip called Second Flat on the Left, about two girls in their twenties, and that formed the basis for the book you hold in your hands. So it is a reasonably accurate view of my life in the nineties, when I loved Friends and had just moved to the big city to build my life and try to do something creative (you could afford to do that in those days).

  Back then, though, there was no Myspace, no Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, or smartphones. There was email and Minesweeper and chat rooms that I was too scared to go in, and that was that. Believe it or not, I used to have an “email phone,” with which I would type my message, take it to a phone box, call a special number, and hold up the antennae to send the email down the phone line (it worked about twice, naturally). Writing about Addison, who meets his girlfriend on the Internet, seemed incredible to me. Now, 53 percent of all couples meet online, and 20 percent of marriages are made that way.

  So this is my most dated book—I am still fond of it, because this was very much how I lived at the time—but I did want to warn you. The other things that have probably dated is that we might now classify Addison as being on the Asperger’s spectrum. Not in any remotely offensive way—or, at least I really hope not. He is, and remains, a very sympathetic character. But I would be a little more sensitive with my language these days.

  So with all these caveats in mind, please take this as the first historical fiction I have ever written! I still think, and hope, that it is one of my funniest books and reminds me now, an ancient, old married mother of teenagers, of all the fun we had back then.

  Very best wishes,

  Jenny Colgan

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  A Word from Jenny

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Acclaim for My Very ’90s Romance

  Also by Jenny Colgan

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  One

  A famous arctic explorer once said that polar expeditions were the most successful form of having a bad time that humans had ever devised. Of course, he’d probably never answered an ad for a flatshare with a bunch of complete strangers. Although, if it hadn’t been for them, I would never have met Addison. Hmm. Which, when I think of it, is kind of like saying, OK, I lost all my fingers and toes to frostbite, but I met some very sweet penguins along the way. . . .

  Thirty-six hours after I moved in to 12A Wendle Close, Harlesden, I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. Tiptoeing around someone else’s home is weird enough, particularly if it’s just after a late night and you can’t remember their name or where they keep the Sugar Puffs or, say, you’re a cat burglar. Tiptoeing around your own is discomfiting, to say the least. But there I was, creeping into my own house and closing my bedroom door extremely quietly, heart pounding, after only my very first quick jaunt to the shops, to try to make friends with my newsagent and see what flavors of Skips he had.

  If I pressed my head against the thin wood veneer of the door I could just about hear my new best friends in the nearby ghastly open-plan Formica kitchenette.

  “Well, I think we need a special long-term rotation too. For cleaning the shower curtain and the drawers. And washing the baseboards.”

  “That’s a great idea, Carol,” came another voice, deep with awe. “Maybe we could do one big job every Saturday night and make an event of it. We could even get takeaway pizza!”

  “And don’t forget the curtains!” screeched Farah, who was about two feet tall and was always being mistaken for a monkey, or Martin Amis. “I’ll get my colored pencils out and start drawing it up. This is going to be such fun!”

  They all mewed.

  “Didn’t I just hear Holly coming in?” asked Laura, who was stolid and sat down a lot. “That sounded like her bedroom door. . . .”

  Damn.

  “No!” I attempted to telepathically send to them. “It must have been the wind. That . . . mysterious bedroom wind.”

  “. . . Why don’t we go and ask her what she’d like to do?”

  I inhaled sharply.

  “Yes, let’s!” yelled Farah. And there was a pounding at my door.

  “Holly? Holly, are you there?”

  Carol, the official leader of Scary Clean Freaks Incorporated, put her head around the door assertively. Was it only a week ago I had checked out her ankle chain and pondered whether we’d ever get on? She looked at me sneerily. I sensed that she secretly knew of the scientifically proven inverse relationship between me and housework (the more messy things were, the less inclined I was to do anything about them), even though I’d attempted to be pristine for my first few days.

  “We were just wondering . . . ,” she hissed.

  Laura sniffed, noisily, behind her. Laura sniffed all the time. I always wanted to tell her that it was OK; no one was about to make her do double PE anymore. Carol shot an evil sideways glance like a viper.

  “Ahem. We were just wondering, given that we’re—ha—divvying up the rotation, if there was anything you particularly liked doing.”

  I eyed her steadily, not about to be intimidated by someone who ringed her lips with dark lipstick pencil on her skin.

  “How about I take lightbulb dusting and big-spider removal?”

  “Ooh, that sounds good,” screeched Farah from somewhere beside my knee. Carol dispensed another one of those Robert-De-Niro-to-doomed-gangster stares.

  “We thought you might prefer loos, sinks, and floors,” she said pointedly.

  “Oh . . . ,” I said. “You mean, all of it.”

  “Ha.” She smiled. “Don’t get around to much cooking, do we?”

  I realized I’d been outmaneuvered. Blast.

  I counterattacked. “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m going to coordinate,” she said. Laura nodded happily.

  “Oh, tough one.”

  “. . . that means I buy all the cleaning materials, arrange the schedule, organize the external cleaning contractors, for example the carpet shampooers I’ve got coming in, arrange everyone’s telephone hours, and oversee everyone’s painting choices. So we’ve all got quite enough to be getting on with, don’t you think?”

  I wanted to try one last stance—perhaps suggesting that Farah take the floors; after all, she was closer—but all I could say was “Telephone hours?”

  “I know; I thought of it,” Carol said proudly.

  “It’s a great idea,” said Farah, standing betwee
n Carol’s legs.

  “Basically, it means you can only use the phone or get phone calls at your set time each night. Then, when we get the bill in, you pay for all the calls in your time, and nobody lies about the expensive numbers.”

  I stared at her. “Well, that’s going to cut down on my sex-line income.”

  Laura’s eyes widened with shock. Carol laughed politely, to show me that if I felt like fighting her, she was up to it.

  “What’s to stop me making phone calls on other people’s time?”

  “We’re going to have a phone lock that can only be opened by me. You come to me when you want to use the phone and I’ll see if it’s your hour or not. Really,” she said, shaking her head, “your chores are much easier than mine, believe me.”

  “Oh goodness me, I think I just heard my mobile go off,” I announced in a flurry.

  “Excuse me,” I said, when they showed no sign of backing away from my door, “I just have to, ehrm, excuse me . . .” Fortunately, the henchmen stuck next to Carol and backed away when she gave the signal, as my next move would have been to scream “Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!” while shoving them out the door and pulling a hose on them.

  I slammed the door behind them and sat on the bed. My mobile wasn’t going off, naturally, but I took it out anyway and thanked that little machine. How could I ever have thought they were only of use to workers on buses who thought that someone not on a bus might want to know when they were on a bus? Oh—and how the fuck was I going to get out of here?

  Some people pick the wrong men all the time. I pick the wrong places to live. Well, OK, I pick the wrong men too, but anyway. So it was that after finally getting totally creeped out by my last landlord, in Hackney, who smelled of piss and used to turn up at random hours of the night to “inspect” things (my knicker drawer included)—which followed the three girls in Dulwich who had all joined a beardy-weirdy religious cult and refused to allow men over the threshold, except for the cult leader, with whom they all slept whenever he wanted them to—I had ended up here, in a new house share with three banana brains who all worked at the local hospital as phlebotomists. Apparently this meant they took blood samples from people. I assumed in Carol’s case she simply bit them.

  Anyway, they’d advertised in Loot for a fourth member to join a new household in tasty Harlesden, and, amazingly, I got it. Perhaps I was the only one who didn’t blanch at the interview, when Laura came in and reported obediently to Carol that she had just bleached the teacups.

  “And how often do you boil-wash the crockery?” Carol had asked me.

  “Ehm . . . I find about every half hour just about does it,” I’d gone for, and noticed her put a big tick on my application form, which had been broken down into sixteen handy sections. The relief of going from the dissipated seediness of Hackney—where they wanted extra rent if you got an inside loo—to a brand-new “executive” flat in the famous industrial waste area of North West London made it seem like a good deal at the time, but it had blinded me to the obvious: i.e., all these people were mad. But because they outnumbered me in the house, I was beginning to think that they were right.

  I began to inspect my mobile for germs and was getting really close up when it rang in my face.

  I shrieked, did a comedy-clown fumble as I accepted the call, and dropped the phone under the bed.

  “Are you all right?” said Carol’s voice, from just outside the door. She was obviously listening to everything. I shrieked again, swallowed some air, choked, coughed, and managed to wheeze, “Fine, thank you.”

  “It must be pretty dusty under your bed.”

  “Yes, yes, it is, thanks,” I said, sitting upright with the phone. Then I jumped—how the hell did she know where I was? I felt a cold hand of fear.

  “Hello?” I finally choked into the phone.

  “Do you know, I haven’t made a woman scream like that for years,” drawled a well-modulated voice.

  I relaxed slightly.

  “Josh, you have never made a woman scream like that. In fact, have you ever made a woman?”

  “Oh ho ho. Yes, of course.”

  “In your country of origin?”

  He paused. “Not precisely.”

  I’d been teasing Josh about this for as long as I’d known him, which was a looong time. Because he was attractive and also nice to girls, most people assumed he was gay. For someone with a posh background, a good job, and a nice haircut, he did horrendously badly with the opposite sex, which I couldn’t understand—not that I’d ever wanted to shag him myself; he was so nice.

  Anyway, thank God he’d rung me back. Worriedly searching the ceiling for CCTV, I sat back on the bed.

  “Josh, you know when you moved into Pimlico and I said I didn’t want to move there because it was snooty London and you were moving in with Kate, who hates me?”

  “Um, yes.”

  “Well, you know, how’s it . . . how’s the whole flatshare thing going?”

  “It’s going fine.”

  “Right—Great! Right. How’s that other guy you got in to fill the space doing?”

  “Addison? He’s just great . . . Well, quiet and undemanding.”

  That didn’t sound much like me. “Uh-huh. So no one’s moving out or anything, then?”

  Josh sighed. “Don’t tell me. Not another Turkish Lesbian Women’s Collective?”

  That had been Hoxton, two years ago. I’d been kicked out for not liking chickpeas and buying that symbol of male forced dominance, sanitary protection.

  “No. Worse.”

  “The cat lady?”

  “Christ. No, not worse than her. But still, pretty bad.”

  I heard Carol’s voice: “Holly! Would you like some tea? Because it’s your turn to make it!”

  I ignored her.

  “Josh, this is absolutely desperate. Listen, you know that little boxroom you were going to turn into a study?”

  “The one you described as a coffin?”

  “Yup, yup, that’s the one. Ehm, have you . . . ?”

  “Turned it into a study? Not since you were last here. I’ve leased it out as a bedroom, though.”

  “Nooo!”

  He laughed.

  “You bastard! Josh, I know this is a huge favor—and please say no if you don’t want to—but please, please, please can I come and live in your coffin? I mean, boxroom?”

  “You’ve asked me this before, Holl,” he said with a sigh.

  “I know.”

  “Then you always dash off, and the next thing I hear from you, you’re on the run from a postgraduate mathematics badminton team.”

  “I know. I’m crazy.”

  “You are crazy. Why didn’t you just move in when I bought the place?”

  “Because you’re rich and Kate makes me miserable.”

  “I am not rich, and Kate can’t help being . . . Kate. Anyway, if that’s how you feel . . .”

  “No, no! I’m sorry! Please. Please. Please.”

  There was a loud knocking at my door. “Tea, please, Holly! It’s in the lease!”

  “It’s the Gestapo!” I whispered. “How soon can you come and get me?”

  “I’ll have to check with Kate and Addison.”

  “Josh!” I screeched, near to tears. “Please.”

  “OK,” he relented. “I’ll pick you up at about seven. Have you got much stuff?”

  “Just a coffinful.”

  “And no diving off again, do you hear me?”

  “Yes, sir,” I mumbled meekly.

  I COULD HAVE snogged Josh, I was so pleased to see him. I wanted to grab hold of his legs around the ankles and sob with gratitude and pour unguents over his feet. Or was that glue?

  Carol had not taken the news well, particularly when I retrieved my deposit check from the shiny silver box to which only she had a key (I distracted her by upending her coupons box all over the kitchen floor and then making a dive for the key when she bent over). In fact, she had advanced on me until her face was
only a few inches from mine—well, her makeup was. Her face was probably about a foot away.

  “Think you can just do what you like around here?” she asked menacingly.

  “Yes, I do, actually. That’s why I don’t live with my parents anymore.”

  “So who’s going to take your room? You’ve got to sort that out.”

  “Ah. Yes, well . . . I’m afraid you’re going to have to sue me for my friends and acquaintances. Here, I’ve written down my forwarding address on this piece of paper.” I waved it reassuringly. It read: 1 Holly Lane, Hollywood, 0171 555 5555. “And don’t forget to send those bills on to me!”

  “We won’t,” said Carol grimly.

  Laura opened and shut her mouth like a fish. “Well, I think it’s disgraceful the way you’re leaving Carol in the lurch like this,” she announced, quivering. “All the trouble she’s been to.”

  “And me!” piped up Farah, from somewhere around my ankles. “I did the schedules!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “My best friend’s got cancer. I’m nursing him till he dies.”

  Laura backed away, crestfallen. “I’m so sorry,” she muttered.

  “Oh really?” said Carol. “What kind?”

  I couldn’t think. “Ehm, nose cancer?”

  “You’re sick,” she said, turning to march out of the room.

  “So are you!” I yelled after her.

  She turned once more, her brutally permed hair a weapon. “Well, at least I’m clean and sick.”

  FORTUNATELY, JOSH’S SPORTY little Spitfire had turned up, and he was honking enthusiastically. Josh did everything enthusiastically.

  I tore out of the house.

  “Where the hell am I going to put anything?” I wailed, after hugging him overaffectionately and then examining his two-seater.

  “I’m so sorry, darling. I meant to trade Bessie in for a Volvo, but, you know, I just couldn’t find the time.”

  “Ha ha ha. Listen, would you mind sitting on my duvet?”

  He looked at me.

  “Well, it’s not like real sex, is it?”

  It took us an hour and a half to crawl back into town. Even though it was only April, Josh insisted on having the roof off, so I had to hang on to everything I owned, like an earthquake refugee.