My Very '90s Romance Read online

  “Freedom!” I yelled into the air. “I am never going to move into a crappy flat again.”

  “Except for the one you’re about to move into.”

  “Josh, it could be a shed at the bottom of the garden, I don’t care! I’m free!”

  “OK, steady on,” said Josh, obviously worried I was about to start leaning dangerously far over the bonnet and singing “My Heart Will Go On.”

  THERE ARE TWO schools of thought concerning the children of parents who divorce nastily just as you’re approaching puberty. One school says, Well, life is like that—chin up, and maybe the seething atmosphere at home will Spur you into staying late at the library and moving on to better and more brilliant things in an attempt to pull yourself out of the flotsam. Lots of famous people have divorced parents. They overachieve for attention. That wasn’t exactly my school.

  The other school says you should instantly become übertruculent and demanding and put down everything you do in your entire life to your bad upbringing. I tended to this school, it being rather easier and low maintenance; plus it tended to mean better Christmas presents, if dodgier exam results. It had worked reasonably well during my teens, but when your friends no longer have to see you every day in class and are too busy off doing horrid careers and stuff—well, so, now I was twenty-eight, and it was definitely becoming less fun by the day, especially when everyone I used to know had suddenly become fascinated by mortgages, for fuck’s sake. I just didn’t get it. Boys and pop music—fascinating. Mortgages are what you get when you look up the dictionary definition of “not fascinating.” Hence my precipitative flat-hopping.

  To make matters even worse, I was starting to realize that my antiestablishment tendencies were beginning to marginalize me—not as a free spirit, as I’d always thought, but instead along with the old hippies and socialist workers and people who talked about smashing the state but couldn’t actually get it together to wash their trousers—ever. It was extremely depressing. I mean, nobody likes washing their trousers, but I didn’t want it to define my entire existence. To make matters worse, my father, who took up bringing home blond women full time after he left my mum, had recently brought home one my age. Who also had a mortgage. And a sports car. Sigh.

  Josh had a mortgage, but he was also a complete sweetie pie who could be endlessly relied upon in a crisis, as I knew and had shamefully abused in the past.

  We finally pulled up in front of his dilapidated Victorian pile in Pimlico.

  “I see you’ve still not got the builders in.”

  “No, I couldn’t afford them,” said Josh, hopping out of the car without opening the door and pulling up two bin liners of my stuff. “Until now.” He smiled sweetly in my direction.

  “Ah yes, about that . . .” I followed him in, clutching my socks-and-pants bag, my cheese plant, and Frank Sinatra the bear. One of the reasons I’d wound up in Harlesden in the first place was that being a freelance florist and general underachieving free spirit didn’t exactly pay very much, and Pimlico was basically posh these days.

  He told me how much I would owe, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The going rate for coffins wasn’t so bad after all.

  The flat was quiet inside. It was big and tatty and comfortable, and I’d always liked it. Josh had bought right at the top of the market and paid a stupid amount of money for it—apart from being infested with dry rot and woodworm and all sorts of other nasty moving things, it needed a new roof—but it was a good homey home. The kitchen was large, with nasty old units, a rickety table and four chairs in the middle, cracked floor tiles, and a huge window at the back that opened onto a rusty excuse for a fire escape. I pottered about in my tiny new room, mostly leaning against cupboards to get them to shut and stuffing things under the bed.

  “Umm, sorry about the mess,” hummed Joshua as I went back into the kitchen for a cup of tea. “It’s not usually . . . Well, in fact, it is.”

  “Great!” I said.

  He smiled weakly at me. I leaned across the table. “Josh, thank you. I’m sorry I forced you into this. I promise I’ll be a good tenant. You’ll see. I promise.”

  “Good. And I could do with the company, to be honest—Kate works all the time, and Addison is, well . . .”

  “Yikes!” I pounced immediately. “Tell me the gossip about Kate.”

  “Oh, she’s a complete bitch, as ever,” said Kate, striding into the kitchen and dumping a Marks & Spencer bag, an enormous briefcase, a Nicole Farhi raincoat, and an expensive leather handbag onto one of the rickety chairs.

  “Hello, Holly. Josh left me a message on my voicemail. Which I got about ten minutes ago. But never mind, eh? Welcome anyway.”

  I went to give her a hug or something, but she was already en route to the bottle opener. Josh touched her lightly on the arm.

  “How was your day, Skates?”

  “Great. Great. As usual. Two sexist comments, four reports to do this week, one irregular forecasting, and I have to be in Dublin for eight A.M. tomorrow morning, to give a presentation on a report I haven’t even read yet. Then back in the office by noon to account for myself, two more meetings, and a four P.M. deadline for the Kinley account. Oh, and then a client dinner with a bunch of ghastly old bores who’ll try and feel me up in the Met Bar.”

  Josh nodded sagely. Kate pulled the cork with a savage pop and poured out three humongous glasses of wine.

  “So, Holly, what are you up to these days?”

  Kate had always intimidated me. We’d only really met because the three of us were on the same corridor of student halls. We’d both stayed friends with Josh—most people did—but never really got on with each other. She was rather more of a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps type of person—she didn’t actually say “lickspittle,” but you could tell when she was thinking it.

  She’d done business studies and gotten some hugely well-paid and prestigious job in the City, which hadn’t helped relations between us particularly. I always felt she was just about to offer to buy a Big Issue off me.

  Actually, that wasn’t quite why we didn’t get on. Specifically, well, you know in Orientation Week, one is often, er, tacitly encouraged to get . . . Well, anyway. Originally, there were the three of us in a row on one of those grotty endless corridors that are completely not the Brideshead University model I’d always hoped for, even in Coventry. Students were still sharing showers, a good life lesson for future flatshares in how much yuck people are actually made of, and how, just when you think you’ve seen everything, there’s always a new variety of repulsiveness.

  Josh had opened his door on the very first day and sat there crudely beaming at everyone who walked past, a technique that probably wouldn’t have worked so well if he hadn’t been so blond and pretty. I wandered in there by accident, already worried by how keen my dad and Blondie had been to leave me but faintly reassured by the seemingly enormous check then burning a hole in my pocket. It worked out to a lot of chocolate bars, although, as I found out four weeks later, not that many beers and taxis.

  “Hello,” said Josh. “This place is nice, isn’t it?”

  “It’s a shithole!” I said, looking around at the regulation stained walls, stained carpet, and dodgy pinboard.

  “Oh yes . . .” He took in the room. “So it is. Oh well—only three years to go.”

  “And a week,” I said.

  “Of course. Hmm. What do you think the cooking facilities are like?”

  “I don’t know—what’s a cooking facility?”

  Through the paper-thin walls we could hear loud, fairly dramatic sobbing. We raised our eyebrows at each other.

  “What is this, primary school?” I said, a tad callously.

  “Maybe she misses her mother,” said Josh.

  I sniffed derisively, something I’d been practicing throughout my teens to great effect.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go cheer her up.”

  “Ah, the beginning of my crazy university years,” I said, but I followed him dutifully outside.

  Next door, perched on the narrow bed, with the door open, sat Kate, thin and a little pinched-looking, and dressed head to toe in immaculately ironed Benetton separates. Even though she appeared distraught with grief, she still had been composed enough to hang up lots of perfect shirts, I noticed.

  “Hello there,” said Josh. “I’m sure it won’t be as bad as all that. When I went to boarding school I cried for my mother for four days. Mind you, I was six years old at the time.”

  “My mother?” said Kate, spluttering. “I don’t miss my mother! I just can’t believe I didn’t do better in my A-levels than to end up in this shitty place!”

  “Didn’t you work hard?” I asked her. That was my excuse.

  “Of course I worked hard!” she said, looking up. “I had a fucking place at Magdalene.”

  “Oh, I see. They only want really tall girls, don’t they?” I said sympathetically.

  “What the fuck’s nervous anxiety, anyway?” Kate went on, ignoring me. “I’ll tell you what it is: It isn’t enough to get your exam marks upgraded. I wish I’d had a fucking full-on nervous breakdown. Then they’d have had to let me in.”

  “Have one now,” I suggested. I knew she wasn’t actually shouting at me, but she was certainly shouting in my direction.

  “Don’t worry,” said Josh kindly, touching her on the shoulder. “Would you like to come out with me? I’m going ice-skating at the Christian Union.”

  “You’re not Christian, are you?” I said, disappointed. I’d liked him.

  “No! But I sure can skaaaaaate!”

  So the three of us ended up in one of those forced friendships that come together extremely quickly out of necessity in early college. Kate decided that Josh was her own personal property, which annoyed me. OK, so both of them had flat stomachs and good posture, but I didn’t like the assumption that because Kate was prettier than me I should butt out, especially as I didn’t even fancy Josh and in fact assumed pretty much from the start that he was gay, rather than, as I later found out, completely and utterly confused.

  Kate hadn’t cottoned on to this, however, and insisted on treating me as an annoying kid sister hanging around with the grown-ups, her repertoire including: “You again, Holly?” “You don’t mind, do you, but I’ve only got two cups?” and “Sorry, Holl, but it’s only a plus-one.” Soon their status as moneyed and classy students at a poor and common college became clear, and I started going out with a greasy sports science student who once tried to teach me kung fu and chipped my collarbone, so I pretty much left them to it—which doesn’t mean that she didn’t really fuck me off, Kate being the accepted suckling pig to Josh’s sow and my runt. An analogy bordering on the disgusting, but that’s how it was.

  In time, of course, Kate realized that simply because she and Josh went to a lot of places just the two of them, it didn’t actually mean they were a couple. But not before I got my revenge . . .

  In a misguided attempt at collegiate unity, two socially inadequate but horrifically bouncy “ents officers”—“ents” stood for “entertainment,” and of course to be involved in “ents” you were anything but—arranged a “Corridor Convulsion” early on in our first term. There was a good and complicated reason for it at the time, but what it meant in effect was an excuse to haul in lots of weepingly cheap alcohol and stuff it down the faces of naïve but nubile eighteen-year-olds in the hope that they might accidentally strip off their tops and run down the corridor. Actually, maybe that was the official reason and it just sounded all right in those days.

  Josh of course would do anything of a community nature enthusiastically, and Kate was still in the gamely-joining-in stage, before she realized that she could dress up as a giant antelope and it still wasn’t going to make her sexually attractive to Josh, so we all trawled into the hallway to figure out what was happening.

  What was happening was what happens anywhere with horribly diverse sects of shy and socially inept people away from home for the first time and unsure of their very identities: Groups of twos and threes stood in small corners grunting nervously at one another and downing obscure former Communist bloc spirits as fast as they possibly could. A group of rugby—or aspirant rugby-playing—lads started getting rowdy in the corner, and the ents officers gibbered around, excited yet again at the possibility of not being one of the 29 percent of students who leave Coventry certified virgins. What they didn’t yet know was that 100 percent of ents officers leave 100 percent of all institutions certified virgins.

  A petite, very pretty blond girl who wore enormous fleeces and was clearly out to score with a rugby boy—Why? being the only unanswered question—became the first person, at around 10:30 P.M. and after a lot of goading, to take off her top and flee down the corridor, bouncing merrily, to massive applause. After that, about fifteen of the men immediately tried to do it with their cocks out—what is it about British men and being completely naked for no good reason? I’ve seen someone play the piano with his.

  Sociologists would have had a field day with all this, given, truly, how few of us that year had yet seen another buck-naked human being they weren’t blood related to.

  Finally, and it all starts to get a bit hazy around this point, pretty much everyone had done a quick streak and been accepted into the gang. Mine would have been sexier had I not stumbled over somebody’s outstretched foot and made a noise that sounded like a fart (but wasn’t) on my way down.

  And at last there was only one more person to go. Kate would clearly rather have died than take part in anything so vulgar. She had that faraway look in her eyes she got whenever she dwelled on what romantic and glistening evenings she could have been having at Cambridge right then. I started egging her on and pointing out to people that she was the only one who hadn’t done it, just in case she got away with it.

  “Shut up, Holl,” Kate hissed.

  “Kate hasn’t gone! Kate hasn’t gone!” I shouted loudly to the rugby players.

  “Kate! Kate! Kate! Kate!” they started chanting.

  Kate flushed redder than ever.

  “Everyone else has,” I said petulantly.

  “Go on, Skatie,” said Josh, who, due to his upbringing, was completely unable to understand why someone wouldn’t want to take part in a group-enforced humiliation in the name of fun. The rugby boys’ name-calling had failed to abate and formed an increasingly ferocious background.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” said Kate, furious.

  “Kate! Kate! Kate!”

  Kate pulled up her top extremely quickly and made a sprint down the corridor. Immediately, silence fell. Quite simply, Kate had the flattest chest anyone had ever seen.

  Of course, nowadays, that doesn’t matter. Kate Moss resembles a boy who’s been stung by two bees and nobody bats an eyelid. But when you’re nineteen and desperate to find yourself attractive . . .

  To cut a long story short, that was never a moment when anybody needed me to inadvertently expostulate, “Christ, they look like two Pop-Tarts!” loudly enough for everyone to hear.

  KATE HANDED ME one of the glasses of wine.

  “Sorry, I didn’t hear that. . . . What did you say you were up to again?”

  “Ehm, I’m . . . I’m a florist.”

  “Still! My goodness. Is it . . . fulfilling?”

  “Huh?”

  Fulfilling? I couldn’t even conceive of what that might mean, and I was standing with a confused expression on my face until I remembered that when Kate asked a question, she required a logical answer quickly—time being money, etc.

  “Yes, it is,” I said. “The pay is shit and the hours are crap and your hands are wet all day, but apart from that it’s fantastic.”

  She smiled thinly. “Never mind, eh? You’d probably hate a career job anyway.”

  “This is a . . .”

  “Where do you work?”

  “Actually, I’m freelance at the moment. . . .”

  Well, I couldn’t commute to Hackney Flowerama anymore, but I did have a chum at New Covent Garden who was going to let me help out.

  “Oh, so you’re like a temp florist? How funny!”

  I didn’t know what to say to that, so I went and helped Josh, who was chopping onions for spaghetti bolognese. I could see Kate reflected in the kitchen window. She did look fantastic—tired but fantastic. Her dark hair was glossy and tied back in a chignon, and she was wearing an expensive fawn suit. I wiped my hands on my apron and sighed.

  “Tell me about your mystery flatmate. Is he away?” I asked Josh.

  Josh and Kate looked at each other and smiled.

  “Away?” echoed Kate. “Addison doesn’t do away.”

  “What—you mean he’s in the house?”

  I felt nervous suddenly. I’d been stomping about merrily for two hours, singing and making loud noises in the toilet, and all along there had been an additional presence. Spooky.

  “Oh yes,” said Josh. “I’ll probably leave some food out for him later on. He forgets to eat until he faints, so I put it by his door.”

  Curiouser and curiouser.

  “Can I meet him?”

  They exchanged glances again.

  “Ehm, best not.”

  “Well, I’ll have to meet him sometime,” I argued. “What if he just pops up in the bathroom one day? I’ll scream the place down.”

  “You might do that anyway,” said Kate.

  “Addison is very . . . well, sensitive. He’s a computer buff, you see.”

  Only Josh still used words like “buff.”

  “You mean, what—an anorak? A geek? Dork? Nerd?”

  “Ahem.” Josh gave a polite cough as a shadow flitted across the open kitchen door.

  “Is that him?” I hissed. “I’m going to see.”

  Kate stepped in front of me and shut the door.

  “What is going on?” I asked. “Is he hideously deformed, like the Elephant Man?”

  Josh patted me on the shoulder. “Sorry, Holls. We’re not doing this on purpose. Addison does a lot of highly technical, top-level computer work, and he hates being disturbed when he’s working.”