Looking for Andrew McCarthy

Everyone looked at each other.

‘They had HUGE apartments,’ said Ellie. ‘Not flats, apartments.’

‘And they went to cool dances at school.’

‘And they started out unpopular, but then got really popular.’

‘And they had makeovers.’

‘And they were going to be friends for ever, despite their class and intellectual differences.’

‘And they were all going to be famous and successful and live happily ever after for ever!’

Everyone sighed.

‘That sounds complete shit,’ said Colin.

‘As opposed to what?’ sniffed Ellie. ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles?’

‘Oh, Hedge,’ said Arthur, rubbing her head affectionately. ‘I don’t think we can get you what you want for your birthday. Although your chiropodist left you some peppermint foot lotion.’

Ellie had been known as Hedgehog since she could talk. Ellie’s mum had started calling her it because she was such a prickly little thing, and it had stuck, because the more you called her it, the pricklier she got. After her mother ran away with an chartered accountant called Archie, Ellie got pricklier still.

Whilst Julia was blonde and angelic as a child – she was still blonde now, although it took a little bit more effort, and she was certainly angelic bordering on martyrdom as far as the Hedgehog was concerned – Ellie was wild-eyed and had kinky black hair and sticky pink cheeks and looked as if she’d just run away from the circus. Their teachers in public had called them ‘Snow White and Rose Red’, in private, ‘Good and Evil’.

Ellie’s mother had skipped town without warning the year before the girls sat their GCSEs. It shocked their friends and neighbours in the respectable suburb, and no-one ever mentioned it to Ellie ever again, no matter how many tantrums she pulled. Julia, and her parents, had made sure that, when Julia sat down to study for her exams and, eventually, applied to university in Sheffield, Ellie did exactly the same, and they had gone up together. Which usually meant that they just felt like very old best friends, although occasionally it could feel that they were yoked together unto death. Julia looked out for Ellie, and it seemed to Ellie that the trade-off was Julia got to be blonde and gorgeous-looking and pick up the nicest guys.

They’d met Arthur at college. Ellie had marched up to him in the student bar and declared that she fancied him. She’d found as a student that this method worked amazingly well on desperate teenage boys away from home for the first time. She would find in later life that it worked well on some older men too, but that the quality was definitely deteriorating year on year.

‘Tough,’ Arthur had replied lazily.

‘Why? What’s wrong with me?’

He looked her up and down.

‘One … two … ehm, three things,’ he said. ‘Adam’s apples I can take or leave.’

‘Oh,’ said Ellie. ‘Ohhhh,’ she said again as the ramifications sunk in. ‘I’ve never met anyone gay before.’

‘Really?’ Arthur had said. ‘How is Mars?’

‘I’m Ellie,’ she had announced sticking out her hand. ‘From Esher. Do you have any brothers who look exactly like you?’

‘No, Ellie from Esher,’ he had said, taking it. ‘Do you?’

‘Pardon me for asking …’

‘I’m not sure I like the way this is going.’

‘But aren’t you supposed to be really stylish and stuff?’

‘Clearly,’ said Arthur who was wearing satin smoking trousers and had his cigarette in a holder.

‘Well then, why do you hang around with Annabel and George?’

He shrugged. ‘To be honest, I like to keep a constant reminder around me of what I’ll never ever have to be. That and the sponge cake.’

‘Really! Me too! That’s me exactly! Would you like to be my partner in crime?’

Arthur had considered it for a second.

‘Yeah, alright then.’

‘My life,’ said Ellie now, sitting up on the bed, ‘is like one of those adverts for soup. You know, when someone has a really horrid, cold, rainy, bad day but it’s all right because at the end they sink into an armchair with a big cup of soup. WITHOUT THE SOUP.’

‘Nonsense,’ said Arthur. ‘There’s nothing wrong with your life that a little scooter wouldn’t sort out. Let’s go shopping on Sunday.’

‘No, it’s not that,’ said Ellie. ‘I mean, just, why do I just feel so bleargh? I mean, is all I have to look forward to squeezing massive foreign objects through my own tissues?’

‘You know, you really don’t have to have a baby if you don’t want to,’ said Julia.

‘We’re going to have to go,’ said Arthur, looking at Colin who was snoring sweetly in an armchair. ‘Come on; why don’t we forget tonight and go out tomorrow and drink the cocktail alphabet?’

‘Uh huh. Maybe. Okay,’ said Ellie. ‘You might as well go now. I’m wearing fifteen layers; it’s going to take me half an hour to get undressed.’

Julia kissed her on the head. ‘Don’t worry. There’s nothing to be worried about. Not really.’

‘Oh, I know,’ said Ellie wistfully. ‘That’s why I’m so worried about why I’m worried.’

‘You looked lovely tonight,’ said Loxy to Julia as they left.

‘Uh huh,’ said Julia. They picked their way through the party detritus and the old Classix Nouveaux LPs.

Ellie didn’t sleep. Or she thought she wasn’t sleeping, but found out she was when she fell out of bed. Having been dreaming of doing something rather disconcerting with Anthony Michael Hall, she bounced and shuddered awake with a yelp and scuttled about on the carpet, noting as she did so how filthy it was. It was grey outside, inside, on the floor, and especially under the bed.

‘Aargh!’ she yelped. ‘The first yelp of my thirties,’ she thought. She paused experimentally, in case the landlord she shared the flat with might get up to make sure she was alright. Her landlord was a bastard and it was a horrible flat, but she’d picked it because it was within walking distance of all her friends.

‘Shut up, Hedgehog!’ came a sleepy voice from next door. He’d come in late the previous night and eaten the remaining sausage rolls very, very loudly.

‘Shut up yourself,’ she yelled, snivelling. Unfortunately she wasn’t bleeding hard enough to go into his bedroom and do a Carrie imitation. She wiped herself with a dirty tissue and crawled back onto the bed, not noticing that the reason she had blood on her head was because she’d knocked the alarm clock off the bedside table. Lying back down, she dropped straight into a coma until the flat farting rev of her flatmate’s supposedly trendy scooter underneath her window woke her up at ten to nine.

‘Aargh,’ she yelped again, and leapt out of bed to look out of the window to try and work out what was going on.

‘Late for work again, Hedgehog? Not like you,’ shouted her big bastard landlord, a huge rugby player who was so muscular he couldn’t cross his own legs. Ellie was looking forward to his thirty-fifth birthday, when he would go to bed a brick shithouse and wake up morbidly obese. His hair was brown and stuck out persistently in different directions, despite his efforts to clamp it down with what Ellie fervently hoped was hair gel and not spit, and his face was permanently red.

She leaned out of the window. ‘Give me a lift on your scooter, Big Bastard.’

He snorted. ‘No chance. You are at least two hours off being ready and it’s morning traffic.’

‘Pleeease. I’ll do your ironing.’

He barked with laughter.

‘If I want fewer clothes I’ll give them to Oxfam, thanks.’

‘I hate you.’

‘I know, I’ve tasted your shepherd’s pie.’

‘I am thirty years old,’ Ellie rifled through her drawers, thinking. ‘And yet I do not appear to have a pair of unladdered tights. How can this be?’

‘Big Bastard!’ she hollered out of the window again. He was slipping his helmet on.

‘Ugh?’

‘Have you been stealing my tights for hilarious drunken pranks again?’

‘Guh … Yeah, I think so. We put one on Vince’s head for … ehm, some reason. Bloody funny though. Oh, and we took a pair of hold ups for Gaz’s stag. Oh, and that bet Willis had to put a pair on those monkeys at the safari park. And, ehm, Carmel borrowed a pair one morning. Oh, yeah, and I needed a pair to fix the car.’

Carmel was his dull girlfriend. Her only point of interest was that, as she was four foot eleven and Big Bastard was six foot four, people were always asking them how on earth they managed to have sex, as casually as if they were asking them if they wanted a cup of tea.

‘You are one big bastard,’ said Ellie.

‘Tough,’ he said. ‘Oh, and I need your rent and your share of the satellite TV.’

‘But I never watch the shagging satellite TV! You only use it for sport and women’s bosoms!’

‘Just write us a cheque, eh darling?’

‘Yeah, minus tight tax. Now I’m going to have to wear my white tights again.’

‘Nothing wrong with white tights.’

‘Yes, Big Bastard, but you think Jordan’s gorgeous. And please give me a lift.’

‘Phforr … Jordan. Sorry, what was that darling? No, I couldn’t possibly be seen out with someone in white tights.’

‘I hope you get run over by a lorry carrying really stinky chemicals that hurt you really badly and make you stink for the rest of your life. Even more than you do now. And maybe turn you purple.’ Ellie petered out, slamming down the window as Big Bastard completely ignored her.

‘Aha,’ she thought. ‘I’m thirty and even the quality of my insults is deteriorating year on year.’

Still, Big Bastard had been right about the ironing. Prodding desperately at a silk shirt that appeared to have taken on several different shades, Ellie cursed the entire institution. ‘In the future,’ she growled to herself, ‘ironing will be like dunking witches and bloodletting. They won’t have a bloody clue why anybody bothered.’

She turned the shirt over and groaned at the large water stain that appeared.

‘Along with commuting,’ she sighed, throwing on a jacket with only one button missing and diving for the door, stopping to scoop up a spoonful of the horrid brown supposedly athletic mush Big Bastard had left behind to cement itself to a bowl. ‘And breakfast cereal, probably. They’ll discover it on an archaeological dig and say “Well, we’ve analysed it, and it’s not food.”’

Ellie stormed out of the door, not even stopping to pick up her newly delivered copy of Smash Hits.

‘Miss Eversholt! How kind of you to join us.’

Ellie tried to smile without using her teeth. Her boss, Mr Rooney, was of the school headteacher sarcastic variety, but you didn’t have the option of sneering back at him or pretending you had your period as compensation. He was pink-eyed, with thinning red hair, and had suspiciously scrofulous looking skin.

‘Everyone, we can start now! Miss Eversholt has deigned to grace us with her presence.’

‘Sorry Mr Rooney. Sorry everyone.’

As usual, the rest of the surveying team looked at her with complete blankness. They always did this, as if they thought being Assistant Administrative Director of Business Development was in some way odd. Ellie hated her job. Beyond hated it. She’d liked the idea of it, but then her idea of it was kind of sexy architects crossed with sexy builders. This didn’t turn out to have a lot to do with what it was, which involved large numbers of protractors and lots of long division. And for some reason the men who worked in it seemed to be required by law to wear loads of pens clipped onto their top pockets, and great big shoes that looked like Cornish pasties.

‘Well, you’ll be glad to know we’ve got a new job in, and it’s going to be taking up lots of our time. They’re turning the old library into … anyone? Anyone?’

‘Don’t tell us, groovy new fake open-plan warehouse flats with fake wooden floors and metal sinks,’ Ellie muttered to the person sitting next to her who was wearing a polyester blouse and completely ignored her.

‘… a revolutionary evolution in inner city migration.’

‘Thought so,’ said Ellie, slugging back some more revolting polystyrene coffee.

‘Miss Eversholt, if you have anything to say, perhaps you’d like to share it with the rest of the group?’

‘No Mr Rooney.’

‘And are you chewing?’

‘No Sir,’ she said. That wasn’t true. There was an undislodgeable and inedible piece of Brantastic stuck to the roof of her mouth.

‘Well, I need a volunteer to dig up the archived Victorian plans … anyone? Anyone?’

There was silence.

‘Ellie, why don’t you take that on?’

This was the filthiest job possible and usually meant several sixteen-hour days in a locked windowless basement, which was good if you were a method actor researching a play about the Beirut hostages, but not particularly useful for anything else.

‘Sir, how can I look for things down at the library when you’re converting all the libraries?’

‘Don’t play smart mouth with me young lady. Now, any other business?’

Ellie sighed and ate another fusty custard cream. Rooney & Co. specialized in ripping the guts out of proper, useful buildings and turning them into Lifestyles for young single professionals; identical rough-walled wanker machines that sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds. As well as it being horribly dull, Ellie always had the sneaking feeling that there was something actually totally wrong with what she was doing, but she couldn’t quite put her finger on it. Arthur had patiently explained it was post-modern and at least they weren’t ripping up the countryside, but the niggling feeling remained, alongside the budding repetitive strain injury.

‘What’s up?’ she remarked to her sullen and uncommunicative temp as she wandered into her cubicle after the meeting.

‘Three churches, six cotton warehouses and a shipyard some wanker wants to offload. Did you have a nice birthday?’ said the temp without lifting her head from Take A Break magazine. What was worse, Ellie wondered: inviting the temp to her birthday party or the temp not turning up?

‘Not really,’ she said. ‘You’re not meant to enjoy your own birthdays, are you? Too fraught.’

The temp shrugged.

‘Can’t remember. I’m always too lashed out of my head.’

‘Maybe that was my big mistake,’ said Ellie. ‘Actually remembering being there.’

What was worse, Ellie wondered: playing patience at work or caring about it enough to change the design on the back of the cards?

Thank God she had something to look forward to after work. Elms, their Clapham local, looked lit up and busy that evening. There was a band playing in the corner with a saxophonist who fortunately wasn’t Billy, friendly waiting staff with aprons, who let you run tabs, and long red-checked-tableclothed tables. Siobhan and Julia were joining them, to see if they could remember what a good night out felt like. As she walked in, Ellie was disappointed at how relieved she was that her friends had found a place to sit and the music wasn’t too loud. She plucked off Arthur’s red hat and sat down.

‘Hey! Where are we up to?’

‘B,’ said Arthur.

‘Perfect. I’ll have a Bloody Mary.’ The waitress nodded and headed off.

‘How are you?’ said Julia tentatively.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Ellie. ‘I’ve had the crappiest day in the universe. I just can’t … God, do you ever feel you’re getting into a big fat rut?’

‘Aha! The middle class Olympics!’ said Arthur.

‘G2 does,’ said Siobhan, handing over the newspaper. The headline read, ‘Are You and Your Twenty-Something Friends in a Big Fat Rut? Why not Experiment With Scented Candle Sticks, Scatter Cushions and Cocaine, Just Like Everybody Else Is?’

‘This is EXACTLY what I mean,’ said Ellie. She picked the paper up. ‘I don’t feel I can have one tiny original thought in my head. And if anything goes wrong I’m just supposed to go and buy something taupe and put it in the right corner of the living room.’

‘Thatcherbaby,’ said Arthur.

‘I know. But I didn’t ask to be a Thatcherbaby!’

‘Well, you are.’

‘I mean, is this it? Is there really nothing more to life than getting your gold card?’

‘Oh, I got mine!’ said Siobhan.

‘Really! Let’s see. Ohh. God, I’m so shallow.’

‘Of course you are,’ said Arthur. ‘Your number one fantasy in life is to kiss Andrew McCarthy in a pink dress. Although world peace runs a close second.’

Ellie sipped her newly arrived Bloody Mary. ‘I think I’m unhappy. I need an adventure. Maybe I should change jobs. Or career. Or dye my hair?’

‘You’re affluent, you have no responsibilities, you have plenty of free time … you are making up INVISIBLE WESTERN PROBLEMS,’ said Arthur. ‘Go see a therapist. They love invisible problems.’

‘It’s just thirtyangst,’ said Julia. ‘I got that too. Don’t worry about it.’

‘Easy for you to say,’ said Ellie. ‘You’ve got your own flat AND a devoted love slave.’

Loxy smiled and put his arm around Julia. She shrugged him off and raised her eyes to heaven, whereupon his smile faded. Loxy was aware at some level that the more uxoriously he behaved the less attention he received, but was too nervous to put any lovebastard techniques into practice. In short he was universally referred to as Sweet with a capital S, never the epithet of choice for strong-armed love gods, unless your name is Eric Cartman. This often puzzled Loxy, as he was six foot two, built, had a fairly difficult responsible job as a prisoner’s advocate and was never normally like this around women. In fact, before he’d met Julia, he’d never done a sappish thing in his life. However he’d never met a woman before who did such a convincing job of combining Felicity Kendal and Ulrika Johnson.

There was no point in envying the fact that Julia got all the great men though, as Siobhan, checking her watch for the hundredth time, was well aware.

‘Where the hell is Patrick?’ she said. ‘He’s so unreliable. I wish he wouldn’t work so late.’

‘Actually, Shiv, Patrick’s incredibly reliable,’ pointed out Julia. ‘He’s always working late.’

‘Oh yeah,’ said Siobhan. ‘Christ. He can’t even be annoying in an interesting way.’

Siobhan had been Arthur’s landlady at college, when they’d taken it in turns to argue about furniture and have immaculacy competitions. No-one liked to go round there too often, particularly not Ellie, who had a bit of a conflict going on between her love for red wine and her red wine’s love for other people’s carpets.

‘What I’d really like,’ said Ellie, ‘is for something really dramatic to happen. An earthquake or something. Hmm, no, a non fatal earthquake. Oh God, I don’t know. Just something.’

‘How about you fall out with your boyfriend in public at your own birthday party have a yelling match with him then lock yourself in the bathroom?’ said Arthur. ‘Oh, no, hang on …’

Ellie’s mobile rang.

‘Oh my God,’ she said. ‘Maybe this is it. Maybe somebody’s seen me in the street and wants me to go to Hollywood and become a movie star!’

‘I bet that’s who it is,’ said Siobhan. ‘Or maybe it’s Prince William telling you he’s in love with you.’

‘Could be anything,’ said Ellie, peering at the phone. ‘Oh. It’s my dad. Oh no! I take it all back! I don’t want anything to happen at all.’

Ellie’s dad lived alone. Ever since Ellie’s mother had left he drank rather too much whisky and relied on seeing his only child often, otherwise he tended to live in string vests and eat cold beans straight out of the tin.

‘Hey?’ she said tentatively, then listened patiently as he described his extremely bad heartburn.

‘And how many sausages? Uh huh. You know, Dad, I think nine sausages is probably too much for dinner.’

She listened some more. ‘Okay, no, they’re on the top shelf of the cabinet. Well, look again. No, I did get some. Listen to me … Oh, for God’s sake.’

She put the phone down. ‘Sorry everyone but I think I’ve got to go and burp my father.’

‘But it’s C!’ said Arthur. ‘Your favourite round: Cosmopolitans.’

‘I know. But I’d better go.’

She shouldered her bag, downed the dregs of her Bloody Mary and headed out of the door, face set against the rain.

‘This isn’t fair,’ she thought to herself, walking down the darkened suburban street in search of a taxi, as the wind blew gusts of rain across her face. Anyone passing her would have thought they were looking at a very upset four-year-old. Her lower lip stuck out tremulously. A bus crashed along the road, spraying her skirt with water, and ploughed on. Ellie stopped in the middle of the street.

‘I’m not happy, okay!’ she yelled at the open sky. ‘I don’t know why, but I’m NOT! And I don’t know who I’m talking to, because my generation doesn’t even believe in GOD anymore!’

‘How are you today, my favourite Hedgepig?’

She gave herself up for a hug inside the gloomy house. An old terrace, it was musty and undecorated, and her father had a thing about putting on the central heating and very rarely did, preferring to stomp about in several layers of faintly grubby pyjamas.

‘Hey Dad. Little bit grumpy. What’s the matter with you?’

‘I think I had a bad sausage.’

‘I told you before: you eat too many sausages.’ She poked him in the belly. ‘Why don’t you have something healthy?’

She went into the bathroom and dug out the bottle of milk of magnesia; as predicted it was on the top shelf.

‘They make healthy sausages?’

‘Not exactly.’ Ellie checked the grill was off – he’d already had a minor fire – made him take the medicine and made them both a cup of tea.

‘How could you not find this? It was right on the shelf.’

Her dad squirmed and tried to look as if he hadn’t done it on purpose so she’d come over and see him. Ellie told him about the party fiasco, and her general sense of being miserable.

‘Well, you’d better do something about it then. Haven’t you been saying since the day after you got your job that you really want to switch jobs? Why don’t you do that?’

‘Not this month. Not until they forget about the customer services rep and the bottle of quink.’

‘Explain exactly what it is you do again, Hedgepig?’

‘Business Development Manager. Oh, never mind. God, they should have a Bring your Parents to Work Day.’

‘My theory is, right, if you can’t sum it up in a sentence, it’s not a proper job. Like, “I nick thieves”.’

‘Dad, that’s a movie pitch, not a career.’

‘“I fix hearts” – cardiologist, see?’

‘Yeah, yeah, I’ve cottoned on. Nobody has simple jobs any more.’

‘That’s true,’ mused her dad. ‘Nobody does. What is it Julia does again?’

‘She’s a systems analyst consultant.’

‘That’s exactly what I mean. That doesn’t even make sense.’

‘There’s too many people in the world. They have to make up stuff for us to do.’

‘Ah. That would explain computers.’

Ellie thought for a second.

‘God, you know, I think it does.’

‘Okay then, if you’re looking for something new to do, why don’t you paint the front room?’

‘Daad! And eat this tomato. It’s better than nothing.’

‘Shan’t. Why don’t you …’

‘… get myself a nice young man? Because there are none, Dad.’

‘In the whole of London, there isn’t one single nice man?’

‘Nope.’ And I have personally checked most of them, she silently added to herself.

‘I know lots of nice coppers I could introduce you to.’

‘Yes, but on the whole my motto is the less Freudian the better.’

‘Nothing wrong with a nice copper.’

‘Nothing wrong with a nice bit of tomato either. Eat!’

He took it reluctantly. This was a constant battle between them. Deep down, he liked his daughter’s chiding at him. It showed she cared. In the same way, Ellie liked his bothering her constantly about all the bad aspects of her life. As an only child and an only parent, they’d done the best they could. Which wasn’t, Ellie reflected, looking at the congealed-egg washing up, that great when you started to think about it. She squirted the remnants of a dusty bottle of Original Fairy into the sink.