About a Girl

CHAPTER THREE

In the four days that had passed since I’d been fired I had learned the following lessons. One: what worked in the movies did not work in real life. Two: advertising was the creative industry equivalent of the movie Mean Girls. Three: four days wasn’t long enough for your hair to start washing itself. Four: if, however, you just didn’t get out of bed, you stopped noticing that your hair smelled disgusting after two and a half days, so that didn’t really matter.

I had woken up on Tuesday strong, confident and fully committed to writing a new chapter in The Story of Tess. Amy called in sick with another migraine and played cheerleader, DJing a motivational mix of music from my largely unplayed music library. By midday, I had an amazing CV, I’d called and left voicemails with every advertising agency in London, and I’d drunk five and a half cups of coffee. Big cups. By four p.m., my CV had gone out to eight recruitment agencies, I’d been to the toilet six times and Charlie had reported back at least a dozen different rumours about my ‘no longer being with the company’. The three favourites seemed to be that I had been leaking information to a competitor, that I had blackmailed the company into promoting me, and, my personal favourite, that I’d been sleeping with Michael and that he’d sent me to France to have his baby. Because clearly it was 1852 and that’s what we did when we got knocked up by the boss.

At six p.m., after Amy had left for the bar job she occasionally bothered with, after Charlie had emailed me the fifteenth different rumour (that I was completing a sex change and would be coming back in the New Year as Terence), and after I had received the fifth phone call of the day explaining no one was hiring at the moment, that things were really tough right now and asking if I had considered retraining as a teacher, I gave up. As in, I took off my people clothes and put on my most disgusting threadbare flannel pyjamas, ate everything in the fridge and turned off my stolen phone. And when I turned it back on twenty-four hours later, the only people who had tried to contact me were Amy and Charlie. So I turned it back off again. The only bright spot was that when I left my room at EastEnders o’clock, Vanessa had mysteriously disappeared and taken her suitcase and toxic personality with her.

For the past seventy-two hours I had only got out of bed to pee, take something out of the fridge or fetch another Sex and the City boxset from the living room. No one ever got laid off in Sex and the City. And they all got the men they wanted in the end. Even if one of them was Steve. It did not make me feel better. I did not turn it off.

But three days later, the universe and Amy had decided enough was enough.

‘Get up, get up, get up!’ She started slapping at either side of my head and bouncing up and down on top of my bed. ‘It’s Saturday. You’ve got to get up. We’re staging an intervention.’

‘I don’t want to be intervened,’ I croaked, pushing Amy away and throwing myself face first into my pile of pillows. ‘Leave me alone.’

‘No, you’re not Anne Frank, you’re not hiding from the Nazis. It’s time for you to get your arse up and out,’ she said, jumping on my back and wrapping her legs around my waist. She was very strong for such a little girl. ‘You need to get in the shower. We’ve got places to go, people to see.’

‘Not possible,’ I remonstrated, pushing up onto all fours and trying to shake her off, but Amy clung to me as though she was riding a scabby horse. ‘Let me go back to sleep.’

‘We haven’t got time – I’m double-parked. Get dressed, you filthy mare.’

Of course the other person in Amy’s intervention was Charlie. I shook Amy loose and tried to push the dead cat on top of my head into something resembling a ponytail. It wasn’t like he hadn’t spent more than one night on my bathroom floor holding my hair back while I brought up half of the student union bar, but still, I tried to avoid looking like utter scum in front of him when I could. If I could.

‘How are you double-parked? You haven’t got a car.’ I blinked at the daylight and the very tall, very lovely man silhouetted by my window.

‘It’s mental, Tess. You just go on the Internet and ask a man if you can borrow one, and then you give him your credit card details and, fuck me, you’ve got a car,’ he replied. Sarcasm was not one of Charlie’s strong points. As opposed to his beautiful, floppy hair and wonderful eyes. And his long, long legs. And broad chest. I was going off topic.

‘If you hadn’t gone the complete Howard Hughes, you’d remember that this afternoon is my niece’s christening and we are attending,’ Amy said, releasing her kung fu grip and rolling across the bed as she wrinkled her tiny nose. Her black bob was ruffled from over-exertion and her cheeks were flushed. She looked the very picture of health. She looked like my complete opposite. ‘So get up and get in the shower because we are on our way up north whether you like it or not.’

Those karma gods were not playing fair.

‘Tess! Amy!’

As was tradition, my mum leapt up from the kitchen table as though I was returning from the war and we hadn’t called seventeen minutes ago to say we were getting off the M1 and would be there in seventeen minutes. No hugs, though. We didn’t hug.

‘And Charlie.’

As was tradition, my boy best friend was met with a wildly inappropriate growl of a hello, as he had been ever since the first time I’d brought him home. The only person on earth who loved Charlie more than I did was my mum. I wasn’t sure if she wanted him to marry me or marry her. Of course she was already married and my stepdad was possibly the best man on earth, but that didn’t stop her from giving him a squeeze that was just half a heartbeat too long. They hugged. They always hugged.

‘Nice to see you, Julie,’ he squeaked as she copped a sneaky feel. ‘You look well.’

‘Isn’t it a lovely weekend?’ Once she had put Charlie down, Mum sat back at the table while Amy helped herself to everything in our fridge. ‘It’s going to be a lovely christening. Amy, you must be so proud of your sister.’

‘Yes, getting accidentally knocked up is quite the achievement these days,’ Amy replied, popping the top off a beer. ‘And two kids to two different men. She’s a living miracle.’

‘So proud,’ Mum beamed, stone cold smile on her face. ‘And what are you doing for work now? Are you still seeing that lovely coloured man?’

I shook my head and planted my face on the cool kitchen table. It smelled of disinfectant wipes and shame.

‘No, that was really just a sex thing,’ Amy said. She did love going toe to toe with my mum. And the worst part was that she was really only warming up for her own mother. ‘But you know what they say – once you go black—’

‘I haven’t, but that’s very interesting.’ Mum always got bored before Amy did and so she turned her attention to Charlie. ‘And what about you, love? How’s work? Tess still acting the slave driver?’

Because the atmosphere wasn’t tense enough already.

During the two-hour drive up into the seventh circle of hell, Amy and Charlie had been thoroughly briefed on the situation. They knew that I had not told my mother about my newly unemployed status, and they knew I was not planning to do so. Originally I just hadn’t been able to face it. And then I had convinced myself I’d be able to get a new job so quickly that there wasn’t any point in telling her. And then I’d spent three days under the duvet eating packet after packet of Hobnobs.

Charlie thought I should tell her. Charlie thought my mum was nicer than Mary Poppins on Xanax. Charlie loved my mum because my mum loved Charlie. Amy did not think I should tell her. Amy thought my mum was a word I’d only ever said out loud twice in my entire life. Amy did not love my mum because my mum did not love Amy. And while no one wants to think badly of their parents, Amy’s opinion of my mum was probably closer to the truth than Charlie’s. It was comforting to know there was someone out there who knew everything about me and wasn’t genetically or legally required to love me but did so anyway. Unfortunately, it also meant that Amy had witnessed all the rows, all the shouting and all the tears, and, as was right and proper for a best friend, she held all the grudges I was biologically denied.

I loved my mum and I knew that she loved me. I also knew that she loved me more when I was doing well. If I got ninety-eight percent in a test, she wanted to know what had happened to the other two percent. If I got a pay rise, she wanted to know why it wasn’t a promotion. If I got a promotion, she wanted to see a business card to verify it. She was a pusher. She was a pushy mother. Whenever I got upset about it, I tried to remind myself I should be happy that she focused her efforts on shoving me up the academic and professional ladders, and even happier that reality TV didn’t exist when I was a kid. I would almost certainly have ended up on X Factor, dancing to Kelis’s Milkshake in a diamante bra-and-knicker set at the age of six. It wasn’t her fault, I reminded myself for the thousandth time that year; she just wanted the best for me. She just wanted me to have the things that she didn’t. And she’d watched Working Girl too many times in the eighties. It wasn’t a coincidence that I was called Tess.

‘Oh, you know Tess doesn’t work in my team,’ Charlie replied with careful diplomacy. ‘And thank goodness. She’s so good at her job, she’d just show me up.’

He always knew the right thing to say. Mum and I sat across from each other and smiled in tandem. Her hair was shorter than mine and starting to go grey, but we had the same colour eyes and identical gigantic rack. I’d got my Big Bird height, overanalytical mind and physical inability to hold a tune from Dad, but the rest of me was pure Julie.

‘So what’s the news?’ she asked, eventually turning to me. ‘How’s that fancy office? Have you got your new business cards yet?’

‘Not yet,’ I said, trying very hard not to tell any lies. ‘And really, the creative director job isn’t that different from what I was doing before. It’s just a different title.’

I actually assumed that was true. Everyone knew you ended up doing the new job for at least a year before you actually got the title.

‘Everyone’s been very impressed – they can’t wait to see you and hear all about it.’ Mum wore my achievements like a badge. ‘Your sisters will be at the christening.’

Joy.

‘Where’s Brian?’ I asked, looking around the house I grew up in for signs of my stepdad, aka the only sane member of my family. It made perfect sense that he wasn’t genetically related to me in anyway. ‘Hiding?’

‘Hiding,’ Mum confirmed. ‘He’s playing golf. He’ll be back by two.’

I nodded and tried not to worry. It seemed like Brian was playing a lot of golf lately.

‘Oh, Tess, Amy’s mum dropped by earlier and asked if you could take some pictures this afternoon?’

‘I would, but I didn’t bring my camera,’ I said, biting my lip and hoping she wouldn’t ask where it was.

It was last summer, when I’d been short on money due to a ridiculous last-minute weekend away with Charlie that I couldn’t afford and which had ended in him copping off with a twenty-two-year-old blonde girl while I sat in the B&B sulking, that I’d traded my camera to Vanessa for a month’s rent. The camera I’d begged my mother to buy me. The camera I had taken with me everywhere until work had got in the way. The camera that sat on my ‘photographer’ roommate’s desk and never moved.

‘She’ll just have to manage without, then, won’t she,’ Mum shrugged. ‘I told her it wasn’t fair to ask anyway. You’ve been working all week and then she expects you to take photos of her bloody granddaughter’s christening? I mean, you’re a bloody director now, for Christ’s sake. And it’s not like there won’t be another one, the way she goes on. No offence, Amy.’

‘None taken,’ Amy replied. ‘My sister is a bigger slag than I am, I know.’

‘Hadn’t we better go and get changed?’ I stood up and grabbed my hastily packed weekend bag, wondering what sartorial treats Amy had shoved in there while I was showering. ‘We don’t want to be fighting for the bathroom.’

‘Fine.’ Mum feigned disappointment that we were trying to escape so quickly, but I knew she was relieved. ‘Be down here by quarter to three. We’ll walk down to the church together.’

I just prayed I wouldn’t burn up on entry.

The christening went as well as a small village christening could go. Babies cried, mums cooed and the twenty-something children who had run away at the age of eighteen stood awkwardly at the back fielding questions from their former Brownie leaders about why they weren’t married yet.

‘We can’t get married,’ Amy was explaining to our septuagenarian Brown Owl. ‘Because we’re a triad. Me, Tess and Charlie. Society doesn’t understand our love. It’s a polyamory thing.’

‘Pollyanna-y?’ Mrs Rogers looked very confused. ‘I don’t quite follow, Amy, love.’

‘Just what we need,’ Charlie whispered in my ear as he fell into the seat next to me. The post-baptismal celebrations were taking place in the pub, ‘the true church of the village’, as it was written. Almost everyone I’d gone to school with was crammed into the conservatory of The Millhouse, putting back pints and taking pictures of Amy’s new niece, Katniss, with their phones and posting them straight to her Facebook page. I had assumed Amy was taking the piss when she’d told me the baby’s name, but no. I should have known. Her big sister was called Bella, after all.

‘What’s that?’ I clinked my Diet Coke against his pint of bitter and took a sip. As predicted, Amy had struggled with my wardrobe of sensible work separates, so I was sitting in a Yorkshire pub at my best friend’s sister’s baby’s christening in July wearing black leather knee boots, a gold sequinned miniskirt I’d worn one New Year at uni, and a white cotton shirt that really needed ironing. It was quite the outfit.

‘Amy is going round telling everyone that the three of us are a couple,’ he said, undoing his already loose tie. ‘I think she got bored of people asking about Dave.’

‘Amy was bored of people asking about Dave seven seconds after she broke up with him,’ I replied, imagining the fun conversation I’d be having with Lorraine from the library and Donna from the post office before the night was out. ‘Now she’s just bored. Why did she even make us come to this?’

‘I’m fairly certain it was to remind you why you left in the first place. Is it working?’ Charlie drained his pint and nodded towards my half-empty glass. ‘What are you drinking? I’m going to the bar.’

Reaching over, I wiped a frothy moustache from his top lip and smiled. ‘Just Diet Coke. I’m not in the mood to drink.’

‘God forbid you should make a scene.’ He looked over to where Amy was performing a jazz tap routine for the pensioners who lived in the bungalows near her mum.

‘I’m not nearly so entertaining,’ I replied. ‘Thanks for coming with us, anyway. I know it’s a ball-ache.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’ He stood up and stretched. ‘Any family is better than no family, remember?’

‘And the grass is always greener,’ I said. ‘Remember?’

Charlie half laughed as he walked away, towering over everyone else in the bar while I watched. It was Christmas in the third year of uni when he first came home with me. His parents were getting divorced, and since I’d been there, done that, I’d told him to come home with me. Never in a million years did I think he’d say yes. Now, eight Noels on, he had a stocking embroidered with his name and a permanent spot at our Christmas dinner table. Just like me, he didn’t really see his dad, and his mum had moved to Malta with his stepdad a couple of years ago. Without any grandparents or siblings, as soon as the Boots Christmas catalogue dropped, he was an honorary Brookes.

‘Tess! You came! We were worried you might be too busy!’

Only a full-blooded Brookes could be that passive-aggressive. I tore my eyes away from Charlie’s arse to the far less pleasant sight of my two younger sisters standing before me, arms full of babies and faces full of judgement.

‘Are those new boots?’ Melanie asked.

‘Your hair is so long,’ Liz said.

‘And you both look well,’ I said, looking down at my niece and nephew and giving them each a curt nod. ‘Hello, babies.’

‘Here, hold her.’ Melanie, twenty-six, married, mother of two, handed me baby Tallulah. ‘She doesn’t even know who you are. Isn’t that funny?’

I bit my lip to avoid pointing out that Tallulah was only nine months old and barely even knew who she was and took the baby with a strained smile.

‘Please don’t be sick on this shirt,’ I whispered to my niece. ‘It was a present.’

‘Look, you’re a natural!’ Liz, twenty-two, engaged, mother of one but desperately trying for another by all accounts, thrust out a second baby. ‘Take Harry while I get us a drink.’

‘I can’t hold two babies,’ I squealed, taking the even tinier bundle in my other arm and looking around in desperation. ‘What if I need a wee?’

‘You’re not allowed to have a wee,’ Mel said, smoothing out her wrinkled-to-buggery dress and sitting down beside me. She picked up a glass of wine that did not belong to her and swigged it back. ‘Welcome to my world.’

‘I think I read something on the way in about overpopulation, so I can’t stay,’ I said. I really wanted to give her one of the babies back, but with my arms full, I had no idea how to offload one. They smelled weird. ‘Are they OK? I can’t see their faces. How do you do this?’

‘Don’t overthink it, you’ll drop one,’ she advised. Her hair, identical to mine, sprang all around her face. While I kept my copper mess carefully tethered in a long ponytail, Mel had clearly decided to embrace the curls for the christening. It was a controversial gamble that had not paid off. ‘Although I realize that telling you not to overthink something is like telling Liz no.’

Mel was the poor put-upon middle sister. While Mum was busy forcing me up an imaginary ladder of success and our stepdad was spoiling little Lizzie with his unwavering attention, the true child of divorce and official Band-Aid baby Mel sat quietly in the middle of it all, shaking her head and counting down the days until she could get out, get married and fuck up a family all of her own. So far, so good. She had a house, a husband, a Rav 4 and two kids. As far as she was concerned, she was winning. And despite her open disapproval of me, I actually liked Mel. She was funny, dry and desperately honest. We didn’t see each other terribly often, mainly because I avoided the village like the plague and she couldn’t exactly come gallivanting down to London with two babies under three. It might seem like a strange thing to say about your sister, but if we weren’t related, I’d want to be her friend.

‘Wiiiiiine.’ Liz returned from the bar and handed Mel a glass bucket of suspiciously green-tinged white wine. ‘So, Tess, tell me everything. You never update Facebook. Have you got a boyfriend?’

Liz, on the other hand, not so much.

‘Me and Jamie are moving at the end of the month, has Mel told you? Right around the corner from her. Isn’t it brilliant? All our babies will get to grow up together. Well, all our babies apart from your babies. You really need to get a move on, you know – you’re not getting any younger.’

There was nothing like being reminded about your tick-tick-ticking biological clock by your six-years-younger half-sister to put the icing on this shitty cake of a week. And cake should never be shitty.

‘Is Charlie going out with anyone?’ she asked, tightening her blonde ponytail. Liz was the only one of the three of us who had escaped Mum’s dark-hair-big-boob genes. ‘He might be up for it now if he’s getting desperate. I could talk to him for you?’

‘Or I could kill you,’ I offered, desperate to offload one of these babies. Preferably whichever one was starting to smell like poop. ‘Charlie isn’t desperate.’

Liz and Mel shared a not-very-furtive glance.

‘And neither am I,’ I added.

‘You know there’s a rumour going round that you and Amy are lezzers.’ Liz sipped her wine and narrowed her eyes. ‘But I told Karen you weren’t. Because you’re not. Are you?’

‘No, Liz, Amy and I are not lesbians. We’re very busy career women who have other things to worry about than babies and boyfriends.’ Didn’t matter how true that was, it still sounded like an excuse. ‘And I think you’ll find Amy probably started that rumour to make Karen look stupid.’

‘So the new job’s going well?’ Mel took over the interrogation and one of the babies. Unfortunately, it was not the smelly one. I gave Tallulah the filthiest look I could muster but she just blew a raspberry back at me. No respect, that girl.

‘Yes?’ I was the worst liar.

‘Because I emailed you and it bounced back.’

Bloody email. She couldn’t have sent flowers?

‘Uh, there was a problem with the server.’

‘But not on Charlie’s email? Because I emailed Charlie and that was fine.’

So much for her being the nice sister. Along with her hair and boobs, Mel had also inherited our mum’s ability to sniff out blood, and once she got a whiff of something not right, she did not let go.

‘I didn’t want to say anything at the christening’ – Amy always told me it was good to start a lie by making yourself look good – ‘but I’m not actually working there any more.’

‘Then where are you working?’ The two of them stared at me as though they already knew the answer but just really, really needed to hear me say it.

‘I’m not working anywhere,’ I said quietly. ‘I got made redundant.’

Mel gasped. Liz reached out and snatched Tallulah from my arms in case unemployment was catching.

‘You know that one isn’t yours, don’t you?’ I asked.

‘Mum!’ Liz grabbed our passing mother’s arm, her face completely white. ‘Tess lost her job!’

‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’ I pressed my hand against my forehead and prayed to whoever might be listening to strike me dead on the spot. I could not handle this right now. Silently I cursed Amy for dragging me up here and wished a plague on Charlie’s house for driving the car. My mother stopped dead in her tracks, her face frozen in horror, and just in case people hadn’t heard Liz, she dropped a full glass of red wine onto the tiled floor. It shattered into not really that many pieces (definitely not crystal) and splattered everyone around us with cheap red plonk.

‘Tess, what is she talking about?’ Ignoring the fact that she’d just ruined about seven people’s tights, my mum looked as though she’d just had a stroke. I really hoped she hadn’t. ‘What does she mean you lost your job?’

‘I was going to tell you after …’ I waved my hand around the very quiet room. ‘I got made redundant.’

And with that, the whispering began. Everyone knew someone who had been made redundant, but Tess Brookes? Her who had moved away to That London? With her fancy job? Scandalous.

‘But your promotion?’ Mum’s face was still a very worrying shade of grey.

‘No promotion,’ I replied. Thank goodness I hadn’t overreacted. This was exactly as horrible as I had thought it would be.

‘I cannot believe you would embarrass me like this,’ she said through gritted teeth as she looked around at anyone but me. ‘I cannot believe you would come here and announce that like it’s nothing. I cannot believe you wanted to embarrass me in front of all my friends.’

I dipped my head, pretending my eyes weren’t stinging, and watched the puddle of her spilled wine bleed across the floor towards a white paper napkin and slowly stain it a dark ruby red. There were so many things I wanted to say. I hadn’t planned to tell her like this. I hadn’t wanted to embarrass anyone. Liz told her! It was just like being fifteen again; Liz was such a grass. But just like when I was fifteen, I knew there was no point answering back. She wasn’t finished.

‘Don’t just sit there crying. What did you do?’