and tourist hell. My room is very quiet and light, Anna and I enjoy a good flatmate relationship (friendly without being in each other’s pockets), and it’s très, très cheap. She could actually get more for it, even given the shittiness of the place, but she doesn’t seem to care. Most of Anna’s time, when she’s not away for work, is spent with her boyfriend, who I’ve never met. I get the feeling she’s hoping to move out soon and in with him.
I give the kitchen a quick once-over with a dishcloth, ignore the huge pile of my unopened bank statements on the breadbin, grab my lucky yellow clutch and head out the door to the tube. I would try a skippy-bunny-hop on my way out the door, but I don’t think I can manage it today. Sigh.
I swing into the newsagents to buy Grazia for a little pick-me-up. As I’m waiting in line, a 20-something guy walks in. He’s wearing rugby shorts and a T-shirt with ‘I taught that girlfriend that thing you like’ written across the front. I lower my gaze behind my sunglasses and check him out. Big strong thighs, good chunky knees like huge walnuts. Mmm, the rugby-playing man. Shame it comes with a predilection for obnoxious T-shirts and ‘boys-only’ nights out that end with pissing in the street.
Break-Up No.2: Rugger Robbie. He played rugby—obviously—with some of the guys in my newly-arrived uni crowd, and after three months of random snogging, we started going out. Rugger Robbie was a classic Fulham rugby boy: easy-going and actually very sweet. You know the type: intelligent but not introspective, good humoured but not humorous. (Yep, the antithesis to Arty Jonathan.) We mostly hung out in our large group of friends; we were all earning money for the first time in our lives, and life was one long party. (Which was fortunate, as Robbie and I would quickly have run out of conversation at one-to-one dinners.) He shared a horrifically messy flat off Dawes Road with three other rugby guys, and got so shit-faced with the rugby boys every Saturday night that once I met up with him at the Sloaney Pony or Crazy Larry’s, I’d have to carry him home practically straightaway and take off his shoes and jeans for him. One time, I woke up to find him pissing on the curtains. ‘At least I got out of bed,’ he said apologetically the next day. For some reason, this didn’t bother me at the time.
I liked Rugger Robbie despite his habit of getting apoplectically drunk because he just seemed so straightforward and familiar after the strange, intimidating pretensions of the East London crowd. And he had a really, really good body. (Ahem.) So I settled into it and decided he was an excellent boyfriend, and was quite content with life. Until, after about three months of properly being together, he said, ‘I’m going to Thailand for Christmas. I’ll call you when I get back.’ And then texted me in mid-January:
I met someone else in Thialand I’m sorry I’ll see you around
Dumped via text. With a misspelling. Or typo, to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Sure, it was no great love affair—Rugger Robbie never really made me laugh and frequently responded to things I said with ‘you’re bonkers’. (I’m so not, but since he had no imagination, I blew his fucking mind.) But I’d grown quite fond of him, so it hurt. That’s the thing about being dumped. Even if you don’t care about him that much, it still hurts. Because if you don’t care much about the dude and you’re still dating him, he must not care about you far, far more to actually go to the trouble of dumping you.
I did have boyfriends at university, since you ask, but they hardly count. It was so much easier then. You’d see them in lectures or at parties and get a crush, and know them via their friends so you could weed out freaks, and flirt for ages and then finally snog, and once you snogged three times, boom! You were going out. Then you’d both agree it was over and move on to someone else. It was easy. Not anymore.
Oh fuck me, again. I can’t believe it’s happened again.
As I walk up towards Victoria station, Grazia tucked underneath my arm, I decide to call Bloomie. She gets to work by 7 am every day, because she has a high-flying job. In a bank. (Note: despite high-flying job in aforementioned arsehole industry, Bloomie is not an arsehole.)
‘Mushi mushi?’
‘You know, Bloomerang, you’re not Japanese.’
‘You better now, Sassafras, my little drama queen?’
‘Dude, I give up. If you pick someone interesting, they’re a bastardo and they’ll dump you. If you pick someone kind, they’ll be boring and, apparently, they’ll still dump you. What. The. Fuck.’
‘So you are better, darling?’
‘Yes. I’m fine. I’m just fucking over…this…shit.’
Sometimes when I’m upset I get dramatic. It makes me laugh. And that kind of makes me feel better. Even when I’m lost in Break-Up Memory Lane.
‘Sass, darling,’ Bloomie whispers. I don’t think talking on the phone is really approved of in her office. ‘I thought we agreed last night that it was better you stopped toying with Posh Mark? You would have thrown him back into the sea sooner or later.’
Bloomie is one of my best friends, and manages to say ‘dahling’ at least four or five times a minute. It’s not pretentious from her, for some reason. She grew up in Chicago, as her dad’s American, but her parents moved to London when she was about 16, so her accent is a bit of a mongrel between East Coast USA and posh London. She’s been exactly the same since the first time we met, on the first day of university.
Bloomie is also a total alpha: always leading the way, immensely more self-assured, together and tougher than I am, and sometimes—and she knows this too—rather spiky. But she’s utterly lovely and funny, of course. Why else would I be friends with her? And since I’m the kind of person who’s quite happy standing on the sidelines smoking fags and making quips rather than leading the pack, we fit together very well. Together with Kate, who I’ll tell you more about later, we’ve seen each other through about 19 boyfriends, 16 holidays together, probably over 250 coffee-and-fags-and-shopping Saturday afternoons, and truly countless hangovers, yet we still don’t run out of things to talk about.
‘I must be doing something wrong. I’ve been dumped six times in a row, Bloomie!’
‘Darling…it’s just really, really, really, really fucking bad luck.’
Suddenly the reality of both statements hits me. I really have been dumped six times in a row. And it can’t just be bad luck. I must be an absolute loser and no one will ever love me again. (Why would Bloomie say I am a drama queen? I mean really.) So I start to cry, ish. Mostly I snuffle into the phone. Bloomie makes soothing noises for a while, and then she clears her throat and says abruptly:
‘Darling, seriously, I have to work. Let’s have a drink tonight. We can talk about this properly…I’m not being, you know, negative, but I don’t want to see you get into a post-Rick spiral…’
How could she remind me of that? ‘Sheesh, of course I won’t. You’re on for drinks, though.’
‘Good, darling, that’s the spirit. I’ll ask Katie too, and email with detes later. Sayonara.’
This perks me up, naturally, and I stride, like the Urban Warrior my outfit makes me, to the tube station, with a cheeriness I don’t really feel. Despite my heartbreak/ache/mild graze, I can’t help but notice a few good-looking men as I walk through and down to the Victoria line. They’re all heading towards the District line. I wonder where they go.
Where was I? Ah yes. Now, on Break-Up Memory Lane, we come to a large
