Vanessa and I had come across each other five years ago. I’d been looking for a new flat closer to the office and she was looking for a new flatmate who wouldn’t walk out after three months because she was a living nightmare. Of course I didn’t know that at the time. We were introduced by a ‘mutual friend’, aka a friend of Charlie’s who was trying to get into Vanessa’s knickers, and even though it was hardly love at first sight, her flat was beautiful, right in the middle of Clerkenwell and only a twenty-minute walk from work. She told me she was a photographer, and I’d been a keen amateur photographer until work had completely taken over my life, so I thought that was nice. We made small talk about our mutual love of Bradley Cooper, Kinder eggs and wearing shorts over tights, and within fifteen minutes I’d signed the lease. The day I moved in, Charlie, Amy and I were treated to the sight of Vanessa and Charlie’s friend shagging over the back of the settee. I never saw him again. Vanessa I was stuck with.
Within weeks, Vanessa had broken every rule in the flatmate book. She drank my booze, my tea and my milk; she never bought toilet paper; she played music so loudly that I had to sleep with earplugs in. Inside a year, she overtook Angelina Jolie on my list of most evil women alive. She fought with my female friends, she slept with my male friends, she took my clothes without asking, and I was fairly certain that on at least one occasion she had stolen money out of my purse. On my twenty-fifth birthday, she performed an impromptu striptease on the bar of the restaurant we were eating at because she was ‘considering a career as a burlesque dancer’ and called me a boring twat when I asked her to get down. Suffice to say my visiting grandparents were not impressed. The day my second granddad died (not related to the burlesque performance as far as I was aware), she punched me in the arm so hard that I had a bruise for a week and told me to cheer up, it wasn’t like I had died. Her favourite term of endearment for Amy was ‘Tweedle Twat’, and she’d been openly trying to shag Charlie since the day he’d moved my stuff into the flat, despite the fact that she knew how I felt about him. And despite the fact that she was actually being penetrated by one of his best friends the moment they met.
Of course there were reasons why I’d stayed. I hated moving and I hated living with strangers even more. Amy refused to leave her shared house in Shepherd’s Bush and I refused to share one bathroom with five nursing students, so that was off the table. And given that Vanessa’s dad was paying the mortgage, the rent was so ridiculously cheap that I’d been able to pay off all my student loans without bankrupting myself. And once in a blue moon she would do something human and I’d think she wasn’t so bad. We’d spend an evening on the sofa watching bad romcoms and slagging off every man who’d ever walked the earth, or she’d suggest ordering a Chinese takeaway and manage not to insult me more than twice the whole time we ate. And every year, without fail, she bought me a new vibrator for my birthday. Which, for Vanessa, was a Nice Thing To Do. Plus I was very busy and she she was away a lot. Somehow, until now, it had worked.
But when the doorbell went again, I was still standing in the living room wrapped in a towel that was not my own, and I really, really wished I lived in a six-to-a-toilet bedsit in West London.
‘Hey, sorry it took so long. I got chatting to this random—’
‘Oh, fucking hell, tell me it’s not the muffbumper?’ Vanessa groaned. ‘I can’t. I just can’t. It’s bad enough that you’re here without that psycho hanging around.’
‘Oh, Jesus Christ, she’s home.’ Amy froze in the living room doorway, the look on her face switching from impending chocolate binge giddiness to an expression Medusa might find ‘a bit cold’.
The second time my best friend and flatmate met, Vanessa had asked Amy if it was hard being a lesbian. As far as we could tell, this question was based exclusively on Amy’s choice of shoe and hairstyle. The fact that Vanessa chose to ask the question while Amy was sitting in her fiancé Dave’s lap at her own engagement party didn’t seem to matter. Ever since, she had filed Amy away in a lovely little box in her brain labelled ‘lesbian’. Even though she wasn’t even a little bit gay. Did not matter in the slightest.
‘Yes, I’m home,’ Vanessa replied without taking her eyes off the TV. ‘Because I live here. You don’t. So you can fuck off.’
‘Fairly certain Tess lives here as well, so I’m probably not going to do that.’ Amy’s voice was laden with faux politeness. ‘I thought you were away?’
‘Stalking me?’ Vanessa asked. ‘I’ve told you before, you’re not my type.’
‘No, I know. You prefer someone with a cock. Or, you know, anyone with a cock. How is the chlamydia?’
Vanessa sat up sharply. ‘Oh my God, you told her?’
Good to know what could get her attention. Obviously I shouldn’t have told Amy that my flatmate had caught the clap from, well, we didn’t know who exactly, but she had and I had. And in my defence, she didn’t need to tell me, but of course she had to. And as the only functioning adult in the flat, I had been charged with reminding her to take her antibiotics every day. It was always nice to be included in things, even your flatmate’s venereal diseases.
‘It’s not Tess’s fault you’re a dirty skank,’ Amy said, dropping the bag full of chocolatey goodness on the side table and rolling up her sleeves. Uh-oh, were we going to have a rumble? Finally? ‘Maybe if you kept your mouth and your legs closed for fifteen minutes out of every day, this wouldn’t happen.’
Inside the plastic bag, I saw the screen of Amy’s mobile flashing. On average she went through one handset every two months – honestly, I’d never known anyone so careless. I wondered how many of her phones my friend from the park had happened upon in the past. But rather than give her a lecture on proper care and management of electronic equipment, I slipped the phone out of the bag and left the two of them at it. They wouldn’t notice if I wasn’t there; they never did. And I had to answer Amy’s phone for her. It was Charlie.
‘Amy’s phone,’ I answered, ever so slightly breathless. Yes, I’d known him for ten years. Yes, I’d worked in the same office as him for the past three. No, it didn’t change anything. Worst. Crush. Ever. ‘It’s Tess.’
‘Tess? It’s Charlie, are – are you OK?’
Oh, Charlie. So concerned.
‘I’m fine,’ I lied, closing my bedroom door on the outbreak of World War III in the living room. ‘Amy’s here.’
‘What happened?’ He sounded so worried. Bless. ‘We just got an email a minute ago saying you’re no longer with the company. What is going on? You quit without telling me?’
You had to laugh, didn’t you?
‘They sent an email saying I’m no longer with the company?’ I laid back against my fat marshmallow pillows and closed my eyes. ‘That’s all it said?’
‘Yeah. I emailed you this morning but it kept bouncing back, and then you didn’t answer my texts so I phoned HR to see if you’d called in sick. Then they sent this. Tess, what happened?’
‘Restructuring?’ I suggested. ‘Downsizing? Redundancies?’
‘Oh. Fuuuuuuck.’
‘Yeah.’ I felt the first tear in a while trickle down my cheek.
I heard Charlie sighing on the other end of the phone and imagined him sitting at his desk three over and two across from where I used to sit. His hair, almost the exact same shade of dark coppery brown as mine,
