I ditch my handbag on the sideboard. No, I’m not so lonely that I’ve resorted to cracking witty jokes to myself about my situation – Honey is my cat. So not so lonely that I’ve started talking to myself, but lonely enough to talk to my cat, it would seem.
‘Well, it’s about time,’ a voice calls back and, despite being a familiar one, it is unexpected and causes me to jump out of my skin.
‘Gosh,’ I exclaim. ‘Don’t do that to me, Aims.’
‘I told you I was going to be here. You must be missing me if you’re talking to that thing.’
My soon-to-be ex flatmate nods towards Honey, who hisses back at her.
‘You two still not getting on?’ I laugh.
‘Let’s just say it makes me feel less bad about hardly ever being here, and the fact that in just over a week I will be officially moved out helps too. Nice use of “gosh” by the way. I take it your old bloke doesn’t appreciate you blaspheming, as well as swearing.’
Amy wanders into the kitchen. It’s only now that I notice the smell of food drifting through the house.
‘There’s nothing wrong with being more ladylike,’ I call after her. ‘I can’t believe you’re getting married and moving out like a grown-up.’
Amy returns, spoon in hand, and points at me with it as she speaks.
‘And I can’t believe you’re wearing that disgusting dress,’ she says harshly. ‘Or what you’ve done with this place. Or that you have a cat. Or that you have nothing but vegetables, chicken and milk made from fucking almonds in your fucking fridge – thank God I brought shopping.’
My friend puts extra emphasis on the word ‘God’ and she reels off her list of things that she can’t believe about the new me. Well, the new new me.
As Amy stands there, still brandishing her spoon in an attacking position, she waits for me to justify all of the above. I don’t see her as much as I’d like to these days, and I guess I must be changing a lot.
Amy Kelly is my best friend, and she came into my life when things were the most difficult for me. By the time I was twenty-four I had lost both my parents. With no grandparents, siblings or even so much as a distant aunt I could turn to, when my dad passed away I became an orphan. Both my mum and dad were very ill in the years before they passed, so as soon as I finished sixth form, rather than going to university or travelling like the rest of my friends, I stayed at home to take care of them. I was happy to do it, and if I had the time again, I wouldn’t do things even a little differently, but it had a huge impact on my life. I stopped seeing my friends; I had no social life, no love life. When my mum passed, it just made my dad and me even closer. As he got worse, he had to go into a home and that’s where I met Amy – she was one of the carers who looked after him. When my dad died I was left with pretty much nothing. That’s when Amy told me she was looking for a new flatmate. Growing up so shy combined with my lack of a social life as an adult had turned me into this quiet little mouse, and Amy saved me from that. It took a year of my life to get there, but I was happy. Truly happy.
Growing up, I was not a tidy child. I would take out a toy, play with it for a while, and then take out another, leaving the previous one on the floor. I never made my own bed, and any clothing I took off would wind up inside out on my bedroom floor. My mum would be constantly telling me to tidy my room, and every now and then she would offer me something in exchange for cleaning up and I would do it, and for a day or so my room would be tidy…until it wasn’t again. I wish my mum were still around to see my Manchester city centre apartment, because she wouldn’t believe just how tidy it was.
When I first moved in with Amy, our place was everything you would expect of the home of two twenty-something chicks. We had fairy lights almost everywhere, fluffy cushions, lots of weird and wonderful ornaments and pictures on the wall. We had so much pink shit, it would make even Barbie herself dizzy and, my gosh, was it messy! No matter which room you were in, the chance of you being able to see a wine glass (clean, dirty or decorative) was very high. The place was full of smells too: hairspray, coffee, a cocktail of perfumes, the unmistakable whiff of chocolate from that one time we tried to use a chocolate fountain and it malfunctioned epically, spraying chocolate everywhere. I remember that night so well, and yet when I think about it, it feels like it didn’t really happen, like it’s something I saw in a movie once.
It was a particularly cold December, not long after I’d started working at Starr Haul – before I got with Will, in fact. I don’t even think he’d given me a second glance at that stage. Both Amy and I were skint, and we were stuck in a battle with our landlord over who should pay for our broken central heating, because he thought it was our fault it had broken down. I was young, I didn’t have my parents to support me and things were so bad I couldn’t even afford to take the bus to work – I had to walk. It was so cold I resorted to buying cheap cups of takeaway tea, exclusively for keeping my hands warm during the journey. One evening we decided we needed to do something to try and keep us warm and it just so happened that for Amy’s birthday someone had bought her a chocolate fountain and bars of the stuff to use with it. So for dinner that night, melted chocolate was on the menu, but without any wooden skewers to stab our Poundland marshmallows with, we resorted to using forks, and when Amy dropped her fork into the fountain it jammed it and the result was us, our furniture and our living room being lashed with chocolate.
As well as smelling delicious, the place had bags of personality. Amy is very hippy-chic. She’s into all this weird and wonderful stuff that I don’t understand, like crystals and dream catchers, and I’ve no idea what they do, but they definitely made the flat look cool. As she started spending less time here and more time at her fiancé’s place, she started taking all the stuff away. And as it started disappearing I realised that although the flat had bags of personality, none of it was mine.
My friend stares at me, waiting for an explanation.
‘What’s wrong with my dress? It’s not that bad,’ I protest, glancing down at the black pencil dress I wore to work.
‘Yeah, not that bad if you’re going to a funeral,’ my friend (who is wearing a white cheesecloth gypsy top as a dress, might I add) says harshly, ‘or you’re still trying to turn yourself into a weird clone of your boss’s wife.’
I stare at my friend for a moment. She hasn’t been back to the flat for a while, and she’s been so busy with wedding stuff that we haven’t spent much time together – not to have a proper chat – but it’s clear that she still doesn’t approve of my situation with Will. She can’t even say his name.
‘This isn’t for anyone’s benefit, I just like dressing a bit smarter,’ I lie. ‘And maybe I have made this place a bit more neutral, but if Will is going to move in here with me eventually then it needs to be less girly.’
‘Ergh, listen to yourself.’ Amy rolls her eyes theatrically. ‘All you go on about is him. You dress for him. You decorate for him. What does he do for you? He won’t even be with you publicly.’
I feel my face fall, and my friend reacts.
‘Candice, I’m sorry, it just upsets me to see him treat you like this. You deserve better.’
Amy carelessly places the dirty spoon down on the chest of drawers next to her and grabs me for a hug.
‘I know I deserve better,’ I tell her honestly. ‘But that’s what this week away is all about. It’s going to be our first anniversary so we’re just going to concentrate
