Read the book: «Talking to Addison»

One

A famous arctic explorer once said that polar expeditions were the most successful form of having a bad time humans had ever devised. Of course, he’d probably never answered an ad for a flatshare with a bunch of complete strangers. Although if it hadn’t been for them I would never have met Addison. Hmm. Which, when I think of it, is kind of like saying, OK, I lost all my fingers and toes to frostbite, but I met some very sweet penguins along the way…

Thirty-six hours after I moved in to 12a Wendle Close, Harlesden, I realized I’d made a terrible mistake. Tiptoeing around someone else’s home is weird enough, particularly if it’s just after a late night and you can’t remember their name or where they keep the Sugar Puffs or, say, you’re a cat burglar. Tiptoeing around your own is discomfiting to say the least. But here I was, creeping into my own house and closing my bedroom door extremely quietly, heart pounding, after my very first quick jaunt to the shops, to make friends with my newsagent and see what flavours of Skips he had.

If I pressed my head against the thin wood veneer of the door I could just about hear my new best friends in the nearby ghastly open-plan Formica kitchenette.

‘Well, I think we need a special long-term rota too. For cleaning the shower curtain and the drawers. And washing the skirting boards.’

‘That’s a great idea, Carol,’ came another voice, deep with awe. ‘Maybe we could do one big job every Saturday night and make an event of it. We could even get takeaway pizza!’

‘And don’t forget the nets!’ screeched the unfortunately named Farah, who was about two foot tall and was always being mistaken for a monkey, or Martin Amis. ‘I’ll get my coloured pencils out and start drawing it up. This is going to be such fun!’

They all mewed.

‘Didn’t I just hear Holly coming in?’ asked Laura, who was stolid and sat down a lot. ‘That sounded like her bedroom door …’

Damn.

‘No!’ I attempted to telepathically send to them. ‘It must have been the wind. That … mysterious indoor wind.’

‘… Why don’t we go and ask her what she’d like to do?’

I inhaled sharply.

‘Yes, let’s!’ yelled Farah. And there was a pounding at my door.

‘Holly? Holly, are you there?’

Carol, official leader of Scary Clean Freaks Incorporated, put her head round the door assertively. Was it only a week ago I had checked out her ankle chain and pondered whether we’d ever get on? She looked at me sneerily. I sensed that she secretly knew of the scientifically proven inverse relationship between me and housework (the more messy things were, the less inclined I was to do anything about them), even though I’d attempted to be pristine for my first few days.

‘We were just wondering …’ she hissed.

Laura sniffed, noisily, behind her. Laura sniffed all the time. I always wanted to tell her that it was OK; no one was about to make her do double PE any more. Carol shot an evil sideways glance like a viper.

‘Ahem. We were just wondering, given that we’re – ha – divvying up the rota, if there was anything you particularly liked doing?’

I eyed her steadily, not about to be intimidated by someone who ringed their lips with dark lipstick pencil on their skin.

‘How about I take lightbulb-dusting and big spider removal?’

‘Ooh, that sounds good,’ screeched Farah from somewhere beside my knee. Carol dispensed another one of those Robert de Niro-to-doomed-gangster stares.

‘We thought you might prefer loos, sinks and floors,’ she said pointedly.

‘Oh …’ I said. ‘You mean, all of it.’

‘Ha,’ she smiled. ‘Don’t get around to much cooking, do we?’

I realized I’d been outmanoeuvred.

I counterattacked. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to co-ordinate,’ she said. Laura nodded happily.

‘Oh, tough one.’

‘… that means I buy all the cleaning materials, arrange the rota, organize the external cleaning contractors, e.g. the carpet shampooers I’ve got coming in, arrange everyone’s telephone hours and oversee everyone’s painting choices. So we’ve all got quite enough to be getting on with, don’t you think?’

I wanted to try one last stance – perhaps suggesting that Farah take the floors, after all, she was closer – but all I could say was, ‘Telephone hours?’

‘I know, I thought of it,’ Carol said proudly.

‘It’s a great idea,’ said Farah, standing between Carol’s legs.

‘Basically, it means you can only use the phone or get phone calls at your set time each night. Then, when we get the bill in, you pay for all the calls in your time, and nobody lies about the expensive numbers.’

I stared at her.

‘Well, that’s going to cut down on my sex-line income.’

Laura’s eyes widened with shock. Carol laughed politely, to show me that if I felt like fighting her, she was up to it.

‘What’s to stop me making phone calls on other people’s time?’

‘We’re going to have a phone-lock that can only be opened by me. You come to me when you want to use the phone and I’ll see if it’s your hour or not. Really,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘your chores are much easier than mine, believe me.’

‘Oh goodness me, I think I just heard my mobile go off,’ I announced in a flurry.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, when they showed no sign of backing away from my door, ‘I just have to, ehrm, excuse me …’ Fortunately, the henchmen stuck next to Carol and backed away when she gave the signal, as my next move would have been to scream ‘Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!’ whilst shoving them out of the door and pulling a hose on them.

I slammed the door behind them and sat on the bed. My mobile wasn’t going off, naturally, but I took it out anyway and thanked this little machine. How could I ever have thought they were only of use to wankers on buses who thought that someone not on a bus might want to know when they were on a bus? Oh – and how the fuck was I going to get out of here?

Some people pick the wrong men all the time. I pick the wrong places to live. Well, OK, I pick the wrong men too, but anyway. So it was that after finally getting totally creeped out by my last landlord, in Hackney, who smelled of piss and used to turn up at random hours of the night to ‘inspect’ things (my knicker drawer included) – which followed the three girls in Dulwich who had all joined a beardy-weirdy religious cult and refused to allow men over the threshold, except for the cult leader, whom they all slept with whenever he wanted them to – I had ended up here, in a new house-share with three banana brains who all worked in the local hospital as phlebotomists. Apparently this meant they took blood samples from people. I assumed in Carol’s case she simply bit them.

Anyway, they’d advertised in Loot for a fourth member to join a new household in tasty Harlesden, and, amazingly, I got it. Perhaps I was the only one who didn’t blanch at the interview, when Laura came in and reported obediently to Carol that she had just bleached the teacups.

‘And how often do you boil-wash the crockery?’ Carol had asked me.

‘Ehm … I find about every half-hour just about does it,’ I’d gone for, and noticed her put a big tick on my application form, which had been broken down into sixteen handy sections. The relief of going from the dissipated seediness of Hackney – where they wanted extra rent if you got an inside loo – to a brand new ‘executive’ flat in the famous industrial waste area of North West London made it seem like a good deal at the time, but had blinded me to the obvious: i.e., all these people were mad, but because they outnumbered me in the house I was beginning to think that they were right.

I began to inspect my mobile for germs, and was getting really close up when it rang in my face.

I shrieked, did a comedy clown fumble, and dropped the phone under the bed.

‘Are you all right?’ said Carol’s voice from just outside the door. She was obviously listening to everything. I shrieked again, swallowed some air, choked, coughed, and managed to wheeze, ‘Fine, thank you.’

‘It must be pretty dusty under your bed.’

‘Yes, yes it is, thanks,’ I said, sitting upright with the phone. Then I jumped – how the hell did she know where I was? I felt a cold hand of fear.

‘Hello?’ I finally choked into the phone.

‘Do you know, I haven’t made a woman scream like that for years,’ drawled the well-modulated voice.

I relaxed slightly.

‘Josh, you have never made a woman scream like that. In fact, have you ever made a woman?’

‘Oh ho ho. Yes, of course.’

‘In your country of origin?’

He paused.

‘Not precisely.’

I’d been teasing Josh about this for as long as I’d known him, which was a l-o-o-ong time. Because he was attractive and also nice to girls, most people assumed he was gay. For someone with a posh background, a good job, and a nice haircut, he did horrendously badly with the opposite sex, which I couldn’t understand – not that I’d ever wanted to shag him myself; he was so nice.

Anyway, thank God he’d rung me back. Worriedly searching the ceiling for CCTV, I sat back on the bed.

‘Josh, you know when you moved into Pimlico and I said I didn’t want to move there because it was snooty London and you were moving in with Kate who hates me?’

‘Um, yes.’

‘Well, you know, how’s it … how’s the whole flatshare thing going?’

‘It’s going fine.’

‘Right – GREAT! Right. How’s that other guy you got in to fill the space doing?’

‘Addison? He’s just great … Well, quiet, and undemanding.’

That didn’t sound much like me.

‘Uh huh. So, no one’s moving out or anything, then?’

Josh sighed. ‘Don’t tell me. Not another Turkish Lesbian Women’s Collective?’

That had been Hoxteth, two years ago. I’d been kicked out for not liking chickpeas and buying that symbol of male forced dominance, sanitary protection.

‘No. Worse.’

‘The cat lady?’

‘Christ. No, not worse than her. But still, pretty bad.’

I heard Carol’s voice:

‘Holly! Would you like some tea? Because it’s your turn to make it!’

I ignored her.

‘Josh, this is absolutely desperate. Listen, you know that little boxroom you were going to turn into a study?’

‘The one you described as a coffin?’

‘Yup, yup, that’s the one. Ehm, have you …?’

‘Turned it into a study? Not since you were last here. I’ve leased it out as a bedroom, though.’

‘NOOO!’

He laughed.

‘You bastard! Josh, I know this is a huge favour – and please say no if you don’t want to – but please, please, please can I come and live in your coffin? I mean, boxroom?’

‘You’ve asked me this before, Holl,’ he said with a sigh.

‘I know.’

‘Then you always dash off and the next thing I hear from you you’re on the run from a postgraduate mathematics badminton team.’

‘I know. I’m crazy.’

‘You are crazy. Why didn’t you just move in when I bought the place?’

‘Because you’re rich and Kate makes me miserable.’

‘I am not rich, and Kate can’t help being … Kate. Anyway, if that’s how you feel …’

‘No, no! I’m sorry! Please. Please. Please.’

There was a loud knocking at my door.

‘Tea, please, Holly! It’s in the lease!’

‘It’s the Gestapo!’ I whispered. ‘How soon can you come and get me?’

‘I’ll have to check with Kate and Addison.’

‘Josh!’ I screeched, near to tears. ‘Please.’

‘OK,’ he relented. ‘I’ll pick you up at about seven. Have you got much stuff?’

‘Just a coffinful.’

‘And no diving off again, do you hear me?’

‘Yes, sir,’ I mumbled meekly.

I could have snogged Josh, I was so pleased to see him. I wanted to grab hold of his legs round the ankles and sob with gratitude and pour unguents over his feet. Or is that glue?

Carol had not taken the news well, particularly when I retrieved my deposit cheque from the shiny silver box to which only she had a key (I distracted her by upending her Asda coupons all over the kitchen floor then making a dive for the key when she bent over). In fact, she had advanced on me until her face was only a few inches from mine – well, her make-up was. Her face was probably about a foot away.

‘Think you can just do what you like round here?’ she asked menacingly.

‘Yes, I do, actually. That’s why I don’t live with my parents any more.’

‘So, who’s going to take your room? You’ve got to sort that out.’

‘Ah. Yes, well … I’m afraid you’re going to have to sue me for my friends and acquaintances. Here, I’ve written down my forwarding address on this piece of paper –’ I waved it reassuringly. It said: 1 Holly Lane, Hollywood, 020 8555 5555 – ‘and don’t forget to send those bills on to me!’

‘We won’t,’ said Carol grimly. Laura opened and shut her mouth like a fish.

‘Well, I think it’s disgraceful the way you’re leaving Carol in the lurch like this,’ she announced, quivering. ‘All the trouble she’s been to.’

‘And me!’ piped up Farah from somewhere around my ankles. ‘I did the rotas!’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘My best friend’s got cancer. I’m nursing him till he dies.’

Laura backed away, crestfallen.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she muttered.

‘Oh really?’ said Carol. ‘What kind?’

I couldn’t think. ‘Ehm, nose cancer?’

‘You’re sick,’ she said, turning to march out of the room.

‘So are you!’ I yelled after her.

She turned once more, her brutally permed hair a weapon.

‘Well, at least I’m clean and sick.’

Fortunately, Josh’s sporty little spitfire had turned up, and he was honking enthusiastically. Josh did everything enthusiastically.

I tore out of the house.

‘Where the hell am I going to put anything?’ I wailed, after hugging him over-affectionately then examining his two-seater.

‘I’m so sorry, darling. I meant to trade Bessie in for a Volvo but, you know, I just couldn’t find the time.’

‘Ha ha ha. Listen, would you mind sitting on my duvet?’

He gave me a look.

‘Well, it’s not like real sex, is it?’

It took us an hour and a half to crawl back into town. Even though it was only April, Josh insisted on having the roof off, so I had to hang on to everything I owned, like an earthquake refugee.

‘Freedom!’ I yelled into the air. ‘I am never going to move into a crappy flat again.’

‘Except for the one you’re about to move into.’

‘Josh, it could be a shed at the bottom of the garden, I don’t care! I’m FREEE!’

‘OK, steady on,’ said Josh, obviously worried I was about to start leaning dangerously far over the bonnet and singing ‘My Heart Will Go On’.

There are two schools of thought concerning the children of parents who divorce nastily just as you’re approaching puberty. One school says, Well, life is like that – chin up, and maybe the seething atmosphere at home will spur you into staying late at the library and moving on to better and brilliant things in an attempt to pull yourself out of the flotsam. Lots of famous people have divorced parents. They over-achieve for attention. That wasn’t exactly my school.

The other school says you should instantly become über-truculent and demanding, and put everything you do your entire life down to your bad upbringing. I tended to this school, it being rather easier and low maintenance, plus it tended to mean better Christmas presents, if dodgier exam results. It had worked reasonably well during my teens, but when your friends no longer have to see you every day in class and are too busy off doing horrid careers and stuff – well, so, now I was twenty-eight, and it was definitely becoming less fun by the day, especially when everyone I used to know had suddenly become fascinated by MORTGAGES, for fuck’s sake. I just didn’t get it. Boys and pop music – fascinating. Mortgages are what you get when you look up the dictionary definition of ‘not fascinating’. Hence my precipitative flat-hopping.

To make matters even worse, I was starting to realize that my anti-establishment tendencies were beginning to marginalize me – not as a free spirit, as I’d always thought, but along with the old hippies and socialist workers and people who talked about smashing the state but couldn’t actually get it together to wash their trousers – ever. It was extremely depressing. I mean, nobody likes washing their trousers, but I didn’t want it to define my entire existence. To make matters worse, my father, who took up bringing home blonde women full time after he left my mum, had recently brought home one my age. Who also had a mortgage. And a sports car. Sigh.

Josh had a mortgage, but he was also a complete sweetie pie who could be endlessly relied upon in a crisis, as I knew and had shamefully abused in the past.

We finally pulled up in front of his dilapidated Victorian pile in Pimlico.

‘I see you’ve still not got the builders in.’

‘No, I couldn’t afford them,’ said Josh, hopping out of the car without opening the door and pulling up two bin-liners of my stuff. ‘Until now,’ he smiled sweetly in my direction.

‘Ah yes, about that …’ I followed him in, clutching my socks and pants bag, my cheese plant and Frank Sinatra the bear. One of the reasons that I’d wound up in Harlesden in the first place was that being a freelance florist and general under-achieving free spirit didn’t exactly pay very much, and Pimlico was basically posh these days.

He told me, and I breathed a sigh of relief. The going rate for coffins wasn’t so bad after all.

The flat was quiet inside. It was big and tatty and comfortable, and I’d always liked it. Josh had bought right at the top of the market and paid a stupid amount of money for it – apart from being infested with dry rot and woodworm and all sorts of other nasty moving things, it needed a new roof – but it was a good homey home. The kitchen was large, with nasty old units, a rickety table and four chairs in the middle, cracked floor tiles, and a huge window at the back which opened on to a rusty excuse for a fire escape. I pottered about in my tiny new room, mostly leaning against cupboards to get them to shut and stuffing things under the bed.

‘Umm, sorry about the mess,’ hummed Joshua when I went back into the kitchen for a cup of tea. ‘It’s not usually … Well, in fact, it is.’

‘Great!’ I said.

He smiled weakly at me. I leaned across the table.

‘Josh, thank you. I’m sorry I forced you into this. I promise I’ll be a good tenant. You’ll see. I promise.’

He grinned back at me.

‘Good. And I could do with the company, to be honest – Kate works all the time and Addison is, well …’

‘Yikes!’ I pounced immediately. ‘Tell me the gossip about Kate.’

‘Oh, she’s a complete bitch, as ever,’ said Kate, striding into the kitchen and dumping a Marks and Spencer’s bag, an enormous briefcase, a Nicole Farhi raincoat and an expensive leather handbag on to one of the rickety chairs.

‘Hello, Holly. Josh left me a message on my voicemail. Which I got about ten minutes ago. But never mind, eh? Welcome anyway.’

I went to give her a hug or something, but she was already en route to the bottle opener. Josh touched her lightly on the arm.

‘How was your day, Skates?’

‘Great. Great. As usual. Two sexist comments, four reports to do this week, one irregular forecasting, and I have to be in Dublin for 8 a.m. tomorrow morning, to give a presentation on a report I haven’t even read yet. Then back in the office by noon to account for myself, two more meetings and a 4 p.m. deadline for the Kinley account. Oh, and then a client dinner with a bunch of ghastly old bores who’ll try and feel me up in the Met bar.’

Josh nodded sagely. Kate pulled the cork with a savage ‘pop’ and poured out three humongous glasses of wine.

‘So, Holly, what are you up to these days?’

Kate had always intimidated me. We’d only really met because the three of us were on the same corridor of student halls. We’d both stayed friends with Josh – most people did – but never really got on with each other. She was rather more of a pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps-type person – she didn’t actually say ‘lickspittle’, but you could tell when she was thinking it.

She’d done business studies and got some hugely well-paid and prestigious job in the City, which hadn’t helped relations between us particularly. I always felt she was just about to offer to buy a Big Issue off me.

Actually, that wasn’t quite why we didn’t get on. Specifically, well, you know in Freshers’ Week, one is often, er, tacitly encouraged to get … Well, anyway. Originally, there were the three of us in a row on one of those grotty endless corridors that was distinctly not the Brideshead University model I’d always dreamt of. It was in Coventry for a start.

Students were still sharing showers, a good life lesson for future flatshares in how much YEUCH people are actually made of, and how, just when you think you’ve seen everything, there’s always a new variety of repulsiveness.

Josh had opened his door on the very first day and sat there crudely beaming at everyone who walked past, a technique which probably wouldn’t have worked so well if he hadn’t been so blond and pretty. I wandered in there by accident, already worried by how keen my dad and Blondie had been to leave me, but faintly reassured by the seemingly enormous cheque now burning a hole in my pocket. It worked out to a lot of Caramac bars, although, as I found out four weeks later, not that many beers and taxis.

‘Hello,’ said Josh. ‘This place is nice, isn’t it?’

‘It’s a shit hole!’ I said, looking around at the regulation stained walls, stained carpet and dodgy pinboard.

‘Oh yes …’ He took in the room. ‘So it is. Oh well – only three years to go.’

‘And a week,’ I said.

‘Of course. Hmm. What do you think the cooking facilities are like?’

‘I don’t know – what’s a cooking facility?’

Through the paper-thin walls we could hear loud, fairly dramatic sobbing. We raised our eyebrows at each other.

‘What is this, primary school?’ I said, a tad callously.

‘Maybe she misses her mother,’ said Josh.

I sniffed derisorily, something I’d been practising throughout my teens to great effect.

‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s go cheer her up.’

‘Ah, the beginning of my crazy university years,’ I said, but I followed him dutifully outside.

Next door, perched on the narrow bed, with the door open, sat Kate, thin and a little pinched-looking, and dressed head to toe in immaculately ironed Benetton separates. Even though she appeared distraught with grief, she still had been composed enough to hang up lots of perfect shirts, I noticed.

‘Hello there,’ said Josh. ‘I’m sure it won’t be as bad as all that. When I went to boarding school I cried for my mother for four days. Mind you, I was six years old at the time.’

‘My mother?’ said Kate, spluttering. ‘I don’t miss my mother! I just can’t believe I didn’t do better in my A-levels than to end up in this shitty place!’

‘Didn’t you work hard?’ I asked her. That was my excuse.

‘Of course I worked hard!’ she said, looking up. ‘I had a fucking place at Magdalene.’

‘Oh, I see. They only want really tall girls, don’t they?’ I said sympathetically.

‘What the fuck’s nervous anxiety, anyway?’ Kate went on, ignoring me. ‘I’ll tell you what it is: it isn’t enough to get your exam marks upgraded. I wish I’d had a fucking full-on nervous breakdown. Then they’d have had to let me in.’

‘Have one now,’ I suggested. I knew she wasn’t actually shouting at me, but she was certainly shouting in my direction.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Josh kindly, touching her on the shoulder. ‘Would you like to come out with me? I’m going ice skating at the Christian Union.’

‘You’re not Christian are you?’ I said, disappointed. I’d liked him.

‘No! But I sure can SKAAAAAATE!’

So the three of us ended up in one of those forced friendships that come together extremely quickly out of necessity in early college. Kate quickly decided that Josh was her own personal property, which annoyed me. OK, so both of them had flat stomachs and good posture, but I didn’t like the assumption that as Kate was prettier than me I should butt out, especially as I didn’t even fancy Josh and in fact assumed pretty much from the start that he was gay, rather than, as I later found out, completely and utterly confused.

Kate hadn’t cottoned on to this, however, and insisted on treating me as an annoying kid sister hanging round with the grown-ups, her repertoire including: ‘You again, Holly?’ ‘You don’t mind, do you, but I’ve only got two cups?’ and ‘Sorry, Holl, but it’s only a plus-one.’ Soon their status as monied and classy students at a poor and common college became clear, and I started going out with a greasy sports science student who once tried to teach me kung fu and chipped my collarbone, so I pretty much left them to it – which doesn’t mean to say that she didn’t really fuck me off, Kate being the accepted sucking pig to Josh’s sow and my runt. An analogy bordering on the disgusting, but that’s how it was.

In time, of course, Kate realized that simply because her and Josh went to a lot of places JUST THE TWO OF THEM, it didn’t actually mean they were a couple. But not before I got my revenge…

In a misguided attempt at collegiate unity, two socially inadequate but horrifically bouncy ‘ents officers’ – to be involved in ‘ents’ of course meaning you are anything but – arranged a ‘Corridor Convulsion’ early on in our first term. There was a good and complicated reason for it at the time, but what it meant in effect was an excuse to haul in lots of weepingly cheap alcohol and stuff it down the faces of naïve but nubile eighteen-year-olds in the hope that they might accidentally strip their tops off and run down the corridor. Actually, maybe that was the official reason and it just sounded all right in those days.

Josh of course would do anything of a community nature enthusiastically and Kate was still in the ‘gamely joining in’ stage, before she realized that she could dress up as a giant antelope and it still wasn’t going to make her sexually attractive to Josh, so we all trawled into the hallway to figure out what was happening.

What was happening was what happens anywhere with horribly diverse sects of shy and socially inept people away from home for the first time and unsure of their very identities: groups of twos and threes stood in small corners grunting nervously at each other and downing obscure former communist bloc spirits as fast as they possibly could. A group of rugby- or aspirant rugby-playing lads started getting rowdy in the corner, and the ents officers gibbered around, excited yet again at the possibility of not being one of the 29 per cent of students who leave Coventry certified virgins. What they didn’t yet know was that 100 per cent of ents officers leave 100 per cent of all institutions certified virgins.

A petite, very pretty blonde girl who wore enormous fleeces and was clearly out to score with a rugby boy – Why? being the only unanswered question – became the first person, at around 10.30 p.m. and after a lot of goading, to take off her top and flee down the corridor, bouncing merrily, to massive applause. After that, about fifteen of the men immediately tried to do it with their cocks out – what is it about British men and being completely naked for no good reason? I’ve seen someone play the piano with his.