George’s posters of oiled-up men in white budgie smugglers and move his collection of club wear and bondage outfits into my room. I was quite excited about the oiled-up men, less so about the bondage gear, though the rubber gimp mask made me chuckle and I did think of stealing it to wear at the next clinical meeting. Margaret would have had a heart attack!
‘The funeral was pretty grim.’
April pulled a sympathetic face.
‘You guys go back to your programme. I’m feeling exhausted. It’s been a long day. I’m going up to my room to lie down. Night.’
Murmurs of ‘I hope you’re OK,’ wafted in my wake before I shut the door behind me, nodding I was fine.
I got into bed without taking off my make-up or brushing my teeth, feeling like a rebel. ‘Never sleep in make-up!’ Louise always used to say when we were teenagers. ‘It’ll give you conjunctivitis and zits.’ Oh well…
Lying in the dark, my thoughts turned to Tom once more. When I’d initially moved in to the Mews, raw from my break-up, I had attended every neighbourhood event, every after-work glass of wine to distract me from wallowing, or worse, wishing Tom would take me back (though I still have no idea how that would have worked with the baby issue). The one person I wanted to talk to, to ease the pain, was the very reason I was experiencing it.
I hadn’t broken up with someone like this before. That first night in Louise’s spare room, I’d sobbed like a love-sick teenager. I couldn’t believe how emotionally destitute I felt, and all the things I’d taken for granted about being in a relationship taunted me like Scrooge’s ghosts. Who was going to squeeze the crater-like bottomless blackhead on my back and clear it out every few months? It was probably going to clog up and mutate into a monstrous cyst to rival Quasimodo’s hump…
Things had got so desperate I had almost broken the lock on the Smash in Case of Emergency jar of swear words in my head. Bugger, crap and occasionally shit, were doled out carefully, but the severely obscene words, they were reserved for extreme situations. Louise had no such jar. Most days were a merry fuck or cunt day for her.
The first morning at work after our break-up had been a shocker. I had walked in to reception to find Tom had taken a sick day. Everyone was asking me if he was OK. I’d wanted to crawl under my desk and vomit into the bin, but there was a small glimmer of relief that he was a no-show. He subsequently changed his shifts and we managed that way for ten days until he broke the news via an email from both of us, not quite in the vein of a Gwyneth Paltrow pompous ‘Conscious Uncoupling’.
The gossip engine went into overdrive. Was there someone else? Who did the dirty? Is it because they’re not married? Is it because they don’t want kids? Is it because Christa is senior partner and Tom’s just a salaried GP? The best one I overheard was that I’d left because I wanted to explore my sexuality. How the crapping hell did that even enter into someone’s head? Not that I was against that kind of thing, but I was pretty sure I wasn’t throwing out those kinds of vibes.
Since we’d split up, along with the hellish hormonal seesaw that is early onset menopause, my libido had skipped off on holiday somewhere more erotic. However, for those few wonderful days that I’d babysat George’s delectable buffed-up Muscle Marys posters, a small miracle had transpired. As a joke, I’d stuck them up on the wall nearest the bed, like once I’d pinned pictures of George Michael and Mags from A-ha in my childhood bedroom.
I blamed the posters for what happened next. The following morning, I’d woken up with the absolute raging horn I hadn’t experienced the like of since I’d been sixteen and had continually fantasised about Mr Olsen, the RE teacher, taking me into an empty staff room and shagging me senseless up against the flip chart. Clearly the chart’s legs buckled, forcing the whole thing to come crashing down on us just as I reached my happy ending with my vibrating cucumber pen that boasted ten interchangeable different-coloured nibs. Honestly, to this day I have no idea why it vibrated but I was super glad that it had.
The horn of plenty was a veritable Dodo and a total