Portia MacIntosh - Drive Me Crazy

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 on being normal together, seeing how it goes and then working out what we’re going to do about our future.’

‘Remind me again how we’re spinning this little holiday-slash-business trip?’ Amy asks, pulling a face.

‘As managing director, Will needs to visit all branches of the company. He’ll make sure things are running smoothly and put in a bit of face time with the other employees. It’s good for his image.’

‘It’s good for an excuse to nail you in a hotel bed instead of a supply cupboard,’ she tells me.

‘That was one time.’ I laugh.

‘And this explains why you’re away for the weekend too, because…’

‘There’s always someone working day and night, seven days a week, to keep things moving,’ I tell her. ‘Haulage never sleeps.’

‘That might be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.’ Amy laughs.

Before I met Amy, I was so so shy. Somehow, she brought me out of myself and for that brief moment between meeting Aims and meeting Will, I felt like a whole new person, like a normal girl in her early twenties. I will admit that since I started seeing Will, I have gone back into my shell a little. I worry about keeping in shape. I worry about coming across as the scrappy, foul-mouthed, party girl I turned into when it was just Amy and me against the world. I know that Will wouldn’t be into that kind of girl, and I hid her from him well until I got out of those bad habits. Will is a smart, educated, well-respected man. He comes from a good family. He’s so well-spoken his accent is almost neutral, despite being born and raised in Manchester. Guys like that don’t wind up with girls like the one I had become, so I cleaned up my act. I know that Amy holds Will responsible for this regression in personality (that’s what she calls it) but I do feel like a better person for being with him.